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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.

The post 12 Extraordinary Stoic Moments appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

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.

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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 ]

The post The Best Parenting Advice I���ve Ever Gotten appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

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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20 Things You Didn���t Know About Marcus Aurelius

One of the pleasures of re-reading a book, re-watching a film, re-visiting a place, is that you always discover something new. The Stoics were fond of the idea���which comes from Heraclitus���that we never step in the same river twice. I have found this to be true when it comes to Marcus Aurelius, a man I have written about and studied now for nearly a decade and a half. Each time I read his writing, each time I talk about him, each time I visit a museum or place he lived, I understand him a little differently. I think about him differently. He speaks to me a little differently.��

He teaches me something new.��

It is amazing Meditations, year after year and read after read, feels both incredibly timely and��incredibly timeless (there���s a reason the book has endured now for almost twenty centuries). It���s amazing that a person so famous���known to millions in his own lifetime and subject to countless books and articles and movies���could still be giving off new secrets, but indeed that���s what he���s doing.��

In today���s post, I thought I would share some of the ones I have discovered, things you probably don���t know about one of the greatest thinkers, philosophers, and leaders who ever lived.��

-He lived through a pandemic. Not just through a pandemic, but they named it after him! The Antonine Plague of 165 CE, a global pandemic with a mortality rate of between 2-3%, began with flu-like symptoms until it escalated and became gruesome and painfully fatal. Millions were infected. Between 10 and 18 million people eventually died. The fact that Marcus Aurelius was writing during a plague, that he may well have died of a plague created a different way for me to see and understand what Marcus was writing about. When he says ���you could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think������he was talking about that in a time when you really could leave life right now. When he talks about how there���s two kinds of plagues: the plague that can take your life and the plague that can destroy your character���he was talking about the things that we���re seeing in the world, that we saw on a daily basis over the last two years. He was writing about a fracturing Rome, a contentious Rome when people were at each other���s throats, when things looked uncertain, when an empire looked like it was in decline.

-He was a crier. We know that Marcus Aurelius cried when he was told that his favorite tutor passed away. We know that he cried that day in court, when he was overseeing a case and the attorney mentioned the countless souls who perished in the plague. We can imagine Marcus cried many other times. Marcus didn���t weep because he was weak. He didn���t weep because he was un-Stoic. He cried because he was human. Because he lived through very painful experiences (as we will see below). Antoninus, Marcus���s stepfather, seemed to be a bit more in touch with his emotions than his young stepson. He seemed to understand how hard Marcus worked to master his temper and his ambitions and his temptations and that this occasionally made him feel bottled up. So when his stepson���s tutor died and he watched the boy sob uncontrollably, he wouldn���t allow anyone to try to calm him down or remind him of the need for a prince to maintain his composure. ���Neither philosophy nor empire,��� Antoninus said, ���takes away natural feeling.���

-His nickname was ���Verissimus.��� The emperor Hadrian, who would have known young Marcus through his early academic accomplishments, sensed Marcus��� potential at a very early age. His nickname for Marcus, whom he liked to go hunting with, was ���Verissimus������the truest one. I love that. Even as a boy he was showing the earnestness and honesty which would define his time in power.��

-He had insomnia. Which makes the fact that he woke up early all the more impressive. As the most powerful man in the world, he didn���t have to do anything. But he was strict on himself about sticking to a schedule. ���At dawn,��� he reminded himself, ���when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself, ���As a human being I have to go to work…I���m going to do what I was born to do.���

–He had a sense of humor. There is a letter from Marcus to his tutor Fronto about a prank he played on a shepherd. There are also a couple jokes in Meditations, including one about a guy who was ���so rich that he had no place to shit.�����

-His most trusted general attempted a coup. In 175 CE Marcus Aurelius was betrayed by his most trusted general, Avidius Cassius, in an attempted coup. Marcus could have been angry. He could have demanded all the sadistic revenge possible to a man of his unlimited power. Yet we know from the historians that he handled even this moment with grace and understanding. In fact, he wept when he was deprived of the chance to grant clemency to his former enemy. ���The best revenge,��� Marcus would write in Meditations, ���is to not be like that.���

-He spent 12 years at war. ���Life is warfare and a journey far from home,��� Marcus writes in Meditations. It was literally true. Some twelve years of his life would be spent at the empire���s northern border along the Danube River, fighting long, brutal wars. Dio Cassius describes the scene of Marcus returning to Rome after one long absence. As he addressed the people, he made a reference to how long he���d been forced to be away. ���Eight!��� the people cried lovingly. ���Eight!��� as they held up four fingers on each hand. He had been gone for eight years. The weight of this hit in the moment, and so too must have the adoration of the crowd, even though Marcus often told himself how worthless this was. As a token of his gratitude and beneficence, he would distribute to them eight hundred sesterces apiece, the largest gift from the emperor to the people ever given.

