Jeff Bezos built a $2.9 trillion company on principles that are almost two thousand years old. He just didn’t explicitly say so. Nobody reads Amazon’s Leadership Principles and thinks: this is a philosophy of how to live. But they should.

Bezos built Amazon because he understood The Lindy Effect: if something has been around for 2,000 years, it’s likely to be around for another 2,000. Unlike Western nations, where state and religion are separate—Bezos didn’t believe in severance. He built into Amazon a culture where business principles and personal principles weren’t two different worlds, but one.

Have backbone; disagree and commit is the courage to go against the grain. Before starting Amazon, Bezos had a well-paid job on Wall Street. When Bezos told his boss he was leaving, his boss gave him two weeks to think it over, but Bezos quit anyway. Deciding what to do in life—your purpose—is inherently hard, but perhaps Bezos listened to what Seneca had to say:

“Each time you want to know what to pursue or what to avoid, look to your highest good, the aim of your life as a whole. Everything we do ought to be in accordance with that aim. Only one who has the entirety of his life in view is in a position to arrange life’s particulars. Even with paints all at the ready, no one can render a likeness until he has decided what he wants to paint. That’s our mistake: everyone deliberates over the parts of life; no one over life as a whole.”

Bezos wasn’t looking at creating Amazon as a side project. He was looking to create his life’s work. If you align your work principles with your personal principles, you create consistency in everything you do.

Frugality is another example of that consistency—and perhaps the most counterintuitive one.

In the early days at Amazon, Bezos had employees use old doors as desks rather than buy new furniture, and reportedly still gives out a “Door Desk Award” to employees who find innovative ways to save money. This wasn’t about being cheap for accountancy reasons: it was to breed a culture of frugality into Amazon. Constraint breeds resourcefulness and self-sufficiency, and leads to invention: overconsumption leads to softness, bloat, and excess, which corrupt judgement.

“It is in times of security that the spirit should be preparing itself to deal with difficult times; while fortune is bestowing favours on it then is the time for it to be strengthened against her rebuffs.”

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That’s the Stoic parallel.

It’s easy for companies to get fat when food is aplenty, but Bezos was distilling in the Amazon culture what Seneca prescribed in the individual: use the good times to prepare for the hard ones.

The same logic runs through Amazon’s approach to trust (justice).

Bezos was famously willing to forgo profits for years to earn customer trust at scale because he valued their loyalty more than his bottom line. By obsessively focusing on customers in the form of low prices and maximum choice, he earned their trust. This discharging your duty to others, even when it’s costly to you in the short term, reminds me of what Seneca said:

“All his thoughts should be as distant as possible from personal advantages.”

It’s easy to scowl now (with the benefit of hindsight) that Bezos is a billionaire, but he wasn’t when he wrote these principles. What Bezos had to do, to instil in the Amazon culture, was to be right—and be right a lot.

At first this leadership principle looks a bit self-promotional, but to have any chance at doing anything well in life you have to be more right than wrong. It sounds overly simplistic, but aside from helping one’s ego, being right also builds something else—judgement. Or as Seneca would say: wisdom.

Judgement isn’t something you can read your way to. It’s built through decisions made, mistakes owned, and patterns recognised over time. That’s what Bezos was encoding—not a principle about being clever, but about developing the kind of wisdom that only comes from being in the arena.

“Besides, what grounds could I possibly have for supposing that a person who has no acquaintance with books will never be a wise man? For wisdom does not lie in books. Wisdom publishes not words but truths—and I’m not sure that the memory isn’t more reliable when it has no external aids to fall back on.”

Amazon’s 14 leadership principles are corporate speak, but I knew there was more to it than that. They were a philosophy: a set of beliefs and guiding principles that worked just as well professionally as they did personally.

The reason Bezos, or anyone interested in building something lasting, reaches for 2,000-year-old principles is because time distinguishes principles that work—from those that don’t.

Are your professional principles different from your personal principles? If yes, asking yourself why might just be the best decision you’ll ever make.

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We’re all suckers for a good comeback story. Whether it’s the Phoenix rising from the ashes, Jesus from a tomb or Matthew McConaughey's acting career, we celebrate tales of perseverance, resilience and faith. We like to believe—or rather want to believe, that our current situation isn’t absolute—that there is always some way out of it. But do we truly get stronger from setbacks? After all, the dodo didn’t come back from extinction, many messiahs haven’t risen back to life, and there are plenty of Hollywood romcom actors who didn’t reinvent their careers.

For all the mythical, religious and Hollywood comebacks, there are many times more those that died a death, so is the prescription that “what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger” true or not?

In today’s essay, we’ll learn what Kintsugi, business failures and the Maginot Line have to do with this question.

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A piece of beautiful terracotta pottery has been in your family for generations, displayed in many different eras but always with pride. People would always pay compliments to its beauty, elegance and timelessness, and you would always love telling new people the same old stories—where it came from, how old it is, who had it before you and so on.

But, one unfortunate day, you accidentally break the fragile pot, shattering generations of family pride along with it. To my knowledge, broken pottery can't be put back together the way it was before, so you're left with two options: (1) store away the broken pieces in an attempt to cling onto the family heirloom, or (2) throw the broken pottery, history and love in the bin.

There is, however, a third option: Kintsugi.

Kintsugi (“golden joinery”) is the centuries-old Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. Unlike most repair methods that aim to hide damage, Kintsugi deliberately highlights the fractures, and people go mad for this.

But why?

Pottery is, by nature fragile, because if it breaks, it loses its function and purpose. Kintsugi reverses the pot's fate. It gets stronger from shock and goes from being fragile to anti-fragile. It's a comeback story for the ages, and remember, we all love a good comeback story. It's a metaphor for all that can happen in our lives and shows that we can come back from being damaged, our dreams shattered, or our hearts broken. It resembles reality, not some static version of it. For most people, breakage is something to be avoided, but for some, it’s an opportunity to weld the broken pieces back together to create something greater than it was before. To adapt. These are the people who see an obstacle as a hurdle—not a barrier, and who strive for innovation.

This ancient Japanese art form offers more than aesthetic appeal—it provides a framework for understanding how damage might become a source of newfound strength. But pottery doesn’t repair itself. It requires skilled artisans, specialised materials, and deliberate technique. It requires practice.

Similarly, organisational recovery from failure isn’t automatic. It requires systems and cultures specifically designed to transform setbacks into strength. Few companies have embraced this philosophy more thoroughly than Amazon. But what skilled intervention is required for this repair process, and can organisations truly repair themselves in the same way?

“Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent, you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it's going to work, it's not an experiment.” - Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos at Amazon embraced and encouraged his leadership team and employees to innovate. To try, fail, learn, and iterate. Bezos clearly lacks a crystal ball to foresee what will succeed or fail, but after launching numerous experiments, many of which were unsuccessful, he inevitably sharpens his ability to reverse the fate of failure into something greater. Before Amazon Prime came unboxed, which was a terrible attempt at entering the digital streaming platform. Being wrong can be costly, but being slow and wrong is worse. But, for all the success that Bezos and Amazon have enjoyed, there is a corporate graveyard of like-minded business owners that didn’t rise from the tomb. That did try to innovate. Bezos’s willingness to experiment and fail represents a corporate manifestation of a much older process—one that has been shaping life on Earth for billions of years. Evolution itself is essentially a system of trial and error, where most mutations fail but occasional successes fundamentally reshape what's possible.

Hundreds of millions of years ago, fish began to grow limbs, which enabled them to walk on the seabed and eventually onto land. From there, fish turned into mammals, which turned into sapiens, and eventually into us, sorry lot. If those fish hadn't mutated, survived, and multiplied, the world might not have been blessed with our current crop of politicians. Praise!

There's a natural and often oversimplified comparison between biological and business evolution, but for good reason. Conventional wisdom states that businesses should avoid failure at all costs, but if businesses stick to conventional wisdom, they're potentially giving themselves a death sentence by missing out on natural ‘business evolution.’ It's easy to embrace the idea of invention but harder to put into practice, because exercising your theoretical muscles and doing something for real are two very different things, because when businesses do things for real, they have to invest resources, time and capital. They open themselves up for breaking. But does the scale of failure matter? Are small, containable failures strengthening while big bets catastrophic?

In his 2015: Big Winners Pay for Many Experiments shareholder letter, Jeff Bezos provides a baseball analogy; the maximum points for a home run will always be four, but in business, the payoff isn't double, triple or ten times...it's potentially hundreds or thousands.

