STOP TRYING TO GET IT AND YOU'LL HAVE IT | STOICISM

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]What if the reason it keeps escaping you is because you won't stop chasing it?

[00:00:06]Love, respect, peace, status, money, validation, that one message, that one opportunity, that one moment where life finally turns around and says, "Here, you've suffered enough. Now you can breathe." But it never comes like that, does it?

[00:00:29]Instead, the harder you grip, the more it slips, the more you try to be admired, the less people respect you, the more desperately you want love, the more unnatural you become, the more you obsess over success, the more anxious, needy, and exhausted you feel. And one day, after trying so hard to make life give you what you want, you realize something terrifying.

[00:00:58]You are not living. You are hunting, always waiting, always forcing, always reaching, always saying to yourself, "Once I get it, then I'll be enough." But stoicism has a brutal answer for that. Maybe the reason you don't have it is because your need for it is exactly what's keeping it away. And the moment you stop needing it, the moment you stop begging life to obey you, the moment you become still, that is often the exact moment everything begins to come. Not because the world suddenly became kind, but because you finally stopped pushing away what was already trying to reach you.

[00:01:46]Tonight, we're talking about one of the hardest stoic lessons to live by. Stop trying to get it, and you'll have it.

[00:01:53]Stay with me because by the end of this, you may never chase the same way again.

[00:02:00]Part one, the trap. The man who had everything. Let me tell you about a man named Marcus.

[00:02:08]He wasn't born powerful. He wasn't born wealthy. He was a teenager when the most powerful man in the world looked at him and said, "You, you're going to be emperor."

[00:02:18]Just like that, Marcus Aurelius was placed on a path he never asked for. And here's what most people don't know about him. He didn't want it. The imperial palace felt like a cage to him. The ceremonies felt hollow. He wrote in his private journal, the book we now call meditations, that he dreamed of a quiet life, a life of philosophy and study, a simple life. But he didn't get that. He got plagues, wars, betrayal, loss. He watched his children die. He watched friends turn on him. He ruled for nearly two decades, fighting one crisis after another. And through all of it, he kept writing, not to be read, not to be admired, just to think clearly. And the thought he returned to again and again more than any other was this. You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength. He wasn't writing that for us.

[00:03:16]He was writing it for himself because he needed to remember it. Now, here's what I want you to sit with. Marcus Aurelius was one of the most powerful men who ever lived. He had every resource, every luxury, every option available to a human being on earth. And he spent his entire life trying to remind himself that none of it was actually his. That's not pessimism. That's not depression.

[00:03:43]That is the most radical form of clarity a person can reach. The trap we all fall into. Here's the trap. We are wired, biologically wired to want. From the moment you're born, your brain runs on a simple algorithm. See something good, want it, get it, feel relief, want something else. Rinse, repeat forever.

[00:04:06]Psychologists call this the hedonic treadmill. You work hard, you get the thing. You feel good for a moment and then the feeling fades and the wanting starts again. The promotion, the relationship, the body, the money, the respect, always something just ahead, always just out of reach. And the cruel joke is, you've probably already noticed this. You've probably already had moments where you got the thing you wanted and stood there holding it, wondering why it didn't feel the way you thought it would. The Stoics didn't call this a personal failure. They called it the human condition.

[00:04:42]And they had a solution. But it wasn't what you think. Part two. What the Stoics actually said, the misunderstood philosophy.

[00:04:53]Here's where most people get stoicism wrong. They hear stoic and they think it means cold, emotionless, robotic, disconnected.

[00:05:02]Just stop caring and nothing will hurt you.

[00:05:05]That's not stoicism. That's numbness.

[00:05:08]And numbness is just suffering in a trench coat. Real stoicism isn't about killing your desire. It's about understanding it. About choosing consciously, deliberately where you place your wanting.