-He had a co-emperor. The first thing the first Roman emperor Augustus did upon seizing power was eliminate Julius Caesar���s illegitimate son, Caesarion. Claudius eliminated senators who threatened his reign. Nero, even with the moderating influence of Seneca, violently dispatched his mother and stepbrother. That���s basically the entire history of emperors and kings���an endless parade of heirs getting rid of other potential heirs. Marcus too had a rival, at least on paper: his stepbrother, Lucius Verus. Yet what did Marcus do? What was the first thing he did with the absolute power that we all know corrupts absolutely? He named his brother co-emperor. He willingly ceded half his power and wealth to someone else. Imagine that.��

-He lost EIGHT children. Of Marcus���s children, five sons and three daughters died before he did. No parent should outlive their children. To lose eight of them? So young? It staggers the mind. ���Unfair��� does not even come close. It���s grotesque. What helped Marcus deal with loss after loss, Brand Blanshard points out, was that he held firmly that the universe was not only logical but good, so he saw it as his duty to not fight against the swings of Fortune. Yet it did stagger him, and multiple times he writes in Meditations about this loss, as it was unquestionably the hardest thing he ever went through.��

-He liked the simple life. From the late Roman collection biographies known as the Historia Augusta, we learn that as a boy, Marcus slept on the floor then ���at his mother’s solicitation, however, he reluctantly consented to sleep on a couch strewn with skins.��� Brand Blanshard adds that he never developed much of an interest in money or the luxuries money could have afforded him. Instead, he likes to spend time on his farm, in a simple woolen tunic. When he visited the philosophers in Alexandria, he dressed like an ordinary citizen. When money was given to him, he signed it away to those who needed it.��

-He never claimed to be a Stoic. Gregory Hays, one of Marcus Aurelius���s best translators, writes, ���If he had to be identified with a particular school, [Stoicism] is surely the one he would have chosen. Yet I suspect that if asked what it was that he studied, his answer would not have been ���Stoicism��� but simply ���philosophy.������ He then notes that in the ancient world, ���philosophy��� was not perceived the way it is today. It played a much different role. ���It was not merely a subject to write or argue about,��� Hays writes, ���but one that was expected to provide a ���design for living������a set of rules to live one���s life by.���

-He actually loved his wife. Despite (unproven) rumors of his wife Faustina���s adultery, Marcus loved her deeply for all their 35 years of marriage. He once wrote to his tutor Fronto, ���I would rather live on Gyara [a desert island for criminals] with her than in this palace without her.������

-He had his life changed by a book. There was a man who changed Marcus��� life. His name was Quintus Junius Rusticus, a teacher who Marcus thanks in book 1 of Meditations ���for introducing me to Epictetus���s lectures���and loaning me his own copy.���

-He had Imposter Syndrome. When Marcus received the news of Hadrian���s plans to have Antoninus Pius adopt him and place him next in line for the throne, he broke down in tears. There was no one he revered more than Antoninus. How could he possibly live up to the task of following in his footsteps? Today, you would say that Marcus was struggling with what we call ���imposter syndrome.��� As the story goes (which I tell in The Boy Who Would Be King), the night before he was to become emperor, Marcus Aurelius had a dream. In the dream, he found that his shoulders were made of ivory. It was a sign: He was not an imposter. He was not weak. He could do it. And then guess what? He did do it. He���like all of us���had stronger shoulders than he thought.

 

-He ran for office. Continuing a tradition set by Antoninus, when Marcus Aurelius was a candidate for any office (even the emperor was expected to serve a term as Consul), he approached it as a private citizen, deferring to the Senate and campaigning, in a sign of respect for free elections free elections. Even when his soldiers would proclaim him imperator���an honorific title to salute battlefield performance���Marcus ���was not wont to accept any such honor before the senate voted it,��� Dio Cassius writes. Even though he was entitled to whatever he wanted, he respected norms and humbled himself.��

