The book was Elif Shafak’s 40 Rules of Love. I picked it up without knowing what it was about, without knowing it would take me somewhere I had not planned to go. By the time Shams of Tabriz walked into the story, something had already shifted. Not intellectually. Something quieter than that. The recognition of a tradition I had been living at the edges of without knowing its name.

I grew up in Morocco. Muslim family. Arabic and Amazigh spoken at home, two languages carrying two cultures, prayer at its proper times, Ramadan observed, the rhythms of Islamic life as natural as breathing. The West, when it looks at that sentence, tends to see something restrictive. A framework of prohibition. A religion that tells you what you cannot do. That reading is not only wrong. It is almost precisely backwards.

Islam, in its classical tradition, is surprisingly liberal on questions of economy, of human nature, of the complexity of the inner life. Morocco specifically is not simply a Muslim country. It is a country with a long and living relationship with Sufism, a mystical tradition within Islam that has shaped its culture, its music, its poetry, and its spiritual landscape for centuries. The Boutchichiyya order has a strong presence here. The zawiya, the Sufi lodge, is not an exotic institution. It is part of the fabric.

I did not know any of this growing up. Not because it was hidden, but because it was so embedded in daily life that it required no label. The practices were simply there, woven into the texture of ordinary existence, unremarked upon because they needed no remark.

Then Elif Shafak handed me a novel about Rumi and Shams of Tabriz, and I started to see what had always been there.

The Journey Deeper

From 40 Rules of Love, I went to the source. Mawlana Jalal ad-Din Rumi’s Mathnawi: six books of verse written in Persian in 13th century Konya, over twenty-five thousand lines exploring the soul’s longing for return, the pain of separation from the divine, the transformative power of love understood as a spiritual force rather than a romantic one.

What struck me was not the mysticism. It was the precision. Rumi was not vague. He was not offering comfort or consolation. He was mapping the interior life with the rigor of someone who had spent years observing it from the inside. The Mathnawi is not a collection of beautiful sentiments. It is a systematic account of what happens to a human being who takes the inner life seriously.

Then Ibn Arabi. Then Al-Hallaj.

Abu Mansur al-Hallaj, executed in Baghdad in 922 AD. His crime was saying “Ana al-Haqq”, which translates as I am the Truth, I am the Real. In Islamic theology, al-Haqq is one of the ninety-nine names of God. Al-Hallaj was not claiming to be a deity in any conventional sense. He was describing a state of spiritual union so complete that the boundary between self and divine had dissolved entirely.

The religious authorities executed him for it. He was flogged, his hands and feet were cut off, he was crucified, and then beheaded. He went to his death without recanting.

I read about this and thought immediately of Socrates. Two men, separated by thirteen centuries, executed by the institutional authorities of their time for what they knew to be true from the inside. Both offered the chance to escape by recanting. Both declined. The parallel is not incidental. It is structural. The Stoic tradition and the Sufi tradition both produce, at their most serious, people who will not betray their inner conviction for external survival. That is not a coincidence. That is a shared understanding of what integrity actually costs.

Turkey: Seeing It in Person

I visited Turkey and saw the Sema for the first time. The whirling dervishes of the Mevlevi order, the tradition founded by Rumi’s descendants in Konya.

I want to be careful about how I describe this because the easy words are the wrong ones. It is not a performance. It is not decorative or ceremonial in the way a Western observer might expect. The whirling, the rotation on one axis, arms extended, right palm open to the sky to receive divine grace, left palm facing down to transmit it to the earth, is a physical embodiment of a philosophical and spiritual idea. The dervish is not dancing. He is enacting the soul’s rotation around the divine center. The music, the ney flute, the slow acceleration, the white robes: all of it is theology expressed through the body rather than through language.

Standing in front of it, I felt something I do not have a precise word for in any of the four languages I speak. Not emotion exactly. Something closer to recognition. The feeling of watching something that has always been true being made visible.

Spirituality Without the Weight

I want to say something honestly that people from my background rarely say in public.

Sufism gives you the spiritual dimension of Islam without the institutional heaviness that organized religion accumulates over centuries. This is not a criticism of Islam. It is an observation about what happens to any tradition when it becomes large enough to require administration, enforcement, and interpretation by a bureaucratic class. The spirit and the institution develop a complicated relationship. They are not the same thing.

Sufism reaches back behind the institution to the source. The direct encounter with the divine. The inner life as the primary site of religious experience. The teacher-student relationship as the vehicle for transmission, rather than the text and the law alone.

For someone raised inside Islam, Sufism is not a departure. It is a deepening. It is the tradition saying: the outer practice has meaning only if the inner work is happening. The prayer is not the point. What the prayer is doing to you. That is the point.

What Rumi and Marcus Aurelius Knew About Each Other

They never met. They never could have. Rumi was born in 1207 in Balkh, in present-day Afghanistan. Marcus Aurelius died in 180 AD in present-day Vienna. There is a thousand years between them and the width of a continent.

But when I read them side by side, I hear the same conversation.

Seneca reviewed his entire day every night before sleep, hiding nothing from himself, passing nothing by. He called it a habit. Al-Muhasibi, the 9th century Sufi scholar whose very name means “one who practices self-reckoning,” developed muhasaba: the same practice, the same structure, the same purpose. Daily self-accounting. Where did I fall short today. What did I improve. What can I do differently tomorrow. Two traditions, no shared theology, no awareness of each other. The same practice.

Marcus Aurelius observed his own thoughts from the inside, the hegemonikon, the ruling faculty watching the mind as it moved. The Sufi practice of muraqaba is almost identical: inner watchfulness, the disciplined observation of one’s own interior states, the cultivation of a self that can witness itself without flinching.

The Stoic concept of preferred indifferents maps directly onto zuhd, the Sufi practice of detachment. Wealth, status, comfort are not evil, but attachment to them is. Neither tradition says poverty is virtuous. Both say that the thing you cannot let go of owns you, regardless of what it is.

Amor fati, the love of what is and the embrace of fate rather than resistance to it, finds its parallel in tawakkul, surrender to divine will, and in rida, contentment with what has been decreed. The Stoic arrives at acceptance through reason. The Sufi arrives at it through love. They are standing in the same place at the end of different roads.

The convergences are not superficial. They run through the center of both traditions: the primacy of the inner life over external circumstances, self-examination as daily practice, detachment from outcomes, acceptance of what cannot be changed, ethics as something you live rather than something you profess.

Where They Part

The honest difference is the destination, and it is a real one.

The Stoic sage, perfected through reason and practice, becomes more fully himself. He grows into greater clarity, greater integrity, greater alignment between what he knows and what he does. The endpoint is a human being fully realized in his humanity.

The Sufi mystic, at the furthest point of the path, ceases to be a separate self at all. Fana: annihilation of the ego in union with the divine. This is what Al-Hallaj was pointing at when he said Ana al-Haqq. Not the assertion of a self, but the dissolution of one. The drop returning to the ocean.

Stoicism is a philosophy of rational self-mastery. Sufism is a mysticism of love-driven self-dissolution. The Stoic uses reason to build something. The Sufi uses love to unmake something. These are not the same project.

I do not resolve this difference. I live in the tension between them. A Moroccan who finds the Stoic framework useful for navigating professional life, and who recognizes in the Sufi tradition something that reason alone cannot reach. Both feel true. Not in contradiction. In conversation.

What It Means to Be From Here

I was not supposed to be the person who reads Rumi and Marcus Aurelius in the same sitting. That is not what the West expects from someone with my name, my passport, my language, my background.

I find that expectation increasingly uninteresting.

Morocco is not simply a Muslim country. It is a country where the spiritual and the philosophical and the poetic have been living together for centuries, where a Sufi lodge and a Roman-era inscription can exist a few kilometers apart, where the call to prayer and the sound of the ney flute are not in conflict but in continuity. The complexity was always here. It did not need to be imported.

Sufism found me through a novel. Stoicism found me through a difficult period in my professional life when I needed a framework that would hold. They arrived separately, from different directions, and then I looked up one day and realized they were standing next to each other in the room.

Two traditions. Two thousand years apart. One practice: the examined life, the disciplined attention to what is happening inside you, the refusal to outsource your inner life to external authority.

I did not go looking for either of them. They both found me.

And I am still, in the quietest sense, a student of both.

What I did not know was how to walk into an interview room and answer a question I had not prepared for. I did not know what to do on my first day, where to sit, how to speak to the senior manager across the desk, whether to ask questions or stay quiet and observe. I did not know how to navigate a difficult closing, how to deliver bad news to a director, or how to disagree with someone three levels above me without ending my career before it started.

No one taught me any of that. And I suspect no one taught you either.

What followed were years of navigating by instinct and, more often than I would like to admit, by luck. I made mistakes that cost me credibility. I stayed silent when I should have spoken. I spoke when I should have stayed silent. I learned everything the hard way, one uncomfortable situation at a time.

It was only later, when I began reading the Stoics seriously, that I realized something: these philosophers who lived two thousand years ago had already mapped the terrain. Not the technical terrain: not how to close a month or build a cash flow forecast. But the human terrain. The part of the job that determines whether you last, whether you grow, and whether you become the kind of finance professional people actually trust.

These are the five principles I wish someone had given me at the beginning.

The Stoics did not call them career advice. But that is exactly what they are.

Principle 1: Observation Before Action

My first real lesson in professional life came not from a textbook but from a senior colleague I watched for months before I ever said a word in a meeting.

He was not the most technically brilliant person in the room. But he had a quality I could not name at the time: he never reacted immediately. When the director asked a difficult question, he paused. When a number was wrong, he did not panic. When someone pushed back on his analysis, he listened first and answered second.

I started doing the same. Not out of Stoic philosophy — I had not read a word of it yet — but out of simple imitation. I watched before I acted. I mapped the room before I spoke. I understood the hierarchy, the informal dynamics, the unwritten rules, before I tried to operate within them.

Marcus Aurelius called this the discipline of perception: seeing clearly before you move. Epictetus built his entire philosophy around the space between stimulus and response. What you do with that space is what separates the professional who lasts from the one who burns out or gets pushed aside.

In finance specifically, observation is a survival skill. Every organization has a culture around numbers: how bad news is delivered, how forecasts are challenged, how errors are handled. None of that is written down. You learn it by watching. By being quiet enough and present enough to absorb the context before you try to operate in it.

When you start in management control or financial reporting, resist the instinct to prove yourself immediately. Prove yourself through your attention first. The people around you are teaching you something every day. Most of it has nothing to do with accounting.

Principle 2: Control What Is Yours And Nothing Else

The Stoics called it the dichotomy of control. Epictetus described it as the most fundamental distinction in philosophy: some things are up to us, and some things are not.

In a finance career, this distinction is not abstract. It is daily.

You do not control whether the business hits its revenue target. You control the quality of your analysis of why it did not. You do not control how the director reacts to your report. You control how clearly and honestly you wrote it. You do not control whether the external auditors find something uncomfortable. You control how prepared your documentation is when they arrive.

Early in my career I spent enormous energy worrying about the wrong things. Whether I would get the promotion. Whether the manager liked me. Whether the numbers would land where leadership wanted them to land. That energy was wasted, not because those things did not matter, but because none of them were mine to control.

What I could control: my preparation, my rigor, my availability, my honesty, and my composure when things went wrong. Those were mine. Everything else was borrowed.

The finance professionals I have watched build real careers over fifteen years share one quality above all others: they do not waste energy on what they cannot change. They put everything into what they can. That is not passivity. That is precision.

Principle 3: The Discipline of Showing Up

Motivation is a feeling. Feelings are not reliable.

The month closes at the end of the month. Not when you feel ready. Not when the conditions are ideal. Not when your personal life is in order or the team is at full capacity or the system is not crashing at 11PM. The deadline is the deadline. The report goes out.

I have closed months under every possible set of adverse conditions: illness, team absences, system failures, last-minute restatements, auditors in the office asking questions while I was still building the final variance analysis. None of those months waited for me to feel motivated. I showed up because showing up was the job.

The Stoics called this the discipline of action, the practice of doing what needs to be done regardless of how you feel about it. Marcus Aurelius wrote about it in his private journal, not as heroism but as the most basic form of professional integrity. You said you would do the work. The work is in front of you. There is nothing else to discuss.

For anyone entering finance or management control: understand early that the most reliable professionals are not the most talented. They are the most consistent. They are there when it is difficult. They deliver when the conditions are unfavorable. They do not need perfect circumstances to produce correct output.

That consistency, compounded over years, is worth more than any technical qualification.

Principle 4: Amor Fati, Love the Assignment Nobody Wanted

Early in my career I was given assignments I had not asked for. Projects that were not glamorous. Reporting responsibilities that felt like maintenance work rather than growth. I watched colleagues compete for the visible roles, the M&A support, the board presentation, the international project, while I was handed the reconciliation no one had touched properly in eighteen months.

The Stoic concept of Amor Fati — love of fate, love of what is — does not mean pretending to enjoy what you do not enjoy. It means understanding that the assignment in front of you is the material you have been given to work with. What you build from it is yours.

