The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.
~ Marcus Aurelius
Conquering the world, proving I’m the best—that’s what my life is about as a twenty-one-year-old speed skater. It’s 2001, and I’m working toward next year’s Olympic Games. I’m going to win everything over the coming year, and I write my future triumphs on the calendar. Failure doesn’t exist for me. I am the youngest and most promising speed skater in the Netherlands.
In order to cash in on my career plans, I lay it on thick while negotiating my contract with my sponsor. They love the ambition I radiate and are taken with my story. I land a big deal, obviously with the caveat that certain achievements are expected of me. Welcome to the hard and results-oriented world of professional sports.
To make good on that promise, I scrap all rest days from my training schedule. At practice I do more than is asked of me. If we have to skate ten laps, I do eleven. If we go to a training camp for three weeks, I stay an extra three days, and if I have to bike for two hours, I always make it three. Working harder means skating harder, right?
That’s what I tell myself in any case, but I’m overdoing things in my eagerness to perform. I’m personally not all that aware of it—I’ve got blinders on—until my body grinds to a halt. I get sick and tired at the weirdest moments. As soon as I recover, I jack up my training schedule to make up for lost time, which only leads me to get sick again.
I’m walking to a training camp in Inzell, Germany, when things take a turn for the worse. It’s freezing cold, dark, and I’m tired before even setting foot on the ice. I fight with the voice in my head that says, “This is pointless. Why don’t you just turn around? Why don’t you go home?” I ignore that voice, put on my skates, and after a couple of laps conclude that I’m exhausted and things can’t go on like this.
Just three months before the Olympic Games kick off in Salt Lake City, Utah, there’s something seriously wrong with me. I’m sick and seriously overtrained, a lot like burnout in normal life. In 2002, the Netherlands wins eight Olympic medals, but I’m not there. On the couch at home, I can barely muster the courage to turn on the TV. Although it pains me, I watch how the medals are divided.
So, there I am, lying like a patient in bed. Of course I can hear the commentators in the speed skating world: it’s the end of the road for Tuitert. It drives me crazy for not being too far from the truth. As a young talent, you’ve only got a few years to make your breakthrough. If by your early twenties, you still haven’t shown what you’re capable of, you can forget about a great career. My dream is falling apart because I worked too hard for it. A nightmare.
A philosophy born out of adversity
If only I’d known then about Stoicism, a school of philosophy that never would have existed without adversity. It would take years before I came into contact with the Stoics, though I could have really benefitted from them back in 2002. From works, for example, by Zeno of Citium (335–262 BC), a wealthy Phoenician merchant and the founder of Stoicism. Shipwrecked near Athens around the year 300 BC, he was forced to give up his precious cargo: he lost nearly all his possessions at one fell swoop.
THE STOIC FREELANCER
The freedom of being my own boss appealed to me: I’ve done a lot of jobs while self-employed. The more you work, the more your earn—it gave me a good feeling. But this can also turn into a trap. You need to learn how to say no to jobs that don’t reward you enough or don’t fit with what it is you want to do.
Visualizing undesirable situations (Practicing Setbacks), found at the end of this chapter, can help you with this. You can imagine a negotiation floundering, or calling off a job because it pays too little. Would the world crumble if that happened? No, probably not. A Stoic entrepreneur will know the value of their work, and will dare to say no every now and then.
He wound up on the Agora, the marketplace in ancient Athens—at the time not only the spot where business was conducted but also the beating heart of education, philosophy, and debate. His shipwreck became reason to give his life a new direction and to dedicate himself to philosophy.
Step one for Zeno was to get to know the works of famous philosophers. He studied under the philosopher Crates. Zeno would draw many ideas from Crates, who belonged to the school of Cynic philosophers—ideas such as gender equality, which back then was a radical view. But above all, Zeno was inspired by the practical philosophy of Socrates (469–399 BC). In the end, he set up his own philosophical school in the painted porch beside the Agora, the Stoa Poikile. He’d lost everything and went searching for what was possible. He strove toward, in his own words, “practicing philosophy with less baggage.” “Now that I’ve suffered shipwreck,” he said, “I’m on a good journey.” In other words: adversity is the source of Stoic philosophy.