-He once held a garage sale. The Antonine plague wiped out much of the Roman army. The people couldn���t afford to pay taxes for new troops. ���So Marcus held a vast auction of contents of the imperial palace, Brand Blanshard writes in Four Reasonable Men, ���and sold gold, crystal and myrrhine drinking vessels, even royal vases, his wife���s silk and gold-embroidered clothing, even certain jewels in fact, which he had discovered in some quantity in an inner sanctum of Hadrian���s.���

-He wrote in Greek. Latin was Marcus��� native tongue, but Greek was ���the language of philosophy,��� Gregory Hays tells us in the introduction of his translation of Meditations. There he is, in his private journal, challenging himself to write in a more difficult language and doing so so beautifully that he endures all these centuries later. It���s like Steve Jobs learning from his father�����

-He was a nerd and a jock. ���With his love of learning and his distinguished panel of flattering teachers,��� Brand Blanshard writes, ���Marcus was probably something of a prig, but he had a lean athletic body, liked to box, swim, fish, and hunt, and as he grew became a handsome man of gracious speech and manners.�����

-He spent his last moments consoling others. We���re told that Marcus was quite sick toward the end, far away from home on the Germanic battlefields, near modern-day Vienna. Worried about spreading whatever he had to his son, and also to avoid any complications about succession, Marcus bade him a tearful goodbye and sent him away to prepare to rule. Then with his own end moments away, he was still teaching, still trying to be a philosopher, particularly to his friends, who were bereft with grief. ���Why do you weep for me,��� Marcus asked them, ���instead of thinking about the pestilence and about death which is the common lot of us all?���

-He never stopped learning. Late in his reign, a friend stopped Marcus as he was leaving his home one morning. Where are you going? To handle business? No, Marcus was on his way to attend a philosophy lecture. ���Learning is a good thing, even for one who is growing old,��� Marcus told the stunned man. ���From Sextus the philosopher I shall learn what I do not yet know.���

***

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13 Strategies That Will Make You A Better Reader (And Person)

Reading is a good thing. A good thing too many people don���t do enough of (or any of it all���) So obviously doing lots of it is good, right? This is why people try to figure out how to speed read (a scam, I say!). This is why they show off their huge libraries (guilty!). This is why they listen to audiobooks at 2x or 3x speed.��

���Less is more? Quality over quantity? Not with books!�����

But not all reading is created equal. As Epictetus said, ���I cannot call somebody ���hard-working��� knowing only that they read.��� He said he needed to know what and how they read. Sure, reading is better than a lot of other activities, but you can still do it poorly or for poor reasons. ���Far too many good brains,��� Seneca said, ���have been afflicted by the pointless enthusiasm for useless knowledge.���

To be a great reader, it is not enough that you read, it���s how you read. These 13 strategies by no means make a complete list, but if you implement even a couple of them, I���m comfortable guaranteeing you���ll not only be a better reader for it, but a better person too.

Stop Reading Books You Aren���t Enjoying��

If you find yourself wanting to speed up the reading process on a particular book, you may want to ask yourself, ���Is this book any good?���

You turn off a TV show if it���s boring. You stop eating food that doesn���t taste good. You unfollow people when you realize their content is useless.

Life is too short to read books you don���t enjoy reading. My rule is one hundred pages minus your age. Say you���re 30 years old���if a book hasn���t captivated you by page 70, stop reading it. So as you age, you have to endure crappy books less and less.

Read Like A Spy

One of the most surprising parts of Seneca���s writing is how that avowed Stoic quotes Epicurus, the founder of Epicureanism. Even Seneca knew this was strange as each time he did so in his famous Letters, he felt obliged to preface or explain why he was so familiar with the teachings of a rival school.

His best answer appears in Letter II, On Discursiveness in Reading, and it works as a prompt for all of us in our own reading habits. The reason he was so familiar with Epicurus, Seneca wrote, was not because he was deserting the writings of the Stoics, but because he was reading like a spy in the enemy���s camp. That is, he was deliberately reading and immersing himself into the thinking and the strategies of those he disagreed with. To see if there was anything he could learn and, of course, to bolster his own defenses.

