7 Stoic Rules to Maximize Your Return on Life
The Amplified Impact Podcast
January 7th, 2023
In this episode, I’ll share seven Stoic lessons that completely changed my mindset.
From embracing fate with “Amor Fati” to remembering the preciousness of life with “Memento Mori,” we’ll talk about managing expectations, taking control, and finding contentment in simplicity.
Let’s not forget the ultimate key…self-mastery leading to true freedom.
Oh, and spoiler alert: happiness? It’s a choice.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“You could choose to be happy. You could. Not saying it’s easy, not even saying you want to, but you could. And I think just accepting that as something that’s within your control is very, very empowering.”
– Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
It was young people. There’s a 16 year old out there, for whatever reason, didn’t wake up this morning. There’s a 25 year old who was about to get married who didn’t wake up this morning, and yet you did. And you’re here consuming this listening right now. And that is just a remarkable thing if you really stop to reflect on that. And yet, we often take this for granted, and we often take it for granted right up until the moment it’s too late. And if we’re lucky, maybe not lucky, but most often, we’re reminded of the fact that life is fragile when we lose a loved one. And that can be a great wake up call.
Granted, it’s not easy, and nobody ever wants that. But it’s sometimes through those depths where you gain the most clarity about your place in fragility in life and how it is so fleeting and so much gratitude can be found when you just stop and say, I’m alive, and that’s awesome. So just take a moment and just remember that you’re alive right now, and that’s awesome. Number three is to manage your expectations. I think this one is from Seneca. He said, we suffer more in imagination than in reality. This has been such a powerful concept in my life when I realize that the entirety of man’s discontent exists in the gap between his expectations and his reality, my life started to change because what I realized was I can’t do anything to change reality itself. It is what it is, but what I can change, what I have complete control over are my expectations, and so I can reduce my expectations and thus close the gap between expectation and reality and thus eliminate or at least reduce my suffering in life.
I find that so damn empowering. Whenever I’m suffering, whenever suffering, not necessarily physically, but emotionally, mentally, anxiety, whatever, I remind myself, you are feeling this way right now because you have an unmet expectation. What can you do right now to remove that expectations and live in alignment with what reality is giving you in this instant? And when I can do that, and I don’t always succeed, but when I can do that, things get instantly better. All right, number four, this ties in. It is to retain control, always. This is the more we value things outside our control, the less control we have. And so the way I always reframe this is if you can’t control it, then at minimum, don’t let it control you. And so you can’t control reality, but you can control your expectations.
So control that. Forget reality. Control what you can control. And I find just a lot of power in that. It puts the control of my destiny back into my hands, and I’m no longer fate to play thing. And for whatever reason, whether that’s true or false, it’s an empowering belief that serves me. And so I hold on to it. Number five is to understand true wealth.
He is richest who is content with the least. I’ve struggled with this, and I think we all do, which is you’re never going to get off the hedonic treadmill, ever. None of us can. We’re humans. It’s just how we operate. Unfortunately, we acclimate to the good times. We acclimate to the bad times, whatever his life gives us. But when things are good, we want them to be better.
We could always be better, always be better. We’re always trying to accelerate and go faster, faster, faster, but we never get off that treadmill. But what we can do is we can just slow it down. And you do that by. Stop chasing more and just cherish what you already have. And this is why I’m such a fan of the idea of doing less but doing it better. I think that will slow down the hedonic treadmill. The richest man is the man who is content with the least.
I love that concept. All right, number six, happiness is a choice. This is maybe the most controversial concept, but it goes like this. Very little is needed to make a happy life. It is all in yourself and your way of thinking. I always think of this idea that happiness is not the prize, it’s the process, and it’s one that any of us at any moment, can choose to employ. It’s simply a choice. And I know a lot of people will disagree with that.
They’ll say, no, there’s a lot of things in life that you can’t control when it comes to being happy or not happy. And tell that to the mother who’s grieving the loss of her child. I get it. I’m not saying it’s easy, but happiness is a biological process that results from certain chemical reactions, and there’s things that we know we can do to manipulate those reactions. And so when you learn how to do that within your own body, then happiness really does become a choice. Now, whether or not you want to employ that, or maybe it is better in that moment to feel the sadness, because then it will only help to contrast the happiness and make it more meaningful in the future. I’m not saying that you need to eliminate sadness or always be happy. I’m not saying that, but just recognize that happiness is a choice and that if you don’t want to feel sad, you don’t have to.
You could choose to be happy. You could. Not saying it’s easy, not even saying you want to, but you could. And I think just accepting that as something that’s within your control is very, very empowering. And as with everything in life, to amplify your impact, you need to take control and accountability for as many things in your reality as possible. I think that is the key to living in alignment with your greatness, at least, has been for me. And finally, number seven, the truly free man, the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self mastery. I think there’s a second part to this quote, which is that those who cannot govern themselves are governed, are condemned to find masters to govern over them.
And I put this in a different way, which is simply that if you can’t discipline yourself, then the world will have to do it for you. Therefore, discipline equals freedom. And that is the concept upon which a lot of my journey really hinged, is learning how to hold myself accountable, how to discipline myself so that the world didn’t have to continually do it for me. That is a very hard concept, a very hard lesson to learn. It’s one that we have to continue to learn every single day. I did a video on this last year called learning this about discipline changed my life, and I share a six step framework for developing discipline. If that’s something that you struggle with, I highly recommend you go to YouTube.com Anthony Vasino and find that video. Give it a watch.
I think it could help you a lot if that’s something that you’re struggling with. So those are seven lessons from stoicism that have had a massive impact on my life, and I hope they bring you a little bit of value. So let me know which one of these was the most helpful, most valuable, or least valuable? Which one did you disagree with the most? Which one do you realize you need to implement in your life the most? I want to hear from you guys. Leave me a comment. Shoot me an email, leave a review. We’re so close to 100 reviews of this podcast on Spotify. So if you’re over there right now, if that’s what you’re listening on, just do me a favor, pull up in the click the button. I don’t know which button, but just take a second to figure it out.
Push five stars or four stars or whatever you want to push. It would truly mean the world to me. So I appreciate you guys, as always, for being here. We’ll catch you in the next episode. Until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.
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