Marcus Aurelius taught that you control only your thoughts and responses, not external events. Young people often feel powerless, but can find strength by focusing on what's controllable: your decisions, actions, and who you learn from. Protect your mental health, physical health, and relationships while making the best choices available to you.
Today I want to cover another topic we've talked about a few times, but it just bears repeating over and over. We'll call this what you have control over. I've been reading a lot of Stoicism books, books on Stoicism, and I finished Marcus Aurelius' Meditations a little while ago, and then I found a quote in another book that I wrote down and thought I would use for a video. It says, you have control over your mind, not not outside events. Realize this and find strength. Marcus Aurelius, from his book Meditations, which is a good book to read. It's hard and it makes you think. Um, and again, I just see you guys sometimes struggle with, you know, being young in your careers, young in school, young in everything, and things suck sometimes when you're at the bottom of the totem pole. Uh, it might suck, but like the quote says, You don't have a lot of control over many things in your life at this point, but you do have control over how you deal with them in your mind and how you process this. And not letting these outside factors just wear you down and beat you down and have, you know, can affect your health, can affect your relationships, it can affect you obviously, you know, greatly. You have to realize that you don't have any control over these. Like we've said, control the controllables in past videos. And deal with these and find your strength in yourself and understand that you can only do the best job you can. You can make the best decisions you can. You can learn from mistakes. You know, you could learn from others. I would do that. I would go out and pick the best sales guy and try to beat him, and I would take him to lunch and ask him, you know, what would you do differently if you're me? This helps you to control those controllables, but still understand that you don't, you know, there's things outside your control, and if you let those eat you up, life's going to be a hard road. So I just thought I would give you a little reminder when times are tough. If you're upset, pissed off at how things are going, realize most of that's out of your control. You can change jobs, you can change careers if you needed to, but Don't let it affect you so greatly that it impacts your health, your mental health, your relationships. Um, find strength where you can, um, look for ways to get out of that situation and change what you can and just don't let it eat you up. Hope that helps.
