A Stoic Playbook to Lead With Clarity, Conviction, and Confidence
Lead Above the Chaos
You make high-stakes calls all day and you don't always have all the answers. This Stoic playbook is built for leading with clarity, conviction, and confidence when the pressure feels overwhelming.
The workbook includes all the exercises you need to create your Stoic Leadership Canvas. Free when you join the list.
You Didn't Sign Up to Feel This Out of Control
The first Slack ping hits before coffee. A big customer might churn. By the time your cup is poured, nine more messages have landed and none of them can wait.
You raised the round. You shipped the product. The thing you bet everything on is working. By every metric a board cares about, you're winning.
So why does it feel like you're holding the whole thing together with both hands while the ground keeps moving?
The company outgrew its infrastructure, and the infrastructure became you. You're the routing layer, the escalation path, the final say on everything. You became the bottleneck, not because you're bad at this, but because you're good enough at it that letting go feels reckless.
A bad day would almost be a relief, because a bad day ends. This is all day, every day.
You can out-grind it for a while. You cannot out-grind it forever.
A System for Leading When the Stakes Are High and the Answers Are Not Clear
You've already tried to fix this. You time-blocked the calendar, read the book on deep work, ran the 5 a.m. mornings. For a few weeks it held, then a fire broke out and you were back where you started.
The calendar was never the problem. Tactics tell you how to move faster, not how to decide what matters or stay grounded when the pressure doesn't quit.
Above the Chaos gives you that missing layer. It takes the philosophy that ran empires and turns it into a working system for the founder's chair.
You'll learn how to:
- Tell what you control from what you've just been carrying
- Pull the lesson out of a setback fast and act on it
- Hold your composure when a call can't wait and the answer isn't clear
- Lead from a set of principles instead of from your last bad day
- Build a team culture that holds when you're not in the room
Written for the Founder in the Messy Middle
This book is for you if:
- You're scaling a company and the way you used to operate stopped working
- You make high-stakes calls on incomplete information every week
- You're the person everyone looks to, and you have nowhere to look yourself
- You want to lead with steadiness instead of running on adrenaline
- You've read the productivity books and the funding playbooks and you're still missing the inner operating system
You don't need another growth hack. You need to become the leader your company requires as it scales. This book is how you get there.
Eight Stoic Principles for a Steadier Way to Lead.
Above the Chaos is built on eight Stoic principles, each turned into a hands-on exercise you can run today.
| Principle | The Exercise | What You Build |
|---|---|---|
| Focus on what you control | Control and Influence Mapping | A map of where your energy actually belongs |
| Cultivate virtue and integrity | Virtue Assessment and Alignment | Decisions anchored to principle, not mood |
| Maintain emotional equilibrium | Emotional Response Analysis | Composure you can summon under pressure |
| Embrace obstacles as opportunities | Obstacle Transformation | A method for mining setbacks for the next move |
| Practice mindfulness and reflection | Mindful Leadership Journaling | A daily practice that keeps you honest |
| Understand the impermanence of outcomes | Success-Failure Reflection | Perspective that survives both wins and losses |
| Foster a strong team culture | Team Culture Audit | A team that holds the line when you're absent |
| Lead by example | Behavioral Modeling | The distance between what you say and what you do, closed |
Get the Companion Workbook, Free
The change happens when you write, not when you read. The workbook holds all nine exercises from Above the Chaos, laid out one step per page with room to work each one by hand. Sixty-four pages of prompts, columns, and the Leadership Philosophy Canvas.
What's inside:
- All nine exercises from each chapter
- The Control and Influence map
- The four-virtue and emotional-trigger diagnostics
- The Leadership Philosophy Canvas
- Templates you'll come back to every quarter
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Who Wrote This
I coach SaaS and AI founders through the messy middle between product-market fit and scale. Before coaching I filled nearly every seat myself, from software engineer to data scientist to CTO, so I write from inside the role.
I've worked alongside more than seventy-five technical founders and teams, including OpenAI, where I helped operationalize GPT-3 during its rapid expansion, along with Heap, Sendlane, Tealium, and Sempre Health. Earlier I led the data science and engineering team behind Qualcomm's $7.8 billion IP business and helped build and launch Sony's PlayStation Network.
I found Stoicism the hard way. Above the Chaos grew out of that turnaround and the years of coaching that followed.
What Founders Are Saying
"Having Eric as my executive coach has been more valuable than my Harvard MBA."
Justin Wieland
Founder and CEO, Reach Technologies
"Eric got me more energized with less stress, which means more value for my company and our customers."
James McKernan
SVP Technology, Pathpoint
"Eric connects technical excellence to leadership effectiveness in a way that makes immediate sense to engineering and product minds."
James Heath
Technical Director, OneUp Sales
"Eric is an absolutely incredible mentor, coach, and friend. If you get the chance to work with him, do it. I truly cannot recommend him enough."
Jack Burlinson
CEO, Stageglass
Eric has coached and built alongside teams at OpenAI, Qualcomm, Sony PlayStation, Heap, Sendlane, and Tealium.
The Oldest Operating System for Pressure
The Stoics didn't write to be admired. They wrote instructions for living, for people carrying real weight. Marcus Aurelius ran an empire. Epictetus was born into slavery. Seneca advised a volatile emperor under constant political threat. These weren't philosophers in a library. They were operators.
Two thousand years later the founder faces the same problem: high stakes, low certainty, a team depending on your judgment.
Tim Ferriss calls Stoicism his personal operating system, the thing he runs on to decide under stress. Above the Chaos takes that same operating system and turns it into exercises built specifically for the founder's chair.
Become the Leader Your Company Needs
The chaos isn't going anywhere. The question is whether you meet next quarter the way you met this one, or with a system built for the pressure.
FAQ
Is this book only for tech founders?
It's written for founders and CEOs leading under pressure, with examples drawn from SaaS and AI. The principles apply to anyone making high-stakes calls with a team watching.
Do I need to know anything about Stoicism?
No. Every principle is explained in plain terms and turned into an exercise you can run immediately.
What's the difference between the book and the workbook?
The book teaches the framework and the thinking behind it. In the workbook you run the nine exercises yourself, with prompts and the Leadership Philosophy Canvas laid out one step per page. They're built to be used together.
How do I get the workbook?
Enter your name and email above. It arrives in your inbox within a couple of minutes, free.
Is there a deeper way to work with Eric?
Yes. Eric coaches founders one on one. Book a free strategy call here.
Get the free workbook
Nine exercises. One leadership canvas. Free.