Know Your Why

Purpose in Stoicism

Michael Tremblay
January 06, 2025

Welcome to The Stoa Letter, the newsletter on Stoic theory and practice. Today’s letter is from Stoa cofounder Michael Tremblay. It’s taken from his new Discipline course in the Stoa app.

🏛️ Theory

You might think a Roman emperor would have no problem feeling inspired to work hard. But we know from Marcus Aurelius’ journal to himself that he struggled to get out of bed. He also wanted to sleep in, and waste the day away.

But Marcus has a strategy for getting over this. Marcus wrote the following in his Meditations:

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for—the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?

Meditations, 5.1

Focus on your purpose. This was Marcus’ strategy for getting over his ambivalence to the day. Marcus wasn’t meant to lay in bed, and we weren’t meant to waste our days either.

Discipline comes from having a goal, or target you are aiming at, and then taking steps towards it. Discipline is ignoring the short term pleasure of a comfy bed, for the long term goal of being a great leader.

If you’re having difficulty motivating yourself to do something hard in the moment, you either don’t have a purpose or you’ve lost sight of it.

The first Stoic lesson for developing discipline is to establish a clear goal or purpose, one you really believe in, and to bring that goal to mind in moments of wavering commitment.

For some, this will be simple. If a clear purpose is difficult for you the Stoics have a simple answer. We can look at our roles in life to establish a purpose. We all have many roles, such as a sibling, a parent, a coworker, a neighbor, or a teammate.

Pick one of these roles and make an actionable goal of it. You want to be a better son or daughter. Achieve this by being more disciplined about contacting your parents. You want to be a better teammate. Achieve this by training hard and doing your part during the game.

We all have a purpose we can find in our roles. This purpose will give us motivation.

To paraphrase Nietzsche, those who have a why to live for can withstand almost any what.

Make sure you know your why.