Difference Between "Would" and "Could"

One Marcus Aurelius line has stuck with me more than most: stop arguing about what a good person should be, and just be one. It cuts straight through the temptation to theorise instead of act.

In this one I sit with that quote and the way it feeds into self-discipline and getting free of approval addiction. The distinction I keep coming back to is the gap between what you would do and what you could do. It works as both a reality check and a quiet push toward what actually matters.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Hello fellow Stoics. This is John Brooks. Welcome back to the Stoic Handbook Podcast. If you've been reading my emails, you would have seen that I am creating a program called Aschesis, a 10-week stoic immersion training program. I'm just in the process of finalizing participants. We already have a truly fantastic group, and I'm super eager to go on this adventure with my fellow participants. If this is something that appeals to you, you can send me a message on stoichandbook at John Brooks.com. Today I want to discuss a very short but very potent quote by Marcus Aurelius. The quote is Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be Be one. This instruction that he writes to himself is extremely deep. Yes, it's iconic, yes, it cuts straight to the point, but it's deep and it applies to so many areas of life. I think that it is so alluring and addictive to discuss other people, to discuss the ideal person, to find faults in others. The term they use for this on the internet is keyboard warrior. So it's this idea that you're sitting behind your keyboard and you're giving this feedback, this advice, this criticism to someone out there in the arena doing the heroic stuff, doing the work. You can become a professional critic, right? You could become a professional criticizer of others. A film critic or a music critic. Now, of course, a lot of these critics have expertise, but some of them they just criticize other people's creation without ever having created anything themselves. In the realm of personal development, have you ever gotten into a discussion about what it means to be enlightened? Who is enlightened? Who isn't enlightened? Who's a good person? Who's not a good person? Who's corrupt? Who's not corrupt? Who's more intelligent? Who would win this debate? Who's more awake than this other person? I am certainly guilty of getting into the kind of discussion where I theorize about what it means to be good, to be wholesome, to be in integrity. These types of discussions, I believe, are just distractions. Distractions from doing the thing. When I encounter people who really struggle with self-discipline, one thing I often see is that they're regularly promising themselves something. So if someone really wants to start a workout routine, but they're never working out, they'll often say things like, I need to start working out, or next week I'm gonna start working out, or tomorrow I'm gonna sign up to the gym. There's always these little promises that they give themselves that keeps this hope, this fantasy alive that they will actually start working out, but yet they just don't, right? There's always this feeling that they might, and this feeling persists for weeks and months and years often, but the evidence suggests that they aren't. And this is a distinction that I love, a very simple distinction, the difference between would and could, right? A lot of us could do many things. I could start a new business for electric cars and try and make the world a better place. I could do that, right? I really could do that. I could write an article every single day for the next 365 days and really go as far as I can into helping people. I could do it, like I really could do that. I could completely clean up my life and avoid any kind of negative influence for the next six months. I could do it, like I really could, and so could you. But the question is would you? Would you do this? We know you could, but would you? And you know the answer to that is not something you can say. You can't actually voice an answer to that. There is no verbal answer. The answer has already been stated by your past. If there's no track record of you doing it, you can't do it. If there's no evidence of you making strides forward in that area, you wouldn't do it. Because if you would, you would have. This goes back also to this idea that people say I could have been this amazing thing, you know, or when I was younger, if I had studied harder, I I could have been a top doctor. When I was younger, if I had trained harder, I could have been one of the world's greatest athletes. The truth is that's not any more true than than the idea that you could have been the creator of Amazon, or you could have been a billionaire zookeeper. It's one reality that you've chosen because it feels good when you choose it. But if you could have done that truly, you would have done that. And this goes back to this idea of stoic fatalism. It's very important to be real with ourselves. We can look back on our life and go, well, if I had studied harder I would have done this amazing thing. But you didn't study harder. That wasn't you. That wasn't you any more than the world isn't the moon. And this is a hard thing for people to grasp. It's a very confronting thing. But to a large degree, yes, you are the result of luck, or randomness, if you prefer that word, or fortune. That is a huge part of your life, okay? You didn't choose your brain, you didn't choose your family, you didn't choose your height. There's so much that is just luck. You didn't choose that you don't have this debilitating disease, or that you do have this debilitating disease. So much of our life is random, and stoicism is the antidote to that, of course. But the other side of this humility that comes from seeing that so much of life is random and that so many people who are quote unquote self-made are just lucky enough to be the type of person who can become self-made based on their genetics and situation. There's also, if you look deep enough into it, a truth that goes something like this. A large part of your life, not all of it, because a large part of it was luck, but a large part of your life is the way it is because on some level you've wanted it to be that way. You know, when people say I don't have enough time for this, I prefer to think that you do with your time everything you want to do every day. When people say I don't have enough time to read books, you do have enough time to read books, but you're choosing to do other things with your time. You want to be doing other things more than you want to be reading books. So that so it's not that you don't have enough time to read books, it's that you would rather do other things than read books. And when people are struggling with discipline and they say I don't have enough time to be disciplined, it's not that you don't have enough time to do this thing that you know is good for you, it's that you're choosing to do other things instead. And looping back to the quote, waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one. The arguing about what a good man should be, the arguing about what a good person should be is the perfect distraction. The perfect distraction from actually being one. We fool ourselves into thinking that if I can create this image and talk as if I know what a good person is, then I vicariously take on some of those traits because other people give me the validation of seeing that I'm onto something. But you know in your heart of hearts you aren't that, and you have to live with that. The idea of stoicism is really simple. You don't practice stoicism so that you can impress your friends. You don't practice stoicism so that you can appear wise, you don't practice stoicism so that people listen to you and think that you understand stoicism. You practice stoicism for those moments when you are on your own lying in the dark, confronted with yourself wondering what am I doing with my life? What is going on? How much of a fake am I? How much of an addict to approval and validation am I? Where am I pretending? Where am I an imposter? Where am I hiding? Where am I weak? And when you survey the ground of your character and you take a good look, the practicing stoic is okay with themselves, is contented with their efforts. Waste no more time arguing what a good person should be. No more time. Be one. Over and over and over again, as many times as it takes. Thank you for listening. I'll see you in the next episode of the Stoic Handbook Podcast.