Amazon Prime was a natural segue for an e-commerce business, but AWS, Amazon Marketplace and Prime Video? They weren’t. When I buy running shoes from Nike, I'm not interested in their cloud storage capabilities or what TV series I can watch on their platform tonight, but Bezos had an insatiable appetite for overdelivering, and if you want to overdeliver, you're going to strike out. A lot. But do the benefits of learning from failure always outweigh the costs of the failures themselves?

"Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right. Given a ten per cent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you're still going to be wrong nine times out of ten." - Jeff Bezos

While Bezos demonstrates the innovative potential of embracing breakage and failure, history provides equally powerful examples of what happens when organisations commit exclusively to avoiding it. Perhaps no case illustrates this contrast more dramatically than France's infamous Maginot Line.

After the Germans were defeated in WW1 and thinking ahead to what those pesky Nazis might do in the future, the French decided it best to protect their interests and build a line of concrete fortifications, obstacles, and weaponry named after the French Minister of War André Maginot, which would finally put them at arm's length from their over-ambitious and nefarious neighbours.

The problem with this type of “Kintsugi” is that it belonged in the 1910s and not the 1940s. A lot can happen in 30 years. Indeed, the Germans, bankrupt, embarrassed, and sent to the world's metaphorical naughty corner, developed something so extraordinarily novel it birthed its own name: Blitzkrieg. And it was something else. The Maginot Line was about as good a defence as a chocolate fireguard, and as the Germans ravaged their way to Paris, it developed its own signature branding: “For expensive things that offer a false sense of security.”

The Germans’ and French attitudes to fragility couldn’t have been more contrast. If your attitude to fixing broken pottery is to send it back in time, don’t be surprised when the future comes steamrolling over it.

Setbacks don't inherently strengthen us because the laws of the world don’t prescribe to platitudes. Rather, they create the conditions where strength becomes possible—but only for those equipped with the right mindset, resources, and systems to learn effectively. It isn’t “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” but rather, “Are you willing to pick yourself and the pieces up and try?” By adding nuance, we move beyond inspirational and pithy platitudes toward a more practical understanding of how failure can sometimes lead to extraordinary growth.

Until next time, Karl (The School of Knowledge).

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What is quality? It's a word we see and hear every day. We talk about it, seek quality products, quality service, quality time, quality work, and quality relationships, but if I asked you to define it- could you?

Your first attempt might be that quality is something that’s good but why not just stop at good? After all, good is easier to define than quality because its opposite is bad, but what's the opposite of quality? Non-quality?

Is quality a thing or an idea? Can it be touched, held, or grabbed, or is it something that exists only in our minds? An abstraction. If it exists in our mind and in the minds of others, is it the same quality that we're thinking of?

How is it that some things are quality and others are not? Is quality permanent or fleeting? If we can freely choose to say or define something as quality can we trust it?

Is quality a process or an endpoint? It’s easy to see quality as the product- that is, the endpoint, but I think it's the process. It's the details, methodology, patience, persistence, imagination, and curiosity that produce the quality. The thing, the endpoint (F1 championship-winning car, award-winning film, hand-made oak dining table,) wouldn't be quality if not for the aforementioned, because cars and films and tables don't just invent themselves. We do.

Quality is in the pursuit of something.

There's also a certain quality that people can have, you know? They “Just have that certain quality,” you can't quite define but know it is there nonetheless. Perhaps it's the ability to have people shut up and listen when they speak or an aura they have when they walk into a room. But it's a certain quality for sure. We know when we find people like this because it's glaringly obvious they possess such quality, and I'm certain it's why people package up seminars and workshop retreats to sell to quality-seeking enthusiasts. But, quality isn't something you can buy in this sense. You can buy quality face cream or quality food ingredients but there's nothing worse than phoney qualities in people, is there?

Quality is personal.

Why should we even care about quality, anyway? Because quality itself reveals care. It shows those who are looking that somebody made a great effort to produce it. Effort and care succeed quality. Do you care enough to create something meaningful?

Quality is the process of caring.

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The process of building muscle, hypertrophy is quality-centric. It relies on quality input by the trainee to build muscle. One of the ways you contribute to this input is the ‘quality’ of your reps. But what is a quality rep? A quality rep in accordance with building muscle is about the connection you feel in the muscle when moving weight. If connection isn’t a definition of quality then I don’t know what is.

Quality is connection.

So what does quality have to do with systems? Quite a lot I think. Everything unnatural is produced by human behaviour and if our quality meter isn't calibrated correctly from the start, how can we expect quality to be produced at the end point?

Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila, conjured up two definitions of quality: static and dynamic. Static quality is the status quo- it's our education systems, justice systems, traffic light systems and all the things that maintain order. It offers stability, and without it, chaos would ensue. Dynamic quality, on the other hand, is the "pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality" and offers freedom and newness. It abhors static patterns of quality and is constantly seeking newer ways of doing things. In battle with each other, we can not survive without the both of them. Static quality maintains our progress, but dynamic quality creates it. They balance.

So where do you start?

Well, systems need goals to act as the direction setters. A sort of compass, train track or other nice metaphor you can think of. If you're designing systems ask yourself what's your goal? Is it to preserve, maintain or protect something or are you seeking to explore, find and accomplish?

Systems that have dynamic behaviour are emergent, adaptive and resilient and often show us new ways, perspectives and values that were hidden beforehand. But dynamic quality can be chaos, and this is why static quality acts more like a ballast than a metaphorical dinosaur clinging on to outdated values, principles and behaviours.

Human history is just a constant renegotiation between existing and new patterns of value. Of static and dynamic quality.

Quality, good and bad, permeates everything we touch in life. We all speak of it like we know it like the back of our hands, yet people are lacking so much of it. When I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila late last year, Robert Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality left a permanent mark on my thinking, and I can think of no better pursuit in seeking quality than in the systems we create as humans.

If you're looking to create systems, then start with quality. There can be no other place.

Until next time, Karl (The School of Knowledge).

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Welcome to this week’s 🔒 paid edition 🔒 of The School of Knowledge.

In case you missed this week’s free editions:

1. How The Feynman Technique Can Make You More Intelligent

2. Why Successful People Have Champion Bias

Approaching 2000 years old, Meditations, by Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius still has as much to teach today, as it did back then. Intended as a journal this timeless book is fundamental in shaping Stoic philosophy.

Filled with personal and pithy insights, this book is filled with advice ready to be used by professionals across various fields today. If you’re a multidisciplinary thinker, it’s as valuable for navigating your career as it is for tackling life’s challenges.

The book is so profound that modern Stoic Ryan Holiday re-reads this book at least once a year.

Here are 5 Stoic lessons every multidisciplinary professional should know:

1. Nature: A Foundation for Interdisciplinary Understanding

2. Indifference to Externals: Focus on What You Can Control

3. Understanding the Common Good: Collaboration Across Disciplines

4. The Pursuit of Virtue: Integrity as a Universal Principle

5. The Power of Self-Reflection

Read time: 9 minutes

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However, we spend most of this time thinking about things that have happened or are yet to happen. We suffer in our imagination.

Our lives are filled with anxiety, hope, fear, ambition, greed & envy. The human mind can lead us astray, ushering us onto a path unrecognisable from what we wanted for ourselves.

We all want to be happy, healthy and wealthy (whatever that term means to you), but today, it feels like the path to lasting happiness is impossible to see-hazed over by fog and covered with brambles, we can’t seem to find our feet.

But the art of living a purposeful life hasn’t changed for thousands of years. Our world is ever-changing at a rate that is only increasing. Trying to keep up is exhausting and futile. There is, however, one simple, almost too simple, trick to counter this:

Let’s break this beautiful quote down into three parts:

1. Learn to Value What You Already Have

2. Become Indifferent to Circumstance

3. Cease to Hope, and You Will Cease to Fear

Read time: 9 minutes

Learn to Value What You Already Have

Desire is a sultry mistress. How many times have you wanted something only to regret it in retrospect? How many arguments have you had over something deemed important only to realise how childish that assumption was? How many times have you lost something, realising only through time the true value of it?

It’s all too easy to undervalue what we already have, what’s familiar and safe to us, and to overvalue what we don’t have, what we desire, hope for and fear.