Keep A Commonplace Book

In his book, Old School, Tobias Wolf���s semi-autobiographical character takes the time to type out quotes and passages from great books to feel great writing come through him. I do this almost every weekend in what I call a ���commonplace book������ a collection of quotes, ideas, stories and facts that I want to keep for later. It���s made me a much better writer and a wiser person. I am not alone. In 2010, when the Reagan Presidential Library was undergoing renovation, a box labeled ���RR���s desk��� was discovered. Inside the box were the personal belongings Ronald Reagan kept in his office desk, including a number of black boxes containing 4��6 note cards filled with handwritten quotes, thoughts, stories, political aphorisms, and one-liners. They were separated by themes like ���On the Nation,��� ���On Liberty.��� ���On War,��� ���On the People,��� ���The World,��� ���Humor,��� and ���On Character���. This was Ronald Reagan���s version of a commonplace book. Lewis Carroll, Walt Whitman, Thomas Jefferson all kept their own version of a commonplace book.��

As Seneca advised, ���We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application���not far far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech���and learn them so well that words become works.���

Re-Read The Masters

You were in high school when you read The Great Gatsby for the first time. You were just a kid when you read The Count of Monte Cristo or had someone tell you the story of Odysseus.��

The point is: You got it right? You read them. You���re done, right? Nope.

We cannot be content to simply pick up a book once and judge it by that experience. It���s why we have to read and re-read. As Seneca put it, ���You must linger among a limited number of master-thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind.��� Because the world is constantly changing, we are changing, and therefore what we get out of those books can change. It���s not enough to read the classics once, you have to read them at every age, every era of your life. We never step in the same river twice, Marcus Aurelius said, and that���s why we must return again and again to the great works of history.

Read Fiction

There���s an interesting thread running through in the writings and teachings of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus that can zip right past you if you aren���t reading closely. What is it? What did all these great men share? They heavily relied on plays, tragedies, satires, mythologies, and other works of fiction to clarify their thinking and their own writing.

Epictetus draws on characters like Achilles and Agamemnon from the Iliad, Admetus from Euripides��� Alcestis, and a long list of others from Greek mythology. Marcus Aurelius quotes from the comedies of Aristophanes, the tragedies and plays of Euripides and Sophocles, and says we should read fiction ���to remind us of what can happen, and that it happens inevitably���and if something gives you pleasure on that stage, it shouldn���t cause you anger on this one.��� Seneca liked to quote the works of the great Roman poets Virgil and Lucius Accius, the legendary Homer, the playwright Plautus, and he wrote many brilliant plays himself.��

Yet, many people���even those with a voracious reading habit���make the same mistake: They hardly, if ever, read fiction. They even brag about it! They���re too busy. They don���t have time for ���art.��� There���s plenty of ���real��� stuff���the characters in fiction that bear little resemblance to the world we know? I don���t have time for it. But fiction, like all wonderful art, is filled with beautiful bits of insight about the human condition. It can change your life and teach you just as much as any non-fiction book. Actually, no, it can teach you more! It can shine a light on universal truths that non-fiction, bounded by the facts and figures of its specific world, often cannot (to say nothing of the research that connects literature with improved empathy, reduced stress, and hone social skills).

Read Before Bed

Speaking of reading fiction, the great William Osler (founder of John Hopkins University and a fan of the Stoics) told his medical students it was important that they turn to literature as a way to nourish and relax their minds. ���When chemistry distresses your soul,��� he said, ���seek peace in the great pacifier, Shakespeare, ten minutes with Montaigne will lighten the burden.��� He told his students to read to relax and to be at leisure. To keep their minds strong and clear.

Instead of turning to the TV or to Twitter, let us follow Osler���s advice:

���Start at once a bedside library and spend the last half-hour of the day in communion with the saints of humanity. There are great lessons to be learned from Job and from David, from Isaiah and St. Paul. Taught by Shakespeare you may take your intellectual and moral measure with singular precision. Learn to love Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Should you be so fortunate as to be born a Platonist, Jowett will introduce you to the great master through whom alone we can think in certain levels, and whose perpetual modernness startles and delights. Montaigne will teach you moderation in all things, and to be ���sealed of his tribe��� is a special privilege.���

Ask People You Admire For Book Recommendations

Emerson���s line was, ���If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.���

When I was a teenager, I got in the habit of doing this. Every time I would meet a successful or important person I admired, I would ask them: What���s a book that changed your life? And then I would read that book. (In college, for instance, I was lucky enough to meet Dr. Drew, who was the one who turned me on to Stoicism.)

If a book changed someone���s life ��� whatever the topic or style ��� it���s probably worth the investment. If it changed them, it will likely at least help you.

Look For Wisdom, Not Facts

We���re not reading to just find random pieces of information. What���s the point of that? We���re reading to accumulate a mass of true wisdom���that you can turn to and apply in your actual life.

