stoic-setback-debrief
Recover from a professional setback — a failed launch, brutal feedback, a public mistake, a lost deal, a layoff — using the actual exercises from Marcus Aurelius' Meditations: the control sort, the evening review, and turning the obstacle into the task. Use when someone says 'today went badly', 'I blew it', 'the launch failed', 'I got torn apart in that meeting', or before replying to something that stung. Produces a structured debrief that separates what happened from the story, and ends in one next action.
npx skills add mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills --skill stoic-setback-debrief --agent claude-code
Same command for any agent — swap --agent for codex, cursor, copilot.
Weekly change comes from our own snapshots, not the repository page — it measures attention, not adoption.
# Stoic Setback Debrief Skill Meditations was never a book — it was a working notebook of a man with an overwhelming job talking himself back to steadiness, entry by entry. That makes it the right tool for the bad professional day: not consolation, but a repeatable procedure. This skill runs the notebook's actual exercises on a specific setback, in order, and refuses to end without a next action. It is a debrief, not therapy — and it says so when therapy is what's actually needed. ## What This Skill Produces - A **facts vs. story split**: what verifiably happened, separated from the narrative currently running - A **control sort** of every element of the situation (yours / partly yours / not yours), with effort reassigned accordingly - The **obstacle-turn**: what this setback now makes possible or necessary — the Stoic move of converting the blocker into the task itself - **One next action** sized for today, and a line for [[decision-journal]] if a real decision was surfaced ## Required Inputs Ask for (if not already provided): - What happened, as the user tells it (take the vent — it's data) - What they're most worried it means (reputation, the project, the job) - Anything irrever
- What This Skill Produces
- Required Inputs
- Framework: the notebook's exercises, applied
- Output Format
- Quality Checks
- Anti-Patterns
What does the stoic-setback-debrief skill do?
Recover from a professional setback — a failed launch, brutal feedback, a public mistake, a lost deal, a layoff — using the actual exercises from Marcus Aurelius' Meditations: the control sort, the evening review, and turning the obstacle into the task. Use when someone says 'today went badly', 'I blew it', 'the launch failed', 'I got torn apart in that meeting', or before replying to something that stung. Produces a structured debrief that separates what happened from the story, and ends in one next action.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills --skill stoic-setback-debrief --agent claude-code` — it drops the skill into your project so the agent can pick it up. Swap the --agent value for codex, cursor or copilot if you use one of those.
Where does this skill come from?
From mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills, a repository with 1,255 stars. We read it straight from the repository tree rather than a submitted listing, so what you see here is what is actually published.
Is a popular skill a good skill?
Not necessarily. Stars measure attention, not adoption — a repository can trend for a week and be abandoned. That is why we show the weekly change from our own snapshots next to the total, instead of a single flattering number.