Did you ever wonder how you can improve your life, your performance, your everything? Isn’t it nice that there’s a self-help guide for everything? Wandering through the bookstores while having a look at the newest books on practical philosophy, I asked myself if they help us improve ourselves.

Most books will introduce one or more persons that lived throughout history. Some may be dead while others may be alive. Yet, all of them will be used to exemplify how to act in certain situations. And that’s where my question came up: How can I improve myself while acting as another person would? The question “What would Jesus do?” popped into my mind. Considering we’re looking at practical philosophy, the question could also be “What would [Socrates / Epictetus / Seneca / enter name here] do?”

I don’t think anyone can improve by acting as other people would. But I think it’s easier to write, read, and learn about those idols while learning about practical philosophy by studying idols might be hard. We are all individuals acting in unique situations. Every situation we find ourselves in is a situation Socrates, Epictetus, or Seneca never lived through. Furthermore, the time and culture they lived in differ from ours.

So, what would we have to study to be able to manage the situations we face? Well, it’s something that won’t sell as well and won’t be as easy to study as the idols we face in self-help books.  I’m talking about the ways we see and analyze situations. In practical philosophy, we know a lot of tools that’ll help us to live a better life. From special perspectives, like the dichotomy of control, certain ways to analyze things, like logic, or the way we categorize the world we see.

Learning those things might be hard. But with some practice, those tools help us to make better decisions, become calmer, and so on. So, let’s study some of those tools together, starting with the question what a good life is and which aspects of our life’s we can control.