Stoicism and a lot of philosophies are all about perception.
How you think about things determines to a large degree
what you're gonna be able to do about. So if you tell yourself that something happens,
it's the worst thing that ever happened, it's totally unfair,
you're not gonna be able to do anything about it, that's obviously a less productive attitude than
"well, this is unfortunate but I'm gonna be fine" or "they didn't know any better"
or "this is actually good." That being said, the secret is not real.
It's not just like if you want something to be good, it is good.
Like when Shakespeare says, "nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so"
he's not saying like thinking magically makes the world better,
you still have to do something about it. So pragmatism, I think, comes after
this sort of managing your perceptions. Pragmatism is,
"this is what I think is possible here, this is what I think is important,
this is the task that I've set up for myself,
well now how am I gonna go about it?" "I'm not gonna go about it naively,
I'm not gonna go about it in an entitled fashion, I'm not gonna go about it in a
lazy fashion either, I'm gonna go about in a way that says
'I'm gonna get this done and I'm willing to do essentially whatever it takes to make that happen'
even if other people say..." And I differ from the stoics a little bit,
I mean the stoics are very big on notions of honour
and dignity and right and wrong and I am too but I'm just saying, you set out for a path,
it's deciding like, "I don't care what the rules say"
or "I don't care what the way you're supposed to do it is,
I'm gonna let the task take me where it needs to go."
In order to make the world what you want it to be,
you have to accept what it is first. And I think that's the problem.
People so vividly live in the idealised future that they want
that they make decisions as if it is already the case and already true.
And so, it's like, let's say you wanna be a writer or you wanna have a video show,
if you wrongly think that the world is eagerly anticipating everything that you're doing
because you walk around thinking like all eyes are on you all the time,
you're gonna launch your show and it's not gonna get seen by anyone
because you've grossly underestimated the amount of noise that you have to break through.
If you're a writer and you think you want the public to consume a certain kind of content
but the public actually likes this kind of content and you produce this stuff,
no one's gonna know about it. So, it's like you've gotta
understand what the world is, you don't have to take it as destiny,
but you have to understand it so you can make decisions based on that reality
so, ideally, you can move the ball forward.
And you probably get this a lot where it's like someone comes to you and they're like,
"this terrible thing happened" or "we were supposed to do this but..."
and then I think the very human natural response is like
"that is bad." But what an entrepreneur does
or what a stoic would do, I would say, is go "okay, that is true, now what?"
What are we gonna do instead? What are we gonna do because of this?
Yes, we were gonna do this, but then we found out that that's closed
or we were gonna buy this but we found out it's too expensive,
any number of things that can happen in the course of a business,
okay, that closes off certain opportunities, but by its nature also presents different
opportunities or it forces you to
look at another list that you had previously. Plan A doesn't work, you have to go to Plan B,
so what are you gonna do instead? And I think, what's really important is
that you waste as little time as possible lamenting the failure of Plan A
or the closing of the list number one of opportunities
and you focus all your energy on looking at the next list
because it doesn't accomplish anything the other way.