The girl couldn’t have been much older than four or five. It was one of those lazy, boring days and she was bothering her mother. She wanted attention. She wanted to be entertained.

But instead of giving her that, Joan Didion’s mother gave her a gift that would last a lifetime…and change the shape of modern literature. Handing the girl a blank notebook, her mother said if she was bored, then she ought to go write a story which she could then read. “I had just learned to read,” Didion later explained, “so this was a thrilling kind of moment. The idea that I could write something–and then read it!”

We can imagine Epictetus having similar exchanges with the young students he taught. A philosopher must “blow their own nose,” he used to say. They must understand that they hold in their hands, in their minds, the solutions to almost all of their problems. No one but ourselves can truly alleviate our boredom or our anger. No one else can make us feel better, no one else is responsible for our time.

This is a lesson that we need to learn while we’re young of course, but it’s also so easy to forget when we’re older. We hold in our hands all the tools we need to be happy, to be stimulated, to be productive and have purpose. We just need to put them to use. We need to blow our own nose.