Ryan Holiday's Blog

We Must Not Devolve Into This (Or We Risk 2,500 Years of Progress)

Before we get into it…with the upcoming release of ​ Wisdom Takes Work —the fourth and final book in my Stoic Virtues series —we’re doing a collector’s set of all four books . There’s a limited run of these, so pre-order them here today . I’m also giving a talk in San Diego in February about applying the Stoic virtues to modern life and modern problems. Grab seats and come see me !

On the night of April 4, 1968, Robert Kennedy, then running for president, was about to give a speech in inner-city Indianapolis when he got the news that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated.

It had already been a grueling campaign. It had been a painful few years. And now, another murder, more violence.

Kennedy was the one who had to break the news to the milling crowds that King, their leader, was dead. The crowd, roiling with anger and despair, was on the verge of riot.

His prepared marks woefully insufficient for the moment, Kennedy began to riff. It was a crossroads moment, he said: “In this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in…You can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.”

To those tempted to move in the direction of hatred and revenge, Kennedy said, “I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling,” for his own brother had been struck down the same way just five years earlier. But he also knew personally what a dark and empty road that was. “We have to make an effort in the United States,” he said, “we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.”

Then, he drew on a line from one of his favorite books, The Greek Way by the classicist Edith Hamilton. On a ski vacation four years earlier, Kennedy was loaned a copy of the book and ended up spending most of the trip holed up in his room, absorbed in Hamilton’s wonderful discussion of what made the Greeks so special, what they can teach us, and how they thought about life. It was from her book that he had read a line by the ancient Greek poet Aeschylus that stayed with him. And there in Indianapolis, from memory, he recited it:

“In our sleep, pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

“What we need in the United States is not division,” Kennedy explained. “What we need in the United States is not hatred. What we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness. [What we need is] love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.”

He urged the attendees to return home and to pray, and offered them an alternative, a chance to take meaning from this terrible experience. “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago,” Kennedy said, “to tame the savageness of man and to make gentle the life of this world.”

All over the country similar crowds erupted into mobs, which turned into deadly riots. But in Indianapolis that night, largely because of Kennedy’s words, the people chose peace and restraint over rage and violence.

The reality is that political violence is not unprecedented in American history. It has always been there, lurking beneath the surface of our democracy. In fact, if you’ve read Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage (or listened to my conversation with Bryan), the statistics are staggering—in 1968 alone, there were over 2,000 terrorist bombings in the United States. The FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings on U.S. soil between 1971 and 1972, an average of nearly five explosions per day. As Burrough put it, perhaps the only thing more startling than those numbers is how completely they have been forgotten by the American public. 

If we go back even further, and if you want a really terrifying look at how political violence can consume a republic, I highly recommend Mike Duncan’s The Storm Before The Storm, about Rome and the hundred years of political dysfunction that preceded Julius Caesar. In the book (and in our podcast episode together), Duncan chronicles how the normalization of mob violence, the normalization of assassinations, people breaking the rules, politicians demonizing their opponents, politicians trying to overthrow elections, people thinking that they alone were the solution to the republic’s problems led to the republic’s fall. 

So again, political violence has always been there. And it can continue to be there, if we let anger and hatred take more and more of us in their direction. We can follow Rome’s path toward the normalization of brutality, where every act of violence is met with more violence. Or we can choose to go the way Kennedy talked about that night in Indianapolis—the harder path of understanding, compassion, and the ancient wisdom that teaches us to find meaning in our suffering rather than let it consume us. We can choose, as he said, to try to tame the savageness of man. 

Look, pluralism is not some nice idea. It is a technology. It was invented out of the hard-won wisdom that Aeschylus talked about, largely by the American pilgrims and then the Founders, who looked backwards at centuries of religious violence. They understood that in a winner-take-all system, people would always be fighting. But in a system that allowed for a multitude of views, for freedom of expression and protecting minority views—even abhorrent ones—where the government did not pick sides, then people of all faiths and beliefs could co-exist. 

I do not mean to be kumbaya about this. I also don’t want to dance around the brutality of what happened to Charlie Kirk—a father of two was gunned down by a high-powered rifle on a college campus, bleeding out before he even knew he was dying. I also won’t refrain from denouncing the inane, trollish, and stupid positions he often espoused. Charlie Kirk was a bigot and a misogynist and a homophobe. He also celebrated and encouraged political violence—not just perpetuating the lies about the 2020 election but proudly busing hundreds of people to the Capitol on January 6th, an event that erupted into an insurrection on par with Catiline’s (which he then pleaded the Fifth about in front of Congress). 

No one deserves to die. George Wallace did not deserve to be shot. Neither did Martin Luther King Jr or Robert F. Kennedy. Neither did Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Health. (I was incredibly disappointed to see that the murderer Luigi Mangione had once retweeted something I’d said. Talk about missing my message!) Assassins threaten not only individual lives but the very concept of pluralism and free expression. They steal from all of us. Because now we question what we say, we question whether our rights will be respected, we question whether this project–that is to say democracy–will keep working. 

We all deserve better than the level of discourse that Charlie Kirk practiced, which was the classic toolkit and style of a demagogue, but discourse is better than murder. Virtue (and just plain human compassion) also demands better than the insensitive and cruel responses to his murder…as well as the anti-democratic and authoritarian rhetoric that politicians have thrown about after. It’s shameful what people have been doing and saying…it’s essential that each of us makes the choice to not be implicated or participate in that ugliness. 

I’m reminded of a recent conversation I had with Dr. Laurie Santos on the Daily Stoic podcast. She talked about an essay by the anthropologist Sarah Hrdy, who studies primates and primate interactions. In the essay, Hrdy describes the familiar experience of being crammed on a long, delayed flight filled with dozens and dozens of strangers, all cranky, tired, hungry, and irritable. “And she’s like, ‘if this was any other species,’” Dr. Santos said, “‘they’d be killing each other. No one would leave with their testicles.’ It’s amazing that we get to be in one of the few species where all that happens is somebody says a nasty thing to the flight attendant.”

What keeps us from tearing each other apart on an airplane or in society or in the middle of intense disagreements about religion or policy or events isn’t biology. It’s the social technologies we’ve developed over the past 2,500 years. It’s the political process. It’s rules, the norms, the shared agreements about how we behave and coordinate and cooperate with each other. None of which are guaranteed or permanent or self-sustaining. 

They require constant work, constant vigilance, constant choosing.

They require, as Kennedy said, that we make an effort. An effort to love, to understand, to have compassion toward one another, to treat our fellow human beings like fellow human beings. 

We desperately need to make that effort. We desperately need to put the genie of political violence back in the bottle. 

Because once it gets out, once that Rubicon is crossed, history shows it’s incredibly hard to tame the savageness of man.

You Must Avoid Getting Corrupted By This

I’m giving a talk in Austin next week ( only a few tickets left ) and San Diego in February. Grab seats and come see me !

My study of history has led me to believe that there is a kind of dark matter inside the human race. 

It’s some combination of evil, cruelty, ignorance, cowardice, mob-ness. It is a kind of dark oppositional energy that goes from issue to issue, era to era. It’s rooted in self-interest, self-preservation, in fear, in not wanting to be inconvenienced, not wanting to change, not wanting to have to get involved. It manifests itself a thousand ways, but once you recognize it, you spot it everywhere. 

It’s there in some of our oldest stories. Written in 430 BC, Euripides’ The Children of Hercules is about the plight of the refugee, and how a society is judged by how it treats the weak and vulnerable. The young children of Hercules are driven to the Temple of Apollo in Marathon by a bounty hunter from an angry king, who demands they be handed over to be punished. “They are suppliants and strangers,” the Athenians reply, “Who look to our city for help. / To reject them is to defy the gods.” But the king, obsessed with his vendetta—his goons following his orders—will risk war rather than let these vulnerable people have some measure of peace or safety.

This energy was the motive force behind s the great cruelties of history and the great backlashes too: the Inquisition, the Holocaust, the Confederacy, the exploitation of colonialism, the thwarting of Reconstruction, collaboration in Vichy France, the excesses of the Red Scare and McCarthyism, Apartheid in South Africa, the Rwandan Genocide. And it’s there in modern moments too, big and small, mundane and outrageous: the NIMBY neighbor at a city council meeting to block desperately needed housing, the bullying of librarians, the shrug at another mass shooting, the mob on Twitter gleefully destroying someone, backlash against immigrants (especially when they look different than you), now the backlash vaccines and wind energy, the endless debates (and excuses) while Gaza descends into humanitarian catastrophe.

Gandhi was once asked what worried him most. His reply? “Hardness of heart of the educated.” 

When I look around right now, I think of this hardness of heart as one of the big problems of our time. And the way, in the face of it, good people can become utterly exhausted and detached, worn down by years of resisting this energy.

In my book Right Thing, Right Now, I write about Raphael Lemkin, who spent the first half of the twentieth century trying to wake the world up to the atrocities in Armenia and then in Europe.

No one listened. Even as his own family was being murdered in Poland.

So he backed up and decided to start very small. Part of the problem was that new technology had made violence possible on a scale beyond words. “As his armies advance,” Churchill said of Hitler in 1941, “whole districts are exterminated. We are in the presence of a crime without a name.”

Churchill almost always had the right words. Here, he did not.

That’s what Lemkin solved first.

Because the crime had no name, people excused it, denied it, or looked away. In 1943, Lemkin coined the word “genocide” to describe the deliberate destruction of a people. Added to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary in 1950, the word changed the moral arc of the universe.

There it was. It could not be denied.

Lemkin then fought to codify the word into law. At Nuremberg, he all but slept in the hallways as he lobbied for a UN declaration. He hounded reporters, mailed research to politicians, buttonholed diplomats, wrote op-eds. It was good trouble for a good cause. After four years of relentless work, in 1948 the UN passed a unanimous treaty banning genocide—the nameless crime that had claimed Lemkin’s mother. All he could do was weep.

But the fight was only beginning.

The United States refused to ratify the treaty for decades. In 1967, Senator William Proxmire picked up the baton. “The Senate’s failure to act has become a national shame,” he declared. “From now on I intend to speak day after day in this body to remind the Senate of our failure to act and the necessity for prompt action.”

This was not empty virtue signaling. Genocide was happening at that very moment in Nigeria. Soon it would be Bangladesh. Then Burundi. Then Cambodia. And on and on.

Proxmire’s first speech wasn’t successful. Neither was his tenth. Or his hundredth. But he refused to give in to indifference. Across two decades he gave more than three thousand speeches, patiently making trades and deals, steadily winning over the sixty-seven senators he needed.

Finally, in October 1988—twenty years after he began, forty years after Lemkin—Proxmire gave his last speech on the subject, his 3,211th. This time, he could announce victory. The treaty had passed. The world had, at last, a tool to fight humanity’s most nameless crime.

Of course, it would be wonderful if the world were naturally just, if people were automatically good. But they aren’t. It would be wonderful if this was the end of genocide, but obviously, it is isn’t. Terrible war crimes are being committed right now, not just in the Middle East but also in Ukraine and in Sudan. One of the most heartbreaking truths of life is that people not only fail to do the right thing, they often persist in error or evil even after every argument has been made, every procedure followed.

They dig in. They don’t let go. 

That was the Southern strategy during segregation—make it so difficult, so painful, so nasty that the North would eventually give up, as it had after Reconstruction.

Which is why the civil rights movement was more than marches. It was endless court cases that took years to be heard, years to win, and were often ignored by Southern officials. When James Meredith sought to integrate the University of Mississippi, Justice Department lawyer John Doar filed hundreds of motions, sat before judge after judge, appealed and appealed again.

“You’ve just got to keep going back,” Doar said. It didn’t matter if an injunction went against them, if governors defied rulings, if mobs surrounded them, if no one cooperated. There was always another motion, another venue, another appeal.

The main thing was that the good guys didn’t quit. They refused to be discouraged. They believed they could—and would—prevail. They stayed with it. They just kept going back, until finally, eventually, they made the tiniest bits of progress.

And the thing about this dark energy is that once it is beaten down somewhere, it finds a new place to pop up. It’s like water: it just pools and then seeks a new outlet. After the famous Brown decision, the Southern energy went into founding Christian “segregation academies” or private white-only schools—effectively creating the Religious Right. Although many modern political issues are complex, when you zoom out, you often see how simple they are: This is somewhere that that energy has found an opportunity to go. 

