Ryan Holiday's Blog, page 10

If You Try To Do Everything, You Won’t Do Anything

In 1956 Harry Belafonte placed a call to Coretta Scott King. With her husband arrested once again, he wanted to check in with her and see how she was doing and what the movement might need. Except they could barely carry on a conversation, because Coretta kept being pulled away from the phone to attend to one of the children, to check on dinner, to answer the door.

Sensing she was doing this���and far too much at that���all alone, Belafonte politely asked why the Kings did not have any help at home. Well, she told him, Martin simply would not permit it. Not only because it was financially prohibitive on a minister���s salary, but also because he was worried what others might think. That he was self-important, enriching himself at the expense of the cause, living the high life while millions of blacks suffered.

���That is absolutely ridiculous,��� Belafonte replied. ���He���s here in the middle of this movement doing all of these things, and he���s going to get caught up in what people are going to think if he has somebody helping you?��� Then he informed Ms. King that from this moment forward, their life was changing. He was going to personally pay for staff���and that Martin had absolutely no say in the matter.

This wasn���t just a nice gesture to an overworked family. It was also a strategic move. What Belafonte was buying Martin and Coretta was time. It was peace of mind. He understood that with this help, they would have more energy, more focus for the cause. The last thing he wanted Martin to be thinking about as he marched for peace and justice was whether his kids had a ride home from school.

It takes discipline not to insist on doing everything yourself. Especially when you know how to do them well. Especially when you have high standards about how they should be done. Even if you enjoy doing them���whether that���s mowing your own lawn or answering your own phone.

A glutton isn���t just someone who eats or drinks too much. Some of us are also gluttons for punishment. Gluttons for attention. Gluttons for control. It can come from a good place, as it did for Martin Luther King Jr. We feel obligated. We feel bad spending money. We feel guilty asking for help. It doesn���t matter the source though, because the outcome is the same: We wear ourselves down.

You have to be able to pass the ball���especially when somebody is open and has a better shot.

I was fortunate to learn this early in my career. One of my first jobs as a writer was as a research assistant to Robert Greene, who not only trained and showed me how the writing process works, but taught me an even more important part in the process: That even someone great and talented and self-sufficient doesn���t do it all by himself (this is also in The 48 Laws of Power, expressed more ominously as ���Let others do all the work, take all the credit���).

When I started having some success as a writer myself, one of the first things I did was hire a research assistant. I have been quite open and up front about this (my current researcher is Billy Oppenheimer���he has a great newsletter you can subscribe to) and yet still people ask how do you put out so much content? How do you juggle it all? How do you do it all?

The answer is, I don���t. I have a team. Just in the way that I don���t do the international edition of my books, I have people who help translate what I���ve done into different mediums. This article itself is an example. I tell the Belafonte story in Discipline is Destiny, I���ve written about hiring help in Daily Dad emails (which you can sign up for here), and I���ve talked about my team on podcasts. So my research assistant gathered all of those pieces, strung them together, which allowed me to spend my time polishing and tweaking it before I put it out in the world.

Yes, cumulatively, it has become quite expensive to pay for help (literally hundreds of thousands of dollars a year at this point). But the true cost would be the quality and quantity of content I couldn���t have created, the time I wouldn���t have had with my family, the energy I wouldn���t still have to do what I do.

While this all might sound a little privileged, I am not saying ���Oh everyone should have an enormous team behind them������though in a fair world that would be great. If you can���t afford to hire someone, the good news is there is a much cheaper option, something that successful and busy people also do. It���s called: Automation.

Some people hire an accountant or a financial advisor to handle their retirement and savings accounts. Just as easily, you can use the automation features in something like Wealthfront. Some people have a personal assistant manage tasks for their business or social media for them. Just as easily, you can use software like Buffer or IFTTT to automate routine tasks for you. Some people complain about what a pain their inbox is to manage. Just as easily they can set up filters and folders or use tools that block their spam or unsubscribe them from marketing emails. Some people spend hours a month opening mail, paying bills and doing administrative paperwork. Just as easily they can sign up for paperless billing, or auto-schedule payments.

Almost everything we do as responsible adults in the world is set up inefficiently. By improving our systems, we buy ourselves time and energy. And then with this time and energy, we are able to be better at what we do, to get more done, to be more present for the people who depend on us.

It doesn���t make sense to try to do everything yourself. You have to delegate and automate. You have to find people who are good at things and empower them to help you. You have to be strong enough to hand over the keys, to relinquish control, to develop a system���an organization���that is bigger than just us. Our willpower is not enough.We shouldn���t have to just gut it out. We need to share.

That is, if you���re trying to scale. Trying to build or do something that matters, something bigger than just us.

Going back to the cost of not delegating, King was once asked by an interviewer what he would do with an uninterrupted week of rest. After scoffing at the pure impossibility of such a thing, given the injustices of the world and the demands of the Civil Rights Movement at the time, King explained,

���If I had the luxury of an entire week, I would spend it meditating and reading, refreshing myself spiritually and intellectually���Amidst the struggle, amidst the frustrations, amidst the endless work, I often reflect that I am forever giving���never pausing to take in. I feel urgently the need for even an hour of time to get away, to withdraw, to refuel. I need more time to think through what is being done, to take time out from the mechanics of the movement, to reflect on the meaning of the movement.���

What brilliant ideas or breakthroughs might have come had King been sooner and better able to do that? At the end of King���s short life, who reflects back and is happy about the time he spent doing things he didn���t need to be doing? We are all the worse for it.

It���s time to ask yourself that question too: What would you manage to do with a week like that? An hour? A little help that would allow you to carve out the space?

And, what steps are you taking, who are you delegating to, what are you automating, to make that possible?

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The Secret To Avoiding Burnout

Two years into writing my latest book, Discipline is Destiny, I hit a wall.

There is no word other than ���despair��� for what I was feeling. Doubt? One always has that. This was deeper. No, this was a fear that the book would not come together. That I had chosen the wrong topic. That I had used up all my material. That I did not have what I needed, that my momentum had run out. At my lowest moment, before I had really even begun, I was facing the necessity of calling my publisher and asking for a delay.

I was also tired. Just so tired.

Coming up with the idea for a book is a creative pursuit, actually creating the book is effectively a work of manual labor, sitting in a chair, grinding out each consecutive sentence���a process not measured in hours or days, but months and years. It���s a marathon of endurance, cognitive and physical.

For me, in the last decade, I have run not just a couple of these marathons, but 12 of them, back to back to back. That���s roughly 2.5 million words across titles I���ve published, articles I���ve written, and the daily emails that I produced in the same period.

To say I was burned out was an understatement���at a moment I could not afford it.

This tends to be exactly how it goes.

Which is why the best organizations and entrepreneurs and athletes solve for that problem before it happens.

In 2012 the San Antonio Spurs were coming off a six game road trip. It was their fourth game in five nights and this game was just 24 hours after their victory over the Magic and 72 hours after a double-overtime victory against the Raptors. More than that, two of their stars Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker had come off long summers playing internationally, while Tim Duncan was in his 16th season in the league. Collectively, the four players had played upwards of 3,000 professional games between them, consistently going deep into the playoffs, nearly every year.

So their coach Gregg Popovich decided to rest them, to not play his stars in a nationally televised game against their most hated rivals. ���We���ve done this before in hopes of making a wiser decision, rather than a popular decision,��� he told a reporter. ���It���s pretty logical.���

Logical, yes. Easy? No. And definitely not popular.

In fact, the NBA would fine them $250,000 for daring to do it.

But the concept of ���load management��� was there to stay.

As someone who is disciplined and driven, I have struggled with this myself. When we are committed, when we are driven, self-discipline isn���t always about getting up and getting to work. It���s easier to workout than to skip a workout, easier to write than relax.

The problem with that is that if you want to last, you have to be able to rest. I remember I had Olympic mountain biker Kate Courtney on the podcast while I was working on Discipline is Destiny and she told me a piece of advice she had gotten from her coach when she was pushing herself too hard in practice. ���Do you want to be fast now,��� they asked, ���or later?��� Meaning, do you want to win this workout or win the race?

���The indiscipline of overwork,��� the writer John Steinbeck wrote, ���the falsest of economies.���

When I say that self-discipline saves us, part of what it saves us from is ourselves.

Sometimes that���s from our laziness or our weakness. Just as often, it���s from our addictions, from our excesses, from our impulse to be too hard on others and ourselves. It makes us not just great at what we do, but best, in that fuller sense of the word. Aristotle, who wrote so much on virtue, reminded us that the point of virtue wasn���t power or fame or money or success. It was human flourishing.

What is more important than that?

As I struggled to write Discipline is Destiny, I tried my best to improve in another area of my life���how my work and self-discipline manifested itself at home. Several years ago, after I sold a project, my editor called my wife, in part to congratulate us but also to apologize. She knew what this meant for my wife���what it would do to me, who I became in the dark depths of a book.

However this book does, even if it makes a difference for a lot of people, what I am proudest of is who I was while I wrote it.

There weren���t any apologies necessary, even when it felt like it might not come together. Did my kids even notice? I���m not sure they did. Even that moment where I felt like I might need to delay the book, I remember thinking: And? So what? Sometimes things have to be delayed.

If that���s what it takes to do things right, so be it.

A less disciplined me, a younger me? I would have been wrecked by all this. I would have acted out. I would have been consumed. There was no ���calm and mild light��� for me when it came to my work. There was little balance. I was all ambition and drive���and when something got in the way, I was indomitable and aggressive. It helped me accomplish things. It also made me unhappy.

It would not have served me well on this project. Worse than that, it would have made me a hypocrite.

So yes, as I finished the book, I was still tired. Every writer is tired when they get to the end of a book.

Yet, I also felt wonderful.

Life is for the living. We are meant to be up and doing.

If books came naturally, without effort? Everyone would write them.

And for [books], you can plug in whatever it is that you do. It���s good that it���s hard. It���s good that it can be discouraging. It���s good that it breaks your heart, kicks your ass, messes with your head.

Remember, scarcity creates value. If it wasn���t hard, everyone would do it.

That���s what separates the disciplined from the undisciplined, the weak from the strong, the amateurs from the pros.

Nobody ever said fulfilling our destiny was going to be easy.

