There are lots of smart people.

There are not a lot of people who can do this smart thing.

The poet John Keats called it “negative capability”—the mental fortitude to be able to entertain multiple contradictory ideas in your head at the same time. Or as F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless, yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

The world is complicated, ambiguous, paradoxical, and contradictory. To make sense of it, to survive it, one must be able to balance conflicting ideas. To try to force everything into a simple box, or adhere to a simple theory? It just won’t work.

People will sometimes email me, “Ryan, Marcus Aurelius contradicts himself. Sometimes he says to zoom in and other times he says to zoom out.” Or they’ll point out that Seneca’s writings tell us to be aware of the dangers of the future and also never avoid anxiety and worry.” Or that they are confused because Law 3 in Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power is “conceal your intentions” but Law 6 is “court attention at all cost.”

I’ve even gotten this about Discipline is Destiny which of course talks about being strict with yourself…and also not so strict with yourself. Is that a contradiction?

The answer is yes.

The famous lines from Walt Whitman are,

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Yes, Marcus Aurelius contradicts himself. Yes, the Stoics contradict themselves. Yes, Robert Greene’s laws of power contradict each other. Yes, I contradict myself.

Because the world contradicts itself. Because different situations call for different things. Because everything in life depends on context.

Look, even the premise that only a genius can manage negative capability is itself a little contradictory. Because you know who has no problem holding a bunch of conflicting ideas at the same time? Really dumb people!

So negative capability seems to follow the Midwit Meme curve.

So how do you cultivate the kind of negative capability Keats was talking about? Here are some thoughts:

[1] Read widely and from people you disagree with. One of the most surprising parts of Seneca’s writing is how often the avowed Stoic quotes Epicurus, the founder of the rival school, Epicureanism. The reason he was so familiar with Epicurus, Seneca wrote, was not because he was deserting the writings of the Stoics, but because he was reading like a spy in the enemy’s camp. That is, he was deliberately reading and immersing himself into the thinking and the strategies of those he disagreed with. To see if there was anything he could learn. Epicurus’s dictum was that “One sage is no wiser than another.” The Stoics believed this too—that we should actively pursue and engage with anyone who can be a source of wisdom to us, regardless of the school of thought from which that wisdom arose. Because if there is wisdom out there to be had, we’d be wise to avail ourselves of it.

[2] Study deeply. Marcus Aurelius chided himself “not to be satisfied with just getting the gist of it.” Instead, he said, “read attentively.” Go “directly to the seat of knowledge.” Seek out tutors and mentors. Linger, as Seneca said, on a small number of master thinkers, reading and re-reading their work. Go way beyond the “gist.”

[3] Put yourself in rooms where you’re the least knowledgeable person. Observe and learn. Ask questions. That uncomfortable feeling, that defensiveness that you feel when your most deeply held assumptions are challenged? Do it deliberately. Let it humble you. In my own education, I’ve always followed Marcus Aurelius’ rule: “go straight to the seat of intelligence.” He also writes, “Mastery of reading and writing requires a master. Still, more so life.” For me, Robert Greene was and is my master in writing and, more so, in life. Go straight to the sources of knowledge, people who have different perspectives and expertise, people who can help you see things from a new angle and to consider alternative viewpoints. Absorb as much as you can from them.

[4] Understand that timing and context are everything. Confucius was once asked for advice by a student, and in replying essentially urged him to wait and be patient. Later he was asked for advice by another student, and advised that student to not be patient and to solve the problem immediately. An observant third student noticed the seemingly contradictory nature of Confucius’ responses and asked him to explain. Confucius replied, “Ran Qiu is over cautious and so I wished to urge him on. Zilu, on the other hand, is too impetuous, and so I sought to hold him back.” Everybody is different. Every situation is different.

[5] Embrace epistemic humility. Epictetus reminds us that “it’s impossible to learn that which you think you already know.” To the Stoics, particularly Zeno, conceitedness was the primary impediment to wisdom. Because when you’ve always got answers, opinions and ready-made solutions, what you’re not doing is learning. The physicist John Wheeler said that “as our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.” The point is the more you know the more you realize there is much more to know.

[6] Keep your identity small. This is a rule from the great Paul Graham. His point was that the more you identify with things—being a member of a certain political party, being seen as smart, being seen as someone who drives a fancy car or someone who belongs to this club or that ideology—the harder it is for you to change your mind or entertain new points of view. You want to remain a free agent.

[7] Don’t always have an opinion. It’s possible, Marcus Aurelius said, to not have an opinion. Practice the ability of having absolutely no thoughts about something. You should be able to have multiple ideas you’re working on in your head at one time, as opposed to a bunch of things you have strong opinions about.

[8] Flexibility is key. A colleague of Churchill once observed that Churchill “venerated tradition but ridiculed convention.” The past was important, but it was not a prison. The old ways—what the Romans called the mos maiorum—were important but not to be mistaken as perfect. Plenty of people have been buried in coffins of their own making. Before their time too. Because they couldn’t understand that “the way they’d always done things” wasn’t working anymore. Or that “the way they were raised” wasn’t acceptable anymore. We must cultivate the capacity for change, for flexibility and adaptability. Continuously, constantly.

