Lyons burned in a single night. Seneca’s friend Liberalis came from the city, and when the news reached him he could not steady himself for days: a colony built over generations was gone between dusk and morning, in peacetime, with no enemy anywhere near it. Seneca wrote to him about the shock rather than the fire.
His diagnosis was that the damage had been done by the suddenness. Liberalis had never once put the thought in front of himself, and so the thought arrived with the event attached to it, at full weight, on the same morning.
Seneca’s instruction was to move the thinking earlier. Our minds should be sent forward in advance to meet all problems, he wrote.
He had no client list. He had the same problem you do.
The Stoics called the exercise premeditatio malorum, and the modern version is unglamorous. You sit down with the income you actually have, you name the two or three sources that make up most of it, and you write the sentence nobody writes: if these pause at the same time, here is the date the arithmetic stops working.
It takes an afternoon. It is skipped almost universally.
Allan Ling skipped it for a year.
He runs a marketing consultancy in Singapore, and he spent this year doing what any sensible operator does, which is building the next thing. New positioning, new target clients, conversations with people who could tell him what he was worth.
All of it forward-facing. None of it touching the base he was standing on.
His account of the gap is exact: “I never thought about what would happen if my old clients had paused.”1
He offers two readings of why, and the second is the honest one. “Sometimes it’s just an obvious missed thing from reflection but it frankly just never occurred to me. Or maybe I was subconsciously avoiding it.”
Avoiding what, put to him directly, produced the answer the exercise exists to reach. He has been in marketing for about ten years. If the honest conclusion were that he should stop, then, in his words, “it’s like I have wasted my last decade.”
That is the reason the afternoon never gets booked.
Running the numbers on your own concentration is arithmetic, and arithmetic is easy. What sits behind the arithmetic is a question about whether the last ten years were the right ten years, and a founder will reorganise an entire calendar to avoid arriving at it.
The exercise is an afternoon with a spreadsheet and a calendar, and it is skipped because of what it asks you to look at rather than how long it takes.
The exercise is an afternoon with a spreadsheet and a calendar, and it is skipped because of what it asks you to look at rather than how long it takes.
The event he did not model is the ordinary one.
Leapers surveyed just over a thousand self-employed people in Britain and found more than half had gone through a significant stretch with no work, and forty-five percent had watched income fall over the year. Those whose income fell were twice as likely to report their mental health getting worse.
For anyone selling their own time, a quiet stretch sits in the middle of the distribution, and it is the one case most operators have never written down.
Seneca did not ask Liberalis to expect the fire. He asked him to have already spent one evening with the idea of it, so that the morning it came, some of the work was behind him.
The founder who has written the date down still loses the client. He loses it on a Tuesday he has already thought about, which is a different Tuesday.
Consider, Seneca wrote, not what is wont to happen, but what can happen.
Footnotes
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Ling’s quotes are from his July sitting with CÈ’s AI interviewer, lightly normalised for print; the wording is his own, transcripts on file. ↩