A Friend’s Assistance, Building Character, & Avoiding Outcome-Driven Desires
May 15, 2024 Wednesday Wisdom
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A Friend’s Assistance
🤨 Quote
“If a person's ears are so closed that he won't even hear the truth from a friend, he is a lost cause.”
Cicero
Source: How to be a Friend
Observation 🧐
Being able to change one’s opinion is one of the most vital things we can do in a world that is evolving as rapidly as ours is.
But trusting someone to give you good advice or to help set you straight is not an easy thing to do.
Nevertheless, when it is a friend whose opinion we trust and admire, we have to be willing to hear out their logic. Perhaps we’re not seeing clearly. Perhaps we are allowing our emotions to get the best of us.
Having a true friend is a blessing in life. Being able to trust their opinion is crucial.
Epictetus taught his students the need to always question the impressions they received rather than allowing it to run away with their emotion.
“tell every jarring thought or impression: "You are just an appearance and in no way the real thing."
This is where a good friend can lend a hand and help. They can tell you when you’re not living up to your potential, when you’re not seeing reality for what it is, or even when you’re too down on yourself.
A friend is there to assist with the judgments you make.
Zeno the founder of Stoicism said we have two ears and one mouth for a reason.
Learn to listen.
🤔 Question
What is one thing you can do this week that will help you turn your ears up and listen rather than react?
Building Character
🤨 Quote
“It can ruin your life only if it ruins your character. Otherwise it cannot harm you - inside or out.”
Marcus Aurelius
Source: Meditations 4.8
Observation 🧐
The pursuit of the good life, of human flourishment, or as the ancients called it, arete, starts first and foremost with the pursuit of one’s character. The good life is paved in the actions we take in perfecting our character.
Part of this is holding the ability to properly control the judgments we make of events. If we cannot properly control our judgments, we can’t expect to be able to judge life appropriately.
A key to our judgments is seeing them as flexible ideas, not immovable objects. The Stoics, for example, were adamant about updating beliefs and properly evaluating the judgments we laid over the world.
“Any assessment we make is subject to alteration - just as we are ourselves,” Marcus Aurelius reminded himself. “Look closely at them - how impermanent they are, how meaningless.”
The inverse of our inability to let go of a judgment we made is our ability to too quickly make a judgment—we are very quickly taken in by appearances and easily forget to use sound reason.
We need to be able to properly adjust how we interpret the world. Much of our pain comes from our inability to judge our experiences levelheadedly. This means reviewing the situation before us and laying it bear, trying to find fact from judgment.