I keep coming back to the same two ideas, over and over, in almost everything I write. It took me a while to notice they were actually one idea, not two.

One is from an investor who died in 2023. The other is from a man who's been dead for roughly two thousand years, and never wrote a word of it down himself.

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.

A manager today wondering why a team keeps missing a target they clearly understand is usually asking the wrong question. The right one is what the bonus structure, the dashboard, or the last promotion actually rewarded — because that's the real instruction the team received, whatever the strategy deck said.

I've watched this play out constantly with SPIFFs — spot bonuses tied to specific products. They drive exactly the product-pushing behaviour you'd expect, and it's often a square-peg-round-hole fit against what the customer's actual long-term plan and timing called for. I've also sat in plenty of organisations that call themselves "customer first" while the thing that actually gets rewarded is closing strong deals by end of Q4. Those two things don't square with each other, and everyone in the room usually knows it — they just don't say it out loud.

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.

A leader stewing over a board's reaction to a decision that hasn't happened yet, or replaying a competitor's move they can't influence, is spending exactly the currency Epictetus warned against. The market's reaction was never on the list. Your preparation and your response always were.

I've spent real time — more than I'd like to admit — frustrated by other teams' decisions that weren't mine to make. Why don't they just fix X, adjust Y, stop Z, and do the obvious? I've got somewhat better at catching myself and accepting what's genuinely above my pay grade to change. Somewhat. Not fully.

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.

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?

Which half do you catch yourself skipping more often — diagnosing the system honestly, or actually letting go of the part that was never yours?

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/Jonas

Everything here is built from my own ideas, drawn from my reading, and life experience. For structure, validating research, proofreading, and edits, I use AI tooling to help make it a better experience for you, the reader.

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