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ยท 2 min read

Today I was listening to this interview of Ariana Huffington by Tim Ferris. She was talking about the concept of Imperturbabilty which I found to be fascinating. By the way, if you haven't checked out podcasts by Tim Ferris, you must check the out. He interviews some world class people in great detail.

Anyways, so the idea of imperturbability is to be in a state where you are not easily perturbed or disturbed. This is essentially the Stoic mindset of taking things in their stride. Not getting too agitated by failure or get too complacent by success.

The word was used by Marcus Auerelius in his classic book, Meditations which is a great glimpse into the Stoic thought process. Marcus Aurelius was a Roman Emperor who led several wars, conquered states and go through plague epidemics in his kingdom. But in all these, he maintained a Stoic way, a state of imperturbability.

The idea is not to never get disturbed, but to be in a stable equilibrium where you get back to your centred-state even after getting agitated. Its essentially the idea of stable equilibrium in physics, where a body gets back to its original state even after it has been moved from its state of equilibrium

Equilibrium

So, in a stable equilibrium, even if you are perturbed by anger or some external stimuli, you get back to the equilibrium state - the state of stable equilibrium.

How do we reach that state? The state of centred equilibrium? Need to explore that further.