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April 27
Day 117/365: Epictetus on avoiding error
Logan
April 27, 2025
Welcome to The Stoic Ledger, a daily money meditation from one of the Stoic sages.
117/365: Epictetus on avoiding error
“When you let your attention slide for a bit, don’t think you will get back a grip on it whenever you wish—instead, bear in mind that because of today’s mistake everything that follows will be necessarily worse…Is it possible to be free from error? Not by any means, but it is possible to be a person always stretching to avoid error. For we must be content to at least escape a few mistakes by never letting our attention slide.” – Epictetus
Epictetus reminds us to focus on what we can control. Attention resides in the epicenter of our control, yet it does not come without effort. Our energy systems look to lighten the cognitive load whenever possible, so attention is an expensive budget item and frequent recipient of well-intentioned cuts.
Think about the sheer volume of automatic tasks you perform each day. You’ve become proficient at driving, so your attention wanes and you blend in with the traffic. It’s the near collision that snaps you out of the fog. The contrast between attention and autopilot becomes obvious. Yet we inevitably fall back into the same patterns and driving routines.
So attention is a muscle that must be worked. And when we don’t strengthen this muscle, we leave ourselves susceptible to injury, to error.
The point today? Mitigate a few more unnecessary errors by reclaiming your lost attention.
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