Raymond Hou (Raymond) has long used Stoic philosophy as the underlying operating system for his business and emotions. In a blog post in November 2020, he first publicly described Stoicism as “the foundational philosophy of life hacking.” Since then, he has repeatedly drawn on it in courses, interviews, and review tools, gradually developing a localized version of his own.1 For Raymond, Stoicism is not a classical text to read for self-cultivation; it is a set of criteria that can be put directly into a workflow to decide “where to spend one’s energy.” For the school’s history, see Stoicism; this entry focuses only on how Raymond uses it.
Core Argument: Accept Uncertainty and Focus on What You Can Control
Raymond summarizes Stoicism as “acknowledging uncertainty in life and actively changing our judgments about events.” He reads this alongside Life Hacker (Reagle), which he encountered around the same time. The hacker mindset seeks a sense of control over life, but reality contains many things that are complex, uncontrollable, and without clear boundaries. Stoicism fills in the missing piece: “What should we do when we face inevitable loss of control and disappointment?” Raymond therefore treats it as a complement to hacker rationality, not its opposite.
He often uses traffic jams as an introductory example: if the fact of being stuck in traffic cannot be changed, shift attention to what can be done in the moment, such as finishing something one wants to listen to or thinking about leaving earlier next time. This action applies the basic Stoic “dichotomy of control”: first ask whether something is within one’s control; accept what is not, without generating additional distress over it. Raymond notes common ground with Adler’s “separation of tasks” and Daoist thought, and describes Stoicism as a way of dealing with life that “removes the religious parts and keeps the philosophical principles.”
The Three-Part Control Framework: Adding “Partly Controllable”
Raymond’s main change to the original dichotomy of control is to add a “partly controllable” category between “controllable” and “uncontrollable,” forming his own “three-part problem (control) framework.” His reason is that a strict binary often leaves people stuck: many situations are neither fully within one’s control nor completely beyond one’s influence, and forcing them into two boxes undermines action. The three categories each correspond to a practical response:
- Controllable: Act immediately, standardize the process, and write it into an SOP or handbook. Follow the process to find the solution with the highest efficiency and lowest cost.
- Partly controllable: Arrange learning and seek resources, gradually bringing more control to one’s side.
- Uncontrollable: Learn to let go or change one’s perspective on the situation.
He incorporated this method into The Super Individual’s Way of Working, teaching it alongside the DIKW model and review journaling as a tool for turning “data and information” into “knowledge that can be acted on repeatedly.” Raymond also feeds journal entries into a custom “review AI assistant,” allowing AI to help classify them into the three categories and analyze possible action paths. This reduces the interference of emotion in judgment and delegates part of Stoicism’s inner work to a tool. The method is described in The Problem Analysis Method.
ABC Theory of Emotion: Connecting Classical Practice with Modern Psychology
Raymond presents Stoicism alongside psychologist Albert Ellis’s ABC theory of emotion as two historical formulations of the same insight. ABC theory holds that emotions (C) are not directly caused by events (A); they are shaped by the intervening beliefs and judgments (B). He often uses an unanswered read receipt as an example: the irrational belief “Does this person hate me?” leads to anxiety and impulsive behavior, while the rational belief “They may be busy” brings calm. From this, Raymond derives his definition of maturity: being able to control the voice inside oneself rather than dance to environmental stimuli.
He cites Ellis’s line, “People are not disturbed by things, but by the views they take of them,” as a bridge between the two systems. External events are neutral in themselves; personal judgment affects emotion, and judgment is precisely what Stoicism identifies as being “within our control.”
Experimentation and Premeditation of Adversity
Alongside control and emotion, Raymond retains Stoicism’s action-oriented side. Citing Tim Ferriss’s description of Stoicism as a “personal operating system,” he emphasizes that this philosophy values reason and systems, but also “experimentation”: deliberately living through a period of poverty, going several weeks without complaining, or imagining in advance that disaster has befallen oneself. These exercises train one’s character and create some sense of certainty amid uncertainty. He sums this up in a practical maxim: “Whatever you fear, go experience it,” whether by experiencing it in reality or imagining it in advance. This attitude—refusing to be held hostage by sunk costs and choosing for oneself what to do next—is how he turns Stoicism from ideas into daily action.
Application to Business Decisions
Stoic thinking about control also shapes how Raymond discusses business and the times he lives in. In an interview with Jacky, he used the same language to define what he pays attention to: he is not very concerned with “the world’s biggest changes,” because they are uncontrollable. Instead, he focuses on actionable questions such as “what opportunities in this era should ordinary people not miss.” When discussing whether to have children, he frames the issue with the rule “skip the things that are even less controllable.”2 For Raymond, the dichotomy of control is not only a way to manage emotions; it is also a filter for directing attention and resources. This thread runs through his accounts of The Self-Employed Era (2020–) and Super Individual.
Sources and Positioning
Raymond’s Stoic influences come from reading and contemporary popularizers, rather than academic training. His early summaries grew out of the book Life Hacker and Wan Weigang’s retellings, including a story about having a wallet stolen in the Rome subway and still living the rest of the day normally. In recent years, he has studied Ryan Holiday as a case of turning Stoic ideas into accessible content: in a 2025 article, he analyzed how Holiday used popular writing to bring Stoicism to a mainstream audience and built a content ecosystem around the four virtues of courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom.3 Raymond’s attitude toward Stoicism has consistently been tool-oriented, echoing Reagle’s observation that life hackers do not care about the intent of ancient sages; they just want to solve their own problems. He also recognizes the cost of this approach: “If you want to be a life hacker, you have to bear its costs—and realizing that is itself a form of practicing Stoicism.”
Sources
Footnotes
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Raymond Hou, “Stoic Philosophy: More Suited to Modern People Than Adler? The Dichotomy of Control and Imaginary Experiments,” WordPress article, 2020-11-02. View original ↩
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Raymond Hou, “What Is a Super Individual? A Conversation with Jacky About Work and Life Philosophy After Thirty | Highlights from an Interview with Raymond,” WordPress article, 2025-08-17. View original ↩
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Raymond Hou, “Who Is Ryan Holiday? From College Dropout to Bestselling Author, Building a Stoic Content Empire with the Card-Note Method,” WordPress article, 2025-09-23. View original ↩