One consistency amongst older people is what they value as they near the end of their lives. It’s never materialistic. It’s relationships, certain periods of their lives, family, friends, and memories.

Seeing other people around you excel when you’re standing still can create emotions of envy and resentment. It’s only human nature. But what you don’t realise is that somebody else is above them. This reminds me of Seneca’s quote: “When you look at all the people out in front of you, think of all the ones behind you.”

There are always people better off than you, but invert this, and the same is true. There are always people worse off than you, too.

It’s easy to want more, but what you have already is enough. You have to realise this. There’s nothing wrong with wanting a better future for yourself or your family, but that shouldn’t come at the expense of your sanity.

There’s a simple exercise for helping you better value what you currently have that works almost instantly. It just requires being slightly uncomfortable for a few minutes.

The Stoics are famous (wrongly) for not caring much. The philosophy has been infiltrated by bros supposedly indifferent to feelings. Their mantra, ‘If somebody disrespects you, cut that person out of your life, with no remorse, then do 15 press-ups, do an ice bath, trade and be ultra-successful,’ is far removed from what the great Stoics practised, lived and taught.

This misconstrued hardiness is better directed in the opposite direction, though. If somebody you care about disrespects you (upsets you for normal people), walk away and deliberately think about how you would feel if that person were dead (careful here; if you don’t like the person, it could become a fantasy). Suppose you love or care for this person, though, visualise their death, their funeral and your life without them. Picture yourself speaking at their funeral. What would you say?

This seems extreme, but you only need to do this once you begin to understand the power of this exercise.

Some people struggle to do this because of the emotion it can bring up, but by practising this, you will almost always see things for what they are. What’s important (valuable), and what’s not.

Therefore, to seek tranquillity, desire less. Be content with what you have, and yes, have ambition, but be indifferent to its success. When work feels like play to you, you’re already winning. When you understand the true value of what you already have, what more is there to gain?

Become Indifferent to Circumstance

You’ll never run out of things to worry about or want to change. The world will never run out of external problems for you to lose sleep over, chat about with friends or get vexed at online.

As far as we know, people have been searching for a Utopian solution to this since humans could put pen to paper. We haven’t found it, and I doubt we ever will. There simply can’t be a world in which it’s great for everybody all the time. Every day, there are winners and losers. This is what nature intended.

Armed with this dour assessment of the world, why would you even bother getting out of bed in the morning?

The internet is great for a whole host of things (including reading this newsletter), but along with social media, it can and often does create a skewed version of reality. It’s easy to hop on X, spend 30 minutes on there, argue with a few d*ckheads, see death, destruction, war, sexism, crudeness, rudeness and a host of other behaviours most people wouldn’t dare dream of acting like in real life.

Our personas online aren’t a true reflection of the person we are in real life. It’s a facade bordering on a con. So why do we get so upset when we come across these external triggers?

We all, at any moment, can determine how we act to something that is happening to us or others. A comment made to us, politics, a rude driver.

What can you change about any of those? Nothing!

How can you react? Well, that’s entirely up to you. Let’s give two examples here: one from a guy named Joe and another from a woman named Mary.

Joe, upon hearing this displeasing comment, sets upon the other person the full force of his fury. Vexed but slightly impressed with his obvious superiority and ability to crush his opponent, he goes online to catch a breath.

Upon going on social media, up pops an inflammatory and purposefully incendiary comment about the upcoming American election. He’s proud of his nationality and believes in values such as community, patriotism and democracy, so when he sees a tweet from somebody he doesn’t know that calls into question his beliefs, he feels that, yet again, this is another attack on him. Poor Joe, he’s not having much luck today. The gloves are back on, round 2. Ding, ding, ding!

Exhausted after a day fighting at the office, he hops in his car and heads home, but as we can now guess, this isn’t Joe’s day. A driver cuts him up, and after an initial few toots of the horn both ways, the guy (who was wrong) calls Joe a wanker.

What’s Joe to do? He’s not somebody to be pushed around, but he’s already exhausted from the two bouts of fighting he’s done just today. Not to have a consistency crisis, he gets out of his car, rips open the door and begins to beat the living daylight out of the guy.

Joe had a bad day. He’s been tormented and in constant fight mode. He’s now also in a cell. His wife and kids are at home, confused, angry and annoyed at him for being so childish. Let’s say this isn’t the first time and probably won’t be the last what’s his wife to do? I suspect she’ll leave Joe because he sounds like a man-child loser who’s unable to control his emotions. Poor Joe.

Mary, on the other hand, has her sh*t together. She realises that a rude comment made by a coworker isn’t something she can do anything about. In this instance, she respectfully decides to disengage and walk away feeling sad for the coworker who felt they might have got some sort of satisfaction from trying to be funny or mean.

Hoping online, she too has the same feelings as Joe about values and identity, but then she sees a comment that’s directly opposed to those beliefs.

What’s Mary to do? Nothing. What good would it do to argue with a stranger online about such topics?

Leaving work in her car, somebody cuts her up and calls her a wanker. What a day Mary’s having! She laughs at this pathetic person, turns the song up in the car and heads home on her merry way.

I can you you i’ve been both Joe and Mary. When I left the Marines, I felt I could fight the world and often went about looking to do so. If it wasn’t for my wife, then girlfriend at the time, calling out my bullshit, I’d still be a Joe. Coupled with reading the works of Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, I’ve come to realise I’m far less capable of fixing everyone’s problems than I first thought and hoped. It humbled me, but it’s given me peace of mind.

At any moment, you can decide how you respond (or don’t) to something. That’s not to say you become this numb vessel; you just learn to prioritise what’s worth responding to and what isn’t.

Therefore, if you seek tranquillity, react less.

Cease to Hope, and You Will Cease to Fear

Wrapping this up, we’ll finish with two quotes. One from Seneca and the other by Hecato.

If Seneca, way back then, knew the limitless bounds of hope, then why, over two thousand years later, does it still have such a grip on us? It’s perfectly ok to hope for a better world, for better medicine, education and rights. These are worthy pursuits.

There’s nothing wrong with ambition either, after all, how do we expect to get the above without it? But to desire things that don’t benefit the greater community? The fear you possess that you’re somehow missing out on life if you don’t have what others have. Are these actions serving you well?

Therefore, if you seek tranquillity, expect less.

Be happy with what you have because, at any moment, it can be taken away from you.

That day, nobody can avoid it.

Until next time, Karl (The School of Knowledge).

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Then you’ll be happy.

That’s the hustle culture mantra.

Repeat until reality.

But 1 in 10 people you meet suffer from depression or anxiety. Almost double an increase since the pandemic. 70% of Americans are overweight or obese with roughly 1 in 7 people worldwide falling into that category. Staggeringly, 1 in 4 people worldwide feel lonely.

Whatever external gratification we’re chasing it’s taking us in the wrong direction. This is a trajectory we don’t want to be on.

But what if there’s a different path? One that’s completely within our power to control.

How about instead of chasing freedom we choose free-from?

Free from anxiety and depression. Free from unable and unhealthy bodies, disease and pain. Free from isolation and loneliness. Free from unimportant and uninspiring work. Free from convenience and Zoom calls. Free from fake social lives and fake interactions. From mediocre relationships! Free from expectation. Free from having to know it all. Free from your internal dialogue screaming at you to “do more, say more be more.”

Free from it all.

You see, most of the above falls squarely within our circle of control. At any moment you’re free to close down your social media accounts that cause you to compare yourself to others. You’re free to choose healthy or healthier food. You’re free to choose to join a club and no, not Call of Duty online, an actual real club with real people and real interactions. You’re free to do a lot of things that can improve your life but you don’t, you continue on your unhappy trajectory creating meaningless moments with your unhealthy body and mind filled with fear and hopelessness.

It’s self-fulfilling to dream though. To chase. It motivates us and lets us think we’re moving, where it doesn’t matter, just so long as we’re not idle we feel like we’re progressing.

We chase happiness like it’s a little puppy running around the garden. All cute, docile and predictable. Something we can just pick up and play with as we please. But happiness isn’t something we can hold in our hands and we almost never know we have it until it’s gone. It’s like trying to hold water. You think you’re doing an ok job until you realise your pants are wet.

You will find a ‘free from’ section when you shop in your local supermarket. Free from lactose, soy, wheat and so forth so why don’t we have such intolerance toward mediocrity in our lives?