It wouldn���t be worth anything if it was.

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This is the Most Important Decision of Your Life

It was long ago now that Hercules came to the crossroads.

At a quiet intersection in the hills of Greece, in the shade of knobby pine trees, the great hero of Greek myth first met his destiny.

Where exactly it was or when, no one knows. We hear of this moment in the stories of Socrates. We can see it captured in the most beautiful art of the Renaissance. We can feel his budding energy, his strapping muscles, and his anguish in the classic Bach cantata. If John Adams had had his way in 1776, Hercules at the crossroads would have been immortalized on the official seal of the newly founded United States.

Because there, before the man���s undying fame, before the twelve labors, before he changed the world, Hercules faced a crisis, one as life-changing and real as any of us have ever faced.

Where was he headed? Where was he trying to go? That���s the point of the story. Alone, unknown, unsure, Hercules, like so many, did not know.

Where the road diverged lay a beautiful goddess who offered him every temptation he could imagine. Adorned in finery, she promised him a life of ease. She swore he���d never taste want or unhappiness or fear or pain. Follow her, she said, and his every desire would be fulfilled.

On the other path stood a sterner goddess in a pure white robe. She made a quieter call. She promised no rewards except those that came as a result of hard work. It would be a long journey, she said. There would be sacrifice. There would be scary moments. But it was a journey fit for a god. It would make him the person his ancestors meant him to be.

Was this real? Did it really happen?

If it���s only a legend, does it matter?

Yes, because this is a story about us. It���s about you. About your dilemma. About your own crossroads. And about the choice you decide to make.

Like Hercules, it���s the choice between vice and virtue, temperance and intemperance, the easy way and the hard way, the well-trodden path and the road less traveled.

We all face this choice.

Hesitating only for a second, Hercules chose the one that made all the difference.

He chose virtue. ���Virtue��� can seem old-fashioned. Yet virtue���arete���translates to something very simple and very timeless: Excellence. Moral. Physical. Mental.

In the ancient world, virtue was comprised of four key components.

Courage

Temperance

Justice

Wisdom

The ���touchstones of goodness,��� the philosopher king Marcus Aurelius called them. To millions, they���re known as the cardinal virtues, four near-universal ideals adopted by Christianity and most of Western philosophy, but equally valued in Buddhism, Hinduism, and just about every other philosophy you can imagine. They���re called ���cardinal,��� C. S. Lewis pointed out, not because they come down from church authorities but because they originate from the Latin cardo, or hinge.

It���s pivotal stuff. It���s the stuff that the door to the good life hangs on.

They are also the topic of the series of books I am currently working on.

Four books. Four virtues. One aim: to help you choose . . .

Courage, bravery, fortitude, honor, sacrifice . . .

Temperance, self-control, moderation, composure, balance . . .

Justice, fairness, service, fellowship, goodness, kindness . . .

Wisdom, knowledge, education, truth, self-reflection, peace . . .

These are the key to a life of honor, of glory, of excellence in every sense. Character traits that John Steinbeck perfectly described as, ���pleasant and desirable to [their] owner and makes him perform acts of which he can be proud and with which he can be pleased.��� But the ���he��� must be taken to mean all of humankind. There was no feminine version of the word virtus in Rome. Virtue wasn���t male or female, it just was.

It still is. It doesn���t matter if you���re a man or a woman. It doesn���t matter if you���re physically strong or painfully shy, a genius or of average intelligence. Virtue is a universal imperative.

The virtues are interrelated and inseparable, yet each is distinct from the others. Doing the right thing almost always takes courage, just as discipline is impossible without the wisdom to know what is worth choosing. What good is courage if not applied to justice? What good is wisdom if it doesn���t make us more modest?

North, south, east, west���the four virtues are a kind of compass (there���s a reason that the four points on a compass are called the ���cardinal directions���). They guide us. They show us where we are and what is true.

Aristotle described virtue as a kind of craft, something to pursue just as one pursues the mastery of any profession or skill. ���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 something we do.

It���s something we choose.

Not once, for Hercules���s crossroads was not a singular event. It���s a daily challenge, one we face not once but constantly, repeatedly. Will we be selfish or selfless? Brave or afraid? Strong or weak? Wise or stupid? Will we 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?

It is the most important decision of your life. Your destiny depends on it.

P.S. The aim of my newest book, Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control, is to teach you how to harness the powers of self-discipline.

The Stoics believed that we are all born to fulfill a great destiny. And while not everyone���s destiny is the same, everyone���s destiny is achieved with self-discipline and control. Discipline is Destiny is a book that will help you fulfill yours.

We are still honoring all the awesome pre-order bonuses (including an opportunity to have a long book-themed dinner with me or get an actual page from the manuscript drafts) over at dailystoic.com/discipline. And if you do order from that link, your order will be fulfilled by us here at The Painted Porch Bookshop in Bastrop, Texas!

If you order copies from anywhere other than the Daily Stoic or The Painted Porch, just send your receipts to disciplineisdestiny@gmail.com, and we���ll make sure you get the bonuses!

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Discipline is Destiny: 25 Habits That Will Guarantee You Success

The ancients were fond of an expression: Character is fate.

It means that character is deterministic, that who you are determines what you will do.

Self-discipline is one of those special things that is both predictive and deterministic. It both predicts that you will be great, AND it makes whatever you are doing great. It is not a means to an end. It is not just something we value until we get something we think we might really value���this job title, that amount of money, winning the biggest game, landing the best opportunity.

No. Discipline is the win. When you are disciplined about your craft���you win. When you know you put your best into something���you win. When your self-worth is tied to things you can control (effort, for example)���you win.

This is what I mean when I say, as I titled my latest book, Discipline is Destiny. Who we are, the standards we hold ourselves to, the things we do regularly���in the end, these are all better predictors of the trajectory of our lives than things like talent, resources, or anything else. So here, adapted from my latest book, Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control, are 25 habits that will put you on the best trajectory possible.

1. Attack the dawn. The morning hours are the most productive hours. Because in the morning, you are free. Hemingway would talk about how he���d get up early because early, there was, ���no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write.��� Toni Morrison found she was just more confident in the morning, before the day had exacted its toll and the mind was fresh. Like most of us, she realized she was just, ���not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.��� Who can be? After a day of banal conversations, frustrations, mistakes, and exhaustion.

2. Quit being a slave. On an ordinary afternoon in 1949, the physicist Richard Feynman was going about his business when he felt a pull to have a drink. Not an intense craving by any means, but it was a disconcerting desire for alcohol. On the spot, Feynman gave up drinking right then and there. Nothing, he felt, should have that kind of power over him. At the core of the idea of self-mastery is an instinctive reaction against anything that masters us. We have to drop bad habits. We have to quit being a slave���to cigarettes or soda, to likes on social media, to work, or your lust for power. The body can���t be in charge. Neither can the habit. We have to be the boss.

3. Just be about the work. Before he was a big time comedian, Hasan Minhaj was asked if he thought he was going to make it big. ���I don���t like that question,��� he said. ���I fundamentally don���t like that question.��� Because the question implies that doing comedy is a means to an end���the Netflix special, selling out the stadium, doing this, getting that. ���No, no, no,��� he said, ���I get to do comedy���I won. It being predicated on doing X or being bigger than Y���no, no, no. To me, it���s always just been about the work. I���m on house money, full time.���

4. Manage the load. ���Absolute activity, of whatever kind,��� Goethe said, ���ultimately leads to bankruptcy.��� No one is invincible. No one can carry on forever. We are all susceptible to what the American swimmer Simone Manuel has helped popularize: Overtraining Syndrome. Even iron eventually breaks, or wears out.

5. Do the hard things first. The poet and pacifist William Stafford put forth a daily rule: ���Do the hard things first.��� Don���t wait. Don���t tell yourself you���ll warm up to it. Don���t tell yourself you���ll get this other stuff out of the way and then���No. Do it now. Do it first. Get it over with.

6. Keep the main thing the main thing. ���I wish I knew how people do good and long sustained work and still keep all kinds of other lines going���social, economic, etc,��� John Steinbeck once wrote in the middle of the long grind of a novel. The truth is, they don���t! It is impossible to be committed to anything���professionally or personally���without the discipline to say no to all those other superfluous things.

7. Make little progress each day. One of the best rules I���ve heard as a writer is that the way to write a book is by producing ���two crappy pages a day.��� It���s by carving out a small win each and every day���getting words on the page���that a book is created. 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).

8. Be kind to yourself. The Stoic philosopher Cleanthes was once walking through the streets of Athens when he came across a man berating himself for some failure. Seeing how upset he was, Cleanthes���normally one to mind his own business���could not help himself but to stop and say kindly, ���Remember, you���re not talking to a bad man.��� Discipline isn���t about beating yourself up. There���s a firmness involved, for sure. Ultimately, after a lifetime of study of Stoicism, this is how Seneca came to judge his own growth������What progress have I made?��� he wrote. ���I have begun to be a friend to myself.��� It is an act of self discipline to be kind to the self. To be a good friend. To make yourself better. To celebrate your progress, however small. That���s what friends do.

9. Bring distinction to everything you do. Plutarch tells us about a general and statesman in Greece named Epaminondas who, despite his brilliance on and off the battlefield, was appointed to an insultingly minor office in Thebes responsible for the city���s sewers. In fact, it was because of his brilliance that he was put in this role, as a number of jealous and fearful rivals thought it would effectively end his career. But instead of being provoked or despairing at his irrelevance, Epaminondas took fully to his new job, declaring that the distinction of the office isn���t brought to the man, the man brings the distinction to the office. With discipline and earnestness, Plutarch wrote, ���he proceeded to transform that insignificant office into a great and respected honor, even though previously it had involved nothing more than overseeing the clearing of dung and the diverting of water from the streets.���

10. Practice. The wonderfully curious economist Tyler Cowen has come to ask greats of various fields some version of the question: How do you practice your scales? What drills or exercises make you better at what you do? If a person wants to get better, wants to continue to develop and polish, they must know the answer to that question.

11. Be hard on yourself. ���Take the cold bath bravely, ������ W.E.B Dubois wrote to his daughter. ���Make yourself do unpleasant things so as to gain the upper hand of your soul.��� By being hard on ourselves, it makes it harder for others to be hard on us. By being our own tyrant, we take away the power of tyrants over us.