[00:05:21]Epictitus, the stoic philosopher who was born a slave and became one of the most influential thinkers in human history, put it this way. Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish, but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life. Read that again slowly. He's not saying don't want anything. He's saying want what is. Not what could be, not what should be, not what you've planned and hoped and prayed for. What is. And when you can do that, when you can genuinely, honestly, from the inside out want your actual life, that's when everything changes.

[00:06:03]The archer analogy. The Stoics love this image. An archer. The archer stands, draws the bow, aims, he does everything perfectly, feet planted, breathing controlled, eyes steady on the target.

[00:06:17]He releases the arrow. And then the wind shifts and the arrow drifts. Now here's the question. Did the archer fail? A lesser philosopher might say yes. He missed the target. He failed. But the Stoics would say something different.

[00:06:36]The archer's job, his actual job was to draw the bow. Well, to aim truly, to release with skill. What the wind does after that, that was never his to control.

[00:06:48]This is what Epictitus called the dichotomy of control. The most important distinction in stoic philosophy.

[00:06:55]There are two kinds of things in your life. Things in your control, things outside your control. And the entirety of human suffering, every anxiety, every resentment, every desperate three, a moment staring at the ceiling comes from one mistake.

[00:07:12]Treating the second category like it's the first. You cannot control outcomes.

[00:07:18]You can only control your aim. This sounds simple. It is not simple because our brains don't like this answer. Our brains want the outcome. Our brains need to believe that if we want it hard enough, plan carefully enough, sacrifice enough, we can guarantee the result. But you can't. You never could. And the moment you really accept that not intellectually but in your bones is the moment you stop suffering in a very particular way. The paradox and here is where it gets strange. Here is where the stoics discovered something that honestly sounds almost like magic. When you stop gripping the outcome, when you release your desperate need for the specific result, when you shift your attention entirely to the process, things start to go better. Not always, not magically, not in a movie ending way, but better. Because the person who isn't white knuckling their desire acts with more clarity, makes better decisions, recovers faster from setbacks, reads the room more accurately, doesn't repel people with their hunger. There's a term for this in psychology, ironic process theory. The more you try not to think about something, the more you think about it.

[00:08:38]The harder you try to fall asleep, the more awake you become. The more you want someone to like you, the more you behave in ways that make you unlikable.

[00:08:47]The Stoics called it something else.

[00:08:49]They called it attachment.

[00:08:51]And they spent their whole lives learning to put it down. Part three, Epictitus and the lamp. A story of radical loss. I want to tell you the story of Epictitus, not the philosophy, the man. Because he didn't come to these ideas in a library.

[00:09:09]He came to them in chains.

[00:09:12]Epictitus was born into slavery in the city of Hierapoulos in what is now Turkey sometime around 50 AD. His name in Greek literally means acquired as in property owned. His master in Rome was a man named Epiphittus who was himself a freed slave who had risen to become a powerful secretary to Emperor Nero.

[00:09:35]Epifidus was by historical accounts cruel. There's a story you may have heard it that one day to test or torture Epictitus Epiphus began twisting his leg. Epictitus calm looked at him and said you are going to break it. The twisting continued.

[00:09:54]There you have broken it. He said it the way you describe weather. Flat, factual, unafraid.

[00:10:01]Now I want you to feel that for a moment. Not to admire it from a distance. Actually feel it. This was a man who had no physical freedom, who could be hurt, sold, or killed by the whim of another person.

[00:10:16]And yet he had found something that could not be taken. something inside him that no amount of physical pain, no degradation, no loss of external freedom could reach. He called it the hegemonic, the ruling faculty, the mind. And his argument, the one he would teach for the rest of his life after he was eventually freed and went on to establish one of the most influential philosophy schools in the ancient world, was simply this.

[00:10:46]Your body can be enslaved. Your reputation can be destroyed. Your possessions can be taken. Your health can fail. But your judgment, the way you choose to respond to what happens to you, that is yours. Always, completely, no matter what. What this means for you.

