Ryan Holiday's Blog, page 11

Here’s Your Secret To Success: Go The F*ck To Sleep

Some people take pride in how little they sleep. It���s proof of their hard work, their dedication, their determination.

Me?

I���m prouder of the exact opposite.

Despite producing over a dozen books, writing my daily emails for Daily Stoic and Daily Dad, reading books to recommend to my Reading List Email each month, opening and operating The Painted Porch Book Shop, and spending lots of time with my wife and kids���I���ve never pulled an all-nighter. My writing pace is not fueled by stimulants. My productivity is not dependent on adrenaline. My work doesn���t interfere with my sleep. The only thing that has ever kept me up and busy in the middle of the night have been my young children.

In the military they speak of sleep discipline���meaning it���s something you have to be good at, you have to be conscious of, something you can���t let slip. We only have so much energy for our work, for our relationships, for ourselves. A smart person knows this and guards it carefully. A smart person knows that getting their 7-8 hours of sleep every night does not negatively affect their output, it contributes crucially to their best work.

So in this article, I am going to give you the 13 strategies that have been the secret to my success. Some of them you may have come by before. Others you probably haven���t. But all of them work.

Beware Burnout

Arianna Huffington quietly grew The Huffington Post into a behemoth with some 200 million unique visitors a month and 17 international editions. Her stake in Huffington Post was worth an estimated $21 million. But for a time, Arianna���s wealth and power came at the expense of living a good life. After years of working upwards of 18-hour days seven days a week, the sleep tax collectors showed up. Arianna was in her home office when she collapsed, hit her head on her desk, broke a cheekbone, and woke up in a pool of her own blood. At the hospital, doctors ran several tests. Brain MRI. CAT scans. Heart sonograms. Her diagnosis? Burnout.

But unlike so many overworked people, however, Arianna was able to look in the mirror after this harrowing incident and do what too many are unable to do: she changed. She realized that life was about more than just doing, that there was no glamor in working oneself to the bone, trading sleep for an extra conference call or a few minutes on television or a meeting with an important person. So, despite being at her peak financially and professionally, she left The Huffington Post, went looking for what she would call the ���third metric��� of success, and launched Thrive Global, where she���s brought the resources of both science and philosophical wisdom to combat the rising epidemic of stress and burnout.

Near the end of his life, Marcus Aurelius sat down and wrote about what he learned from the mentor who most shaped his life: his adopted step-father Antoninus. Antoninus worked hard, Marcus wrote, but he also made sure ���to take adequate care of himself…With the result that he hardly ever needed medical attention, or drugs or any sort of salve or ointment.��� Marcus said that life is short and if we practice bad habits, if we don���t take care of ourselves, if we aren���t willing to change, we will surely shorten that time.

You Are Not An Exception

People say, I do perfectly fine on four or five hours of sleep. No, you don���t. I���m an exception. No, you���re not.��

In a study by a team of scientists at the Division of Sleep and Chronobiology in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, participants were divided into four groups: one was sleep deprived for up to 88 hours, one group slept for four hours a night, one group slept for six hours a night, and one group slept for eight hours a night. There were two important findings. First, the performance of the groups who slept four and six hours was as impaired as the sleep deprived group. Second, when asked, all participants grossly miscalculated how impaired they were.

As Dr. Thomas Roth, the Director of the Sleep Disorders and Research Center at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, put it, ���The number of people who can survive on five hours of sleep or less without any impairment, expressed as a percent of the population, and rounded to a whole number, is zero.��� Or if not zero, close enough to zero that we can assume it doesn���t include you.��

Sleep With Your Phone in the Other Room

Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska is known for giving his young staffers old-school alarm clocks ��� not because he wants to make sure they���re on time for work, but so they don���t have an excuse to sleep with their phone on the nightstand. If you have an alarm that���s not your clock app, your phone can go in the other room, and if your phone is in the other room, you can���t check it at night.

This means you won���t know if you get a text message or an email. It means you won���t be tempted to scroll through social media. It means you won���t be staring at a screen that are, as Matthew Walker writes in Why We Sleep, ���artificially forcing us awake, thereby masking our�� natural tiredness at night, [which] keeps people awake for longer, and makes falling asleep more difficult.���

Wake Up Early

I have written many times about the power of waking up early. The mornings are the most productive hours of the day���before the interruptions, before the distractions, before the rest of the world gets up and going too. Early, we 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 early morning, before the day had exacted its toll and while 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.��

And of course, when you get up with the sun, you are more likely to wind down with the sun. It was one of Seneca���s observations: we were made to follow the rhythm of the sun. ���We are more industrious, and we are better men if we anticipate the day and welcome the dawn,��� he wrote, ���but we are base churls if we lie dozing when the sun is high in the heavens, or if we wake up only when noon arrives.��� If you want the secret to success, if you want to start executing at a higher level, then you have to get in the habit of waking up early. You have to come to the realization that you are at your best when you are in rhythm with the sun.

Strenuous Exercise Every Day

I take a walk and go for a run just about every day. It���s not about burning calories or getting the heart rate up or training for a marathon. ���It is indeed foolish,��� Seneca wrote, ���to work hard over developing the muscles and broadening the shoulders and strengthening the lungs.��� Rather, he said, the goal of exercise is simply to ���tire the body��� so we can later enjoy a heavy sleep.��

The ancients didn���t need the research, but it is nice knowing what we now know. Matthew Walker writes of the ���clear bidirectional relationship��� between exercise and sleep. Physical activity leads to better sleep which boosts physical activity which leads to better sleep which, so on and so on. ���It is clear,��� Walker writes in Why We Sleep, ���that a sedentary life is one that does not help with sound sleep, and all of us should try to engage in some degree of regular exercise to help maintain not only the fitness of our bodies but also the quantity and quality of our sleep.��� Make it a rule, as I have: strenuous exercise every single day.

Go The F*ck To Sleep

You think you���re not an early morning person���but that���s mostly because you���re not going to bed early enough. You���re staying up to what? Scrolling through TikTok or tweets at 11pm? You should be asleep!

When you���re burned out, when you���re exhausted, when you���ve had that long day where all you want to do is veg out on the couch? That���s precisely when you need the extra discipline to get up and go to bed. Follow 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 important too. Being disciplined about wrapping up and winding down is essential.��

Read Before Bed

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.”

Journal Before Bed

���Is there anything finer than this practice of examining one���s entire day?��� Seneca asked. ���Think of the sleep that follows this self-inspection,��� he said, ���how peaceful, deep, and free, when the mind has been either praised or admonished, when the sentinel and secret censor of the self has conducted its inquiry into one���s character.���

That���s what a great night���s sleep requires. A mental state free of clutter and chaos. It is a state that is never not hard to achieve, because each day presents plenty of opportunities to clutter or minds���responsibilities, the dysfunctional job that stresses you out, a contentious relationship, reality not agreeing with your expectations. But journaling is a tool uniquely suited to help us declutter our minds. A couple thousand years after Seneca intuited it, the Journal of Experimental Psychology proved that journaling before bed decreases cognitive stimulus, rumination, and worry, allowing you to fall asleep faster. So tonight, try Epictetus���s nightly ritual and see what it can do for you:

���Allow not sleep to close your wearied eyes, Until you have reckoned up each daytime deed: ���Where did I go wrong? What did I do? And what duty���s left undone?��� From first to last review your acts and then Reprove yourself for wretched [or cowardly] acts, but rejoice in those done well.���

Treat The Weekends The Same

It almost doesn���t matter what the problem is, the solution is often a consistent routine. Tell a sleep expert you���re not sleeping well, that���s what they���ll suggest. Tell a psychiatrist you���ve been feeling anxious, that���s what their first question will be. Tell a productivity guru your work output isn���t where you want it, that���s where they���ll start. Tell a dog trainer your dog is acting up, that���s where they���ll start. Tell a strength trainer you want to get stronger, tell an author you want to get better at writing, tell the Stoics you want to round out the day in a calmer, more tranquil state���a consistent routine will be the answer.