You have to read and approach reading accordingly. Montaigne once teased the writer Erasmus, who was known for his dedication to reading scholarly works, by asking with heavy sarcasm, ���Do you think he is searching in his books for a way to become better, happier, or wiser?��� In Montaigne���s mind, if he wasn���t, it was all a waste.

Don���t Just Learn From Experience

���If you haven���t read hundreds of books,��� the soldier-philosopher General James Mattis says, ���you���re functionally illiterate.��� Human beings have been fighting and dying and struggling and doing the same things for eons. To not avail yourself of that knowledge is profoundly arrogant and stupid. To paraphrase Mattis, it is unconscionable to fill up body bags while you get your education only by experience. It���s worse than arrogant. It���s unethical, even murderous.��

Well, the same is true for much less lethal professions. How dare you waste your investor���s money by not reading and learning from the mistakes of other entrepreneurs? How dare you so take your marriage or your children for granted that you think you can afford to figure this out by doing the wrong things first?

Too much depends on you for you to learn solely by experience���you have to also learn by the experiences of others. Drink deeply from history, from philosophy, from the books of journalists and the memoirs of geniuses. Study the cautionary tales and the screw ups, read about failures and successes. Read constantly���read as a practice.

Because if you don���t, it���s a dereliction of duty.

Study The Past To Understand The Present

���I don���t have time to read books,��� says the person who reads dozens of breaking news articles each week. ���I don���t have time to read,��� they say as they refresh their Twitter feed for the latest inane update. ���I don���t have time to read fiction���that���s entertainment,��� they say as they watch another panel of arguing talking heads on CNN, as if that���s actually giving them real information they will use.��

Being informed is important. It is the duty of every citizen. But we go about it the wrong way. We are distracted by breaking news when really we should be drinking deeply from the great texts of history. Because the truth is that most truths are very old. In fact, it���s these timeless truths that teach us more about the future and about our current times than most of our contemporary thinking.��

The actor Hugh Jackman said in an interview that he gets his news by keeping his eye on the big picture���going through the Ken Burns catalog and reading books like Meditations. ���That���s the way you should understand events and humanity,��� he said, ���with that sort of 30,000-foot view.��� If you want to be informed, study the past.

Aim For Quality, Not Quantity

The philosopher Mortimer Adler talked about how the phrase ���well-read��� has lost its original meaning. We hear someone referred to as ���well-read��� today and we think someone who has read lots of books. But the ancients would have thought someone who really knows their stuff, who has dived deep in a few classic texts to the point that they truly understand them. ���A person who has read widely,��� Mortimer says of the modern reader, ���but not well deserves to be pitied rather than praised.��� The early 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes joked similarly, ���If I read as many books as most men do, I would be as dull-witted as they are.���

You don���t have to read hundreds and hundreds of books. In fact, most people who make it their goal to read a certain amount of books each year inevitably fall off pace, get discouraged, and stop reading altogether. You���ll both read more and get a better return on your investment if you do what the Stoics advised. As Marcus Aurelius would say, don���t be satisfied with just ���getting the gist��� of things you read. ���Read attentively,��� he said. Read deeply. Read repeatedly. Aim for quality, not quantity.��

Get Out Of A Dry Spell

The path to wisdom is not a straight one. The journey is long and circuitous. It���s a windy road with twists and turns, ups and downs, highs and lows. Maybe you���re in the middle of one of those lows yourself right now, at the bottom of the valley. This can be a scary place to be, because without the proper perspective it can feel like you���re going to be stuck there forever. You take a few steps in one direction, and it feels like you haven���t gotten anywhere. The top of the mountain is just as far away, if not more distant.��

There is a term for this phenomenon: being stuck in a slump. A reading slump always pops up for me, for instance, during a book launch when it’s nearly impossible to concentrate enough to read. I���m busy. I���m fried. For a variety of reasons, the result is always a reading dry spell. But I���ve found I���m able to get back into it by rereading something that has really spoken to me in the past. Instead of expecting a random book I pick up to really speak to me, I go back to something that has already spoken volumes���and find out how much more it has to say. I���ll grab a new translation of Marcus Aurelius and see him from a different view. I���ll go reread a favorite novel, such as A Man in Full or The Moviegoer or Memoirs of Hadrian.��

Join A Program

In 2018, we did our first Daily Stoic Challenge, full of different challenges and activities based on Stoic philosophy. It was an awesome experience. Even I, the person who created the challenge, got a lot out of it. Why? I think it was the process of joining a program. It���s the reason personal trainers are so effective. You just show up at the gym and they tell you what to do, and it���s never the same thing as the last time.�� Deciding what we want to do, determining our own habits, and making the right choices is exhausting. Handing the wheel over to someone else is a way to narrow our focus and put everything into the commitment.

