The emperor's notebook

You don't have to let this upset you - Stoicism at work

Some time around the year 170, at the start of what would be, no doubt, a very long day governing the Roman empire, whilst also running a war on the Danube and burying friends to a plague, the most powerful man alive sat down and wrote himself a small, personal and tired note about the morning to come.

"Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness."

Marcus Aurelius wasn't composing philosophy for publication, nor quotes for the gram. He was bracing himself for a difficult day at work – the way you or I might give ourselves a pep talk and stand up straight before attending a meeting we'd rather not be in. Over time, these notes to himself became the book we now call the Meditations. It was never really a book at all. It was a private journal: an emperor talking himself, night after night, scratching down his thoughts, about staying calm and behaving decently while a lot of what was around him was actively conspiring against both.

Isn't this a remarkable thought to consider; the most humble possible origin for one of the most useful things a person could ever read.

I came to Stoicism proper through the work of Ryan Holiday, after an early awareness of it through vague references in management books that kept quoting Marcus and Epictetus. I jumped into various books from the original philosophers themselves and quickly discovered an intensely practical instruction: how to stay calm, think clearly and behave well, when circumstances make all three hard. I was taken by how it read less like a philosophy and more like the field notes of people who'd had days a lot worse than mind, and figured out how to deal with them.

At the centre of the thinking sits an important point, and Epictetus – who began life enslaved, and so knew something about circumstances you can't control – put it very simply:

"The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices that are my own."

Your thoughts, your actions, your standards, your effort – yours to control and have a say in. Other people's behaviour, the politics, the outcomes, the world around you, the climate of organisational life – not yours, however intensely they demand your finite resources of time, energy and attention. Oh, it's so very easy to write and say that, but much harder to actually do. But for anyone working under pressure, surrounded by strong opinions and competing agendas, and wanting to regain a little mental clarity and control, I've yet to find a more useful idea to work on.

The most useful of the lot, for me at least, is one Marcus kept returning to and modern therapists later borrowed more or less verbatim:

"You don't have to let this upset you."

It sounds glib, perfect for a LinkedIn update, right up until you catch yourself living the opposite every day. An email lands, poorly worded (which is common), and your stomach drops, and it ruins your morning – except that the email is only an event, a few sentences on a screen, and the ruining that it's doing is something you add to it afterwards, for free, and sometimes for a staggeringly long time.

The Stoics noticed two thousand years ago what Cognitive Behavioural Therapy rediscovered: events are more or less neutral, and it's the story we tell around them that does the real damage. This doesn't mean bottling up what you feel or maintaining a stuff upper lip as we Brits would say – no, the Stoics never pretended feelings don't arrive. They just spotted that there's a moment, a nano-second after the first emotional reaction, where thought can step in and choose the response. Learning to find that pause is one of the most valuable things we can do.

The morning note he wrote about interference and ingratitude works the same way – as a sort of inoculation against what we will face. And remarkably, the human conditions keeps providing similar situations to ancient Rome. It isn't cynicism and a dislike of other people, or a way to cast aspersions on others; Marcus wasn't telling himself people are dreadful, or awful, or below him. It's preparation. Expect that some difficulty will turn up today, and it doesn't derail you when it does, because you are expecting it.

Poorly designed systems, incentives, politics, confusion, lack of direction and pressure routinely bring out behaviour in organisations that falls short of everyone's better nature and behaviours, and the person caught unprepared tends to react and add to it. Frustration, defensiveness, or a sulk by the kettle. The Stoic alternative is preparedness without bitterness or resentment. It's about being clear-eyed about human nature in pressured environments, and entirely positive about actual humans.

And then, having braced for the day ahead, you have to get up and do the work in front of you – which Marcus also had to talk himself into. Don't we all.

"I have to go to work as a human being," he grumbles at one point, before telling himself: "What do I have to complain of, if I'm going to do what I was born for?"

There's something comforting in learning that the philosopher-emperor, too, lay there resenting the alarm, and not always wanting to leap out of bed at 4am, drink a protein green smoothie, lift heavy weights, meditate and blast out a thousand sales pitches on LinkedIn before the kids get up.

Most trouble at work, in my experience, isn't a shortage of ability, far from it. It's our wavering attention – days that often fill up with noise, confusion, competing demands, the whims of others – instead of intent. The solution to this is rather unglamorous and yet remarkably reliable: bring our attention back to the present, to the thing that absolutely needs doing now, and to that powerful question of what's within your control to do it well.

Beneath the daily practice of all of this runs a bigger practice indeed, about who you're trying to be before you worry about what you're trying to get.

"First say to yourself what you would be," said Epictetus, "and then do what you have to do."

Culture in the workplace tends to wander apart and dilute when people trade founding behaviour for results, one small trade at a time, until we can't point at what the high bar is, let alone where it slipped. Stoicism focusses the other way: hold the standard of behaviours regardless of circumstance, and most of all when circumstance makes holding it costly. A useful, if not a little tragic, question to ask every so often – if today were the last one I had, would I be remembered for the right reasons? Did I act well? Did I hold the bar?

It helps to expect and anticipate the friction, too, rather than take it as a personal affront.

"A gem cannot be polished without friction," wrote Seneca, "nor a man perfected without trials."

Work will test you and everyone around you; people will let you down; the plan will fall over on a Tuesday, the release will get sent back by angry customers, the person on floor 4 will throw you under a bus for no rational reason. Working without friction simply doesn't exist, and the Stoic move here is neither to resign in fury nor to rage at others, but to treat the difficulty as the raw material you're actually working with rather than an insult to your character.

And when the small irritations threaten to eat a whole day, which they will, the Stoics reached for perspective:

"When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive."

They kept death in view – not morbidly, but, I think, rather usefully – because most of what we grumble about at work (and life) looks pleasingly trivial from there. I meet a lot of people who spend their days in complaint, about the process and the politics and the culture and the leaders and the government, and I suspect Seneca would have poured them a cup of tea, reached for the Fox's Cream biscuits and offered a very long, meaningful awkward pause.

The last piece is the kindest: keep someone you aspire to be like in mind. Seneca advised choosing a person whose character you admire and holding them in your thoughts

"Choose a master whose life, conversation, and soul-expressing face have satisfied you; picture him always to yourself as your protector or your pattern."

It might be someone you've worked with; it might be someone you've only ever read about, it might be someone you've seen on the TV. The point is to have a human reference for the leader or person you're trying to become, so that in the hard moment you've got someone to ask: what would they do here? Marcus, as it happens, makes a rather good one.

None of this makes the work easier, nor the problems go away. That is not the promise of Stoicism. It just makes you a little steadier and stable while you go about your life and work – better at holding the bar of good behaviours when it's hard, at responding rather than reacting, at spending your finite attention on the handful of things that are actually yours to shape, as you journey towards becoming the person you wish to be.

Which is, in the end, most of what leadership quietly asks of anyone: to stay calm, think clearly, role model, treat people well, focus on the important things and behave as you expect others, especially on the days when it all feels remarkably overwhelming.

Marcus knew he'd need reminding of all of this. So he wrote it down when he needed it, and read it back, night after night. And now we can read that too. It's not a bad habit, that – for an emperor, or for anyone else walking into a hard morning.