12. View everything in the calm and mild light. George Washington had a mantra that always calmed him down when things seemed to be at their absolute worst. In a single two week period in 1797, Washington included it in three different letters. And later, in Washington���s greatest but probably least known moment, when he talked down the mutinous troops who were plotting to overthrow the U.S government at Newburgh, he said it, as he urged them away from acting on their anger and frustration. View everything, he liked to say, ���in the calm light of mild philosophy.���

13. Stay in the saddle. There is an old German word sitzfleisch which means basically sitting your butt in the chair and not getting up until the task is complete. Even as it goes numb, even as one by one, the people around you call it a day. Showing up yourself, day after day, until your back aches, your eyes water, and your limbs turn to mush. Many a great conqueror in the days of horseback were called ���Old Iron Ass��� for their ability to stay in the saddle.

14. Get back up when you fall. It���s wonderfully fitting that in both the Zen tradition and the Bible, we have a version of the proverb about falling down seven times and getting up eight. Even the most self-disciplined of us will stagger. Marcus Aurelius said it was inevitable to be jarred by circumstances, but the key was to get back the rhythm as quickly as possible, to come back to yourself, rather than giving in.

15. Find your comrades. The Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus introduced the common mess hall and required that all citizens eat together. It was harder to eat more than your fair share, more than your healthy share, when you were surrounded by your comrades in battle.

16. Be a little deaf. We have to develop the ability to ignore, to endure, to forget. Not just cruel provocations from jerks, but also unintentional slights and mistakes from people we love or respect. ���It helps to be a little deaf,��� was the advice that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was given by her mother-in-law. It helped guide her through not just 56 years of marriage, but also a 27-year career on the court with colleagues she adored���but surely disagreed with on a regular basis.

17. Speak little. Robert Greene puts it perfectly: ���Powerful people impress and intimidate by saying less.��� They have the discipline and this discipline creates a powerful presence.

18. Focus. Ludwig van Beethoven was known for drifting off in social conversations. Are you even listening to me, a friend once asked. Sorry, Beethoven replied, ���I was just occupied with such a lovely, deep thought, I couldn���t bear to be disturbed.��� They called this his raptus. His flow state. His place of deep work. His profound concentrated periods of focus. The source of his musical greatness. We can all develop this skill. As Steve Jobs, speaking to his top designer Jonny Ive, would explain, ���focus is not this thing you aspire to���or something you do on Monday. It���s something you do every minute.���

19. Delegate. Delegation is not cheap but it affords you the most expensive thing in the world: time. Not just any kind of time, but time to reflect and to think, a precious commodity to say the least. We need this space to learn, space to plan. An opportunity to examine what is important to us. To step back and look at how we���re doing in life. And when necessary, as we said above, to get back to keeping the main thing the main thing.

20. Hustle. ���There���s no excuse for a player not hustling,��� Lou Gehrig would say. ���I believe every player owes it to himself, his club and to the public to hustle every minute he is on the ball field.��� I���m not just about running, exactly, but about maximum effort. In any and every situation.

21. Slow down. There���s a difference between hustling and hurrying. They like to say in the military that slow is smooth and smooth is fast. The saying in the ancient world was festina lente. That is, to make haste slowly. Energy plus moderation. Measured exertion. Eagerness, but under control. ���Slowly,��� the poet Juan Ramon Jimenez would say, ���you do everything correctly.���

22. Be strict only with yourself. It was said that the true majesty of Marcus Aurelius was that his exactingness was directed only at himself. He found a way to work with flawed people, putting them to service for the good of the empire, searching them for virtues which he celebrated, accepting their vices, which he knew were not in his control. Tolerant with others, he reminded himself, strict with yourself.

23. Get the little things right. Dating back, perhaps to time immemorial, is the poem and proverb about a horse. ���For want of a nail, the shoe was lost,��� it begins. And then because of the shoe, the horse was lost and because of the horse, the rider and because of the rider, the message and because of the message the battle and because of the battle, the kingdom. For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost. Because of poor discipline, everything was lost. Save yourself. Save the world. Get the little things right.

24. Beware perfectionism. As Churchill said, another way to spell ���perfectionism��� is p-a-r-a-l-y-s-i-s. Again, it���s good to have high standards but all virtues become vices if taken too far. An obsession with getting it perfect misses the forest for the trees���because ultimately the biggest miss of the target is failing to get your shot off.

25. Do your best. In an interview with Admiral Hyman Rickover for a chance to join the nuclear submarine program, a young Jimmy Carter was asked how he ranked in his class at the Naval Academy. ���59th in a class of 840 sir,��� Carter replied with pride. Rickover followed up with, ���Did you always do your best?��� Carter began to instinctively answer that of course he always did his best, but something inside of him caused him to pause and reconsider. ���No, sir, I didn���t always do my best.��� Rickover didn���t say anything and just looked at Carter for a long time. Then he stood up, asked one final question, ���Why not?���, and walked out of the room.

__

The Stoics believed that, in the end, it���s not about what we do, it���s about who we are when we do it. They believed that anything you do well is noble, no matter how humble or impressive, as long as it���s the right thing. That greatness is up to you���it���s what you bring to everything you do.

Temperance, as Cicero claimed, can be the fine polish on top of a great life.

It���s not a palace or a throne that makes someone impressive, the Stoics would say, but kingly behavior that does. It���s discipline, self-control. He wasn���t after power or status, he said, but, ���perfection of character: to live your last day, every day, without frenzy or sloth or pretense.��� He was after becoming the best version of himself possible, putting a fine polish on top of everything he did, no matter how humble or impressive.

The aim of Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control, is to teach you how to harness the powers of self-discipline. The Stoics believed that we are all born to fulfill a great destiny. And while not everyone���s destiny is the same, everyone���s destiny is achieved with self-discipline and self-control. Discipline is Destiny is a book that will help you fulfill yours.

Because we���d like to encourage you to preorder Discipline is Destiny right now, we���ve put together some exciting bonuses, including a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at dailystoic.com/preorder.

The post Discipline is Destiny: 25 Habits That Will Guarantee You Success appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

12 Extraordinary Stoic Moments

Unlike the ���pen-and-ink philosophers,��� as the type was derisively known even 2,000 years ago, to the Stoics, Stoicism is something you DO. They were most concerned with how one lived. The choices you made, the causes you served, the principles you adhered to in the face of adversity. They cared about what you did, not what you said.

Throw away your books, Marcus Aurelius said. ���Don���t talk about what a good man is like. Be one.���

So in this article, I want to show you some DOERS. I want to share with you some of the most extraordinary, most inspiring moments of Stoicism in the real world, in history, practiced by real philosophers���whether they knew that���s what they were doing or not.

Shunzo Kido

At the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, California, a flashy Japanese equestrian named Shunzo Kido gave one of the most remarkable performances in the history of sports.

He was competing in the 22 �� mile, 50 obstacle jump endurance horse race. It wasn���t his usual event. His horse wasn���t trained for it. But a teammate was injured and without hesitation Kido replaced him. Off to a solid lead, he surprised the crowd and was in a position for gold. But just as he pulled away from the pack going into the finish and cleared the second-to-last jump, he stunned the crowd by pulling the reins and dropping out of the race.

Why?

He could feel the horse struggling and sensed that even just a few more seconds at full speed would kill the horse as it crossed the finish line.

As the plaque on the Friendship Bridge along the Mount Rubidoux Trail commemorating his unprecedented displayed of sportsmanship reads,

���Lt. Col. Shunzo Kido turned aside from the prize to save his horse. He heard the low voice of mercy, not the loud acclaim of glory.���

As the Stoics would say���it���s not winning that counts. It���s character.

Epaminondas

Plutarch tells us about a general and statesman in Greece named Epaminondas who, despite his brilliance on and off the battlefield, was appointed to an insultingly minor office in Thebes responsible for the city���s sewers.

In fact, it was because of his brilliance that he was put in this role, as a number of jealous and fearful rivals thought it would effectively end his career.

But instead of being provoked or despairing at his irrelevance, Epaminondas took fully to his new job, declaring that the distinction of the office isn���t brought to the man, the man brings the distinction to the office.

With discipline and earnestness, Plutarch wrote, ���he proceeded to transform that insignificant office into a great and respected honor, even though previously it had involved nothing more than overseeing the clearing of dung and the diverting of water from the streets.���

By the way, this story is adapted from my latest book, Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control. The aim of the book is to teach you how to harness the powers of self-discipline and self-control so that like the many great men and women throughout the book, you too can fulfill a great destiny. It officially releases on 9/27, but you can pre-order it right now !

We���ve put together some exciting bonuses, including a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at Dailystoic.com/preorder .

Jackie Robinson

In 1945, a couple years before Jackie Robinson broke into Major League Baseball, he had a meeting with Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey. ���l���m looking for a ball player,��� Rickey said, ���with the guts not to fight back.���

There would be hotel clerks refusing him a room, rude waiters, and opponents shouting slurs. Any bit of retaliation, Rickey knew, would not only end Robinson���s career, but would set back his grand experiment of breaking MLB���s color barrier for at least a generation.

The manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, Ben Chapman, was particularly brutal. ���[He was] the most vicious of any of the people in terms of name calling,��� Robinson said.

Despite, as he later wrote, wanting to, ���grab one of those white sons of bitches and smash his teeth in with my despised black fist,��� Robinson never retaliated. Not only that, but a month after playing the Phillies in 1947, he agreed to take a friendly photo with Chapman to help save the man���s job.

The thought of touching, posing with such an asshole, even sixty years removed, almost turns the stomach. Robinson would write in I Never Had It Made, ���I have to admit that having my picture taken with this man was one of the most difficult things I had to make myself do.��� He was willing to do it, he said, because it was part of a larger plan.

Knowing what he wanted and needed to do in baseball, it was clear what he would have to tolerate in order to do it.

Marcus Aurelius, who also brushed up against a fair share of terrible people, said that asking to never encounter a shameless person is to ask for the impossible, but, ���the best revenge is not to be like that.���

George Marshall

George Marshall never wanted anything more. It was the promotion he worked for his entire career, the opportunity he dreamed of his entire life. To lead a historic military invasion���it���s what a soldier���s reputation depends on. It was Marshall���s for the taking. But he turned it down.