[00:11:03]Now, I know what you might be thinking.

[00:11:06]Okay, but I'm not a slave. My problems are different, and you're right. They are. But here's the thing about suffering. It doesn't care about context.

[00:11:17]The executive who loses her job after 20 years feels a very specific kind of devastation. The man who gets left by the person he thought he'd spend his life with lies awake with a very specific kind of ache. The young person who builds something for years and watches it collapse in a weak nose. A very specific kind of grief. None of these people are enslaved, but all of them know what it's like to have something taken, to reach for something and find empty air. And Epictitus speaks to all of them because his message isn't life won't hurt you. His message is there is a part of you that cannot be broken and you keep forgetting it's there. The lamp at the center of yourself, always lit, always yours, even when everything outside goes dark. The lamp exercise.

[00:12:08]Here's something I want you to actually try. Not now. After this video, sit somewhere quiet. Take a breath. and think about the thing you want most right now. The thing you've been chasing, the thing that wakes you up at 3:00 a.m. Write it down if you want.

[00:12:26]Now, ask yourself three questions.

[00:12:28]One, what part of getting this is within my control? Your actions, your preparation, your decisions, your mindset, your consistency.

[00:12:37]Two, what part of getting this is outside my control? other people's choices, timing, luck, the market, the economy, the way someone feels.

[00:12:46]Three, where am I spending most of my energy? For most people, and be honest here, the answer to question three is column two, the things you can't control. The conversation you keep replaying, the outcome you keep trying to force the person you keep trying to change. And all that energy, all that wanting, all that gripping, all that desperate hoping is pouring into a bucket with a hole in the bottom. The Stoics aren't asking you to stop caring.

[00:13:16]They're asking you to care about the right things. To redirect that same fire, and it is fire, toward the column that actually responds to it. your effort, your character, your craft, your choices.

[00:13:30]Put everything there and then release the rest. I want to stop here for a second because I can feel the objection building. You're thinking, "This sounds good in theory, but I live in the real world. I have deadlines and bills and people depending on me. I can't just let go." I hear you. And the stoics heard that objection too every single day from their own students. Zeno of Obsidium, the founder of Stoicism, was himself a merchant who lost everything in a shipwreck. His entire fortune gone. One day he walked into Athens and wandered into a bookshop. And he picked up a copy of Zenapon's memorabilia, a book about Socrates, and something in him cracked open. He looked at the book seller and asked, "Where can I find a man like this and at that moment a philosopher named Crates walked by. The book seller pointed and said, "Follow him." So he did. He went from being a wealthy businessman to spending years sitting at the feet of a philosopher in rags, learning how to be free. Not from poverty, inside poverty. The Stoics weren't people who had comfortable lives. and then philosophized about letting go. They were people who had lost things, real things, and found in the rubble something that couldn't be lost. Part four. A mo fat ti love what is. There's a concept in stoic philosophy that Friedrich Nichze later borrowed and made famous. Am or fatty, love of fate, not tolerance of fate, not grudging acceptance, love. And I know that sounds impossible. Love my cancer diagnosis. Love my failed marriage. Love the years I wasted on the wrong path.

[00:15:24]No, that's not what it means. Here's what it means. Marcus Aurelius wrote this in his journal. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. Ryan Holiday turned this into a book called The Obstacle is the Way. And millions of people read it. But Marcus wrote it for himself alone in a tent on a military campaign, exhausted and grieving.

[00:15:51]He wasn't being poetic. He was trying to survive.

[00:15:55]The idea is this. Everything that has happened to you, every setback, every loss, every closed door, every moment of humiliation and failure has shaped you into the exact person sitting here right now. Not despite those things, because of them. And if you could go back and remove even one of them, truly remove it, erase it completely, you would not be who you are. You would be someone else. Someone who hasn't learned what you know, someone who hasn't become what you've become.

[00:16:27]Ammer fatty doesn't mean pretending it didn't hurt. It means choosing to see the hurt as the curriculum.

