Don't be replaced: staying yourself through success

Executive overview

Success and power reshape people — often for the worse. Hemingway started as a humble craftsman; fame turned him into a bloated caricature of himself. Marcus Aurelius faced the same pressure and fought it deliberately.

The antidote is twofold: resist being "Caesarified" by flattery and status, and apply Epictetus's practice of essaying — treating every impression as counterfeit until tested.

You can't trust what success tells you about yourself. Test everything.

The danger of being imperialized

• Hemingway after The Sun Also Rises: the shy reporter vanished, replaced by a literary celebrity
• He cheated on his wives, bullied friends, believed his own myth
• Marcus Aurelius feared the same — "Caesarification" — being changed by the purple cloak of absolute power
• He saw what absolute power did to predecessors and made it a deliberate fight to resist it
• Hemingway lost the better version of himself; Marcus Aurelius didn't

Testing your impressions: the Epictetus framework

• Epictetus uses a key verb — to essay — 10 times in the Discourses and once in the Enchiridion
• The word comes from the assayer: the expert who tests coins and metals to verify authenticity
• A skilled merchant can hear a counterfeit coin hit a table the way a musician detects a sour note
• The assay office at Cerro Gordo: miners brought raw ore here to find out what it was actually worth — belief in value meant nothing without the test
• Epictetus: we apply careful scrutiny to money, but "yawn and doze off" when it comes to our own perceptions

How to apply the practice

• When an impression arrives, pause: "Hold it up — who are you, where are you from?"
• First test: does this belong to what is in my control, or not?
• If not in your control, the answer is: "It is nothing to me"
• Don't spend currency you haven't confirmed you have — don't act on impressions you haven't verified
• Biases, upbringing, and misleading appearances distort first glances; the test cuts through them