I built more from those unglamorous assignments than from any project I would have chosen for myself. The reconciliation taught me the business in a way no high-profile project could have. The maintenance work revealed the structural weaknesses no one else had bothered to understand. I became the person who knew where the bodies were buried and that knowledge, over time, became genuine leverage.

The finance professionals who advance are not always the ones who executed the most visible projects. They are often the ones who took the difficult, invisible work seriously when no one was watching and built expertise that no one else had.

Take the assignment no one wanted. Do it better than it has ever been done. The visibility will come later and it will mean something when it does.

Principle 5: The Long Game

Seneca wrote that we are not given a short life, we waste the time we are given.

A career in finance is long. Fifteen years feels like a long time from the outside. From the inside, it moves faster than you expect and the person you become in year fifteen is built almost entirely from the habits and choices of years one through five.

I see young finance professionals making the same mistake I made: optimizing for the short term. The salary negotiation that wins the battle and damages the relationship. The job change made too early because the title looked better. The credit taken for work that was collaborative. The shortcut in the analysis because the deadline was tight and the manager would not check the detail.

Every one of those choices compounds. Not dramatically, nothing collapses immediately. But slowly, quietly, the professional you are becoming is shaped by the professional you are choosing to be today.

The Stoics were obsessed with character not reputation, which is what others think of you, but character, which is what you actually are. They understood that character is not a destination but a practice. Every day you are either building it or eroding it. There is no neutral.

In finance, character means rigor when no one is checking. It means honesty about a number that is wrong even when the director does not want to hear it. It means giving credit where it belongs even when it costs you something.

Play the long game. Not because it is romantic. Because it is the only one that pays.

A Final Word

I did not learn any of this from Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius on my first day. I learned it the slow way through situations that were uncomfortable, decisions I would make differently now, and years of watching people who were doing it right without ever explaining why.

The Stoics simply gave me the vocabulary for what I had already experienced.

If you are starting in finance, or considering it, or a few years in and trying to make sense of what you are navigating: the technical skills will come with time and practice. They are teachable and learnable and the industry will train you whether you ask or not.

What the industry will not teach you is how to be the kind of professional people trust, rely on, and remember.

That part is on you.

And it starts not with a better Excel model, but with learning to observe before you act.

It takes two minutes. It changes nothing about the day that is about to happen. And yet I have been doing it without exception for longer than I can remember, because of a video I watched once. It was about a commencement speech delivered on May 17, 2014, at the University of Texas at Austin, by Admiral William H. McRaven, ninth commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command.

He stood before an arena full of graduating students and told them this: if you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride. And it will encourage you to do another task. And another. And another.

I watched that video years later, alone, on a screen somewhere. No arena. No ceremony. But something in it landed so precisely that I never forgot it. The bed. Every morning. Done.

What Admiral McRaven understood — and what the Stoics had articulated two thousand years before his Navy SEAL training — is that motivation is not the point. The point is completion. Small, consistent, unremarkable completion. The kind that nobody applauds. The kind that simply moves the day forward before the day has had a chance to resist you.

What Seneca understood about beginnings

Seneca wrote to his friend Lucilius about a particular kind of person he had observed throughout his life. The person who is always beginning. Always planning the next great undertaking. Always sketching the outline of the thing they are about to do. He was not gentle about it. He called it a form of self-deception: the feeling of motion without the reality of movement.

Two thousand years later, we have a more flattering word for it. We call it ideation. We call it strategy. We build entire professional identities around the art of starting things and leave the finishing to someone else, or to a future version of ourselves who will somehow feel more ready.

But the Stoics were not interested in readiness. They were interested in action that matches intention. Marcus Aurelius, in the private journal he never intended anyone to read, wrote about the discipline of getting up in the morning, not because it felt good, not because he was motivated, but because it was the work of a human being. Epictetus, born a slave and freed into philosophy, taught that the discipline of continuation — doing the thing after the impulse to stop arrives — is where character is actually formed. Not in the heroic beginning. In the unglamorous middle.

Completion, for the Stoics, was not about the result. It was about the integrity of the person doing the finishing.

3AM or 3PM — it does not matter

I have worked in corporate finance for fifteen years. Every month, without negotiation, the books close. The numbers reconcile. The reports go out.

There is no version of this where I tell the month: I am not feeling it today, let us revisit next week. The month ends when it ends. And on the days when circumstances conspire: when the data is late, when the team is stretched, when the situation is genuinely difficult. I do the work anyway. Sometimes at 3PM. Sometimes at 3AM. The time is irrelevant. The closing is not.

What I have noticed, without exception, across fifteen years and hundreds of monthly closings, is this: it is always satisfying afterwards. Not during. Rarely during. But when the last figure is verified and the report is sent, something settles. A quiet that is different from rest. The satisfaction of a thing that is complete.

That gap — between the resistance before and the satisfaction after — is where discipline lives. Motivation waits for the gap to close before it shows up. Discipline crosses it anyway.

The habit tracker on a bad day

I keep a daily habits tracker. It is not complicated, just a list of things I have committed to doing, and a record of whether I did them. Some are health-related. Some are professional. Some are personal. The Stoic Financier is on that list: one essay, every Sunday, published.

I wrote last week about the practice behind that habit, the structure that made it stick, and what it took to get there.

On the bad days — the ones that arrive without warning and drain everything — I look at the tracker and see a day that is almost empty. Most of the boxes are blank. The day has passed and I have very little to show for it.

What I have learned to do in those moments is not to attempt everything. I choose two things. The easiest ones. Drink the water. Take the medication. Stop scrolling. Put something in two boxes.

Two completions on a day heading toward zero. The day does not feel different afterwards. But I do. Because I know that the person who finished two things on the hardest day is not the same person who finished nothing. The difference is invisible to everyone else. It is not invisible to me.

This is essay number eighteen

I have published one essay every Sunday for eighteen consecutive weeks. Month-end closing weeks. Weeks when family came first. Weeks when I had nothing to say and sat down anyway and found something. Eighteen Sundays without a missed publication.

The goal is fifty-two.

No one will give me a medal when I reach it. There is no ceremony planned, no audience waiting to applaud the person who sat down every Sunday for a year and wrote something they were proud of. If I fail, if week twenty-three arrives and the essay does not, the publication will go quiet. The subscribers will move on. There will be no real consequences.

Except one.

I will be the one to know.

And that, I have come to believe, is the only consequence that has ever mattered. The Stoics built an entire philosophy around this idea, it’s called that “the internal witness”, the self that cannot be deceived, is the only judge worth standing before. Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations for an audience of one. Not for Rome. Not for posterity. For the person he was trying to become, accounting to himself in the dark.

I am not Marcus Aurelius. I am a finance executive in Casablanca who makes his bed every morning and publishes an essay every Sunday. The scale is different. The principle is identical.

Discipline is older than productivity

I want to be careful here, because this essay could be misread as an argument for hustle. It is not.

The culture that tells you to grind, to sacrifice sleep and relationships and presence in pursuit of output — that culture is not discipline. It is compulsion dressed in the language of virtue. The Stoics had no patience for it. Seneca was explicit: the goal is not to do more. The goal is to do what you said you would do. There is a difference between those two things that modern productivity culture has almost entirely erased.

Making the bed is not hustle. Closing the books is not grind. Publishing the essay is not content strategy. They are simply the practice of being someone who finishes what they start, quietly, without drama, for no audience but the internal one that is always watching.

Motivation will come and go. It always does. The day you do not feel like it is not a sign that you should stop. It is the most important day. It is the day the discipline is actually built.

Start each day with a task completed. An admiral said it to ten thousand students in 2014. Seneca said it in different words two thousand years before that. I say it to myself every morning, standing at the foot of a made bed, before the world has had a chance to ask anything of me.

It is enough to begin there.

Not because I had nothing to write about. Life produces material continuously at work, at home, in traffic, in the small collisions of daily existence. The problem was not the absence of events. It was the absence of an angle. I would open the blank page, stare at it, write three sentences about what happened, and feel nothing. No clarity. No insight. Just a record of the day, which I could have reconstructed from memory anyway.

Everything that lacks structure and purpose eventually fades. I know this from finance. A budget without a framework is a wish list. A forecast without assumptions is a guess. I spent fifteen years building discipline around structure in my professional life and completely ignored that discipline the moment I sat down with a notebook. I thought journaling was supposed to be free. What it actually needed, at least for me, was the same thing everything else in my life needed: a reason and a form.

The third attempt started differently. I came across a video on YouTube about habit tracking and journaling. The premise was simple: make a list of the habits you want to build and the habits you want to stop, and check them every day. The creator also introduced a concept called AMWAP: as many wins as possible. Each evening, you write down every win from that day, no matter how small.

I want to be honest about how that went at first. Most days, I failed to find anything. I would sit with the notebook and draw a blank. Not because nothing had happened but because I had spent the day looking past everything that didn’t feel significant enough to count. A conversation that ended well. A moment where I didn’t say the thing I would have regretted. Getting somewhere on time. None of it felt like a win. It felt like the minimum.

Then, slowly, something shifted. Not in my days but in my attention. I started noticing things I had been walking past for years. Small recoveries. Small moments of patience. Small choices I had made deliberately rather than by default. The wins were always there. I had simply never trained myself to see them. By the time I had been doing this for a few weeks, I could find three wins on the worst days, the days when nothing went according to plan, when I arrived home depleted and certain the day had been a write-off. It wasn’t. It never entirely was. I just needed the practice of looking.

Once the habit was established, once sitting down with the journal in the evening felt as natural as brushing my teeth. I began to add to it.

I started tracking habits that mattered to me not just practically but philosophically. Being kind. Less distraction. Less social media. Reading. Meditating. Showing up fully in conversations instead of being mentally elsewhere. These were not productivity metrics. They were character metrics. And I needed to see them on a page to take them seriously.

This, I later realized, is precisely what the Stoics did.

Marcus Aurelius kept what we now call the Meditations. The original Greek title was Ta Eis Heauton — To Himself. It was never intended for publication. It was a private journal, written in a language he chose deliberately for its intimacy, not the language of the court, not the language of empire, but the language of his interior life. He wrote about pride, anger, distraction, ingratitude, the temptation to seek approval. He wrote about falling short and beginning again the next day. He was the most powerful man in the known world, and he was keeping score on himself in a private notebook. Not for posterity. For himself.

Epictetus taught his students to examine each day with three questions: Where have I gone wrong? What have I improved? Where could I have done better? Not as self-punishment. As calibration. The Stoic evening review was not about guilt. It was about noticing.

Seneca described his own nightly practice in a letter to his friend Lucilius: when the light is out and his wife has fallen silent, he goes back over the entire day, hiding nothing from himself, passing nothing by. He calls it a habit. Not a spiritual exercise. A habit.

I did not know any of this when I started my third attempt at journaling. I found the Stoic practice after the habit was already there. What struck me was how precisely the same structure had emerged from two completely different starting points a YouTube video and a two-thousand-year-old philosophical tradition. Both arrived at the same conclusion: write it down, every day, honestly, for yourself alone.

At some point the tracker and the wins list were no longer enough. I started writing about what I had learned from the day, not what had happened, but what it meant.

I remember one evening in particular. There had been a serious problem at work. I will not go into specifics, because I cannot. But I arrived home feeling shattered from the inside. This is something I have had to confront about myself over the years: my career and my job are woven into my identity in a way that is not always healthy. When one goes wrong, some part of me concludes that everything is going wrong. That the floor is falling. I have hated that feeling every time it arrives, and it has arrived more than once.

That night I sat down with the journal and tried to write about it. The first difficulty was that I could not name what I was feeling. I thought it might be anger. Then I thought it was shame. Then something closer to helplessness, that specific exhaustion of a situation that felt out of my hands. I kept writing, not because the words were coming easily but because stopping felt worse.

Two things emerged from that hour.

The first was clarity. By the time I had written long enough to stop revising what I was feeling and simply describe it, I understood: I felt hurt. Not angry. Not ashamed. Hurt. That distinction mattered more than I expected. It changed what the situation actually was.

The second was perspective. Once I could see the situation clearly enough to name it, I could also see around it. This was not the end. It could be another beginning. The problem that had felt definitive began to look like a problem: serious, but solvable. It was resolved more easily than I had imagined, in the end. But I do not think I would have been able to meet it clearly without having written my way through it first.

Writing about something forces you to examine it. You cannot stay vague about an emotion on a page the way you can stay vague about it in your own head.

The journal does something else I did not anticipate: it catches ideas before they disappear. A few weeks ago, a friend of mine on Substack — , feel free to check his work on — asked in one of his notes how to hold onto ideas that arrive at the wrong moment. In the shower. Just before sleep. On the way somewhere.

I told him I send myself an audio memo. What I did not say is the second half of the practice: when I sit down with the journal that evening, I listen to the memo and write the idea down properly. Not a transcript. A reflection. What is the idea, what does it connect to, what would I want to do with it.

This essay came from exactly that process. I read Csaba’s note. I recorded a memo while the thought was still forming. That night I wrote it out. By the time I was done, I had the outline of everything you have just read.

The journal did not give me this essay. It gave me the conditions in which the essay could arrive.

People who dismiss journaling often say the same thing: you will never re-read it, so what is the point?

