Control, Struggle, and the Pursuit for Deeper Learning
Sweet Bites for May 17, 2024
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Hi all,
Welcome to another edition of Sweet Bites, Mind Candy’s bite-sized newsletter with thought-provoking finds to send you into the weekend with.
This week we explored the power and perils of judgements, and how they lead to our experience of the world (links below).
And don’t forget to check out our Monday Meditation this week where you can win a free audiobook of Marcus Aurelius: The Stoic Emperor.
Choose Your Dessert for the Week
🍰 Mini Bites
🍰 Mini Bites
🍰 On our control
Before Jim Mattis was a four-star general or Secretary of Defense for the United States, he was a rambunctious youth who often found himself in trouble.
“After I caroused too much one night, the local judge ordered me to spend weekends in jail—punishment for underage drinking,” he would retell.
One night he ended up with a cellmate named Porter Wagner who completely change his perspective on life.
“What do you see, Jimmy?” Wagner asked as Mattis tried looking out the barred window. When Mattis respond saying he saw nothing but a muddied parking lot, Wagner replied, “From down here, I see stars in the night sky. It’s your choice. You can look at stars or mud.”
This would stick with Mattis.
“From that wayward philosopher I learned that no matter what happened, I wasn’t a victim; I made my own choices how to respond. You don’t always control your circumstances, but you can always control your response.”
🍰 On how struggle provides depth and perspective
When the author Robert Greene was a student at Berkeley, he took a six week course on learning ancient Greek. He was assigned the project of translating a passage from Thucydides. He spent hours upon hours trying to interpret and translate the passage until finally he felt like he did it justice and turned it in.
“Robert, I see what you were thinking,” his professor said, “I see where you were going. You were almost there but you missed it, you completely mistranslated this beautiful paragraph but you were getting at something.”
“And that had an incredible impact on me,” he would later tell Ryan Holiday. “It made me realize that if you face a problem you don’t understand, you have to think, you have to think more deeply, you have to use that anxiety of ‘is this right? No, I have to go deeper and deeper and deeper.’”
Greene would keep this lesson and apply it to other aspects of his life. This desire to investigate deeper became core to his work ethic and his advice to others.
“This is the single most powerful thing you can do in your life. What you need to do is when you have a feeling… you want to stop yourself and look at it with a degree of detachment. And you want to say ‘all right, I’m feeling this anger now in the moment, where is it coming from? I think it was triggered by what this person said but maybe it isn’t, let me analyze.’”
In essence, Greene’s advice embodies that of what the Stoic philosopher Epictetus taught his students over 2,000 years ago:
“In all circumstances keep in mind to turn in to yourself and ask what resources you have for dealing with these things... By developing these habits, you will not be carried away by your first impressions.”
There is always depth to our problems. We attain the answers through continually working to uncover what lies beneath. Each new layer provides a new perspective of the problem at hand, and in turn, a new way of approaching it.
📚 This Week’s Newsletters
This week, we partnered with Yale University Press for a free audiobook of
’s latest book, Marcus Aurelius: The Stoic Emperor.For your chance to win, check out the instructions in the Monday Meditation.
📰 Article (and Exercise)
This week I enjoyed reading this article by
who runs the Substack, . The article does a great job of teaching the Stoic practice of detachment, how to properly judge the emotions we’re feeling, and how to combat the pull of negativity.Favorite quote:
“It’s a little sad that in so much of what we do, the first thing we consider is what other people will think about it. We disturb ourselves on that account. We allow our judgment to be colored by the imagined opinion of someone else.”
✏️ This Week’s Most Wednesday Wisdom
😂 Lighthearted Concept Review
The judgments and opinions we hold dictate how we view the world—they are the colored glasses we wear. Below is a funny example of just how this plays out.
🦉 Wisdom
“To erase false perceptions, tell yourself: I have it in me to keep my soul from evil, lust and all confusion. To see things as they are and treat them as they deserve.”
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations 8.29
📖 Book Recommendation
How to be Free by Epictetus (translated by A.A. Long)
How to be Free is a recent translation of Epictetus’ famous work, The Enchiridion. Hellenistic scholar A.A. Long presents the work alongside several passages from Epictetus’ Discourses to present a wonderful overview of Epictetus’ philosophy.
Favorite Quotes/Passages:
“In all circumstances keep in mind to turn in to yourself and ask what resources you have for dealing with these things... By developing these habits, you will not be carried away by your first impressions.”
-Passage X
—
“Until you know their reasons, how do you know whether they acted wrongly. This way you will not combine indubitable impressions of a situation with an endorsement of something else that lacks this certainty.”
-Passage XLV
—
“Keep in mind that desire presumes your getting what you want and that aversion presumes your avoiding what you don't want, and that not getting what we want makes us unfortunate, while encountering what we don't want makes us miserable.”
-Passage II
🛠️ Tactic
We’re all looking to find fulfillment in life (this month’s theme), yet it always seems so illusive. In this video, Seth Godin explains how we can attain fulfillment and inspires one to keep searching for it.
Until next time,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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Thanks for the mention Dylan!