BONUS | 6 Stoic Rules of Arete (Excellence)
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What does Arete mean in the context of Stoicism?
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How can seeking discomfort lead to personal growth?
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Wayfair. Every style. Every home. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.
These are six stoic strategies for a life of erite, that is to say, excellence. Number one, you have to seek out discomfort. You're not going to grow, you're not going to learn. Doing things the way that you're comfortable with, keeping them the way that they are. In meditations, Mark Spruillis talks about practicing holding the reins in his non-dominant hand. If he wanted to make himself uncomfortable, get out of his element on purpose because that's how you get better. Number two, focus on process, not on outcomes. This sounds contradictory. Don't you want to win? Don't you want to make great stuff? Yes, of course you do, but you don't get there by focusing on that. It's insane, the Stokes would say, to tie your well-being, your sense of success, to things that are outside of your control.
Instead, what a Stoke does is put your ass in the chair, do the work, you assemble a life, you assemble a project. Marx really says in meditations, action by action, doing that thing in front of you. He says no one can stop you from that. Number three, this is really important, ask for help. Marcus Aurelius compares us to a soldier storming a wall. He says, if you've fallen and you have to ask a comrade for help, so what? What I love in meditations is all the people that Marcus Aurelius thanks at the beginning. People who helped him. People who he learned from. People whom, without, he would not have become who he was. It's wonderful to ask for help. You absolutely should. Don't be afraid to ask for help.
That's how you get better. That's how you grow. That's how you become the person you are capable of being. Four, ego is the enemy. It's impossible to learn that which you think you already know, Epictetus says. Zeno talked about... how conceit prevented us from growing and improving. Ego focuses on all the things that are great about us. Humility focuses on where we need to get better, what we don't know. Again, that's what Socrates was focused on. Not what he knew, but how little he knew. And in doing so, he got better and he grew. Five, embrace failure. The only way to grow, the only way to get better is to fail, is to try things and to learn. Marx really talks about how we're going to be jarred by circumstances in life.
We're going to be knocked off our block. But excellence is how quick you can get back to it. It's to celebrate behaving like a human being, which is going to mean failure. Elite performance is a game of failure. It's messing up, it's failing, it's setbacks more often than you succeed. And it's how determined, how committed you are, how quickly you are able to get back that separates the winners from the losers. And that leads us to the sixth and final one.
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