How to Think Like a Roman Emperor
If you have anger issues, this one is a great tool (h/t mindyourbusiness)
This week’s book:
Discourses and Selected Writings
Disclaimer: I’m not your Supervisor. These are my opinions after reading through these books a few times.
Epictetus was born a slave around 50 ad. His owner was Epaphroditus, a rich freedman who was once a slave of Nero. Though he was a slave Epictetus was sent to study philosophy under Musonius Rufus.
Epictetus was lame and there are some stories it was caused by his master and others that it was caused by disease.
He was a freedman when all philosophers were banished from Rome in 89 by the Emperor Domitian. He then started his school in Greece, and had many students. He did not leave any writings from his lessons, but one of his students, Flavius Arrian, took notes and wrote the Discourses.
Epictetus did not marry, had no children, and lived to be around 80-85. In retirement, he adopted a child that would have been abandoned and raised him with a woman.
He died sometime around AD 135.
He is my favorite Stoic teacher. I love his bare bones and very straight forward approach.
Following is a paragraph-by-paragraph discussion of one of his lessons. Epictetus’s text appears italicized in bold, my replies are in normal text.
Of freedom from fear Part II
When a man has once grasped all this, what is there to prevent him from living with a light heart and an obedient disposition; with a gentle spirit awaiting anything that may yet befall, and enduring that which has already befallen? “Would you have me bear poverty?” Bring it on and you shall see what poverty is when it finds a good actor to play the part.[2] “Would you have me hold office?” Bring it on. “Would you have me suffer deprivation of office?” Bring it on. “Well, and would you have me bear troubles?” Bring them on too. “Well, and exile?” Wherever I go it will be well with me, for here where I am it was well with me, not because of my location, but because of my judgements, and these I shall carry away with me; nor, indeed, can any man take these away from me, but they are the only things that are mine, and they cannot be taken away, and with the possession of them I am content, wherever I be and whatever I do.
When I am in control of my reactions, inconveniences do not bother me. If I am not, then everything seems to bother me. Both of these situations are caused by my choices. It doesn’t matter whether it is a small situation or a large one. I still need to practice being better at this and remember that I am responsible for my state of mind.
15“But it is now time to die.” Why say “die”? Make no tragic parade of the matter, but speak of it as it is: “It is now time for the material of which you are constituted to be restored to those elements from which it came.” And what is there terrible about that? What one of the things that make up the universe will be lost, what novel or unreasonable thing will have taken place? Is it for this that the tyrant inspires fear? Is it because of this that his guards seem to have long and sharp swords? Let others see to that; I have considered all this, no one has authority over me. I have been set free by God, I know His commands, no one has power any longer to make a slave of me, I have the right kind of emancipator, and the right kind of judges. “Am I not master of your body?” Very well, what is that to me? “Am I not master of your paltry property?” Very well, what is that to me? “Am I not master of exile or bonds?” Again I yield up to you all these things and my whole paltry body itself, whenever you will. Do make trial of your power, and you will find out how far it extends.
Death is a natural part of life. When it is time for a person to die, being scared will not lengthen the time left. When I cling to life at all costs I give others the ability to control me. I am not at this level and may never be. While I do not fear a natural death, being threatened with losing my life in a situation where I could make choices would be difficult to deal with as calmly as Epictetus describes here.
Going to be a short one this week because my wife and I are traveling for my work and got back to the hotel late and we have to wake up early to fly home tomorrow.
Don’t have much fear of death any longer. Hope it to be a reunion with long lost family and friends.
Every arrangement is temporary, even life. If you back up and look at it 50 years, 500 years…there is not that much difference.
Fearing the inevitable is pointless. Be the best person you can be everyday and just roll with the punches.
A few years back, I took a lateral transfer into my current role. At the time there was plenty to do – I had to clean up the technical mess, standardize policies, procedures, and documentation, fix technical issues, and get the software upgraded to current. I did all that. Everything’s ticking along like a well-oiled machine.
And now I’m fucking bored. Almost everything that comes in the door is routine, already-solved tasks. Most of the tasks involve waiting for other people, or advising on the appropriate strategy to do X. The most exciting thing to happen was that somebody turned on iptables on their box without thinking, and we had to figure out why things were suddenly not talking.
