The Problem: Living in Repair Mode
Years ago, I decided that I wanted to learn how to ride a motorcycle. They had always been scary to me and I wanted to get over that fear, and save some gas on my commutes to work. While taking the course to get my permit, I clearly remember one of the most important lessons. In order to avoid a hazard in the road — a pothole, debris on the road, a stopped car — don’t look at it. When you focus on what you’re trying to avoid, you’re more likely to ride straight into it.
There’s a name for that. It’s called target fixation. Whatever holds your eyes, your hands follow. You steer toward what you’re staring at, even when it’s the very thing you’re trying to avoid. That’s why riders get told the same thing over and over: look where you want to go, not at what you’re afraid of hitting.
I’ve been thinking about how much of our inner life works the same way.
The other day when I was journaling I noticed that I kept listing all the ways that I was falling short of the things I wanted to accomplish. All the times that I didn’t stop doing some habit that I was trying to change. In each one, I was focused on what was broken. It made me reconsider my approach.
Let me give you two people. The first is an architect. Before anything gets built, the architect has a picture of what it’s supposed to be. There’s a plan and a purpose. Every decision gets measured against that plan.
The second is a repairman. The repairman’s whole job is finding what’s wrong. Something leaks, he patches it. Something cracks, he fills it. He’s always scanning for the next problem, because that’s the job.
Now, we need repairmen. Things break, and ignoring them just makes the problem worse. But think about what it would mean to live your whole life as one, with no plan and no picture of what you’re building. Just a constant scan for what’s wrong.
I think a lot of us do exactly that when it comes to who we are.
Try this. Think about the things you’re trying to improve about yourself right now. If you’re like most people, the list sounds something like: stop yelling, stop procrastinating, stop scrolling, stop overthinking, fix my temper.
Notice something about that list. Every item is a pothole. It’s a list of what’s broken.
And underneath that list there’s usually a quieter belief. It goes something like: once I fix all of this, then I’ll be a good person, as if goodness is what’s left over after you’ve patched every leak.
Here’s what happens when you live that way.
First, the flaw becomes the center of your attention. You wake up thinking about it and you go to bed reviewing it. You’re staring at the pothole, and you know where that leads.
Second, you become reactive. If there’s no plan, the only thing that tells you what needs attention is whatever feels uncomfortable right now. Today it’s your temper, tomorrow it’s your phone, next week it’s something else. You’re always responding and never building.
And third, the one that does the most damage: you start to believe the repairman’s basic assumption, which is that something is broken. Not that something went wrong, but that I am broken. Your identity becomes the defect list.
Picture two homeowners. Over the course of a year, they spend exactly the same amount of money on their houses. The first one only calls someone when something breaks. A leak here, a cracked tile there. All year long he’s fixing. The second one has a plan. He’s finishing the basement. When a pipe leaks along the way, he fixes it too, but the repair serves the plan.
At the end of the year, the first homeowner has the same house he started with. The second one has a better one.
So here’s where I want to land with this idea. Repair isn’t the problem. We all have things to fix, and pretending otherwise is just another way of avoiding things. The problem is repair without a blueprint. Because without a picture of what you’re building, you can’t even tell what’s actually broken. You only know what hurts.
And the Stoics had a lot to say about that.
The Philosophy: You Need a Blueprint
Start with a simple question. What does it mean for something to be broken?
A chair with a cracked leg is broken because it can’t do what a chair is for, which is holding you up. A clock that won’t keep time is broken because keeping time is its job. “Broken” always means broken relative to a purpose. Without knowing what something is for, you can’t say whether it’s broken. You can only say whether you like it.
The same goes for us. If you don’t know what you’re for, you have no way to tell a real flaw from something that’s just uncomfortable.
Marcus Aurelius wrestled with this on mornings when he didn’t want to get out of bed. In the first entry of Book Five of the Meditations, he reminds himself:
“In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present — I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world? Or have I been made for this, to lie in the bed-clothes and keep myself warm?”
Notice what he does there. He doesn’t attack himself for being lazy. He doesn’t make a list of his flaws. He asks what he was made for, and he measures the moment against that. That’s an architect’s question.
Seneca gave his friend Lucilius a very practical version of this. In his Letters to Lucilius, he tells Lucilius:
“Cherish some man of high character, and keep him ever before your eyes, living as if he were watching you, and ordering all your actions as if he beheld them.”