We’re brought up in a culture of more is better but that can’t be sustainable. There are materialistic people out there where this is the case but I think people just want to have an ok life and to feel content. I think people just want a healthy body and mind that ages ok. I think people want real relationships where they feel valued, respected and loved. Not the kind of synthetic love we feel when we receive a digital like or heart. Actual love. Real love. I think people want to wake up in the morning and not dread work. To not cry from the fear they feel of doing miserable work. I think inspiring and fulfilling work is what everybody wants.

Once you get started down this rabbit hole it’s hard to find your way back out. You’re constantly in comparison mode never feeling fulfilled or happy on the way up because to do so would mean stopping and slowing down. To admit defeat.

But when you’re free from the judgement of others and your own internal drill sergeant you become mentally free. When you’re free from mediocre relationships you can feel true value, respect and love. When you commit to being free from unfulfilling work you can begin to feel inspired. You feel adventure when free from a body that kept you in shackles.

Charlie Munger is legendary for inverting problems. I think if you asked him how to be happy he’d start off by asking what a miserable person’s life would look like. We all know what a miserable life looks like and therein lies some very promising starting blocks we can build on toward a life free from mediocrity.

Do you have the courage to try? As always, the choice is yours to make.

Until next time, Karl (The School of Knowledge).

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I’ve tried gratitude journaling and to be honest, it gave me the ick. There is something about it foreign, almost alien. Most importantly though, it began to seem artificial and contrived.

I can understand the logic and studies show that it can be beneficial for mental health and I do understand it’s important to feel grateful for my wife, my family and friends. Things like my career, the country I was or wasn’t born in, my opportunities in life and so on. But will I look back at my journal 3 years from now and say “Yeh, what a day that was when that nice lady smiled at me in the park?”

Maybe, but probably not.

Sure, if I decide to have kids I can imagine my entry being something like “Today I became a father for the first time. I’m so grateful that the amazing medical team were able to help deliver our child and that my wife and child are both safe.”

But isn’t it a given that you’re grateful for the birth of your first child? Hopefully anyway.

I can imagine that if I read that a week from now or 50 years from now it would make me smile. The problem I found though is that a lot of my entries lack substance.

How does an entry on 18/4/21 that you were grateful for your partner become different from another? And another. Sure, you can elaborate but for me, it lacks depth, but what it mostly lacks is philosophy.

“I’m not a philosopher,” you say.

We are all philosophers. Here’s a definition:

• The study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline.

“I’m not an academic,” Try this then:

• A theory or attitude that acts as a guiding principle for behaviour.

You might say that demanding respect, dignity and equality in a relationship might be your values. Your principles. Your non-negotiables.

Why not your philosophy?

How about a fair justice system? The right to education?

To me, these are ‘philosophies’ especially when comparing them to the second definition.

An alternative to gratitude journaling

It should be pretty easy to find something you’re grateful for on any given day. After all, if you’re struggling you can always write about something that hasn’t happened to you. Like not getting the shit kicked out of you on the way home from work. But what if you did get the shit kicked out of you on the way home from work? That’s going to make it harder for you to feel grateful that day right?

But what if you look for something to be grateful for when there seems to be nothing to be grateful for?

The example about getting beaten up is a pretty easy example to visualise. We may even wince imagining a mob of people knocking us to the floor as they imprint on our faces their size 9 Nikes. Hard to imagine a positive from that!

So what’s my point?

The Stoics believe in gratitude, but they believe in taking each circumstance for what it is, good or bad. They look to turn almost anything into a philosophical opportunity. When somebody smashed a police baton into the back of my head, knocking me unconscious, that could have defined me as a person. I could have battened down the hatches and never ventured out again, paranoid and scared.

It may not have been obvious then but that moment would give me solace. I got into that situation because I and another of my friends ran back to help our friend. He was on crutches and couldn't run away when 20-25 lads turned up at a party looking for trouble. So, all three of us ended up in a bad way. He was the unfortunate one who had the Nikes imprinted on the side of his head.

I could have run away but I went back to find my friend who wasn’t able to run away and I suffered because of it. Lessons like that helped me 3 years later in Marine training and 5 years later when in Afghanistan. Look for an opportunity to turn the negative around even if you think you can’t see one.

Let’s try some more (less aggressive) examples to hammer home the point.

Your midnight flight, which is already bad enough is delayed 3 hours. It’s hard to think of something to be grateful for right? You’re going to be even more tired and even more annoyed. Well, you could practice patience. That might sound trivial but when you practice patience you only become aware of how important it is when you need it.

You were supposed to deliver an important project by a specific date but didn’t. Your job is on the line and understandably you’re worried. You're meeting with management where you’ll be asked to explain yourself. You're praying that you can find evidence that can get you off the hook except, there is none. This is your fault. This situation will be painful but offers an opportunity to practice integrity. You hold your hands up and say look, I’ve not performed well here and I apologise. You’d be surprised at how disarming owning up to your mistakes can have on a person’s anger or annoyance toward you.

Being beaten up, delayed and poor performance at work aren’t nice things. They’re certainly not things you should be grateful for. Nor is getting cheated on, losing all your money or being ostracised.

But something can be good if it makes you good and it is not unfortunate if you can find a way to be fortunate from it.

Zeno’s life and fortune changed dramatically when he lost it all after a shipwreck. He would later wander into a bookstore in Athens and create one of the most powerful and followed philosophies of the last 2 millennia.

You’re free to choose which approach works best for you but remember, the choice is always yours.

Until next time, Karl (The School of Knowledge).

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I’m excited about my upcoming holiday to Crete, a beautiful island rich in culture, hospitality and history. Lots of history. I’m not usually the type to be excited until I’m either in the airport or actually on holiday but this time it’s different.

Sometimes when you are about to go on holiday you feel that you are ‘ready’ for it or that you ‘need’ it. Works been exhausting, there are other problems in your life and you feel like you’re ‘this close’ to someone tipping you over the edge. This time, however, I don’t feel any of those. I feel content. I’m happy with my professional career and also this writing publication. I’m nowhere to be seen near any edge.

But I am aware that I have mentally and physically checked out the last week or so and I’ve got to say it’s bothering me a little.

Is it right to mentally propel your thoughts away from the present and to something on the horizon?

Marcus Aurelius wouldn’t say so. Marcus Aurelius as a man and an emperor went through pretty much everything imaginable yet he still managed to remember that life, at any moment can be taken away from us and that the only virtuous thing to do is to not live in the past or the present, but in the now.

I have nothing to wish away yet it’s what i am doing. How ashamed a younger me would be if he would have known, stuck deep in that abyss that all his toil would bring such wastefulness.

I think it’s only human nature, especially in bad times that we wish time away. We crave something to look forward to especially if that something is better than what we currently have but this mode of thought isn’t for content people and it’s something I ought to remember and tell myself more often.

Good moments seem fleeting and bad moments seem never-ending which can create this hopeful thinking that we can slow down time when we want to savour moments and fast forward, even skip time when we don’t like what’s going on around us.

We can’t change the past and we do not know the future so what we are left with is the now. That’s all that we can ever have that we can use.

So for good and for bad remember that what you’re going through is unique, it’ll never happen to you again, at least not exactly the same way anyway. If it’s something special and memorable remember to take a few pauses to savour the moment and if it’s something ugly then try to take solace in your courage and the lessons the future you will thank you for.

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The men who pioneered the old routes are leaders, not masters. Truth lies open to everyone. There has yet to be a monopoly of truth. And there is plenty of it left for future generations too.

- Seneca, Letters From a Stoic, Letter XXXIII

4.3 billion people have access to a smartphone globally and within seconds can have access to history’s greatest-ever minds, ideas and stories. People have a near-unlimited amount of material to source and digest as they read for entertainment or betterment - from Orwell to Seneca, the Persian to the Roman Empires, Greek Mythology to Voodooism. But history’s greatest thinkers and doers didn’t just read and become talking pieces for their former teachers, they distilled and fine-tuned their workings and made them their own. They were originals.

When I was in training to become a Royal Marine back in 2009 I joined my troop which consisted of around about 75 people. Every 2 weeks on the training camp comes along another troop. So if my troop number was Troop 983 in two weeks came along Troop 984. The goal was to pass out with your green beret but there was also another goal, an unspoken goal that everybody wanted. Everybody wanted to be an original.

