“Epithets for yourself: Upright. Modest. Straightforward. Sane. Cooperative. Try not to exchange them for others.” — Marcus Aurelius
Clemson hadn’t won a conference championship in eighteen years, and they hadn’t won a national championship in twenty-eight years, when Dabo Swinney took over as interim head coach of the Clemson Tigers football team in 2008.
The interim head coach position is one of the most unenviable positions in all of sports. You are the boss, but with no real power and very little control — of the program, of the roster, of your future. None of the 29 interim head coaches in college football before Swinney, for example, were able to turn their extended tryout into a full-time job. Swinney would be different, though. He would make the most of those seven weeks in 2008, finishing with a winning record and starting a journey that would ultimately lead to a Clemson dynasty.
One of Coach Swinney’s secrets was to fix the broken team culture his predecessor cultivated. One of his strategies for achieving that goal was to implement his “one word” practice.
“Every year I choose a word,” Swinney says, “to help me have a specific focus.” He tells his players to do it too. “I tell them to pick a word. I say, ‘I need you to have one word for you that’s going to help you stay locked in, stay focused on being the very best you can be this year.’” Here are just a few examples:
2012: Believe
2016: Love
2018: Joy
2019: Purpose
Your challenge today is to pick one Stoic word to live by this year. One word to help you stay focused on being the very best you can be this year.
In Dabo Swinney’s first full season, he led Clemson to the school’s first bowl win in four years. In his third season, Clemson won its conference. In his seventh season, Clemson lost by five in the National Championship game. The following year, Clemson avenged the loss with a four-point victory over Alabama to claim the school’s first National Championship since 1981. And in his tenth season, Swinney led Clemson to a historic undefeated season — one that has them in the discussion as one of the best college football teams ever.
Such is the power of having your one word. A version of this exists in yoga practice, with the setting of intention. In Hinduism and Buddhism, with meditation, you might call this a mantra. Marcus Aurelius famously called them “epithets for the self”:
Upright
Modest
Straightforward
Sane
Cooperative
There are many others he could have added to his list, that you can choose from:
Honest
Patient
Steadfast
Kind
Brave
Calm
Generous
How should you choose your word? What we learn from both Swinney and Marcus is that you should begin with a destination. For Dabo Swinney, as long as he is a college football coach, that is winning a National Championship. For Marcus, that was being one of the great Emperors. As Seneca said, “If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.” The one word is a kind of polestar. It is both the port of call and the wind at your back helping you get there. It pushes and pulls you.
Which is what we kept in mind when choosing our Stoic word for 2022. We know what our goals are, but we also know that 2022 is going to be a year where we’re going to need some push and pull. Through the omicron variant and whatever other mutations are coming. Through continuing market volatility. Through tech disruption and job displacement and media distrust. Through all that’s about to happen in 2022, we are going to need “resilience”.
If Stoicism is anything, it’s a formula for enduring the blows of fortune, the whims of life. Stoicism has been there for great men and women in business failure, in grief, in market collapses, in natural disasters and pandemics. It’s what Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and Seneca were all talking about in their own way: How to not only keep going in a world in which most of what happens is not up to us, but to be made better, stronger, by difficulty. “Misfortune brings this one blessing,” Seneca wrote, “to whom it always assails, it eventually fortifies.” Marcus Aurelius said he was working to be like a fire that “makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.” And it was Epictetus who said that difficulty turns us into who we are meant to be. “So when trouble comes,” he said, “think of yourself as a wrestler whom God, like a trainer, has paired with a tough young buck. For what purpose? To turn you into Olympic-class material.”
These are the things we want to come back to throughout the year when we think of our word, “resilience”. Whenever adversity strikes — this is turning us into who we are meant to be. This will make us stronger. This is our sparring partner. Without this, we could never become Olympic-class material.
Watch: Stoicism and the Art of Resilience
You can choose “resilience” as well, or maybe there’s a word that is more true to you and your goals. What is important is that the word is not chosen for you in retrospect, by the course of events, because you couldn’t decide. You can see what that looks like if you reflect on where we have found ourselves as a culture these last few years. A lot of us have been calling 2021 “abnormal.” 2020 was “unprecedented.” Search 2016 stories on Google and it isn’t long before you run into the phrase “worst year ever.”
In this way, every year seems to end up with its own word. The idea with this challenge is we choose the word for the year, instead of letting the year choose the word for us after it’s all over.
To do that, we must begin today with some thinking about what port we want to sail to this year. Pretend 2022 is nearing its end — what would have made it a great year? What do you want to create or accomplish or strive towards? What do you want more of in your life? What do you want less of? What do you want to change? When you’re ringing in the new year 360 days from now, what will allow you to say to yourself: “I did it.”
Choosing your word is not about setting a goal for the year, it’s about setting a tone for the year. But inevitably, that tone is aimed at a goal. Again, think of Coach Swinney — his word of the year is working backwards from the goal of winning a championship. His word helps him stay locked in on his goal. So today, you should think about your goals for the year. When those become clearer, your one word will start to reveal itself as well. Because let’s be clear: you are going to choose your word just as much as your word is going to choose you.
Jon Gordon, the author of One Word that Will Change Your Life who works with the Clemson Tigers, says your one word should choose you and not the other way around. “Give it some time,” Gordon writes. “Your word will come! I’ve had people email me saying, ‘I waited and waited and waited and one day, bam, the word hit me. I knew it was my word for the year.’”
Once you have your one word, we encourage you to create a daily reminder of it. It could be as simple as writing the word down on an index card and taping it to your desk. Or if you want to get a little more elaborate, Gordon shares how his coauthors, Dan Britton and Jimmy Page, with the help of their kids, make paintings of their words and hang them in their homes where they’ll see them each day.
In any case, the important thing is that your one word pushes you each day to be the very best you can be this year…and beyond. “If you maintain your claim to these epithets,” as Marcus wrote, “you’ll become a new person, living a new life…Set sail, then, with this handful of epithets to guide you.”
