6 Things Stoicism Teaches You To IGNORE.

The young man arrived in Nicopolis on a windy afternoon.

He came from a wealthy city in Asia, the son of an important family, with fine clothes, a fine education, and a temper everyone knew about.

One word out of place was enough to set him off.

His father had sent him there with one blunt sentence, either you learn to govern yourself or nothing you inherit will ever do you any good.

And his father was right.

That temper had already cost him dearly.

Friends who stopped speaking to him over an argument he couldn't let go of.

A teacher of rhetoric who threw him out of class for shouting back.

Whole nights without sleep replaying insults nobody else remembered.

Everyone saw a brilliant young man in him.

but a brilliant young man anyone could control, with two well-chosen words.

On the ship, a sailor had mocked his accent.

He fired back, the sailor fired back, and they nearly came to blows in front of everyone.

He stepped onto the dock, still shaking with rage, his pride wounded and his head full of everything he should have said.

The school wasn't what he had imagined.

There was no marble, no columns.

There was a simple house near the sea, a few wooden benches, and about twenty young men sitting in silence.

And at the front, an older man with a grey beard, who spoke without raising his voice, and looked at people as if he could see right through them.

It was Epictetus.

He had been born a slave.

He walked with a limp.

Rome had banished him along with other philosophers, and he had settled in that corner of Greece with no wealth, no power, nothing anyone would ever want to take from him.

And even so, he was the freest man that young man would ever meet.

The first thing he heard him say was this, The philosopher's school is a hospital.

No one should leave here feeling comfortable.