29-SEP-2026
Open any social media, turn on the radio, or even check your email. Let’s face it: in the 21st century, we’re dealing with a lot. It can sometimes feel chaotic and out of control. But in fact, chaos and uncertainty have been around for a long time.
Over 2,000 years ago, the Emperor of the Roman Empire, Marcus Aurelius, had even more on his plate. He was the most powerful human being on the planet at the time, yet think of what he woke up to each morning:
His empire was being militarily attacked from the north and from the east.
Heavy rains forced the Tiber River over its banks, causing massive overflows and deaths across large parts of Rome.
A pandemic known as the Antonine Plague wiped out an estimated 5 to 10 million of his citizens.
He regularly dealt with ambitious, untrustworthy, and self-serving individuals within the Roman elite and military command.
Still, Marcus Aurelius was grounded in Stoic philosophy. In his personal diary, he reflected on all that was going on and wrote passages that gave him strength, encouragement and focus. (His diary became one of the best-selling books of all time, known as The Meditations – a fact that would no doubt startle and astound the author himself!)
Here is where we can borrow from the Stoic philosophers like Marcus Aurelius, and others such as Seneca and Epictetus. One of the primary tenets of Stoicism is this: Don’t give your energy to the things that you can’t control; focus only on your actions and reactions that you can control.
Marcus Aurelius wouldn’t even recognize what we’re attempting to manage today. Each one of us is juggling a million things (not to mention our government leaders) and the pressure to get it all correct can leave us feeling anxious and exhausted.
Consider leaders and team members in the corporate world who travel for work. They’re regularly expected to chase down multiple paper receipts, itemize what each was for, fill in endless forms for the accounting department, and make all their own travel arrangements. It sucks up a lot of time and energy – scarce resources that could be spent on other more
productive tasks.
Fortunately, today’s technology offers some fantastic tools for navigating our way through the chaos, by allowing us to focus on the things we can control.
In Canada, SAP Concur offers Concur Expense and Concur Travel – two simple-to-use apps on your mobile device, housed together so you don’t have to switch from one app to another.
With Concur Expense, you simply snap a photo of the receipt, and the app does the rest! No more collecting receipts, hours of itemizing and endless accounting forms. And Concur Travel makes planning work trips a breeze. It finds the best deals, schedules your transportation, and maintains all the travel expenses in one place. Simple and convenient.
By doing the work for us, Concur Expense and Concur Travel give us back our energy! We aren’t giving away our energy to the things we can’t control – like lost receipts, missed flights, over-priced hotels and foregone travel conveniences. It takes the energy-sucking tasks off our plates.
Instead, team members are free to focus their energy on the things they CAN control – creativity, client relationships, and their focus on the company’s objectives. And they’ll be happier and more productive as a result.
Canadian corporate leaders and the CFO benefit from greater accuracy and compliance in accounting – resulting in better financial results.
The stoics knew it thousands of years ago. Don’t give away your energy to things beyond your control. Focus on the things you can control. Using Concur Expense and Concur Travel lets you do both.
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