Stoic strength first: the foundation of success

Pavel Tsatsoulin has a company called Strength First and his premise is you need to develop strength before you can develop anything else, whether that's endurance, muscular endurance, cardiovascular endurance, flexibility. He says work on strength first. Strength is the priority. It makes everything else possible. I think one of his coaches put it this way, "Strength is the glass and every other performance metric of fitness fits within the glass itself." But if you don't have the glass, nothing is going to happen or at least it won't happen the way that you might prefer it to happen.

So that got me to thinking, my company, Stoic Strength, I think the mantra or the mission, the message that I should be spearheading and just reiterating over and over again is Stoic Strength First. Because whereas Pavel is talking about physical strength, my contention is it's got to be mental strength. And from the Stoic perspective, that is all that we essentially have. Our physical strength is simply a manifestation of what we can do with our mental strength.

So whereas that Strength First coach said that "strength is the glass and all the physical other performance metrics fit inside the glass", the bigger the glass, the more you can pull and put in there, I contend, and the Stoics did as well, that what comes first is how you make your choices. And what I call virtuous self-control, which I've coined for myself as Stoic Strength, that is the virtue that makes all other virtues possible. I even define the four Stoic cardinal virtues as derivatives of virtuous self-control.

So I think that is a good start. Stoic Strength First. And then any success that an individual might want to realize will be much better handled by having Stoic Strength First.