Regardless of the practices you implement from above, the best thing you can do for your sleep is be consistent, seven days a week. ���There is much we can do to secure a far better night of sleep using what we call good ���sleep hygiene��� practices,��� Matthew Walker writes in Why We Sleep, ���but if you can only adhere to one of these each and every day, make it: going to bed and waking up at the same time of day no matter what. It is perhaps the single most effective way of helping improve your sleep.���

Sleep Is An Act Of Character

I mentioned it above���in the armed forces, they refer to the idea of sleep discipline. In the Persian Gulf in the 1990s, future Admiral James Stavridis had just been given command of a ship for the first time. This occurred at exactly the same time, he noticed, at age 38, that his natural metabolism and his infinitely youthful ability to just gut it out, had begun to decline. You don���t have to be the most self-aware person on the planet to see that you make worse decisions when you���re tired, that you���re less able to work well with others, that you have less command of yourself and your emotions. But it was still a considerable innovation for Stavridis to decide to treat sleep as an equally important part of a functioning warship as its weapons systems.

In response, Stavridis began to monitor the sleep cycles of his crew, moderate their watch duties and encourage naps wherever possible. ���Watching our physical health,��� he would write later, specifically referring to sleep, ���is an act of character and can enormously help with our ability to perform.���

Discover The Life-giving Powers Of The Nap

Anders Ericsson, of the classic ten-thousand-hours study, found that master violinists slept eight and a half hours a night on average and took a nap most days. A friend said of Churchill, ���He made in Cuba one discovery which was to prove far more important to his future life than any gain in military experience, the life-giving powers of the siesta.��� Naps are restorative, especially as you get older. After a triple-double performance by Lebron James on a Sunday following back-to-back road games in the Midwest and a stop in Phoenix to watch his son play, James was asked if there���s any secret to all the energy he���s been playing with. ���Sleep,��� LeBron said. ���I slept last night from 12 to 8. I got up, ate breakfast, and then I went back to sleep from 8:30 to 12:30.��� Teammates joke that Lebron is always either sleeping or playing basketball.

I try to tell this to my kids, who hate napping���one day you will miss this. Trust me.��

Don���t Sleep When You���re Dead (Sleep Or You���ll Die)

The thing I take from Arianna Huffington���s story is that cutting back on sleep not only decreases your quality of life���but it can take your life. People get depressed without sleep. They burn out. They crash their cars. They faint in the bathroom and hit their heads. The philosopher and writer Arthur Schopenhauer used to say that ���sleep is the source of all health and energy.��� He said it better still on a separate occasion: ���Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death. The higher the interest rate and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.���

If you want to have a good and long life, sleep now, not later.��

Invest In Your Sleep

When I dropped out of college and moved to LA, I didn���t have enough money to buy a bed. I borrowed an IKEA futon and slept on the floor for almost two months. When I made a little bit of money, I bought the cheapest mattress from the cheapest mattress store and slept on it for almost a decade. I don���t remember when exactly I decided to upgrade but it was long after I could afford otherwise. The point is: If sleep has all these benefits, if it is literally life-saving, then it makes sense to invest in it. Maybe that���s buying a better mattress. Maybe that���s biting the bullet and paying for a layback seat on an international flight. Maybe that���s a sound machine or blackout shades. Figure out what gets you better sleep and consider it a hell of a deal.��

(One part of my sleep routine is the Eight Sleep���s Pod Pro Cover. Actually I should say OUR sleep routine because my wife loves it more than I do…and if she sleeps better, my life is also better.)

P.S. Eight Sleep users fall asleep up to 32% faster, reduce sleep interruptions by up to 40%, and get more restful sleep overall. Eight Sleep���s Pod Pro���s technology makes it easier to sleep through the night, tracks sleep stages, heart rate and HRV, to provide deep health insights. And overtime, it learns from all this data and auto-adjusts to create your optimal sleep environment. It even offers dual-zone temperature control. And I worked out an exclusive deal with Eight Sleep for you all. Go to eightsleep.com/ryan right now to upgrade your sleep experience and get $150 off the Pod Pro Cover!

 

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29 Lessons From Owning A Bookstore

I’ve done some crazy things in my life, but as I’ve said, the absolute craziest was deciding to open a bookstore. Running a small business is always difficult, running a small business during a pandemic is damn near impossible but a small town book store in rural Texas? 

But here we are, a year later, not just still standing but doing great! 

We’ve learned a lot…about business, about books, and about ourselves. 

I made a YouTube video about the experience, but I wanted to expand it here into a fuller explanation of all the lessons that The Painted Porch has taught me. I share them here so you can get something too—and perhaps learn a little from my experiences and hopefully go create something cool of your own out of it. Here are 29 lessons from the first 12 months of owning The Painted Porch. 

– It always takes longer than you think it’s going to take. That’s Hofstadter’s law. From the moment my wife suggested we open a small-town bookstore, everything has taken longer and been harder than we expected. If you can’t pass the marshmallow test of delaying gratification and deferring things into the future, you’re just going to get crushed. 

– For most of my life as an author and entre­preneur, my work has been digital. Close to half of the sales of my books are audiobooks and ebooks. Every morning, I send out the Daily Stoic and Daily Dad emails to over 500,000 people. I put out a podcast that’s had 80 million downloads. As satisfying as it is to reach large numbers of people through the enormous scale of the internet, there is even more satisfaction in doing something in real life, for real people, even at a much much smaller level. Every time I walk by or to the bookstore, I think, Wow, I made that. 

– I think one of the best decisions we made was making our book tower. It’s 20 feet tall and made of some 2000 books, 4000 nails, and 40 gallons of glue. It was not cheap to do. It was not easy to do. It took forever. We had to solve all sorts of logistical problems to make it work. But it’s also probably one of the single best marketing and business decisions we made in the whole store. Because it’s the number one thing that people come into the store to take pictures of. 

– You want to have a unique proposition. You want to have something that only you could do. Most bookstores have thousands and thousands of books. But what we decided here was that we’d have only a couple hundred books, only my absolute favorite books, only the books I put in my Reading List Email. It would only be those books. So not only did this make it cheaper and easier to run the bookstore, it makes us stand out. 

– There’s this great story of when Jeff Bezos had the idea for Amazon. He was working on Wall Street at the time. He and his boss go for a walk in Central Park and after he tells him his idea, his boss says, “that sounds like a great idea for someone who doesn’t have a job.” Meaning that somebody else should do it, not Bezos. If there’s something crazy that you’re thinking about doing, maybe you should get serious about actually doing it. On the other side of the risk and the crazy leap can be something that changes your life, that changes your community, that changes the world.

– Doing something cool means risk…but just because you take a big risk doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of little ways to take risk off the table. My office is above the bookstore. I rent part of the building out to another business, etc. 

– There are lots of easier ways to make money than a physical bookstore in 2022…so everyday I try to remind myself this project was not about making lots of money. Remembering why you did something and how you measure success helps you calibrate your decisions properly. I’m happy enough to be putting books out in the world, making this community better, having a physical space, challenging myself, etc…as long as I don’t lose lots of money, that’s a win. 

– Start small. The problem is when you have really high standards, when you expect a lot of yourself, it’s hard to be comfortable with something that’s kind of crappy or mediocre or not all the way there. But there’s a reason most tech start ups think in terms of a minimum viable product. 

– Related to that there’s a great Hemingway line—we actually have a shirt with it, and I have a print of it on my wall—it’s one of my all-time favorite quotes: the first draft of everything is shit. I love how The Painted Porch is now, but it took weeks and months to get it to where it is. It’s been a continual process of improvement and growth and making changes.