Being an original consisted of passing every test the first time. It wasn’t enough to simply pass out of training, which was already hard enough, you had to do everything right the first time and pass out with as many lads from your troop who could also do the same. It’s an enormous vanity metric in hindsight but the pull to be an original was as strong, if not stronger than passing out. Many lads, after getting back trooped (sent back a minimum of 2 weeks after failing something or getting injured) to another troop decide to leave.

I don’t know if I would have stayed if I got back trooped because thankfully I was 1 of 13 in my troop who passed out as an original. What I will say though is that being an original meant a great deal to me and it’s something that always will. It showed adaptability, humility and mental fortitude. I also came to understand the harsh reality that luck can play. Simply not getting injured or having your body breakdown was purely a lottery.

Originality (or lack thereof) seems like it’s a hot topic today but Seneca was also writing about originality some 2000 years ago.

Here Seneca is speaking about a lack of originality from people who do nothing other than act as talking pieces for the people whose ideas or words they are using. They’re pretenders.

Hop on your phone, go on social media if you use it and go on your feed. It will more than likely be full of trends. People repeating something in the hope that it’ll bring them as much micro-fame and exposure as somebody else before them. It’ll also be full of Twitter (X) bros exclaiming how to be original with a not-so-original ‘how to be original blueprint’ for only £999!

There is also the flip side of this - doing things just to be different. The rebel. Going against the grain for the sake of it.

I’m not here to say which is right or wrong and we can’t be original in every area of our life. Imagine if everybody had to be original in everything they did all the time? That sounds exhausting. So there is safety in numbers and humans have known this forever. I did an article on herd mentality you can read here.

Seneca has been called a hypocrite by some because he was a wealthy man and a philosopher but to me, and many others what he did was something original and it’s exactly because of that that people remember him. Many unhappy, poor philosophers in the graveyard of time will never be remembered. Seneca took the writings and teachings of others before him and thought about them and how they affected his life and the world around him and adapted them. He used what was useful and discarded what was not. If that’s not original then I don’t know what is.

Elon Musk started Space X and changed people’s thinking about space rockets forever. For decades the genuine geniuses at NASA used the rockets as a single-use item but Musk demonstrated within 2 decades that rockets can be reused changing space flight forever. This is on top of his other billion-dollar-plus companies!

Musk is a famous proponent of first-principle thinking. He takes ideas from other people/disciplines and strips them right back to their skeleton, ridding them of everything that is of no use to him and keeping only what is essential. Elon Musk is certainly an original.

People worry that AI will take over, that it will fill some void that only humans are capable of filling but I see a version of AI everywhere already. I see humans doing exactly what we say AI will be, being unoriginal.

Seneca said that:

Being original in some area of your life requires dedication, faith and luck. But something I’ve spoken about more recently in this newsletter after reading through Paul Graham’s essays is curiosity. Curiosity is the key to originality. Being curious requires that you ask questions and that you poke and prod things. Elon Musk poked and prodded space rockets and certainly asked questions. The first one perhaps was can we turn this into a reusable rocket in some way shape or form? His idea or question at inception may have been wholly different from the outcome but he got there by climbing branches from the trees he planted.

Musk didn’t take pride in an idea that wasn’t his own (space rockets are a single-use item) and he probably got a few funny looks the first time he said this out loud to people but Elon Musk doesn’t follow paths laid out before him. He makes his own.

Not all of us have the appetite, bandwidth and dedication to achieve something like this but your idea of originality can be as big or as small as you want it to be. After all, Musk didn’t think of something entirely new, he simply remixed a pre-held notion or idea. Charlie Munger called this Physics envy:

You never quite know that what you are doing will be something original if you’re looking forward to the outcome of something. Charles Darwin may or may not have thought that his theory of evolution would turn into anything let alone change biology forever. It’s certainly easier to determine if something is so after the fact and my least favourite bias the hindsight bias will tell you this but if Charles Darwin wasn’t curious and if he didn’t ask questions or poke and prod he almost certainly wouldn’t have got to the conclusions he did.

So really if you want to be original then it goes without saying that you need to be curious and you need to be willing to follow ideas down paths especially if you don’t know where they lead. There’s a comparison I think helps explain how to be original really clearly: You have two types of people, those who are cool and those who try to be cool. People who try to be cool aren’t cool exactly because they’re trying to be cool. Cool people are cool because well, they’re cool. Using Charlie Munger’s advice on inversion I’d say it’s certainly easier to not be a pretender (uncool) than it is to be original (cool).

So we should maybe start with that? As always, the choice is ours to make.

Until next time, The School of Knowledge.

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“For one does not need a great number of words, but words that are effective.”

- Seneca, Letter 38

Everybody has too much to say today and everybody is seemingly an expert in everything. Their knowledge is in everything from social justice to content creation, and from politics to self-diagnosis. What a time to be alive where everybody is so intelligent!

The truth is we aren’t that intelligent. Well, a great deal number of us anyway and I’m not talking about the standard IQ. Most people live their lives on the surface level of information, always moving forward and never digging down. This is a great shame because the last time I checked precious stones weren’t found at the surface level—they require you to put some effort into finding them.

Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein are two fairly modern geniuses but one thing that is not often spoken about is that aside from their seismic contribution to their sciences they were deep thinkers. Darwin so much so, that it took him 20 years before he published his work because he was actively trying to find arguments against his thesis. Both men were constantly trying to find evidence that contradicted their beliefs. Just imagine what could be possible if more people simply thought like that.

I’ve spoken recently about anchoring and group biases and how important it is to be an independent thinker today more than ever. After all, Deep Fakes et al.

I’m reading Poor Charlie’s Almanack at the minute alongside Robert Greene’s The Laws of Human Nature and they are both eye-opening regarding how easily we are fooled by our own psychology and how easily we are manipulated by others. Is our defence really as bad as the Maginot line?

But it is my old friend Seneca again who offers the simplest pearls of wisdom.

There’s not much we can do about a lot of the information we consume. We can come off social media and not watch mainstream news—or any news actually, because it’s almost all worthless, but we can’t walk around with headphones on and tape over our eyes. We can’t do much about the toxicity of online people. We can’t rationalise with them that the way they speak and act online is false and that they wouldn’t act like that public. It’s too much to ask the social media puppet masters to censor and expose these monsters. After all, I tend to agree with Elon, if you want free speech you can’t just have what you want to hear. Free speech is free speech. Censoring any of it isn’t free speech—it’s censorship, and while I never condone or agree with despicable language or behaviour, online or other you can’t have your cake and eat it. That’s what law is for and if they’re not doing their job either, well, you get exactly what we’re getting now I suppose. A shit show.

But one thing you can do is choose what content you consume. You can also, for free if you can believe, get to choose your thoughts and reactions to what you consume. Impossible, you say! It simply can not be that easy.

What you let into your brain can quickly become who you are. It can take over and mask as an identity.

Seneca is speaking about the good of words here and how only a few words are needed to flourish into metaphorical trees. We imagine an old sage handing down worldly wisdom to their grandchildren. But if a small amount of correct and timely words can inspire and guide us, surely they can enrage and discourage us?

When we consume information and hear other people speak, in life or online now and again something happens to us. We feel a twinge in our body that almost compels us to act or speak immediately. It is here where you have to be rational, to be a good independent thinker because those few words you just heard are seeds. They can either flourish and be beautiful plants and trees or they can be invasive species.

The choice is simply yours.

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Time is a river, a violent current of events, glimpsed once and already carried past us, and another follows and is gone.

- Marcus Aurelius

The above quote is from Marcus Aurelius's infamous book, Meditations. The book itself is a masterpiece but it was never meant to be.

Unlike Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic which is written in perfect prose surely meant for an audience, Meditations was a Roman Emperor’s personal diary. His thoughts and reflections were not meant for anybody else’s eyes but his own.

After his death, some clever bugger decided that people needed to see this instead of it being buried and who can blame them? This was the most powerful person on the planet at the time and unlike nowadays where even the president of the United States of America doesn’t have absolute power we can rest assured that his power was absolute and final.

However, in this diary, you wouldn’t have thought that was the case. He seemed to be in constant conflict with himself and his decision-making process. Leaning on his personal and Stoic principles, on his allegiance to Rome and how all 3 of them can form a symbiotic relationship.

