Stoicism This Week (6/14)

Here's a list of helpful and interesting content that I encountered this week.

Get in touch if you find it useful.

Optimism and Pessimism

Powerful piece on optimism:

Anything you want to do in the world requires a little bit of force. The force I’m talking about is in your mind. For example, I didn’t want to write this book. I did everything I could to avoid it. Every excuse imaginable, but in the end it was force that got me here. I turned every negative thought into “I can, I will and I must”. Every statement you make to yourself about yourself, you must examine it.

Very similar to Epictetus' line on the impressions on the Epictetus:

Practice, then, from the very beginning to say to every rough impression, ‘You’re an impression and not at all what you appear to be.’ Then examine it and test it by the standards that you have

Massimo Pigliucci and Chris Gill

Two titans in the Stoic space, they've also appeared in Stoa Conversations (here and here).

We've added John Sellars to the roster. He's written a few books on Stoicism, including the excellent Lessons in Stoicism, and has a new on Marcus Aurelius coming out soon.

You can read a recent piece of his on Marcus Aurelius here.

Practical Stoic Podcast

Simon Drew's Practical Stoic Podcast has had a number of excellent guests recently. I particularly enjoyed his discussion with William Stephens here.

Mental Models

Scott Young helps you learn better and faster. He's well known for completing MIT's Computer Science track in a year. In this post he goes over the mental models that he finds most useful.