This is an exercise I often do. I mentally put all the specifics aside and I think: What would the people who shouted slurs at Ruby Bridges (or Ernest Green, who I’ve interviewed) as she walked into school for the first time feel about this issue? Or, what about the oligarchs who controlled the levers of power until the Civil War, then fought social reformers during the Gilded Age and then resisted the social safety net during the Great Depression and then fought tooth and nail for isolationism in the run up to WWII (and after too, which is why many senators refused to sign the UN Genocide treaty), what stance would they be drawn to here?  I try to think about where the darkness would go—or how it would be rationalized—and I try to go the other way.

In his private writings, we see Marcus Aurelius doing something similar, constantly reminding himself during his own dark and ugly times: Don’t become implicated in the ugliness. Don’t let it infect you. Don’t become cynical or bitter. “Take care,” he writes in Book 7 of Meditations, “that you don’t treat inhumanity as it treats human beings.” Or to put it a more colloquial and modern way: Don’t let the sonsofbitches turn you into a sonuvabitch. Don’t let bad times make you a bad person.

I’m reminded of Montaigne, who, as we have talked about before, faced what might have been even darker times than our own: mass executions, religious wars, persecution, demagogues, bandits, riots, conflict, thousands of people burned at the stake for mostly imagined crimes. He was aghast at the way people treated each other, especially people they disagreed with or didn’t understand. Yet for all the cruelty around him, Montaigne would not be sucked in. As Stefan Zweig would write in the biography I turn to whenever the world seems dark, Montaigne remained human in an inhuman time. He would not get sucked into the dark energy. He would not let inhumanity drive him away from humanity. He would not let the sonsofbitches turn him into a sonuvabitch.

“No one can stop you from that,” Marcus writes. Because, he added. No one can make you do that. It’s a choice. There’s a fountain of goodness there inside us, inside the world. It is up to each of us to make sure that fountain keeps bubbling up. No matter how much shit and evil people try to dump on it. 

Don’t let the darkness make you dark. 

Don’t let inhumanity deprive you of your humanity.

Don’t equivocate. Call a spade a spade. Condemn evil, cruelty, and injustice. 

And keep going back to that fountain of goodness within. As long as you keep going back, “and as long as you keep digging,” Marcus wrote, “it will keep bubbling up.”

No one can stop you from that.

The World Lost a Great Man (and my friend) But His Legacy Lives On…

When he was born, he was legally considered less than fully human. 

Born in segregated Washington in 1937, George Raveling and his family were second-class citizens, denied basic rights and dignities. 

And then it got worse from there. When he was nine, his father died at the age of forty-nine. His mother was committed to an asylum when he was thirteen. Effectively orphaned, this could have been another sad story from a long time ago. Instead, the life of George Raveling became something beautiful, inspiring, and almost unbelievably modern—a classic American story, equal parts Alexander Hamilton and Forrest Gump. 

It started with a man named Father Jerome Nadine, a Catholic priest in Brooklyn, who loved basketball (one of his other parishioners was the Wilkens family, whose son Lenny would go on to be an NBA Champion and one of the winningest coaches of all time). He got George a spot at St. Michael’s, a boarding school in Pennsylvania for boys from broken homes, and asked the basketball coach if he could make a spot for the tall young man. Soon enough, the head coach from Saint Joseph’s College, Jack Ramsay, came to his games and told George he would be offering him a college scholarship. 

George loved to tell the story of what happened when he went to his grandmother, Dear, to tell her the good news. “I thought I raised you better than that,” Dear said when George told her a college was going to pay for his education to play on their basketball team. “What do you mean?” George said. “I think you’ve done a great job.” “Well, I’m disappointed in myself,” Dear replied, “because I can’t believe that you’re naive enough to think that some white people are gonna pay for you to go to college just so you can play basketball. It makes no sense. They’re tricking you.”  

At Villanova, where he did end up with a scholarship (and later a degree in Economics), George led the country in rebounds, only the second black player in the school’s history. In the days before televised basketball, it was often a shock when this integrated team showed up to play southern schools. In 1959, they drove down to Morgantown to play West Virginia. Assigned to guard Jerry West—the future NBA logo—George chased West on a fast break late in the game. When West went up for a layup, George jumped in an attempt to block the shot, colliding with West in the air and sending both of them crashing into the stands. “As we lay there tangled together,” George wrote, “the field house fell silent. I could feel the eyes of the crowd on us, could sense the anger and hostility crackling in the air. In that moment, I feared for my life. But then, something extraordinary happened.” West—“the golden boy of West Virginia, the pride of Morgantown”—got up and then reached out his hand to George. As West pulled George to his feet, the all-white silent crowd erupted into applause. After the game, West ran over as George walked off the court and grabbed him by the arm. “Good game,” West said as he shook George’s hand and looked him in the eyes. “It was a pleasure playing against you.”

After college, he spent time as a traveling assistant and bagman for Wilt Chamberlain, who was getting tons of requests to make appearances at summer camps around the east coast. “I’ll hire you to be my chauffeur,” Wilt told George one day. For a hundred dollars a day, George jumped at the chance to drive Wilt’s purple Bentley convertible from camp to camp, talking basketball and life.

Just these few anecdotes alone would have made George Raveling a living legend. But his rendezvous with history didn’t happen until August 28, 1963. Sent by the father of a friend, 6-foot-four George was recruited to work security for the March on Washington. Standing on the podium a few feet from Dr. King on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, George was one of the first people to greet him as he finished the “I Have a Dream” speech that would change the course of American politics. Accepting the congratulations, King handed George the only existing notes/text (which he had largely ignored in favor of improvisation) of one of the most famous speeches of all time. George tucked it into a book at home—a personalized copy of Truman’s autobiography, which the former president had given him his senior year at Villanova when George played in the East-West All-Star game in Kansas City. There it would sit, safely preserved, for the next few decades until journalists got around to figuring out what had happened to it. 

It is a shame that George Raveling’s coaching career is not more well known. He was a great and pioneering one. While an assistant at Villanova, he started recruiting players from the South who, up to that point, were only looked at by historically Black colleges and universities. Players like Johnny Jones and Howard Porter became part of what one sportswriter dubbed “the Underground Railroad,” George’s trailblazing pipeline bringing Southern talent to a predominantly white Northern school. He would later become the first African American basketball coach in what’s now the Pac-12 and went on to go 335-293 over his career, leading programs at Washington State, the University of Iowa, and USC. He won 2 Olympic medals, a gold in 1984 and a bronze in 1988. He coached against John Wooden, Dean Smith, and Bob Knight. He earned his Hall of Fame induction as an X and O’s guy, a recruiter and as a leader of young men to victory. 

Of course, we remember him most for his contributions to the game slightly off the court. It was George Raveling who, as an assistant coach for the 1984 Olympic Team, steered Michael Jordan to Nike and changed the economics of sports and entertainment and fashion. You might not know this from the movie Air, which is largely about Sonny Vaccaro, but Michael Jordan knows the truth and has always and repeatedly credited Raveling. Ben Affleck tells the story of meeting with Jordan to get his blessing to make Air. Jordan gave the go-ahead, but with two conditions: Viola Davis had to play his mom, and George Raveling had to be in the story. He released a statement this morning after the news of George’s death, thanking him for his decades of friendship and mentorship. “I signed with Nike because of George,” he said of his most famous and consequential business decision, “and without him, there would be no Air Jordan.”

And then there is what George did while he was at Nike. After a twenty-two-year career, he retired from coaching in 1994, and at the age of sixty-two joined Nike as their director of international basketball. He traveled around the world to countries where basketball was a little-known sport, where resources were limited, good coaching was scarce, and talented players had no exposure to college or professional scouts. In an attempt to fix that, in 1995, George developed the Nike Hoop Summit, an annual all-star game featuring the top young players from around the world. Since the inaugural event, to this day, the Hoop Summit has launched the careers of countless international stars: Dirk Nowitzki (Germany), Tony Parker (France), Enes Kanter (Turkey), Luol Deng (South Sudan), Serge Ibaka (Republic of the Congo), Nikola Jokić (Serbia), and most recently, Victor Wembanyama (France). 

I, myself, met George in 2015 at a University of Texas Basketball practice. I thought I was just shaking hands with a friendly older gentleman. I did not know that day that I was shaking hands with history–a hand that had in turn shaken hands with Presidents Truman and Ford and Carter and Reagan and Clinton and had held the “Dream” speech. 

I liked to say that George was my oldest friend, but that was literally not true, since he and I once went and sat on the porch with Richard Overton, then literally the oldest man in the world at 111. Most of the time, George felt like one of the youngest. Not only was he an avid texter, but he loved to email articles that he read from his iPad on topics as diverse as mastermind groups and AI, leadership principles and personal habits, philosophy, politics, time management, parenting, public speaking, storytelling, and on and on. For someone who taught so many people—regularly taking calls from John Calipari, Shaka Smart, and Buzz Williams—he was always quick to call me his mentor. I didn’t know quite what to make of the compliment, finding it both extremely complimentary but obviously absurd. In time,  I have come to see it as just another lesson: We’re never too old to learn and the wisest people remain students all their lives, learning from everyone they can find, including, apparently, people a fraction of our age.

I’m not sure there was a bigger supporter of bookstores than Coach Raveling, who rarely arrived at a meal without books as gifts. He would send me pictures from his weekly trips to Barnes and Noble, whenever he saw any of my books. It was one of the honors of my life to help him fulfill a lifelong dream of writing his own book, What You’re Made For, which he lived long enough to see in stores.

What You’re Made For by George Raveling

My only sadness about my time with George is that he had to cancel a book signing he was going to do at my bookstore, The Painted Porch, for health reasons back in May. I was sad not to see him obviously, but mostly sad that he seemed to take needing to cancel something so hard. He was not used to accepting limitations–he had been defying them all his life. 

There was not a major figure you could name in the 20th century and not get a story from George about them. I asked him, after Jimmy Carter died, if he ever met him, and he told me about a trip in 1981 to the People’s Republic of China. George was there leading a coaching clinic for 200 Chinese coaches. The clinic was held in Shanghai, and one night he was asked to move out of his hotel room because, he was told, President Carter had unexpectedly arrived at the same hotel and the Secret Service asked that the rooms above, below, and adjacent to Carter’s suite be empty. Despite the inconvenience, George said it turned out to be the highlight of the trip—Carter invited George to have dinner with him to make up for the disruption.

I asked him if he knew John Wooden and he told me not just of coaching against him and their breakfasts together, but that in his coaching column for The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, George had broken the story of Wooden’s retirement after 27 years at UCLA. He told me stories about Kareem and Chamberlain and Sammy Davis Jr. and Kobe Bryant and Bill Russell and Charles Barkley and Bill Walton and of course Truman and Jordan and Phil Knight and his beloved grandmother, Dear. Who would have guessed that that lonely little boy living on the corner of New Jersey and Florida Avenues in Depression-era Washington would have intersected with so many fascinating people? 

A life like George’s could have hardened a person, necessitating a narcissism and self-absorption in order to survive in a cut-throat, fast-paced world. I’m sure he was a hard-ass as a coach (one of Michael Jordan’s children told me with a twinkle that although everyone saw George as a kindly old man, he had seen him yell at people). I remember being cc’d on an email about a negotiation George was in and when he didn’t like the terms was blunt and forceful about shutting the whole project down. He was not going to be taken advantage of. It gave me a sense of the strong and savvy coach and executive who had broken down so many barriers and carved out a space for himself—as well as for others as a founding member of the Black Coaches Association. 

But for the most part, he was one of the kindest and calmest and supportive people I have ever known. When we would do our calls for the book, it caught me off guard at first. George, before hanging up, would say, “I love you.” I’m not used to that—at least not from people outside my family. But George never hesitated. “I’ve learned that it’s hard for people, especially men, to say ‘I love you,’” he told me. Even with his own son, he noticed that for years it felt uncomfortable for him to say it back. “It’s strange,” George said, “because every one of us has a thirst to be loved, appreciated, acknowledged, respected. And yet, for some reason, we struggle to express it.” So George has made a habit of saying things like, “I appreciate you.” “I respect you.” “I’m glad you’re my friend.” “I’m here for you.” Simple words that so many people rarely hear.

