The Things We Control

Why Stoicism is the ultimate nonbillable investment

I started The Quiet (Nonbillable) Hour for two basic reasons. First, I was tired of seeing colleagues in the legal profession struggle mightily with mental demons—and even die too soon—in a culture that promotes keeping all of that secret (or at least at the whisper level). Second, I realized that it was a way to do something I greatly enjoyed: recommend and talk about books that had helped me.

The reaction has been humbling. But as I reflect on the beginning of a new year, it is time to pause and reflect more broadly on the lessons from all the discussions, articles, podcasts, and books that have enriched my life. And if there’s a single common thread in The Quiet (Nonbillable) Hour, it is the role of Stoicism as a unifying philosophy that helps us become better professionals and more grounded people. So that’s where we are going.

Let's start with a few caveats.

1. I am not an expert in Stoicism (much less a philosophy scholar). I’m an eager student who looks forward to continuing my education, yet makes mistakes along the way. If I misstate anything, my apologies in advance.

2. I strongly believe, with people like Massimo Pigliucci and Ryan Holiday, that Stoicism is not a life hack (or, as Holiday is fond of saying, not a guide to becoming a better sociopath). It is a commitment to a way of life, and its true benefit comes from embracing it fully rather than treating it like a self-help to-do list.

3. I hope that you treat this post not as a source for answers but as an invitation to take a deeper dive. I include a reading list and some recommendations at the end of the post.

Stoicism for lawyers

What is Stoicism?

Stoicism is a Greek-Roman philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium more than a thousand years ago. It started with a professional disaster after Zeno, a merchant, was shipwrecked near Athens. After being exposed to Greek philosophy in Athens, he later started teaching in the Stoa Poikile (the “Painted Porch”), from which the Stoic school gets its name. Stoicism eventually reached Rome, where it quickly spread.¹ Eventually, Roman thinkers and philosophers, including Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Musonius Rufus, adapted and transmitted Stoic teachings to a wider Roman audience. Marcus Aurelius and Seneca left us some of their writings (even though they did not intend to). Epictetus and Musonius Rufus reach us through students who transcribed some of their lessons.

The Core of Stoicism

To borrow from Massimo Pigliucci in How to Be a Stoic, Stoicism has three basic principles:

1. We should pursue virtue as the chief good in life.

2. We should apply reason to achieve a better society.

3. We should apply the dichotomy of control: recognize that some things are within our control and others are not.

The four cardinal virtues that Stoics pursue are wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance. Wisdom is about making decisions that improve our lives. Courage is about how we act in the face of challenging circumstances. Temperance is about controlling our desires and actions. Justice is about treating others with dignity.

A key element in cultivating these virtues is distinguishing between what we control and what we do not (the dichotomy of control)—and accepting that there is not much we can—or should—do about the latter. Equally important is living in accordance with our nature, i.e., as rational beings. It means accepting obstacles as part of the natural order, striving to see reality objectively and rationally, and acting in accordance with ethics and reason. It means realizing that our impressions, or judgments, are things our minds make up that often do not accurately reflect reality. It also means recognizing that the universe, our world, is a cosmos governed by a rational order.

What Can Lawyers and Other Professionals Learn from Stoicism?

1. Focus on What You Control

Epictetus said it plainly: “Some things are up to us and some are not up to us."² What is within our control? Our opinions, impulses, and desires. What is not within our control? What the Stoics call the externals—things outside ourselves and, hence, outside our power.

The dichotomy of control does not mean resignation or withdrawal. It does, however, mean being careful and selective about what we spend our time on. Our time and energy are not infinite. Spending it worrying about our regrets or past actions is a waste. Epictetus explains it in the context of planning a sea voyage.³ We don’t control the approaching storm. Worrying about it or thinking about all the ways it could destroy the boat is a waste of time—and a classic example of worrying about externals. But we control our choices—who will serve as captain, who will join the crew, when the ship will depart, how we maintain the boat, and what precautions we take. So we focus on that, not on the past we cannot change or the future angst over potential events we cannot control.