How Marcus Aurelius dealt with change was that he tried to be indifferent about it. He understood that change is just stuff that happens to us and it is always within our control how we respond to it. How often have there been periods in our lives that we wished would remain as they are? Seemingly perfect moments but nonetheless they are moving, changing slowly until before you know it, before you realise have gone. Most people don’t like change. They like what is familiar and safe, what is known. But nothing stays the same forever. It’s not how nature intended things to be.

Life is in constant flux. It is just as futile to try and grab ahold of water as it is with life. We think we are safe from change but we are not. Just look back at the photos on your phone from a few years ago and you almost won’t recognise yourself. Did you realise yourself growing older?

So why not use change, slow change for the better? Why not try to use the river’s current to gently take you downstream, to a place you want to be, dream to be but are afraid of? Change doesn’t have to be this cataclysmic event. Just like the change in life, it can be gradual and unassuming, it doesn’t have to have the weight of a heavy-weight boxer’s punch behind it.

The choice is yours to make but know this, it is always your choice. Things happen to you in life and it may seem unfair but remember, just as those most special moments in life are fleeting so too are the moments cast in shade.

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"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

Thoreau

In life, we are faced with many decisions most of which are trivial such as what should I eat tonight or what clothes should I put on today but every now and again you have to make decisions that will affect your life forever.

I made one of those decisions 15 years ago when I was 19.

I had the choice between joining the company my best friend worked at and still does or get on a train and head south to Lympstone at the bottom of the U.K. The place where the longest basic military training in the world takes place. The Royal Marines Commando Training.

I come from a working-class family. Me and my brother never went without but we weren’t by any means flush with money. My mum could spend every penny in the world if it was in her hands, my dad, the more frugal of the two never wanted to borrow money. You earned it, saved it and then spent it.

I respected my parents but it was with my friends that I learned to grow up in a rough area of North Manchester. I wasn’t brave or courageous. I was just a normal kid who blended in and didn’t stand out in any way whatsoever.

But that decision to jump on that train changed my life. I was suddenly immersed in a world so far from what I was accustomed to it was untrue. But from that day to 6 years later when I left I was a different person and still am today thanks to that decision.

That decision laid the foundation for the drive and ambition I have today.

At times, however, it can feel like it’s a hindrance more than a superpower and I still don’t resemble anything like my friends in that sense. All of my friends are seemingly comfortable. The jobs are chosen for them by other people to make them money, in a routine that’s set by somebody else. Akin to a puppet master pulling their strings with only weekends to really do as they please.

To be clear I’m really happy, (probably the happiest I’ve ever been) with where I am right now in life, I’m a co-owner of a construction business, happily married and have a house that me and my wife have ripped apart and put back together, transporting it back to its original time and magnificence. Well nearly!

But I can’t help but feel unsettled. To go where and in which direction I do not know. I have a yearning to find that place. I hope that when I am there, there are people like me. People searching, creating, poking, prodding, doing!

For now, it seems like a solo mission but in my mid-twenties I started, ever so slowly to pick up books. That habit has transformed the way I think. It was another decision, this time less obvious that changed my life. Over the last couple of years, I’ve taken it more seriously and set up a proper reading routine but it’s helped with the isolation. I’m by no means a hermit, I have a great social life and work also allows me to socialise a lot too. I’m going to France next week on a work trip. Fantastic!

But by reading books by authors like Nassim Taleb, Naval Ravikant, Seneca, Phil Knight (Nike), Ray Dalio, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos you get to immerse yourself in their world.

I’m not sure where I’m heading but I know that within those books I’ll find an answer. Even if it’s peace. Perhaps I’m a lost soul. I have something familiar with our ancestors in that I want to roam. To where I do not know but I suspect a lot of time neither did they. They roamed to where they needed to be. They knew they needed to be there when they were there and not a second beforehand.

This newsletter aims to take sections from books by people similar to those above and to try to explain how you and I can use their sage advice in our lives. I’ve been slightly sidetracked doing that the last few days and I’m not sure how this may help anybody but I have these dreams. They’re always with the same people but always different.

When I was in the Marines I was based in Scotland and I went up there with a few lads I passed out in training with. We were inseparable. They were my best mates and I thought it would be that way forever. After a few years, one of them got a draft down on the English South Coast, then another one somewhere else until there was just me. I’d allowed myself to remain idle. I stopped wanting to move forward and instead hoped I could mark time.

I dream about those lads all the time. And it’s always the same in the sense that they’re doing something I can not or that I’m fumbling around trying to catch up to them or I’m trying to fight them. I read something the other day by Naval Ravikant that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about and triggered another one of them dreams last night. He said:

It’s pretty blunt advice but from my experience it’s true. Nothing lasts forever, good or bad thankfully. My wife and I nearly moved to Texas last year. Well, we at least started towards doing it but we love our families and I’m particularly close to hers. The company I co-own is her father’s and he’s passed it down to me and another lad middle of last year now that he’s retiring. It was a choice I had to make also and I put Texas on the back burner. But that nagging feeling. That wanting to roam, to explore is burning inside of me like a fire I can’t put out. My wife is the same. How on Earth am I going to figure this one out?

I wish there was something actionable here. Something logical I could lay out that what show me. I prefer logic. It feels concrete to me because it makes sense. I struggle with emotions, with deciding between two things I desperately want but know I can’t have.

But I’ve done this before. I did it 15 years ago when faced with chasing a dream or remaining idle. And again when I was left behind by my mates in their pursuit of their careers. My dreams are perhaps reminding me, pushing me forward and in the right direction. I suspect I already know the answer. I just need logic. I just need it to make sense to me.

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When some state or other offered Alexander a part of its territory and half of its property he told them that ‘He hadn’t come to Asia with the intention of accepting whatever they cared to give him, but of letting them keep whatever he chose to leave them.’ Philosophy, likewise, tells all other occupations: ‘It’s not my intention to accept whatever time is left over from you; you shall have instead, what I reject.’

The above quote struck a chord with me when I read it, not just because I marvelled at Alexander’s gall but because of the analogy Seneca compared it to, philosophy. Time is a finite resource. Something, unlike territories and conquests one can never get back. When I read the quote I was reminded of how much of our time, or as Seneca uses, philosophy, is taken away from from us. Much like the Grim Reaper with Death wielding his scythe, I imagine a metaphorical arbiter taking away our time and leaving us only enough to keep us going.

Think of our lives, each with the same number of hours in a day but seemingly never enough of them. Days turn into weeks and weeks turn into years. For a 5-year-old to get to the magical number of 10 they have to live a whopping 100% of their life. For a 50-year-old to get to 55 it’s a mere 10%. A blink of an eye.

Think of our jobs, family and social lives. Great (I hope) as they are most of the time they dictate what time we have, or more accurately, have left each day. My wife asked me why I get up at 5 am to read and write the other day when I can do it in the evening. If I did, and I have tried, it just is not the same. My wife is there, my dog, my TV, my phone. I’m tired. I have a loft studio but even when I’m up there and someone else is downstairs there’s almost an admission of guilt and uneasiness the whole time I’m up there.

Seneca utilises the above quote in letter LIV in his famous book, Letters from a Stoic. The book is a select number of letters that were written to a friend called Lucilius. Seneca was aware of this constant attempt at robbery. For him, it’s his philosophy, but for others, it could be something else. It could just be the fact of doing absolutely nothing. Some alone time. Hypothetically we don’t have to turn in for work or do this or do that but most of the time we do. If we do not we end up homeless or isolated or both.

So how do we find a balance?

Most people are carefree with their time and careful with their money. Should it not be the other way around? Time is the most precious and finite currency we have. Should it not be treated accordingly?

The art of saying no. It’s not just as easy as that is it? There are books on it, on how to perfect it, how to not feel guilty when you say it, to yourself, to loved ones. I think a lot of people who say yes do so because saying the opposite is hard. The fear of upsetting people, of yourself. It’s guilt-ridden. It’s giving up when you turn around to yourself, exhausted, and say that you’re not going to the gym or for that run because rest is what you need. It seems like quitting. It can seem rude when a friend invites you for a drink but you say no. Or you say no to the job promotion. DO YOU HAVE NO AMBITION?

Saying no can be all of those things but you also have the power to decide how you react, and how you feel when you say no when you guard and choose what to do with your most precious commodity, time.

If other people are upset that’s their problem. Don’t isolate yourself and say no to everything but choose for yourself a bigger slice of the pie.