I think this misunderstands what the practice is for. The value is not in the archive. It is in the writing. When I write about what I learned today, I am not storing information, I am completing a thought that would otherwise dissolve overnight, unexamined, into nothing. Marcus Aurelius almost certainly never re-read the Meditations. He was not building a reference document. He was maintaining a discipline. The person who sat down on Friday was shaped by having written on Thursday. That is the whole point.

I have been journaling consistently long enough now that I notice when I skip it. Not guilt but something closer to incompleteness. The day has not been examined. Something is still unresolved.

What I know is this: it is the only moment in my day that is genuinely, entirely selfish. Not selfish in the way we use the word as an accusation. Selfish in the way that matters, deliberately intended to help me become the person I am trying to become. Everything else I do in a day is for something or someone else. The journal is mine. The hour I spend with it is the one hour where the only question on the table is: who are you, and are you moving in the right direction?

I intend to keep writing about that journey here.

I am still writing.

— Anouar

The seven deadly sins : pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, sloth. I came to them the way most people do: sideways, through fiction. A film about Dante’s journey through Hell. Then the curiosity that follows when a story opens a door, who was this man, what was this structure, why did it feel so precise? Later, Seven, a film I would not call easy to watch, but one that stays with you precisely because it takes the list seriously. Brad Pitt in the rain, at the end, and the terrible logic of what has just happened. When a story can do that with an idea, the idea is worth understanding on its own terms.

We encounter these sins in sermons, in literature, in Dante’s Purgatorio where he organized an entire vision of the afterlife around them, each terrace of the mountain corresponding to a sin. We recognize them in other people immediately. In ourselves, we negotiate.

In the fourth century, a Christian monk named Evagrius Ponticus wrote down what he called the eight evil thoughts. He was not writing for a general audience as an ascetic in the Eastern Christian church, he was writing to other monks about how these patterns of mind could interfere with their spiritual practice. His student John Cassian brought the framework to the Western church. Then in the sixth century, Pope Gregory I condensed and rearranged them into seven, describing pride not as one sin among equals but as the root from which all the others grow. Thomas Aquinas systematized them. Dante gave them cultural immortality.

What strikes me is something the history books mention only in passing: the Stoics were working on the same diagnosis four centuries before Pope Gregory, and from a completely different direction. Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca. They had no theological framework for sin, no concept of divine punishment. But they identified the same human weaknesses: pride, desire, anger, excess, avoidance. They called them passions: disturbances of reason that pull us away from a good life.

Two traditions, centuries apart, with no shared theology, no shared purpose, and no awareness of each other, made the same list. That is not a coincidence. These are not moral failures unique to weak people. They are the standard equipment of being human.

I have been thinking about my own relationship with each one. What follows is an honest account. Not a confession of things I have overcome. An account of things I actually live with.

Pride

There is a saying in Islamic tradition that I encountered in school and did not fully understand until much later: two kinds of people never learn: the arrogant and the shy. The arrogant because he already believes he knows, and is too proud to admit otherwise. The shy because he is too afraid to raise his hand and ask. I was both, at different moments, sometimes in the same classroom. The arrogance showed in how I defended my work as though criticism of it was an attack on me. The shyness showed in how many times I stayed silent rather than admit I did not know something and learned nothing as a result. Both kept me from growing. Both, I understood later, were pride wearing different clothes.

Because pride and perfectionism are two sides of the same coin. I did not understand that for a long time either.

I took pride in my work genuinely, deeply. In university, in my early years in finance, I produced work I believed in and I defended it accordingly. The problem was that I had made my work an extension of my identity. When someone criticized the work, I experienced it as a criticism of me. I did not separate the two. I could not.

The Stoics called this the confusion between what is ours and what is not. Marcus Aurelius wrote about it repeatedly: your reputation, your titles, even your accomplishments, these are externals. You can invest in them, but you cannot make your peace of mind contingent on them. When you do, you have handed the keys to your equilibrium to whoever last evaluated your work.

With age, something shifted. I am still proud of what I produce. But I no longer confuse the work with the person. A criticism is information. It is not a verdict. That distinction took me longer to learn than I would like to admit.

Greed

I grew up in a humble background. Money was not abstract in my house, it was concrete, it had weight, it had consequences. That context does not leave you.

I manage money professionally. Nine legal entities across North Africa, hundreds of millions in revenue. I apply the same discipline to my own finances. I enjoy life. I indulge myself, but not in excess. On that dimension, I think I do reasonably well.

Where I do less well is recognition. And being right.

Pope Gregory I wrote in the sixth century that greed is not just a desire for wealth but for honors and high positions, that things we consider immaterial can also be its object. He was describing me in the twenty-first century.

The need to be right. The difficulty of yielding in an argument when I know I am correct and sometimes when I am not. The pleasure of intellectual victory over intellectual honesty. That is greed. It is smaller than financial greed, and considerably harder to notice in yourself.

Lust

The Stoics defined lust not as a purely physical failing but as unbounded appetite, a desire that has escaped the authority of reason. Epictetus wrote about it plainly: begin with small disciplines, and the larger ones become possible. Temperance in small things trains temperance in large ones.

I have desires. I have my failings. I will not pretend otherwise, that would be a different kind of dishonesty, and this essay does not have room for it. But they do not outgrow me. I live accordingly, with a clarity about three things I will not let desire touch: my health, the people I care most about, and my integrity at work. Within those limits, I am human. Outside them, I do not go. That line is not always comfortable to hold. But it is the line.

Envy

Envy is more subtle in me than I would like to admit. It is not a dominant trait. I do not resent the success of people I do not know. I do not wish failure on anyone.

But there is a specific condition under which it appears. When I see someone with the same background, the same starting point, the same potential and they are further ahead. Something moves in me then. It is not malice. It is closer to impatience directed at myself, triggered by someone else’s mirror.

The Stoics drew an important distinction here between envy and emulation. Envy wants the other person to fall. Emulation wants to rise to meet them. Marcus Aurelius used the examples of those he admired not as sources of resentment but as evidence of what was possible. What they did, a human being can do.

I think what I feel is closer to emulation. It works for me, not against anyone else. But I am honest enough to know that the line between the two can be thinner than I prefer.

There is another side to this that took me longer to develop but has given me more than the competition ever did. Learning to be genuinely happy for someone else’s success, not politely, not performatively, but actually. It is one of the more quietly rewarding things I have practiced. To sit with a friend or colleague who has achieved something real, and feel the pleasure of it alongside them rather than in spite of it. Shared success is a bliss that envy will never produce. The Stoics called this living in accordance with nature, because human beings are social creatures, and a success celebrated together compounds in ways a success resented alone never does.

Gluttony

Not food in the obvious sense. But I would be dishonest if I did not mention that I spent years consuming too much sugar, not dramatically, but consistently, the quiet kind of excess that accumulates slowly until the body registers it. I also know what it is to lose evenings to binge-watching series, episode after episode, past the point of enjoyment and into something closer to numbing. I do not dress these up as sins of the soul. They are health issues. Failures of balance, not failures of character.

But balance is precisely the point. My more persistent gluttony is information, the compulsive need to read one more article, consume one more analysis before I feel ready to think. There is a version of that which is genuine intellectual curiosity. There is a version that is avoidance dressed as preparation. I know both.

And work. Hours spent past the point of diminishing returns, not because the task required it but because stopping felt like abandonment. The Stoics valued duty. Marcus Aurelius was unambiguous about showing up. But they did not confuse duty with excess. A person can drown in their own discipline.

Wrath

This one I carry more than the others.

I hate injustice. I have always hated it. The particular kind of anger that comes from watching something wrong happen and being unable to stop it. The world currently produces this feeling in me with considerable frequency.

The problem is not the anger itself. The Stoics were not opposed to anger in principle. Marcus Aurelius wrote that some things deserve our indignation. What they warned against was what happens when you let it accumulate without a channel.

And that is what happens to me. The injustice I see in the news. The tension of driving in Casablanca. The friction of certain family gatherings. The unresolved pressure of work. These are separate streams. But they feed the same reservoir. And when it overflows, it rarely overflows on the person or situation that filled it. It overflows on whoever is nearest. Someone who did nothing. Someone who deserved nothing.

I feel this anger physically in my shoulders, in my jaw, in a particular kind of tiredness that is not fatigue. I have learned to recognize it earlier than I used to. I have not learned to always act on that recognition in time.

The Stoic remedy is the pause. The space between what happens and how you respond. Epictetus called it the most important discipline in human life. I know the theory. The practice remains, for me, genuinely unfinished.

Sloth

I am not a lazy person. I show up. I deliver. When something matters I am there, and I do not leave until it is done.

But I procrastinate. I have felt guilty about this for most of my adult life, the sense that a task I am not yet doing is a task I am failing. I carried that guilt as evidence of a character flaw.

At some point I changed how I look at it. When I am procrastinating on something, the task is not idle, it is running in the background. Somewhere below the surface, something is processing, assembling, making connections I cannot make by staring at a blank page. When I finally sit down to do the work, it comes more easily than I expected. Not always. But often enough to notice.

The Stoic version of sloth is not ordinary laziness. It is the permanent avoidance of what matters or the failure to do your duty, to show up for the things that are yours to do. By that definition, I do not think I am slothful. I procrastinate on timing. I do not procrastinate on substance.

I am still not entirely sure that distinction is not a story I tell myself. But it is the most honest version I have.

What the list is actually for

I am a finance executive who reads Stoic philosophy and writes about it on Sunday afternoons. I have no theological authority and I am not offering any.

But I find it remarkable that two traditions: one emerging from Egyptian desert monks in the fourth century, one from Greek philosophers four centuries before thatAll arrived at the same list of human failures. Not the same remedies. Not the same language. The same list.

That convergence tells me something. These are not sins in the narrow doctrinal sense. They are the patterns that pull a human being away from a good life. They are remarkably stable across cultures and centuries because human nature is remarkably stable. We have better phones now. The same wrath. Better financial systems. The same greed. More information than any previous civilization. The same sloth, the same avoidance, the same preference for comfort over what actually matters.

The Stoics did not promise to eliminate these patterns. They offered a practice: notice them, name them, and choose — each time, imperfectly — what to do next.

I am working on it. On all seven. I have not finished any of them.

— Anouar

I am a finance executive. I read Marcus Aurelius. I write essays about discipline and proportion and the long game. And sometimes, late on a Thursday night, I watch a man on my phone explain how he built a seven-figure passive income from a laptop in Bali, and for a moment — not a long moment, but a real one — I want what he has.

Not the money, exactly. The freedom. Or what looks like freedom.

I am telling you this because this essay is not about them. It is about us.

Last week, people camped outside Swatch stores for up to a week before the launch of a new watch. A collaboration with Audemars Piguet — a brand whose entry-level pieces sell for around twenty thousand euros. The Swatch version retailed for four hundred dollars. But before a single store opened, the machine was already running. Watch creators on TikTok and Instagram had decoded Swatch’s cryptic teaser campaign and spread the conclusion everywhere: this was the drop of the year, maybe the decade. Scarcity was implied. Status was promised. The luxury halo of the AP name was doing the rest. By the time the doors opened, the crowd had already been told what to want and how urgently to want it. In Paris, police fired tear gas to control the crowds. In Milan, a fight broke out at opening time. Someone did the math on the resale margin: eight days of camping, one hundred and ninety-two hours, for a profit of five hundred and ten dollars. That is two dollars and sixty-five cents an hour. Below minimum wage in every American state. Swatch later clarified the watch is not limited. They will make millions of them.

No one forced anyone to be there. And yet.

We talk about influencers as if they were the disease. As if, without them, we would all be living quietly within our means, satisfied with what we have, immune to envy and aspiration and the pull of a beautiful life we did not choose. But I think that gets the causality backwards. The influencers are not the disease. They are the mirror.

They exist because we watch them. And we watch them because they are showing us something we already want to see.

The crypto guru, the trading coach, the passive income architect, the lifestyle curator posting from a rooftop pool — they did not manufacture our desire for freedom. They found it already there, gave it a face, and learned to sell it back to us in thirty-second increments. The product is not the course, or the signal, or the Swatch. The product is the feeling. The sense that we are one decision away from the life we were supposed to have.

And belonging. Let us not forget belonging.

I have watched this operate in a particular way. There is something tribal about these communities — the early adopters, the insiders, the people who got the watch, the people who bought in at the right time. You are not buying a four-hundred-dollar pocket watch. You are buying membership in a story. You are saying: I am the kind of person who moves when something matters. And when you are standing in that queue at six in the morning, freezing, with fifty strangers who made the same decision, there is a genuine warmth to that. A sense of shared purpose.

There is another layer beneath that warmth. A quieter one, more private. The story you tell yourself before you even arrive: if I wear this, carry that, am seen with the right object, I belong to the tribe of people who matter. Not a crowd decision — an internal one. An identity claim made through purchase. I have watched this logic work on people I know well. I have never felt it pull on me in the same way. I am not entirely sure why. Perhaps because the tribe being sold was never the one I wanted to join. Perhaps because I was always more drawn to what I could build than to what I could display. I genuinely cannot say.

