S01 · Adversity and Setbacks
Practical setbacks and obstacles
Plans derailed, projects obstructed or goals met with unexpected friction.
Cues
Showing 18 of 18 cues
“Every difficulty in life presents us with an opportunity to turn inward and to invoke our own submerged inner resources. The trials we endure can and should introduce us to our strengths ... Dig deeply. You possess strengths you might not realize you have. Find the right one. Use it.”
The Stoic archer and preferred indifferents
Like an archer who controls his training, aim and release but not the wind or target once the arrow leaves the bow, we control our health and work habits but not genes, illness or outcomes; health and wealth are preferred indifferents, but worth lies in what we do with the situation.
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
“Excellence withers without an adversary. It is not what you endure that matters, but how you endure it.”
“If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.”
“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own ...”
“You shouldn’t give circumstances the power to rouse anger, for they don’t care at all.”
“I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.”
“I don't add to my troubles.”
“Seek not for events to happen as you wish but wish events to happen as they do and your life will go smoothly.”
“Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens. Some things are up to us and some things are not up to us.”
“For all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”
“He robs present ills of their power who has perceived their coming beforehand.”
“Everyone approaches a danger with more courage if he has prepared in advance how to confront it. Anyone can endure difficulties better if he has previously practiced how to deal with them. People who are unprepared can be unhinged by even the smallest of things.”
“It is not things that trouble us, but our judgements about things.”
“It is circumstances which show men what they are. Therefore when a difficulty falls upon you, remember that God, like the trainer of wrestlers, has matched you with a rough young man. “For what purpose?” you may say. Why, that you may become an Olympic conqueror; but it is not accomplished without sweat.”
“What a caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.”
Life as a game of dice
The conditions of our existence at any moment are like dice already thrown: the roll cannot be changed and must be accepted, while how skillfully we play the dice after they fall is entirely up to us.