George told me that when he had heard that Jerry West, his friend of 65 years, had died, he found himself shouting, “Oh no, oh no!” When I got a text on Monday night that George had passed, I had a similar reaction. George told me the last text he had sent Jerry was, “I think of you every single day with love in my heart and best wishes for good health and stability. I miss your presence, wisdom, and leadership. Hope to see you soon, my friend. God bless you and your family.” I went back through mine and found a few—a meme he’d sent me about the new pope, an article he thought I should read, a message I had passed along from RC Buford, the CEO of the San Antonio Spurs who had just purchased signed copies of George’s book for a bunch of people in their organization, including all their players. 

Of course, no one is totally surprised when someone dies at the age of 88. And I know George wouldn’t have been either. In one of my favorite passages in his book, George writes about thinking of his life as a basketball game in its final quarter, with just a few minutes left on the clock. “For me,” George writes, “I know what time it is…which is to say, near the end. There’s no way around that. In fact, at my age I’m closer to something like double overtime or extra innings.” He lived accordingly–which is to say gratefully–and tried never to leave anything undone or unsaid. 

In July, I had checked in on how he was feeling. He replied: 

It’s been a marvelous 88 years(6/27/37) on planet Earth!! You changed my life forever!! Each day I’m in search of strategies that will allow me to Grow personally and professionally!! thanks for believing in me!!!! thanks for investing in me!! God bless you and your family!

I told him I loved him and I missed him. 

It’s true. 

We all did and do. 

***

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Why I Ran A Solo Race From Marathon To Athens (And What It Taught Me)

I remember exactly where I was. 

Twenty years ago, I was working in Hollywood. On my lunch break, I was at Philly’s Pizza on La Cienega and Olympic, reading The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene. In a chapter about the “divide-and-conquer” strategy, Robert writes about the Athenians’ legendary stand against a massive Persian invasion on the plains of Marathon in 490 B.C. After the battle in Marathon, the soldiers had to immediately race back to Athens where a second Persian fleet was on its way to take the city from the sea. 

“There was simply no time to rest,” Robert writes. “They ran, as fast as their feet could take them, loaded down in their heavy armor, impelled by the thought of the imminent dangers facing their families and fellow citizens…Within a matter of minutes after their arrival, the Persian fleet sailed into the bay to see a most unwelcome sight: thousands of Athenian soldiers, caked in dust and blood, standing shoulder to shoulder to fight the landing. The Persians rode at anchor for a few hours, then headed out to sea, returning home. Athens was saved.”

Had the tired, dusty soldiers not run from Marathon to Athens, Robert writes, “history would have been altered irrevocably,” as the Persians, in conquering Greece, would have crushed the Athenians’ nascent democratic experiment that went on to shape the western world. Perhaps there would be no such thing as Western civilization. 

I had previously read about the Battle of Marathon in Herodotus’ Histories but this was so much more vivid, I actually understood what was happening and why it mattered. There in the pizza shop, I was struck by the way the same historical event could be transformed in the hands of a different storyteller. I remember being struck in particular by Robert’s line, “caked in dust and blood.” 

In any case, I emailed Robert and asked what he read when he was researching this famous event. He told me his sources, which included a book called The Greco-Persian Wars by Peter Green. I immediately ordered it on Amazon, and a few days later (Amazon was a little slower then), I began to read it on my lunch break.

The screenwriter and director Brian Koppelman (Billions, Rounders, Ocean’s Thirteen) talks about “The Moment”—the critical moment in every aspiring artist’s life, when the craft they have long elevated as magic or beyond their grasp suddenly becomes a bit more comprehensible. 

My moment happened about forty pages into The Greco-Persian Wars, where Peter Green writes, “The reappearance of the Marathon warriors — grim, indomitable, caked with dust and sweat and dried blood — not only gave Datis pause for thought; it also, obviously, came as an unexpected shock to the Alcmaeonidae and the pro-Persian party.” It was here that I realized: Oh,  this is how it works. This is what a researcher, a writer, a storyteller does: they read a collection of books on the same event, filtering the many details through their own lens based on their own tastes, which they then shape into their own style to make something new. 

The passage from ​The Greco-Persian Wars​ (top) that Robert Greene used in ​The 33 Strategies of War​ (bottom).

 It was a breakthrough moment for me. A little peek behind the curtain of the previously intimidating craft that I was drawn towards. A realization that on the other side of the books I admire and love is just another human being doing a job. And I’m a human being too, so maybe if I work hard enough, I can write books too.

Now, there was nothing in either of the Green(e) books about the fact that one could still go to Greece and run the course the Athenian soldiers, caked in dust and blood, ran from Marathon to Athens. But not long after, I read what became another all-time favorite book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, in which Haruki Murakami writes about running “the original marathon course” all alone, not as part of “an official race.”

Re-reading “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running”

I had been a runner for a long time, and the one thing you get asked all the time as a runner is, “Are you training for a marathon?” My answer was always, “No, this is the marathon.” That is, the day-to-dayness, the doing it for no reason other than because, is the real challenge I’m tackling.

That’s how I thought about running basically from the moment I left organized sports as a kid. It’s, as Murakami talks about in one of my favorite passages in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, both exercise and a metaphor. “Running day after day,” he writes, “bit by bit I raise the bar, and by clearing each level I elevate myself. At least that’s why I’ve put in the effort day after day: to raise my own level. I’m no great runner, by any means. I’m at an ordinary—or perhaps more like mediocre—level. But that’s not the point. The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday. In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.”

Combined with my longtime fascination with the way that ancient, original Marathon tipped the balance of history, Murakami’s quiet account of running it alone—not for a medal or a crowd, but simply to raise his own level—planted the idea of one day running it myself. It had been sitting in my mind for some fifteen years when my wife and I started planning a trip to Greece with our two boys this past summer.

Along with bringing to life the places I’ve been reading about for years and years—Olympia, Ithaca, Delphi, Thermopylae, Mt. Olympus and more—finally, I was going to try to run from Marathon to Athens.

After looking at a lot of the marathon training regimens out there, I didn’t have to change much. (Which was my point all along: ​If you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready​). The only real shift was being more deliberate than usual about running in as many different environments and conditions as possible. 

I went for long runs up switchbacks in Palm Springs, along the Santa Ana River in California, on mountain trails in Utah (where I was warned to look out for a very protective mother moose and her two calves) and as I often do, around Lady Bird Lake in Austin, and through the eerie elephant graveyard of the burned-out forest of Bastrop State Park.

Training in Sundance, UT

I ran in 105-degree heat. I ran on steep inclines. I ran before dawn, at altitude, on cement, gravel, sand. And once we got to Greece, I trained at the Acropolis. I trained in Ithaca. I trained running up Mount Olympus. I went on hikes with my family. I swam in the Aegean Sea. As Epictetus says, the goal when we come up against adversity—as I knew I often would during the long, hot, solitary run from Marathon to Athens—is to be able to say, “This is what I’ve trained for, for this is my discipline.”

Training in Greece

Swimming in Greece

At 6:51 a.m. on July 13, I stood at the starting point of the original Marathon route. I wasn’t nervous. And I was nervous about not being nervous. But the stillness came from training. I had done the work.

It was not the prettiest of courses, and I was the only one out there. I ran on sidewalks. I ran on the shoulder of busy roads. I ran along shopping centers and autobody shops. I ran on the side of a freeway and through underpasses. There was a brief period where you had a peek at the ocean, but most of it was industrial and gritty. It was entirely asphalt excepting a few brief moments of rocks by the side of the road. 

Three and a half miles in, I came to the ruins Murakami writes about in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running,

“As those who watched the TV broadcast of the marathon at the Athens Olympics are aware, after the runners leave Marathon, at one point they go off on a side road to the left, run past some less-than-distinguished ruins, and then return to the main road.”

It is perhaps the only part of the book I disagree with. I wouldn’t say they are “less-than-distinguished” ruins. I would say they are some of the most impressive and meaningful ruins in the entire world. I was incredibly struck by them. In particular, I was struck by a giant mound surrounded by trees—the burial mound of the 192 Athenians who died at Marathon, to whom we owe basically all of Western civilization. Theirs was not to reason why, Tennyson famously wrote about another group of soldiers on an impossible mission. Theirs was but to do and die. Or as the Spartan monument says, tell a stranger passing by that here, obedient to their laws, we lie. 

In part, Stoicism itself, the philosophy that I am lucky enough to write about, is rooted in the epic heroism of those Athenian soldiers. Not just because they saved Greek civilization, but because they were held up by the early Stoics as models of the four virtues—courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom—that they themselves strived to live up to. The Stoa Poikile—literally the “Painted Porch”—where Stoicism was founded, earned its name not because the porch itself was painted, but because a series of famous paintings lined its walls. 

We’re told by ancient historians that of all the “great deeds” depicted in the Stoa Poikile, none was more prominently displayed than the Battle of Marathon. One 1st-century B.C. writer writes that the Athenian general Miltiades “was given a special honor…When the battle of Marathon was painted, his picture was placed first among the ten generals, and he was shown urging on his men and joining battle.” Again, this wasn’t just a 26-odd-mile run for those soldiers sweltering under armor, caked in dust and blood. It was an existential fight. The fate of Greece—and with it, the future of the world—was on the line. The sheer bravery and strength of those Athenians, covering the very distance I was now running, powered me through the next seven or eight miles. 

A little over halfway in, I was still feeling good. And I found myself thinking about what the Stoics say about undergoing a hard winter’s training: we train, we do hard things, we challenge ourselves—physically, mentally, spiritually—so that when life throws its own challenges at us, we have something to draw on. We have proof. Evidence that we are someone who can do hard things. Someone who can keep going. Someone who has done the training.

25 km into the run

But then I entered what Courtney Dauwalter, one of the great ultramarathoners of all time, calls the “pain cave”—where you hit the edge of your mental and physical limits. When I interviewed Courtney on the Daily Stoic podcast, she talked about how she gets excited when she reaches her pain cave during a long run. Instead of thinking about the pain and discomfort, she thinks about exploring how far back the cave goes, what’s inside it, how she might chip away at the back wall to push it just a little farther away for next time. 

With about 3 miles left, I was as deep in that cave as I think I’ve ever been as a runner. It was 90 degrees now and it didn’t matter how much water I drank, I could not get hydrated. I had trouble reading the map on my phone, my brain basically wasn’t working. It’s clear afterwards that I had sunstroke or was in the early stages of it. Whatever time I was hoping for fell away, and it was really just whether I was going to continue or not. Epictetus talked about only entering competitions where winning is up to you. I tried to remind myself that I was not doing this for an outcome. There was no time or goal I was chasing. Doing this thing I had never done before, elevating myself, raising my own level—that was the real competition. And winning it was up to me. As long as I don’t quit, I thought, I’ll probably make it to the other side. 

I would have loved to have finished stronger, but I ran into a complete wall. There wasn’t much I could do—physically or mentally. Both my mind and body were begging to quit. I thought of the Kipling lines in If—

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”

I held on. I didn’t quit. I gutted it out. I finished.

After finishing, I was wrecked. The story about Pheidippides is that when he finished the journey back to Athens, he delivered his message and then immediately died. I didn’t exactly do that, but I did throw up in one of the oldest and most beautiful stadiums in the world. I threw up before the long drive back to my hotel. And when I got to the hotel, I threw up several more times. I couldn’t keep down even water. 

In the days after the run, once I was somewhat back in command of my faculties, I thought about what I could have done better. I could have managed the nutrition side of things better. I could have started a little bit earlier so that I could have finished before it got as hot as it did on the final miles. 

In a word, I could have been wiser. Obviously, discipline is incredibly important, but without the virtue of wisdom—understanding the right place to apply that discipline and how to support that discipline—you can get yourself in some very rough spots. And so discipline is something we have to moderate with wisdom. The wisdom of, What is the best plan? What is the best nutrition? How do you not get wrecked by the heat? How do you take care of your body?

Seneca talked about how the only people he pitied were those who hadn’t been through adversity or experienced difficulty. Because they will never know what they’re capable of.

What I took most of all from running the Marathon is that I am a person who is capable of doing hard things. I know that because I did a hard fucking thing. 

And I take that with me.

You Can Choose To Be Great, But Not What You’re Great At

I think it’s safe to say that no one is great at anything by accident.