The object is almost beside the point.

What I find harder to accept is what has grown up around the edges of that pull. A new kind of shame.

I live in Morocco. I work in finance. I am surrounded, professionally and personally, by people navigating real economic constraints — not abstract ones. And I have noticed, watching the content that reaches them, two distinct forms of humiliation operating quietly inside the same feed.

The first: if you cannot afford this, you are not worth noticing. It is rarely said directly. It is said through the backdrop, the wardrobe, the car in the driveway, the hotel room that appears casually behind the person speaking. The entire visual grammar of the content communicates, without a single word, who the intended audience is — and who is not in the room. In a country where purchasing power is what it is, that message lands differently than it does in California.

The second is crueler because it wears the costume of motivation. If you are still poor, it is your fault. You lack ambition. You are not trying hard enough. You have chosen comfort over growth. This framing is everywhere — dressed as empowerment, functioning as blame. It takes a structural reality and converts it into a personal failing. And it sells very well, because the person watching is already anxious and already looking for an explanation.

When did being poor become an insult? I do not know exactly when it happened. But I know I have watched it happen, clip by clip, in the content that reaches people I care about.

There is a phrase we have inherited without much scrutiny: social influencer. I think we should retire it.

What these people do is not primarily social. It is emotional. They do not change your opinions through argument. They change your feelings through proximity — through the studied intimacy of a camera held at the right distance, a voice that sounds like a friend, a life that looks adjacent to yours. The mechanism is not persuasion. It is resonance. And resonance bypasses the part of the brain that asks whether any of this makes sense.

Emotional influencer is the more honest term. And honesty, in this case, is useful — because once you name what is actually happening, you have a slightly better chance of noticing when it is happening to you.

There is a story that stayed with me. A young woman — a celebrity, the founder of a fashion brand — was publicly thanked online by a fan who had worked double shifts to afford a pair of her jeans. The celebrity posted a warm reply. Thank you for the support. I read that exchange several times. And each time I sat with the same question: who needed the support in that room? The person who worked double shifts, or the person with the brand?

I do not think the celebrity was cruel. I think the system had already arranged everything so that neither of them had to ask that question.

The same logic applies beyond fashion. When money enters influence without guardrails, the person paying the cost is rarely the person in the frame. The same is true when money enters politics, or when it funds AI development that outpaces any meaningful accountability. In each case, the argument offered is roughly the same: the market wants this, our shareholders expect this, someone else will do it if we don’t. What the argument quietly omits is that the consequences fall on people who were not invited to that conversation.

I am not saying keep money out of everything. I am saying that when financial interest and emotional influence operate together without friction, the result is a room where one person is selling and another is buying something they did not know they needed, using money they cannot always afford, to feel something that will not last.

That combination already has a name. We just keep calling it by the polite one.

Because the answer these voices give is always the same. The sky is the limit. Live up to your dreams. You are not lacking resources — you are lacking ambition. Be bolder. Want more. Become more. The formula never changes, only the product attached to it.

Seneca wrote that it is not the man who has too little who is poor, but the man who hankers after more. He wrote that two thousand years ago. He had never seen an Instagram reel. The diagnosis still holds.

Temperance is not deprivation. It is not the rejection of pleasure or beauty or a good life. It is the discipline of knowing what is actually good for you and what is simply loud. The Stoics were not ascetics. They were people who had thought carefully about desire and concluded that chasing it without limit is its own form of poverty.

I prefer financial stability to the ephemeral feeling that comes from unboxing a new phone. That is not virtue. That is a calculation I have run enough times to trust.

But I say that while knowing that on Thursday nights, I still watch the man on the rooftop.

Which means the mirror is also showing me something I do not always like to admit.

The influencer cannot exist without the audience. The watch company cannot create a riot without the crowd. The dream cannot be sold to someone who has already decided what is enough.

That is the real question this content never asks on your behalf. Not: can you afford this? Not: do you deserve better? But simply: what is enough for you? Not for the person on the screen. For you, in your actual life, with your actual resources, building toward something that is actually yours.

I have two failed entrepreneurship attempts behind me. I know what it costs to chase a version of freedom that was not quite the right one. I am not writing this from a position of indifference to the dream. I am writing it as someone who has learned, slowly and at some expense, to ask the question before buying the answer.

The influencer will not ask it for you. That part is yours.

I am working on it. I have not finished.

— Anouar

The Comfortable Lies — a three-essay series on the myths modern culture sells us about success, work, and aspiration.

Essay 1:

Essay 2:

There is a man I came across on LinkedIn not long ago. His post was confident, specific, and impressive. He had built a system, he said, that handled his entire sales process from prospection to closing: no phone calls, no emails, no human intervention. AI did everything. He had freed himself completely. And at the end of the post, as you might expect: comment GUIDE below and receive the full system.

I was genuinely intrigued. I went deep. I commented. I received the guide. And then, a few days later, he called me. On the phone. To convince me to buy the bot.

I let him finish his pitch before I said anything. Then I said: your entire argument just collapsed. You had to call me.

He did not have a good answer for that.

I am not telling you this to mock him. I am telling you this because that phone call is a perfect summary of where we actually are with AI and automation in 2026, not where the posts say we are, but where we actually are. The tool is real. The promise built around it is not.

Let me tell you what the data says first.

A February 2026 survey of nearly 750 CFOs and corporate executives published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that AI productivity gains exist but are modest and uneven. Finance and high-skill services showed the largest effects roughly 0.8 percent labor productivity gain in 2025, expected to grow to around 2 to 3 percent in 2026. Those are real numbers. They are also nothing like the transformation being sold on your feed. Meanwhile, a separate NBER study of 6,000 executives across four countries found that the vast majority of companies report zero productivity impact from AI whatsoever. And PwC’s 2026 AI Performance study found that 74 percent of AI’s economic value is captured by just 20 percent of organizations — the ones that rebuilt their operations around the technology rather than simply installing a tool and calling it a strategy.

The failure rate data is even more sobering. MIT’s Project NANDA found that 95 percent of custom enterprise AI pilots fail to reach production with measurable impact. RAND Corporation puts the broader AI project failure rate at over 80 percent roughly double that of non-AI technology projects.

These are not numbers from AI skeptics. These are numbers from the organizations that study and invest in AI most seriously.

Now let me tell you what I have seen from inside a finance function.

The narrative on LinkedIn goes like this: the CFO of the future no longer works on spreadsheets. AI handles the data, the reconciliations, the reports. The CFO focuses exclusively on strategy and insight. It sounds liberating. It is also, at least for now, a significant exaggeration.

AI can help with presentations. It can draft emails and communications. It can accelerate research and surface patterns in data. These are genuine contributions and I use them, and they save real time. But the daily work of a finance function: the judgment calls on provisions, the interpretation of variance, the conversations with operational managers who do not trust a number until a human explains it, the regulatory reporting that requires accountability, the audit trail that requires a signature. None of that has been automated away. I work inside a global organization operating across more than 150 countries, using the same systems everywhere. The tool assists. It does not replace. And anyone telling you otherwise is either working in a very unusual environment or selling you something.

The entrepreneurship version of this lie is even more elaborate.

You can now, we are told, build and run a business entirely with AI agents. End to end. From customer acquisition to delivery to accounting. Two hours a day. The rest is automated. I went looking for this. I tested it seriously. And what I found is that AI can genuinely do a remarkable number of things, it can draft content, manage certain communications, analyze data, build simple tools, run workflows across connected platforms. It is genuinely impressive. But it cannot file your taxes in a jurisdiction it does not know. It cannot hire someone and assume the legal responsibility that comes with that. It cannot manage physical inventory, repair equipment, or show up to a client meeting when the relationship requires a human in the room. It cannot negotiate a lease. It cannot resolve a dispute with a supplier who stopped responding.

More importantly, it cannot compensate for expertise you do not have.

This is the point that nobody making the two-hour-workday promise will tell you. AI is a multiplier. If you know your field deeply, if you have spent years inside it, built intuition about where things go wrong, accumulated the kind of judgment that only comes from proximity to real problems, then AI can make you significantly more productive. It takes what you know and extends its reach. But if you do not have that foundation, AI does not build it for you. It amplifies what is there. If nothing is there, it amplifies nothing.

A media agency built by someone who has never worked in media is not a media agency. It is an AI-assisted performance of one.

An accounting firm launched by someone who does not understand accounting will not survive its first tax season, regardless of which tools it uses.

Marcus Aurelius understood something about this that applies here with uncomfortable precision. In his Meditations, he returns repeatedly to one idea: do not confuse the instrument with the craftsman. The sword does not make the soldier. The brush does not make the painter. The tool belongs to whoever has earned the right to use it well. Two thousand years later, the instrument has changed. The principle has not.

AI is a remarkable instrument. In the hands of someone who knows their craft, it produces things that were not possible before. In the hands of someone who is using it to avoid learning the craft, it produces something that looks like work but isn’t and the gap between the appearance and the reality will eventually show.

Here is what I think is actually true, having been on both sides as a finance executive trying to understand what AI can do for a complex, regulated, global function, and as someone who tried to build something with automation and learned its limits firsthand.

AI is not here to replace your expertise. It is here to reward it. The people who will benefit most from these tools are not the ones who avoided learning their field because they were waiting for technology to do it for them. They are the ones who showed up, did the work, built real knowledge and now have a tool that lets them go further with what they already know.

The two-hour workday is not coming. Not for most businesses. Not for most functions. Not for most people.

What is coming — what is already here — is a genuine advantage for those who combine competence with the tools. That combination is worth pursuing. The shortcut that skips the competence part is not.

This is the second essay in The Comfortable Lies: a series on the myths modern culture sells us about success, work, and aspiration. The next one is about the mirror. Not the influencers selling the dream, but the audience watching them and what that says about all of us.

— Anouar

I have watched this content multiply on my feed for years in Morocco and internationally. And I want to push back on it. Not because I am against entrepreneurship. I am not. But because the message underneath it is a lie, and it is costing people more than they know.

Let me tell you what it cost me first.

I have tried entrepreneurship. Twice. In the first venture, I invested both money and time while keeping my day job. I took both seriously at the same time, and it was not my career that paid the bill. It was my personal life. The evenings, the weekends, the presence I could not give to the people who deserved it. Marcus Aurelius wrote that we suffer more in imagination than in reality, but there is a different kind of suffering he did not mention: the slow erosion of things you are not paying attention to while you are busy elsewhere. We worked for a year. We built something. And then it became obvious, gradually and then all at once, that it was not going to work. The market was too crowded. We had not promoted well. We had built before we had confirmed that anyone actually wanted what we were selling. I stopped. I absorbed the loss. Epictetus would have recognized the error immediately: I had mistaken enthusiasm for preparation, and motion for progress.

The second venture taught me something different, not about markets or promotion, but about human nature. This time I invested money only. Someone else was running it. And what I watched, over time, was a person becoming progressively reckless with a resource that was not theirs. The caution that should have been there was absent. The decisions that would never have been made with personal savings were made easily, almost casually, with mine. The Stoics called this the discipline of assent — the practice of seeing things clearly, without the distortions of wishful thinking. My partner was not practicing it. And I had not built in the safeguards that would have forced him to. That is on me. The lesson I carried out was simple and permanent: money without skin in the game produces a different kind of person than the one who showed up to the first meeting.

Here is what nobody tells you about failing at something you genuinely tried: it is clarifying. Not in the motivational poster sense. In the factual sense. These are not small lessons. I am glad I have them. I am also glad the damage was limited to money, because I have watched others lose much more: relationships, health, years they cannot recover.

I am telling you this because the influencers selling you the entrepreneurship dream will not tell you their version of this story. They will show you the rooftop, the private jet, the fancy car. They will not show you the year before any of that.

If you look closely at what they are actually doing, a pattern emerges. Most fall into one of three categories. The first wants to sell you something a course, a masterclass, an ebook, because selling is their real expertise, and the dream they are packaging is simply the product. They do not care whether you succeed. They care whether you buy. The second category is the attention seeker, people who have nothing to teach but everything to perform, whose content exists not to help you but to remind you that they exist. And the third is the most insidious: the dropshipping fanatics, the crypto gurus, the passive income architects, people who arrived at a moment of luck or timing, mistook it for a system, and are now selling that system to people whose circumstances bear no resemblance to their own.

What all three have in common: your outcome is not their concern. Your attention and your money are.

They will not tell you that for every person who made it work, there are many more who tried just as hard and did not. Not because they lacked ambition. Because entrepreneurship is genuinely difficult, genuinely risky, and genuinely not suited to every person, every season of life, or every market. And in the age of AI, the fantasy has acquired a new shape — they call it vibe coding now: the idea that anyone can build a product, launch a tool, generate revenue by next Tuesday, no experience required. What they do not tell you is that building something and building something good are two entirely different things. The expertise you quietly accumulate inside an institution, through years of proximity to real problems, real pressure and real consequences is exactly what makes entrepreneurship viable when the time is right. Without it, you are not an entrepreneur. You are noise.

But here is what bothers me most. It is not the fraud. It is what the hustle gospel does to everything else.

