7 Rules For Life That Made The Greatest Thinkers So Wise

These pieces of wisdom will make you unstoppable.

Photo by Thom Holmes on Unsplash

Some things in life don’t age. Or change. The basic problems of our lives (fear, frustration, irritation, desire, distraction or the urge to control things you can’t) haven’t changed at all. These ideas, rules and wisdom to solve some of our problems will keep working and compounding for your good as long as you keep applying them.

I’ve been putting these rules to work for years. They are from thinkers who spent their lives staring straight at those problems. They will help you figure out how to live well on your own terms.

#Sort your problems into two piles. Marcus Aurelius ran the Roman Empire while it was falling apart. Plagues, wars, betrayals from people he trusted. And every night, he sat down and wrote notes to himself. Just for himself. Trying to think clearly about how to handle it all. Those notes became Meditations. His big idea is simple. Every problem you face belongs to one of two piles. Pile one: things you control. Pile two: things you don’t. You control your effort, your attention, how you treat people, and what you choose to focus on. You don’t control other people’s opinions or whether your boss is in a good mood. Most of our suffering comes from getting these two piles mixed up. Spending energy on pile two as if it were pile one. Aurelius said, “You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realise this, and you will find strength.” For every experience that frustrates you, put it into one of the piles before you react. You’re allowed to either let it go or take action. Knowing the difference changes everything.

#Your reaction is reality. This is a follow-up to rule one. And it might be the most useful stoicism idea. Things don’t happen to you, and then you react. The reaction is the thing that happens. Two people can experience the exact same event. Getting fired, say and walk away with completely different lives. One spirals for months. The other treats it as the push they needed. Stoic philosopher Epictetus said, “People are not disturbed by things, but by the views they take of them.” If you are harmed by any external thing, it is not the thing itself that troubles you, but your judgment about it. The event is just knowledge. Your mind interprets it.

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment,” says Aurelius. If you can notice the gap between what happens and what you’re telling yourself about it, you have the power to change how it informs your next action. Next time you feel frustrated, choose how you feel furious about it. A better response takes the bad mood out of the anger a little. You start to see the choice you’re making. And choices can be remade. “Don’t let your imagination be crushed by life as a whole,’ says Aurelius.

#Happiness ensures. Choose to pursue meaning. Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist before World War II. Then he was sent to Auschwitz and other camps, where he lost almost his entire family. After he survived, he wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, one of the most devastating books ever written. It’s not really about despair, though. But what kept some people going when everything had been taken from them? Frankl figured out something counterintuitive. The people who survived were the ones who still had a reason to live. A person waiting for them. A piece of life work left unfinished. A belief they hadn’t let go of. He wrote that the way a man accepts his fate and the suffering it brings. The way he takes up his cross. Gives him the rare opportunity to bring meaning to his life.

The lesson here is simple.

Pursuing happiness directly tends to backfire. “The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself,” Frankl said. But choosing meaning does something to you. Meaning comes from outside yourself. A person you’re responsible for. Work that matters to someone. A problem worth solving. All of these ensures the good feeling you want. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run — in the long-run, I say! — success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it,” he adds.

#Face the parts of yourself you’d rather not look at. Carl Jung spent his career studying the mind. And one of his most powerful ideas that can change your life is the concept of the “shadow.” Everything about yourself you would rather bury. The anger, jealousy, selfishness and the fear. These things don’t disappear. They become unconscious and run your life. You snap at people for no clear reason. You feel jealousy you can’t explain. You judge other people harshly for traits you secretly have. Jung’s famous warning was that “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Every time you have a strong, out-of-proportion reaction to someone. An irritation that seems too big for the situation, get curious. Most people become defensive. What does this reaction say about you, not them? You don’t have to act on the answer. Just get to the bottom of your reactions to life’s experiences. The shadow isn’t your enemy. It’s just the part of you that’s been waiting to be acknowledged.

#Stop forcing it. Lao Tzu, the philosopher behind the Tao Te Ching, gave the world a strange idea. Wu wei. It means “effortless action.” Or doing things in a way that works with the natural flow of life. Most people are fighting against the flow. Water doesn’t push through rock by force. It finds the cracks, flows around obstacles, and over time, wears the rock down without ever straining. Lao Tzu wrote that “nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” In practice, the writer who forces a thousand words a day won’t produce great work.

The one who works with their natural rhythm, when the ideas are flowing, resting when they’re not, produces more and better, over the long run. The manager who tries to control every detail burns out their team. The one who sets clear, measurable direction and then lets people work tends to get better results. Forcing things feels productive because it’s effortful. But effort and effectiveness are not the same. Sometimes the fastest way through is to stop pushing.

#Stay a beginner on purpose. Richard Feynman won a Nobel Prize in physics. But what made him remarkable was his refusal to pretend he understood something he didn’t. He had a famous test: if he couldn’t explain an idea simply, he assumed he didn’t understand it yet, no matter how many equations he could write down. He once said, “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.” That’s a strange thing to say, for a genius to say. Most people want certainty. “I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing,” he said. Feynman preferred honesty more than certainty. This is a habit you can build. Curiosity is one of the most useful social tools you have. It also keeps your mind flexible. The minute you stop asking “why” and “how,” you fall back on your assumptions. Which are not always objective. If you get stuck, use it as a clue to find better knowledge. Now you know where to focus to get better answers in life.

#Your attitude is the one thing nobody can take. Viktor Frankl watched people lose everything. And reduced to numbers. And from that, he drew out what he called the last of the human freedoms: the ability to choose your attitude in any given set of circumstances. Everything else can be taken from you. Your job, your health, your plans, even the people you love. But how you decide to meet what happens to you. That stays yours, all the way to the end. “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances,” says Frankl.

He saw people in the worst conditions imaginable still choose dignity, to help someone else. And still choose hope. That choice was the one thing still in their control. You’ll never face what Frankl faced. But the muscle is the same. When something goes wrong. And something will, today or this week. There’s a split second where you decide what kind of person you’re going to be about it. Bitter, or steady. Closed off, or still useful to someone. That split second is small. But it’s yours, every single time, and nobody can take it from you.