And if you are serious about becoming a great reader, the Stoics can help. We built out their best insights into our Read to Lead: A Daily Stoic Reading Challenge . Since it first launched in 2019, Read to Lead has been our most popular challenge, taken on by almost ten thousand participants. We recently announced that, for the first time ever, registration to join the 2022 live cohort is officially open.

The 2022 live course will take place across 5 weeks at a pace of 2 emails a week (~30,000 words of exclusive content). Additionally, there will be weekly live video sessions with me! It���s one of my favorite things to get the chance to interact with everyone in the course���I would love to have you join us. You can learn more here! But it closes May 16 at Midnight so don���t wait.

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18 Little Stories That Will Have Massive Impact On Your Life

When I was 18 years old, I was a research assistant to Robert Greene. My job was to find stories he could use in his writing. Nearly seventeen years later, I still use so much of what Robert taught me about finding great stories in researching for my own writing. But the gift has been less in how it has helped me professionally, and more in how it has helped me personally.��

As I would learn much later, Robert was teaching me how to find what the ancient Greeks called a chreia: ���an exemplary story about a famous person, often culminating in a memorable utterance,��� as Gregory Hays has defined it. ���Learning by precepts is the long way around,��� Seneca wrote. ���The quick and effective way is to learn by example.��� In this article, I thought I would share a handful of my favorite stories I have found over the years���ones that have stuck with me and that I think will have a lasting impact on your life.

Enough.

The writers Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five) and Joseph Heller (Catch-22) were at a glamorous party outside New York City. Standing in the palatial second home of the billionaire host, Vonnegut began to needle his friend. ���Joe,��� he said, ���how does it feel that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel has earned in its entire history?���

���I���ve got something he can never have,��� Heller replied.

���The knowledge that I���ve got enough.���

How you do anything is how you do everything.

On the campaign trail, a heckler once tried to embarrass President Andrew Johnson by shouting about his working-class credentials. Johnson replied without breaking stride: ���That does not disconcert me in the least; for when I used to be a tailor I had the reputation of being a good one, and making close fits, always punctual with my customers, and always did good work.���

Anything you do well is noble, no matter how humble.

Just work.

The dancer Martha Graham tells a story about her vaudeville days, when she was followed by a bird act. When the music went on the white cockatoos, trained by years of reinforcement and ritual, would become almost hysterical with excitement, clawing and beating at the cage until they go on stage and perform. ���Birds, damnit, birds!,��� she would yell at students who didn���t give their full commitment. The birds can���t want it more than you can.��

As they say in the Army, ���You don���t have to like it. You just have to do it.�����

Always stay a student.

Late in his reign, a friend stopped Marcus Aurelius as he was leaving the palace, carrying a stack of books. Finding this to be a surprising sight, the man asked where Marcus was going. He was off to attend a lecture on Stoicism, he said, for ���learning is a good thing, even for one who is growing old. From Sextus the philosopher I shall learn what I do not yet know.���

That���s right, even as the most powerful man in the world, Marcus was still taking up his books and heading to class.

It���s harder to be kind than clever.��

When he was a young boy, Jeff Bezos was with his grandparents, both of whom were smokers. Bezos had recently heard an anti-smoking PSA on the radio that explained how many minutes each cigarette takes off a person���s lifespan. And so, sitting there in the backseat, like a typical precocious kid, he put his math skills and this new knowledge to work and proudly explained to his grandmother, as she puffed away, ���You���ve lost nine years of your life, Grandma!���

The typical response to this kind of innocent cheekiness is to pat the child on the head and tell them how smart they are. Bezos��� grandmother didn���t do that. Instead, she quite understandably burst into tears. It was after this exchange that Bezos��� grandfather took his grandson aside and taught him a lesson that he says has stuck with him for the rest of his life. ���Jeff,��� his grandfather said, ���one day you���ll understand that it���s harder to be kind than clever.���

Your work is the only thing that matters.

A young comedian approached Jerry Seinfeld in a club one night and asked him for advice about marketing and getting exposure.

Exposure? Marketing? Seinfeld asks. Seinfeld, a pure stand-up, a comedian���s comedian, is appalled by the question. It���s offensive to his legendary heads-down work ethic. But to the kid, this was a surprise. Isn���t that the kind of question you���re supposed to ask? Isn���t that how you get ahead?