It has constructed a story in which staying in a job, building expertise inside an institution, showing up reliably and doing the work well, these things are somehow lesser. Comfortable. Uninspired. The word “employee” has been turned into a mild insult in certain corners of the internet, and I find that not just wrong but dangerous.

Here is what I know from fifteen years in corporate finance across North Africa. Organizations do not run on founders. They run on the people who stay. The controller who catches the error at 11PM. The manager who holds the team together during a restructuring. The analyst who knows where every number comes from and why it matters. And beyond the office: the teacher who shows up every morning for thirty years. The nurse who works the night shift. The police officer, the lawyer, the welder, the plumber and all the people on whom every functioning society depends, quietly, without a LinkedIn post to mark the occasion.

These are not people who failed to dream big enough. They are people the hustle gospel has simply decided not to see, because their lives cannot be packaged into a free guide, and their discipline does not photograph well on a rooftop.

That invisibility is itself a kind of lie. And it is more damaging than the private jet, because it reaches people who are doing something real and tells them it doesn’t count.

Marcus Aurelius governed an empire while the world around him was falling apart — plague, war, betrayal — and what he wrote in his journal was not about building his personal brand. It was about doing the work in front of him, well, without complaint, without the need for an audience. That is not a diminished life. That is perhaps the most demanding version of a life there is.

I am not saying do not try. If you have a real idea — grounded in evidence, not just enthusiasm — and you have thought seriously about the market, the competition, the capital, the time it will actually require, the personal cost you are genuinely prepared to absorb — then try. Entrepreneurship done honestly is one of the most demanding and worthwhile things a person can do. But do it with your eyes open, not because someone on the internet told you that your salary is a ceiling and your comfort zone is a prison.

If you are sitting at your desk right now, doing your work, building your skills, paying your rent, taking care of your family. Please, hear this clearly: that is not a consolation prize. That is a life. A real one, built on something solid.

The most expensive lie on your LinkedIn feed is not the one about passive income.

It is the quieter one. The one that tells you the life you are already living does not count.

IT DOES.

This essay is part of a series called The Comfortable Lies — on the myths modern culture sells us about success, work, and aspiration.

Next: the automation promise. Why the tool is never as easy as the tutorial, and what that says about the people selling it.

— Anouar

I had been comfortable at that company for years. Comfortable in the way that is not quite happiness but close enough that you stop asking the question. I knew the hallways, the rhythms, the people. It felt like home. And then this man arrived, and slowly, then all at once, it stopped feeling that way.

I remember one moment in particular.

The company had an annual bonus. It was part of the culture, calculated the same way for everyone, determined by a formula that had nothing to do with him. He had not designed it. He had not fought for it. He had simply arrived after it already existed.

He called me into his office one day and asked me why I had not thanked him for the bonus.

I did not thank him. I could not. It would have been a lie dressed as politeness, and I have always been bad at that particular combination. He did not take it well.

I think about that moment sometimes. Not with anger anymore — that passed a long time ago. But because of what it quietly taught me. Every year since, when a bonus comes from someone who actually earned the right to give it — a good manager, a decent human being who fought for their team — I make a point of saying thank you. Genuinely. Because I know what false gratitude looks like, and I refuse to offer it. And I know what real gratitude costs, and I refuse to withhold it.

He taught me that. He would hate knowing it.

I left. Not dramatically. But I left because of him.

For years after, I carried a conversation in my head. The things I would say if I ever saw him again. The sentences I had rehearsed, sharpened, ready. I replayed scenarios the way you replay a match you lost — looking for the moment you should have done something differently, the line you should have delivered. I was fluent in a language he would never hear.

I resented him for taking my home.

Then, slowly, something shifted.

Not a moment. Not an epiphany. More like a fog lifting over several years until one day I could see clearly what had been there all along.

The career I built after I left that company was not available to me inside it. The challenges I faced, the responsibilities I took on, the person I was forced to become — none of that was on offer in those comfortable hallways. I had been settled. He unsettled me. And everything that followed — the growth, the clarity, the work I am most proud of — followed directly from that unsettling.

If I ever meet him again, I will not deliver the speech I rehearsed.

I will thank him.

Nietzsche called it Amor Fati. Love of fate. Not acceptance — something harder and stranger than that. The active embrace of everything that happened, including the parts you would have chosen differently. Not “I made peace with it.” More like: “I would not remove it even if I could.”

It is a difficult idea. It sounds like the kind of thing people say when things have already worked out.

But it is older than Nietzsche. The Quran says it plainly : “You may dislike something although it is good for you, or like something although it is bad for you. God knows but you do not.”

Two traditions. Fourteen centuries apart. The same uncomfortable truth.

We are not good judges of our own fate. We see the door closing. We do not see what is on the other side.

I want to be honest about something.

Amor Fati is easier to embrace when the story has a good ending. A difficult boss who turned out to be a turning point is one thing. Illness is another. Loss is another. There are things that happen to people that do not reveal themselves as gifts with time. There are griefs that do not resolve into gratitude.

I do not want to pretend otherwise. That would be a comfortable lie dressed up as philosophy.

But I have noticed something, even in those darker territories. Acceptance — not love, just acceptance — changes the texture of how you carry a thing. The weight does not disappear. But you stop fighting the weight on top of carrying it. You stop suffering the suffering. And that, even in the hardest circumstances, is not nothing.

Amor Fati does not promise that everything happens for a reason. It asks something quieter: can you stop wishing it had been otherwise?

I am not going to tell you what your version of this looks like.

You have one. I am certain of it. A door that was closed in your face. A person who made things difficult. A plan that fell apart. Something you hated at the time that you can now, if you look carefully, trace a line from — to here. To who you are now. To what you can do now that you could not do before.

The imaginary speech you rehearsed. The resentment you carried longer than it deserved.

Maybe it was the best thing that ever happened to you.

Maybe you just don’t know it yet.

— Anouar

Then I saw him.

A small shape, moving the wrong way. Too fast, too low, too exposed. A kitten, running between lanes on a highway, terrified and completely alone.

I do not remember deciding to stop. I remember stopping.

I pulled over to the side of the road, turned on the hazard lights, and ran back toward him. He ran from me, which made sense — from where he stood, a large creature was sprinting toward him at speed. That is not a rescue. That is a predator.

He bit me twice before I got him secured. I carry a pet cage in the back of my car for situations like this — I am not sure what that says about me, but there it is. Only when I closed the cage did I realize how small he actually was. Three weeks old, maybe. Small enough to hold in one hand. He must have been absolutely terrified.

Once he was inside, I looked at my hands. There was more blood than I expected. I sucked the wounds clean and improvised a bandage from what I had in the car. The bleeding eventually slowed. I was surprised that something so small, with such small teeth, could do that much damage. Then again, my heart was still pounding. Maybe it was the adrenaline pushing everything faster. I am still not sure.

I got back in the car with a caged kitten on the back seat and drove.

I called a private clinic from the road. They told me what I already half suspected: rabies vaccination is handled by a single public institute in Casablanca. No exceptions, no alternatives. It was forty-five minutes away in the opposite direction from my office. Five injections for rabies, two for tetanus — on a schedule, across several weeks.

I headed there.

At some point I needed cash. I stopped at an ATM about five hundred meters from the institute, withdrew what I needed, and went in. The receptionist asked for a copy of my national ID. A physical copy — this is still how things work here in Morocco. I did not have one. I had to go back to the car.

When I walked back through the lobby, I saw money on the floor near the ATM. My money. Lying exactly where I had been standing, untouched, for however long I had been gone.

I had dropped it without noticing. And the only reason I was walking through that lobby again — the only reason it was still there — was the ID copy I had experienced as a bureaucratic inconvenience.

The obstacle was the protection. I did not know that when I was annoyed by it.

I managed to get through the workday. Barely, but I did. It was after 7PM when I started chasing the tetanus shot. It turned out to be its own problem — I needed to buy it separately at a pharmacy. Only one specific pharmacy had it in stock. Then I went to two hospitals to get the injection administered. Both refused. A third — a public one — accepted. That surprised me. I had expected it to be the other way around. I got home around 9PM.

I thought about the kitten on the drive home that evening.

He did not know I was trying to help him. He could not have known. From his position on the highway, low to the ground, surrounded by moving metal and noise, something large was running toward him at speed. His instinct was correct given everything he could observe.

He bit the hand that was saving him.

And I have been thinking about that ever since.

We are very quick to label what happens to us.

Good day. Bad day. This went wrong. That worked out. We do it immediately, reflexively, with complete confidence — as if we had access to the full story. As if the scene in front of us were the last scene.

The Monday I stopped on that highway was, by any measure, a difficult day. I spent hours across clinics, pharmacies, and hospitals. I came home with bandaged hands and a tight night of catch-up work ahead of me to close the month. The day did not go as planned.

It was also the day I found out that a bureaucratic obstacle I resented had quietly kept my cash safe on a lobby floor for fifteen minutes.

It was also the day a kitten who bit me is now, weeks later, in a foster home, alive.

I do not know what to do with that arithmetic. I am not sure it is supposed to add up.

Marcus Aurelius wrote that the obstacle is the way. People quote that as motivation. I think he meant something more uncomfortable: that we genuinely cannot tell, in the moment, which part is the obstacle and which part is the way.

The ID copy request looked like lost time. It was not.

The kitten running from me looked like a problem. It was not.

My running toward him looked, from his perspective, like the threat. It was.

Same moment. Different readings. All of them true from somewhere.

I have five cats at home. I did not plan any of them. Each one arrived in a moment that looked, at first, like complication. Each one is now simply part of the life I live, as if they had always been there.

I am still getting the injections. The last one is tomorrow. The kitten is in foster. The month-end closed.

And I still do not know if March 31st was a good day or a bad day.

I am starting to think that is exactly the right place to end up.

— Anouar

Nothing I had done wrong. No misconduct, no negligence — just a situation where the numbers might land higher than what I had initially estimated and communicated to management. In corporate finance, that gap between estimate and reality is not just a number. It is a conversation you have to have. And the conversation you imagine having is always worse than the one that actually happens.

For weeks, I carried it. I ran every scenario. I mapped every consequence. I built, in my head, the full architecture of a problem that was still theoretical. I lost sleep over it. I lost presence over it. I lost hours of perfectly good days to a future that had not arrived and might never arrive in the form I was imagining.

It resolved. Quietly, the way most things do when you give them enough time and space. The numbers landed. The conversation happened. The world did not end.

And I stood there, on the other side of it, realizing I had spent weeks mourning something that never died.

This is a specific kind of exhaustion. Not the exhaustion of work — the exhaustion of living inside a problem that has not happened yet. Of running scenarios at 11PM, at 2AM, at 5AM when the room is still dark and your mind has already started its second shift. Of carrying something invisible that weighs more than anything on your actual desk.

I know this exhaustion well. I have built entire futures out of it.

Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations: “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it.”

I have read that line many times. I thought I understood it. What the tax issue taught me — what three weeks of 2AM scenarios taught me — is that understanding something intellectually and applying it when your chest is tight are two entirely different skills.

The Stoics were not naive about difficulty. They did not pretend problems disappear if you think correctly about them. What they argued is that we almost always suffer twice. Once when the problem arrives. And once, much longer, in the anticipation of it.

During those weeks, I was not suffering from the tax issue. I was suffering from my estimate of it. I had built a version of the management conversation so detailed, so damaging, so complete — that I was grieving an outcome that existed only in my own construction. The actual conversation, when it finally happened, was shorter than anything I had rehearsed. And here is the part that still surprises me when I think about it: it was pleasant. Not just survivable — genuinely pleasant. The people across the table were reasonable, collegial, almost warm. I had spent three weeks building a courtroom in my head. What I walked into was closer to a conversation between colleagues who wanted the same thing.

In “10 Rules I Wrote for Myself,” I described happiness as your actual life minus your expectations. The corollary nobody talks about is this: your worst case is almost never your actual worst case. It is your imagination’s worst case. And your imagination, when frightened, is not a reliable narrator.

We call this being responsible. We call it planning. We call it due diligence.

Sometimes it is those things. Often, it is just fear with a spreadsheet.

Here is what I have observed, both in myself and in the organizations I work with: we are trained to think in consequences. Every decision has a downstream. Every gap has a cost. Every deviation from plan requires a corrective action and a responsible party.

This is useful. It is also, if you are not careful, a machine for generating dread.

I ran the chain myself, during those weeks. The tax gap becomes a difficult conversation. The difficult conversation becomes a credibility problem. The credibility problem becomes a career moment. The career moment becomes a story I tell about myself for years — or stop telling, because it ends there. The mind does not stop at the first consequence. It is thorough. It is relentless. It follows every branch to its darkest endpoint and then sits there, waiting for you to catch up.

None of that chain materialized. Not one link of it.

Epictetus, who was a slave before he was a philosopher, understood something about powerlessness that most of us will never have to learn the hard way. He taught that the only domain we truly control is our own judgment — our response to what happens, not what happens itself. Everything else is, to use his word, externals.

The tax issue was an external. The management conversation was an external. The outcome was an external.

What was mine — entirely mine, and entirely misused — was the weeks of anticipation I poured into something I could not yet control and could not yet resolve.