In the letter, Seneca decides to take a trip to another island by boat. He states that he hated the ocean but the weather looked favourable so he went for it. The weather soon changed and with seasickness raging and a storm looming Seneca ordered the Helmsman to drop him off on the rugged coast. He jumped in the cold water in his clothes and soon felt quite sorry for himself curled up on the coastline, sick, wet and cold. He was reminded of our physical frailties. Our bodies grow old and wear but our spirit, does that have to? Can the spirit not grow, and become stronger as we age?

Each time we choose what time we have and what time we give back to everyone and everything else, we grow. Our spirits grow. We become richer for it.

Most of the time I don’t notice it but when it does come into my periphery it tends not to distort my vision a little, it engulfs it. I was reminded once again of how I wish my brain worked differently on my recent trip to Ireland.

My grandparents are both Irish and after my grandad passed away last year, I felt a sudden urge to go. We’ve always been proud of our Irish roots in the family, my mum especially and my grandparent's house was always full of totems from their past lives. Richmond sausages (which were made in Liverpool for Irish immigrants) were always on the go as was Gaelic football. The coffee table would be littered with Irish papers and my grandad would know more about what was going on in County Clare than he would Manchester. It was like walking through a door into a different country at times.

My wife surprised me for my birthday last year with 2 flights booked and headed for Ireland. I was finally going to go! After initially being booked to head over there in April we rearranged due to work commitments for September. We would go to Limerick where my nana was from and head over to County Clare, and more specifically Crusheen where my grandad was from. We couldn’t help but fly into Dublin when we realised that Ireland was playing World Champions South Africa in the France 2023 rugby World Cup which they, of course, won and make a night of it.

The trip was everything I wanted it to be. We hired a car and travelled over 500 km over the course of a few days which granted us the ability to see more than I’d hoped for. We visited Doolin and watched the Atlantic Sea smash into the cliffs. We visited the beautiful Cliffs of Moher and were taken away by the brutality and geology of the cliffs (my wife has a geography masters), and we went to Spanish Point where we had probably the best toastie I've ever eaten. There was still one thing that I wanted to do though.

My grandad was an orphan. He was born out of wedlock and considered back in them days to be a ‘bastard’. His mother, whom he would never speak to abandoned him. He would eventually find out who she was at least but as for his father he never even knew his name. We can all be thankful that practices such as these are disappearing. Albeit not soon enough. My grandad was taken in by a lovely couple called May and Jack as well as two other boys who my grandad would stay close to until he died.

I was on the road to find out where his home was.

The village was beautiful, and my immediate words were why would anybody want to leave here? Everywhere you looked it was green, there were forests and lakes, winding country roads and the houses, isolated on their own little piece of land stood proudly. I can only imagine what the sky would have looked like there. We almost gave up trying to find the house as our flight time was counting down. We had instructions from my mum as to what it looked like (nothing like she described), my auntie (nothing, but different to how my mum described it) and a lady in the local shop who knew where the house was (somewhat right). We decided to give it one last throw of the dice as the road it was supposed to be on was en route to the airport to catch our flight. We cautiously stopped at what could have been ‘the two, two-storey houses’ which the lady from the shop said (wrong colours windows though) and took a turn down the road. This was the last road and if my grandad's house was to be there it would be the first house on the left. As we drove down the road we spotted a house, but it wasn’t on the left it was on the right. I decided to stop.

This was one of those moments in life where all the stars align.

We looked at the house and after some silence, my wife said, ‘That’s the house’. There was a rusty gate which my mum said there would be and a tree that had been chopped down. I saw a man walking towards us in the rear-view mirror of the car and decided to step out and walk towards him. I didn’t know what I would say to him, he was walking towards me and was covered in cut grass. I’d interrupted him during his work it appeared. He began to lift his helmet off and greeted me with a kind hello, a familiar hello.

There was only one man who knew where my grandad's house was, and he was walking right towards me.

Out of sheer chance, the man walking towards me was a man named James who used to look after my nan and grandad when they both visited Ireland every year. I’d met James for the first time at my grandad's funeral and was taken aback by his kindness and the gratitude he had towards my grandad. My family couldn’t speak highly enough of him and there he was, at exactly the moment I needed him the most walking right towards me to tell me that this was his house.

“Would you like to take a look inside your grandad's house”? he offered.

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The trip was marred with tiny incidents reminding me that my brain was beginning to feel overwhelmed.  It was the Autumn of 2021 when I decided to look for help regarding getting a diagnosis of ADHD. My wife and friend had always been convinced that I’d had it and urged me to get a formal diagnosis from somebody qualified to do so and when it did come it wasn’t a surprise. I didn’t feel any immediate relief, more of vindication and I somehow felt a little prouder of the things I’ve achieved in the past with this apparent handicap I have. I scored high for the inattention section of the diagnosis and just missed the boat on the hyperactivity, but I’m always reminded of the words she said to me. “You’ve just missed out on the scoring for the hyperactivity (like it was a game) but, you need to be careful going forward as you’re showing potential signs of burnout”.

I remember lying, unintentionally, on the test when I was asked about my impulsivity, and I said I wasn’t anything like that. I don’t know why I lied and didn’t really notice I’d lied until a couple of weeks after our chat when it became clear that I was in fact, very impulsive. Maybe I knew I was impulsive but felt that somehow it showed a lack of discipline and didn’t want to admit it however, it might be the symptom I notice the most now. I have this urge to all the time be doing something. It completely engulfs me, and it becomes more apparent the second I decide it’s time to sit or lie down and chill out. I’ve got up in the middle of the night to water the plants, like if they had to wait another moment they’d dehydrate to death! My brain is constantly on send. It’s like a thought factory that’s just pumping out instructions 24 hours a day and, in any order, relevant or not it wants. I can go from playing the piano to checking my work diary, to searching for something on Google to watching a YouTube video and ordering some clothes in a few minutes. I know exactly now what she meant by burnout. It wasn’t physical, it was mental. Being mentally exhausted is hard to spot. If I’m in the gym and I can’t press anymore I can be sure my shoulders, arms and chest are taxed. When juggling all these impulsive thoughts and acting on them, how do I know when I’ve gone too far? When is it time to try and rest and recuperate? I find it a little harder to know when I’ve gone past that line.

I went to Crete this year for a 10-day break and felt after it, the most refreshed I’d felt in years. I knew I was putting too much pressure on myself and that’s where the idea of this newsletter came from. It was just my thoughts, my interests written down. A form of meditation and if somebody so happened to read it hopefully there’d be something practical or interesting, they can take away from it. I decided to follow my interests and do and write only about those. Since coming back from Crete in July my addiction to adding extra work on top of an already high workload has crept back in. I’ve purchased an online piano course that consists of over 40 hours of video. I’ve purchased a writing course to help me with my newsletter and social media content. I’ve purchased an annual membership to an investment newsletter that has thousands upon thousands of PDF pages from all-time great investors that I need to find time to read as well as complete the courses they have. I’ve purchased Tiago Forte’s second brain template to help try and offload what’s in my brain to free up more bandwidth. That comes with hours and hours and hours of tutorials and getting to know the software. I have to read for a certain number of pages a day (which I never hit) and feel horribly guilty for being lazy when I don’t. On top of all the extra curriculum I give myself I’m also a newly appointed co-owner of a construction company and with that a bucket load of real-life adult stuff that I can’t shy away from anymore. There are probably more but like most adults, I only get a few hours a day to actually do the things I want and with the evening being taken up by going to the gym and feeling exhausted I get up at 05:00, a few hours before work to get done, in peace the things I like to do such as this newsletter, reading, stock analysis and of course, water the plants. I’ve not even mentioned housework and socialising.

In Ireland, I left my wife’s luggage on the plane (her fault for making me responsible), forgot the pin to my credit card and almost couldn’t hire our car which we’d paid for, had a shower with my non-waterproof watch THREE times with each subsequent shower shouting the words “For fuck’s sake I’ve done it again” and lost my coat. I kept jokingly telling my wife that it’s hard being me, but I somehow feel she has the shitter end of the stick! I can’t fill in forms, check myself into the airport or look for places to eat. I rely on her for all those things. It’s not that I physically can’t it’s just 1. I fucking hate doing all the above 2. It bores me beyond belief and 3. It would literally take me ages to do so. When Abbi does make me do it, she stalkingly watches over my shoulder and shouts at me when I divert from the task which I inevitably do. “CONCENTRATE” she yells.