– Lengthen your timeline. I mentioned Hofsteader’s Law above—it was important to remind ourselves many times that the building we were in was nearly 150 years old. It can be very easy on a project to get caught up in the immediacy of what’s in front of you…but you miss the big picture and you miss the reality that most things that work are set up to work for a long time. We sell books in our store that were written 2,500 years ago! Who cares if the project took 13 months longer to open than we thought?

– As Zeno said, books are a way to have conversations with the dead. You can learn from people who came before you. They can also inspire and reassure you. Some books I leaned on often throughout this were The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and A Calendar of Wisdom by Leo Tolstoy.

– One of the things I did while I was kicking around the idea is I looked up how expensive it is to start a bookstore. Search results said it was hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars—way more expensive than I was interested in. But then I wanted to question whether that number was real. So then I went and looked up how expensive it was to start an ecommerce business—something like Daily Stoic. Search results said it was hundreds of thousands of dollars more than I’d spent to start Daily Stoic. That was really helpful—to learn, oh, these people don’t really know what they’re talking about. Or that there’s a cheaper way, a different way to do it. You don’t have to do it the way that everyone else does it.

– Steal like an artist (also a great book we carry). We got the idea for the bookshelves in our store at someone’s house for a toddler’s birthday party. They had built them themselves, we took a picture and had our contractor do his own version. The book tower was roughly inspired by The Last Bookstore. Even the idea to carry fewer titles and put them face out was partly inspired by Amazon’s physical bookstores. Take from many influences and make them your own. 

– One of my favorite parts of the whole experience has been watching my wife work her magic. Not only was the original idea to do the store hers, but almost all the big design ideas were hers too. We have very different styles of working but collaborating on this challenged me to see the wisdom in her approach on a humblingly regular basis. 

– When you get criticism, when you get information, when you get facts—and of course you have to look for those things—you have to take them with a grain of salt. You have to put them up to the test, as the Stoics say. You have to question some of the assumptions out there. You might just find, as we did, that instead of something being way too expensive, it is actually doable for you to do it.

– Think of it as an experiment. When I was thinking about opening The Painted Porch, I asked Tim Ferriss for advice. “Think about it as an experiment,” he said. “How are you going to know if it’s something you want to do if you haven’t tried doing it?” The decision to see it as an experiment, not as a permanent life choice, was so freeing. It allowed me to go into it knowing that I was going to commit to it for the next two years, and then, I can reassess, I can change my mind.

– Confidence is earned. People talk about trusting their gut. But that’s something you have to earn. I talk about this in Ego is the Enemy—there’s a difference between confidence and ego. Ego thinks, whatever I want to do, of course I’m going to be successful. Confidence is something you earn, something you earn over time. It’s something you earn through having an idea and bringing it into reality. It’s learning what you’re capable of, learning what’s possible, learning why you do deserve to trust yourself. Confidence is on the other side of having done a scary thing, a thing that a lot of people said wasn’t a good idea.

– In Letters From A Stoic, Seneca says he pitied the person who’s never gone through adversity, who’s never done anything difficult. Because they don’t know what they’re capable of. Well…cue March 2020.

– Help yourself by helping others. When I first started my Reading List Email in 2008, the idea was that I wanted to celebrate other people’s works. To me, the bookstore is an extension of the idea of celebrating other people’s work. And when you do that, when you create value for people, when you’re generally a positive force in your industry, in your space, you develop a reputation. People want to support you. People want to help you.

– Robert Greene’s metaphor for mastery (if you haven’t read Mastery, you must) is being on the inside of something. When we start a new sport, when we get a new job, when we approach a field we haven’t yet studied, we are on the outside of. But as we put in the work, as we familiarize ourselves with every component, as we develop our intuitive field, we eventually make our way to this inside. This is a metaphor I think about constantly with the bookstore.

– Permission assets are everything. All my success as a writer, right down to this bookstore, has been rooted in the email lists and social media accounts I have built. When you have direct access to people who like what you do, everything is more affordable and more scalable. When you don’t? Everything is harder and requires so much more luck. 

– Just do the right thing…the rest doesn’t matter. That’s what Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations. We delayed opening during the worst days of COVID—we didn’t need to, so why contribute to the problem? We paid people to work remotely instead. We kept up safety protocols even after the state of Texas washed its hands of its responsibilities last year. We did it even though people got mad at us for it, even though it probably cost us business. My conscience is clean and that’s what counts. Keeping your community and your staff safe is good for business in the long run anyway. 

– If it makes you a worse person (parent, neighbor, writer, whatever), it’s not success. On a note to myself when we were opening the bookstore in the middle of the pandemic, I wrote, “2020 is a test: will it make you a better person or a worse person?” That was the test that I reminded myself of over and over again: will this make you a better person or a worse person? If starting a business makes you a worse person—if it stresses you out, if it tears your relationships apart, if it makes you bitter or frustrated with people—then it doesn’t matter how much money it makes or external praise it receives. It’s not successful.

– As we were going through it, my wife and I asked ourselves, what does success look like? And we decided that success was going to be: becoming more community minded, becoming more responsible, becoming better organized, having more fun, making a positive contribution.

– Physical experiences matter more in a digital world. If people wanted a book cheaply, they’d buy it online. There has to be a reason people would drive out and come to your business.  We made a lot of our design and marketing decisions around that idea.  

– It would be wonderful of course if marketing didn’t have to exist. If things could be bare-boned. If presentation and packaging didn’t matter. That’s just not how life works—never has and it never will. You have to do interesting stuff. You have to make remarkable things, as Seth Godin writes in Purple Cow, you have to do remarkable marketing. Do stuff that commands attention. Draw attention like a magnet. These things cannot be underestimated.

– COVID has been tough. Even as I was working on this piece, we had to close because people got sick, even after all our precautions and we couldn’t stay open. That was expensive and it was scary for everyone. But we took it one day at a time, we adapted, we adjusted, we figured it out. Which is all you can do. .

– In The Obstacle is the Way, I quote this Haitian proverb that I like: behind mountains are more mountains. That’s just how life is. You don’t overcome one obstacle, you don’t get through the first year of your business, and then suddenly, you’re magically done with obstacles. No, that’s not how life works. Life is one obstacle after another. You just have to keep going. 

– I mentioned Austin Kleon’s book Steal Like An Artist earlier but his book Keep Going was even more relevant to this journey. 

I happened to be writing Courage is Calling during most of the crazy period of putting this book store together. Obviously, starting a small business is not the same as running into a burning building or onto a battlefield, but one thing you can’t escape noticing when you read history or biography is just how badly we need people to step up, to put themselves out there, to pursue their crazy ideas. All of human progress—big and small—depends on that. 

If you’re thinking of doing something, if you feel called to do something…well, maybe you should do it. Just remember to…

Start small.Be patient.Think of it as an experiment.Do it the way only you could do it. Find ways to take risk off the table.Define what success means to you.Question some of the assumptions out there.See adversity as an opportunity to find out what you are capable of.Keep going—behind mountains are more mountains.

Anyway, come visit us on Main St. in Bastrop sometime…or support the store online at thepaintedporch.com ! Some of the most popular books in the store are Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne, The Library Book by Susan Orlean, and The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant. We’ve also had many of my favorite authors stop by and sign copies of their books, such as: The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson, From Strength to Strength by Arthur Brooks, and Finding Ultra by Rich Roll. If you buy from those links, your books will be shipped from us here in Bastrop, Texas!

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You Actually Should Do Something That Scares You Every Day

All the data about taking cold showers is bullshit to me. 

Sure, some research says that they can reduce anxiety, improve your immune system, increase metabolism to assist in weight loss, reduce the number of days you call out sick from work, and potentially even improve cancer survival.

But I don’t care about any of that. 

The reason I interrupt my warm showers by cranking the knob to the side is far more simple, in fact it’s nearly tautological. I do it to do it.

It’s making a statement about who is in charge. 