The U.S. was preparing to launch the invasion at Normandy. Marshall wrote the document outlining the strategy. It was assumed he would command the invasion.

But President Franklin Roosevelt wanted to keep Marshall in Washington. Marshall was his chief of staff. In the waging of a global war, Roosevelt said he didn���t think he���d be able to sleep without his chief of staff in Washington. But Roosevelt also knew what Marshall wanted. He wanted to storm the beaches of Normandy. He wanted to be an American hero.

So Roosevelt left it up to Marshall. If he wanted the command, it was his.

No, Marshall said, this isn���t about what I want. He told Roosevelt to, ���act in whatever way he felt was to the best interests of the country���and not in any way to consider my feelings.���

Roosevelt gave the job to Marshall���s prot��g��, Dwight Eisenhower. The next day, Marshall had to draft the letter to President Stalin, informing him that, ���The appointment of General Eisenhower to command of OVERLORD has been decided upon.��� Roosevelt added the word ���immediate��� before ���appointment��� then signed it. Marshall sent the original copy of the letter to Eisenhower with the note: ���Dear Eisenhower: I thought you might like to have this as a memento. It was written very hurriedly by me as the final meeting broke up yesterday, the president signing it immediately. G.C.M.���

Eisenhower became the famous leader of the Normandy invasion. Eisenhower became president. Eisenhower became the American hero. Not Marshall.

Eisenhower later called that copy of the letter, ���one of my most cherished mementos of World War II.���

Martin Luther King Jr.

At the SCLC conference in 1962 in Birmingham, Ala., Martin Luther King, Jr. stood before a large, integrated audience and gave the closing address. As King spoke, thanking the audience and reminding them of plans for the next year, a white man named Roy James walked onto the stage and began to savagely beat him.

The first punch struck King with such force in the face that he spun around. King turned to face his assailant and dropped his hands, ���like a newborn baby,��� as one observer recalled, to receive more blows.

The next blows came in rapid succession, hitting him in the head and the back, filling the now silent auditorium with the sickening sound of bone connecting with flesh.

He was opening himself to an attacker, instinctually, under fire, proving his commitment to nonviolence.

As an angry crowd of people tried to come to King���s defense, he shouted, ���Don���t touch him! We have to pray for him.��� As the crowd began to pray and sing, King spoke kindly to the man who had just beaten him, reassuring him that he would not be hurt. After he went to a private office where he was given two aspirin by Rosa Parks, King concluded the conference as he held an ice pack to his face.

I tell this story in more detail in Discipline is Destiny ���King appears throughout the book and is one of the great examples of what one can achieve with self-discipline and self-control. As I said above, Discipline is Destiny officially releases on 9/27, but you can pre-order it right now !

Zeno

Zeno lost everything. He was forced to start over. He could have resented this. He could have been bitter. It could have broken him. Instead, he used his disaster to change the world.

He was a merchant from a family who made their fortune trading Tyrian, the purple dye used to dye the robes of kings.

On a voyage across the Mediterranean, Zeno���s ship and all its cargo sank.

No one knows how it happened. All we know is that Zeno was stranded somewhere in Athens, while his ship sat at the bottom of the sea.

He made his way to the nearest city and walked into a bookstore where the bookseller happened to be reading works about Socrates. Spellbound, Zeno asked the bookseller where he could meet someone like Socrates. He introduced Zeno the famous Cynic philosopher Crates of Thebes.

Zeno trained with Crates and other Socratic philosophers for the next twenty years. Eventually he founded his own school on a public porch in Athens called the Stoa Poikile

���Well done,��� Zeno would later say to Fortune, ���to drive me thus to philosophy!��� ���I made a prosperous voyage when I suffered a shipwreck,��� he said.

Theodore Roosevelt

It was over a century ago now that Theodore Roosevelt walked out of the Gilpatrick Hotel on his way to the Milwaukee Auditorium to give a speech to a packed crowd as part of his independent campaign for president.

As he approached the venue, a man rushed from the crowd and shot him at close range.

The bullet���a .38 caliber���hit Roosevelt in the chest but was miraculously slowed by the eyeglasses case and the thick folded speech he had in his overcoat pocket.

His staff tried to rush him to the hospital, but Roosevelt insisted he still had to give the speech.

He walked on stage, quieted the crowd, and said, ���I don���t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot���but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.���

When something goes wrong, a Stoic isn���t cowed by it. They don���t quit. They say to themselves, It���s going to take a lot more than that to stop me. They don���t just accept that it happened, they love that it happened.

Marcus Aurelius said when things happen that we would have preferred didn���t happen, there���s basically two kinds of people: people who see an obstacle and people who see an opportunity. He loved the metaphor of fire���he wanted to be like the ���blazing fire [that] takes whatever you throw on it and consumes it, and rises higher��� because of it.

Like a Bull Moose, a blazing fire, a Stoic, next time something goes wrong, say to yourself: it���s going to take more than that to stop me.

Steve Scott

In 1996, Tiger Woods headed into the U.S. Amateur Championship having won thirty straight matches. With a win at Pumpkin Ridge Golf Club, Tiger would become the first golfer to ever win three straight U.S. Amateur Titles.

The first five rounds of match play were uneventful. Woods advanced to the finals where his opponent was the relatively unknown 19-year-old Steve Scott.

After the first 18 of the 36-hole final, no one could believe it: Scott led by 5 holes.

The final 18 holes were a battle. Tiger cut Scott���s lead to 1 by the back 9. On the par-3 10th, Scott drained a flop shot from the deep rough to stretch his lead back to 2. Then Tiger sank a legendary thirty-five-foot putt for eagle to move within 1.

On the 16th hole, down two with three holes to play, Tiger hit his wedge shot within six feet of the pin. He placed a quarter to mark his ball before picking it up. The marker was in Scott���s putting line, so he asked Tiger to slide it over, and so he did. Scott made his par putt.

Forgetting he���d moved his marker, Tiger put his ball down and was about to putt from the wrong spot. If he did, he���d automatically lose the hole and the tournament.

But before Tiger could make this historic mistake, Scott intervened, ���Hey, Tiger, did you move that back?���

Tiger paused, returned his marker then his ball to the correct spot, and made the putt. He birdied 17 to force a sudden death playoff. On the second playoff hole, Scott���s putt lipped out, and Tiger tapped his in for the victory and his place in history.

It would be Scott���s one and only moment in the spotlight. He hoped to have a career on the PGA Tour but it didn���t quite pan out. But in an interview for a piece commemorating the twenty-year anniversary of that 1996 match, Scott said ���[I���ve] gone on to have a great life. I think I���m walking proof that you can win in life without winning.���

���Runners in a race ought to compete and strive to win as hard as they can,��� the Stoic Chrysippus said, ���but by no means should they trip their competitors or give them a shove. So too in life; it is wrong to seek after the things useful in life; but to do so while depriving someone else is not just.���

Frederick Douglass

It was the 1840s. Only a couple years after Frederick Douglass had escaped the slave state he was born in and ���bade farewell���to that slavery which had been my abhorrence from childhood.���

The young man, still in his early twenties, was on a mission. A member of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass toured all across the Northeastern United States. He attended abolitionist meetings. He told the story of his escape from bondage. He lectured at churches and chapels and universities and small town centers and anywhere there was a chance people might congregate.

Traveling somewhere in Pennsylvania, Douglass was forced to move and ride in the baggage car because of his race.

A white supporter rushed up to apologize for this horrible offense. ���I am sorry, Mr. Douglass, that you have been degraded in this manner,��� the person said.

Douglass wouldn���t accept any of the gentleman���s consoling.

No, he wasn���t angry. He wasn���t hurt. He replied with great fervor: ���They cannot degrade Frederick Douglass. The soul that is within me no man can degrade. I am not the one that is being degraded on account of this treatment, but those who are inflicting it upon me.���

The ancient Stoics���because of their independent thinking, their positions of leadership, and their willingness to stand on principle���were often the subjects of verbal and physical mistreatment.

But it was Epictetus, the slave turned Stoic teacher, who said that a person can only degrade you with your consent. ���It is not enough to be insulted or to be harmed. You must believe that you are being harmed. If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation.���

James Stockdale

On September 9, 1965, Admiral James Stockdale���s A-4 Skyhawk jet was shot down in Vietnam.

���Five years down there, at least,��� Stockdale said after ejecting from his plane. ���I���m leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.���

The North Vietnamese used thirteen prisons and prison camps. The H���a L�� Prison was famously the worst. H���a L�� means ���fiery furnace��� or ���Hell���s hole,��� which is what it was���a dark dungeon where captives were physically and mentally tortured to the unimaginable extreme.

It was the center of North Vietnam���s propaganda exploitation and psychological warfare where no limits were placed on getting the enemy to break down and confess war crimes. So if you were a high ranking American troop that got captured, you went to H���a L��.

Stockdale was not only high ranking, of the 800 prisoners estimated to enter H���a L��, Stockdale had no superior. Victory then for the captors in the ���Hanoi Hilton,��� as Stockdale and his fellow inmates would come to call it, was getting Stockdale to break.

His captors kept him in the main torture room in the most isolated part of the prison. After a month straight of torture, they thought they had him. They thought he was broken and ready to be marched down town to commit treason in front of television cameras.

Before they could, they needed him to look presentable, so they took him out of the torture room to a bathroom where he���s told to shower and shave.

Left alone in the bathroom, Stockdale grabbed the razor he was given to shave, and sliced open his scalp. He���s bandaged and thrown in a cell while his captors look for something to cover the wounds, now even more determined to parade him in front of cameras.

Stockdale, realizing he needed to further disfigure himself, took a wooden stool and bashed his face until he could barely see.

Guards rushed in and debated with one another about what to tell their commander. ���You tell him,��� Stockdale interrupted, ���that the captain will not be going downtown.���

The sheer bravery and strength. It���s just unreal���a living embodiment of what Epictetus said, ���you may bind up my leg, but not even Zeus has the power to break my freedom of choice.��� His captors deprived him. They tortured him. They beat him. They stripped him of his possessions. But they could not break him.