There is a navigation concept I find useful here. When you are too close to something, you lose your reference points. Sailors used to call it losing the horizon. You become so focused on the wave in front of you that you forget which direction you were sailing.

Problems do this to us. They fill the frame. They become the whole picture. And when the problem fills the frame, everything else — your judgment, your proportion, your sense of what actually matters — gets pushed to the edges.

I know exactly what this looked like for me during those weeks, because it followed the same circuit every time. First the consequences: the gap becomes a conversation, the conversation becomes a credibility problem, the credibility problem becomes something worse. Then the rehearsal: how the room would feel, what would be said, how I would respond, how they would respond to my response. Then the arithmetic: adjusting exchange rates by a fraction, tweaking small assumptions in the model, recalculating to see if the exposure moved. It barely did. It never did enough to matter. And so the circuit restarted — consequences, rehearsal, arithmetic — long after the day had ended and everyone else had stopped working.

I was not solving anything. I was just moving through the same loop, faster and faster, convinced that another pass would eventually produce a different exit.

It never does.

The big picture does not disappear when you lose sight of it. Your family is still there. Your health is still there. Your values have not changed and your judgment, the moment you step back from the wave, is still intact. But you are no longer consulting any of those things. You are consulting the problem, exclusively, as if it were the only input available.

It never is.

The tax issue resolved. I will not pretend it resolved because I worried well about it. It resolved because the underlying facts were manageable, the people involved were reasonable, and time — unhurried, indifferent time — did what it always does.

What I lost in the weeks before was not recoverable. The sleep, the presence, the mental energy spent furnishing a catastrophe that never materialized — that is gone. Every day after lunch I take a coffee break with the team. We walk to a café nearby, we sit for a few minutes, and normally I am in the conversation — that is just who I am in those moments. During those weeks, I sat there quietly. Looking at the people walking past. Looking at my phone. My colleagues were talking and I was somewhere else entirely, still inside the loop, still running the circuit.

I do not get those breaks back. And nobody around that table knew what they were sitting next to.

That is the real cost of anticipatory suffering. Not the problem itself. The life that runs quietly alongside it, unattended.

Marcus Aurelius kept returning to this — not as philosophy, but as a personal instruction he had to write down because he kept forgetting it: “Confine yourself to the present.” He was the most powerful man in the known world. He still needed the reminder. That has always made me feel better about needing it too.

The discipline — and it is a discipline, not a temperament — is to notice when you have left the present and started living in a future you invented. To catch the moment the loop starts. Consequences, rehearsal, arithmetic. To recognize the circuit before it completes another pass and ask, plainly: what do I actually know right now, as opposed to what I fear?

Most of the time, what you actually know is much smaller than what you fear. And much more manageable.

The worst case rarely comes in the form you built it.

And if it does come — in some other shape, on some other day — you will handle it then, with the information you have then, with the version of yourself that exists at that moment.

That version of you is more capable than the one lying awake at 2AM, running projections on a future that hasn’t arrived yet.

Trust him a little more.

If this resonated, you might also find “10 Rules I Wrote for Myself” worth reading — it lives in the archive.

Not a task I completed. Not a meeting I survived. Just one act of kindness I managed to pull off that day. Sometimes it’s big. Most of the time it’s small — holding a door longer than necessary, asking a colleague how they actually are, letting someone merge in traffic without making them feel like they owe me something.

That last one is harder than it sounds. I live in Casablanca. Traffic here is not a commute, it is a daily negotiation between fifty thousand people who are all late and all convinced they are right. Every morning I make a decision: I will not honk. I will let the aggressive driver cut in. I will let the misbehaviour pass without returning it. Restraint, in Casablanca traffic, is a genuine act of discipline. I have been doing it for years. Maybe I am getting old. Maybe I am getting wise. Probably both.

I still cannot tell you what the ROI is.

If you work in finance, you know what ROI means. Return on investment. It is one of the clearest frameworks in the discipline: what did you put in, what did you get back, and how does that ratio compare to the alternative? Two projects with the same ROI — you pick the cheaper one. Two projects with the same cost — you pick the one that returns more. Clean. Rational. Defensible.

I have spent more than twenty years applying this logic — first in school, then across boardrooms and budget cycles in North Africa. It is a good framework. It works. I trust it.

I just cannot apply it to kindness.

Here is the problem. I am not, by nature, a warm person. I am analytical. I tend to read situations rather than feel them. In meetings, I notice what is not being said. I track inconsistencies. My default mode is observation, not connection.

This is useful in my job. It is less useful at 6PM when someone on my team needs five minutes of genuine attention, not a performance review.

I made a decision, some years ago, to build kindness as a practice — not because I felt it naturally, but precisely because I did not. The notebook is part of that. It is my way of holding myself accountable to something that does not appear on any KPI dashboard.

And I mean that literally. I keep a monthly tracker — a hand-drawn grid in the same notebook. It has columns for productivity, health habits, social media, Substack engagement, essays, new projects. And one column that sits between all the others, marked simply: Be Nice. Every day gets an X or a dash. Same rigor. Different numbers.

But here is what I noticed: the moment I started thinking about it like a finance person, the logic broke down.

What is the return on holding someone’s gaze long enough that they feel heard? On paying for a stranger’s coffee when they are short by a dirham? On going out of your way for someone who will never know you did it?

You cannot measure it. And when you try, you corrupt it.

I have read the research — there is research, of course. Acts of kindness release oxytocin. They lower cortisol. Someone will tell you that companies with higher empathy scores outperform the S&P 500. All of this is true. And none of it is the point. Because the moment you perform kindness for its oxytocin, you are no longer being kind. You are optimizing. And optimization and kindness are not the same thing.

Here is what April 6th looked like.

I got my fifth vaccine shot — because two weeks earlier I had stopped on a highway to pick up a stray kitten and had been bitten for the trouble. (That story will be told in full, another time, in another essay. It deserves its own space.) I met a work deadline I had been carrying all week. I helped a stranger at a pharmacy buy medicine for his father. Later that day I found three elderly men standing confused outside a bus station — they had come to Casablanca for work from a city far away and did not have enough for the tickets home. I bought the tickets. They were old and weak and a long way from where they belonged.

I also bought gardening equipment.

When I write in my notebook at night, I do not sleep differently. That is the honest answer and I think it matters. I write what I did, I close the notebook, and I sleep exactly the same as the nights I have nothing to write. The kindness does not reward me. It does not settle something in my chest or make the day feel more complete. It just happened, and then the day ended.

But somewhere, someone was helped. Maybe it was small and they did not notice. Maybe it was small and it felt like the world to them. I will never know which. And that idea — that I cannot know, that the effect exists somewhere outside my awareness — is precisely what makes me want to keep going.

And then there is the helplessness.

Some days I open my phone and I read about Palestinian children held in Israeli prisons. I read about girls in Sudan. I read about things I cannot stop, cannot reach, cannot fix. And I feel a rage that has nowhere to go and a shame that I cannot quite explain — the shame of someone watching from a distance who is not suffering and knows it.

So I share a post. I write something. I tell myself that bearing witness is not nothing, that refusing to look away is a form of solidarity, that a story shared reaches someone who needed to read it.

I am not entirely sure I believe that. But I keep doing it anyway, because the alternative — scrolling past, staying comfortable, letting the distance become permission — feels like a worse kind of failure.

Maybe that is also kindness. Imperfect, insufficient, and the best I have from where I stand.

So what is the ROI of kindness?

I do not know. I genuinely do not know.

What I know is that I will open my notebook again tonight. I will write something down, or I will sit with the discomfort of having nothing to write. Either way, somewhere today, something small happened that would not have happened if I had chosen differently.

That does not appear in any model I have ever built.

But it is the one metric I keep tracking.

— Anouar

My father had a modest salary. We weren’t poor, but resources were counted carefully. So when I decided I wanted to learn an instrument, I had to be strategic about it. I chose the guitar.

The reasoning was airtight, I thought. It looked easy. It looked cheap. And, I’ll be honest, it looked cool. Particularly with girls. I was wrong on all three counts.

There was no YouTube in the early 2000s. At least not for me. We didn’t have a computer at home. To access the internet, I had to take a 30-minute bus ride downtown and pay the equivalent of three dollars for an hour at a cybercafé. Three dollars sounds like nothing today. But adjusted for context, a Moroccan family in the early 2000s, purchasing power factored in, that hour at a screen was closer to what fifteen or twenty dollars feels like now. Twelve dollars a month for internet access was money the household actually needed elsewhere. So I learned alone. No mentor, no community, no one with the same interest to practice with. That was another mistake, though I only understood it much later.

The biggest mistake, though, was the goal I set for myself.

I wanted to play Nirvana songs. Within weeks.

When that didn’t happen and of course it didn’t happen, I stopped. Not gradually. I just stopped. And like most people who quit a new skill, I didn’t question the goal. I questioned myself. I told myself I wasn’t talented. That music wasn’t for me. I even discovered later that I genuinely lack rhythmic sense and a music ear. I love music deeply & I just cannot sing, cannot dance, and apparently cannot learn guitar in a few weeks by wanting it badly enough.

I still have that guitar. It has been sitting in the same spot for over twenty years. And here is where it gets a little embarrassing.

When someone visits and notices it, they ask the natural question. “Do you play?” And then I face a choice: either I pick it up and embarrass myself in front of them, or I come clean. Yes, I can play, but only the kind of tunes children learn in their first month. That moment, repeated over the years, is one of the most quietly humbling lessons I know. Not painful. Just honest. A small, recurring reminder of what unchecked ambition and abandoned consistency actually look like, sitting in the corner of the room.

The strange thing is: I can still play a few simple tunes. Which means the learning wasn’t zero. The consistency was.

If I had set a smaller, honest goal, not Nirvana of course, but one chord, then two, then a simple melody and committed to it twice a week for a few months, I wouldn’t have become a virtuoso. I know that now. But I might have become the person who plays something real when friends come over. I have friends who do exactly that, they pick up a guitar, play something, and the whole room settles into a different mood. I love those moments. This is a small, sincere shoutout to them. You know who you are.

I don’t regret it. What I did was change my methodology.

Since then, I’ve learned things I actually stayed with. I ride motorcycles now. I camp outside. Neither came naturally, but I enjoyed both genuinely enough to stay consistent and that, it turns out, is the only real prerequisite.

I’ve watched the same pattern play out with coding. Two friends, same ambition, different approaches. One bought a thick, intimidating book, because spending money feels like commitment. The other started by watching programmers work, playing with simple tools, keeping it light. One of them can code now. It’s not the one with the book.

The failure mode is identical whether the skill is music, code, cooking, or a language. We look at the whole mountain from the base and decide we should already be near the top. When we’re not, we conclude the mountain isn’t for us.

Learning is not about heroic effort. It’s about time spent, repeatedly.

When you break it into small, achievable commitments, something shifts and it becomes enjoyable. You start to see movement. Not mastery, but direction. And direction, sustained long enough, is what mastery is actually made of.

If you can commit to sitting with something for fifteen minutes, twice a week, for one month, you will learn far more than you think. Not because fifteen minutes is enough. But because fifteen minutes, kept consistently, becomes the habit that eventually becomes the skill.

So don’t aim for achievement first.

Aim for presence. Commit to the time window. Let the skill take care of itself.

The guitar is still there. It reminds me, every time I walk past it, that the instrument was never the problem.

The goal was.

— Anouar

P.S. — After this essay went out, a reader named Dr. Salvucci left a comment that I keep thinking about. He had the same experience with guitar in high school — wanted to play like his friends immediately, quit when he couldn’t. Decades later he picked up a ukulele, mastered that, moved to a baritone uke, then finally returned to guitar — ready this time, on his own terms. He didn’t just slow the process down. He redesigned it entirely from scratch.

I love that. Not as a technique — as a way of thinking about yourself and what you’re still capable of.

Dr. Salvucci engages with every essay here and makes this newsletter feel like a real conversation rather than a monologue. That matters more than he probably knows.

The comments are open if you have a similar story.

Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life was the provocation. Not because I agreed with everything in it, but because it asked a question I had been avoiding: what do you actually believe? Not in theory. In practice. When things are difficult and no one is watching.

So I wrote these down. Some I arrived at myself. Some came from people far wiser than me — philosophers, a scout leader, an ancient oracle. I do not always live up to them. But they are there, waiting, every time I fall short.

Looking at them now, I notice they follow a kind of arc from the inside out. The first two are about who I am and what I am trying to build in myself. The next three are about how I try to show up for other people. The four that follow are about how I govern myself when no one is looking. And the last one is about what I hope to leave when I am gone.

Rule 1. Always have a purpose.

Meaning is more important than any other success metric. I have met people who had achieved everything the world told them to want — the title, the income, the recognition — and yet when you sat with them long enough, something was missing. Not missing in a dramatic way. Quietly missing. Like a conversation where the other person is present but not really there. Their answers were correct but their enthusiasm was elsewhere. You could sense it in how they talked about their work: no genuine spark, just the performance of satisfaction. Without purpose, success is just accumulation. With it, even difficulty has direction.

Rule 2. Wisdom comes when you begin to have conversations with the dead.