In one of his letters, Seneca describes himself as a “cold-water enthusiast.” He would “celebrate the new year by taking a plunge into the canal, who, just as naturally as I would set out to do some reading or writing, or to compose a speech, used to inaugurate the first of the year with a plunge into the Virgo aqueduct [present day Trevi Fountain].” But then he gives the real reason: “The body should be treated more rigorously that it may not be disobedient to the mind.”

I think about that every morning just before I crank the knob. Who is in charge? The courageous side of me or the cowardly side? The side that doesn’t flinch at discomfort or the side that desires to always be comfortable? The side that does the hard thing or the side that takes the easy way? 

In a Sports Illustrated story by Greg Bishop about the Los Angeles Rams’ difficult path to becoming Super Bowl champions, we learn that Rams General Manager Les Snead is a cold-water enthusiast. “As Les Snead watched his grand football experiment unfold over the course of the 2021 season,” Bishop writes, “he decided that, starting on Jan. 1, he would borrow from the Roman philosopher Seneca and plunge into the Pacific Ocean. And he did that, every morning, every week, all the way until Super Bowl Sunday.”

It wasn’t so he could improve his immune system to make it through the long season. It wasn’t to increase his metabolism. It wasn’t to reduce anxiety. Those things might have been nice ancillary benefits but they were not the point. The purpose was to become the kind of person that could do it—that could crank the handle or dive into the surf even though that’s almost certainly not going to be pleasant. 

Because that guy is also the guy who can trade a quarterback he just signed to an enormous contract. That guy is also the guy who can say ‘Fuck those draft picks’ even though everybody else in the NFL thinks that insane. 

As I write about in Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave, we can’t just hope to be brave when it counts. Courage has to be cultivated. No athlete just hopes to hit the game-winning shot—they practice it thousands of times. They take that shot in scrimmages, in pickup games, alone in the gym as they count down the clock in their head.

You know there’s that cliché: Do one thing each day that scares you. 

It’s hokey but it’s actually not bad advice! How do you expect to do the big things that scare you—that scare others—if you haven’t practiced them? Why do you think you can endure the cold reception of a bold idea if you can’t even endure cold water? How can you trust that you’ll step forward when the stakes are high when you regularly don’t do that when the stakes are low? What gives you any confidence you’ll do the hard thing when people are watching if you can’t do that even when no one is watching? 

The person who does something scary every day is less fearful than someone who can’t. The person who does something difficult every day is tougher than someone who doesn’t. And life? Well life is scary and it is tough. There is nothing worth doing that isn’t. You need those traits…unless you plan to cower and hide or get really lucky. 

We treat the body rigorously to remind it who is in charge. We push ourselves in little ways so the big ways stop seeming quite so big, quite so out of character. We minimize fear by making the act of overcoming it routine. We test ourselves to prepare for the tests of life.

Courage, self-control—all of the virtues are habits. They are superlatives paid for over the course of a life of virtuous decisions. They are not something you declare, like bankruptcy, they are something you earn, that become part of you. Just as a writer becomes one by writing—we build them by doing. By doing things like them.  

We can crank the knob in the shower to cold. We go for the run even though we’re tired. We pick up the phone and start the conversation we’ve been dreading. We agree to try what we have never tried before. 

We do something difficult, something scary, something good every day. 

We do it to do it. 

We do it because we’re in charge.

We do it so we can do it when it counts. 

P.S. Also I’m excited to announce we’re re-opening Stoicism 101: Ancient Philosophy For Your Actual Life. It’s a 14-day course designed to show people how to integrate philosophy into their everyday lives. Along with the 14 custom emails delivered daily (~20,000 words of exclusive content), there are 3 live video sessions—what we call office hours—with me where I’ll be taking all your questions about Stoicism. 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 March 21 at Midnight so don’t wait.

 

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Life Is Up To You: 8 Choices That Will Make Your Life Better

Life is about choices.

How we choose to see things. What we choose to say. What we choose to think.

We choose what kind of person we are going to be. 

It all comes down to choices.

And Stoicism, it could be said, is a philosophy about how to make better choices. This is what we see in a book like Meditations. We see Marcus Aurelius journaling, working to get better at choosing. Choosing the right things to value, the right things to think, the right things to focus on, the right response to a difficult situation. 

In this article, I am going to give you the best insights from the Stoics on choosing well to live better. 

Start now by making the choice to…

Say Yes Only To What Matters

Being great at anything requires concentration. It requires elimination, Seneca says. “He who is everywhere is nowhere.”

If you want to be great at whatever it is you’re doing, you have to make some choices about what you say yes to and what you say no to. Everything you say yes to means saying no to something else. And conversely, everything you say no to means saying yes to something else. 

When you say no, when you cut out the inessential, the Stoics say, it allows you to double down on what is truly essential. So the question is: are you saying no to say yes only to what matters?

Control Your Emotions

Cato was once spat on by a rival politician. He was a physically tough man, a soldier, who could have, let’s say, taken matters into his own hands. Instead, he is reported to have laughed and said, “I will swear to anyone, Lentulus, that people are wrong to say that you cannot use your mouth.”

In another case, he was punched and responded to the man’s apology by saying, “I don’t even remember being hit.”

Cato chose not to be provoked. He chose not to be dragged down to their level. He didn’t lose his temper. He didn’t let them get to him. He abided by Marcus Aurelius’s wisdom, “You don’t have to turn this into something. It doesn’t have to upset you.”

Let Go of Anxiety

This was a breakthrough I had during the pandemic. Suddenly, I had a lot less to worry about. I wasn’t doing the things that, in the past, I told myself were the causes of my anxiety. I wasn’t having to get to this plane. I wasn’t battling traffic to get somewhere on time. I wasn’t having to prepare for this talk or that one.

So you’d think that my anxiety would have gone way down. But it didn’t. And what I realized is that anxiety has nothing to do with any of these things.

Marcus Aurelius actually talks about this in Meditations. “Today I escaped from anxiety,” he says. “Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions—not outside.” He writes this during a plague, no less.

We tell ourselves we are stressed and anxious and worried because of the pressure our boss puts on us or because of some looming deadline or because of all of the places we have to be and people we have to see. And then when all that gets paired down, you realize, ‘Oh, no, it was me. I’m the common variable.’ The anxiety is coming from the inside. And you can choose to discard it. 

Stop Wasting Time

When I was 20 years old, I was thinking about becoming a writer. I had about a year left on my contract at the company I was working at. I was telling Robert Greene, one of the greatest writers of all time, about all of this, and he told me I had two options. With this next year, he said, you have the choice between alive time and dead time.

Dead time is when you waste time sitting around, waiting, hoping for things to happen to you.

Alive time is when you are in control, when you make every second count, when you are learning and improving and growing and experimenting.

Is this going to be Alive Time or Dead Time? I decided to print it out and put it on my wall. And it was one of the most productive years of my life. I read stacks and stacks of books. I filled up a box of notecards. I reached out to people and have relationships to this day that came out of that experience. 

Most of all, what I took was life is constantly asking us, Is this going to be alive time or dead time? A long commute—are you going to zone out or listen to an audiobook? A delayed flight—are you going to get a couple thousands steps around the terminal or shove a Cinnabon into our face? A contract we have to earn out—is this tying us down or freeing us up?

What you do with the time when you are not totally in control—that is the critical choice you have to constantly make. 

Focus On What’s In Your Control

99 percent of the things that you spend time on don’t matter. It’s not that they’re not important. It’s that we focus on things that are not up to us.

Epictetus said, “The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control…”

The chief choice is between things that are in our control and those that are not in our control. What other people do, what other people say, what the weather is doing, how the dice rolls—just about everything except our actions, our thoughts, our feelings—not in our control.

Our actions, our thoughts, our feelings—these are up to us. Other people, the weather, external events, these are not. But here’s the thing: our responses to other people, the weather, external events are in our control. 