Simone Biles

She was called ���selfish,��� a ���quitter,��� a ���shame to the country,��� and the proof that, ���we are raising a generation of weak people.���

But actually, what she did was incredibly disciplined and unselfish.

At the Tokyo Olympics, four-time gold medalist Simone Biles withdrew from the all-around competition, an event she won gold in at the Rio de Janeiro games. Had she competed, Biles would have been vying to become the first woman to win back-to-back gold medals in the all-around in over fifty years.

The day before she made the decision to withdraw, Biles felt off. Her take-offs felt off. Her aerials felt off. Her landings felt off. And she knew, if she were to perform the way she was performing, she would have cost her teammates a medal.

So Biles put the team first. ���I can���t risk a medal for the team,��� she explained, ���so I need to call it.��� She admitted, ���you usually don���t hear me say things like that because I���ll usually persevere and push through things, but not to cost the team a medal.���

Stoicism, being disciplined, is not about punishing yourself. It���s a firm school, for sure, but as Seneca, after a lifetime of study of philosophy, came to judge his own growth: ���What progress have I made?��� he wrote. ���I have begun to be a friend to myself.���

It is an act of self discipline to be kind to yourself, to rest when you���re not feeling your best, to put the team first���that���s what friends do.

Marcus Aurelius

Late in his reign, sick and possibly near death, Stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius received surprising news. His old friend and most trusted general, Avidius Cassius, had rebelled in Syria. Having heard the emperor was vulnerable or possibly dead, the ambitious general declared himself Caesar and assumed the throne.

Marcus should have been angry. After all, this man was trying to take his job and possibly his life. If we think about what other emperors did to their rivals and enemies���for instance Nero killed his own mother and Otho had Galba murdered in 69 A.D. and paraded his head around Rome���it makes Marcus���s response all the more unusual. Because he didn���t immediately set out to crush this man who had betrayed him, who threatened his life, his family, and his legacy. Instead, Marcus did nothing. He even kept the news secret from his troops, who might have been enraged or provoked on his behalf���and simply waited: Would Cassius come to his senses?

The man did not. And so Marcus Aurelius called a council of his soldiers and made a rather extraordinary announcement. They would march against Cassius and obtain the ���great prize of war and of victory.��� But of course, because it was Marcus, this war prize was something wholly different.

Marcus informed them of his plan to capture Cassius, but not kill him. Instead, he would ���forgive a man who has wronged one, to remain a friend to one who has transgressed friendship, to continue faithful to one who has broken faith.���

In a true Stoic fashion, Marcus had controlled his perceptions. He wasn���t angry, he didn���t despise his enemy. He would not say an ill word against him. He would not take it personally. Then he acted���rightly and firmly���ordering troops to Rome to calm the panicking crowds and then set out to do what must be done: protect the empire, put down a threat.

As he told his men, if there was one profit they could derive from this awful situation that they had not wanted, it would be to ���settle this affair well and show to all mankind that there is a right way to deal even with civil wars.���

It brings to mind a line from another Stoic, Seneca: ���Bestow pardon for many things; seek pardon for none.��� This is a common theme in Stoicism���one we hear often in the writings of Marcus Aurelius: Hold yourself to a very high standard, and don���t make excuses when you fail to meet it. Meanwhile, leave other people to their standards and make every excuse you can when they fail. Be tough on yourself; be understanding to your fellow citizens.

���

Stoicism is not a philosophy for school. It never has been. It���s been a philosophy for life.

���Show me a Stoic, if you know of one,��� Epictetus said. ���Show me someone untroubled with disturbing thoughts about illness, danger, death, exile or loss of reputation. By all the gods, I want to see a Stoic!���

So go and do as the Stoics have done all throughout history. Do the right thing. Be strong in the face of adversity. Show us a Stoic. Show us the actions of a philosopher.

Today. Tomorrow. Always.

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Why I Pick up Trash at the Beach

I have lived on a rural country road for many years.

It is unpaved and unmaintained by the county or the state, lined with trees, and more frequently crossed by deer and jack rabbits than people.

It���s a throwback to an older, simpler way of life.

It���s also a throwback to a scene I���ve always remembered from Mad Men, where Don Draper and his family finish their picnic and then nonchalantly throw all their trash into the grass below.

My experience walking and running and biking and driving on this road has been to witness the return of that attitude. People dump tires and old mattresses. They dump debris from construction sites. They dump beer bottles and candy wrappers. They dump illegal deer kills and for some inexplicable and alarming reason, a lot of dead dogs.

At first, this just pissed me off���especially because the nails kept giving me flats. It made me angry at humanity and the place that I lived. I tried calling the police and animal control and my local politicians���of course, they did nothing. I put up cameras which did nothing. I despaired about the climate and the future. I thought about moving.

But then one morning on my walk with my kids, a thought hit me that was both freeing and indicting. How many times do I have to walk past this litter, I thought, before I am complicit in its existence. Even if I moved to a place where this didn���t happen, I thought, it would still be happening here. Marcus Aurelius was right when he said that you can also commit injustice by doing nothing.

So I started cleaning it up. The tires went into the back of my truck���and I paid to have them properly recycled. I was down in the gullies by the side of the road picking up soda bottles and plastic bags. I tossed countless nails and screws into the trash. I have put on face masks and gloves and scooped up dead goats, a dead calf and dead dogs which I burned or took to the back of my ranch to decompose in a less disruptive place.

I can���t say the experience was pleasurable, but it was empowering.

The Stoics would agree that the world can be ugly and awful and disappointing. They would just remind us that what we control is what we do about this. We control what difference we try to make. We control whether it makes us bitter or makes us better���whether we complain or just get to work.

But the ultimate reward came more recently, because we spent the last few weeks at the beach as a family. My kids were excited to play in the ocean and to build sand castles and have ice cream, of course. Yet they seemed to have the most fun running up and down the empty beach in the morning���unprompted by me���picking up trash left by the beach goers the day before and asking for my help lifting them up so they could put it in those paper bag trash cans that the county puts up every few hundred yards.

I posted about it on Instagram once and people showed me there was a whole hashtag of people doing this. It started with a viral Facebook post in 2019, which has 335,000 shares and 102,000 likes (and counting). A guy posted before and after photos with this caption:

���Here is a new #challenge for all you bored teens. Take a photo of an area that needs some cleaning or maintenance, then take a photo after you have done something about it, and post it.���

The challenge spread globally thanks to the #TrashTag hashtag. You can see people cleaning up a beach in , filling up dumpsters full of trash in Kansas City, and collecting garbage in .

A Daily Stoic reader emailed me a little while back to tell me about how his picking up trash spread locally. In his townhome community, there���s a trash dumping problem. ���It was driving me mad,��� he wrote. He put up cameras to try to catch offenders. He stayed up late to see if he could run them off. Then he came across the video I made and instead of policing his area, he began cleaning it up. ���I saw it rub off on some of my neighbors and family,��� he said. And now, the number of neighbors picking up trash outnumbers the number of neighbors dumping trash.

The Stoics spoke of our ���circles of concern.��� Our first concern, they said, is our mind. But beyond this is our concern for our bodies then for our immediate family then our extended family. Like concentric rings, these circles were followed by our concern for our community, our city, our country, our empire, our world.

The work of philosophy, the Stoics said, was to draw this outer concern inward, to learn how to care as much as possible for as many people as possible, to do as much good for them as possible.

There���s a sign by the track I run at in Austin, put there by the football player Hollywood Henderson (who paid for the track). It says, ���Leave This Place Better Than You Found It.���

To me, that���s a pretty good life philosophy. In things big and small (but mostly small). As Zeno said, ���well-being is realized by small steps, but is truly no small thing.��� You don���t have to save the planet. You don���t have to save someone���s life. Can you just make things a little bit better?

There is a Mr. Rogers quote I love. ���When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news,��� Rogers said, ���my mother would say to me, ���Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.������

We decide what we look for in life���do we get mad at the people making the mess or do we look towards the people cleaning things up? We decide whether to despair or find hope and goodness.

But I actually think we can go further. Do we decide to be one of the helpers? Do we decide to pick up the trash? Do we decide to leave this place a little better than we found it?

That���s what makes the difference���and life better for everyone, but especially you.

The post Why I Pick up Trash at the Beach appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

This Is The Best Career Decision You Can Possibly Make

At birth, each of us is original. Our DNA has never existed before on this planet. No one will ever have our unique set of experiences. No one will ever have our totally unique point of view.

There has never been anyone like us���and there never will be again. We have been given a complete and total monopoly over the business of being us.

Yet what do we do with this rarest of rarities? We give it up! We choose not to be ourselves. We become our own trustbuster.

That���s something I���ve always loved about the Stoics. They were characters. The Stoics were not afraid to be themselves, to be seen as weird. Epictetus tells us about the Stoic Agrippinus being asked why he was so difficult, why he couldn���t just conform to the same practices as everyone else. ���I want to be the red, that small and brilliant portion which causes the rest to appear comely and beautifully������be like the majority of people?��� And if I do that,��� Agrippinus liked to answer, ���How shall I any longer be the red?���

Sure, being ���red��� got Agrippinus into trouble. It also made him great. It made him one of the only people who actively resisted the tyranny and injustices of Nero���s regime. It made him famous for all time.

When we are ourselves, we have value. When we are like everyone else���we are fungible. We are replaceable���by definition. We have little value���by definition.

Peter Thiel has said before that the only kind of business worth making is one where you can have a monopoly. The profits, he said, are in owning an entire market. So it goes with ourselves as individuals. You want to be just another investment banker? You want to be another business writer publishing the same boring books that quote the same boring studies with the same bland covers fighting for spots at the same bland conferences?

No way.

BE YOU. Be the only one of you in the whole world. Be the red. That���s where the fun is (without having to fake it). That���s where the money is (you can name your price). That���s where the value is (you can���t be replaced).

When my wife and I decided to open a bookstore, I bought a course from a bookstore consultant. One of the first things they told me was we���d have to carry at least 10,000 titles. That���s what the average indie bookstore carries. It was, as far as I could tell, an unques��tioned assumption in the business.

Naturally, the first thing we did was the opposite of that. At the Painted Porch, we carry roughly 600 titles. The vast majority of them are not new, or even particularly famous. But they are books we have loved over the years.