It’s one of the greatest exchanges between Epictetus and a student. “Tell me what to do!” the student says. Epictetus replied, “you must understand how laughable it is to say, ‘Tell me what to do!’” The student is confused. Epictetus says, “What advice could I possibly give? No, a far better request is, ‘Train my mind to adapt to any circumstance.’ . . . In this way, if circumstances take you off script . . . you won’t be desperate for a new prompting.”

It would be nice if someone could show us exactly what to do in every situation. Indeed, this is what we spend a good portion of our lives doing: preparing for this, studying for that. Saving for or anticipating some arbitrary point in the future. But that’s not life. Life punches us in the face. It destroys our plans.

The Stoics did not seek to have the answer for every question or a plan for every contingency. Yet they’re also not worried. Why? Because they have confidence that they’ll be able to adapt and change with the circumstances. Rooted in the teachings of Epictetus, the United States Navy Vice Admiral and prisoner of war James Stockdale perfectly described this mental attitude when he said that to survive years of imprisonment and torture, he needed a paradoxical combination of optimism and realism. He needed to maintain unwavering faith that he would ultimately prevail, and at the same time, he needed to confront the brutal facts of his current situation. As Fitzgerald put it above, Stockdale needed to “be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

Instead of looking for instruction, the Stoic cultivates skills like creativity, independence, self-confidence, ingenuity, and the ability to problem solve. They cultivate negative capability. They cultivate true genius.

In this way, they are resilient instead of rigid.

Gratitude, like forgiveness, is something we pay lip service to but struggle with in practice.

It’s one of those things, as I like to say, that’s simple…but not easy.

Today, Thanksgiving here in America, is a day where we’re supposed to take the time to think about what we’re grateful for. And the candidates are usually pretty obvious: We should be grateful for our families, for our health (especially through a pandemic), that we live in a time of peace (the first Thanksgiving America has not been at war in 21 years), for the food laid out in front of us. All the usual suspects.

I agree, these are important things to recognize and appreciate. It’s also good to have a specific day dedicated to that occasion. So by all means, celebrate.

But what about all the other stuff in the world?

The obstacles. The frustrations. The stresses and difficulties of life. The people that wronged you. The haters. The dilemmas. The bad days.

That too?

Yes, that especially.

The writer Jorge Luis Borges said:

Or as my mentor Robert Greene once told me,

It’s all material.

He means that everything that happens in your life can be turned into something useful, whether it’s your writing, your relationships, or your new startup. You probably wouldn’t have chosen for things to go wrong–just like no one would choose any of those things on the list of current events above–but they came anyway. Now the question is, how are you going to think about them?

Are you going to think about what you don’t like? What you resent or fear or hate? Or are you going to find the good in them, what you can use in them, what you can be grateful for in them?

In the mornings when I sit down to journal, one of the notebooks I write in is a gratitude journal. When I first got it, I would fill the pages with all the stuff I liked about the stuff I liked. But after a time, this came to feel sort of pointless and rather repetitive. Now what I do is try to find ways to express gratitude, not for the things that are easy to be grateful for, but for what is hard.

• Gratitude for that nagging pain in my leg
• Gratitude for that troublesome client
• Gratitude for the challenges of the pandemic
• Gratitude for that delayed flight
• Gratitude for that damage from the storm

Because each one was an opportunity. Because I learned from it. Because it reminded me of what was actually important. Because it’s allowed me to see how lucky I am. Because I became a better person for it.

Every situation has two handles, the Stoics would say. Which one will you grab?

As Cicero explains, “you may say that deaf men miss the pleasure of hearing a lyre-player’s songs. Yes, but they also miss the squeaking of a saw being sharpened, the noise a pig makes when its throat is being cut, the roaring thunder of the sea which prevents other people from sleeping.”

In the chaos and dysfunction of the world, I try to notice where I have been gifted in the latter category than where I have been deprived in the former.

Besides, it’s already happened…what’s the use in getting upset?

“Let us accept it,” Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself in his journal, “as we accept what the doctor prescribes. It may not always be pleasant, but we embrace it —because we want to get well.” He could have been talking about the pandemic of his times, the stresses of his job or the children he had buried. He could have been talking of his own ill-health, the bad weather, or the noise of the city’s streets. We don’t know, we just know that whatever it was, he was trying to find a way to say thank you for it, to be grateful for it. “Convince yourself that everything is the gift of the gods,” Marcus said, “that things are good and always will be.”

Beautiful.

So as you gather around your family and friends this Thanksgiving or Christmas or any other celebration you might partake in, of course, appreciate it and give thanks for all the obvious and bountiful gifts that moment presents. Just make sure that when the moment passes, as you go back to your everyday, ordinary life, that you make gratitude a regular part of it. Again—not simply for what is easy and immediately pleasing. That comes naturally enough, and may even go without saying.