My grandad's house was a beaten-up old white cottage with overgrown shrubbery around it. Looking out from the house offered a tranquil, peaceful view of rolling green hills and trees for miles. It made me happy to think that, with everything going on in his life he got to look out at that every day. Inside was like stepping back in time. In fact, nothing had changed, apart from decay since the 1970’s when May died. Upon walking through the door, you were in the centre of the room which I’m told was the kitchen area. There was a beautiful old cast iron wood fire and a table with old VHS videos and Gaelic football posters. There were two rooms to the left, one a bathroom and the other a bedroom no bigger than 2 x 2m. To the right was a living/bedroom about twice the size. When thinking that 5 people lived in this house my thought was “I hope they got on with each other”! The old ceiling looked as if it could fall down at any minute, and the original timber windows were rotted. There were spider webs over almost everything inside of the house and it looked more like a set from a Halloween film than a home, but I felt nothing but happiness. James was there telling us stories about the house and how their days would have been which made it even better. For the first time on the trip, I wasn’t thinking about all the things I needed to do I was happy being where I was with whom I was in an old beaten-up house.

James invited us back to his house for a brew and even though we knew we wouldn’t have time we couldn’t refuse. We were accompanied by his dog chops. An overly eager Springer Spaniel. James made us a brew, insisted on us having some brack cake with Irish butter on it and pulled out a booklet he’d had made. It was everybody from the mid-1800s who went to the local but now shut down school. This included my grandad. I found a picture of my grandad dating to the 1950s with a small phrase underneath it from my grandad himself when asked to comment on his time at school. “Always getting told off ha ha. I remember when I ripped up some books and told the teacher the school was infested with rats”. I don’t think he left Ireland; I think he was kicked out!

We were in James' kitchen exchanging stories when he said something that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. He said that my grandad was a gentleman and that “No matter what, he was always happy with his lot”. My grandad battled cancer 7 times, had a leg amputated and had only 6 working fingers but I never, ever saw him grumble. Not once. We mock the stiff upper lip, just crack on attitude of yesteryear as if it was some kind of curse but I never saw anything of the sort. He inspired his wife, his children, his grandchildren, and those who knew him.

Since being back I’ve been in my own head. The funniness of my calamities has worn off and there’s a sense of embarrassment and anger that’s crept in. I’ve found myself wallowing at my apparent disadvantage. I’ve researched which ADHD books I need to buy and re-listened to the Huberman special on ADHD to try and get to grips and wrestle with this annoyance. I’ve written this newsletter to vent, to share and for reference.

So what do I do when I’m reminded of my ADHD? There are a million things I could do but only one of them has made me feel something in the pit of my stomach. Moving forward, there’s only one thing, one quote, one reminder I need to tell myself:

Last week I was having a bit of a shit day at work. Something important needed to be done where I've been acting as an intermediary (middleman) that wasn’t being done. I couldn’t do what needed to be done because a) it can’t be done by me and, b) it’s a specialist job. The frustration grew and grew and grew as this had been going on for weeks. It directly impacted the job I was doing, and I was stuck in limbo until this had been completed.

I’ve read bits and bobs over the years from the Stoics as well as listened to podcasts and watched YouTube videos from various people and I’ve always been drawn to Stoicism. Not in the dogmatic sense but I’d say I find most of it worthwhile enough to think about and practice when I can. On this particular day on the drive home, the idea of pre-meditation of evils crept into my mind.

I was stuck in traffic alongside the local hospital which was having a major upgrade. There was an extension being built alongside the pre-existing, old traditional building and I just thought how odd it looked. How glaringly obvious it was that they were two separate things pretending to be one. There probably were planning stipulations for altering the existing building. It may even be listed but no attempt seems to have been made to try to blend them together. This was almost certainly an architect’s grab to make something new entirely.

Uncalled for I said to myself in annoyance that it doesn’t matter anyway, it’ll be knocked down in 100 years or so. A few generations. Then I looked at the car in front of me. I thought about what would happen to all the steel and other components of that car in the same timeframe. Where would they end up? Would the steel be recycled into another car or some other use? What would happen to the seats and the tires? Who knows for sure, but that car was destined one day, to be that car no more. I thought about the road I was stuck on, limping forward and about how it would look after 10 years if we all ceased to exist at that instance. I thought about a documentary I watched about Chernobyl and how the city had turned lush green and was rife with local wildlife. Could that happen here? A swarm of green overtakes the road. Trees and bushes rise and what used to be a road that had 1000s of cars pass by every single hour was no more.

I had no intention of thinking like this, it was just a thought that came into my mind and got carried away, but I thought about my day after it and it seemed insignificant. Why did I care so much, especially about something that I had little control over?

My mood changed again early the next morning when my dad abruptly texted the family chat to tell us he was putting the family dog, Molly, down. My first response was to ask him why, but I already knew why he had to. She was nearly 18 and for some time now she’d been on a downward trajectory. The final straw was not eating or drinking and unable to take herself to the bathroom. It must have been a horrendous decision to have to come to terms with let alone make but it absolutely was the right one. If only humans could be offered the same dignity.

My mind began to drift for the rest of the day to when we first got her as a pup. I lived a 30-second walk from the high school I used to go to, and I used to spend my dinner breaks at home playing with her. Our other dog at the time Leroy impregnated Molly fairly early and after giving birth I was the only person in those first few days she would let near them or her. I remember how she used to come into my bed after my dad left for work and tucked herself behind my knees.

I’d decided I wanted to be there at the vets to see her one last time.

The mood was obviously sombre, and she was wrapped in her blanket receiving copious amounts of attention from myself, mum and dad. When it was time to take her in the mood got even worse and tears began to run from my mum and dad's faces. When they did inject her, she was standing on the bed and very slowly she just collapsed, and it was all over.

I’d never physically seen anyone or anything die before my eyes before, and it won’t be something I’ll want to revisit anytime soon. It was a soul-crushing, devastatingly easy thing to have been taken away so easily. I tried to keep myself together for my dad because I knew how much pain he was in, but I no longer could.

As I was looking at Molly on the bed asleep it dawned on me that I’d have to make that same decision my dad just made one day, and I too would be in just as much pain as my mum and dad were right now. That was because of a little friend called Roo. Or Rufus on Sundays.

Roo’s a Cavapoo and he’s my wife and I’s best friend. People who aren’t dog lovers need to reassess their lives but for those who are, or those who love pets in general you know that they can offer you something no other living thing can. And you’d know that the love you have for them is in every inch of your body and soul. It hurts to think about how much you love them.

Now this post has gone off on a bit of a tangent about my love for dogs but on the drive home, I couldn’t help but think about Roo and about the fact that one day he won’t be here and if I’m lucky enough to have had him for as long as we had Molly that the decision to let him go might fall on me and my wife’s. He’s 7 this year and it’s gone in a flash. Suddenly my mind ran wild with guilt, have I played with him enough? Walked him enough? Loved him enough? How much more time have I got with him? What if it’s not 17 years like Molly? Obviously, this was upsetting. I’d just seen Molly be put down and now I was thinking about the thing (joint with my wife) I love the most dying too!

It was a fairly long drive home, about 30 minutes and I wasn’t in a rush. I needed to think this through.

By thinking about Roo dying (pre-meditation of evils) I suddenly felt compelled to try to love him even more. To cuddle him more that night. We went to Scotland that weekend for his first ‘overseas’ trip (technically it isn’t overseas, but you get my drift) and we didn’t leave each other's side all weekend. We saw some Lochs, went on some walks, went out for some food and stopped over in a haunted hotel.

It shouldn’t take a moment such as a loss to come to terms with how important something is for us but unfortunately, at times it does. Life is so busy, all the time and romance, friendships, and commitments can fall by the wayside. It’s not that you don’t care but it’s so much harder to make the effort than it is to not make it. Maybe this is why the Stoics practiced Premeditatio Malorum so much. Maybe it was just them putting the things that mattered the most to them in perspective.

So, although the exercise might make you feel uncomfortable and even upset (if it makes you happy then you need to leave the relationship like yesterday!) it can help us in several ways. It can help us put our shitty day into context. How important is anything other than family, friendships, love, clarity, peace of mind, being content or of not wanting? It can also put the things in our life that we do care about front and centre of our perspective. To feel compelled to make that extra effort because you know that one day you won’t be able to.