Today (May 1st), I want to commemorate all the victims of communism — past and present — from all over the world. The myriad moral evils committed in the name of “equality” and “brotherhood” never cease to amaze me.

The Daily Stoic, a popular Internet platform created by Ryan Holiday (see here), sums up Stoicism in one sentence as follows: “A Stoic believes they don’t control the world around them, only how they respond–and that they must always respond with courage, temperance, wisdom, and justice.” (Daily Stoic, 4 Feb 2019) I will therefore start off my survey of Stoicism with the most famous Stoic moral precept of all: the crucial distinction between things that are in one’s power–i.e., one’s actions, thoughts, beliefs, desires, and judgments, all of which are entirely under one’s control–and externals or “indifferents” (ἀδιάφορον), such as one’s reputation, social status, and other people’s actions, none of which are ultimately under our control. This distinction is so crucial for the Stoics because it points us in the right moral direction, making it possible for us to live a good life by acting in harmony with nature and in accordance with reason.[1]

As it happens, the Stoic doctrine of indifferents is not just relevant to one’s moral life; it also plays out in the business world as well, for some business outcomes are the result of pure chance, of factors outside one’s control, while others are the result of one’s hard work and good planning. As such, a shrewd capitalist must be able to distinguish between luck and skill when making decisions.[2] Billionaire financier Robert Rosenkranz, for instance, illustrates this key capitalist mental trait by asking us to imagine a group of dart-throwing monkeys:

“By the laws of statistics, if 1,000 monkeys pick stocks by throwing darts at a stock table, 500 of them will do better than average in a year and 500 will do worse. Repeat the exercise and 250 will outperform two years in a row; 125 will outperform three years in a row…and so on until you have thirty-one monkeys with great five-year track records. Quite a few of those lucky monkeys will be showing up in your office, touting their billion-dollar hedge funds and encouraging you to invest with them. The challenge is to distinguish luck from skill in an investment track record.” (Rosenkranz 2025, p. 134; ellipsis in original)

But if we dig a little deeper, we will see just how superficial the parallel between these two distinctions is, between the astute capitalist’s ability in the business world to separate skill and luck and the Stoic ability in the moral realm to discern the difference between things that are in one’s power and things that are not. Simply put, the correspondence between these otherwise similar abilities breaks down for two reasons. One is that they are qualitatively different. Unlike the Stoic dichotomy of control in which things either are or are not in one’s control, the distinction between skill and luck in the business world is more a matter of degree, rather than two separate or self-contained categories. In fact, it would be more accurate to talk about a “luck-skill continuum” (see, e.g., Mauboussin 2012, pp. 174-174), since most business outcomes are the result of some combination of luck and skill.

But even if we put aside this qualitative difference, the other, more fundamental reason this correspondence breaks down is because the capitalist is focused on (literally) the bottom line, while the Stoic is focused on intentions, efforts, and character. We can use the Stoic archer metaphor (see, e.g., Stephens 2012, p. 94) to illustrate this crucial difference between capitalist and Stoic mindsets. On the one hand, the sole aim of the capitalist archer is to hit his target, so to speak (e.g, meet projected sales, expand market share, close a good deal, etc.). Why? Because in order to get ahead in the world of business (or to “better one’s condition” in the parlance of Adam Smith), you have to get results: “Show me the money!,” as the fictional sports agent Jerry Maguire would say. The main objective of the Stoic archer, by contrast, is more process-oriented as opposed to outcome-oriented: the Stoic archer will do his utmost to develop his skills and talents, but whether his arrows actually hit the target is an indifferent to the Stoic.[3] (To be continued …)

[1] Marcus Aurelius equates reason with nature in Meditations, 7.11: “For a rational being, to act in accordance with nature is also to act in accordance with reason.”

[2] See generally Mauboussin 2012.

[3] Cf. Stephens 2012, p. 94: “The archer musters all her skill to try to hit the target. But once the well-aimed arrow is shot from her bow, what happens to the arrow is no longer up to her. If an external factor causes the arrow to miss the target, the archer has not failed to shoot expertly. Similarly, the Stoic who does all she can to act justly and wisely succeeds in hitting her target, even if the world is not caused to improve by her virtuous ‘shot’ (attempt).”