The last few months have been rough for me, as they have been for most people. Most of my talks have been cancelled. Without retail stores open, physical book sales have fallen by a third. We had two new employees start work on February 15th, in new offices we just had renovated, which now sit empty. 

There have been trying supply chain and inventory issues with Daily Stoic. My retirement accounts were savaged and then bounced back and then savaged like everyone else’s. We estimate our total business losses, so far, to be well into the mid-six figures, and that hurts a lot less than watching my son cry that he can’t see his friends at school. My other son had ear infections we couldn’t go to the doctor for, and the stray cat we rescued managed to get pregnant and have kittens before we could get her fixed. 

So like I said, it’s been rough. That’s one way to see it, anyway. I could also choose to see it as not so bad, considering the fact that, unlike 130,000 other Americans and at least 400,000 others worldwide, none of my family members nor I have died in a pandemic.

Still, it has been rough. It would be untrue to deny it, even if other people have it much, much rougher. But just because something is objectively difficult or complicated or unenjoyable, doesn’t mean that’s what you should focus on. 

“Every event has two handles,” Epictetus said, “one by which it can be carried, and one by which it can’t. If your brother does you wrong, don’t grab it by his wronging, because this is the handle incapable of lifting it. Instead, use the other—that he is your brother, that you were raised together, and then you will have hold of the handle that carries.”

This is a critical life question and particularly relevant right now in light of the mountain of adversity we are facing, individually and collectively. Which handle will we grab?

When I look at the last three months, I don’t grab onto the things that were taken from me. I could grab on to blame or despair. I could grip the anger and frustration and impotence. I could even latch onto some pretty valid excuses to sit around and wait for all the chaos to pass, or…

I could look at what I’ve been able to accomplish despite a quarantine and the obstacles it has presented: 

• I’ve run and biked and walked more than 1,200 miles
• I’ve written close to 100,000 words
• I’ve launched four new challenges and courses for Daily Stoic
• I’ve recorded over 40 hours of content for the Daily Stoic podcast and YouTube channel
• I’ve gotten in the pool with my kids almost every day
• I’ve read a few dozen books and filled over a thousand notecards
• We’ve had 360 meals together as a family
• I haven’t missed a bathtime or a bedtime
• We cleaned out the garage
• With sales from the Daily Stoic Alive Time Challenge, we raised enough money to provide 75,000 meals
• We donated $100,000 to Alan Graham’s Community First! Village

Not a bad handle to seize hold of, right?

If you’ve ever been stuck in Los Angeles traffic at night, you know it’s miserable. But if you’ve ever flown into Los Angeles at night and seen the lit-up city from above, you’ve noticed how from a different perspective this same miserable experience can suddenly seem almost beautiful and serene. We call one a traffic jam, the other a light show.

The chaos of international politics can strike fear in us—wars break out, property gets destroyed, people get killed. Yet if you zoom out just slightly—across time, rather than space in this case—all those terrifying CNN updates seem to blur together into an almost coordinated dance of nations lurching towards a balance of power. We call one journalism, the other history.

Same thing, different perspective.

Life is like that. We can look at it one way and be scared or angry or worried. Or we can look at it another way and see an exciting challenge. We can choose to look at something as an obstacle or an opportunity. We can see chaos if we look close, we can see order if we look from afar. 

We can focus on our lack of agency in what has happened or we can focus on what we do control, which is how we respond.

Isaac Newton did some of his best research when Cambridge closed due to the plague. Shakespeare wrote King Lear while he hid out from the plague as well. Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang while he was laid up in the hospital, expressly forbidden from working on something as tough as a novel. Malcolm X educated himself in prison and turned himself into the activist the world needed. Seneca produced some of his best writing in exile. Marcus Aurelius wrote Meditations while Rome was being scourged by the twin evils of plague and war. 

This is what the idea of Alive Time vs. Dead Time, which I’ve written about before, is really all about: which handle will you grab? The one that bears weight? Or the one that won’t take you anywhere?

So yes, things are rough right now. That’s not your fault. But what you do during these rough times? That’s on you. How are you going to look at things? Will you choose to be miserable or awed? Will you choose to sit around and wait for things to get back to normal or make the most of every second of every day? Will you choose to focus on all the ways this has been a rough few weeks? Or will you choose to step back and look at all the things you still have and still can do?

It’s up to you. It’s always up to you. Because there are always two handles. 

I’ve come to see this pandemic as a radical lifestyle experiment that would have been impossible under any other circumstances. What does zero travel look like? Or full remote work for the team? What if your outside income sources evaporate? What if you completely eliminated meetings? What if you politely excised subtractive people from your life? What if you stopped eating out? What if your day didn’t have to be built around anything you didn’t want to do? What if there was a lot less peer pressure? 

This has been an opportunity to try different things… things that, as it turns out, I much prefer to how things were before. Things I’ll be trying to preserve when “we go back to normal” (which of course, we won’t). 

Given the immense devastation and tragedy of this pandemic, that hardly makes up for what has happened. It would be blasé and offensive to claim that it does. Dialing in a bit better at home, becoming more productive, finding things you like better than what you’re supposed to like—these hardly compensate for the rising death tolls. 

But the Stoics would urge us still not to dismiss this progress we have made as meaningless. Because it isn’t. It’s the only handle we can grab right now. It’s the only meaning and good that can come out of this suffering and uncertainty. 

Which is why I will continue to grab what Thomas Jefferson—paraphrasing Epictetus—would call the “smooth handle.” Because what else am I going to do? What would be better?

I urge you to do the same.

None of us truly control our own destiny.

Fate has too much power over us puny humans.

Still, we often suspect that were we just a little richer, just a little more famous, if we were in charge and got the success we craved, then we’d finally have some say over the direction of our lives and of our world.

How naive this is. How many false prisons this has created!

Now to be sure, the poor and disenfranchised amongst us suffer greatly. Some lack access to basic resources. Some are held down by systemic forces. Some are buffeted by adversity that we cannot even imagine.

And we think, if we can just be the opposite of that, then everything will be great. In many ways, that is at the root of our pursuit of fame and fortune. And yet, it’s worth noting that the people we envy, who have reached the pinnacle of success as we have defined it, are hardly as free as we think.

There is a revealing scene in Miss Americana, Netflix’s Taylor Swift documentary from earlier this year, that speaks to just this point. Here is a young woman who has accomplished in her field nearly everything you could ever dream was possible. She’s rich. She’s famous. She has millions of fans and followers. She’s sold tens of millions of albums. She’s won Grammys. She has challenged and beaten Apple and Spotify, as well as a man who sexually assaulted her.

And yet there she is, on film, confronting her manager, her parents, her publicist and nearly everyone who works for her, fighting—no, begging—for permission to make a standard political contribution to a candidate in a Democratic primary election in her home state.

Eventually, she breaks down in tears. Why can’t you let me do this? Don’t you see that it’s important to me?

You might think that all this resistance is just a quirk of her particularly risk-averse team, that it would be easy to push past it, but it isn’t. With power and success come all sorts of limitations and constraints. It’s not worse than oppression or actual slavery or incarceration, obviously, don’t be crazy. But it doesn’t change the fact that to experience the kind of suffocating restriction on display in the Taylor Swift documentary is to feel like you are living within a prison of your own making, a slave to what you have built.

“Today, I’m sort of a mannequin figure that’s lost its liberty and happiness,” Napoleon once wrote to a friend. “Grandeur is all very well, but only in retrospect and in the imagination.”

Ernest Renan, writing about Marcus Aurelius, observed that the “sovereign… is the least free of men.” You’d think that being a millionaire or being a celebrity or being the CEO would be empowering. If done right, perhaps it is. But the reality is that most of the time it is inherently disempowering. How is that possible, you might ask?

Many years ago, Mark Bowden answered that question in a fascinating article about Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. While ostensibly a detailed day-in-the-life portrait, Bowden illustrates many of the paradoxes of power. This paragraph is worth reading in full:

Lest you think this is an edge case in the history of power, know that it is in fact the oldest story in the world. There’s even an ancient myth about it: The Sword of Damocles. We think a king is free… in fact, terror hangs over him.

The point of painting this picture is not to get you to pity the powerful; it’s to get you to ask some important questions about your own ambitions and desires. Are you sure the goals you pursue are what you truly desire? Are you sure you understand what success entails? Are you sure you have defined it properly? Are you sure it will make you happy?

Over the years, I have wrestled with this. As I wrote a while back, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a highly-paid one. I wanted to have influence and a platform. But one of the very interesting things about becoming a writer—a job which is a calling and a craft—is that the more success you have at it, the less time you actually have to write.

Suddenly, people want you to speak. They want you to be on social media. They want you to consult. You have all sorts of decisions to make about covers and titles and foreign publishing deals. You have gratifying emails from fans, from people who want your advice, but all of that–to read it, to respond to it—takes time.

It is very possible, and very tempting, for this to consume your life. Write another book? Who has the time? Sitting down on a quiet morning with your thoughts? Ha! Quiet mornings don’t exist anymore.

Think of the actor who gets typecast. Think of the billionaire whose every waking second is consumed by managing their fortune. Think of the CEO who is at the mercy of the enormous beast that is their business. Think of the prime minister whose schedule is controlled by their staff. It might seem glamorous, but looking closer, it’s hardly so enviable.

It took me a while to realize that it was quite possible that the success I thought I wanted would prevent me from doing the thing I actually wanted to do. What kind of sense does that make?

Today, I don’t define success the way that I did when I was younger. I don’t measure it in copies sold or dollars earned. I measure it in what my days look like and the quality of my creative expression: Do I have time to write? Can I say what I think? Do I direct my schedule or does my schedule direct me? Is my life enjoyable or is it a chore?

In a word: autonomy. Do I have autonomy over what I do and think? Am I free?

Free to decide what I do most days…

Free to do what I think is right…

Free to invest in myself or projects I think worth pursuing…

Free to express what I think needs to be expressed…

Free to spend time with who I want to spend time with…

Free to read and study and learn about the things I’m interested in…

Free to leave the office to enjoy dinner with my family before tucking my kids into bed…

Free to pursue my definition of success…

This also always helps me to weigh opportunities properly. Does this give me more autonomy or less?

Screw whether it’s fancy.

Screw whether it’s what everyone else is doing, whether it gets me a few more followers or a couple extra dollars. What matters is freedom.

Because without freedom, what good is success? As Seneca said, “Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.”

Don’t just nod your head at that. Think about it for a minute. Or for the rest of the day. Was this morning your own? Or were you rushed through it, to go somewhere, to do something, for someone you don’t actually like?

Are you sure that “getting everything you want” is what you actually want? Will it mean the ability to dictate what you do today? Will it give you control of your life—insofar as that is possible as a puny human being?

Because if it doesn’t… well, what’s the point?

When I was starting out, I got a really good piece of advice. An author told me: If you want to be a great writer, go live an interesting life. 

He was right. Great art is fueled by great experiences. 

Or, if not “great” experiences, at least interesting or eye-opening ones.

That very encounter would illustrate that for me. I would go on to work for that writer for several years, seeing up close what profound psychological issues can do to a person and watching—and experiencing—the emotional wreckage this creates. I would look back on this period with regret… were it not for all the material it opened my eyes to and the cautionary tale it remains to me. 

I don’t think this advice is limited just to writers. 

Why was Seneca so wise? How has his philosophy been able to reach through the centuries and still grab readers by the throat? It’s because he had a wide swath of experiences to draw on, he had lived in such a way that he understood life.

Think about it: Seneca studied under a fascinating and controversial tutor named Attalus (who was later exiled). He started a legal career. Then he got tuberculosis and had to spend 10 years in Egypt, where he lived with his uncle Gaius Galerius who was prefect of Rome. Then on the journey back to Rome, a terrible shipwreck killed his uncle. Once in Rome, he entered politics, where his career was ascendant until he was exiled and nearly executed by the jealous emperor. He spent eight years on the distant island of Corsica before he was brought back to Rome to tutor Nero. Seneca served as consul. He became an investor. He had a wife. He had a son (who may have died tragically). He hosted parties. He did scientific experiments. He managed his family’s estates. He enjoyed gardening—“a hobby he found deeply sustaining,” biographer Emily Wilson writes, “and also informative as a way to think about how cultivation can be achieved.” He wrote letters and essays and speeches and poems and comedies and tragedies. He attended philosophy classes and civic center meetings and gladiatorial games and court hearings and theatrical performances. He served as consul, he tried to protect Rome from Nero’s worst impulses. He wrote plays. He wrote letters. 

Of course he was wise. Look at all he experienced!

Branko Milanović recently wrote about just how uninspired the resumes of the young people he sees are: 

He/she graduated from a very prestigious university as the best in their class; had many offers from equally prestigious universities; became an assistant professor at X, tenured at Y; wrote a seminal paper on Z when he/she was W. Served on one or two government panels. Moved to another prestigious university. Wrote another seminal paper. Then wrote a book. And then… this went on and on. You could create a single template, and just input the name of the author, and the titles of the papers, and perhaps only slight differences in age for each of them.

