Dealing with Conflict #5: Stoicism & Focusing on What You Can Control (Classic)

What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder’s Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. This week on Founder’s Journal, we're doing things a little differently. We're dropping a mini series about Dealing with Conflict. We're talking about everything from respectfully disagreeing with your manager to mediating conflict and navigating competition. Consider this week's batch of episodes as a guide to handling uncomfortable situations in a corporate setting and beyond. That means instead of just one episode, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, this week, we're giving you two: a new show that you won't want to miss, plus a classic episode you maybe haven't heard before. In today's classic episode, originally released on October 15th, 2021, I talk about some of the insights I've gained by studying the philosophy of Stoicism and how it has helped me find direction. Let's hop into it.

So if I'm being honest, I was going to focus this episode on something super businessy. I feel like we've done a lot of, you know, emotion and psychology focused episodes the last few days. And I was thinking, you know, we need to get more back to the core of the show. So we're going to talk about something like mentorship or finding product-market fit as a company. But given this podcast is a journal of my life, I wanted to share something that was actually happening. If you listened to the last episode of the show, you know that I've been spending a lot of time trying to find myself/ Since the sale of my business and moving from my role as CEO to Chairman, I felt lost.

The Beginner’s Guide to Stoicism

I've felt directionless and I'm not sure what gives me meaning or what I want to do with my time. So to try and find direction, I spend time reading. I cracked open a book that someone had sent me as a gift. Basically I do a lot of speaking engagements and one event that I did, the person who had asked me to speak at this company event sent me a thank you, which was a book. And they wrote in the cover of this book, Alex, this book helped me so much and I hope you also enjoy it. So I took my dog, Rambo, to the park and we spent hours just reading through it. Well, I spent time reading it. He, he played with the dogs. The title of the book is The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity.

It's embarrassing to say, but I've known about Stoicism for a long time, but I've never spent time reading about it because I thought it had to do with being stoic. That being said, it's something that's always interested me because a ton of successful people from business to music to sports to politics have been cited as practitioners of Stoicism. This ranges from Tim Ferris, obviously one of the largest podcasters in the world, to Theodore Roosevelt, to Arnold Schwarzenegger, to several NFL superstars, to entrepreneurs like Jack Dorsey. They all cite Stoicism as kind of their guiding light for navigating life, as well as their careers.

And as someone who feels stoic by nature, the last thing that I wanted to do was practice a philosophy that made me more detached from my emotions and made me feel indifferent. That's originally why I was against the idea of reading into Stoicism when I kind of conflated Stoicism and stoic as the same thing. It turns out they're not at all the same and Stoicism is a philosophy that dates back to the ancient Greeks. The ancient Greeks passed it onto the ancient Romans. And it's actually all about positivity and methods for finding happiness and being present. Once I found out about the distinction, I was like, sign me up. So now what I want to do is share a few of my biggest learnings about Stoicism and also how it helped me shift my perspective about career success and how I spend my time.

Two principles of Stoicism

So let me start by giving you the TL;DR on Stoicism. Stoicism, as I mentioned, is a philosophy and it's built on one simple belief. No matter your circumstances, a good life is available to you right now. Basically it's this notion that if you have command over your mind, you can find positivity and resilience in any situation because our perception is what drives our feeling of happiness. By the way, I just want a level set. There's one part of me that initially read this and was like, fuck, yeah, I'm into a good life. I have a direction now. And then there's another part of me that was like, this sounds like the beginning of a self-help infomercial and I'm gagging. I promise you reading on was the best decision I made while sitting in that dog park and listening on will be well worth it for you. So if I had to sum up my understanding of Stoicism, it's all about two things. First living in the present and second controlling what you can control. It sounds so obvious, right? When you hear these two things, but when you think about the moments in life where you feel most anxious, upset, or frustrated, it's generally because we're not doing one of those two things. We're not practicing these what feel like very obvious rules. Here are examples.