This is attributed to the Oracle of Delphi, advising Zeno — the founder of Stoicism — when he asked how to live a good life. Read, she told him. Learn from those who are no longer here to defend or revise what they said. Books are the only time machine available to ordinary people. Every time I open one, I sit down with someone who has already lived through something I have not yet faced. That seems like a reasonable use of an evening.

Rule 3. Treat people according to your values, not theirs.

If someone is rude, I do not have to be rude back. If someone is dishonest, I do not have to lower myself to match them. This sounds obvious. It is surprisingly hard. The temptation to mirror what we receive is almost instinctive. But how I treat people is a reflection of who I am, not a reaction to who they are. I decided a long time ago that I would rather lose an argument with my integrity intact than win one without it.

Rule 4. Do not try to fix people. Try to understand them.

This rule carries a tension I have not fully resolved. There is a difference between understanding someone and excusing everything they do. I try to find the explanation behind difficult behavior, not to justify it, but to keep from making it about me. Understanding why someone acts the way they do makes it easier to respond with clarity rather than reaction. It does not mean tolerating everything. It means choosing your response from a place of awareness rather than injury.

Rule 5. Be tolerant with others. Be strict with yourself.

The inverse — being strict with others and tolerant with yourself — is the formula for resentment and mediocrity. Holding myself to a higher standard than I hold others is not self-punishment. It is the only way to grow without becoming bitter. Other people are not obligated to meet my expectations. I am obligated to meet my own.

Rule 6. Bad habits only get worse.

I have noticed a pattern over many years, with colleagues, with friends, with family. Someone new enters the picture — a partner, a colleague, a business contact — and the people around them talk about this person as though they have finally found exactly who they were looking for. The best thing.

And in those early days I would notice small details. Coming late. Being sloppy about a deadline. Not taking something seriously that deserved to be taken seriously. Small things. Easy to explain away. Easy to forgive when someone is still making the effort to give a good impression.

That is exactly the point. If this is the behavior when they are trying, what arrives when they stop trying?

A bad habit introduced early is not a phase. It is information. The version you see at the beginning, when someone is still performing their best self, is not the floor. It is the ceiling. I have learned to pay attention to what shows up before comfort sets in — because comfort does not create new habits. It reveals the ones that were always there.

Rule 7. Do not take yourself too seriously.

You are not the center of the universe. Neither am I. Ego inflates in the silence between other people’s indifference to us and it thrives when we start believing our own importance. The moment I stopped treating every setback as a verdict on my worth, things got considerably lighter. I have noticed that people who cannot laugh at themselves carry a particular kind of exhaustion with them. Not the good exhaustion of hard work. The exhaustion of constant self-defense.

Rule 8. Happiness = your actual life minus your expectations.

This is the rule I return to most. Not because it is comforting — it is not always — but because it is honest. Suffering rarely comes from circumstances alone. It comes from the gap between what is and what we believed should be. I cannot always change my circumstances. I can almost always examine my expectations. Most of the time, the adjustment needs to happen there.

What I have not mastered — and I want to be precise about this — is the moment when a situation pulls me in so completely that the whole picture disappears. I stop seeing my life as it is and start seeing only the problem directly in front of me. The equation is still true. I have just forgotten I was holding it.

That is the practice. Not knowing the formula. Remembering to use it when it matters most.

Rule 9. Always try to take the higher road. When it feels too easy, walk back — you are on the wrong path.

The higher road is not always obvious. But it has a texture. It usually involves more patience, more restraint, and less immediate satisfaction than the alternative. When I find myself in a situation where the right thing to do feels effortless and costless, I have learned to pause. The higher road requires something. If it is not requiring anything from me, I am probably not on it.

Rule 10. Leave this world a little better than you found it.

Robert Baden-Powell wrote this — the founder of the Scout movement — and I have never found a more quietly radical statement about what a life should amount to. Not famous. Not wealthy. Not remembered. Just: leave the world a better place than you found it. When your turn comes to die, you can die happy in the knowledge that you did not waste your time. I read this as a young man and it has not left me.

These are not commandments. They are a working draft of a self — written in pencil, not stone. I revise them occasionally, not because I have found better rules, but because I understand them more honestly than I did before.

That, I suppose, is the point.

— Anouar

The latest one: ask ChatGPT to draw a caricature of you based on everything it knows about your profile. Thousands of people did it. Thousands of caricatures flooded the feed. For a few days, LinkedIn looked less like a professional network and more like a digital carnival.

I watched it happen. I understood the appeal. And I found myself thinking about a Greek philosopher who died nearly 2,500 years ago.

I will be honest about my reaction. The first feeling was irritation — not moral outrage, just the quiet frustration of someone trying to find genuine thinking in a feed that was suddenly full of the same joke in a thousand different faces. The second feeling was more uncomfortable. I recognized that generating a caricature requires less effort than writing a single honest sentence about yourself. And the third feeling, which arrived slowly, was something closer to fatigue. Trends like this don’t stay funny. They become wallpaper. By the time everyone has done it, nobody is doing anything — they are just participating.

I use AI every day. And it makes me measurably better at my job.

I receive a volume of emails that would be unmanageable without AI assistance. When I join a thread mid-conversation — sometimes after dozens of exchanges — AI summarizes the entire discussion in thirty seconds and gets me straight to what matters. It drafts responses. It pulls accurate financial data. It helps me build cleaner, sharper presentations.

This is AI at its best: a tool that amplifies human judgment rather than replacing it. Used this way, AI is not a convenience. It is a genuine competitive advantage.

So this essay is not an argument against AI. It is an argument for temperance.

Here is what most people generating AI caricatures do not know.

There is a vast gap between what a text query costs and what an image costs. Generating a standard AI image requires roughly 2,282 joules of energy — about twenty times more than a large text response. A short AI video can require up to 3.4 million joules. That is the energy equivalent of running a microwave for over an hour, for five seconds of content you will scroll past tomorrow.

At the individual level, this seems negligible. But we are not talking about individuals. We are talking about scale.

US data centers consumed around 200 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024 — roughly the annual energy consumption of Thailand. AI-specific servers accounted for an estimated 53 to 76 terawatt-hours of that figure. The energy demand from dedicated AI infrastructure is projected to more than quadruple by 2030.

The consequences are already visible at the corporate level. Google’s greenhouse gas emissions rose 48% since 2019, driven primarily by data center energy consumption. Microsoft reported a 29% increase since its 2020 baseline for the same reason. Both companies have acknowledged that meeting their 2030 climate commitments is now in serious doubt — not because of inaction, but because AI demand is outpacing every efficiency gain they make.

These are not abstract statistics. They are the cumulative cost of millions of people generating caricatures, viral videos, and AI art they will forget about by next week.

The Stoics identified four cardinal virtues: wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance.

Temperance — sophrosyne in Greek — is not abstinence. It is not the rejection of pleasure, comfort, or technology. It is the disciplined use of what is available to you. Using things in proportion to their purpose. Not because you cannot have more, but because you understand that having more is not always better.

Epictetus, who owned nothing, understood this better than most. He did not teach people to suffer. He taught people to distinguish between what serves them and what merely entertains them.

The question he would ask today is not “can you generate a caricature of yourself?”

He would ask: should you? And at what cost?

When something is free, we consume it without thinking. This is not a moral failing — it is human nature. Behavioral economics has documented it extensively. Zero price removes the psychological mechanism that forces us to evaluate whether something is worth it.

AI image and video generation is functionally free for most users. So people generate thousands of images they will never use, videos nobody will watch twice, and caricatures that disappear into a feed within hours.

Not because they are irresponsible. But because nothing in the experience asks them to pause and consider the cost.

The Stoics would recognize this immediately. They had a practice called negative visualization — imagining the full consequences of your actions before taking them. Not to paralyze yourself, but to decide consciously rather than reflexively.

Applied to AI: before generating that image, pause for one second. Is this useful? Does this serve a purpose? Or am I just consuming because consuming is easy?

That one second is the entire difference between temperance and excess.

It would be easy to blame users. But the Stoics also believed in justice — in giving each party their fair share of accountability.

Most major AI providers still do not publish detailed sustainability reports or share meaningful emissions data. Google has taken a step toward transparency by disclosing per-prompt energy figures for Gemini. OpenAI has not done the same. Companies that profit from consumption at scale have an obligation to make that consumption visible. Transparent pricing — even just showing users the energy cost of their query — would change behavior without restricting access.

The solution is not banning free AI. It is making the invisible visible.

I use AI for emails, data, drafting, and analysis. Tasks where the output justifies the input. Where judgment guides the tool rather than the tool replacing judgment.

I do not use AI to generate images I do not need. I do not participate in viral challenges that exist purely for entertainment. Not because I am morally superior. But because I have asked myself the Stoic question: does this serve what I am trying to build?

Usually, the answer is no.

Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations not for publication, but for himself. As a daily practice of self-examination. A private reminder to use his power wisely — not because he had to, but because he chose to.

He was the most powerful man in the known world. He could have had anything. He chose discipline.

We are not emperors. But we live in a world where, for the first time in history, we have access to tools of almost unlimited generative power at essentially zero perceived cost.

The question Marcus Aurelius would ask is the same one worth asking today:

Just because it is available, does that mean you should use it?

Temperance is not a limitation. It is the decision to use what you have wisely — because you understand that everything, even what appears free, has a cost.

— Anouar

I had never seen him before. One morning he simply appeared — white, gorgeous, with a green collar around his neck and the kind of easy confidence that cats carry when they have decided, without asking permission, that they belong somewhere.

The first day I assumed he was a neighbour’s cat. The second day I thought the same. By the third day I had stopped assuming anything and started simply watching.

He liked my cats immediately. I have five of them: Sally, Cookie, Flifla, Tom, and Jerry. Each one arrived in my life not by plan but by circumstance, carrying a story I did not ask for and could not refuse. I did not choose any of them. They chose me. And somehow, over time, that distinction stopped mattering.

The white cat fit in naturally. He was friendly, curious, unhurried. He had the demeanor of someone who has never been treated badly and sees no reason to expect otherwise.

Then I noticed he was getting dirtier every day.

It was a small observation. A gradual thing. But once I noticed it I could not unnotice it. The green collar. The friendly temperament. The fact that he kept coming back. And then, quietly, the thought arrived: he is either lost or abandoned.

Those are two very different things. A lost cat has a family somewhere — perhaps a child crying, searching, waiting. An abandoned cat has learned that waiting leads nowhere.

I do not know which one he is. And that uncertainty is what torments me.

Since that realization, I think about him every day. Whether he is okay. Whether he is hungry. Whether he sleeps somewhere warm or somewhere exposed. Whether he feels the particular sadness of an animal that once knew where home was and no longer does.

I am the Stoic Financier. I play with numbers and scenarios. I navigate budgets, crises, and decisions under uncertainty for a living.

And I am kept awake at night by a white cat with a green collar. I have made peace with that contradiction.

I have thought about taking him in. Many times. But every time I get close to the decision, three things pull me back.

If he is lost, taking him in means a family never finds him. Somewhere there may be a child who posted a picture of his pet in a Facebook group dedicated to animal rescues. Taking him in means that child never gets an answer.

I also have five cats already. My family vet has told me, gently but clearly, that every time I add a new cat, the group dynamics shift. Not always badly but always significantly. Sally, Cookie, Flifla, Tom, and Jerry have their own relationships, their own hierarchies, their own sense of how the world is ordered. Introducing a sixth means asking all five to renegotiate something they did not ask to renegotiate. Their quality of life matters to me as much as his.

And five cats is already a serious responsibility. Not just emotionally but also practically. Time. Attention. Veterinary care. The kind of presence that animals need and deserve.

So I hold back. Rationally. Carefully. And still the torment remains.

Being a Stoic does not mean being without feeling.

This is the misunderstanding I encounter most often. People hear Stoicism and imagine a kind of emotional coldness — a person who has trained themselves not to care, not to be moved, not to feel the pull of things that cannot be resolved by reason alone.

That is not Stoicism. That is numbness. And numbness is not a philosophy — it is a defense mechanism.

The Stoics felt everything. Marcus Aurelius grieved. Seneca loved. Epictetus, who had nothing, still chose to care about the world around him. What made them Stoic was not the absence of feeling but the refusal to let feeling become the only thing.

And being a finance executive does not mean looking at every situation through an economic lens. I did not calculate the cost-benefit of adopting Sally. I did not model the ROI of bringing Cookie home. Each of my five cats arrived because something in me recognized a need and responded to it — not because it made sense, but because it was right.

The white cat is teaching me something I thought I already knew. Kindness does not require a solution. It only requires presence.

I cannot take him in today. But I can feed him. I can make sure he knows there is one place in the world where he is expected, where someone notices when he arrives and thinks about him when he does not. I can give him what I can give — not everything, but something real.

Sometimes that is what caring looks like. Not the grand gesture. Not the permanent commitment. Just showing up, consistently, for as long as you can, for someone who has no reason to expect it.

We have built a trust, the white cat and I. He comes every day now. He eats. He stays for a while. He leaves.

I also built him a small box with warm clothing inside, for the nights when it rains.

And I watch him go, hoping he finds his way to wherever he belongs.