It was one of the best decisions we made���both personally and professionally. Not only did this make it cheaper and easier to run the bookstore, it makes us stand out. The store reflects who we are. If people want a specific book, they go to a certain trillion-dollar e-commerce behemoth. If people want to discover new books and have a unique experience, they come to us. There are a lot of bookstores in the world, but there are none like ours.

The Stoics had a head for business in that way. Two thousand years before Peter Thiel said that, ���competition is for losers,��� Epictetus quipped that, ���You can always win if you only enter competitions where winning is up to you.���

When you���re the fortieth Indian restaurant in town, your chances of success are dependent on so many things that are outside your influence: how good the other restaurants are, who gets the best location, whether the critic at the local paper likes your biryani. The margins of victory are likely to be small, even if you do get lucky, because the spoils are split between so many competitors. Worse still, if your success and happiness are dependent on winning that kind of difficult contest and you don���t win, you have set yourself up to be a double loser.

It���s far better then, if you were to launch a restaurant, to come up with something totally new, or to create a new kind of dining experience for which you can have a monopoly (there is a wonderful book on this called Blue Ocean Strategy). Where the contest is not with other people, but with being the best version of yourself. It���s better still that you so enjoy this endeavor that your happiness comes from the process and the pursuit itself, rather than the outcome. In this way, you���re set up, if not guaranteed, to be a double winner.

Too many people pointlessly enter contests where the outcome is dependent on forces outside their control. They think it���s safer to be like everyone else���when in fact, what they���re really doing is hiding themselves in the chorus, protecting themselves from judgment. They���re less likely to be singled out and laughed at, sure, but they���re guaranteeing that they���ll never really be noticed or appreciated. Theirs becomes the Indian restaurant that will never be great, but it will never be closed. That is the best you can expect when you���re not playing to win���you���re playing not to lose.

How sad that is. What a waste of their uniqueness.

I read an interview recently with the great architect and designer Frank Gehry. ���When I teach a class��� he said, ���the first thing I do with students is ask them to write their signature on a piece of paper. And we spread them out and I say, ���They all look different and that���s you, and that���s you, and that���s you, so stay with that forever.������

Staying with that forever doesn���t necessarily mean you���ll be the biggest or most popular thing in the world. But it does mean you���ll have a monopoly. And that you���ll always be a winner.

The wise, whether it���s an Epictetus or a Peter Thiel, know that the better contest is with yourself. They know the best route to success is to be yourself.

And to stay that way forever.

***

This post is sponsored by InsideTracker. At InsideTracker, we understand that in order to live your longest and healthiest life possible, your body needs to be periodically tested and recalibrated. Blood biomarkers���objective measures of health status���change over time. And certain blood biomarkers are more closely associated with aging than others. InsideTracker has identified five main blood biomarkers related to healthy aging. All five of these biomarkers are measured as part of their Ultimate Plan.

For a limited time, InsideTracker is offering a FREE ebook: The Top 5 Biomarkers for Longevity, plus 20% off the entire InsideTracker store! Head on over to insidetracker.com/RSS to get started!

The post This Is The Best Career Decision You Can Possibly Make appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

The Things You Think Matter…Don’t

I dropped out of college.

When this happened it was a big deal���to my parents anyway. Then it was a big deal when people met me because they were constantly surprised by it. You didn���t finish college?! But for all the warnings and then surprise, there has been literally zero times where my lack of a degree has come up in the course of any business deal or project.

So I am always surprised by the lengths people will go to get their degree. I read a fascinating book a couple years ago about the Varsity Blues scandal and the parents who bribed their kids into various colleges���many of which were not even that hard to get into. The parents were so convinced that college mattered that they were willing to do just about anything to make sure their kids got in���even in one case where one of the girls had millions of YouTube followers and didn���t want to go to college. Or another where the daughter wanted to be an actress and the mother was an actress, but she still tried to cheat on her daughter���s SAT���s to get into Juilliard (even though Julliard doesn���t require SATs!)

It reminds me of a line from Peter Thiel who pointed out that we can get so good at trying to win that we don���t stop and ask if we���re playing the right game.

Here���s something I thought mattered a lot: The New York Times Bestseller list. When my first book came out I worked very hard to sell a lot of copies so I could say I was an NYT bestseller. I missed it (for somewhat suspicious reasons) and hit the WSJ list instead. As it turns out, this had absolutely no impact on the sales of the book or my ability to have a writing career. What mattered was whether the book continued to sell well over time and whether I continued to have interesting things to say.

Literally no one ever bought the book because it hit one list���and certainly no one didn���t buy it because it wasn���t on the other.

But I found it quite funny in the years since that when people would introduce me for talks they would call me ���a New York Times Bestselling author��� because they just assumed, and it sounded like something important. So in one sense the term did matter and mean something���yet the fact they couldn���t tell or care about the difference was a reminder to me that it didn���t really matter at all.

I would write more than a half dozen other books before I did become ���a New York Times Bestselling author��� in fact and let me tell you, nothing changed. And when I did debut on the list for my book Stillness is the Key, it was at the #1 spot. But nobody threw me a parade. My speaking fee and my royalties did not go up. The publisher sent me a cool plaque but it wasn���t that cool���my wife asked that I keep it at the office instead of the house.

Still, whenever I talk to first-time authors and ask them what they hope to do with their book, hitting the list is almost always at the top of their list. I realize it���s easy for me to say that it doesn���t matter, since I have the plaque in my office, but it���s true. I wouldn���t trade my sales numbers for more weeks on the list. I wouldn���t trade having written books I���m proud of to spend more time there either. Writing a book that I���m proud of, saying what I have to say, growing as a writer in doing it, making something that reaches people, that makes a difference in their lives? That���s way more important.

But this is what we do���we put way too little time and energy into the things that do matter (e.g. being a decent person) and way too much time and energy into the things we think matter���but don���t (e.g. getting into a decent college).

Sometimes our kids can help us realize this (as the Varsity Blues kids often tried in vain to do). We did an email about David Letterman for DailyDad.com recently (sign up!). After becoming the longest-serving late night talk show host in the history of American television (33 seasons), the king of late night decided to walk away. He went and told his young son Harry, ���I���m quitting, I���m retiring. I won���t be at work every day. My life is changing; our lives will change.��� Who knows what Letterman expected his son to say, but certainly he expected more than, ���Will I still be able to watch the Cartoon Network?��� Letterman replied, ���I think so. Let me check.���

We spent our energy���our lives���slaving away, chasing things that don���t matter. Worse, we tell ourselves we���re doing it for some specific reason���for our careers, for our kids���but it���s all based on nothing! They don���t care! Not like we think they do.

Why do we do this? One, I guess it���s because we don���t know, we don���t listen. We only realize the things are worthless once we get them���even though plenty of people had already returned to the cave and told us we were chasing shadows.

But I think the biggest reason is actually the biggest thing we chase that doesn���t matter. We chase achievements and money and status because we���re trying to create a legacy. Because we want people to remember us, for our stuff to last.

You want to talk about what really doesn���t matter? Other people���s opinions of you when you���re dead! As Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations, ���people who are excited by posthumous fame forget that people who remember them will soon die too. And those after them in turn.��� And suppose all those people you want to remember you were immortal, Marcus says, ���what good would it do you?��� You���ll still be dead!

A couple of years ago, I worked on an album that won a Grammy. I got to go on stage and accept it with a group of producers who all had to share one statue together. So a few months later, I had my own commemorative with a little reminder: ���When you die, this will go in the trash alongside all your other ���accomplishments.������

None of that external stuff matters.

Only right now matters. The life you���re living���that���s the only monument that counts. Who you are in this moment, how you treat people, how you treat yourself���that is what you think doesn���t matter���but does. That is the real legacy.

And it���s passing you by as you read this.

***

This week���s article is sponsored by InsideTracker . Founded in 2009 by top scientists from acclaimed universities in the fields of aging, genetics, and biology, InsideTracker is a truly personalized nutrition and performance system. To live your longest and healthiest life possible, your body needs to be periodically tested and recalibrated. Blood biomarkers���objective measures of health status���change over time. And certain blood biomarkers are more closely associated with aging than others. InsideTracker has identified five main blood biomarkers related to healthy aging. All five of these biomarkers are measured as part of their Ultimate Plan.

For a limited time, InsideTracker is offering a FREE ebook: The Top 5 Biomarkers for Longevity plus 20% off the entire InsideTracker store! Head on over to insidetracker.com/RSS to get started!���

The post The Things You Think Matter…Don’t appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

The Best Parenting Advice I���ve Ever Gotten

In his letters, Seneca writes about the habit of finding one thing each day that makes you smarter, wiser, better. One nugget. One quote. One little prescription. One little piece of advice. And that���s how most of Seneca���s letters close: Here���s a lesson, he says. Here���s one thing.

Obviously that���s the logic behind the daily emails I write (Daily Stoic and Daily Dad) but it���s also the way I try to live. Every time I listen to a podcast or record one myself, I try to grab at least one little thing. That���s how wisdom is accumulated���piece by piece, day by day, book by book, podcast by podcast.

So today, coming now a few days after a quiet Father���s Day camping with my kids along the Llano River in Texas, I wanted to share some of the best pieces of parenting advice I���ve picked up from conversations with people on the Daily Dad podcast (which you can subscribe to here), reading, and interactions with other ordinary parents.

If you���re a parent or will be one day, these are 25 pieces of advice you will want to regularly return to:

–When your child offers you a hand to hold, take it. That���s a rule I picked up from the economist Russ Roberts. You might be tired, you might be busy, you might be on the other line���whenever they reach out, whenever they offer you a hand to hold, take the opportunity.

-There is no such thing as ���quality��� time. On my desk, I keep a medallion that says Tempus Fugit (���time flies���) on the front and ���all time is quality time��� on the back, so I think about Seinfeld���s concept of quality time vs. garbage time every day.��

-This solves most problems. When you���re grouchy and frustrated and anxious and short with your spouse and your kids���you might just be hangry. In 2014, Researchers from Ohio State University found that most fights between couples are because someone is hungry. Same goes with parents and kids and between kids, I imagine.��

-Just be. Before we had kids, I was in the pool with my wife. ���Do you want to do laps?��� I said. ���Should we fill up the rafts?��� ���Here help me dump out the filter.��� There was a bunch of that from me. ���You know you can just be in the pool,��� she said. Now when I���m with my kids, I remind myself, Just be here now. Just be here with them.��

-Do this over dinner. Some families watch TV at dinner. Some families eat separately. Some families talk idly about their day. Dinner at the philosopher Agnes Callard���s house is different. She told me that she, her husband, and her children have philosophical debates over dinner. The topics range from serious to silly, but it���s the activity itself that really matters. It���s that for an hour or two every night, she is not doing anything but connecting with the people she loves. My kids are younger, so our dinner discussions range from silly to sillier. But again, it���s the time together that really matters.