Making this distinction and then choosing to focus on the things that are in your control will make you happier, stronger, and more successful. If only because it concentrates your resources in the places where they matter.

Do The More Difficult Thing

Whenever we come to a little crossroad—a decision about how to do things and what things to do—the Stoics said to default to the option that challenges you the most.

Marcus Aurelius wrote in Meditations about holding the reins in his non-dominant hand as both an exercise to practice and a metaphor for doing the difficult thing. Seneca talked about how a person who skates through life without being tested and challenged is actually depriving themselves of opportunities to grow and improve. 

It is both these ideas that informed one of the things I wanted to do with my book Courage is Calling. I wanted to alter people’s perception of courage. To get people to stop thinking our courage only as what happens on the battlefield or when destiny calls you onto the world’s stage. Courage is a kind of craft, something you pursue day in and day out just as one pursues the mastery of any profession or skill. It’s something you do, something you make a habit of.

Jump into the colder pool. Walk instead of drive. Pick up the book instead of your phone. Take responsibility instead of hoping it goes unnoticed. It matters big and small, courage is choosing the more difficult option. Make it a habit. Iron sharpens iron, after all. You’ll be better for it—not only for the improvement that comes from the challenge itself, but for the willpower you are developing by choosing that option on purpose. 

When you have two choices, choose the more difficult one. Choose the one, as Marcus would agree, that allows you to take the reins in any situation.

Grab The Smooth Handle

If you’ve ever been stuck in Los Angeles traffic at night, you know it’s miserable. But if you’ve ever seen a helicopter shot of Los Angeles at night, you’ve seen how this same miserable experience can suddenly be made to seem beautiful and serene. We call one a traffic jam, the other a light show.

Same thing, different perspective.

Life is like this. We can look at it one way and be scared or angry or worried. We can look at it another and find an exciting challenge. We can choose to look at something as an obstacle or an opportunity. We can see chaos if we look up close, or order if we look from afar. 

As Epictetus said, each situation has two handles—one that will bear weight and one that won’t. We get to choose how we look at things. We get to look for the best handle to grab. As Marcus would put it, we get to choose the thoughts we dye the world with.

Little Choices Make For a Big Change

These choices are all very minor, I get that. But that’s the point. These little choices we make–the choice to direct our attention, to grab the right handle, to not get upset–this adds up. 

To what?

To freedom, the Stoics would say. To be in control of your life…even when so much of what happens in life is outside your control. 

***

P.S. Happy Texas Independence Day! One of the best choices I ever made was moving to Texas back in 2013. I continue to fall deeper and deeper in love with the Lone Star State. At The Painted Porch , we have a section just for books about Texas . The one I most recommend is the wonderful and important book, Forget the Alamo . Bryan Burrough, one of my all time favorite authors, and his co-writer Jason Stanford came out to The Painted Porch and signed copies of Forget the Alamo . Bryan also signed my two favorite books of his: Public Enemies and The Big Rich . You can check any of those out here !

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Our Country is Filled with Problems; Reading Too Many Books Isn’t One of Them

The piece below is about banned books, which I feel so strongly about that I’ve decided to give away free physical copies of banned books. If you come by The Painted Porch today from 2-6pm or on February 19 from 10am-2pm, we’ll be giving away free copies of books such as Fahrenheit 451 , Lawn Boy , and Out of Darkness .

The tragic irony of many books we are assigned in school is that we are far too young to understand what they really mean. 

Like many public school kids, I was assigned Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in high school. I remembered the book as a warning against totalitarian censorship by the government. It was only later, re-reading it as an adult, that I realized Bradbury—who had written the book on purchased time at a library typewriter—was depicting something much more insidious. 

As Captain Beatty explains to Montag, who had begun to doubt his terrible profession, censorship was what the people wanted. This horrendous burning of books hadn’t been forced on them by a tyrant. They had chosen this. 

“Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo,” he says, using terms that today would render the book politically incorrect, if not entirely canceled. “Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping. Burn the book.” 

Bradbury’s message is a much more salient warning to modern Americans than many of us are ready for upon first reading. America is, and always has been, in less danger of top-down Chinese or Soviet style suppression and much more vulnerable to short sighted or even well-intentioned democratic censorship. 

I didn’t grasp this as a high schooler, but I can see it now. Because here we are in 2022 where book banning is not only popular with state legislatures and local school boards, but a pastor in Tennessee held a literal book burning, which featured worshippers willingly tossing books into a bonfire that appears to reach ten or fifteen feet in the air. 

Depending on where you live, this might all seem very distant. As a writer and bookseller in rural Texas, it hits closer to home for me. Interestingly, Marcus Aurelius—who I write about often—makes an appearance in Fahrenheit 451. “Wasn’t he a European,” Montag’s wife asks. “Wasn’t he a radical?” Nobody knew…like today, people were willing to burn a book because of what they thought might be in it, or because of what someone else said was in it. 

The high school my sons will go to has been in the news for challenging a book called Out of Darkness, about segregation in a Texas oil town in the 1930s. More comically, another parent angrily protested an example of gay sex from a book called Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison at one of our school board meetings in September…but as the school librarian later pointed out, the school doesn’t even carry that book. The mother had confused it with another book literally about a boy who mows lawns. Just the other day, a man came into our bookstore snarling about all our “liberal” and “woke” books and our Google reviews have been briganded by anti-maskers and COVID-deniers. 

America has many problems. Reading too many books is not one of them. In fact, I would argue that our problems stem from the exact opposite. We spend too much time online. We watch too much real-time (partisan) news. We have a poor understanding of history and our founding principles. We say experience is a great teacher and neglect the hard won experiences of the people who came before us and did us the service of writing that all down. 

As a lifelong autodidact, I’ve been known to mispronounce many words that I had never heard outside the pages of a book. I always smile when I see someone doing the same thing—there goes a reader, I think. When Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene decried Nancy Pelosi’s “​​Gazpacho Police,” I knew that was a very different kind of error—the kind that comes from someone who has not read a single book about the Nazi Party. In fact, when I look at her cruel mockery of school shooting victims, heinous anti-semitism and dangerous pandemic misinformation, I can’t escape thinking: This is what happens when people don’t read books at all.

I don’t mean to single her out. There are plenty of politicians on both sides of the aisle who very obviously don’t read—or read only things that confirm what they already believe. 

In our world, it seems, reading and studying has become almost a revolutionary act. 

In Bradbury’s world, Montag strikes back against the regime simply by memorizing passages from books in order to protect and preserve them. As my wife and bookstore partner Samantha reminded me, to sit by while the government or your fellow citizens ban books is to endorse it. Each of us has an obligation to push back against the anti-intellectual bent of our time—whether it comes from the right or the left. When a book is banned or attacked—whether because it contains Critical Race Theory or because Critical Race Theorists are attempting to cancel the author—read it! As Stephen King has said, “Don’t spend time waving signs or carrying petitions around the neighborhood. Instead, run, don’t walk, to the nearest nonschool library or to the local bookstore and get whatever it was that they banned. Read whatever they’re trying to keep out of your eyes and your brain, because that’s exactly what you need to know.”

In a time of misinformation and disinformation, that quote might not always be right but directionally the argument is good. We shouldn’t insulate our kids from uncomfortable ideas, we should expose our kids to them and encourage them to engage with that discomfort. Moreover,  we have to model the lifelong pursuit of knowledge in our own reading habits as adults, if for no other reason than so we can be their guides. We certainly can’t leave their fate in the hands of school board members  and  local elected officials who fear what might happen to a young person given free reign in a library. 

The good news is that these people have less control over us than they once did. In the digital world, books are more plentiful than ever. It’s harder to truly suppress important perspectives. I am proud to have called in a favor with the folks at Scribd, a subscription service for ebooks and audiobooks, to make a number of these “banned” books accessible to anyone who wants them. They’ve also helped donate thousands of copies of books like Not My Idea by Anastasia Higginbotham, King and the Dragon Flies by Kacen Callender, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, and New Kid by Jerry Craft, among others, to give away to students in my local community (as a result, one small publisher told me they’re having to print extra copies of some banned titles). 

