Before You Begin

This volume is a book by a very old teacher, written down by a student more than nineteen hundred years ago. The teacher's name was Epictetus. He spent part of his life as a slave and the rest as a free man. The book you are about to read came out of that life.

The Handbook, which takes up Part I, has fifty-two short chapters. Some are a single sentence. None is more than two pages. It was meant to be carried. It was meant to be read in small pieces and practiced in between.

Before you step into it, here are the five big ideas the book turns on. If you keep these in your head as you read, the fifty-two chapters will start to fit together like the pieces of one map.

First, the dichotomy of control. That is a big phrase for a simple idea. Some things are up to you and some are not. Your body, your money, your reputation, other people's opinions of you, whether your team wins, whether you get the job, whether someone you love stays or dies, all of these are not up to you. What is up to you is what you do with your mind. How you think about things. What you choose. Who you become. Epictetus says most human misery comes from confusing these two lists. We chase what we cannot control and neglect what we can. He spent his life pointing people back to the right list.

Second, role-playing in life. This is the idea that you did not cast yourself in the life you are living. You did not choose your family, your country, your body, the century you were born into, or the situations you keep finding yourself in. Those are the role you were given. What is yours is how you play the role. Epictetus uses the image of an actor in a play. You did not write the lines and you did not pick the part. Your job is to play the part well. When this idea sinks in, a lot of old arguments with the world go quiet.

Third, response over reaction. Between something happening to you and you feeling a certain way about it, there is a small gap. In that gap is a judgment. A story you tell yourself about what the event means. Epictetus says people are not upset by things themselves. They are upset by the judgments they form about those things. That may sound too simple. It is not. If you can learn to catch the judgment before it hardens, you can learn to meet the same events other people meet without being pulled around by them.

Fourth, character as your only true possession. Everything outside of you can be taken. Money can be lost. Bodies age and break. Friends move away. Even the people we love most can die. Character, though, the kind of person you actually are on the inside, cannot be taken from you by anyone else. Epictetus was once chained as a slave. He said, and he meant, that his owner could chain his leg, not his will. He wants you to see that the one part of you no one can touch is also the one part that matters most.

Fifth, progress over performance. This book does not ask you to become perfect. It does not even ask you to be a student of philosophy. It asks you to make progress. Progress has a particular look to it, in Epictetus's world. The person making progress is quieter than the person who has just read a new book and wants to tell you about it. The person making progress is not trying to impress anyone. The person making progress blames no one, praises no one, boasts of nothing, and, when he fails, looks at himself first. You will see him, late in the book, drawn clearly in Chapter 48. Picture him now and hold him in mind as you read.

Those are the five. Keep them close as you go.

One more thing before you start. You may not agree with everything Epictetus says. You may want to argue. Good. He would have wanted you to. A student of his named Arrian took down these lectures because he saw how alive the conversation was when Epictetus taught. Reading the book is meant to feel like being in that room. Write in the margins. Close the book and think. Come back to it. That is how this kind of reading works.

The book is small. The ideas in it are not. Begin.

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