About The Stoic Leader

A leader working through Stoic philosophy one mistake at a time. Stronger and wiser, the hard way.

I started my first real job at twenty, answering phones at a call center in a small Arizona town because it paid double minimum wage and I needed the work. I didn’t plan on a career in leadership. I just kept getting handed harder versions of the same problem: how do you get good work done through other people? I’ve been chasing the answer ever since, through telecom, satellite, retail, and the kind of big, matrixed organizations where the politics are harder than the work.

For a long time I thought the work would speak for itself. I kept my head down, drove the impact, and let other people stand in the spotlight. I was wrong about a lot of that. The boss who taught me something I didn’t want to learn. The interview I bombed. The afternoon I had to pull over at a hamburger stand because the feedback had landed so hard I couldn’t see the road. I’m not writing from the mountaintop. I’m writing from the middle, where most of us actually work.

Somewhere along the way I found Stoic philosophy, and it gave me a way to do this work without losing myself. Not the bumper-sticker version. The practice. What’s mine to control and what isn’t. How to take a hit and learn from it instead of carrying it home. How to give my team what they’re owed instead of hiding behind false humility. I journal on it most days, I’m writing a book about it, and every week I work through one piece of it here, in a story, usually one where I got it wrong before I got it right.

This is for the middle managers. The ones who carry their team’s burdens, deliver the hard messages, and translate the strategy from above. If you want to lead with more wisdom and less ego, and you’re not too caught up in the title to admit you’re still learning, you’re in the right place.

New writing every Sunday. Some weeks a story from work. Some weeks one from life.

Live with Wisdom. Lead with Purpose.