Mystery Gift Box #005 | The Discipline of Will

Hey friends,

It’s important to be able to verbalise your emotions in as much detail as you can but sometimes our limited vocabulary (in emotions) means that we just generalise all our emotions to main ones like happy, sad, angry, and etc.

It’s beneficial to be able to use a more fine-granular emotion vocabulary and properly distinguish between emotions. For example, the difference between shame and guilt.

I finished the Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience by Brene Brown this week and it covers the difference between all kinds of emotions in different life and human experiences.

I will share more in future newsletter but for this week, I will share the last stoic discipline; the discipline of will.

The stoic work can be organised into three disciplines:

1. The Discipline of Perception (how we perceive the world around us)

2. The Discipline of Action (the decisions and actions we take)

3. The Discipline of Will (how we deal with things outside of our control, have clear judgements, and a true understanding of our role in the world)

All three disciplines focus on things that are within our control; by controlling our perceptions, we get mental clarity and strength; by controlling our action, we are effective; and by controlling our will, we are ready to deal with anything that comes from the external world.

The Discipline of Will

September to December are the months for the Discipline of Will. Here are 4 of my favourite meditations; one from each month:

19th September - Flexibility of the Will (Fortitude and Resilience)

There are two sides to everything…

Doesn’t matter how good something is, there’s a cost.. whether you know it or not.

You want to stand out… prepare to feel isolated and misunderstood.

You want to make lots of money in finance… prepare to give up personal time in exchange.

You want to move fast… prepare to “sacrifice” the short-term.

It’s a great asset to have persistency (iron will).

But if you have a lot of it, it can turn into a liability… a liability to your ability to be adaptive.

You want to be persistent but when new information comes in, you need to NOT let your persistency hold you back from your ability to adapt.

The goal is not to have an iron will… but an adaptive will of flexibility and strength.

This is why I don’t pre-commit to year-long projects anymore since 2020…

It doesn’t mean that I won’t have projects that last longer than a year but right now, all my projects (besides two projects) are subject to review every quarter; to decide if I should continue or not.

25th October - Two Tasks (Virtue and Kindness)

For me… to be a good person… amongst many things, it is to treat others how I would like to be treated.

But how I would like to be treated is link to my inner self-love…

And so… to treat others with kindness, you must first be kind to yourself; to love others, you must first love yourself.

If you find yourself highly critical of others, than you are most likely to be highly critical of yourself too…

How you treat yourself is how you treat others…

The second task is to pursue the occupation that you love… simply put, it’s to do what you love.

If I am competing against an opponent, I am never threaten by how hard they work but by the source of their hard work… what percentage of their hard work comes from discipline and love?

If it’s discipline dominant, the hard work is short-term. If it’s love dominant, the hard work persists. Now the question is who loves it more?

For me, your obsession level is define by how much you love it.

11th November - It’s Not The Thing, It’s What We Make Of It (Acceptance / Amor Fati)

Coming back to the discipline of perception.

Things happen in life… but whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, that’s up to us to decide.

I got bullied a lot when I was a kid… it’s a “bad” thing… but without knowing, that experience has helped me to foster a very strong internal positivity to counter all the external negativity that I was experiencing… the external negativity was temporary but the internal positivity stays with me… and it’s the reason why I have the inner power in me to have more adversity quotient than others… so looking back, it’s a “good” thing 🤔

The event didn’t change… but what I made of it did.

6th December - The Sword Dangles Over You (Meditation on Mortality)

Imagine there’s a sword hanging over your head and you don’t know when it will drop and cut your head off…

That’s how close death is to us… every second of the day.

Do you feel fear?

or do you feel grateful to be alive still?

Echoing the previous section, it’s all up to you what you make of the fact that death is so close to us all the time :)

Another Good Reading Music

Have interesting gems you want to share with me and others? Share it by replying to this email and I will include it in the next gift box :)

With love,

Ryan O. 🎮

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