Daily Stoic Entry #116: How Can I Learn from My Sparring Partners?

April 26th, 2022

Follow along with my personal daily stoic journal, unfiltered, unedited (except for some spelling mistakes).

Morning Reflection:

Creativity, the best part of sparring, is a real-life counterpart who is reacting to your moves and comments. Their response will teach us just how creative we can be. Much like sparring in martial arts, no amount of practicing will compensate for the actual sparring match, you need to be able to put what you’ve learned into practice. This is true for all things, go out there and spar about whatever you’re learning or working on.

Evening Reflection:

Adopting the sparring attitude, that everything is a training exercise, may allow you to adopt a more playful attitude about events in life that happen to you. If you keep that playfulness in mind then anything that happens, you will see it as an opportunity to learn, rather than seeing it as a life-or-death matter. This provides for a much more stress-free and willful way to conduct your everyday life.

Title prompts are taken from The Daily Stoic Journal by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman.