What I focus on and write about in these Insights traces back to two sources. One died in 2023. The other has been dead for roughly two thousand years. Neither was writing for the modern workplace. Both describe it with uncomfortable precision.
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The question about everyone else

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner for over fifty years, built his reputation on one question: what is actually being rewarded here, regardless of what's being said?

A salesperson paid on volume chases volume, whatever the onboarding deck says about customer-first values. A team punished for reporting bad news stops reporting it. Munger's maxim isn't cynical — it's diagnostic. It tells you where to look when someone's behaviour doesn't match their stated intentions: not at their character, but at the structure around them.

The question about yourself

Roughly two thousand years earlier, a man who'd been enslaved for most of his early life taught a different question entirely — though he never wrote a word of it down himself. Epictetus taught purely by lecture; everything that survives comes from his student Arrian, who recorded the talks and distilled them into a short manual, the Enchiridion — Greek for "handbook."

Draw a hard line between what's genuinely yours and what isn't. Spend your energy only on the first list. This isn't resignation — Epictetus wasn't teaching people to care less. He was teaching them where their energy actually does something.

Why you need both, not either

Use Munger's lens alone, and you become an excellent diagnostician who burns out trying to personally fix every misaligned system you correctly identify — most of which were never yours to fix directly.

Use the Stoic discipline alone, and you become calm about situations you never properly diagnosed — composed, but blind to a structural problem you could have actually changed.

Together, they're a complete loop. Diagnose the system honestly first — what's actually being rewarded, not what's being said. Then act only on the part of it that's genuinely yours to move. Let go of the rest before it turns into anxiety instead of action.

Marcus Aurelius — a man with about as much power as existed in the ancient world, and unlike Epictetus, someone who did write his own words down, in a private journal never meant for publication — used the same discipline daily, rehearsing each morning the difficult people he'd likely face, reminding himself their behaviour wasn't his to control, only his response was. If an emperor needed to rehearse it every morning, "just stay calm" was never going to be enough on its own.

Where I actually use this

I catch myself doing only half the loop more often than I'd like. Diagnosing a misaligned incentive correctly, then trying to personally fix the whole system — including the parts that were never mine to control. Or staying composed about something I never took the time to properly diagnose, mistaking calm for clarity.

The two questions in sequence fix both failure modes. First: what's actually being rewarded here? Then, only then: what's actually mine to act on?

Neither idea is original. Both survived — one recorded by a student who thought it was worth writing down, one from a shareholder letter — because they keep being true regardless of the century.

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And if you want to browse the archive go here.

/Jonas

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