–Routine is EVERYTHING.

–You are constantly losing them. Every parent���s deepest fear is losing their child. And the terrible, beautiful tragedy of parenthood is that, indeed, we are constantly losing our children. Day, by day, by day. Not literally, of course, but in the sense that they are constantly growing, changing, becoming someone different. On a daily, if not an hourly, basis. On the podcast, Professor Scott Galloway told me about the profound grief he felt looking at a picture of his 11-year-old, who was now a great 14-year-old. The 11-year-old, Galloway realized, was gone for good.��

-A child���s life should be good, not easy. There is a famous Latin expression. Luctor et Emergo. It means ���I struggle and emerge��� or ���wrestle with and overcome.��� The gods, Seneca writes, ���want us to be as good, as virtuous as possible, so assign to us a fortune that will make us struggle.��� Without struggle, he says, ���no one will know what you were capable of, not even yourself.���

–There���s a difference between having a kid and being a parent. In one of his Father���s Day messages as president, Barack Obama pointed out that the ability to have a kid isn���t what makes you a parent. It���s actually raising a child that makes someone a father ��� or a mother.

–Let them know your suitcase is packed. One of my favorite stories we���ve written about at Daily Dad is one about Jim Valvano���s dad. In high school, Valvano told his dad he was not only going to be a college basketball coach, but he was going to win a National Championship. A few days later, his dad pointed towards the corner of his bedroom, ���See that suitcase?��� ���Yeah,��� Jim said, ���What���s that all about?��� ���I���m packed,��� his dad explained. ���When you play and win that National Championship I���m going to be there, my bags are already packed.��� As Nils Parker pointed out on the Daily Dad podcast: The suitcase is a metaphor. It may have literally contained clothes, but it was really full of love and faith and limitless support. Valvano���s father was not making a statement about basketball. He wasn���t even telling his son that he expected him to be a great coach. What he was saying was much simpler, much more visceral. He was saying, I believe in you. He was saying, I support you. No matter what it is you want to do, or where life pulls you, I will be there for you.

-Be demanding and supportive. From Angela Duckworth: ���The parenting style that is good for grit is also the parenting style good for most other things: Be really, really demanding, and be very, very supportive.���

-Spend money to teach values. Ron Lieber���the longtime ���Your Money��� columnist for The New York Times and author of The Opposite of Spoiled: Raising Kids Who Are Grounded, Generous, and Smart About Money (one of my all-time favorite titles)���told me a story about a time his three-year-old daughter asked, ���Daddy, why don���t we have a summer house?��� He said that she clearly had been pondering the question for some time, that she clearly had an interest in where her family stood in relation to other families, and that she clearly had a hunch that her family could have a summer house but made a decision to not have a summer house. It struck Lieber in that moment: how you spend money is a signal of what you value. ���Our choices, not just our words, but our choices have meaning. They are modeling something. They model a certain form of trade-off.���

-Go the f*ck to sleep. That���s the advice of a book I love to read to my kids: Go the F*ck to Sleep! Morning routines are great but a bedtime routine is maybe more important.��

-Give power to get power. Randall Stutman, leadership coach to some of Wall Street’s biggest CEOs, told me his teenage kids taught him an important lesson about power. You gotta figure out how to get people to think it���s their idea to do what you want them to do. ���You gotta give up power to keep power,��� he said. ���You gotta give up power to maintain power.��� One of the interesting things about power is that the harder you try to hold on to power, the less of it you actually have. The harder you try to force your kids to do things, the less likely they are to do those things. Whatever it is you want them to do, you gotta figure out how to get them to think it���s their idea.

-Give what you didn���t get. Josh Peck never met his dad. Thoughts about his absent father haunted him throughout his life. When he died in his 80s, Josh was 26 and for six straight years, he was haunted by the thought of never getting amends. Then at 32, Josh and his wife had their first child. ���When I had my son,��� he told me, ���I realized that I received the amends I���d always been looking for.��� How? ���By being the father to him that I never felt that I got. Correcting generational trauma can be as easy as just not giving it to the next generation.���

–Let them see you loving your work. Our instinct is to find ���work-life balance.��� Our instinct is to take the job that can afford the best life for our kids. But what if these instincts are wrong? Paul Graham has written about how these instincts can actually do more harm than good. ���If you take a boring job to give your family a high standard of living, as so many people do, you risk infecting your kids with the idea that work is boring. Maybe it would be better for kids in this one case if parents were not so unselfish. A parent who set an example of loving their work might help their kids more than an expensive house.���

-Carve out sacred time for yourself. Speaking of not being so selfless, James Clear, author of the wonderful bestseller Atomic Habits, told me that when he became a father, he carved out ���two sacred hours��� in the morning to do his writing. Sometimes he gets more, but never less. This idea of sacred time is important. You have to carve it out. You have to stick to it like clockwork, protect it like you would a doctor���s appointment or a big meeting. You���ll marvel at what you can accomplish in that sacred time you���ve kept all to yourself.

-You can only pick two. I asked the prolific artist and father of two, Austin Kleon, how he makes time for it all. ���I don���t,��� he said. ���The artist���s life is about tradeoffs.��� And then he added a little rule that we should all keep with us always: Work, family, scene. Pick two.

-Hang their pictures on your wall. In 2019, Volodymyr Zelenskyy gave a twenty-minute presidential inaugural address to the people of Ukraine. Despite being one of his country���s greatest success stories, making a fortune in the entertainment business and then holding its highest office, Zelenskyy asked not to be celebrated or held up as a model. “I really do not want my pictures in your offices, for the President is not an icon, an idol or a portrait,” he said. “Hang your kids’ photos instead, and look at them each time you are making a decision.”��

-Everything you say ���YES��� is saying ���NO��� to something else. Related to the last two bullets, a few years ago, Dr. Jonathan Fader, an elite sports psychologist who spent nearly a decade with the New York Mets, gave me a picture of Oliver Sacks. Sacks is in his office speaking on the phone, and behind him is a large sign that just says, ���NO!��� I have that photo hanging on the wall in my office now. On either side of it, hang pictures of each of my sons. I can see them���all three photos���out of the corner of my eye even as I am writing this. It���s a sort of embodiment of the options Austin Kleon had laid out. I���m working. I have my two kids and my wife. I���m tapped out.��

-Your living is the teaching. Socrates��� students said of their teacher that for all the genius he possessed, Plato and Aristotle and all the other sages who learned from him ���derived more benefit from [his] character than [his] words.�����

-Make fast transitions. Another from Randall Stutman: ���������Your job as a leader is to make really fast transitions���Your job is not to carry the last conversation…if that means you need to settle yourself and sit out in your car for a couple of minutes before you walk in the house so you can now be Dad, then that’s what you need to do. But your job is not to walk into that house and carry with you anything that came from before.���

-Don���t do everything for them. General H.R McMaster, a father of a millennial, told me about how he and his daughter jokingly refer to her peers as the ���start-my-orange-for-me generation.��� Meaning, they can���t even peel an orange without having their parents get it going first. And why is that? Because for as long as they���ve been conscious of it, their parents have been doing stuff like that, whether it was with science fair projects or arguing with teachers over their grades or funding the downpayment for a house. There are lots of reasons for this snowplow, helicopter parenting style: Narcissism, fear, insecurity, economic uncertainty and, of course, real love. But regardless of the emotion behind it, the effect is the same: It creates a kind of learned helplessness. It creates dependency. It creates resentment too���at the parents, at the world���as they face difficult problems without the necessary tools for solving them. I think Plutarch���s line about leaders applies to parents too: “A leader should do anything but not everything.”

-They do most of it. When the comedian Pete Holmes heard that Mitch Hurwitz, the creator of Arrested Development, had two daughters who were both in their twenties, he congratulated him. ���You did it!,��� he said, acknowledging that his friend had made it through the gauntlet, successfully raising two daughters to adulthood. But Hurwitz refused to take the compliment. ���You know, they did most of it,��� he joked. Which is true! While being a parent is incredibly important���we���re not nearly as important as we think we are. Our kids are doing the most of the work.��

-Every situation has two handles. And as Epictetus said, we always get to choose which handle we grab. The pandemic has been hard on our family, like all others, but instead of grabbing onto that, I grab onto one of the things I���m most grateful for: the time at home it gave me with my family���all the meals together, all the time in the pool with my kids, all the bathtime and bedtimes, and all the time working on�����

Last year, Daily Stoic put out The Boy Who Would Be King. I���m excited to share that we���re following it up with Epictetus���s story���from a slave to a symbol of the ability of human beings to find freedom in the darkest of circumstances���in another all-ages fable, The Girl Who Would Be Free.

I���ve probably read The Girl Who Would Be Free to my kids 50-60 times over the last year.It started out as rough notes on pieces of scrap paper, then coalesced into a narrative and then were laid out as the drawings came in from my awesome collaborator Victor Juhasz. They saw it not just evolve, but be trimmed and tightened and then ultimately made real, into this thing we can hold in our hands. I���m really proud of it and hope you check it out. It is available right now for pre-order over at dailystoic.com/girl where we are offering a bunch of exclusive bonuses and deals to everyone who orders The Girl Who Would Be Free through the Daily Stoic Store BEFORE July 8, 2022.

Anyway, I look forward to hearing what your family takes from this delightful story ������filled with timeless lessons.