In big letters on our front window, we have stenciled the words “Good Things Happen In Bookstores.” But really, good things happen anywhere books are plentiful—even offensive or strange or uncomfortable books. 

The converse is also true, as the playwright Heinrich Heine tragically predicted of his German homeland. “Wherever they burn books,” he warned, “they will also, in the end, burn human beings.”  

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If You Only Read a Few Books in 2022, Read These

It’d be wonderful if a new year magically marked a new beginning. But 2021, like all years, reminds us that the same things keep happening, that world events continue on in their own unpredictable way and that in the end, we control very little but our own actions and opinions. 

One of my favorite quotes—enough that I have it inscribed on the wall across the back of my bookstore—comes from the novelist Walter Mosley. “I’m not saying that you have to be a reader to save your soul in the modern world,” he said. “I’m saying it helps.”

2022 stands before us promising nothing but the same difficulties and opportunities that last year and every year before it promised. What are you going to do about it? Will you be ready for it? Can you handle it?

Books are an investment in yourself—investments that come in many forms: novels, nonfiction, how-to, poetry, classics, biographies. They help you think more clearly, be kinder, see the bigger picture, and improve at the things that matter to you. Books are a tradition that stretches back thousands of years and stretches forward to today, where people are still publishing distillations of countless hours of hard thinking on hard topics. Why wouldn’t you avail yourself of this wisdom?

With that in mind, here are 16 books—some new, some old—that will help you meet the goals that matter for 2022, that will help you live better and be better.

The Daily Laws: 366 Meditations on Power, Seduction, Mastery, Strategy, and Human Nature by Robert Greene

I’ve always loved the “daily read” format, I’ve recommended some of my favorites here before, I’ve been lucky enough to publish one of my own, and now I feel even luckier to have been able to help Robert bring this book into existence. People ask me all the time, Where should I start with Robert Greene? What book should I read first? It’s been impossible to answer, so I suggested he do a book that was a kind of greatest hits album, a book that captures the totality of his brilliant, life-changing thinking. And now that book exists! Even though I’ve read and reread all of Robert’s books, this book has not left my desk since I got my copy. Here’s my hour long video with Robert, filmed in LA.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport 

Cal is not just one of my favorite thinkers, not just one of my favorite authors, but also one of my favorite people to talk to. I think Cal holds the record for most appearances on the Daily Stoic podcast (you can listen to our conversations here, here, here, and here). But anyone doing knowledge work in the 21st century has to be familiar with Cal’s concept of deep work. This is a book that explains how to cultivate and protect that skill—the ability to focus, be creative, and think at a high level.

Meditations: The Annotated Edition by Marcus Aurelius (translation by Robin Waterfield) 

I first read Meditations more than fifteen years ago. I’m a champion of the Gregory Hays translation but it was a treat (and an eye-opening experience) to read this new annotated edition by Robin Waterfield. Marcus, like Heraclitus, believed we never step in the same river twice. Reading a new translation of a book you’ve read (or love) is a great way to see the same ideas from a new angle…or find new ideas you missed on the previous go-arounds. The annotations (presented as footnotes) here also provide great context. If you haven’t read Marcus Aurelius or if you have…you should read this book and then read it again. I also did a two-hour interview with Robin, which you can listen to on the Daily Stoic podcast (Part 1, Part 2). But whichever translation you go with, the amazing thing about reading Marcus is, year after year, he feels both incredibly timely and incredibly timeless. There’s a reason this book has endured now for almost twenty centuries.(Here are some lessons from me having read Meditations more than 100 times). 

Atomic Habits by James Clear

It’s when things are chaotic and crazy, when the world feels like it’s falling apart, that we most need to develop good habits. I think about James Clear’s concept of atomic habits on a regular basis. To me, this is a sign of a great book—that even just thinking about the title has an impact on you. I love the double meaning of the word atomic—not just meaning explosive habits, but also focusing on the smallest possible size of habit, the tiniest step you can take to start the chain reaction that can in fact lead to explosive results.

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

The Moviegoer is almost truer now for the millennial (or generational) experience than it was in the 1960s when it was published. Any reader will relate to the rather ageless angst of the next generation trying to find its meaning and purpose in the world. It is exactly the novel that every one stuck in their own head needs to read. The main character, on what he calls “the search,” is so in love with the artificiality of movies that he has trouble living his actual life in the real world.

Letters to a Young Athlete by Chris Bosh 

I was lucky enough to help Chris bring this book into existence. Obviously, I am biased, but I think this is a book that very much needs to exist and Chris is a wonderful thinker and philosopher about sports, craft, the drive to win and responding to adversity. You can listen to my interview with him (recorded at the front table at the bookstore) here, but do read the book. He’s great. I think this is a future classic. 

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman 

As I’ve said before, I carry this memento mori coin in my pocket to remind me: You can leave life at any minute. Let that determine what you do and say and think. (I also have a piece of a tombstone on my bathroom counter). Oliver Burkeman’s new book illustrates the same point well–we have roughly four thousand weeks on this planet. How will we spend them? How should we think about them? And don’t be deceived by medical advancements. As I said in my monuments talk, I got to know a guy who lived to be 112. That’s still ‘only’ like 5,800 weeks. You can listen to my conversation with Oliver as well. 

The Choice: Embrace the Possible by Dr. Edith Eger

Dr. Edith Eger is a complete hero of mine. At 16-years-old, she’s sent to Auschwitz. And how does this not break a person? How do they survive? How do they endure the unendurable? And how do they emerge from this, not just not broken, but cheerful and happy and of service to other people? The last thing Dr. Eger’s mother said to her before she was sent to the gas chambers was that very Stoic idea: even when we find ourselves in horrendous situations, we can always choose how we respond to them, who we’re going to be inside of them, what we’re going to hold onto inside of them. Dr. Eger quotes the one and only Dr. Viktor Frankl, who she later studied under, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” It was this idea that allowed Dr. Eger to not only endure unimaginable suffering, but to find meaning in it. She went on to become a psychologist and survives to this day, still seeing patients and helping people overcome trauma. I had the incredible honor of interviewing Dr. Eger and the joy and energy of this woman, this 93-year-old Holocaust survivor, was incredible.

The Inner Citadel by Pierre Hadot

The “inner citadel” is a concept that comes to us from Marcus Aurelius. The Stoics believed you’ll have far better luck toughening yourself up than you ever will trying to take the teeth out of a world that is—at best—indifferent to your existence. So the inner citadel is the fortress inside of us that no external adversity can ever break down. An important caveat is that we are not born with such a structure; it must be built and actively reinforced. During the good times, we strengthen ourselves and our bodies so that during the difficult times, we can depend on it. We protect our inner fortress so it may protect us. 

Turning Pro: Tap Your Inner Power and Create Your Life’s Work by Steven Pressfield

This book is so good and so perfect for the moment, whether you’re an artist or an entrepreneur, a parent or a movie producer. Because the early 2020s have been separating the amateurs from the pros. When times are good, you can be soft and lazy. But when the going gets tough? I hope this book can be an investment in yourself this year. As Steven writes, “I wrote in The War of Art that I could divide my life neatly into two parts: before turning pro and after. After is better.”

How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell

The book is spectacular. It was a bestseller in the UK and was featured in a 6 part series in The Guardian. The format of the book is a bit unusual, instead of chapters it is made up of 20 Montaigne style essays that discuss the man from a variety of different perspectives. Montaigne was a man obsessed with figuring himself out — why he thought the way he did, how he could find happiness, his fetishes, his near-death experiences. He lived in tumultuous times too and he coped by looking inward. We’re lucky he did, and we can do the same.

