Goo-ood morning, Strypers (and honorary Strypers)!
It’s been an exciting week, so I’d like to start by announcing that as a company we’ve been funded! After weeks and weeks of effort and trying, we’ve now got a bunch more runway to keep doing what we’re doing and further prove ourselves as a business. What it is that we do as a company, well, you can ask me another time and I’ll give you the low-down. More importantly, I’d like to talk about the mindset that has helped me weather these wild ups and downs of this startup journey.
The ‘ism’ of the Stoics
If you’re unaware, Stoicism is an ancient school of thought¹ that will almost certainly be too expansive for me to summarize properly in a half-drunken write-up. But if it pretty much says “Life sucks sometimes, and other times it’s awesome! Don’t let either really get to you. The real deal is in being, separate from the effects of fortune.”
The true meaning of life is in GIFs
There’s a lot in life that a person can’t control. The weather, their genetics, the whims of the market, traffic, the actions and reactions of others, etc. Sometimes these things are seemingly positive, like a sunny day or finding $20 on the ground. Sometimes it’s seemingly horrible, like having coffee spilled on you or the dumpling shop being out of the chive ones again!²
Ultimately though, while these things are often seen as good/bad, it is always within our control to choose how to react and interpret them.
Philoso-free’ing
So while a deal going south could be seen as bad, it would be worse to let such a misfortune ‘get to you’. And while it’s ‘awesome’ that as a company we have enough funding to hire and move into office space³ these things shouldn’t have an oversized impact on my mood.
Because, the philosophical stance continues, everything is of the same universe. We are all “natural”. So anything that happens to us is not inherently good or bad, it just ‘is’ according to its nature. People can lose sight of this and become slaves to their passions of the moment. Further, they might even lose sight of the fact that we’re all here together⁴. Because we are.
This is your life. The only thing you ever really have is time and your own mind. There is always a choice on how to act.
There are many things you might want to do with your life, but rain or shine, win or lose, you’re living this life. So it stands to reason to not let these winds of fate sway you too hard and blow you off course, and instead continue living a ‘virtuous’ life.
What is “virtuous”? To classical Stoics, it’s in possessing wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance. To a high-school version of me it might be: “Don’t be a dick about it”.
Day after day, hour after hour, you have the choice to find the meaning and live that virtuous life. There is always a choice.
I didn’t even know this GIF existed five minutes ago, but it, too, is of nature
Wrapping It Up
There is no single philosophy that works for everyone, least of all within the microcosm of ‘startup land’. Some founders turn to eastern meditation practices and yoga. Others to the irrational optimism and optimization of the modern entrepreneur. For me, I’ve found satisfaction in being able to appreciate the beauty in the good and the bad things that happen. Because all of it, separate from subjective judgement, is life.
And in the philosophical framework of Stoicism, life is good.
I wish this format was more conducive to rambling on and on about this kind of stuff and I wish I had more time to draft and refine this post to really communicate what I mean, but I don’t have that kind of opportunity right now (you know, because of that startup I keep mentioning). So this post, in all its imperfections, will have to be enough.
Until next week, enjoy whatever life brings you!
¹ Stoicism gets its name from the Greek word ‘stōïkos’, which means ‘porch’ because one of the earlier Stoic-preaching philosophers did so from his porch.
² In all seriousness, who is buying them all before me though?
³ Like, I have to wear a shirt to work now. Is that something that I should let ‘get to me’?
⁴ I couldn’t find anywhere to squeeze it in without interrupting the flow of the text, but there’s a quote I like by Marcus Aurelius (a famous Stoic & Roman emperor):
“Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. All of the ignorance of real good and ill… I can neither be harmed by any of them, for no man will involve me in wrong, nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him; for we have come into the world to work together…”
Fun Fact Friday 