Why the Stoics Never Needed Willpower

You have quit every hard goal for the same reason, and it is not lack of willpower.

The Stoics worked this out 2,000 years ago. Instead of fighting discomfort with more discipline, they asked one question that bypasses the willpower battle entirely. In this episode I walk through the Stoic framework of virtue, vice and the indifferents, and the single question from Epictetus that replaced willpower in my own life, including the 12-pound cut I am on right now.

We get into why discipline is a finite resource and willpower always loses, the Stoic distinction between good, bad and indifferent, the one question that reframes hunger, hard conversations and difficult training, how to turn discomfort into material for character instead of an enemy to defeat, and the preferred indifferents caveat: why the Stoics were not masochists.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Every diet, every training program, every hard goal that you've ever quit, you've quit for the same reason. It's not because you're lazy, it's not because you lack willpower, it's because your brain told you a story and you believed it. And that story goes something like this. This is uncomfortable. Uncomfortable is bad. I should stop. Hunger is bad, tiredness is bad, saying no to the thing that we want is bad, struggle is bad. And it feels so true, it's so ingrained that we accept it as a fact. But what if I were to tell you that it's not? What if there's a way to evaluate what is happening to you in a way that makes discipline automatic? Not through willpower, not through motivation, but through a 2,000-year-old philosophy that asks a question that completely changes your relationship to discipline. That is what we're going to be discussing in this video. I'll start with a quick personal story. So I'm currently on a cut. I've lost 11 or 12 pounds over the last two months or so. Nothing fancy, just a calorie deficit, regular exercise. But we all know how it feels to be on a diet. The first few days, or maybe even the first few weeks, go well. We feel pumped, we feel motivated. This time we are going to go all the way and get lean, get toned, get in shape. And then after a few weeks, when the motivation starts to wane, and the clever, sophisticated tricks of our body and our mind kick in and they start saying things like, you know what would feel good is if you ate that food. Dieting doesn't feel so good. Why are you even doing this? You're fine as you are, right? And all these voices come in and try to persuade you and distract you from the goal. You're not starving, right? You just have this sort of low-level hum of discomfort. Like things are not quite as nice as they would be if you could eat whatever you liked whenever you liked. And this is where most people make the mistake, including myself for years. We try arguing with that voice on its own terms. We try to replace the negativity with positivity. We try to use willpower and discipline. We tell it to be quiet. We argue back. And this works, this way of using discipline, works until it doesn't. Because discipline is a finite resource and our brain never stops arguing. What's changed for me personally is to now no longer tell myself I need more discipline or more motivation or to white knuckle myself through the discomfort, but to instead just to ask a different question that I got from the Stoics. The Stoics had a pretty radical opinion on what constitutes good and bad, and I mean radical even by today's standards. Epictetus would say that the only true good, truly, is excellence of character, and the only true bad is vice, which would be corruption of character. So the only true good is virtue, and the only true bad is vice. And everything else, everything. Health, sickness, poverty, emotions, pleasure, pain, reputation, these would be called indifference, conditions, if you will. It doesn't mean that they don't matter. Naturally, there are things that have selective value. It's more natural to prefer health over sickness and financial security over poverty, of course. These would be preferred indifference, but they are not truly intrinsically good or bad. They are just conditions, helpful conditions, hard conditions. And the reason they thought this way is because of these conditions, like having money, having reputation, having health, it depends how you use them, right? Someone who has a corrupt character can leverage these things to cause more harm. Whereas someone who has a good character can leverage these things to do good in the world. So on their own, they are just tools. They are neither intrinsically good or bad. And that's why they came up with this indifferent way of thinking about the world. So the only good is virtue, the only bad is vice, and everything else is indifferent, and it kind of depends how you use it. This could seem a bit abstract and philosophical, so let's bring it now into the day-to-day modern world. So I'll talk about my cat, right? It's the middle of the day, and I start feeling this awareness of the deficit. Maybe I've just done a workout and I'm feeling my sugar levels starting to crash a bit, and I want to eat more food than I've allotted to myself. The storyline starts up. This feels bad. I should feel better. Feeling bad is bad, intrinsically bad. Being uncomfortable is bad. Intrinsically bad. So I need to eat more food. That's the storyline. And the logic that most of us would operate on is what I've just said, right? This feels bad. I don't want to feel bad, therefore I should feel better, and eating will make me feel better, therefore I should eat. That's the logic, it's airtight. And a lot of us would resort to using willpower to try and override this and force ourselves to not do it, which eventually won't work given enough time. So instead, I like to ask a different question that gets rid of this old framework completely. And the question I ask is, is this good or bad for my character? Does this situation harm my character? Does it corrupt my character? Or does it improve my character, help me grow? And this question flips everything on its head completely. So is being hungry something that will harm my character? No, of course not. Hunger is not something that will harm my character. It will not corrupt my character. It's external. Epictetus would say that my character is untouched by hunger. Is sitting with this discomfort, choosing not to react to it, to engage with it, to give in to it, to be mindful and accepting of it, something that will help my character. Well, actually, yes, it could. That's temperance, moderation, self-governance, choosing to stick to what I've already decided to do, even if in the moment I don't feel like doing it. So the emotion hasn't changed. The discomfort hasn't gone. But the question I've asked about what it means is very different now. And here's why this is so much better than willpower. Willpower is a battle, it's a fight, it's a war. It's