[00:16:34]The exact curriculum you needed. The river. There's an image I keep coming back to. A river doesn't fight the rocks. It doesn't stop and complain that the rock shouldn't be there. It doesn't try to convince the rock to move. It doesn't sit still and wish for a different riverbed.

[00:16:53]It just goes around. And in doing so, over years, over centuries, the river carves the rock into something beautiful.

[00:17:02]That's not weakness. That's a kind of power that brute force can never achieve. The Stoics called this oosis, a sense of belonging to the world as it actually is. Not the world as you wish it to be, not the world you've been promised, the world as it is. And they argued, they genuinely believed that when you stop fighting the world and start moving with it, when you stop treating reality as an obstacle and start treating it as the material you have to work with, everything you do becomes more effective, more graceful, more powerful because you're not wasting half your energy on resistance.

[00:17:42]James Stockdale. I want to tell you about a man named James Stockdale.

[00:17:48]He was an American fighter pilot shot down over Vietnam in 1965.

[00:17:54]As he parachuted into enemy territory, he thought to himself, "I am leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictitus."

[00:18:03]He spent 7 and 1/2 years as a prisoner of war. He was the highest ranking American military officer in the Hanoi Hilton. He was tortured more than 20 times.

[00:18:14]And throughout all of it, he held on to one thing. the philosophy of Epictitus which he had studied at Stanford before deployment.

[00:18:22]When Jim Collins later wrote good to great, he asked Stockdale, who didn't make it out of the camps. Stockdale's answer surprised him. He said, "The optimists."

[00:18:34]Collins was confused.

[00:18:36]Stockdale explained, "The optimists were the ones who said we'll be out by Christmas. Christmas would come and go.

[00:18:42]They'd say Easter. Easter would come and go. Thanksgiving. and then they died of a broken heart. He paused and then he said something Collins never forgot.

[00:18:54]This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end, which you can never afford to lose with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

[00:19:08]This became known as the Stockdale paradox.

[00:19:12]Hold both truths at once. I will get through this. And this is genuinely hard. Don't flinch from either one.

[00:19:19]That's not pessimism. That's not blind optimism.

[00:19:23]That's the stoic path walked through fire. Part five. How to actually do this. It's not a switch. It's a practice. Here's where I want to get practical.

[00:19:35]Because everything I've said so far could sound like inspiration. And inspiration is the thing you feel in the shower and forget by lunch.

[00:19:44]The Stoics didn't believe in inspiration. They believed in practice.

[00:19:49]Every single day, Marcus Aurelius sat down and wrote in his journal, not because he'd figured it out, because he kept forgetting.

[00:19:57]Every single morning, Epictitus would remind himself out loud, deliberately, what was in his control and what wasn't.

[00:20:05]Every single evening, Senica would review the day. Where did I give power to something outside myself? Where did I react instead of respond? Where did I confuse effort with outcome?

[00:20:17]This isn't philosophy as an idea. It's philosophy as a habit. Practice one, the evening audit. Before you sleep tonight, ask yourself three questions.

[00:20:28]First, what did I chase today that wasn't mine to control? The email you kept refreshing, the conversation you kept replaying, the approval you kept seeking.

[00:20:39]Second, where did I do the work without attachment to the result? Where were you, the archer, aiming well, releasing cleanly, not flinching at the wind?

[00:20:48]Third, what happened today that I resisted that I can now choose to receive? You don't have to have answers.

[00:20:54]The asking is the practice.

[00:20:57]Practice too, the morning frame. In the morning, before your phone, before the news, before the noise, take 60 seconds.

[00:21:06]Just 60 seconds. and set what the Stoics called a reservation.

[00:21:11]Marcus wrote, "I will meet today with ingratitude, arrogance, deceit, envy, and selfishness, for they do not know the difference between good and evil.

