by Ryan Holiday

Stoic philosophy has never sat well with me—I’m always at odds with the fact that in order to manifest true Stoicism, you have to discard your emotions, and act on rational choice alone. “BUT MUH EMOTIONS,” I lamented, “it’s all I have to feel alive!”

This book (unlike “The Obstacle is the Way” that I have read previously) takes a more holistic approach and quotes a few notable Stoics on various aspects of the “art of living one’s life” (the purpose of philosophy). Reading all the 366 quotes, I’ve got a more coherent picture of Stoicism than ever before.

One thing that particularly stood out to me while reading the book was what I would call “being right by induction.” In mathematics (and sometimes in programming), proof by induction is a common way to prove that something is covering all cases. For example, if we can give a correct answer for 0 (the base case) and the next number (0 + 1 or 1), then “by induction” every next step is an instance of the step “number + 1”, which, in turn, means that we have all the numbers covered.

It is the same for Stoics. Similar to Buddhists, they say that you will only suffer if you try rely on events outside of your immediate control (e. g. the future or other people), hence you must only focus on the choices you make about things under your immediate control. Which is, obviously, what you do here and now. This is the base case—if you do the “right” thing now, you are behaving honestly and correctly, according to the Stoics.

The induction step is the integration of these moments where you are doing the right thing. If you ignore things outside your immediate control and follow your immediate and rational choice from one moment to the next, then by induction you will live as a true philopher, you will have learned the “art of living” by showing that you know how to do it, moment to moment.

Both the Buddhist notion of “groundlessness” (that the future is uncertain, and change is inevitable) and this Stoic notion of “being right by induction” have been powerful and liberating in that they give you a solid (despite their meaning) alternative viewpoint that exposes a completely different view of your situation in the world. I’m constantly struggling with finding meaning in my life, and learning about both has made a difference.

I was skeptical about reading “The Daily Stoic” but the multiangular approach the author takes definitely gives enough food for thought—it’s far from the modern business book density of one idea per hundred pages. Even if you don’t like all of it, you’ll find some of it interesting.

This review on GoodReads

I’ve gotten very good at talking myself out of doing any side projects. Finding flaws and planning for failure, the qualities that help me a lot at work, don’t let me believe in my ideas enough that I would take them to life.

On the other end of the spectrum is the hopeful entrepreneur making a classic mistake, developing a product before confirming she has a verifiable edge over the competition, and solves a problem real people have. Edward Thorpe said it the best in “A Man For All Markets”: in business, just like in gambling, you only play when you know that you’ll win.

I decided that for some current ideas, as well as new ones that I consider viable, I’ll withhold judgement. Instead of gauging whether the product would work, I’ll take it unconditionally to the landing page stage. It takes almost no commitment and creates no technical debt, it’s just a domain and some static HTML. It’s a win-win from any point of view: I spend much less time on it than building the simplest MVP, writing a description forces to be precise about the idea and its details, and I can show the result to people, perhaps potential users.

You don’t even need a landing page. Market research should come first in talking to your future users. But my ideas usually have me as the user, so I can make the first pass without talking to people.

It’s too easy to get into the habit of consuming by default: check email, Twitter, Facebook, Slack, Basecamp or a million other services designed to consume our attention. It’s funny how “consuming” works both ways.

Producing by default, when you have to restore lost context to continue writing or programming, or drawing after switching away, is much harder, but it’s a habit just like any other. Initial friction will go away and you won’t feel resistance starting to re-explore your own, not someone else’s, ideas.

I see that a lot in myself when starting to write code in an unfamiliar language. My intention is to write the best code I can. In order to do that, I need to read a guide, best practices, examples and try and build a mental scaffolding that will help me produce the code that I want.

But it’s too easy to be stuck in the “research phase” as it’s called, never doing the work. How am I going to be fluent in a language if I don’t practice producing it? How am I going to produce if I don’t know how to do that?

There’s a catch. Reading leaves few traces in your mind, and when the time comes to write, you feel like gripping thin air, nothing comes out. Try writing the simplest things, make mistakes, no one is judging. Code is meant to be rewritten anyway.

Sounds simple? I get caught often. Just when I think I learned enough, I try writing and find I forgot almost everything that I’ve read. What was the point of reading then? I could spend that time writing, encountered the problem and would have read the answer the same way.