So in one sense, greatness is a choice.

We choose to be great.

You get to decide, ‘I’m going to take this craft, sport, talent, profession, discipline, genre, or subject as far as I am capable of taking it.’

That’s up to you.

But on the other hand, I don’t know if you get to choose what you’re great at. I don’t want to be too mystical about it, but I think what we get called to do is a confluence of circumstances that are not up to us. When we’re born—not up to us. Where we’re born—not up to us. If we’re male or female, short or tall, from a rich family or a poor one—not up to us. Why does this light me up and that lights you up? Why does math come easy to some but not to others? Why does this genre of music grab you instead of that one? Why is it writing for me and picking stocks for you? Teaching yoga for one person, teaching chemistry for another?

I don’t know, but I don’t think it is up to us.

There is something a little bit unfair about this. I think about this with my friend Paul Rabil, who I got to work with on his book ​The Way of the Champion​. Paul is considered the greatest lacrosse player of all time. He chose to be great. In the book, he talks about a coach who told him the key to being a great lacrosse player was simple: ​take one hundred shots a day​. If you get one hundred reps a day, every day, eventually, you’ll get an offer to play D1 lacrosse. He promised them.

And you know what, that’s exactly what Paul did, getting a full scholarship to play at Johns Hopkins and winning two national championships and All-America honors all four years. But it wasn’t all sunshine and roses. His calling for the game was actually a kind of curse. Because even though it’s one of the oldest sports in history, lacrosse is a fringe sport to say the least, so when Rabil got drafted to the pros first overall, it didn’t mean making millions of dollars, signing big endorsement deals, or playing before huge crowds and national TV audiences the way it does in some professional sports. No, his rookie wage was $6,000 a year. Games were played in small high school and college stadiums, often with just a few dozen fans in the stands. And there were no national TV broadcasts, just the occasional grainy webstream on some little-known site tucked in the corners of the internet.

He was the LeBron James of a sport for which transcendent greatness meant relative obscurity, as it continues to mean for the best lacrosse players in the world.

More recently, ​I had a great conversation with Candace Parker on the Daily Stoic podcast​. She is also one of the greatest to ever play her sport. She played for the University of Tennessee under Pat Summit, where they won two NCAA championships in 2007. In 2008, she was drafted number one overall in the WNBA. She was the Rookie of the Year and the MVP in her first season. She’s won two gold medals and her jersey is being retired this year by two separate teams. Yet, there are far fewer accomplished NBA players—maybe even basketball players who play overseas—that you’ve never heard of that make more money in a season than she did throughout her entire career.

Is that fair? I don’t know if fair is the right word. It’s just what it is. And what it’s always been. Jim Thorpe, one of the greatest athletes of all time, got to choose to be great, but he didn’t get to choose that he was born in 1887. He didn’t get to choose that he lived decades before sports became big business. He didn’t get to choose that professional football players of his time made less than the average college football player makes today.

It isn’t only athletes in less popular sports or from bygone times, of course, who can be world-class yet poorly paid or recognized. The best middle school teachers. The world’s leading experts on this niche topic. The once-in-a-generation talent at that obscure skill. The woman at the daycare I used to send my son to who could put thirty toddlers down for a nap at once, when I struggled to do it with just one. The list could go on and on. There are so many people out there who are utterly extraordinary at what they do, but whose greatness—for one reason or another—doesn’t translate into mass appeal, doesn’t command high compensation, doesn’t receive the recognition it deserves.

I think about this with myself. ​I write books about Stoicism​. If I wrote about something with more mass appeal or if I wrote romance novels or if I ghostwrote celebrity memoirs, maybe I would sell more books, make more money, or be known by more people.

Now, you might say, oh, why don’t you just switch to one of those things? Well, that’s the whole dilemma, right? Paul Rabil and Jim Thorpe could have switched to other professions, maybe. But Candace Parker can’t switch to the NBA. I have written books about other things, but I can tell you, it’s just not what lights me up. It’s not what gets me excited. It’s not what I feel called to try to be great at. Maybe if I had been involved in the design process, I would have chosen to be lit up by something else. But they didn’t consult me. It wasn’t up to me that writing about an obscure school of philosophy is what I find endlessly fascinating.

What is up to me is whether I choose to take it as far as I am capable of taking it.

And this is no small thing. I would actually argue there is a moral imperative to take your talents as far as they can go—irrespective of what the market says about them. After Rabil took his talents as far as they could go—multiple championships and MVP awards, two gold medals with Team USA, 10 All-Star teams, and the all-time record for career points in professional lacrosse—in 2018, he founded the Premier Lacrosse League, a pro league that rivaled and then overtook the 20-year incumbent. The PLL today has a major media rights deal with ESPN, pays its athletes full-time salaries with equity, and includes investors like The Chernin Group, the Raine Group, billionaire Joseph Tsai, NBA star Kevin Durant, and many others.

Because he chose to be great at the thing that had chosen him, Paul has raised the sport’s ceiling so that today’s lacrosse players can take their talents further than was possible when he was playing.

What makes his decision remarkable is that he had been presented with a highly tempting alternative. When Paul was 24, a couple of years into his professional lacrosse career—living with his parents and working a day job—he got a call from New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick.

“I told Paul he could be a strong safety in the NFL,” Belichick writes in the foreword to ​The Way of the Champion​. “I thought he had the size, the speed, and the toughness to play in our league. I had a good sense of his transferable skills because, like him, I grew up playing lacrosse.” Belichick had also had success converting athletes from other sports into great NFL players.

After several conversations, Belichick laid out the options: Paul had the tools to be a pretty good NFL player, and he had the opportunity “to define the pinnacle of a sport.” “Everything worth anything in life comes at a sacrifice,” Belichick said. What did he want to sacrifice? Millions of dollars, perhaps a Super Bowl or two, and the prestige of being an NFL player? Or the call to be one of the greatest lacrosse players of all time? “I would go all in on lacrosse,” Paul writes. “This was my path.”

That’s the choice in front of all of us.

Eventually, we all come to this crossroads—between being pretty good and being great, between what looks impressive from the outside and what lights us up on the inside, between what’s lucrative and what’s calling us.

Where this calling comes from doesn’t matter.

What matters is where we take it.

You Need This Now More Than Ever

Come see me live in Austin and San Diego this year. ​Get your tickets here​ .

It’s ironic that the only thing we all seem to agree on lately is that there’s a lot to be angry about.

This is what traditional media and social media both fuel…and then there is also the fact that reality itself is pretty awful.

Our airports suck. Our politicians are cowards. Our systems are broken. Things are too expensive. Our environment is being ravaged. Horrible things are being done by people who seem to revel in the pain and anguish their actions cause.

I mean, how could you not be pissed off?

As they say, if you’re not outraged, “You’re not paying attention.”

And actually, the fact that a lot of people aren’t paying attention is another thing to be mad about!

Except…this is exactly the wrong response. To injustice. To inefficiencies. To broken systems. To frustrations.

Because anger doesn’t make things better. It always makes things worse.

If anger were something that made people better, do you think athletes would work so hard to get under the skin of their opponents? Do you think lawyers would try to attack and frustrate witnesses under cross-examination? Of course not. It is precisely because anger is blinding, because it makes us irrational, that one opponent uses it to undermine another.

What we need—in sports, in life, in activism—is restraint, not rage.

Oh, but that’s very privileged of you to say, one might think. You wouldn’t be so blasé if things were worse for you personally.

History overwhelmingly disproves the idea that self-composure is a synonym for resignation. Think of Abraham Lincoln. A defining moment of his life came in 1841 when he, then no more than a successful Midwestern lawyer, saw a group of slaves chained together on a riverboat like “so many fish on a trotline.” Abolitionists had long witnessed such scenes and many became radicalized. Lincoln’s reaction was different—not anger, but a deep, profound sadness at the injustice. This was key. For all the abolitionist passion, it was Lincoln who spent the next two decades plotting political change that achieved what generations had failed to do. Unlike even the radicals, he never doubted the Union could be preserved, the war won. He steered the ship unswervingly through those terrible times, preaching understanding, forgiveness, and mutual culpability—even keeled in his determination to improve the world.

The Women’s Rights Movement—while many of the suffragettes involved had blind spots, even abhorrent views about class or race—was defined by their remarkable ability to put aside differences and come together for the cause. “For the first time in the woman movement,” Carrie Chapman Catt would say at the opening of the seventh conference of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Budapest in 1913, “it is expected that Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, Mohammedan, Jewish and Christian women will sit together in a Congress uniting their voices in a common plea for the liberation of their sex from those artificial discriminations which every political and religious system has directed against them.”

The Civil Rights Movement—per Martin Luther King’s leadership as well as the leadership of brave people like John Lewis—was defined not by anger, but by love. By a call to our better angels, not our worst ones. So was Gandhi’s. New to South Africa after a couple of frustrating years struggling to establish himself as a lawyer in India, Gandhi was humiliatedat a Maritzburg train stop in 1893, thrown off a train because of his race. But it wasn’t anger that he stewed in as he sat there shivering in the cold waiting for a ride, it was something deeper, something he later referred to as the most profound spiritual experience of his life. “I began to think of my duty,” he wrote. “Should I fight for my rights or go back to India?…It would be cowardice to run back to India…The hardship to which I was subjected was superficial—only a symptom of the deep disease of color prejudice. I should try, if possible, to root out the disease.” There at that train station, in that moment of pausing to weigh his options, a floundering young lawyer made the choice that would turn him into the crusader who changed the world.

It’s not that things aren’t awful. It’s not that things aren’t outrageous. It’s not that you should simply accept the injustices and the cruelty that are happening all around you. As ​we often talk about over at Daily Stoic​, to think that this is what the Stoics would advise is to miss who they were and what they did. Cato fought valiantly, selflessly in the hopes of preserving the Roman Republic. George Washington fought valiantly, selflessly in the hopes of forming one. Epictetus and Musonius Rufus were exiled for their transgressive teachings. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the translator of Epictetus, led black troops for the Union in the Civil War. The Stoics were involved in public life, they were involved in important causes, they lived in a scary world where outrageous things happened on a daily basis.

And it is precisely for this reason that the Stoics cultivated poise and restraint and self-command. Because the outrages and injustices of their time demanded it. Not apathy, but the ability to step back and be objective, to be strategic, to be diplomatic, to not despair or scream or alienate.

In fact, Washington’s favorite expression, borrowing from a play about Cato, draws on this idea, that we must be able to look at everything “in the calm light of mild philosophy.” It was in the calm and mild light that Washington approached the news that one of his generals was slandering him behind his back. It was in the calm and mild light that Washington dealt with the saddening realization that he and his wife could not have children. It was in the calm and mild light that Washington approached a mob-like meeting of his officers who threatened mutiny against the new American government, slowly, masterfully, talking them back from treason.

In June 1797 alone, Washington wrote this reminder in three separate letters, trying to stop himself from rushing to judgment or losing control of his emotions and instead looking at the situation with the temperament befitting the father of a country.

Washington refused to get upset, he refused to get angry—no matter the insult, no matter the injustice, no matter the betrayal. And it was precisely this self-control that allowed him to direct his efforts towards his great task—freeing a colonial people from the subjugation of a capitalistic imperial empire, to put it in modern language—so it cannot be argued that he simply tolerated the status quo.

Like the rest of us, this was not his natural disposition. He was not exempt, a friend said, from the “tumultuous passions which accompany greatness, and frequently tarnish its luster.” Fighting them was the first and longest battle of his life—and, as another friend said in his eulogy, his greatest victory: “so great the empire he had there acquired, that calmness of manner and of conduct distinguished him through life.” As Washington’s great biographer ​Ron Chernow told me on the Daily Stoic podcast​, “He wanted to see things through the calm light of mild philosophy—it was always an ideal. It was not something that was easy to achieve. And occasionally, his self-command would break down. But he imagined that he had to embody the nation and had to live up to a certain ideal of courage, temperance, wisdom, and justice. That became a description of George Washington, but again, this was something earned, something achieved, over many years.” Washington wasn’t naturally Stoic; he made himself this way. Not permanently but anew every minute, every day, in every situation, as best he could. He had the initial reactions we all do, but he tried to put every situation up for a kind of review, searching for a better light to explain and understand it.

