A Stoic is tough, as we have said. A Stoic does not look to make excuses. But does that mean a Stoic is also a glutton for punishment? Hardly.

As Steven Rinella writes in American Buffalo, his wonderful study of the great American mammal that doubles as a memoir of his hunting trip in Alaska to harvest a wild one, “there’s a fine line between being practical and being a candyass, which is a word that my father used to describe someone whom he considered to be the opposite of tough. When I’m in the woods and I run into a situation that seems like a bad idea, whether it’s climbing up a steep icy mountainside or taking a canoe through a nasty stretch of rapids, I always ask myself which of these two words, practical or candyass best defines my decision making.”

That distinction between practicality and weakness, fragility, timidity, fear–it’s the perfect way to describe the balance every Stoic must strike when handling adversity. A Stoic is tough and resilient and resolute–the opposite of (to use Rinella’s father’s outdated term) a “candyass,” to be sure. But a Stoic is also not a fool. They are smart, clever and most of all practical. Marcus Aurelius, himself a hunter, writes in Meditations that the response to “brambles in the path” is not to plunge into them unnecessarily but to go around them. Unless of course there was no other alternative, in which case, the obstacle is the way.

We endure the blows and twists of life. We have a heart for any fate. But we also have a brain. We look for sustainable, painless, practical solutions…if they exist. We compromise. We look for efficiencies. We don’t care how something looks to others, only whether it gets the job done. If we need help, we ask for it. If there’s an easier path, we take it, provided we can still hold tight to our standards and self-respect.

We’re tough…but only when we need to be. We’re practical first.