8 Stoic Strategies for Peak Performance

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]Eight Stoic strategies for peak performance. Always stay a student.

[00:00:04]There's a story about Marcus Aurelius late in life he's seen leaving the palace in Rome and a friend stops him and says, "Sir, where are you going?" He says, "I'm off to see Sextus the philosopher to learn that which I do not yet know." That was the idea. Here, the philosopher king, the oldest and wisest and most powerful man in Rome, still taking up his tablets and going to school. It's not enough to study your craft and your profession at the beginning. You have to remain a student of it always. There is always more to learn. There's ways to get better. You want to focus on that. Focus. You have to focus. Marcus Aurelius talks about concentrating like a Roman, doing this task in front of you like it's the last thing you are doing in your life. A Stoic practices essentialism. Says, "Hey, I do the things that I should be doing and I do those things with the best of my ability and my total focus and I tune out, I ignore, I say no to the rest." You have to seek out discomfort. You're not going to grow, you're not going to learn doing things the way that you're comfortable with, keeping them the way that they are. In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius talks about practicing holding the reins in his non-dominant hand. He wanted to make himself uncomfortable, get out of his element on purpose, because that's how you get better. Focus on process, not on outcomes. It's insane, the Stoics would say, to tie your well-being, your sense of success to things that are outside of your control. Instead, what a Stoic does is put your ass in the chair, do the work, you assemble a life, you assemble a project. Marcus Aurelius says in Meditations, action by action, doing that thing in front of you. He says, "No one can stop you from that." This is really important. Ask for help. Marcus Aurelius compares us to a soldier storming a wall. It's wonderful to ask for help. You absolutely should. Don't be afraid to ask for help. That's how you get better. That's how you grow.

[00:01:50]That's how you become the person you are capable of being. Ego is the enemy. It's impossible to learn that which you think you already know, Epictetus says. Ego focuses on all the things that are great about us. Humility focuses on where we need to get better, what we don't know.

[00:02:05]Embrace failure, the only way to grow, the only way to get better is to fail, is to try things and to learn. Elite performance is a game of failure. It's messing up, it's failing, it's setbacks more often than you succeed. And it's how determined, how committed you are, how quickly you are able to get back that separates the winners from the losers. The obstacle is the way. If you are only able to handle circumstances going your way, you're not going to go very far. Instead, what a stoic does is turn what happened to it into fuel.

[00:02:37]Marcus Aurelius said that everything that happens to us is an opportunity to practice virtue. Everything that happens to us is a chance to practice excellence, a chance to get better, a chance to try new ways of doing things, a chance to challenge ourselves. This is an occasion we can rise to meet. That's what the greats do. They use it all and so must you.