The Stoicism Lecture #2: Stoicism vs Pessimism

There is a huge difference between being a stoic and a pessimist. Many people mistakenly consider stoics as pessimists; but this is far from the truth. Pessimist is a person who thinks that, everything is bound to go wrong and will go wrong. But a stoic thinks that, many things can go wrong so one must be strong enough to face them. It encourages a person to be self sufficient and have the courage to face adversities.

Simply put, a stoic is not devastated when he gets fired from his job. Being fired from job is so common these days that many people are familiar with the not so happy situation. Getting fired is bad but panicking is not the solution. There must be some reason behind the termination and that has to be analysed. Maybe it's because the economy is down or may be the candidate is missing some skills that the company require. So what you can do is to find out which skills sets are required to land a job and try for job in another company.

We must not be a pessimist and be afraid of losing our job the next day. Rather we need to be aware that the world is not perfect; things can go wrong. If it does go wrong, we should be able to handle it. We must also be keen in upgrading our skillsets. There was a time when knowing C programming language could land you job in IT industry.But look at the situation now; a candidate needs to have knowledge in Java, C, C# , JavaScript and many more to land a job. A pessimist will say, i cannot learn all this and that he will lose the job. But a stoic will say that Even though it is hard, i will learn and a have a better future. This is the attitude we must have these days my friend and surely it will let you achieve your goals.