We need this view more than ever today, especially if we hope to change things for the better. We can’t fly off the handle. We can’t say everything we think. We can’t give in to those initial feelings of disgust, rage, contempt, or resentment.

No, we must do as the Stoic Athenodorus told the emperor Augustus—something he wanted him to follow always. “Whenever you feel yourself getting angry, Caesar,” he instructed, “don’t say or do anything until you’ve repeated the twenty-four letters of the alphabet to yourself.” Or try the principle that artist Marina Abramović lays down in her book ​Walk Through Walls​. “If you get angry,” she writes, “stop breathing and hold your breath until you can’t hold it anymore, then inhale fresh air.”

We know that between every stimulus and its response, every piece of information and our decision, there is space, one with room enough to insert our philosophy. Will we use it? Use it to think, use it to examine, use it to wait for more information? Or will we give in to first impressions, to harmful instincts, and old patterns?

The pause is everything.

The one before . . .

. . . jumping to conclusions

. . . prejudging

. . . assuming the worst

. . . rushing to solve your children’s problems for them (or put them back to sleep)

. . . forcing a problem into some kind of box

. . . assigning blame

. . . taking offense

. . . turning away in fear.

It is a brief space, to be sure, but in it lie the choices that shape the course of events in our own and each other’s lives. Using that all-important space to respond isn’t easy. As I said above, this is not something that comes naturally to most of us. It’s a discipline, something one gets better at through practice and repetition. To get better at this in my own life, as a kind of tool to strengthen my own practice of using the space between stimulus and response, ​I carry this coin in my pocket​. One side reads DELAY IS THE REMEDY (a nod to Seneca’s line, “The greatest remedy for anger is delay”), which is encircled by the 24 letters of the alphabet (a reminder of Athenodorus’ advice to silently run through them before reacting in heated moments). The reverse is a polished, mirror-like surface, inspired by Seneca’s suggestion to look at oneself when gripped by anger—not only because the sight of our own unflattering reflection can be jarring enough to prevent an unflattering response, but also because “whoever comes to a mirror to change himself has already changed.” Encircling the mirror are the words Pausa et Reflecte, Latin for pause and reflect.

​Get your medallion here.​

Today, as people throughout history always have, we face—individually and collectively—problems and injustices that are complex and urgent. Which requires that we bring our best, calmest, most focused selves to them. We don’t want to hand our enemies extra ammunition. We don’t want to make things worse. We don’t want to widen divides and deepen hostility. Instead, we must meet these problems and injustices with precisely the opposite traits of those that created them in the first place. Like Lincoln, Gandhi, Washington, the leaders of the Women’s Rights and Civil Rights Movements, we must meet cruelty with compassion, hardship with courage, provocation with self-control, and injustice with the calm, mild determination to improve things.

Whether it’s a triggering post on social media or a costly mistake at work, an obvious lie someone tried to deceive us with, an insubordinate employee, a difficult obstacle, a casual insensitivity, or a complex problem—everything must be met with a measured and mellow eye.

We can’t make decisions on impulse. Again, that’s not to say we won’t have impulses. It’s that we must be disciplined enough not to act on them.

Not until we’ve paused and reflected.

Not until we’ve counted the letters of the alphabet, inhaled fresh air, and looked in the mirror.

Not until we’ve sat for a bit in the space between stimulus and response.

Not until we’ve put things under or in the calm light of mild philosophy.

This Is A Lesson I Hope To Pass Down

This originally ran in The Free Press.

Poems have always been earnest. That’s why some of them are so cringe. 

Rhapsodizing about nature. Pouring out your heart to a lover. Finding deep meaning in small things. Brooding on mortality.

But a few years ago, I was talking to Allie Esiri for the Daily Stoic podcast about her wonderful book A Poem For Every Night of the Year, which I have been reading to my sons since they were little. I mentioned that I was struck by the earnest desire for self-help and self-mastery in many of the 19th-century poems written by male authors. 

You might be familiar with some of them. 

Kipling’s If— is obviously a classic of this genre. So is Henley’s Invictus. Adam Lindsay Gordon’s Ye Weary Wayfarer is another one of my favorites. 

“Life is mostly froth and bubble,

Two things stand like stone,

Kindness in another’s trouble,

Courage in your own.”

It must be acknowledged that many of the most famous of these poems were products of the British Empire at the height of its imperial power. While I’m pleased that we no longer publish poems calling a generation to pick up ‘the White Man’s burden’ or celebrating the suicidal (and avoidable) charge of the Light Brigade, I would like to point out that there was once a time, not that long ago, when an average person would pick up their daily newspaper and find a totally straightforward, understandable poem full of advice on how to be a good person or navigate the difficulties of life. 

Perhaps because it doesn’t have any jingoism or machismo—just the source code for existence—one of my favorites of this genre has always been one that is uniquely American: Longfellow’s A Psalm of Life.

It opens quite powerfully, 

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

     Life is but an empty dream!—

For the soul is dead that slumbers,

     And things are not what they seem.

 

Life is real! Life is earnest!

     And the grave is not its goal;

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

     Was not spoken of the soul.

 

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

   Is our destined end or way;

But to act, that each to-morrow

   Find us farther than to-day.

I was a kid in the 90s. I was in high school in the early 2000s. I started my career in the citadel of hipsterdom, American Apparel. Everything was couched in irony. There was a self-consciousness, an almost incapacity to be serious. The drugs and the partying and the sex were, I suspect, hallmarks of a culture distracting itself with pleasure so it would not have to look inward and come up empty. 

Is that really what we’re here for, Longfellow asks? No, he says, we’re here to work on ourselves and to get better, to make progress—for tomorrow to find us a little bit further along than we are today. 

Do things! Make things! Try your best! You matter! That’s what Longfellow is saying.

A 13-year-old Richard Milhous Nixon was given a copy of A Psalm of Life, which he promptly hung up on his wall, memorized, and later presented at school. Perhaps it’s because of people like Nixon—or Napoleon or Hitler—that we shy away from talking about individuals changing the world these days. The ‘Great Man of History Theory’ is problematic. It’s dangerous. It’s exclusionary. The problem is that in tossing it, we lose the opportunity to inspire children that they can change the world for the better, too. 

Many of Longfellow’s poems do precisely this: There’s one about Florence Nightingale, an angel who reinvents nursing. There’s another about Paul Revere and his midnight ride to warn revolutionary Patriots of approaching British troops. He celebrates Native American heroes in “The Song of Hiawatha.” They are not always the most historically accurate accounts, but to borrow a metaphor from Maggie Smith’s poem, “Good Bones”—which, again, some pretentious folks might find cringe—when we read poems to our children, we are trying to “sell them the world.” Will we sell them a horrible one? Or we will sell them on all the potential, the idea that they could “make this place beautiful”?

One of the reasons I find so many modern novels boring and end up quitting most prestige television is that everybody sucks. Nobody is trying to be good. Nothing they do matters. I’ve even found that many children’s books fall into the same trap. They are either about nonsense (pizza, funny dragons, etc) or they are insufferably woke (pandering to parents instead of children). Academia has been consumed by the idea that everything is structural and intersectional and essentially impossible to change. History was made by hypocrites and racists and everything is rendered meaningless by the original sins and outright villainy of our ancestors.

To be up and doing, as Longfellow advises, laboring and waiting, they would claim, is therefore naive. His privilege is showing when he tells us to live in the present and have a heart for any fate. One Longfellow critic has referred to the poem’s “resounding exhortation” as “Victorian cheeriness at its worst.”

But what’s the alternative? Because it’s starting to feel a lot like nihilism. I’m not sure that’s the prescription for what ails young men these days. In fact, isn’t that the cause of the disease?

I draw on one of the lines from A Psalm of Life in my book Perennial Seller, about making work that lasts: “Art is long, and Time is fleeting.” There’s a famous Latin version of this expression: Ars longa, vita brevis. 

I find it depressing how ephemeral and transactional most of my peers are. They chase trends and fads. They care about the algorithm and the whims of the moment—not about making stuff that matters and endures. Longfellow urges us to resist the pull of what’s hot right now—to think bigger and more long-term, to fight harder:

In the world’s broad field of battle,

   In the bivouac of Life,

Be not like dumb, driven cattle!

  Be a hero in the strife!

That stanza is an epigraph in another one of my books, Courage is Calling. I return to it throughout the book because that’s what these things—earnestness, sincerity, the audacity to try, to aim high, to do our best—require: courage. It takes courage to care. Only the brave believe, especially when everyone else is full of doubt and indifference. As you strive to be earnest and sincere, people will laugh at you. They will try to convince you that this doesn’t matter, that it won’t make a difference. Losers have always gotten together in little groups and talked about winners. The hopeless have always mocked the hopeful.

It’s been said by many biographers—often with a sneer—that the key to understanding Theodore Roosevelt (who would have certainly seen Longfellow strolling through Cambridge while he was an undergrad at Harvard) is realizing that he grew up reading about the great figures of history and decided to be just like them. Roosevelt actually believed. In himself. In stories. In something larger than himself. It is precisely this idea that Longfellow concludes Psalm with:

Lives of great men all remind us

   We can make our lives sublime,

And, departing, leave behind us

   Footprints on the sands of time;

But this is not mere hero worship, because Longfellow qualifies it immediately with a much more reasonable, much more personal goal, explaining that these are,

“Footprints that perhaps another,

     Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,

A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,

     Seeing, shall take heart again.

 

Let us, then, be up and doing,

   With a heart for any fate;

Still achieving, still pursuing,

   Learn to labor and to wait.

Indeed, Longfellow would hear, not long after the poem’s publication, of a soldier dying in Crimea, heard repeating to himself with his final words, “footprints on the sands of time, footprints on the sands of time, footprints on the sands of time…” 

A Psalm of Life is a call to meaning. A call to action. A call to be good. A call to make things that matter. A call to try to make a difference—for yourself and others. A reassurance that we matter. That although we return to dust, our soul lives on.

That’s why I read it to my sons. That’s the lesson that I want to pass along, a footprint I am trying to leave behind for them now, so that they might draw on it in some moment of struggle far in the future. So that they can always remember why we are here:

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

   Is our destined end or way;

But to act, that each to-morrow

   Find us farther than to-day.

One foot in front of the other. One small act after one small action. One little thing that makes a difference, for us and for others.

Everything (And I Really Mean Everything) Is A Chance To Do This

Get the limited edition collector’s set of my series on The Stoic Virtues.

I think people get it wrong.

I know I did.

When the Stoics say that the obstacle is the way, that there’s an opportunity in every obstacle, most of us take that to mean there’s some way to turn adversity into advantage.

We think of entrepreneurs pivoting during a downturn and building a billion-dollar business. We think of an investor buying back their own stock or taking advantage of being underestimated by their competitors. We think of a general using the bad weather as cover. We think of an athlete coming back stronger after an injury. We think of some rejected artist going independent and building their own label.

That’s how I was thinking about obstacles and opportunities when I wrote ​The Obstacle is the Way​ in my twenties. The simplest idea at the center of the book is that there are hidden advantages in every problem, that businesses and teams and people can take seemingly impossible situations and triumph over them. “Hard times can be softened,” Seneca writes in one of his essays, “tight squeezes widened, and heavy loads made lighter for those who can apply the right pressure.”

But what I’ve come to understand in the intervening years is that the Stoics were getting at something more profound than the fact that every downside can be flipped into some kind of advantage or transformed into a success story.

They had to.

Because it would be insane (and insulting) to say that terminal cancer was an advantage. Was there a way for Marcus Aurelius to spring forward after he buried another one of his children? Seneca can say that hard times can be softened, but then again, he didn’t have to live like Epictetus, not just through slavery but with a crippling disability from the torture he underwent at the hands of his master.

What I’ve come to understand is that the “opportunity” the Stoics saw inside adversity, big and small, was the opportunity to practice virtue. That is, it was a chance for them to rise to meet an occasion, to do the right thing, to be magnificent or magnanimous, even when they were heartbroken, even when they were being kicked around by life, even when they were dying.

Ok, so what is virtue?