I feel lost because I'm worrying about the future and worrying about what I'm going to spend my time on for the next several years. College students get stressed because they're worried about if they're going to get a 4.0, which may give them some opportunity to get a top internship, which whatever that means by society’s standards. Employees feel nervous because they wonder if their boss thinks they're doing a good job. A manager is afraid to give feedback because they're worried that their direct report will get upset, or they just fear how they'll react. All of these negative emotions and these very real things that happen to all of us in life are driven by dwelling on the past, fearing about the future, or being concerned with things that are not in our control at all.

So yes, these two truths of Stoicism are probably obvious, but they're clearly not intuitive since we break these rules every single day. So then with this foundation, Stoicism gives you a set of what it calls disciplines and virtues to help you live a stoic life. I think of the stoic life as a happy and balanced life, Stoicism calls it a virtuous life or living your life with virtue, which they just view as becoming skillful at controlling your mind since that's the only thing that we can control, right? You can't even control your body because at times your body does things that you wouldn't expect, or that are just totally out of your control.

Desire, action, and assent

As for, you know, the, the phrases they use of disciplines and virtues, it’s just jargon that means “tools that help you control your mind and be happy” in the same way we have bicep curls or split squats or lunges or other exercises to get our physical body in shape. I think of Stoicism as offering these mental exercises and tools to get your mind in shape. So going to the disciplines that I just mentioned, there are three disciplines in Stoicism. First, discipline of desire, which is all about desiring things that are within your complete control and being indifferent to things that you can't control at all.

Second discipline of action, which is all about seeking healthy and positive relationships with everyone you meet, even if they don't reciprocate the same healthy and positive things you want to give off. And third discipline of assent, which is all about mastering your thoughts and separating your immediate reaction to things in life, to your final judgment of the things that you experience. So let's keep the exercise analogy going. I think of these three disciplines as basically muscle groups of your mind, where discipline of desire is your arms. Discipline of action is your legs, and discipline of assent is your abs.

And then within each discipline or each muscle group, there are specific workouts to build up each of your muscles. Given I could literally spend probably all of Founder’s Journal episodes talking about this way of thinking. I'm going to just share one specific workout that Stoicism offers and how it changed my perspective of career within the discipline of desire. There's an exercise called circling the present. And as I mentioned, discipline of desire is all about desiring things that are within your complete control and not desiring things that are completely out of your control. So what is circling the present mean? The whole idea is to relieve stress, fear, or anxiety by only dwelling on the right here and now, and completely fencing off in your mind, things in the future or things in the past.

Circling the present

Now there are many ways to go about circling the present, but the way that I do it is by literally creating a list of those things that I can control right now. So I'll read it off to you. Right now, I can control the effort that I'm putting into recording this podcast. Right now I can control the eye contact I'm making with the camera. Right now I can control the energy that I give to this script that I'm reading. Right now I can control the attention that I give to this recording versus all of the other things in life that are competing for my attention. Why is it helpful to write those things out? Well, first it just makes me appreciate how many things in life I give mental real estate to on a daily basis that I have zero control over. I just listed four things. And those are literally only four things right now that I can actually control. 

So for example, whether this podcast gets downloaded a lot, once it gets published, I have no control over that. Whether my producer thinks this is a good episode, I have no control over his perception. Whether this franchise of Founder’s Journal makes a lot of money for Morning Brew longterm, I have zero control over that, and this is one example, but it really extends to our future fearing default that all of us practice in every aspect of life.

So, as I mentioned, I was going to make this episode very businessy. I decided to just make it authentic to what I actually did yesterday in life at the dog park. And I would love to hear what you think about what I've shared about Stoicism. So let's even use the example of circling the present. As you reflect on your career, your day to day job, or even life in general, I'd love for you to share with me one thing that causes you anxiety or frustration or fear that now, as you reflect on this exercise and the mindset of only controlling the things you can control, share with me one thing that you worry about that is absolutely out of your control.

Shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com or DM me on Twitter @businessbarista. And one last ask of you. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to Founder’s Journal. You can smash the subscribe button on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whatever podcast player you use. That is the number one way to grow the show. Finally, our show is produced and engineered by Dan Bouza. Our associate producer is Bella Hutchins. Brian Henry is our executive producer. Alan Haburchak is Morning Brew’s director of audio. Holly Van Leuven is our fact checker. And I'm your host, Alex Lieberman. Thanks again for listening and I'll catch you all next episode.