Leadership: In Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin 

This is an absolutely incredible book. I think I marked up nearly every page. The book is a study of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR and Lyndon Johnson, and it is so clearly the culmination of a lifetime of research… and yet somehow not overwhelming or boring. Distillation at its best! I have read extensively on each of those figures and I got a ton out of it. Even stuff I already knew, I benefited from Goodwin’s perspective. This is the perfect book to read right now—a timely reminder that leadership matters. Or as the Stoics say: character is fate. Or as I wrote about in this piece about leadership during the plague in ancient Rome: when things break down, good leaders have to stand up.

America in the King Years by Taylor Branch ( Vol.1 , Vol. 2 , Vol. 3 )

I’ve raved about some of my favorite epic biographies before: Robert Caro’s LBJ and William Manchester’s Churchill, among others. Well, add another to the list: Taylor Branch’s definitive series on Martin Luther King Jr. and the American civil rights movement. I’ve come to believe that one of the best ways to become an informed citizen in the present is not to watch the news, but to read history. 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, get off Twitter and read these books.

Phosphorescence: A Memoir of Finding Joy When Your World Goes Dark by Julia Baird

I LOVED Julia Baird’s biography of Queen Victoria and have raved about it many times. When I heard she was writing a follow up, I assumed it would be another biography. I did not expect this powerful, inspiring book about resilience and powering through. Through some dark times, Julia said what sustained her was “yielding a more simple phosphorescence—being luminous at temperatures below incandescence, having stored light for later use, quietly glowing without combusting. Staying alive, remaining upright, even when lashed by doubt.” She’s basically talking about Stoicism…without talking about Stoicism (though she does that too). I found myself marking dozens of pages in this one and just continually smiling throughout. It’s a great little book and, among other things, reminds me why I need to get back into swimming. I had a great conversation with Julia on the podcast, which you can listen to here.  

***

As I have published different versions of this piece over the last couple of years (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021), I made one final recommendation worth repeating: Pick 3-4 titles that have had a big impact on you in the past and commit to reading them again. Seneca talked about how you need to “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.”

We never read the same book twice. Because we’ve changed. The perceptions about the book have changed. What we’re going through in this very moment is new and different. So this year, go reread The Great Gatsby. Give The Odyssey another chance. Sit with a few chapters from The 48 Laws of Power. See how these books have stood the test of time and see how you’ve changed since you’ve read them last.

It can be some of the best time you spend with a book this year. Happy reading!

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The Secret To Better Habits in 2022

Only 3 days left to sign up to join me in our New Year New You Challenge !

At the end of the year, we all think about how the past year went and how we want the new year to be better. When we do this, what we’re really thinking about is habits. The things we did accomplish, didn’t accomplish, or hope to accomplish—these are all a byproduct of our habits.

The Stoics had a word, arete, which means human excellence—moral, physical, spiritual. It’s what the Stoics were chasing. It’s what you’re chasing today. And the only way to get there, the Stoics said, was through repeated action, through habit. Excellence isn’t this thing you do one time. It’s a way of living. It’s like an operating system and the code this system operates on is habit. 

So if we want to be better, if we want to be successful, if we want to be great, we have to develop the day-to-day habits that allow this to ensue. Here are the steps I’m taking. As you stare down the barrel of a new year, my question to you is: if you aren’t going to cultivate good habits now, when will you? 

Think Small

George Washington’s favorite saying was “many mickles make a muckle.” It was an old Scottish proverb that illustrates a truth we all know: things add up. Even little ones. “Well-being is realized by small steps,” Zeno would say looking back on his life, “but is truly no small thing.” Don’t promise yourself you’re going to read more; instead, commit to reading one page per day. Thinking big is great, but thinking small is easier. And easier is what we’re after when it comes to getting started. Because once you get started, you can build.

Use Physical Reminders

A physical totem can make the habit or standard you’re trying to hold yourself to into something more than an idea, and that helps—a lot. The author and minister Will Bowen has a simple system that helps people quit complaining. He provides each member of his congregation with a purple bracelet, and each time they complain, they switch the bracelet from one wrist to the other. This method is simple and straightforward and makes it easy to hold yourself accountable. Over my desk, I have a picture of Oliver Sacks. In the background he has a sign that reads “NO!” that helped remind him (and now me) to use that powerful word. One of the reasons we made coins for Daily Stoic was that when you have something physical you can touch, it grounds you. The coins are made at the same mint where the first Alcoholics Anonymous chips were invented, and they represent the same idea. If you have 10 years of sobriety sitting in your pocket or clasped in your hand, you’re less likely to throw it away for a drink.

Decide WHO You Want To Be

Generally, I agree with Paul Graham that we should keep our identities small, and generally, I think identity politics are toxic. It’s a huge advantage, however, to cultivate certain habits or commitments that are foundational to your identity. For example, it is essential to my understanding of the kind of person I am that I am punctual. I also have decided that I am the kind of person who does not miss deadlines. This also works in eliminating bad habits. In one of the most vulnerable scenes in Miss Americana, Taylor Swift talks about how she feels while looking at a paparazzi photo of herself. Her lifelong habit, she says, is to see what’s wrong with her appearance, to instinctively see that she needs to lose weight. But then she stops herself as she lingers on the photo, drawn toward that well-worn habit and says, “No, we don’t do that anymore.” She identified the version of herself that doesn’t do that anymore. We can decide to be the kind of person who doesn’t do that anymore, or who finishes projects before the deadline, or gets up early to go for a run, or doesn’t lose their temper around their family. It’s up to you—who are you going to identify as?

Create A Routine

The Stoics were big on routine. In a world where so much is out of our control, committing to a routine we do control, they said, was a way of establishing and reminding ourselves of our own power. Without a disciplined schedule, procrastination inevitably moves in with all the chaos and complacency and confusion. What was I going to do? What do I wear? What should I eat? What should I do first? What should I do after that? What sort of work should I do? Should I scramble to address this problem or rush to put out this fire? That’s torture. Seneca would call it a design problem. “Life without a design is erratic,” he wrote. “As soon as one is in place, principles become necessary. I think you’ll concede that nothing is more shameful than uncertain and wavering conduct, and beating a cowardly retreat. This will happen in all our affairs unless we remove the faults that seize and detain our spirits, preventing them from pushing forward and making an all-out effort.” The writer and runner Haruki Murakami talks about why he follows the same routine every day. “The repetition itself becomes the important thing,” he says, “it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.” 

Lay Out Your Supplies

When I get to my desk in the morning, the three journals I write in are sitting right there. If I want to skip the habit, I have to pick them up and move them aside. So most mornings I don’t move them, and I write in them. You can use the same strategy if, for example, you want to start running in the morning. Place your shoes, shorts, and jacket next to your bed or in the doorway of your bedroom so you can put them on immediately. You’ll be less likely to take the easy way out if it’s embarrassingly simple to do the thing you want to do.

Associate With People Who Make You Better

The proverb in the ancient world was: “If you dwell with a lame man, you will learn how to limp.” It’s a pretty observable truth. We become like the people we spend the most time with. In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear talks about the importance of who you surround yourself with. ​​”One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior,” Clear writes. “Your culture sets your expectation for what is ‘normal.’ Surround yourself with people who have the habits you want to have yourself. You’ll rise together.”

Develop the Muscle

My wife hated that I chewed gum. I didn’t go anywhere without a pack of gum. Gum is probably the least bad habit you could possibly have, so I never considered quitting it. Then as part of one of the Daily Stoic challenges, I wanted to quit using social media so much. The challenge email talked about flexing the quitting muscle—starting by quitting something small to prove to yourself that you are the kind of person that can decide to stop doing things that you don’t want to do anymore. So I started with gum. I was able to flex the muscle, to prove that I could quit something just for the sake of quitting it. And every time I see gum, or I think about wanting to have gum but don’t give in—that helps reinforce that identity. In time, the thought of me quitting social media didn’t seem so impossible. So if you want to become a person that can do something hard like giving up alcohol, start by doing something easy like giving up gum. The logic applies to good habits. If you want to become a person that writes books, for instance, start by becoming a person that writes in a journal for 15 minutes every morning. 