Unlike his great inspiration Socrates, who was condemned to drinking hemlock, Zeno was honored as a highly respected citizen of Athens. He was seen as a man valuable in every way, in particular for teaching young people and so bringing out the best in others. After his death, Zeno’s students would build on his philosophy and spread Stoic ideas beyond Greece.
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Half a millenium after Zeno, in the second century AD, we meet a second important Stoic philosopher, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–180 AD). To cope with the challenges facing an emperor at that time—fighting corruption, leading his army against Germanic tribes—he trained himself in Stoicism with the help of philosophy teachers.
This philosophy aided him in state affairs, but it also taught him how to cope with setbacks: his wife and nine of his fourteen children would die during his lifetime, and if that wasn’t enough, he was betrayed by his most valued general. With that much adversity, you could use some Stoic philosophy.
Marcus Aurelius gave his own spin to Zeno’s philosophy: he told himself that everything in life, even adversity, was useful. He drew a comparison with a fire to illustrate this point. A small fire dies out at the first setback; throw something onto it, and it goes out. However, if the fire is big enough, it will devour everything you might throw onto it. In fact, it blazes even higher. What was once adversity becomes fuel.
Marcus Aurelius used the setbacks he was faced with as fuel for his own fire. In one of his texts, notes originally intended as reminders for himself rather than for others, he wrote: “This is not bad luck, but rather it is my good luck that, although this has happened to me, I can bear it without pain, neither crushed by the present nor fearful of the future.” A fine example of a Stoic mindset.
You can learn to handle adversity
Stoic philosophy emerged in a time of great hardship. Society was regularly ravaged by devastating wars, famines, and epidemics. It was therefore important to arm yourself both physically and mentally. Nowadays, certainly in the West, we’re more likely to die from overabundance than scarcity, and that brings with it different challenges. Setbacks are rarer and we mainly have to teach ourselves how to deal with excess: excess of news, information via our telephones, food—the list goes on. Should we want to live a good life, it’s wise to arm ourselves against excess instead.
Sometimes we rediscover old rituals to do so. When it comes to fasting or taking ice baths, you might think of modern influencers trying to sell us healthy lifestyles from their mansions on Ibiza, but these methods are as old as the road to Rome. Seneca (4 BC–65 AD), another Roman Stoic, used to douse himself in ice water. Though good for his body, it was mainly to train himself to deal with hardships.
When you’re lying safely in bed, you’re probably not worrying about hunger or the freezing cold, but by thinking about what you are scared of you can better deal with adversity. What if you lost your job tomorrow? What if everyone laughed at you during that crucial presentation? With it already in mind, you don’t have to be shaken up if it actually happens to you.
Too often, we expect that our lives will follow some predictable, manicured path. Everything might be cruising along nicely, exactly as planned, until—BAM!—things take a very different turn. What do you do then? What if your partner ends your relationship? If you’re fired? Or a pandemic breaks out, just to name a few?
Everyone with a bit of life experience knows these kinds of things can happen. Setbacks are part of life. On the one hand, you can have a passionate dream, the happy expectation of what you plan to achieve in life, and on the other hand the pain that arises when something fails.
You can rub salt in the wound by blaming yourself when things don’t succeed, but this only traps you in the past. You can also look to the future and learn from your mistakes. A Stoic would say it’s fine to enjoy the expectation of a dream as long as you can rid yourself of the negative feelings that arise if that dream doesn’t pan out, which is a real possibility. Guaranteed success doesn’t exist, having to deal with setbacks, however, is a fact of life.
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Copyright © 2024 by Mark Tuitert