Just work on your act, Seinfeld said.

Get moving.

As a young woman, Amelia Earhart aspired to be a great aviator. But it was the 1920s, and people still thought women were frail and weak and didn���t have the stuff. Woman suffrage wasn���t even a decade old. She couldn���t make her living as a pilot, so she was working as a social worker.��

Then one day the phone rang. A donor had been willing to fund the first female transatlantic flight. But there was a catch: Amelia wouldn���t get to actually fly the plane. She���d have to sit in the back like ���a sack of potatoes,��� as she put it. And not only that���the two male pilots were going to get paid, but she wouldn���t get paid anything.

Guess what she said to the offer? She said yes. Because that���s what people who defy the odds do. That���s how people who become great at things���whether it���s flying or blowing through gender stereotypes���do. They start. Anywhere. Anyhow. They don���t care if the conditions are perfect or if they���re being slighted. They swallow their pride. They do whatever it takes. Because they know that once they get started, if they can just get some momentum, they can make it work. And they can prove the people who doubted them wrong, as Earhart certainly did.

They still hide money in books.

As a young boy, the famed basketball coach George Raveling learned an invaluable lesson from his grandmother, who raised him. As they were preparing dinner in the kitchen one evening she began to tell him about how in the days of slavery, the plantation owners would hide their money in books on the shelves of their libraries. ���Why did the slave masters hide their money in books, George?��� she asked him.

���I don’t know Grandma,��� George replied, ���why did they do that?���

���Because they knew the slaves couldn’t read,��� she said, ���so they would never take the books down.���

There���s a reason it was illegal to teach slaves to read. There is a reason that every totalitarian regime has burned and banned books. Knowledge is power. It sounds like a cliche, but cliches only sound that way because of the generally accepted truth at their core.��

How to create anything of consequence.

Plutarch tells the story of a rich Delian ship owner who was asked how he built his fortune. ���The greater part came quite easily,��� he said, ���but the first, smaller part took time and effort.���

Creating anything of consequence or magnitude requires deliberate, incremental, and consistent work. ���Well-being is realized by small steps,��� Zeno would say, looking back on his life, ���but is truly no small thing.���

Be the red.

In a famous exchange, the Stoic philosopher Agrippinus explained why he was spurning an invitation to attend some banquet being put on by Nero. Not only was he spurning it, he said, but he had not even considered associating with such a madman.��

A fellow philosopher, the one who had felt inclined to attend, asked for an explanation. Agrippinus responded with an interesting analogy. He said that most people see themselves like threads in a garment���they see it as their job to match the other threads in color and style. They want to blend in, so the fabric will match. But Agrippinus did not want to blend in. ���I want to be the red,��� he said, ���that small and brilliant portion which causes the rest to appear comely and beautiful������Be like the majority of people?��� And if I do that, how shall I any longer be the red?���

Use it all as fuel.

At age sixty-seven, Thomas Edison was eating dinner with his family when a man came rushing into his house with urgent news: A fire had broken out at Edison���s research and production campus a few miles away. Fire engines from eight nearby towns rushed to the scene, but they could not contain the blaze. Fueled by the strange chemicals in the various buildings, green and yellow flames shot up six and seven stories, threatening to destroy the empire Edison had spent his life building.

Edison calmly but quickly made his way to the fire, through the now hundreds of onlookers and devastated employees. Finding his son standing shellshocked at the scene, Edison would utter these famous words: ���Go get your mother and all her friends. They���ll never see a fire like this again.���

The Stoics loved the metaphor of fire. Marcus Aurelius would write that ���a blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.��� That���s what Edison did. He did not despair. He did not weep. He did not rage. Instead, he got to work. He told a reporter the next day that he wasn���t too old to make a fresh start, ���I���ve been through a lot of things like this. It prevents a man from being afflicted with ennui.�����

Do what you have to do.��

Before the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant experienced a long chain of setbacks and financial difficulties. He washed up in St. Louis, selling firewood for a living���a hard fall for a graduate of West Point. An army buddy found him and was aghast. ���Great God, Grant, what are you doing?��� he asked. Grant���s answer was simple: ���I am solving the problem of poverty.���

Never question another man���s courage.