The dichotomy of control can be incredibly valuable in our professional lives. As attorneys, we control our preparation—preparing for a meeting or a court hearing, developing a good strategy, conducting due diligence, and anticipating counterarguments. We control our judgment—deciding where we draw ethical lines, what strategy we recommend to clients, and whether we advise clients to settle. We control our behavior—choosing to be civil to opposing counsel, exhibiting candor to the court, not overreacting emotionally, resisting panic—all reactions and behaviors that are up to us.

Conversely, what are the externals? The ultimate outcome of the case. How others will judge our work. The behavior of opposing counsel. The client’s reaction. Whether we are “ranked” or honored by industry groups and the trade press. Stoicism does not teach us to ignore these aspects of our lives; it teaches us that, in a world of finite time, it is a colossal waste to spend energy worrying about them at the expense of the things that are under our control.

Understanding and applying the dichotomy of control has been a game-changer in my personal and professional life. As lawyers, we are prone to agonizing over too many things beyond our control. And we like to compound the problem by creating layers of unfounded speculation. I cannot count how many times I’ve had conversations with associates over why they did not reach out to a partner to seek more work or get a clarification, only to see the conversation quicky move not merely to how the associate feared not getting a response, but to agonizing speculation about why they would not get answer to the email they have not sent anchored on the worst possible scenario (e.g., the partner does not like me, the partner has figured out I’m a hack, they have not responded because they are going to fire me). And I remember when—not that long ago—I was guilty of a similar line of reasoning. The angst is unnecessary; we can avoid it entirely by distinguishing between what we can control and what we cannot.

2. Composure and Self-Control

A natural corollary of the dichotomy of control is that while we do not control events, we do control our judgments about—and our reactions to—events. Marcus Aurelius wrote that external things were not the problem, but rather “your assessment of them,” which we control.⁴ Epictetus made the same point: “What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgments about the things.”⁵

Realizing that we control our judgments and reactions to events means recognizing that we have the power to determine whether it is worth our time to respond and opine. One of my favorite quotes on this topic comes from Marcus Aurelius in Meditations VI-52. Older translations put it in the context of opinions: “It is in our power to have no opinion about a thing, and not to be disturbed in our soul.” The more modern Hays translation drives the point home even more clearly: “You don’t have to turn this into something. It doesn’t have to upset you.”⁶ In other words, we can have opinions deep down, but we do not always have to express them. We don’t need to be enraged and turn into keyboard warriors over everything. We don’t need to argue with everyone who says something idiotic. We will have to deal with people who are “meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly,” but we do not need to allow them to implicate us in their “ugliness.”⁷ There isn’t enough time in the day for that. It’s not necessary.

This is a complicated and challenging task, particularly for lawyers. After all, our job is to make arguments, to have opinions on the issues before us, to turn things into “something.” But the maxim rings true far more than we may care to admit. As a young attorney, I used to anxiously wait for the opposition or response from opposing counsel, devour it, and come up with an outline that addressed every single thing in the document that was wrong or otherwise upset me. I could turn what should have been a short response into a mammoth pile of paper, and I would take personally every single misrepresentation, misleading argument, and snide response. It wasn’t necessary to do so, of course. But even worse, I was allowing the really good and important points in my response to be obfuscated by unimportant nonsense. The lesson is the same: you don’t need to turn everything into something. You don’t need to win every little argument to deliver a favorable outcome for a client. Some things that are worth our time and a good fight; learning to distinguish between them is a sign of wisdom and inner peace.

