Redefining Hard Work and Success
To Become Invincible
What the Stoics have to say
My daughter is graduating from college and like many others is stepping into a future unlike any other in modern history. Normally, to help her through this extraordinary uncertainty, her mother and I would rely upon our own past and experiences, but amid this global pandemic normal does not exist. It’s just a word sandwiched halfway between nope and north in my dictionary, of which the placement, I feel, is fitting. How can anyone with a compass, moral or otherwise, not feel their effort entirely negated by the struggle of the last several months?
So lacking the capacity to arm her with the wisdom and knowledge necessary to navigate the weeks, months and probably years ahead, I considered the most common suggestion of the last forty years — work hard and you’ll find success (or as the astute psychologist William James called it: “the bitch-goddess SUCCESS) — and I strained it through the lesson provided by one of the great ancient philosophers, Epictetus, who said:
“You can be invincible, if you enter into no contest in which it is not in your power to conquer”.
The Intent Behind Hard Work
Let’s funnel that guidance through the part of work hard first, partly because it feels like it’s sound advice and also because we’ve all had occasion where the intensity and focus of our effort has paid off in some sort of desirable value, albeit perhaps a delusional one. Think running a foot race, or writing a novel. Both require skill, both require stamina. What Epictetus would say about either, however, is that our goal should be such to not be frustrated by having a goal you might not be able to fulfill. As in, actually winning the race or having the novel published. These outcomes are not up to you entirely. External factors are at play.
Take novel writing for instance. All of my life I’ve enjoyed writing, challenging myself and dedicating the time to develop the craft through practice and study and while I let myself imagine that all that focus and hard work might one day produce a novel, really my intention when sitting down to the keyboard was and always has been to write one good sentence, then another good sentence and so on and so forth. To bleed the truth, as Hemingway put it.
Sure, those sentences were connected by story but story implied I had something weighty to say, which required someone to listen. Translation: a ton of pressure. But writing one good sentence was solely on me. It was in myself to conquer. Borrowing an image again from Hemingway, I believe to write well might require a tourniquet, but hard work requires reasoning.
When it did come time to find a listener, I sent the manuscript to an agent suggested to me by another writer. The agent liked my writing and offered suggestions for improvement. While most of his ideas were good, one in particular changed the story in such a way that it tried to turn it into something it was not. I resisted and eventually after several years of partnering with them on this topic we parted. I felt the sentences spoke for themselves. They felt the story should speak more for the readers.
The book is still unpublished, so who was right? To answer you have to ask the questions: Was the goal on each of those occasions I sat at my desk confronting a blank page to be published or to have written? Was any feeling of defeat I might be experiencing because the one person I reached out to said no, or because I only reached out to one person?
Redefining Success
Questions such as these form a common, twenty-first century quandary, especially in the mind of a young person ready to launch themselves into their future adulthood amid COVID-19 (the kind of beast that William James might himself be very keen on harnessing to prove his point): What even is the point?
Everything has been cancelled. Jobs have been cancelled. Events have been cancelled. Occasions with friends have been cancelled. Even home, the one place where, according to Frost, they have to take you in, has been cancelled. You can see how a person fresh out of college might want to crawl inside their bed and hide beneath the covers, hoping to just wait it out. But that would be a mistake.
There is after all much work to be done. And much of it involves nothing more than better understanding our own self.
“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself in your way of thinking.” — Marcus Aurelius
Marcus was, according to the 19th century historian W.E. H. Lecky, one of the best rulers who ever lived, overseeing a “period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous”. Then, like now, if people weren’t happy it was in large part because of their insatiable appetite to have more, which, disregarding birth status, could only be achieved through hard work and finding success.
Some would argue that Marcus was wealthy and famous, and that many other Stoics would’ve enjoyed their own degree of fame and fortune, but the question here is one of value, not of hedonic adaptation. The good life, according to Marcus, was to value things that are genuinely valuable and be indifferent to things that lack value.
How to do this? By measuring success on the things we alone can control. Like writing one good sentence.
So, back to the present and my daughter and other graduates…what might we say that will give them some hope, that all is not lost, that the wilderness bursting within them will find purchase and grow and become whatever they want it to become? Maybe what’s called for is not so much advice as it is a maxim, so to keep with my philosophical discourse, something better than work hard and success will follow. Maybe something like…
I am invincible.
I. Am. Invincible.
Say it with me. I am invincible.
I am invincible because I believe in myself, which is the most important choice I can make in my life.
I am invincible because I try hard to do my best, and while there is no guarantee I will change the world, I will know I did what I could.
I am invincible because happiness is not a thing or a person or a job or a status. It is, instead, a philosophy. A philosophy that reasons that life is scruffy and tattered and torn and the goal is not happiness at all, but meaning.
I am invincible because I refuse to be paralyzed with fear, because I am indifferent to ridicule, to the discouragement of others, to the values society (mis)places on me. Because my world is large and wild, without boundaries, and unbreakable by anyone or anything I deem too small for it.
I am invincible.
I am.
