This is a section from my book Philosophy for Business Leaders: Asking Questions, Navigating Uncertainty, and the Quest for Meaning where I share how adopting a Stoic mindset helped me navigate uncertainty and adversity. Check it out! You can also order a copy of the book at the following link. Thank you.
I’ve already shared my story in the introduction to this book, so I won’t go over it in detail again. I’m more interested in showing how adopting a Stoic mindset, which is certainly not an easy task, helped me navigate professional and personal adversity and uncertainty.
I will focus on two interrelated aspects: career and economic. Over seven years in academia, I gradually experienced mounting feelings of frustration, anger, stress, and anxiety due to the precariousness of my job situation.
During these seven years, I believed I had earned the right to be offered a permanent role at any of the universities where I was teaching in Lebanon. After all, I possessed all the necessary prerequisites, including a PhD, teaching experience, and some publications.
However, this never materialized into a full-time position. As the years went by, I became more resentful because, in my mind, not securing a steady job was a terrible thing. I was judging external events over which I had no control as bad things happening to me.
It’s not that I wasn’t trying to do anything about it; I anxiously yet eagerly attempted to find an industry job without any success. I was viewing my situation through a negative lens, lacking mental clarity, clouded by an array of beliefs that were preventing me from taking the proper actions to change my situation. I was stuck in a vicious circle.
While I was earning good money from two part-time gigs and gaining a great deal of experience in dealing with uncertainty by increasing my income streams, I nevertheless chose to focus on what I did not have because I thought it was bad not to have a permanent position.
During that time, I even managed to save some money on the side. Not much, just enough to sustain me for six months if I had lost my job. Yet, I was stressed and depressed. I even began to resent philosophy and was not investing in myself, even though I could have acquired new skills or established contact with a different network to transition from academia.
When I started teaching the Stoics, whom I hadn’t paid much attention to before, my perspective slowly began to change. This transformation commenced around 2018. Thankfully, during this time between 2018 and 2020, I engaged in serious introspection and took the time to focus on where I was and what I needed to do to enhance my skills to find a new path. Whereas I once felt a sense of entitlement, I understood that there was little I could do about the decisions other people made, and all I could control were my own actions. I decided to embark on a journey, a quest, hence my Twitter handle @decafquest. Long story short, by 2020, I had worked through my anger and frustration and was psychologically closer to a Stoic mindset than ever before.
Why is this an important detail? During the last couple of months of 2019 and the first few months of 2020, Lebanon experienced a severe economic crisis. During this period, I lost around 60% of my savings, and my salary devalued significantly. It went from the equivalent of $4,000 USD a month (this amount always fluctuated depending on the number of courses I was teaching each semester) to around $1,000 USD a month; now it would be worth much less. On top of all that, in March 2020 the entire world shut down, and we found ourselves in what seemed like a never-ending lockdown.
In absolute terms, this situation was infinitely worse than not getting a full-time position as a philosophy professor. Despite that, thanks to two years of Stoic habituation, I had cultivated a different mindset, one that enabled me to weather this storm.
Instead of lamenting the situation I found myself in, I accepted that there was little I could do to regain my savings and focused on ways to increase my income streams. Without the burden of unnecessary emotions, I found myself exploring new avenues and opportunities because I was not constrained by any defined set of beliefs. I remained open to new possibilities and began to see opportunities where I wouldn’t have noticed any before.
That was when I decided to post a Tweet (now X) in which I announced my intention to offer an Existentialism in Literature course starting in June 2020. Unexpectedly, many people expressed their interest and signed up.
Through the subsequent help and endorsement of numerous individuals on social media, for whom I will always be thankful, including Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Daniel Vassallo, and Dan Azzi, I managed to reach a wider audience, which resulted in an increase in the number of sign-ups in the subsequent months. I could delve into this experience further, but I have already written about it elsewhere.
The point here is to contrast my situation pre and post-pandemic and economic crises in Lebanon. It was thanks to the Stoic mindset I had slowly cultivated that I managed to stay afloat during a very rough period I lived through. I don’t even want to imagine how bad my reaction would have been, how angry and frustrated I would have become if I had not broken free from the vicious circle of stress in which I was trapped.
My lesson has been that Stoicism is not about eliminating life’s uncertainties but equipping ourselves with the mental and emotional tools to address them as effectively as possible.
For me, Stoicism revolves around maintaining control over our judgments and beliefs. It’s about habituating and training ourselves to simulate worst-case scenarios not to dwell on how dire things could become, but to open up a world of possibilities and opportunities that can minimize the impact of uncertainty and adversity.
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