With any goal, our imaginations often run wild envisioning all the things that can go wrong. While it can be productive to think about the troubles that might lie ahead — the Stoics used an exercise called premeditatio malorum , or “premeditation of evils,” to prepare for potential adversity — imagining the worst usually just causes us to become paralyzed with fear.

This is why Marcus Aurelius’ advice was to keep in mind that a life is built action by action. No author ever writes a book, he would say. Instead, they write one sentence and then another and then another.