3. Not Everything Is an Insult

An especially important corollary to this principle relates to how we deal with perceived insults and offenses. Epictetus teaches us that what is insulting is not what another person says or does, but the judgment we make about them. That is why he urges us to “drop this readiness to hate and take offense”⁸ and take power away from the person insulting us:

If someone responds to insult like a rock, what has the abuser gained with his invective? If, however, he has his victim’s weakness to exploit, then his efforts are worth his while.⁹

Marcus Aurelius follows the same line, insisting that an insult or offense “doesn’t hurt me unless I interpret its happening as harmful to me,” which “I can choose not to.”¹⁰

This is an invaluable Stoic principle for attorneys, who are often tortured by both real (albeit often exaggerated) insults and imagined offenses and transgressions, particularly from the other side. If we pause to assess the statement or action objectively before rushing to conclude it is insulting, we are more likely to find no insult. Or we may conclude that the supposed insult is simply not worth it, that we do not have to make it into something. Again, there is no insult if we refuse to feel insulted. And responding “like a rock” (e.g., not yelling or hurling insults back) to the insult actually disarms the person who intended to insult us.

When I pause and reflect in the face of perceived (or real) insults, I often remind myself of a piece of advice I got from the then-managing partner of the first law firm I worked in DC: “don’t be the asshole.” I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was, in a way, quite Stoic. It’s a blunt modern translation of a sophisticated ancient truth: “The best revenge is not to be like that.”¹¹

4. Take Control of Your Time

Time is our most valuable commodity. Seneca was on point thousands of years ago: “It is not that we have a brief length of time to live, but that we squander a great deal of that time.” Marcus Aurelius has good advice on how to deal with this: “Ask yourself at every moment, ‘Is this necessary?’”¹²

We would have more tranquility—more inner peace and groundedness—if we protect more of our time by applying this key filter. And yet we seldom do that before giving away our time. We give it away when we endlessly scroll on our mobile phones. When we let others control too much of our calendar. When we waste our mornings. When, at work, we spend most of our time in what Cal Newport calls the appearance of productivity—responding to emails, being in the office for face-time, focusing on work about work instead of actual work.¹³

We are often our own worst enemies when it comes to our calendars. We've become so convinced that everything is urgent that we don’t protect our time and instinctively say yes to every Outlook invite. But not everything is urgent. Not every call needs to happen at the exact time it was originally proposed.

Stoicism urges us to break that cycle. Start with your morning. One of my favorite parts of Meditations is when Marcus Aurelius—the Emperor of Rome—tells himself to get out of bed and reminds himself that he was not created “to muddle under the blankets and stay warm.”¹⁴ So take a note from Marcus Aurelius. Grab Arthur Brooks’s book, From Strength to Strength, and develop a morning routine that fulfills you and prepares you for the day. Then block the time in your calendar for your morning routine. Use the time to meditate, practice yoga, or exercise. Use it to read the Stoics or other philosophies. Use it to attend church or engage in spiritual reading and prayer. It doesn’t matter as long as you take control of your time to do the things you want, which helps you grow.

5. Impermanence Defines Life

Stoicism teaches us that life and the universe are in constant motion, that most things are ephemeral. Marcus Aurelius describes time as “a river, a violent current of events, glimpsed once and already carried past us, and another follows and is gone.”¹⁵ Everything is in flux.

The message is not pessimistic (or, at least, it should not be interpreted as such). “There is nothing bad in undergoing change—or good in emerging from it,” Marcus Aurelius tells us.¹⁶ We accept impermanence to be better prepared for surprises and shocks to the system. As Marcus Aurelius reminds us, we don’t truly "lose" things; we simply return them to the universe. It was a loan, not ownership.

For professionals—especially attorneys—this is a difficult pill to swallow. We spend years climbing a steady ladder of progression, and we instinctively crave the stability that a title or a partnership is supposed to provide. Stoicism offers three warnings to help us navigate the reality of a changing world:

• Our identity is not our title. Just as we don’t fully control outcomes, we don’t fully control our titles and positions. A prestigious title or recognition can be taken away in an instant by firm politics, a market downturn, or failing health. When we let our identities be defined by our victories and titles, the shock to the system can be brutal. If we understood that these things were ephemeral and instead focused on defining ourselves as parents, as friends, and as productive members of a community, the shock would be easier to handle.