He then gives him a few examples to follow:
“Choose therefore a Cato; or, if Cato seems too severe a model, choose some Laelius, a gentler spirit.”
And then he gives the reason, which I love.
“For we must indeed have someone according to whom we may regulate our characters; you can never straighten that which is crooked unless you use a ruler.”
That’s the blueprint. And notice that the role model isn’t there to shame you. It’s there to show you what “straight”, what good character, actually looks like.
Epictetus says the same thing in the Enchiridion.
“Immediately prescribe some character and some form to yourself, which you shall observe both when you are alone and when you meet with men.”
Decide who you are going to be, and then build to that.
Now, I want to be honest here, because there’s a fair objection. The Stoics did a lot of repair work. Epictetus called his school a hospital. He said you shouldn’t walk out of a philosopher’s lecture feeling pleased with yourself, but feeling the sting of treatment. Seneca describes reviewing his entire day every night once the lamp was out:
“What bad habit of yours have you cured to-day? what vice have you checked? in what respect are you better?”
So weren’t the Stoics repairmen?
Look closer at Seneca’s review. He asks what bad habit he cured that day and what fault he resisted. But he also asks in what way he’s better. That’s not just hunting for defects. That’s checking progress against a plan. The inspection only makes sense because he knows what he’s trying to build.
That’s the difference. The Stoics repaired, but always against a blueprint.
And there’s something else in Stoicism that should take a lot of pressure off. The Stoics held that everyone who isn’t a perfect sage is, in an important sense, equally short of virtue. Cicero used the image of a person drowning a few inches below the surface can’t breathe any better than one drowning at the bottom of the sea.
That sounds rough, but let’s think about about what he really meant. If the gap between you and perfect virtue doesn’t close until you’re a sage, then “I’ll fix everything first, and then I’ll be good” is literally impossible. You’ll never finish the repairs.
So the Stoics stopped measuring the gap. They measured direction. They had a name for the person who is facing the right way and moving, the prokoptōn, someone making progress. Not finished. Not perfect. Someone under construction.
So how does building actually work?
Epictetus describes it clearly:
“If you like doing something, do it regularly; if you don't like doing something, make a habit of doing something different. The same goes for moral inclinations. When you get angry, you should know that you aren't guilty of an isolated lapse, you've encouraged a trend and thrown fuel on the fire.”
Then he applies it to anger.
“If you don't want to be cantankerous, don't feed your temper, or multiply incidents of anger. Suppress the first impulse to be angry, then begin to count the days on which you don't get mad.”
That’s not a repairman fighting a flaw head-on. That’s a builder killing one habit while building another.
Let me make that real.
Picture a dad who keeps snapping at his kids. In repair mode, his project is “stop snapping at my kids.” Every night he replays the moments he lost it. He feels terrible. He resolves to do better. And snapping at his kids stays the center of his attention. It’s the pothole he can’t stop staring at.
Now give him a blueprint. Instead of “stop snapping,” he asks: “What kind of father do I want to be?” Maybe the answer is: I want to be the dad my kids aren’t afraid to bring bad news to.
Now he has something to build. When they come to him, he gets down at eye level. He asks a question before he reacts. He lets a pause happen. He’s building a new way of being.
And here’s the thing. He didn’t defeat the snapping. He crowded it out. There’s less room for it, because he’s filling that space with something else. Rater than being a broken father being repaired, he’s a father under construction.
The Practice: From Stop List to Blueprint
So what do you actually do with this? Here’s a practice in four steps. You can do the first three in about fifteen minutes, and the fourth takes a few minutes every night.
Step one: write your stop list.
Get a piece of paper and write down the things you’re trying to fix about yourself.
A few that I had on my list:
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Stop scrolling on social media when you get up in the morning.
Stop pushing things off just because you’re tired.
Don’t have a whiskey with dinner on weekdays.
Then look at the list. Count how many items start with “stop,” “less,” “don’t,” or “fix.” If it’s most of them, you’re not alone.
Psychologists call these avoidance goals: goals aimed at getting away from something rather than moving toward something. In a 1997 study, Andrew Elliot, Kennon Sheldon, and Marsha Church followed students across a semester. The students who had more avoidance goals reported lower well-being, and their well-being actually declined over the semester. Your stop list is just a list of potholes. Staring at it wears you down.
