This week, you’ll practice doing exactly what Marcus was doing when he wrote the advice that started this chapter. Each morning, take a few moments to remind yourself that you may meet difficult people, but that you will do your best not to be angry or frustrated with them, and instead work with them.

Every morning, before you start your day, write out your own premeditation on encountering difficult people. Reading Marcus’s words for the first few mornings may be a useful way to start. Writing out these concepts in your own words will help further ingrain them. If you get stuck, try incorporating in your own writing these three ingredients that Marcus used to remind himself of how to work with difficult people:

• A premeditation to remind you that you will likely encounter frustrating people—this helps take the sting of surprise out of such occurrence.
• A reminder that they are doing what they think is right and that you are trying to improve yourself by focusing only on what’s in your control.
• Some reasons you’ll be better off if you try to work with other people—this part of the recipe provides motivation to work with difficult people, that is, in order to cultivate your own prosocial tendencies.

If you choose to read Marcus’s passage instead of writing for the first couple of days, make a brief note that you did so.

To print a blank version of this prompt, please go to our web page for the book: theexperimentpublishing.com/?isbn=9781615195336.

This exercise marks a turning point in your practice of the Discipline of Action. The exercises for the past several weeks have primarily focused on the first part of the discipline according to Epictetus: to “act according to order, to reason, and not carelessly.” Starting with this exercise, we’ve shifted the focus to becoming a better, more prosocial person or, in Epictetus’s words, “not to be free from affects like a statue, but . . . to maintain the relations natural and acquired.”² So far, we’ve worked on controlling our actions as a result of strong emotions with the Discipline of Desire, and we’ve practiced acting more thoughtfully and less out of habit with the first part of the Discipline of Action. These two phases have set the stage for this next step: to become a better person.

How did your premeditation on other people go this week? Did you find that it helped you act and feel calmer around people who would have frustrated you in the past? If not, is there anything you could have done to make your practice more effective? Take some time to reflect on your experience over the past week, and write down.