I was wondering: how can people who had lived such boring lives, mostly in one or two countries, with the knowledge of at most two languages, having read only the literature in one language, having travelled only from one campus to another, and perhaps from one hiking resort to another, have meaningful things to say about social sciences with all their fights, corruption, struggles, wars, betrayals and cheating. Had they been physicists or chemists, it would not matter. You do not have to lead an interesting life in order to understand how atoms move, but perhaps you do need it to understand what moves humans.

If you want to be a philosopher, if you want to be a good entrepreneur or a good coach or a good leader or a good parent or a good writer, you have to understand the world. You have to cultivate experiences. You have to see adversity first-hand. You have to take risks. You have to go do stuff.

Without this, not only are you boring, but you are sheltered and stupid. Marcus Aurelius said that no role is so well-suited to philosophy as the one we happen to be in. That’s true, but also we will be more well-suited to our roles if we had a wide breadth of experiences, and if we learn from all of them. 

Emerson spoke of something very similar. He noted how fragile the “specialists” are:

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not “studying a profession,” for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances.

So go live an interesting life. 

How do you do that?

Well, life is always presenting you with opportunities. A road diverges in the woods, and we have a choice. The safe one and the dangerous one. The one that pays well and the one that teaches a lot. The one that people understand and the one they don’t. The one that challenges us and the one that doesn’t. 

It’s the cumulative result of these choices that leads to a life worth writing about, or a life worth being written about. The person who chooses safety, familiarity, the same thing as everyone else? What perspectives will they gain that will allow them to be distinct, unique or wiser than others? What will the person who never risks hope to ever gain?

This will be a hard road, no question. There will be failure. There will be pain. You will kick yourself, at times, when you see people you went to high school with settling into nice houses or being recognized before you. You will envy, when you’re struggling, what seems like the easier path. You will wish you took it too sometimes. 

But you have to remember, this is all adding up. You are putting in work. You are lifting weights. You are building a biography. 

Nowhere is this more important than in the arts. One of the benefits of being an artist is that everything that happens to you—no matter how traumatic or frustrating—has at least one hidden benefit: It can be used in your art. A painful parting can become a powerful breakup anthem. Melancholy mixes in with your oil paints and transforms an ordinary image into something deeply moving. A mistake creates an insight that leads to an innovation, to a new angle on an old idea, to a brilliant passage in a book.

The writer Jorge Luis Borges spoke to that last benefit well:

A writer—and, I believe, generally all persons—must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

But make no mistake, this raw material is necessary for all professions of any importance. 

In my own life, I have failed. I have traveled. I dropped out of college. I’ve started businesses and closed them. I’ve made money, lost money. Moved to different places, including a ranch. Met good people and bad people. Followed good people and bad people. Watched the rise and fall of American Apparel. Been in rooms where important things happened. Seen bureaucracy and incompetence up close, and excellence too. Been in rooms with important people (who turned out to be not very impressive). I’ve gone through pain. I’ve gone through loss. I’ve messed stuff up. I’ve had my hopes dashed. I’ve been surprised beyond my expectations. 

I remember going through something tough once and my mentor Robert Greene giving me a shorter version of Borges’ advice. 

It’s all material, he said. You’ve got to use this. 

Everything that happens in your life can be used for something useful, whether it’s your writing, your relationships, or your new startup. Everything is material. We can use it all. Whether we’re a baseball player or a hedge fund manager, a psychiatrist or a cop. The issues we had with our parents become lessons that we teach our children. An injury that lays us up in bed becomes a reason to reflect on where our life is going. A problem at work inspires us to invent a new product and strike out on our own. These obstacles become opportunities. These experiences and failures and experimentations and setbacks and discoveries converge to give you what David Epstein calls range. 

“As I write in Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World,” Epstein explained when I interviewed him for Daily Stoic, “your ability to take knowledge and skills and apply them to a problem or situation you have not seen before… is predicted by the variety of situations you’ve faced… This is true whether you’re training in soccer or math. As you get more variety… you’re forced to form these broader conceptual models, which you can then wield flexibly in new situations.” He then sums up research on how people find meaning and fulfillment, “Our insight into ourselves is constrained by our roster of previous experiences. We actually have to do stuff.”

The line from Marcus Aurelius about this was that a blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it. That’s how we want to be. We want to be the artist that turns pain and frustration and even humiliation into beauty. We want to be the entrepreneur that turns a sticking point into a money maker. We want to be the person who takes their own experiences and turns them into wisdom that can be learned from and passed on to others.

So go look for fuel. Take the more interesting road. 

Go live a life that is not boring. 

Your work—and the world—will thank you for it.