After he became premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev was onstage, speaking to the Politburo, denouncing the crimes of Stalin���s regime. Anonymously, some unnamed member passed a note to the front of the room. ���Yes,��� it said, ���but where were you at the time?���

Without a beat, Khrushchev, with an intimidating tone, shouted and asked who wrote the note. Silence. ���I was where you are now,��� Khrushchev. Meaning, in the audience. Anonymous. Intimidated. Doing nothing. Just like everyone else.��

Alter your approach.

As a young working actor, George Clooney struggled with how to tackle his audition process. Clooney was always concerned about the problem that he faced: how to book an acting job and earn some much-needed income. How did he deal with this?��

Clooney turned the situation around and had a realization: the audition was also an obstacle for the producers, who needed to find someone to fill the role and do an amazing job. Clooney began to approach his auditions from a different angle. Instead of going into his auditions as someone trying to get a job, he approached them as someone who could help the producers do theirs better. As a result, he began landing roles and would eventually become one of Hollywood���s most celebrated leading men.

You only control the effort, not the results.

John Kennedy Toole���s great book A Confederacy of Dunces was universally turned down by publishers, news that so broke his heart that he later committed suicide in his car on an empty road in Biloxi, Mississippi.��

After his death, his mother discovered the book, advocated on its behalf until it was published, and it eventually won the Pulitzer Prize.

What changed between those submissions? Nothing. The book was the same. It was equally great when Toole had it in manuscript form and had fought with editors about it as it was when the book was published, sold copies, and won awards. If only he could have realized this, it would have saved him so much heartbreak. He couldn���t, but from his painful story we can at least see how arbitrary many of the breaks in life are.

Good things happen in bookstores.

On a merchant voyage in Athens in the 4th Century BC, a man named Zeno was shipwrecked. He lost everything. He washed up in Athens where he walked into a bookstore and listened to the bookseller reading dialogues from Socrates. After the reading, Zeno asked the question that would change his life: ���Where can I find a man like that?��� and in so doing, he began a philosophical journey that led to the founding of Stoicism and then, to the brilliant works of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius ��� which, not lost to history, are beginning to find a new life on bookshelves today. From those heirs to Zeno���s bookshop conversion, there is a straight line to many of the world���s greatest thinkers, and even to the Founding Fathers of America.

All from a chance encounter in a bookshop. According to the ancient biographer Diogenes Laertius, Zeno joked, ���Now that I���ve suffered shipwreck, I���m on a good journey,��� or according to another account, ���You���ve done well, Fortune, driving me thus to philosophy,��� he reportedly said.��

On the window of our shop, The Painted Porch���named after the Stoa Poikile (���Painted Porch���) where Zeno taught his classes���we have written in large letters: ���Good things happen in bookstores.���

Big ones, small ones, corporate or independent ones. Where books are browsed, new ideas are introduced to older readers, while old ideas are introduced to newer readers. And perspectives shift just the same. Couples connect. Experiences are shared. Worlds are built���in the pages of the books being browsed, and in the lives of those doing the browsing.

Follow the process.

There���s a story of the great 19th-century pioneer of meteorology, James Pollard Espy, and a chance encounter as a young man. Unable to read and write until he was 18, Espy attended a rousing speech by the famous orator Henry Clay. After the talk, a spellbound Espy tried to make his way toward Clay, but he couldn���t form the words to speak to his idol. One of his friends shouted out for him: ���He wants to be like you, even though he can���t read.���

Clay grabbed one of his posters, which had the word CLAY written in big letters. He looked at Espy and said, ���You see that, boy?��� pointing to a letter. ���That���s an A. Now, you���ve only got 25 more letters to go.���

As Heraclitus observed, ���under the comb, the tangle and the straight path are the same.��� There is no task, however seemingly mammoth, that is not just a series of component parts.

Remember that you will die.

In late 1569, a French nobleman named Michel de Montaigne was given up as dead after being flung from a galloping horse. As his friends carried his limp and bloodied body home, Montaigne watched his own life slip away, like some dancing spirit on the ���tip of his lips,��� only to have it return at the last possible second. This sublime and unusual experience marked the moment Montaigne changed his life. Within a few years, he would be one of the most famous writers in Europe. After his accident, Montaigne went on to write volumes of popular essays, serve two terms as mayor, travel internationally as a dignitary, and serve as a confidante of the king.

It���s a story as old as time. Person nearly dies, takes stock, and emerges from the experience a completely different, and better, person. And this is the old philosophical idea of memento mori���”remember that you will die.��� In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius wrote, ���you could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.��� Never assume that you have a firm grasp on life because it could slip from your fingers at any moment.

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