In the opening pages of his private journal, Marcus Aurelius — the most powerful man in the Roman world, commander of its armies, the Emperor himself, answerable to almost no one — sits down and lists what he owes to the people who shaped him.

Near the top of that list: gratitude to his teacher Rusticus, for introducing him to the teachings of Epictetus, and lending him his own personal copy to study.

Epictetus was born a slave.

Two very different lives, one shared discipline

Epictetus spent his early life enslaved in Rome, reportedly permanently disabled by a master's cruelty before eventually being freed. He went on to found one of the most influential philosophy schools of the Roman world — a school whose reputation reached all the way to the palace, generations after his death, to a future emperor who would credit him as one of the most important influences on how he thought.

That a man born with nothing and an emperor who commanded everything both organised their entire approach to life around the same core idea says something about how load-bearing that idea actually is. It isn't circumstance-dependent. It works whether you have no control over your own body or command over an empire.

The idea itself

Epictetus opens his handbook, the Enchiridion, with the single distinction everything else in his philosophy builds on:

Draw a hard line between what's genuinely yours to control and what isn't, and stop spending emotional energy on the wrong side of that line. Your judgments, your effort, your choices — yours. Other people's opinions of you, the market, how your board reacts to bad news — not yours, however much they concern you.

This is not resignation. Epictetus wasn't teaching people to care less. He was teaching them to direct all their energy toward the part of the problem they could actually move, instead of leaking it into the part they couldn't.

How Marcus turned the idea into a daily practice

Marcus didn't just read Epictetus and nod along. He built the principle into an actual habit — visible in the private notes that make up his journal.

Early in that journal, he rehearses, before the day even starts, the difficult people he expects to encounter:

This is the dichotomy of control, turned into a morning ritual. Their behaviour — not up to him. His own composure — entirely up to him. He rehearsed the split before he needed it, so it wasn't a decision he had to make under real pressure in the room.

How to actually run this

Two minutes, before your first difficult moment of the day — a hard meeting, a stakeholder conversation, a decision you know will draw pushback:

Name exactly what friction you expect. Be specific.

Sort it: what part of this is genuinely yours to control — your preparation, your response, your composure? What part isn't — their reaction, the outcome, how it's received?

Decide, in advance, what you'll actually do with the part that's yours. Let go of the rest before you walk in.

Why I keep coming back to this one

I spent a long time believing that staying composed under pressure was a matter of willpower in the moment — that if I was disciplined enough, I'd manage it when it counted.

What actually changed things wasn't more willpower. It was doing the sorting in advance — deciding, before the room got hard, exactly which parts of what was about to happen were mine to own and which weren't. The emperor with total power still needed to rehearse it every morning. That tells you something about how little "just staying calm" actually works without preparation.

Thanks for reading!

If you liked it, please share and tell your friends to subscribe.

And if you want to browse the archive go here.

/Jonas

​
​