[00:21:20]But I know." He wasn't being dark. He was preparing. When you expect difficulty, not with dread, but with readiness. It no longer has the power to knock you off center. So set your frame.

[00:21:33]Not today will be perfect. Not today will be terrible, but today will be what it is, and I will respond as I choose.

[00:21:42]Practice three, the release. This one is the hardest, and also the most important.

[00:21:48]Find the thing you're gripping right now, the outcome you're trying to force, the person you're trying to hold, the version of the future you've decided has to happen. Feel the grip. actually notice it where it lives in your body, chest, jaw, shoulders.

[00:22:04]And then deliberately, consciously ask yourself if this doesn't happen, what is still true? You are still breathing. You have still learned. You have still tried. The person you've become in the pursuit, they don't disappear if the outcome doesn't come. And sometimes in the moment you loosen the grip. In the moment the desperation leaves your body.

[00:22:26]The thing you've been chasing turns around.

[00:22:29]Not always, but sometimes because you're finally approaching it as someone who doesn't need it. And that changes everything about how you move.

[00:22:40]The last words of Senica. In 65 AD, the emperor Nero sent a messenger to Senica with a simple instruction.

[00:22:49]You are to die today by your own hand.

[00:22:52]Senica was 70 years old. He had lived through exile, poverty, unimaginable wealth, political scheming, and four decades in one of the most dangerous courts in human history. He had written more about how to die well than almost any philosopher before or since. And now it was his turn to prove that he meant it. He called his friends together. He said goodbye. He cut his veins.

[00:23:17]And while he waited, and it took a long time because he was old and his blood ran slow, he dictated to his secretary.

[00:23:26]He kept writing right until the end not to impress anyone, not to leave a legacy.

[00:23:32]Just because it was what he did, because the practice was the point. One of his final sentences written in those last hours was this. It is not that I am brave. It is that I have nothing to fear. He had spent a lifetime releasing the things that could be taken. And by the end, nothing essential remained that could be lost. The thing you're looking for. Here's the truth that sits underneath everything in this video. The thing you're chasing, the success, the love, the peace, the validation, the life that finally feels like yours. It isn't in the destination.

[00:24:10]You know this already. You've heard it before, but you keep forgetting.

[00:24:14]We all keep forgetting because the wanting feels like progress, because the desperation feels like caring, because the grip feels like control. But the Stoics looked at that grip 2,000 years ago in a world of plagues and wars and emperors with absolute power over life and death. And they said, "Put it down.

[00:24:38]Not because it doesn't matter, because you matter more than your attachment to it. Your clarity matters more. Your character matters more. Your peace, the lamp inside you that Epictitus kept burning in a slave's chains, that matters more than any outcome you're trying to force.

[00:24:56]So, here is what I want you to carry from this video. Not a system, not a hack, not five steps to stoic success.

[00:25:05]Just this. Do the work. Do it fully, completely with everything you have. Aim the arrow. Stand firm. and then let go.

[00:25:14]Not because the outcome doesn't matter, because the only thing that can rob you of your peace is believing that it does.

[00:25:22]The archer doesn't chase the arrow.

[00:25:25]Shoot well and trust the wind to be what it is. Marcus Aurelius died in 180 AD on campaign away from Rome. He never got the quiet philosophical life he dreamed of, but he left us something. Not the empire that fell eventually, as all empires do, something that didn't fall.

[00:25:45]A journal filled with notes to himself, reminders about how to be human. And 2,000 years later, we're still reading it, still learning how to want the right things, still trying to put down the grip, still becoming.

[00:26:01]That's enough. If this video shifted something for you, even a small thing, then share it. not for me because somewhere someone you know is gripping something so tightly it's cutting off the blood flow to everything else. They need to hear this too. And if you want to go deeper, the next video on this channel will walk you through Senica's letters on time, the most underrated philosophy on why we spend our lives so poorly.

[00:26:30]It's there when you're ready. Until then, aim well and