Until then, he will find food here.

And someone who thinks about him.

— Anouar

You'll be amazed by the stories you'll hear from a friendly stranger you accidentally met by chance, opened your door to, or let into your inbox. Let me be that stranger.

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Not because I had nothing to say. I had plenty to say. But the moment I imagined saying it out loud in English, in front of native speakers something would tighten in my chest. I would rehearse the sentence in my head, hear my own accent before I had even spoken, and decide that silence was safer.

So I stayed silent. And my ideas stayed caged.

This went on longer than I would like to admit. Years of meetings where I nodded, took notes, and saved my real thoughts for the drive home. Years of letting fluency or the lack of it determine what I was allowed to contribute.

I told myself it was humility. That I was being careful. Precise.

But it wasn’t humility. It was shame.

I remember the meeting clearly.

There was a colleague in the room a white, South African, senior. When he spoke, the accent was thick. Not difficult out of carelessness, but genuinely hard to follow. People leaned in. Some exchanged glances. A few asked him to repeat himself.

He never hesitated. He never apologized. He simply continued — clearly, deliberately, with complete confidence that what he was saying was worth the effort of being understood.

And here is what struck me: everyone in that room made the effort. Because he made it clear, without saying a word, that his ideas mattered. That he mattered.

Nobody questioned his intelligence. Nobody questioned his authority. The accent was just an accent, a feature of the voice, not a measure of the mind.

I drove home that evening and sat with an uncomfortable question: who exactly had been making fun of my accent all these years?

The answer, when it finally came, was humbling.

It was me.

Confidence in a room has very little to do with the language you speak and everything to do with how you inhabit what you say.

When you speak with hesitation, people hear the hesitation not the accent. When you speak with conviction, people hear the conviction. The accent becomes background noise, a detail, a minor feature of the delivery.

This is not theory. I have tested it. The same idea, delivered with apology in my voice, lands differently than the same idea delivered as if it matters, because it does.

What I learned is simple enough to say and hard enough to practice. Slow down, not because your English is imperfect, but because ideas worth saying deserve room to land. Take the pause when you need it. And never apologize for your accent before you have said anything. “Sorry for my English” is the fastest way to tell a room that what follows might not be worth listening to. It is not true. Do not say it.

And remember why you are in the room. You are there because of what you know, what you have built, what you can contribute. The language is the vehicle. You are the destination.

This essay would be incomplete without a word for native English speakers.

I have sat in professional settings and watched native English speakers mock the accents of colleagues. Sometimes openly. More often with a glance, a suppressed smile, a quiet aside.

I want to say this as directly as I can: that behavior is not wit. It is not sophistication. It is a small cruelty dressed as humor.

The person speaking English with an accent is not inferior to you. In most cases, they are operating in their second, third, or fourth language. They are doing something you have likely never had to do: think, argue, persuade, and lead in a language that is not native to them.

Can you do the same in their language? Could you hold your own in a boardroom in Arabic, French, or Spanish? Could you defend a financial model in a language you learned as an adult, in a culture not your own, in a room where the default assumption is that fluency equals intelligence?

If the honest answer is no — and for most native English speakers, it is — then perhaps replace the smile with something more appropriate.

Respect.

I still have an accent. I always will.

It carries the sound of where I come from, the languages I grew up with, the cultures that shaped how I think. I have stopped hearing it as a flaw.

It is not a flaw. It is a map.

And the ideas that were caged in my head for years? They are finding their way out — one essay at a time.

— Anouar

I have managed monthly closings under pressure. Steered budgets through uncertainty. Navigated crises nobody saw coming.

And the most useful lesson I have ever learned did not come from an MBA, a financial certification, or a management course. It came from a Greek slave who died 2,000 years ago.

His name: Epictetus.

His philosophy: Stoicism.

Here is how 10 ancient principles became my daily framework for business.

1. The Dichotomy of Control

Epictetus had lost everything. His freedom. His rights. His life was in someone else’s hands. And yet, he was free.

Because he had understood something most people never learn: there is what depends on you, and what does not.

What depends on you: your thoughts, your judgments, your actions, your values.

What does not depend on you: markets, interest rates, political decisions, global crises.

I have seen CFOs spend weeks worrying about central bank rates they cannot influence, while neglecting the quality of their cash forecast — which they control entirely.

In finance, this principle is radical: stop optimizing what you cannot control. Master what you can.

2. Amor Fati — Love of Fate

Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor. The most powerful man in the known world.

He could have had everything. He chose wisdom.

In his Meditations, he wrote: love what happens to you. It is woven into your destiny.

This is not resignation. It is transformation.

In business, every crisis I have navigated taught me something no period of stability ever could. The 2008 recession. Covid. Difficult restructurings.

Every obstacle, embraced rather than endured, becomes an accelerator.

3. Memento Mori — Remember You Will Die

Not morbid. Liberating.

The Stoics reminded themselves of their mortality daily. Not to despair, but to prioritize.

In finance, we waste precious time in pointless meetings, reporting nobody reads, analyses that influence no decision.

Memento Mori forces you to ask: if this were the last meeting of my career, would it be worth it?

The answer often changes your agenda.

4. The Obstacle Is the Way

Marcus Aurelius: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

I once knew a company that nearly disappeared. Zero cash. Nervous banks. A demoralized team.

That moment of crisis forced a radical transformation of financial processes that, in normal times, would never have happened.

The obstacle had become the path to a better organization.

5. Reason Before Emotion

Markets panic. Executives overreact. Teams spiral. The Stoic observes. Analyzes. Decides.

Not because he has no emotions. But because he does not let them make decisions for him.

I learned this the hard way.

Years ago, we were budgeting for a new project. It had real potential — the kind that fills a room with energy and makes everyone lean forward. We saw the figures. We knew some of them were stretched. Nobody said it. The excitement was pulling in one direction and we all went with it.

The project worked. Just not the way we had projected. And when the gap between ambition and reality became impossible to ignore, it wasn’t the spreadsheet that took the damage. It was my manager. His credibility in the organization never fully recovered. He eventually left. It was the right decision for his mental health — but it shouldn’t have been necessary.

The numbers had told us the truth. Our emotions had edited it.

The worst decisions in finance don’t come from bad analysis. They come from good analysis that nobody wanted to believe.

6. Negative Visualization

Seneca advised spending time each day imagining the worst.

Losing your job. Losing your company. Losing what matters. Not to suffer in advance, but for two reasons: first, you realize the worst is often survivable. Second, you prepare rather than get caught off guard.

I do this instinctively. When I budget, I always start from pessimistic assumptions. I prepare for far-reaching eventualities in negotiations that others think will never happen. I run scenarios that make people uncomfortable to sit through.

Some colleagues have called me exhausting. I understand why. But I have never been blindsided by an outcome I had already imagined.

Better to forecast a difficult year and deliver a good one than the other way around. The organization forgives pleasant surprises. It rarely forgives the opposite.

The best CFOs practice negative visualization professionally without knowing it is Stoicism.

7. The Present Is All That Exists

Marcus Aurelius: “Confine yourself to the present.”

In finance, we live constantly in the past — variance analysis, monthly closings — or in the future — forecasts and budgets.

And we forget to act now.

Last month’s closing report will not change. Next year’s budget is not yet real.

The only thing you can influence is what you do today.

8. Virtue as the Only Good

The Stoics were clear: wealth, power, and reputation are not goods in themselves. The only true value is virtue. Wisdom. Courage. Justice. Temperance.

I have made mistakes in my career. When I did, I faced three choices every time: bury it and hope it never surfaces, find someone else to carry it, or take full responsibility.

I have always chosen the third. Not because I am particularly virtuous. Because I could never bring myself to blame someone else for something that was mine. And burying it — I will be honest — I was tempted. The temptation is real. The quiet calculation of whether anyone will ever find out is something most finance professionals have experienced and few will admit.

What kept me honest was simpler than principle: I could not live with the alternative.

Integrity in reporting is not about being watched. It is about who you are when nobody is.

9. Detachment from Results

Do your best. Accept the outcome. Identify with neither your successes nor your failures.

This is the hardest principle for me. I am fully invested in everything I do. Detachment does not come naturally when you have put everything into something.

I have stayed up all night on reports that were never opened. I have championed projects that ended up shelved. I have delivered analyses that influenced no decision and received no acknowledgment.

Those moments used to stay with me longer than they should have.

What I have learned — slowly, imperfectly — is that the quality of the work and the fate of the work are two separate things. You control one. You do not control the other. Confusing them is how good people become bitter ones.

The Stoic paradox holds: those who detach from results often achieve better ones. Because they decide clearly, without the distortion of needing the outcome to validate the effort.

I am still working on this one.

10. The Examined Life

Socrates said: “An unexamined life is not worth living.”

The Stoics practiced daily examination. Each evening they asked: what did I do well today? What could I have done better? What did I learn?

In finance, this is the post-closing debrief. Variance analysis. Project retrospectives.

But also, more personally: did I act with integrity today? Did I ask the right questions? Did I serve my mission or just the numbers?

Why This Matters Now

I am not a philosopher. I am a finance executive.

But after 15 years of watching how the best decision-makers work, I have realized something most business schools never teach:

The ability to stay calm, clear-headed, and focused on what truly matters is not a personality trait. It is a practice. One that can be learned, trained, and applied — even in a boardroom, even under pressure, even when the numbers are bad.

Stoic principles are not abstract philosophy. They are a decision-making technology tested over 2,000 years.

This is what I call being a Stoic in business.

And this is what I will explore in the essays that follow. One principle at a time. With concrete examples. Without philosophical jargon.

Because ancient wisdom deserves better than dusty libraries.

It deserves to be tested in boardrooms.

— Anouar

The realization embarrassed me. Not because I was wrong. But because of how quickly I got there.

What surprised me more was what I saw next. She wasn’t rushing. She wasn’t distracted or resentful. She spoke softly to the dog, petted him often, laughed when he pulled on the leash. They looked content. Genuinely content.

And standing there watching her, I felt something I wasn’t expecting. Longing.

Not for the dog. Not for her life. But for something I recognized and couldn’t quite name in that moment. A question that formed slowly, almost against my will: what happened to me?

My first serious job was at a Moroccan SSII of around 200 people, and I was not a big shot. Junior title, junior salary, working under a finance manager old enough to be my father. In many ways, he was. I learned more from him in those early years than from anything I’ve read since.

In Moroccan culture, you don’t say no to your elders. So when he asked me to bring him lunch, fetch coffee and cigarettes, do the copying, retrieve something from his car. I did it. Without hesitation and without resentment.

But here’s what I remember most clearly: I volunteered for more. Not because I was paid extra. Not because I was trying to impress anyone. Just because I genuinely enjoyed being useful. Enjoyed being part of something. Enjoyed showing up.

That woman didn’t choose to walk someone else’s dog. I chose to do work that wasn’t mine.

And I was happy.

I couldn’t tell you when it changed. There was no moment, no decision, no morning I woke up different. It happened the way most important things happen: gradually, quietly, while I was looking elsewhere.

My salary increased. My enjoyment decreased. Not disappeared — I want to be precise about that. I still love what I do. But the excitement of those early days, the willingness to show up for anything, to volunteer for the unglamorous work, to find genuine pleasure in small tasks, that’s harder to find now.

Somewhere between the junior salary and the senior title, I traded presence for performance.

I don’t have a clean answer. But I know two things now that I didn’t before that walk.

The first: enjoy it while it lasts. Not as a warning but as an instruction. If you’re early in your career and everything feels alive, that feeling is worth more than the salary you’re chasing.

The second: if the joy is gone, don’t stand there watching someone else have it. That’s what I was doing on that street. Work on it. It’s not a fatality.

She didn’t know she was carrying something I’d lost. She was just walking a dog.

— Anouar

You’ll be amazed by the stories you’ll hear from a friendly stranger you accidentally met by chance, opened your door to, or let into your inbox. Let me be that stranger.

Not because I have all the answers. Not because I think my life is particularly extraordinary. But because I’ve been carrying thoughts that don’t fit anywhere else.

LinkedIn is for professional insights. Instagram is for images. Twitter is for hot takes.

Substack is for the longer thoughts. The ones that need space.

Here’s what I know about myself:

I work in finance. Management control, reporting, budgeting. The kind of work where precision matters and uncertainty is constant. I’ve spent 15 years watching smart people make questionable decisions, and occasionally making a few myself.

I read Stoic philosophy. Not because it’s trendy but because it works. Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca. Three very different men who arrived at the same conclusion: clarity comes from within, not from circumstances.

I live in North Africa. Morocco, specifically. A place the world often misunderstands, and I often feel compelled to explain — not defensively, but honestly.

I believe in kindness. Not the performative kind. The quiet, deliberate, costs-you-something kind. The kind you practice when nobody is watching.

And I write. Not because I’m a great writer (I am not, i’m still learning) but because writing forces clarity. And clarity is the thing I’m always chasing.

So that’s what this is.

Every Sunday, one essay. Sometimes about finance. Sometimes about philosophy. Sometimes about life in a way that doesn’t fit any category.

Just writing.

If you’re here, I’m glad you are.

— Anouar