I never realized how stressful being bored can be. It’s all just routine that I literally wrote the book on handling.
I’m sure the stoic advice would be “suck it up, buttercup.”
You could always spend your free time plotting out a mutiny and take over the system from the inside.
But…why?
He said he was bored.
So, why not?
You don’t want to mutiny.
If you are successful, then you are in charge. Being in charge is never fun. The sweet spot is when you can get paid, but be a 1 man team that works on special projects.
I was a one man team for a number of years.
It Sucked. That was the time when I was burned out and work came in faster than it could be processed. It was “chase the latest emergency and ’emergency’ until a new emergency or ’emergency’ came along.”
Been there. Went from stressed from too much work and problems, too stressed from boredom.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=StIcRH_e6zQ
I manage the fax and batch processing applications, supervise a team of technical staff, write policies and procedures, develop upgrade documentation, perform upgrades, coordinate with other teams, provide technical consultation for other teams, troubleshoot technical issues, and shitpost on the internet.
Idle hands…
More time to write!!!
I can’t write on state time. Using remunerated time for an outside business is not only grounds for termination, but a potential felony in my case.
UCS:
I’ve been in that situation several times. I either picked some pointless fight just to amuse myself or I changed jobs.
It is also one of the reasons I liked consulting. If you got to the point where everything was cleaned up, you just moved on to some other frontier town looking for someone to bring law and order to it.
The fights I’d picked were always with some manager who had gotten in my way when I was fixing things up. I’d make some power grab to steal part of his empire. That would force him to commit to doing things to keep all his stuff. It was pretty obvious that he had no chance to deliver, but he had to do it to save face. Spite can only put off boredom for so long.
I just want to solve problems.
I never worked for Elon, but I think that this is bullshit.
I don’t believe any company bigger than 6 people just lets you do whatever you want. Some midwit middle manager somewhere in the company will want to have a meeting.
Jimbo – We need to talk about what you’ve been up to.
“If you could come to my office and bring all your stuff, that’d be great.”
Slumsy:
I’ve only been fired one time*. And that was after I had spent 3 months transitioning my duties because I wanted to quit. I thought they were going to extend me another month and instead fired me that day.
* Individually that is. I’ve been fired several times because the whole company has gone under.
I don’t believe any company bigger than 6 people just lets you do whatever you want.
I’ve worked at megacorp for 30+ years now. And I’ve had the pleasure of working in research for 10ish years of that time. And yes, you basically got to skip all the process that the products go through. Your job was to invent shit. Of course, you needed to have a history of getting shit done to get funding to invent shit. And if you failed to invent good shit, your funding (and you job) could be taken away at a moments notice.
I’ve also worked the committed program side of the house. Budgets, schedules, processes, documents, and all the hassles that come from working on heavily regulated products.
Inventing shit is way more fun. But that is a tiny fraction of the annual budget of the corporation and your job is only secure as long as you get results.
I do get the impression that Musk treats a much larger portion of his business as pure invention than most traditional corporations. And it has paid off for him. How much longer can he sustain that model? Who knows. Can anyone else replicate it? Probably not. Elon himself seems to be the critical factor.
I think Musk is an extraordinary grifter. But his grift is unique in that it depends only actually inventing stuff that works.
AKA – The Edison
I dunno. Grifters don’t deliver the goods. Musk does, so far.
Counter argument: Tesla, regulatory capture and tax credits.
kinnath, one of my favorite SF/F writers was a co-inventor of the Pringle chip process.
Gene Wolfe.
Correct R C.
Musk is the snake oil salesman that sells a tonic that actually makes people healthier.
Jobs vs Cook
Boring jobs are the worst.
In college I’d take temp jobs (in addition to my regular job) any time there was a break. Most of them sucked pretty hard, but there was one that still haunts me.
It was at a plastics factory and my job was to take plastic cups falling out of the plastic cup machine, stack up 25 of them and then put it into a plastic sleeve. That would be put on a conveyor belt. The hopper had a red line on it, so you didn’t even have to count to 25.
I’d fall hopelessly behind because I’d zone out so completely. The old lady on the other side would regularly come over and help me catch up. She’d cheerily tell me no to worry because she’d been doing this for 25 years and was pretty good at it.
I couldn’t go back for Day 2, much less do that for 25 years.
I’m sure it depends on the flavor of ‘boring.’ Most folk at Wally had iPods or whatever in and talked on the phone or listened to something, etc. While walking around without any background filler of my own, I always had time to think. And plenty to look at, frankly. I don’t consider either to be ‘boring,’ though I’ll admit little was actually *accomplished* in my own mind.
I wasn’t sitting around in that gig, true, but I can imagine getting bored on a factory line, doing one thing over and over again, particularly if that action required just a *little* bit of thought, aim, or something similar, so one’s thoughts couldn’t wallow in themselves.
Like me counting backwards as I’m going to sleep, it does *just* enough to occupy me enough so I don’t get lost in a rabbit hole of ‘Not Sleep.’ Needing that minuscule focus at work, 8 hours a day? That’d be boring. (What does it pay? *pen on notebook*)
Id much rather be too busy than bored. I find that the “majoring on the minors” part of law is intensely boring. Dickering over which words to use while we all know how things will end up is a massive waste of time, and makes me feel like a hamster on a wheel.
I actually much prefer the work my side business pulls in, but even that is hard to get motivated to do after 8+ hours of boredom at the day job.
“Professional development” time – surely there’s something arguably, vaguely job related that you’re interested in learning more about – a new language, a new tool, etc.
I work remote in a job with a lot of boring stretches, so this advice may not be applicable to everyone, but I spend a lot of time studying programming, reading books, and browsing certain libertarian websites. Even when I was in the office and couldn’t be blatantly doing non-work stuff, I’d get through tons of audiobooks.
(This one manager had told us we can get into this other queue of tasks if we are ever bored, so we used to keep busy with that. Then he quit and another manager took his spot. That manager emailed us one day and basically said good work, but please stay out of that queue since there’s a specific order for the tasks to be done, and another team has already been assigned to it.)
I’m sure the stoic advice would be “suck it up, buttercup.”
Invade Poland.
Does anyone know if acorn butter works as a subtitute for peanut butter in peanut sauce for chicken satay?
Try it.
I have one difficulty – I have not managed to source the key ingredient.
UCS:
There was a documentary about beer and brewing that was released quite a while ago that mentioned that the first settlers were foraging anything they could find to ferment it into beer. One of the items was acorns.
The process for getting the acorns to a usable state involved bags of acorns, that you then split open, get out the small amount of meat per nut, discard any that have worms (or worm sign) in them, then roast the meat, grind it and brew it. The few who stated they tried it said it was a lot of work for very little reward.
🤔
I suppose that’s why it’s hard to find any on the market, if the labor to yield ratio is that poor.
Mrs. Holiness makes Dotori-muk (acorn gelatin) every year. She goes out and harvests acorns at various places.
At a local community college she was busy gathering acorns when a herd of white tails showed up and were not happy to see her. She claimed that several of them were stomping their feet at her. Being a hardy Korean farm girl, she didn’t let them drive her away before she had gotten all the acorns she wanted.
I don’t like dotori-muk. It is a bland gelatin and basically tastes like whatever dip you spread on top of it.
I especially don’t like it after seeing my mother-in-law make it. During our visit last year, she made several batches and sold it to local super markets. (the markets were the ones who cut it up and packaged it). Let’s just say my MIL is not going to earn any merit badges in clean food preparation. Most of her cooking process happened outdoors and at one point involved a piece of cheese cloth that was dirtier than anything I have ever seen.
UCS:
Yes, a lot of the acorns will be worm infested. You gotta bust a lot of nuts to get stuff done.
From ded thred, coincidentally was thinking about the ATF’s dead records and digitization program. If Trump was half serious, he could order the ATF to immediately destroy all records over twenty years old. But he and his admin are gun grabbers posing as 2A supporters and won’t.
Bondi would probably sue to stop a move like that.
I can see that.
Why does the ATF maintain any sales records? Their job is to review pending transactions. Once they have blocked or approved one, delete the fucking records.
My cunning plan:
Tell the ATF to digitize their records. Once that is done, tell them to destroy the paper records, because they don’t need them any more. Then, delete the fucking database as a violation of the statutory ban on such things.
