A quick update before we begin- I’m in the final stages of editing The Stoic Manual: Meditations on the Art of Living, a collection of 150 Stoic meditations on living well. It’ll be released soon and included free for all Annual and Lifetime members.
Welcome! Stoicism teaches us to pursue excellence and a good life without mistaking wealth, status, or recognition for personal worth. This essay explores how luck influences success, why people are larger than their titles, and how to choose ambitions that genuinely belong to you.
A Kinder Philosophy of Success
There’s a question you’ll hear within minutes of entering almost any adult gathering- “What do you do?”
I ask it too. It gives a conversation somewhere to begin. Yet I know how much weirdness can gather around the answer. Tell people you’re a doctor and you can sometimes feel their attention change. In hospitals, a few words- consultant, resident, intern- can alter the way people behave around…
