The Stoic Entrepreneur: Ancient Wisdom for your Entrepreneurial Journey | Adam Alpert | TEDxBryantU

In 2016, I was held up at gunpoint. It was a home invasion. I walked to my room, and there they were. No time to think. I step forward to stop them. And as I do, they pull out a gun on me. I step back, back against the wall. Nowhere to go. I was powerless. They are one muscle twitch away, one neuron firing from that gun going off. Breathe. It was the only thing I could do. Try to stay calm. So many thoughts rushing through my head, and I can still remember the moment so clearly. All I can say is please. Their gun stays trained on me. Laser pointer on my chest as they step back. Back through the window through which they came. The window I had left open. Never thinking that something like this would happen to me. And then they were gone. Along with a backpack full of my things. Why me? I asked myself that night and many after. Losing a lot of sleep, afraid it might happen again. Well, it could happen to anybody. And on that night, it just so happened to be me. Such is life. Lucky to be alive, I re-evaluated. I re-evaluated my priorities, my direction, my purpose. What if tomorrow it happened again and it went differently? Would my life have been one that I was proud of? Life couldn't wait. One of my college friends and I made the decision that after graduating, we would pursue it. It. That thing we had always wanted to do someday, but someday was no longer guaranteed. Now or never. So in 2017, that's exactly what we did. We got to work building a college Craigslist. It was going to be huge, we told ourselves. Convinced we'd have immediate traction, raise a million dollars and make the next killer app. Well, it didn't take off. In our first year, we did $58 in transaction volume. Most people would have been embarrassed by it. I think we were a little bit too. But we decided to stick with it. Even as those around us didn't. We learned how to listen more, sell less, how to edit our products, our market, even reassess our vision. And in time, we evolved it into a platform where college students could freelance. Since then, we've helped students earn more than a million dollars. Most people, myself included, would have thought that as time went along, things would get easier. More funding, more teammates, more traction, more validation. But the reality is, it's only gotten harder. I think a better representation of our journey is this. From that initial rush of our idea, to our failed launch, to getting our first customer and our first dollar, to getting rejected again and again and again from VCs and angels and investors. To getting so many users signed up in a week that our entire app crashed to ultimately making it to where we are today. The reality has been that as time has gone on, the highs have gotten higher and the lows have gotten lower. Increasing not only in amplitude, but also in frequency. Learning how to deal with this emotional up and down has been one of the most important lessons I have learned in life. And maybe even the thing that kept me alive that night in 2016. To become better at coping, I have become a student of Stoicism. An ancient philosophy for how to live life that emerged in 300 BC, but is as relevant today as it was then. One of the most foundational concepts you learn in Stoicism is known as the dichotomy of control. Big word. Put simply, it's the idea that there are things that are inside of our control and there are things that are not. What other people do, what they think of you, even your emotions, these are things that we cannot change. They're outside of our control and therefore we should not spend time and energy chasing them. Rather, we should always focus on the few things that are inside of our control, such as how we choose to respond to life. One of the best illustrations of this is a story about Abraham Lincoln, the president during the bloodiest war in American history. After the Battle of Gettysburg, the Confederate forces were in full-on retreat, but the retreat was cut off by a bridge that had been washed out by an overflowing river. The Union army could have encircled them and ended the war that day, but the Union general in charge of those troops hesitated, giving the Confederates enough time to build a bridge and retreat. When Lincoln found out, he was furious. How many more weeks, more months, more years would this war drag on? He took out a piece of paper and penned an angry, upset, furious note to that general, scolding him, relieving him of his command. He took that letter, put it in an envelope, sealed it in wax, and he put it in his drawer, where it was discovered years later after his death. You see, Lincoln never sent that letter. Impulses, emotions, distractions all pop into our heads and our hearts, and we cannot stop them. We are all human after all. But we all have some amount of veto power when it comes to translating a thought or emotion into action. We all have an opportunity to respond to life with courage, with patience, with justice, and with wisdom, the four core Stoic virtues. Having the courage to say and do what's right. No matter how difficult the circumstance. Having patience and self-control in all spheres of life. Learning how to breathe, how to think before we react. Justice. Having justice and empathy in considering how our actions will affect others. And having the wisdom to know right from wrong in challenging, uncertain circumstances. Every difficult situation we face, every obstacle, every challenge is an opportunity to exercise one of these four values. Every night I rate myself on a scale of one to five on how well I exhibited those values each day. And I'm far from perfect. But I use this as an opportunity to reflect on how I might improve. Stoicism has provided me an incredibly pragmatic framework for how to deal with life's challenges. Now, before I end today, I want to leave you with a couple key takeaways. Number one, don't focus on the things that are outside your control and do not let them get the best of you. If you recall that chart I showed you before, I could not control those ups and downs. They happen to all of us. They are unpredictable. But we could all focus on the few things that are inside of our control and what we do about it. Respond. Don't react on your initial emotion. Think. Pause. Be patient. Think about how we can be courageous, patient, just, and wise in what we do when life happens to us. It's never the thing itself that upsets us, but rather our judgment that makes us upset. Be thoughtful of this next time you feel your emotions getting the best of you. And embrace every challenge, every obstacle, every problem as an opportunity to be the best version of yourself that you can be. If any of these values resonate with you as they have for me as I've navigated the difficult journey of being entrepreneur, I encourage you to look to stoicism as a potential source of ancient wisdom to discover what might be waiting for you today.