In the ancient world, virtue consisted of four key components:

​Courage​—bravery, fortitude, honor, sacrifice…

​Temperance​—discipline, self-control, moderation, composure, balance…

​Justice​—fairness, service, honesty, fellowship, goodness, kindness…

​Wisdom​—knowledge, education, truth, self-reflection, peace…

Marcus Aurelius called them the “touchstones of goodness”—guiding principles for how to act, who to be, and how to respond in any situation. And there really is no situation that we can’t use as a way to practice these virtues. Even the hardest, most tragic, most heartbreaking moments of life—a terminal diagnosis, a crippling injury, losing your livelihood, burying a loved one—can be transformed by endurance, by selflessness, by courage, by kindness, by decency.

When I interviewed ​Francis Ford Coppola on the Daily Stoic podcast​​, he shared how he’s been getting through a recent tragedy in his own life—losing his wife of 60 years. “There was a Marcus Aurelius quote that really lifted me,” he told me, “which was that ‘if you lose a loved one, honor her.’ In a sense, try to be more like her, and then she’ll live on in your actions. My wife was very good—if someone was alone or sick or something, she’d call them up and be comforting to them. And I’m not like that, you know? So I started to do that. People that I know—some guys my age who have no grandchildren—I call them up and say, ‘Hey, how are you?’ And they are so pleased and so kind. And that’s how I keep my wife in my life.”

Beautiful. And closer to what I think it really means when we say the obstacle is the way.

I’ve tried to apply this formula practically in my business and creative life, but also in the difficulties I’ve faced in my life. The last decade and a half has been good to me in many ways. It’s also been…a lot. There were natural disasters, floods and fires, a freeze that broke the power grid and most of our pipes. A long drought that devastated our livestock and land. A tragic, years-long pandemic that dashed countless plans (nearly killing the ​independent bookstore we opened in the teeth of it​). Disputes with business partners. An employee caught embezzling. Funerals and late-night phone calls with news you never want to get. The company where I made my bones went bankrupt, taking with it not just much of my résumé but what was supposed to be several years’ salary in stock options. There was a falling out with family. Hundreds of thousands of miles on the road. There was getting skunked on the bestseller lists, creative differences, daily battles with procrastination.

I remember in the early days of the pandemic, I wrote a note to myself along these very lines:

In spending much of that time working on the ​Stoic Virtues Series​—four books, each on one of the cardinal virtues—I have come to more fully understand what the Stoics were getting at: LIFE IS ALWAYS DEMANDING ONE OF THESE VIRTUES FROM US. Always demanding us to be a good person despite the bad things that have happened. To do good in the world despite the bad that has befallen you. And in good times—in the face of the temptations, distractions, responsibility and obligations and obstacles that come with success and abundance—to be humble, to be disciplined, to be decent, to be generous, to hold true to your values.

When I look at the world right now, as frustrated and alarmed as I am by it, what I try to remind myself is that it’s moments like this that demand virtue from us. We don’t control so much of what’s happening. We wouldn’t choose so much of this. But here it is. What are we going to do about it? Who are we going to be inside it?

The fourth and final book in the virtue series, ​Wisdom Takes Work​, is set to come out this fall (but is officially available now for preorder at ​dailystoic.com/wisdom​, where we’re doing a run of preorder bonuses like signed and numbered first editions, early access to the introduction, bonus chapters, and even an invite to a philosophy dinner at my bookstore, The Painted Porch—​check out all the bonuses here​).

When Edward Gibbon finished ​The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire​, he noted his sadness at taking “everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion.” I don’t feel exactly that way—virtue isn’t something you ever finish or take leave of—but there is something bittersweet about drawing these books to a close.

I’m better for having written them—not just as a writer, but as a person. Of course, I can already see all the things I’d do differently if I were starting over, all I’ve learned since publishing the first book in 2021. But, that’s kind of the point. To get better as you go. To learn from your time here. To put your past self to shame.

One thing I’ve noticed? I am calmer. I am quieter. I argue less. I get upset less. I admit I am wrong more often. There’s still a long way to go, but I’m proud of the progress I’ve made.

That’s how Aristotle described virtue—as a kind of craft, something one gets better at just as one would get better at any skill or profession. “We become builders by building and we become harpists by playing the harp,” he writes. “Similarly, then, we become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions.”

Virtue is not something you demand of others. It’s not a standard you pass laws about or police. It’s not something we flippantly say or conflate with “success.”

It’s something you demand of yourself. It’s something you do. It’s something you use day to day, moment to moment. It’s something that steers the choices you make and the actions you take. It’s something you choose.

And every situation—big and small, positive or negative—is an opportunity to make a virtuous choice.

Will you be ​brave​ or afraid? Selfish or ​selfless​? ​Strong​ or weak? ​Wise​ or stupid? Will you cultivate a good habit or a bad one? Courage or cowardice? The bliss of ignorance or the challenge of a new idea? Stay the same…or grow? The easy way or the right way?

Is it easy to make these choices? Of course not. That’s why I put it in the title of the new book—​it takes work​.

I finished the ​Stoic Virtues Series​, but I remain committed to the work.

I hope you do the same.

With the upcoming release of ​Wisdom Takes Work​, the team and I at Daily Stoic wanted to do something special, something we’ve never done before—a limited edition collector’s set of all four books in the Stoic Virtues Series. Each set is signed and numbered with a unique title page identifying them as part of the only printing of this series. I’m also throwing in one of the notecards I used to help me write the series (​learn more about my notecard system here​). There’s a limited run of these, ​so check them out here today​.

37 Lessons From The Birthplace Of Stoicism

​From my run on a trail overlooking Mt. Olympus​.

On a fateful day in the fourth century BC, the Phoenician merchant Zeno lost everything.

While traveling through the Mediterranean Sea with a cargo full of Tyrian purple dye, his ship wrecked upon the rocks, his cargo lost to the sea. He washed up in Athens.

We’re not sure what caused the wreck, but it devastated him financially, physically, emotionally. It could have been the end of his story—the loss could have driven him to drink or suicide, or a quiet ordinary life in the service of others. Instead, it set in motion the creation of Stoicism, one of the greatest intellectual and spiritual movements in history.

“I made a prosperous voyage,” Zeno later joked, “when I suffered a shipwreck.”

Indeed, we were all richer for it.

Why am I telling you this? Because I’m in Greece right now with my family for our summer vacation–the birthplace of Stoicism. We didn’t just fly into Athens and take a couple of tours, but decided instead to really cover quite a bit of geography on the trip (2,500km or so by car and boat between Athens, Olympia, Ithaca, Delphi, Patras, Thermopylae, Mt. Olympus, Marathon, Cape Sounio, among others) and I’ve had the wonderful experience of bringing to life Stoic lessons and stories that I’ve been studying, reading, and talking about for decades.

And as I’m stomping around in the places where it all began, I thought I’d riff on some of my favorite lessons and ideas from Stoicism. I was first introduced to this philosophy two decades ago and have since ​written thirteen books​, sent out well over 3,000 ​Daily Stoic emails​, and hosted ​500+ Daily Stoic Podcast interviews​. I’ve picked up some pretty good lessons along the way. Here are some of my favorites:

[*] “The chief task in life,” ​Epictetus​ said, “is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own . . .” That’s the fundamental premise of Stoicism, also known as the “dichotomy of control”. If we can focus on making clear what parts of our day are within our control and what parts are not, we will not only be happier, we will have a distinct advantage over other people who fail to do so.

[*] As I wound up the Sacred Way to the Temple of Apollo last week, it occurred to me that I was literally following in Zeno’s footsteps, the footsteps he would have taken when he visited the Oracle at Delphi and received a life-changing prophecy: “To live the best life,” the Oracle told Zeno, “you should have conversations with the dead.” What does that mean? Zeno wasn’t sure…until he made a realization that you may have made yourself: Reading is the way to communicate with the dead. Reading doesn’t just change us, it opens us up to live multiple lives, to absorb the experiences of generations of people. It allows us to gain cost-​free knowledge that someone else gained through pain and suffering.

[*] It’s fascinating to me that ​Epictetus​–a Greek slave–ends up intersecting (and interacting) with FOUR different Roman emperors: Nero, Domitian, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius. And do you know who was most influenced by Epictetus? Whose life was most radically changed by his lectures? Marcus Aurelius. So it’s unfortunate Epictetus isn’t more widely known and read—because when he is, he changes lives. And that’s why ​we’re dedicating a whole month to Epictetus over at The Daily Stoic​. In an effort to make his work more accessible, we created a brand new guide called ​How To Read Epictetus​. It’s part book club, part deep dive into the life, lessons, and legacy of this incredible teacher. So if you want to understand why Epictetus is ​your favorite philosopher’s favorite philosopher​ (as he was for Marcus Aurelius), then join me and thousands of other Stoics over at ​dailystoic.com/epictetuscourse​ today.

[*] Epictetus reminds us that “it’s impossible to learn that which you think you already know.” To the Stoics, particularly Zeno, conceit was the primary impediment to ​wisdom​. Because when you’ve always got answers, opinions and ready-made solutions, what you’re not doing is learning.

[*] A wise man, Chrysippus said, can make use of whatever comes his way but is in want of nothing. “On the other hand,” he said, “nothing is needed by the fool for he does not understand how to use anything but he is in want of everything.” There is perhaps no better definition of a Stoic: to have but not want, to enjoy without needing.

[*] It’s strange how often Stoicism is associated today with “having no emotions,” because all the Stoics are explicit in how natural it is to have emotions, in deed and word. A Stoic feels. We only have a dozen or so surviving anecdotes about Marcus Aurelius, and ​THREE of them have him crying​. He cried when his favorite tutor passed away, he cried in court over deaths from the Antonine Plague. Stoicism isn’t a tool to help you stuff down your emotions, it’s a tool to help you better process and deal with them.

[*] People will piss you off in this life. That’s a given. But before you get upset, stop yourself. “Until you know their reasons,” ​Epictetus​ once said, “how do you know whether they have acted wrongly?” That moron who cut you off on the highway, what if he’s speeding to the hospital? The person who spoke rudely might have a broken heart. The Stoics remind us to be empathetic. Almost no one does wrong on purpose, Socrates said. Maybe they just don’t know any better.

[*] In my favorite novel, ​The Moviegoer​ by Walker Percy (who loved Stoicism and wrote about it often), the wisest character in the book, Aunt Emily, says there’s “one thing I believe and I believe it with every fiber of my being. A man must live by his lights and do what little he can and do it as best he can. In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.” That captures Stoicism to me. The Stoics didn’t always win, but they always showed themselves as worthy of winning. Cato’s fight against Caesar was a losing battle. He could have folded, he could have fled, but he didn’t. He gave everything to protect the ideals Rome was founded on, a cause he believed was just. He didn’t succeed, but he did the next best thing: He gave his best.

[*] The ancients didn’t have the advantage of looking down from an airplane to see the world from a 30,000-foot view. They never saw their home in a satellite image. Still, at least twice in ​Meditations​, Marcus speaks of taking “Plato’s view.” “To see them from above,” he writes, “the thousands of animal herds, the rituals, the voyages on calm or stormy seas, the different ways we come into the world, share it with one another and leave it.” For him the exercise was theoretical—the tallest mountain in Italy is about 15,000 feet and as far as we know, he never climbed it. But what he got from this exercise was humility, a better understanding of how small and interconnected we are.

[*] In one of his most famous letters to Lucilius, Seneca gives a pretty simple prescription for the good life. “Each day,” he wrote, “acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes.” One gain per day. That’s it. One quote, one prescription, one story. “Well-being,” Zeno said, “is attained by little and little, and nevertheless is no little thing itself.”

[*] “He who is everywhere,” Seneca says, “is nowhere.” If you want to be great at whatever it is you’re doing, you have to make some choices about what you say yes to and what you say no to. “Most of what we say and do is not essential,” Marcus Aurelius reminds us. “If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time, and more tranquility. Ask yourself at every moment, ‘Is this necessary?’”

[*] There is a wonderful quote from ​Epictetus​ that I think of every time I see someone get terribly offended or outraged about something. I try to think about it when I get upset myself. “If someone succeeds in provoking you,” he said, “realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation.” Whatever the other person did is on them. Whatever your reaction is to their remark or action, that’s on you. Don’t let them bait you or make you upset. Focus on managing your own behavior. Let them poke and provoke as much as they like. Don’t be complicit in the offense.

[*] ​Courage. Justice. Temperance. Wisdom.​ They are the most essential virtues in Stoicism, what Marcus called the “touchstones of goodness.” “If, at some point in your life,” Marcus Aurelius wrote, “you should come across anything better than justice, truth, self-control, courage — it must be an extraordinary thing indeed.”