Step two: turn each item into a blueprint.
For every item on the list, ask yourself: If this flaw weren’t here, what would be standing in its place? Who would I be?
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“Stop procrastinating” becomes “someone who starts before he feels ready.”
“Less time on my phone” becomes “someone who is actually present with the people in front of him.”
“Stop snapping at my kids” becomes “the dad my kids aren’t afraid to bring bad news to.”
Here’s a quick test. Could you say the new version about the person you’d choose as your Cato? If you can, it’s a blueprint. If it still sounds like a correction, keep working on it.
This is Seneca’s ruler. You’re not writing a list of what’s crooked anymore. You’re drawing what straight looks like.
Step three: attach one small action to each blueprint.
Remember Epictetus: every habit is strengthened by the corresponding acts. So for each line on your blueprint, pick one small, concrete action you can do today:
Starts before you feels ready mean working on the first ten minutes of the hardest task, before getting stuck clearing email.
Being present with the people in front of you means putting phone in another room during dinner.
The dad his kids can talk to starts with one question before reacting.
Keep each action small enough that you can do it on a bad day. Construction doesn’t happen in heroic bursts. It happens one brick at a time.
Step four: change your evening review.
Keep Seneca’s practice, but notice where you point it. Instead of starting with “What did I do wrong today?”, ask two questions:
Where did I build today?
Where did I drift from the plan?
Notice the word drift. Not “fail” and not “break.” When a cyclist drifts off his line, he doesn’t decide he’s a terrible rider. He looks up and steers back. Drift is a navigation problem, not a verdict on your character.
And then do what Epictetus suggested: count the days. Not the days you failed, but the days you built. Once a week, look back at the count. That’s how you see your trajectory, which is the only thing a prokoptōn is measuring.
One warning. Don’t let the blueprint become a new stick to beat yourself with. If you catch yourself holding it up and thinking “look how far I am from that,” you’re measuring the gap again. You’ve turned the architect back into a repairman. The blueprint points a direction, not distance.
Which brings us to what to do when you drift, and you will.
Conclusion: Maintenance not Repair
Let's go back to the house one more time.
The architect's house still needs work. Gutters get cleaned. Paint gets touched up. The furnace gets serviced every fall. From the outside, it looks a lot like what the repairman does.
But it isn't the same. Repair is triggered by failure. Something breaks, it hurts, and you scramble to fix it. Maintenance is done before anything breaks, and for a completely different reason. You maintain something because it's worth keeping.
I make sure to make time for maintenance on my bike. Cleaning the chain, checking the tires before a long ride. I don't do it because the bike is broken. I do it because you care about my bike and where it's going to take me.
That's the shift I want to leave you with. The same work can come from two completely different places. You can work on yourself because you believe you're broken, or because you believe you're building something worth taking care of.
Maintenance assumes you've already built something of value. And you have. Every time you acted on your blueprint, every brick you laid, that's real. It's yours. Taking care of it isn't an admission that you're broken. It's what you do with something you value.
And you will drift. Some days you'll snap at your kids. Some days the phone will win. Marcus Aurelius knew this. He was emperor of Rome, writing to himself, and he still needed this reminder:
"Be not disgusted, nor discouraged, nor dissatisfied, if thou dost not succeed in doing everything according to right principles; but when thou hast failed, return back again, and be content if the greater part of what thou doest is consistent with man's nature, and love this to which thou returnest."
Return back again. Not "start over," and not "tear it all down." Return to the plan. And notice the last part: love this to which thou returnest. He's not telling himself to grit his teeth and go back to the work. He's telling himself to love the blueprint. To love what he's building.
That's the difference between a repairman and an architect. One works out of fear of what's broken. The other works out of love for what's being built.
So here's what I'd ask you to take with you this week. You don't become good by fixing everything that's wrong with you. You'll never finish that list. You become good by building what's right, and the fixing takes care of itself along the way.
Pick your Cato. Draw your blueprint. Lay one brick today.
And when you're out there, on the bike or anywhere else, and you notice your eyes locking onto the pothole, remember what every rider learns:
Look where you want to go.
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