What is in more desperate need of appreciation and perspective are the things you never asked for, the things you worked hard to prevent from happening in the first place. Because that’s where gratitude will make the biggest difference and where we need the most healing.

Whatever it is. However poorly it went. However difficult the last few years have been for you.

Be grateful for it. Give thanks for it. There was good within it.

Write it down. Over and over again.

Until you believe it.

There was more than one moment in the depths of the pandemic that the decision to open a small town bookstore seemed like the absolute worst idea in the world—a monument to arrogance and self-indulgence. At first we couldn’t open. Then we didn’t feel right opening. Then a freak storm (and political incompetence) shut down the power grid, leading to burst pipes and a busted roof. Then books were unavailable due to a global logistics crisis.

In between all this, there were new variants and sick employees. Expensive new air conditioning units. Online attacks from political extremists and trying to raise two young children.

It was, you might say, one damn thing after another.

I don’t know what my wife and I expected the experience to be when we first conceived of opening our store, The Painted Porch, back in the fall 2019, but I’m not sure we could have predicted this. Nor do I imagine we would have proceeded had we had any such inkling.

During one of these many dark nights of the soul, I turned back, as I often do, to Stoicism, the philosophy that I am lucky enough to write about. As it happens, there was plenty to find parallels to. In 160AD, Rome was hit by a horrible plague. The “Antonine Plague” would kill somewhere between 10 and 18 million people. No one knew what caused the awful disease, or what had brought it on. But it quickly overwhelmed the country—bodies piled up in the streets, the economy was devastated, civic institutions crumbled.

One ancient historian, Cassisus Dio, would write that Rome’s emperor Marcus Aurelius “did not have the good fortune that he deserved…and for almost his whole reign was involved in a series of troubles.” It’s almost incomprehensible and impossible to compare to…and yet not all that different than how life goes for the rest of us: one damn thing after another.

Yet Dio would write that these events made Marcus Aurelius, that he “admired him all the more for this very reason, that amid unusual and extraordinary difficulties he both survived himself and preserved the empire.”

I’ve always wanted to do that, people will say when they hear you’ve opened a bookstore, not unlike the way we fantasize about being president or famous or achieving some other lofty thing. Of course, they’re not thinking about how hard these things are, why so few are able to do them well—what they take out of a person, what they expose you to.

Dreams are great. They are also burdens, crucibles that can feel at times like nightmares.

Life is rarely easy, nor is doing the things you feel called to do. But it is in the struggle, in what Longfellow called the “world’s broad field of battle,” that we decide who we are, that we become who we are capable of being.

Or we don’t.

If everything went as planned, if loving books and culture was enough, well, I suspect every small town would have a thriving bookshop and every author would make not only enough to get by, but to have a lovely cottage too. My years in publishing and in business have let me know that this is not the case.

No, every small business, every book, is a struggle. It’s a struggle against your desire to procrastinate, a struggle against your doubts, a struggle against the obstacles of the industry and the market, a struggle against other people’s doubts too. And then you put your thing out in the world and it’s a struggle against indifferent and a vicious street fight for attention.

Few of us—few ideas—make it out alive.

Some lament this. Some embrace it.

At one point in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius would lament all that had happened to him. It’s unfortunate that this happened. Then he catches himself and decides no, in fact, it’s fortunate. Because this is what he trained for. Because this is a challenge he could rise to.

One of the first things people want to know is how the bookstore is doing, whether it’s a success. I like to say that first, my wife and I are still together, so yes, that’s a big win. We survived. We kept ourselves together despite it all.

Aside from sales—which have been strong—and the community that’s formed around the shop—which has been rewarding—the metric I am most proud of is a bit harder to measure and considerably less binary. I am a better writer, for having gone through the wringer. I am a better neighbor and citizen—I think—for having been made to think about all sorts of things I was blissfully unaware of before. I am a better member of my industry, having had the opportunity to support and advocate for all sorts of different writers and books.

Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, happened to realize this first hand. Losing everything when his convoy of ships sank offshore, he washed up in Athens, penniless and directionless. He ended up in a small bookstore where he heard a discussion of Socrates. “Where can I find a man like that?” he asked the bookseller. So began his journey into philosophy and so began the twenty five hundred year journey of a philosophy that remains relevant to this day. “I made a great fortune,” he would later joke, “when I suffered a shipwreck.”

Opening a bookstore during a pandemic has been beyond difficult.

But that’s a good thing because difficult things are good for you.

It’s fortunate that it happened to us, I would say. First off, that we were not retirees who put our nest egg into what we thought would be a fun, low key project. Instead, we’re energetic and (for now) well-off young people with the time and the resources. It’s also fortunate because it was an opportunity to put the ideas that I have long written about into practice. Besides, if I had to choose between Rome during the Antonine Plague and Texas during COVID, I’d choose my fate any day.

Yet I’d also choose my fate over not having been challenged the way these last few years have challenged me.

Because I would not be the person I am today without it.

—

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