[*] “If your choices are beautiful,” ​Epictetus​ said, “so too will you be.” It’s simple and it’s true: you are what your choices make you. Nothing more and nothing less.

[*] It’s a strange paradox. The people who are most successful in life, who accomplish the most, who dominate their professions—they don’t care that much about winning. They don’t care about outcomes. As Marcus Aurelius said, it’s insane to tie your well-being to things outside of your control. Success, mastery, sanity, Marcus writes, comes from tying your wellbeing, “to your own actions.”

[*] It’s possible, Marcus Aurelius said, to not have an opinion. Do you need to have an opinion about the scandal of the moment—is it changing anything? Do you need to have an opinion about the way your kid does their hair? So what if that person is a vegetarian? “These things are not asking to be judged by you,” ​​Marcus writes​​. “Leave them alone.” Especially because these opinions often make us miserable! “It’s not things that upset us,” Epictetus says, “it’s our opinions about things.” The fewer opinions you have, especially about other people and things outside your control, the happier you will be. Of course, this is not to say that we shouldn’t have any opinions at all, but that we should save our judgments for what matters—right and wrong, justice and injustice, what is moral and what is not.

[*] The occupations of the Stoics could not be more different. ​Seneca​ was a playwright, a wealthy landowner, and a political advisor. ​Epictetus​ was a former slave who became a philosophy teacher. ​Marcus Aurelius​ would have loved to be a philosopher, but instead found himself wearing the purple cloak of the emperor. ​Zeno​ was a prosperous merchant. ​Cato​was a Senator. ​Cleanthes​ was a water carrier. Once asked by a king why he still drew water, Cleanthes replied, “Is drawing water all I do? What? Do I not dig? What? Do I not water the garden? Or undertake any other labor for the love of philosophy?” What matters to the Stoics is not what job you have but how you do it. Anything you do well is noble, no matter how humble.

[*] The now-famous passage from Marcus Aurelius is that the impediment to action advances action, that what stands in the way becomes the way (which is also the passage that inspired my book ​The Obstacle is the Way​). But do you know what he was talking about specifically? He was talking about difficult people! He was saying that frustrating, infuriating, thoughtless people are opportunities to practice excellence and virtue—be it forgiveness, patience, self-control, or cheerfulness. But it’s not just with difficult people. That’s what I’ve come to see as the essence of Stoicism: every situation is a chance to practice virtue. So when I find myself in situations big and small, positive or negative, I try to see each of them as an opportunity for me to be the best I’m capable of being in that moment.

[*] Every event has two handles, Epictetus said: “one by which it can be carried, and one by which it can’t. If your brother does you wrong, don’t grab it by his wronging, because this is the handle incapable of lifting it. Instead, use the other—that he is your brother, that you were raised together, and then you will have hold of the handle that carries.” This applies to everything. When bad news comes, do I grab the handle of despair or the handle of action? When I’m slighted, do I grab the handle of grievance or the handle of grace? When things feel uncertain, do I grab the handle of fear or the handle of preparation? I don’t get to choose what happens. But I do get to choose how I respond. And if I want to carry the weight of whatever comes next, I have to grab the handle that’s strong enough to hold.

[*] “The things you think about determine the quality of your mind,” Marcus writes in ​Meditations​. “Your soul takes the color of your thoughts.” If you see the world as a negative, horrible place, you’re right. If you look for shittiness, you will see shittiness. If you believe that you were screwed, you’re right. But if you look for beauty in the mundane, you’ll see it. If you look for evidence of goodness in people, you’ll find it. If you decide to see the agency and power you do have over your life, well, you’ll find you have quite a bit.

[*] Over the years, the Stoics have completely reoriented my definition of wealth. Of course, not having what you need to survive is insufficient. But what about people who have a lot…but are insatiable? Who are plagued by envy and comparison? Both Marcus Aurelius and Seneca talk about rich people who are not content with what they have and are thus quite poor. But feeling like you have ‘enough’–​that’s rich no matter what your income is​.

[*] This was a breakthrough I had during the pandemic. Suddenly, I had a lot less to worry about. I wasn’t doing the things that, in the past, I told myself were ​the causes of my anxiety​. I wasn’t hopping on a plane. I wasn’t battling traffic to get somewhere on time. I wasn’t preparing for this talk or that one. So you’d think that my anxiety would have gone way down. But it didn’t. And what I realized is that anxiety has nothing to do with any of these things. The airport isn’t the one to blame. I am! Marcus Aurelius talks about this in ​Meditations​. “Today I escaped from anxiety,” he says. “Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions—not outside.” It’s a little frustrating, but it’s also freeing. Because it means you can stop it! You can choose to discard it.

[*] One of the most relatable moments in ​Meditations​ is the argument Marcus Aurelius has with himself in the opening of book 5. It’s clearly an argument he’s had with himself many times, on many mornings—as have many of us: He knows he has to get out of bed, but so desperately wants to remain under the warm covers. It’s relatable…but it’s also impressive. Marcus didn’t actually have to get out of bed. He didn’t really have to do anything. The emperor had all sorts of prerogatives, and here Marcus was insisting that he rise early and get to work. Why? Because Marcus knew that ​winning the morning was key to winning the day and winning at life​. By pushing himself to do something uncomfortable and tough, by insisting on doing what he said he knew he was born to do and what he loved to do, Marcus was beginning a process that would lead to a successful day.

[*] The Stoics kept themselves in fighting shape, they liked to say, not for appearance’s sake, but because they understood life itself was a kind of battle. They did hard things. They sought out opportunities to push their physical limitations. Socrates was admired for his ability to endure cold weather. Marcus Aurelius was a wrestler. Cleanthes was a boxer. Chryssipus was a runner. This wasn’t separate from their philosophy practice, it was their philosophy practice. “We treat the body rigorously,” Seneca said, “so that it will not be disobedient to the mind.”

[*] This was Marcus’ simple recipe for productivity and for happiness. “If you seek tranquility,” he said, “do less.” And then he clarifies. Not nothing. Less. ​Do only what’s essential​. “Which brings a double satisfaction: to do less, better.”

[*] Just because someone spends a lot of time reading, Epictetus said, doesn’t mean they’re smart. Great readers don’t just think about quantity, they think about quality. They read books that challenge their thinking. They read books that help them improve as human beings, not just as professionals. They, as Epictetus said, make sure that their “efforts aim at improving the mind.” Because then and only then would he call you “hard-working.” Then and only then would he give you the title “reader.”

[*] The Stoics come down pretty hard on procrastinating. It’s “the biggest waste of life,” Seneca wrote. “It snatches away each day and denies us the present by promising the future.” To procrastinate is to be entitled. It is arrogant. It assumes there will be a later. Stop putting stuff off. Do it now.

[*] Marcus talked about a strange contradiction: we are generally selfish people, yet, more than ourselves, we value other people’s opinions about us. “It never ceases to amaze me,” he wrote, “we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.” The fundamental Stoic principle is that we focus only on the things that are within our control. Other people’s opinions are not within our control. ​Don’t spend any time worrying about what other people think​.

[*] The Stoics often quote the poet ​Heraclitus​, who said that character is fate. What he meant was: Character decides everything. It determines who we are/what we do. Develop good character and all will be well. Fail to, and nothing will.

[*] It’s called ​self-discipline​. It’s called self-improvement. Your standards are for you. Marcus said philosophy is about ​being strict with yourself and forgiving of other people​. That’s not only the kind way to be, it’s the only effective way to be.

[*] Marcus reminded himself: “Don’t await the perfection of Plato’s Republic.” Because if you do, that’s all you’ll do…wait. That’s one of the ironies about perfectionism: it rarely begets perfection—only disappointment, frustration, and, of course, procrastination. So instead, Marcus said, “be satisfied with even the smallest progress.” ​You’re never going to be perfect—there is no such thing​. You’re human. Instead, aim for progress, even the smallest amount.

[*] Seneca said we have to “choose someone whose way of life as well as words have won your approval. Be always pointing him out to yourself either as your guardian or as your model.” Choose someone who you want to be like, and then constantly ask yourself: what would they do in this situation? In Seneca’s last moment, when Nero comes to kill him, it’s ​Cato​ that he channels. It’s where he gets his strength. Even though Seneca had fallen short of his writings in a lot of ways, in the moment it mattered most, he drew on Cato and became as great as philosophy could have ever hoped for him to be.

[*] Some days, Marcus wrote, the crowd cheers and worships you. Other days, they hate you and hit you. They’ll build you up, and then tear you down. That’s just the way it goes. The key, Marcus said, is to assent to all of it. Accept the good stuff without arrogance, he writes in ​Meditations​. Let the bad stuff go with indifference. Neither success nor failure says anything about you.

[*] Seneca said that the key distinction between the Stoics and the Epicureans is that the Epicureans only got involved in politics and public life if they had to. The Stoic, he says, gets involved unless something prevents you. Sometimes I get pushback from people when I talk about anything political with The Daily Stoic. “Why pick a side?” they ask. “You’re going to piss off your audience.” The reason I pick a side is that you have to pick a side. That’s what the Stoic virtue of ​justice​ is about. Stoicism says we have to be active—we have to participate in politics, we have to try to make the world a better place, we have to serve the common good where we can. You can’t run away from these things. It has to be a battle you’re actively engaged in—in the world, in your job, in the community, in your neighborhood, in your country, in the time and place that you live.

[*] The reality is: we will fall short. We all will. The important thing is that we pick ourselves back up when we do. “When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstances,” Marcus Aurelius wrote, “revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help. You’ll have a better grasp of the harmony if you keep on going back to it.” You’re going to have an impulse to give in, your temper is going to get the best of you. Ambition might lead you astray. But you always have the ability to realize that that is not who you want to be, that is not what you were put here to do, that is not who your philosophy wants you to be.

[*] A Stoic is strong. A Stoic is brave. They carry the load for themselves and others. ​But they also ask for help​. Because sometimes that’s the strongest and bravest thing to do. “Don’t be ashamed to need help,” Marcus Aurelius wrote. “Like a soldier storming a wall, you have a mission to accomplish. And if you’ve been wounded and you need a comrade to pull you up? So what?” If you need a minute, ask. If you need a helping hand, ask. If you need a favor, ask. If you need therapy, go.

[*] I spoke at a biohacking conference a few weeks ago where the stated purpose was all about living well into your hundreds. I teased them a little. Why? I said. So you can spend more time on your phone? So you can accumulate more stuff? So you can check more boxes off your to-do list? Marcus Aurelius would’ve asked, as he did in Meditations,“You’re afraid of death because you won’t be able to do this anymore?” We all think we need to, deserve to, live forever. But death is real. Memento mori. None of us has unlimited time. Which is why we have to get serious now. We have to live and be well now.

34 Lessons From Writing Every Day for Two Decades

I remember driving home from my high school graduation, excited. I was excited not because I was done with school but because of what I was about to start. I’d been working with a friend to put up my first website.

I was going to be a writer.

I’m sure whatever I wrote that day was terrible but that’s sort of the point. It was the first of many, many days. Two decades of days, in fact. I have been writing almost every day for twenty years. How many millions of words is that? I don’t know.

The published output is pretty decent: sixteen books under my own name. Another half dozen or so ghostwritten. One of them was optioned to be a movie starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, directed by Gus Van Sant (if it ever happens…) Ten million copies sold. Articles in the New York Times, Forbes, USA Today, and Thought Catalogue.

But mostly, I can feel it. I feel like I am just starting to hit my stride, just starting to get the hang of it. If you told me twenty years ago that that’s how long real confidence would take, I don’t know if I could have handled it. Still, I stayed at it and here we are…and I’ve learned a few things along the way, both about craft and about life (the two are more related than you think).

So that’s what I wanted to share today…

– I am very ambitious as a writer. I no longer have any ambitions as an author. ​​I’m not aiming at lists. I don’t think about deals. I rarely even look at sales numbers​​. I have stopped tracking how other people’s books are doing. What I’m saying is that I have locked into process and tuned out publishing. The funny thing is that my results have gotten better the more I have flipped this ratio. I have also gotten much more content.

