Resilience

Derren Brown finds a theme in Book Five of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations: resilience. Marcus says we're given nothing we can't bear, and Brown turns it into a question he asks himself whenever something stings: which side of the Stoic Fork does this fall on, and if it's outside my control, how is it fine? He means it as a thought to let drip in rather than a mantra, like waking on a Saturday and realizing there's no school.

The turn is luck. Brown recounts his friend Richard Wiseman leaving a 20 pound note on the sidewalk outside a cafe: everyone who called themselves lucky found it, and everyone who called themselves unlucky missed it. He adds his own television experiment with a 'lucky' dog statue in an English village. Then he lands the Stoic version: of everything that decides your success, you control two things, talent and energy, and the rest you can let go.