[ Pre-order The Girl Who Would Be Free ]

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35 Lessons on the Way to 35 Years Old

Today, I turn 35 years old. This feels incredibly weird to me because I vividly remember writing a version of this article on my 25th birthday, on the eve of the release of what would be my first book. But that is the nature of life, as you get older, long periods of time���like the famous Hemingway line���slowly and then all at once, feel like short periods of time. And so here I am, entering the second half of my thirties, reflecting on what I���ve learned.��

In those ten years, I wrote more than 10 books. I got married. I had two kids. Bought a house. Then a farm. Then a 140-year old building to open a bookstore in. I���ve traveled all over the world. I���ve read a lot. I���ve made a lot of mistakes (as I wrote about last year). I���ve seen some shit (a pandemic?!?). I���ve learned some stuff, although not nearly enough.��

As always, that is what I wanted to talk about in this annual article (you can check out my pieces from 33, 32, 31, 30, 29, 28, 27, and 26). Rules, lessons, insights, trivia that I���ve learned in the last year���as well as the last thirty five years. You may agree with some and find others to be incomprehensible or outright wrong (but that���s why it���s my article).��

So���enjoy.��

���Don���t compare yourself to other people. You never know who is taking steroids. You never know who is drowning in debt. You never know who is a liar.��

���There���s a sign by the track I run at in Austin, put there by Hollywood Henderson (who paid for the track). It says, ���Leave This Place Better Than You Found It.��� To me, that���s the meaning of life, in things big and small (but mostly small).��

���I���m continually surprised at how much even very famous, very rich, very powerful people appreciate a kind word about their latest TV appearance, accomplishment or project. The point of this isn���t that ���celebrities are people too,��� it���s that if praise from a friend/acquaintance still registers even at that level, what do you think it means to your kids or to your co-worker/employees or to your siblings and friends?

���You don���t have to explain yourself. I read one of Sandra Day O���Connor���s clerks say that what she most admired about the Supreme Court Justice was that she never said ���sorry��� before she said no. She just said ���no��� if she couldn���t or didn���t want to. So it goes for your boundaries or interests or choices. You can just say no. You can explain to your relatives they need to get a hotel instead of staying at your house. You can just live how you feel most comfortable. You don���t have to justify. You don���t have to explain. You definitely don���t need to apologize.

���You don���t have to be anywhere. You don���t have to do anything. All that pressure is in your head. It���s all made up.

���On your deathbed, you would do anything, pay anything for one more ordinary evening. For one more car ride to school with your children. For one more juicy peach. For one more hour on a park bench. Yet here you are, experiencing any number of those things, and rushing through it. Or brushing it off. Or complaining about it because it���s hot or there is traffic or because of some alert that just popped up on your phone. Or planning some special thing in the future as if that���s what will make you happy. You can���t add more at the end of your life���but you can not waste what���s in front of you right now.��

���The older you get, the harder it is to see how subpar���or outright crazy���the things you accepted as totally normal once were. You notice this trend when you have kids and people proudly (see: judgmentally) explain to you the insanely dangerous or cruel things they used to do to their kids. We used to let our kids���You see this with some of the COVID analogies people make (pointing out all the other dangers we accept as if it���s totally reasonable for so many people to die of heart disease or car accidents). It���s important to push back against this���to not let cognitive dissonance prevent you from enjoying a better, safer, different present/future.��

���Speaking of a process that happens when you get older, I absolutely hate that expression that says, ���if you���re not liberal when you���re young, you have no heart, and if you���re not conservative when you���re older, you have no brain.��� Put the dubious politics of that aside, the implication there is that you should stop listening to your heart as you get older. That���s the opposite of what you want. The goal should be to get kinder, more compassionate, more empathetic as you go.��

���Just drink more water. It���s very unlikely you���re drinking enough and a veritable certainty that you���re not drinking too much. Trust me, you���ll feel better.��

���Same goes with walking. Walks improve almost everything.

���One of my all-time favorite novels is What Makes Sammy Run? After spending the whole novel hoping that the main character ���gets what���s coming to him,��� the narrator finally realizes that the real punishment for Sammy is that he has to be Sammy. His life, having to live inside that head���even with all the trappings���that is the justice he was hoping would fall upon him. I have found that this observation held true with many of the people who have tried to hurt me or screw me over in my life. Comeuppance did not come in the form of some sudden event, but like Schulberg said, it was a subtle, insidious daily thing.��

���This backlash against ���elites��� is so preposterously dumb���and I say that as a proud college dropout. Everyone and everything I admire is elite. The way Steph Curry shoots. The way Robert Caro writes. What a Navy SEAL can do. This idea that we should celebrate average people and their average opinions about things is well���how you make everything worse than average.��

���Lengthen your timeline. Opening my bookstore, The Painted Porch (delayed a year by COVID) taught me that it always takes longer than you think it���s going to take. That���s Hofstadter���s law. And even when you take the law into account, you���re still surprised.��

���I have come to believe that inside the human species there is a kind of dark energy���some combination of fear, evil, ignorance, cruelty, mob-ness. This dark energy has always been with us. It was there when they burned witches. It was there when they sicced dogs on protestors who wanted their right to vote. It was there screaming slurs at gay people or telling women to go back to the kitchen. This energy can be blocked but never defeated���it���s like water, it just pools and then seeks a new outlet. The question always, in every political and social issue, is to ask whether you���ve been corrupted by or given yourself over to that dark energy.

���If you can���t walk away from the deal, it���s probably not a deal in the first place.��

���Seneca said, ���I pay the taxes of life gladly.��� He doesn���t just mean from the government. Annoying people are a tax on being outside of your house. Delays are a tax on travel. Negative comments and haters are a tax on having a YouTube channel. If you become a famous person, they���ll make up rumors about you. If you do charitable work, people will question your intentions or your motivations. If you have kids, you will lose sleep. There���s a tax on everything in life. You can whine about it. Or you can pay the taxes of life gladly, as Seneca said, and then move on.

���My kids often nap in the car, usually for an hour or so. It���s strange, sometimes as I drive around while they sleep, I���ll look down at the speedometer and think, why am I going so fast? I have nowhere to go, I have nowhere to be���literally the whole point of the drive is waiting���yet here I am trying to hurry while I do it?��

���What if the most impressive thing was to be great at what you do and be a good parent, good spouse, good person? What if instead of trying to achieve one more thing or set some new record, you tried to prove it was possible to be elite and decent? Or better, elite and (relatively) normal?��

���A year or two ago, I made the decision to stop basically all the advertising that my business does. I decided to put that money into making content instead���videos, articles, etc. I did this because it occurred to me that the money I was spending on ads made basically no positive impact on the world (if any impact at all), but articles and videos could at least be enjoyed by people (for free no less), even if they didn���t drive the same amount of ROI. In the long run, this content will be around forever and have a bigger and more meaningful reach. This is a small-scale decision given the size of my business, but if people spend more time trying to maximize the positive externalities of what they did instead of optimizing for short term profits, I think they���d be happier���and ultimately do better.��

���I have a drawing on my desk that Hugh McLeod sent me. It just says, ���Like an asshole, I took him/her/it for granted.�����

���The last few years are an important reminder that good leaders/correct ideas fail without good communication and bad leaders/abhorrent ideas can find serious traction with good communication. It���s not enough to be right. You have to be able to sell it.��

���Despair and cynicism only contribute to the problem. Hope, good faith, a belief in your own agency? These are the traits that drive the change that everyone else has declared to be impossible.��

���Modern life is hard. Just think of all the things people have to know how to do today���from technology to the unwritten rules of polite society. Think of all the information thrown at a person from the moment they wake up. Think of the emotional acuity required to operate in daily life today. When you understand this, and how incredibly unequipped many people (see: some whole generations) are for this, it should help you be a lot more patient. They just can���t handle it. That explains so much of their behavior. Doesn���t excuse but it exposes.

���When Seneca said that poverty wasn���t having too little, it was wanting more, he wasn���t talking about poor people. He was talking about rich people. Which brings me to something I have begun to understand: wealth is not having to think a lot about money very often. Sadly this means a lot of rich people choose to live very poorly.

���Bruce Springsteen has a lot of great lyrics but the one that I think about most is this:

We fought hard over nothing

We fought ’til nothing remained

I’ve carried that nothing for a long time

���The most important thing I���ve taken from the success of my books is an understanding that everything starts as an uncertain mess���one you often despair of ever coming together. At a low point during my last book, I found a note card that I���d written to myself that just said, ���Do your notecards. The book will come together.��� That���s how it goes with every project. The process will get you there���if you trust it. The more you���ve done it, the more trust you have. Because you know.��

���We tend to think of ego as a millionaires or billionaires disease���something that afflicts the successful. In fact, it does the most damage to promising people/teams/causes in the early phases.��

���I was reading a book recently and I could feel a part of my mind trying to find a way to blame the subjects of the book for their own problems. The reason I was doing this, I came to reflect, was that if it was their fault, then I wouldn���t really have to care. I wouldn���t have to do anything or change any of my beliefs. I think it is this impulse that explains so much of where we are in the world today. This headline here is one that I think about almost every single day for that reason. You have to fight that trick of the mind, the one that looks for reasons not to care. It���s the devil���s magic.��

���If you can afford to, delegate it. If you can���t yet afford to, automate it. Time is the most precious resource.��

���The best coaches and CEOs aren���t the ones who succeed just on the field or in the boardroom. The true greats are measured by their coaching tree���what the people who worked for them, who they mentored, who they inspired go on to do.��

���Most people would rather argue about reality than do something about reality.��

���When I get emails/comments from people who are mad that I said something political, I sometimes remind them that I didn���t build an audience by telling people what they want to hear. I built it by saying what I think needed to be said. And besides, how successful are you really if you censor yourself because you���re afraid it will cost you?��

���Peter Thiel, famously seen as a ���contrarian,��� once told me that being a contrarian is a bad way to go. You can���t just take what other people think/do and put a minus sign in front of it. The point is to think for yourself. So in fact, if you find yourself constantly in opposition to everyone and everything (or most consensuses) that���s probably a sign you���re not doing much thinking. You���re just being reactionary.��

���Everyone else has patterns. Has an ego. Follows trends. Is a product of their time. But not you, right?

I guess the final thought here, as it is in some form every year, is my favorite one from Seneca. It���s not that I am now one year closer to my death per some actuary table, it’s that I have now died one full year. Because Seneca is right, the time that passes is as good as dead. The question to ask yourself with every year, every month, every day, every minute is: Did I live it while I was in it?

***

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