– Related…I once read a letter where Cheryl Strayed kindly pointed out to a young writer the distinction between writing and publishing. Her implication was that we focus too much on the latter and not enough on the former. It’s true for most things. Amateurs focus on outcomes more than process. The more professional you get, the less you care about results. It seems paradoxical but it’s true. You still get results, but that’s because you know that the systems and processes are reliable. You trust them with your life.

– And if you’re doing what you’re doing for external rewards, god help you. ​A Confederacy of Dunces​ was rejected by publishers. After the author’s suicide, it won the Pulitzer. People don’t know shit. YOU know. So love it while you’re doing it. Success can only be extra.

– Speaking of which, that distinction between amateur and professional is an essential piece of advice I have gotten, first from Steven Pressfield’s writings and then by getting to know him over the years. ​There are professional habits and amateur ones​. Which are you practicing? Is this a pro or an amateur move? Ask yourself that. Constantly. – Professionals work. Amateurs talk a lot about tools. Software does not make you a better writer. If classics were created with quill and ink, you’ll probably be fine with a Word Document. Or a blank piece of paper. Don’t let technology distract you. Helen Simpson has “Faire et se taire” from Flaubert on a Post-it near her desk, which she translates as “Shut up and get on with it.”

– Don’t get caught up trying to please everyone all the time. No one who has ever created anything has escaped criticism. It’s inevitable that some percentage of people will not like what you do. You’ll drive yourself crazy if you think you’re somehow the exception to this. Just stay true to your work and who you are and don’t be too attached to your reputation.

– I’m not sure where I stole the idea from, but I am a big proponent of printing out and putting up good advice and quotes. What goes up on the wall next to where I work can change project to project, but right now, I have a quote from Martha Graham: “Never be afraid of the material. The material knows when you are frightened and will not help.” One from Boccaccio: “Who in our day can penetrate the hearts of the Ancients? Who can bring light and life again minds long since removed in death? Who can elicit their meaning? A divine task that–not human! It is, therefore, my plan of interpretation first to write what I learn from the Ancients, and when they fail me, or I find them inexplicit, to set down my own opinion.” And one from Bob Johnson to Johnny Cash: “You need to build a mausoleum in your head with big iron doors so that nobody can get in there except you. You don’t let me in there, you don’t let June in there, you don’t let your manager in there, you don’t let the record company people in there. You have to decide for yourself what you want to do with your music and not let anyone else tell you.”

– The novelist Philipp Meyer (whose book ​​The Son​​ is an incredible read) ​​told me on the podcast​​, “You have to be very careful about to what (and to whom) you’re giving the best part of your day.” I fiercely protect my mornings—family first, then writing. My assistant knows not to schedule anything before mid-morning because early calls and meetings don’t just take time—they sap the energy needed for the essential work.

– Writing ​Trust Me, I’m Lying​, I was 90% conscious about what other people might think and 10% following what was in my heart as an artist. The book I am most proud of is my book ​Conspiracy​. The only parts of it I wish I could do differently are the few instances that, in retrospect, I was too conscious of what other people might think (particularly journalists). I’ve flipped the ratio by this point, but I wish I had gotten to that happier place sooner.

– When ​The Obstacle Is the Way​ came out, it did okay, but I was already deep into working on what would become ​Ego Is the Enemy​. About a year later, Obstacle really took off—teams like the New England Patriots were reading it, and there was a big article that fueled sales. But by then, I didn’t care as much because I was focused on the next book. I accidentally stumbled into a process that protected me from both disappointment and ego—I was too focused on the next thing to get caught up in good or bad news. Now I always try to start the next project before the last one launches, even arranging my schedule so I’m working the day sales numbers come in, to avoid getting caught up in those ups and downs.

– When I look back on my own writing, the stuff that makes me cringe isn’t necessarily even stuff I was wrong about. What disturbs me is the certainty. I thought I knew, but I didn’t really know. I wasn’t even close to knowing. Ego never ages well, even if it was correct in a narrow instance. My books have gotten longer as I’ve gone on. I don’t think I’m being self-indulgent, I think I am being more fair, more compassionate, more truthful.

– I’ve heard this many times from many different writers over the years (Neil Strauss being one), but as time passes the truth of it becomes more and more clear, and not just in writing: When someone tells you something is wrong, they’re almost always right. When someone tells you how to fix it, they’re almost always wrong.

– Along those lines…I wanted ​Trust Me, I’m Lying​ to be titled Confessions of a Media Manipulator. I also should have stuck to my guns about the prologue of ​Ego is the Enemy​ (I didn’t want to be in it, they wanted me in it). In creative disputes, the publisher/studio/investors/etc. are not always wrong, but often they are. And even when they’re not, you have to remember that whatever the decision, you have to live with it in a way they do not. I’ve regretted every time I did not go with what was in my heart as an artist.

– Writing is a byproduct of hours and hours of reading, researching, thinking and making my notecards. When a day’s writing goes well, it’s got little to do with that day at all. It’s actually a lagging indicator of hours and hours spent researching and thinking. Every passage and page has a prologue titled Preparation.

– As I was writing ​The Daily Stoic​, I got into it and decided I would just keep going. That’s what started ​The Daily Stoic email​. I’ve written and sent out a meditation on Stoicism every day since—I’d estimate that’s 1,500,000 words? It might seem like a lot of work to write and put out an email every day for almost nine years…and it is! But it’s also one of my favorite things to do, and it has made me so much better. Committing to this has been a forcing function for my productivity. We all need reps. If I only published books, I wouldn’t get nearly as many reps as I have gotten from publishing these daily emails–each one making me a little better at my craft.

– When Winston Churchill was driven from power, he could have wallowed or retired. Instead, he became a one-man media company—publishing 11 books, 400 articles, and giving 350 speeches between 1931 and 1939. He became more famous in the U.S. than in Britain, delivering his message without intermediation. They tried to cancel him, but it didn’t work. That’s what I’ve built with The Daily Stoic. It’s not just an email list but also a ​YouTube Channel with 2M subscribers​, an ​Instagram account with 3.4M followers​, ​a Twitter account with 600K followers​, a ​TikTok page with 800K followers​, and ​a Facebook page with 1M followers​. It’s Stoicism directly to the people.

– I can’t tell you how many times ​I’ve thought of a great line or solved an intractable writing problem while running or swimming​. Exercise is also an easy win every day. Writing can go poorly, but going on a run always goes well.

– James Altucher has a great rule that I have stolen: write what you’re afraid to say. If your stuff isn’t scaring you, you’re not pushing yourself enough.

– The guy that spoke before Lincoln at Gettysburg went on for about two hours—his speech was 13,607 words long. Lincoln got up and spoke just 271 words. Think about how short ​Meditations​ is. Think about Seneca’s best quotes, how boiled-down and blunt they are. Real insight does not take many words to express. (More on this idea in Gary Willis’ incredible book ​Lincoln at Gettysburg​).

– Near the end of his presidency, Eisenhower asked speechwriter James C. Humes to draft an address. After submitting a draft, Humes was called to Eisenhower’s office to discuss. “What’s the QED of this speech?” Eisenhower asked. Humes was confused. “QED,” he said, “what’s that?” “Quod Erat Demonstrandum,” Eisenhower barked. “Don’t you remember your geometry? What’s the bottom line? In one sentence!” Eisenhower was a brilliant man, but a simple and straightforward one after years in the Army. He had no patience for rambling. This is a good lesson for anyone and everyone when it comes to communication. Don’t dress things up more than they need to be. Don’t hedge. Don’t distract. Speak plainly. Make your point.

– Precisely zero of my sixteen books were immediately accepted by my publisher—and they were right to kick them back at me. In being forced to go back to the manuscript, I got the books to where they needed to be. Hemingway once said that “the first draft of anything is shit,” and he’s right (​I actually have that on my wall as a reminder​).

– Don’t talk about projects until you’re finished. Save that carrot for the end. Talking and doing fight for the same resources.

– My editor Niki Papadopoulos once told me, “It’s not what a book is. It’s what a book does.” This is why musicians follow the “car test” (how does the song sound in a car driving down the highway). It’s not about whether you like it…but about what it does for the people buying it.

– Vivian Gornick said, “What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.” As Robert Greene once told me, it’s all material. If you start asking more often, “How can I use this to my advantage?”—your creative output will not only get better, your life will too.

– Speaking of Robert…I’ve talked before about ​my notecard system​—the process I use to research and write my books, which I learned from Robert. As he says, “A lot of books fail because the writer loses control of the research. You are either a master of the material or it’s the master of you.” That’s true beyond books: You either master your to-do list or the day masters you. You either set clear priorities or get lost in trivial tasks. You either build systems or get overwhelmed by chaos.

– A formative lesson for me when I was Robert’s research assistant came when he sent me off to find stories for his writing. I’d spend weeks gathering material and bring back options I thought might work. At one point, looking over what I’d found, he said something like, “Ryan, all your stories are from nineteenth-century white guys. That’s not going to work.” He wanted diversity in his examples—not just so every reader would feel included, but because a book on the laws of power or mastery or human nature would be incomplete if it only drew on white men from the nineteenth-century.

– One more from Robert. He once told me a book needs to be either extremely entertaining or extremely practical—most fail because they fall somewhere in between. He taught me to ask: What role does this book play in someone’s life? Does it justify its cost to the reader? Readers are customers, and many authors forget that, thinking readers are just lucky for whatever the artist creates. Robert helped me see that a book has to do a job.

– My research assistant ​Billy Oppenheimer​ recently reminded me of a time I once called him about some piece he was working on, and said, “You know the ‘go for the throat’ story in ​Courage Is Calling​?” (Early in the Korean War, with U.S. forces trapped and the enemy advancing, General MacArthur strode to the blackboard, circled the point of attack, and said, “That’s where we should land…go for the throat.”) “That should be your motto,” I said, “write it down. Don’t spin your wheels or backstory your way into the story—grab the reader by the collar and rip them immediately into the story.

– For a long time, my writing habit was all-or-nothing—either I wrote a lot of words or I didn’t. Over time, I’ve lowered the stakes: now the question is simple: “Did I make a positive contribution to my writing today?” Sometimes that means writing, sometimes editing, adding, deleting. Sometimes I’m home and it’s in my office, sometimes I’m on the road and it’s on a plane or in a hotel room. Sometimes it’s a big contribution, sometimes it’s a little contribution. The line from Zeno was that big things are realized by small steps. That’s what I try to remind myself: every day, just make a positive contribution.

– Related…​I once asked one of my favorite writers, Rich Cohen,​ about how he’s able to be so consistently productive at such a high level. He said he approaches a big project like he approaches a cross-country road trip. “The way you deal with long road trips is you set yourself a minimum number of hours a day, no matter how you feel.” The point is that “not much” adds up if you do it a lot.

– Counterprogramming is key. Writing ​The Obstacle Is the Way​ and later launching ​The Daily Stoic​ might have seemed crazy. Not just to me—everyone said so. Who was going to care about some obscure ancient philosophy? The world wasn’t exactly clamoring for books or daily content about Stoicism. But that’s exactly why it worked. It was crazy because no one else was doing it. It was different. It stood out.

– The best way to market your writing is to write the marketing into the writing. My explicit mission with ​Trust Me, I’m Lying​ was to write an exposé of the media system that would shock and appall anyone who followed the news or worked in marketing world. The book was written to provoke, to challenge, to make people uncomfortable enough that they would talk about it. As Elizabeth Wurtzel put it, “Either you’re controversial, or nothing at all is happening.”

– Nothing is so good that it just finds its audience. You have to bring it to them. As literary agent Byrd Leavell puts it to his clients: “You know what happens if your book gets published and you don’t have any way of getting attention for it? No one buys it.” Plenty of artists can make great work. Not everyone has the dedication to make great work and market it. Marketing is where you distinguish yourself and beat out the talent whose entitlement or laziness holds them back.

– Most of all, I’ve learned to enjoy the work. A few years ago, I was talking to a retired pro athlete and they were telling me how they regretted not enjoying the game as much when they played, that they hadn’t had more fun while they played. It wasn’t a particularly unique insight. I’ve heard it in a million speeches and interviews, but I was in the middle of a particularly hard writing project at the time and not having much fun. I remember thinking: I’ve made it. I’m a pro at this really cool job…why am I not enjoying myself? I’ve made a conscious effort since to appreciate that I get to do this, to not let it turn into a grind or a slog.