Facing Fear, Mastering Life: A Practical Guide to Stoicism and Fear-Setting

Carefully selected 100 classic TED Talks, each lasting 8–15 minutes, covering innovation, growth, and future trends. Provides MP3 streaming, downloads, and English transcripts to help you improve listening and speaking skills. Ignite your passion for learning with the power of ideas! Here is this issue’s 【TED】 collection of 100 classic speaking and listening materials. Keep building your skills so your English gets closer to everyday life!

So this happy pick of me was taken in 1999, I was a senior in college, and it was right after dance practice. I was really, really happy. And I remember exactly where I was about a week and a half later, I was sitting in the back of my used minivan, in a campus parking lot when I decided that I was going to commit suicide. And I went from deciding to full-blown planning very quickly, and I came this close to the edge of the precipice. It's the closest I've ever come. And the only reason I took my finger off the trigger was thanks to a few lucky coincidences. And after the fact, that's what scared me the most, the element of chance. So I became very methodical about testing different ways that I could manage my ups and downs, which has proven to be a good investment. Many normal people might have six to ten major depressive episodes in their lives. I have bipolar depression; it runs in my family. I've had 50 plus at this point, and I've learned a lot. I've had a lot of at-bats, many rounds in the ring with darkness, taking good notes. So I thought, rather than get up and give any type of recipe for success or highlight reel, I would share my recipe for avoiding self-destruction. And certainly self-paralysis.

And the tool I found, which has proven to be the most reliable safety net for emotional free fall, is actually the same tool that has helped me make my best business decisions, though that is secondary. And it is stoicism. That sounds boring. You might think of Spock or conjure an image like this: a cow standing in the rain. It's not sad. It's not particularly happy. It's just an impassive creature taking whatever life sends its way. You might not think of the ultimate competitor, say Bill Belichick, head coach of the Patriots. He holds the all-time NFL record for Super Bowl titles. Stoicism has spread like wildfire in the top NFL ranks as a means of mental toughness training in the last few years. You might not think of the Founding Fathers—Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington—to name three students of stoicism. George Washington actually had a play about a stoic—"Cato, a Tragedy"—performed for his troops at Valley Forge to keep them motivated. So why would people of action focus so much on an ancient philosophy? It seems very academic. I would encourage you to think about stoicism a little differently: as an operating system for thriving in high-stress environments and making better decisions.

And it all started here, kind of, on a porch. Around 300 BC, in Athens, someone named Zeno of Citium taught many lectures while walking around a painted porch—a stoa—that later gave stoicism its name. In the Greco-Roman world, people used stoicism as a comprehensive system for many purposes. But for our purposes, the main one was training yourself to separate what you can control from what you cannot control, and then doing exercises to focus exclusively on the former. This decreases emotional reactivity, which can be a superpower. Conversely, let's say you're a quarterback, you miss a pass, you get furious with yourself—that could cost you a game. If you're a CEO and you fly off the handle at a valued employee because of a minor infraction, that could cost you the employee. If you're a college student in a downward spiral and you feel helpless and hopeless, unabated, that could cost you your life. So the stakes are very, very high.

And there are many tools in the toolkit to get you there. I'm going to focus on one that completely changed my life in 2004. It found me then because of two things: a very close friend, my age, died of pancreatic cancer unexpectedly; and my girlfriend, who I thought I was going to marry, walked out. She'd had enough. She didn’t give me a "Dear John" letter, but she did give me this—a "Dear John" plaque. I'm not making this up; I've kept it. It read, "Business hours are over at five o’clock." She gave it to me to put on my desk for personal health because at the time I was working on my first real business. I had no idea what I was doing. I was working 14+ hour days, seven days a week. I was using stimulants to get going, depressants to wind down and sleep. It was a disaster. I felt completely trapped. I bought a book on simplicity to try to find answers, and I did find a quote that made a big difference in my life: "We suffer more often in imagination than in reality." by Seneca the Younger, a famous stoic writer. That took me to his letters, which took me to the exercise *premeditatio malorum*, meaning "the pre-meditation of evils." Simply put, this is visualizing in detail the worst-case scenarios you fear, so you can take action to overcome that paralysis.

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