They may be doing that, but their real treasure trove is surrendered sales books. FFLs that have records under 20 years when they go out of business are required to forward those to the ATF. In practice, the FFLs just send all records in their possession, unredacted, to the ATF. The ATF has been busy digitizing those out of business records into a searchable DB.
Oh, and not just out of business in a conventional sense but also if your FFL gets revokes such as due to Biden’s zero tolerance campaign to revoke as many FFLs as they could. Just by coincidence, all those out of business records immediately go the ATF.
“FFLs that have records under 20 years when they go out of business are required to forward those to the ATF.”
Why?
But sure, once those are digitized, destroy them, etc.
RC: Hier:
(4) Where a firearms or ammunition business is discontinued and succeeded by a new licensee, the records required to be kept by this chapter shall appropriately reflect such facts and shall be delivered to the successor. Where discontinuance of the business is absolute, such records shall be delivered within thirty days after the business discontinuance to the Attorney General. However, where State law or local ordinance requires the delivery of records to other responsible authority, the Attorney General may arrange for the delivery of such records to such other responsible authority.
That’s why.
and a quick add on before I need to drop off:
The ATF has regulations implementing that Federal law I linked. I don’t have time to find them, but they should be out there. 27 CFR I think?
I heard Tundra sometimes lurks here on Fridays. Let’s throw out some Hayek bait(MNSFW) and see if he shows up.
If he doesn’t, the rest of you can enjoy some Prime Salma
She doesn’t look like she works on electromagnetic weapons.
Don’t judge a book by its enormous rack.
Correct
Speaking of companies and inventions…
An interesting read about how dynamic companies stop being dynamic. Uses Amazon and Bezos handing over the reins as an example.
You mean the answer isn’t to put an AI in it and make it gay?
I knew we shouldn’t have replaced all our Compaq servers with Fujpaq servers!
We have a brand new glib meme going here.
Uffda! What happened there?
Somehow my bon mot about Compaq and Fuji merging was gone. That is how I got Fujpaq.
Fujitsu?
https://youtu.be/w_IExJhgt9o
Good read.
I’d love to know if there are any counter-examples, where the founder handed off to someone else with the same founder’s mindset. Maybe the Nadella mention counts.
That’s a pretty good sub. Subscribed.
From one of his other articles:
I retired as soon as I could. The handwriting was on the wall. It has certainly grown after I left but seems to have lost the dynamism that I enjoyed.
A few of the stores have unionized and the President has other interests. (At one time she worked for me, she was no ball of energy then but she was the owner’s daughter.)
The CEO is left with not a lot of corporate support.
Jimbo-
My dad was a management consultant, and he used to talk about how creating a business requires a different skill set from running a business over the long haul. He saw it a lot.
“Wherever I go it will be well with me, for here where I am it was well with me, not because of my location, but because of my judgements, and these I shall carry away with me…”
Eek, with this part. I’m harshly, often (I tell myself) unnecessarily, critical of myself. I’m mostly ‘content’ with Big Judgements and actions I’ve made in my life, including at present, but I will pick nits no one else would think of noticing. (So I tell myself, afterwards.) I get rather upset with myself. Just now, I was muttering some nastiness to myself and realized the door was ajar(!) and I should shut it to make sure no one overheard. Naturally, I remembered this about midway through my deprecating rant, but it’s good I was quiet.
That excerpt is absolutely correct, but it requires internal confidence, a barometric metric which I do not at all think is ‘inherent.’ (Those who think it is in themselves run the risk of being assholes.) On the positive end of that, making more good decisions and actions tends to further fill that vat. People are better when that needle rises, until it raises past a person’s *actual* abilities and clashes with the results of their actions.
False confidence is worrisome, but it’s far better than a vacuum in daily life.
Apparently that Irish guy who overstayed his tourist visa, got that visa and got on the plane to the US right before his trial on drug dealing charges.
TOS has not updated their article.
Nor should you expect it or much of MSM to do so.
And wasn’t he presented in the media as a ‘small business owner?’
Would you prefer independent contractor?
These days identifying anyone as some flavor of European doesnt mean much, in fact it is used quite a bit deceptively.
“He is Irish.”
“Oh yeah? What is his name?”
“Mustafa Al Najjar”