a form of deprivation that you're fighting against. Part of you wants one thing, another part of you wants a different thing. And in the end, the willpower will always lose. You're going against desire and you're fighting against it, arguing with it, and desire usually wins in the end. Whereas this is not about motivation or discipline, this is about reframe. When you ask, does this help or harm my character? You are now no longer fighting against the discomfort in this war of discipline and motivation. Instead, you're reinterpreting the whole thing. Hunger is now no longer a problem to solve. It's an opportunity to grow. It's an opportunity to practice. It's the material that your character is built from. And Epictetus had this passage in the Enchiridian handbook that I keep coming back to. And it essentially tells us that difficulties and challenges are the things that show us what we're really made of. When difficulty comes your way, it's like God or Zeus or the universe has given you a very difficult sparring partner, and you're meant to practice with a sparring partner so that you can become stronger. You're unlikely to grow much if every time you train with someone, they're easy. Through sweat and toil and struggle and training, you build character, you build new skills. So struggle and discomfort is not a bug in the system of life, it is one of its best features. So when I'm struggling during this diet, this cut, I'm not fighting discomfort. I'm not trying to use discipline. I'm training. I'm training in virtue. I'm always asking the question: does this harm my character or help my character? Or is it indifferent or nothing or neutral or none of my concern? And it can be quite a relief actually. So look at something like hunger or discomfort and say, this is not intrinsically good or bad. And it's sort of a way of putting it down, and it can be quite consoling to think of it that way. Obviously, I've been using the example of dieting and cutting because it's a simple, regular activity that a lot of us have got experience with. But the beauty of this way of thinking about life and struggle and difficulty is that it can be applied to pretty much anything. Let's just say that you're building a business. You're not getting any recognition, nobody's buying anything, and so the logic runs as usual. Nobody's buying, this feels bad. Feeling bad is bad, therefore I should stop. And instead, we ask a different question now. Is building this business showing up with integrity, working hard, building my character, or harming my character? And the answer you should find is pretty obvious, and you keep going. Let's say you're engaged in some kind of conflict at work with family, with friends, with your partner, and you have this urge to say something. Let's say that you're in a difficult conversation with a partner, family member, a work colleague, and you have this feeling come up, right? They're attacking me, I don't feel good, this is bad, I should attack them back, that will feel better, therefore that's what I should do. Whereas the stoic perspective here would be more like not so much will this make me feel better, but is this the kind of person that I want to be? So it's more character-based. And then you respond as if you are responding, and now you've got a cleaner answer for how you can respond. Or let's just say that you're in the gym and you're doing some reps and it's painful and uncomfortable. You ask the question, is this pain bad for my character or good for my character? And you can ask a question, is this gonna help me grow in temperance and coverage, or will this actually just injure me? And if the answer is injure me, then obviously stop. But if it's gonna help your character, then you continue and you push through and you see it as another form of practice. So this framework, this reframe works because it takes you out of this endless debate about whether you should or shouldn't do something that feels good or doesn't feel good. Should you eat the cookie or not? You can talk about that all day long, it's endless. Whereas does this help or harm my character is clean. It either does or it doesn't, and you have your answer, and now you have your path forward. A little caveat that I want to give here though is that the Stoics were not masochists. They weren't into just suffering for suffering's own sake. You know, you always have to be doing the thing that is painful or difficult. Ultimately, the only good or bad thing, as we've seen, is your character. But there are preferred indifference, all else being equal. Let's just say that you are practicing virtue, excellence of character, then obviously being a bit more comfortable is naturally preferred over being uncomfortable. Being warm is naturally preferred over being freezing. We naturally can prefer these things, but we don't attach our identity to them and we don't tell ourselves that these things are intrinsically good or bad. We step outside of that way of framing it. And sometimes there are shades of grey and nuances here. Sometimes it's good to break the diet for a social event so you can be present with your family. Right? Now, it's not about all or nothing thinking, it's about balance, it's about using this compass of virtue of the character that you are to make informed decisions. That's the whole point. So you go through life asking the question, does this help my character or harm my character? And then you use that as your compass for making decisions. And there's one final thing I want to share with you. When you start practicing this question, this reframe of discomfort, instead of asking, does this feel comfortable? you ask, does this help or harm my character? Something actually happens to the discomfort. It actually gets lighter. You feel hunger doesn't disappear, hard conversations don't go away, challenges don't suddenly feel easy. But it's now no longer pointless. Suffering and discomfort is material for building character and for practice. Epictetus had a line: how long will you wait before you demand the best from yourself? That could feel a lot like pressure, but now it's more like permission. It's permission to stop arguing with comfort, arguing with desire, and just to give yourself permission to build your character into the kind of person that you want to be. So here's the practice that you can use today and well into the future. The next time you feel the pull to quit something, to stop doing something that you've started, ask yourself, does continuing doing this improve my character, or does quitting protect my character? You'll find that the answer is often quite simple and obvious, and it will take you out of the comfort discomfort logic loop that we've discussed. And if you want to start practicing Stoicism every day, I've created a free seven day challenge called the Stoic Power Challenge. You can get it at stoicchallenge.co. The link is in the description. Thank you for watching. Go well.