• Our identity does not depend on rankings and awards. Here, the dichotomy of control is helpful as well. The part of our reputation built on our ethics and work standards is within our control. But the perception of others and the endless rankings and awards that saturate our profession are inherently impermanent and most definitely outside our control. This is an area where I struggled earlier in my career. If there is a danger in rankings and awards becoming your identity, there is also the danger of interpreting the lack of them as a sign of failure. Recognizing that this aspect of my reputation is ephemeral and focusing instead on what I can control (my ethics, my work, my commitment) brought much clarity and inner peace to my life.

• Impermanence Makes Us Look Inside. Marcus Aurelius again is on point: “Not to live as if you had endless years ahead of you. Death overshadows you. While you’re alive and able—be good.”¹⁷ The point is simple: be good, be virtuous. If we were forced to retire or make a major career change tomorrow, would we be satisfied with what we have done? When the titles and positions disappear, our satisfaction with what we did will remain. That we control—and no one can take away.

6. The Obstacle Is the Way

Although popularized in modern times by Ryan Holiday, the concept of the obstacle being the way is embedded in Stoicism. Life will throw us curveballs. And we know we have no control over externals. But we can turn those curveballs into something. Marcus Aurelius explains it clearly:

The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.¹⁸

We will face challenges, obstacles, and frustration. Adverse rulings, difficult clients, losing clients, internal politics, professional setbacks, and the feeling of getting stalled are obstacles we are likely to face at some point. Stoicism teaches us that these are the moments when we are called to exercise wisdom, virtue, courage, and justice. I left this for last because overcoming obstacles and turning them into learning experiences requires incorporating many of the principles of Stoicism we discussed earlier: the dichotomy of control, the impermanence of life, composure and self-control. That is a point Ryan Holiday expands on in his writings: if we can perceive the obstacles clearly and objectively, if we distinguish what we control from what we do not, and if we are ready to act, we can use obstacles and challenges to grow, to learn, to be virtuous.

Ultimately, Stoicism isn't about memorizing ancient Greek names or becoming indifferent to the world. It is a philosophy that requires reading, reflection, and application. If we apply it, it can be an invaluable practical tool for the modern lawyer—a way to find a bit of steady ground in a profession that often feels like a constant landslide of deadlines and demands. The legal profession is chock-full of externals beyond our control. But we can control how we prepare, how we react, and how we protect our own peace of mind. By taking this "quiet hour" to focus on what actually belongs to us, we stop being victims of our circumstances and start becoming masters of our actions, our judgments, and our time.

Postscript

As I explained above, I’m a big fan of Cal Newport’s “ladder of complexity” approach to learning. Here’s a good approach to learning about Stoicism.

Intro to Stoicism

• How to Be a Stoic, by Massimo Pigliucci

• How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius, by Donald J. Robertson

• The Obstacle Is the Way, by Ryan Holiday

• The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher's Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient, by William B. Irvine

• The Daily Stoic, by Ryan Holiday

Basics

• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

• Letters of a Stoic by Seneca

• The Enchiridion by Epictetus

• Discourses by Epictetus

Next Tier

• Essays and Dialogues, by Seneca

• Lectures and Sayings by Musonius Rufus

• The Inner Citadel, by Pierre Hadot

1. See Robertson, Donald, Detailed Review: How to Be a Stoic by Massimo Pigliucci, available at https://donaldrobertson.name/2018/07/28/detailed-review-how-to-be-a-stoic-by-massimo-pigliucci.

2. Epictetus, The Enchiridion ¶ 1.

3. Epictetus, Discourses, 2.5.9.

4. Aurelius, Marcus, Meditations, VIII.47 (Gregory Hays trans., Modern Library ed., 2025).

5. Epictetus, The Enchiridion ¶ 5.

6. Meditations, supra, at VI.52

7. Meditations, supra, at II.1.

8. Discourses, supra, at I.18.9.

9. Discourses, supra, at I.25.29.

10. Meditations, supra, at VII.14.

11. Id. at VI.6.

12. Id. at IV.24.

13. For more on this, see my write-up on Cal Newport’s book, Slow Productivity.

14. Meditations, supra, at V.1.

15. Id. at IV.43.

16. Id. at IV.42.

17. Id. at IV.17.

18. Id. at V.20.