Free Up Precious Resources

One of the reasons I’ve talked about watching less news and not obsessing over things outside your control is simple: resource allocation. If your morning is ruined because you woke up to CNN reports of another ridiculous tweet-storm, you’re not going to have the energy or the motivation to focus on making the right dietary choices or sitting down to do that hard piece of work. I don’t watch the news, I don’t check social media much, and I don’t stress about everything going on in the world—not because I’m apathetic, but because there are all sorts of changes I want to make. I just believe these changes start at home. I want to get myself together before I bemoan what’s going on in Washington or whether the U.K. will figure out a Brexit strategy. “If you wish to improve,” Epictetus said, “be content to be seen as ignorant or clueless about some things.” (Or a lot of things.)

You Can Binge on Good Habits Too

I read a lot, but I sometimes go days without reading. For instance, in the two weeks I spent driving an RV across the country and back to do some media for Courage is Calling, I was in a reading funk. Trying to force myself to read every single day (or for a set amount of time or a set amount of pages) would not have been productive or enjoyable. Once back home, I got rolling again and finished a stack of books in a week. Binge reading may not be the right thing for everyone, but not every good habit has to be part of a daily routine. Sprints or batching can work too. What matters is that the results average out.

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.

To kick off 2022, we’re doing another Daily Stoic Challenge . The idea is that you ought to start the New Year right—with 21 great days to create momentum for the rest of the year. If you want to have better habits this year, find a program you can participate in. Just try one: It doesn’t matter what it’s about or who else is doing it.

Pick Yourself Up When You Fall

The path to self-improvement is rocky, and slipping and tripping is inevitable. You’ll forget to do the push-ups, you’ll cheat on your diet, you’ll get sucked into the rabbit hole of Twitter, or you’ll complain and have to switch the bracelet from one wrist to another. That’s okay. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. I’ve always been fond of this advice from Oprah: If you catch yourself eating an Oreo, don’t beat yourself up; just try to stop before you eat the whole sleeve. Don’t turn a slip into a catastrophic fall. And a couple of centuries before her, Marcus Aurelius said something similar:

When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstance, revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help. You’ll have a better group of harmony if you keep on going back to it.

In other words, when you mess up, come back to the habits you’ve been working on. Come back to the ideas here in this post. Don’t quit just because you’re not perfect. No one is saying you have to magically transform yourself in 2022, but if you’re not making progress toward the person you want to be, what are you doing? And, more importantly, when are you planning to do it?

I’ll leave you with Epictetus once more, who spoke so eloquently about feeding the right habit bonfire. It’s the perfect passage to recite as we set out to begin a new year, hopefully, as better people.

From now on, then, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable, or highly or lowly regarded, remember that the contest is now: you are at the Olympic Games, you cannot wait any longer…

 

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The (Very) Best Books I Read In 2021

The 2022 Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge is open for registration! Join me in this year’s challenge —a set of 21 actionable challenges, presented one per day, built around the best wisdom in Stoic philosophy.

I read for a lot of reasons. I read for self-improvement. I read for entertainment. I read to make sense of this crazy world we’re living in. And I read professionally—as a writer, if I’m not reading, I can’t do my job. 

Every year, I try to narrow down all the books I have read and recommended in this email list down to just a handful of the best. The kind of books where if they were the only books I’d read that year, I’d still feel like it was an awesome year of reading. (You can check out the best of lists I did in 2020 (video), 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011.)

The only difference between this year and past years is now I’m the actual owner of a bookstore (read about that here) and I have the extra benefit of having handed these books to people in real life and been able to see how much they helped them too. I promise you—you can’t go wrong with any of these.

Enjoy!

Meditations (Annotated Edition, translation Robin Waterfield) by Marcus Aurelius

The fact that Marcus Aurelius was writing during the Antonine plague, that he may well have died of the Antonine 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 in 2021. 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. So I got a lot, as always, out of reading Meditations (the Gregory Hays translation), which I keep by my bedside table (here’s what mine looks like these days). But I was VERY excited this year because a new edition has come out, a fully annotated edition by Robin Waterfield, where for almost every passage, Robin provides the necessary context, gives insight into what Marcus was referencing, draws connections to other passages, etc. If you have not read Meditations, Robin’s translation might be the one to start with. I also did a two-hour interview with Robin, which you can listen to on the Daily Stoic podcast (Part 1, Part 2). But whichever translation you go with, the amazing thing about reading Marcus is, year after year, he feels both incredibly timely and incredibly timeless. There’s a reason this book has endured now for almost twenty centuries. 

How The Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith

We are going through a racial reckoning across the globe. There’s a lot of people that are trying to capitalize on this. People who want us to be divided. People who don’t understand their history. There’s, of course, people who want to stick their heads in the sand about this too, choosing to ignore the history that challenges them or makes them uncomfortable. My understanding of America’s history of racism and slavery comes from a deep study and reading of great minds like Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Malcolm X. Last year, I re-read Ellison’s Invisible Man and was profoundly impacted by Taylor Branch’s epic three-part series on Martin Luther King Jr.—truly life-changing for me. But if I could get everyone to read one book to understand the legacy of racial divisions in this country, How The Word Is Passed might be that book. Clint goes and visits the most controversial monuments, plantations, slave pens, markers or moments in American history—from Monticello to the Whitney plantation to Confederate battlefields and cemeteries—and he explores what they mean, how they came to exist, the lies we’ve been told (or told ourselves about them). As it happens, my book store’s building in Bastrop, Texas, dates to the Reconstruction period and is down the street from a particularly odious Confederate statue. Bastrop is actually a town that voted against the secession. But then in the early 1900s, they put up a monument that was designed to celebrate, as one observer said, “the noble white-souled Southland.” And one of the things I’ve been active in is exploring why it’s there and what its actual history is— not the propaganda that it was designed to represent. And when I went down and spoke in front of the Texas historical commission about removing the statue (you can watch that clip here), Clint’s book influenced what I said. I also interviewed Clint on the Daily Stoic podcast. Put your political predispositions aside, put your fatigue with or outrage about the issue aside either way, and read this book. It hit me very hard, and it’s changed how I think about a lot of things. I think it will do the same for you.

The Choice: Embrace the Possible by Dr. Edith Eger

Dr. Edith Eger is a complete hero of mine. At 16-years-old, she’s sent to Auschwitz. And how does this not break a person? How do they survive? How do they endure the unendurable? And how do they emerge from this, not just not broken, but cheerful and happy and of service to other people? The last thing Dr. Eger’s mother said to her before she was sent to the gas chambers was that very Stoic idea: even when we find ourselves in horrendous situations, we can always choose how we respond to them, who we’re going to be inside of them, what we’re going to hold onto inside of them. Dr. Eger quotes the one and only Dr. Viktor Frankl, who she later studied under, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” It was this idea that allowed Dr. Eger to not only endure unimaginable suffering, but to find meaning in it. She went on to become a psychologist and survives to this day, still seeing patients and helping people overcome trauma. I had the incredible honor of interviewing Dr. Eger and the joy and energy of this woman, this 93-year-old Holocaust survivor, was incredible (you can watch our interview here). Of course, another incredible must-read in this category is Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning. It’s one of my favorite books—one of the greatest works of philosophy ever produced. I wrote an article this year for The Economist about an idea in this book. The idea that while the Statue of Liberty is wonderful and beautiful and inspiring, there needs to be a corresponding statue on the west coast: the Statue of Responsibility. You can read that piece here. And then, mind-blowingly, a delightful gift from the heavens: there was a new book from Frankl this year. How? A set of never-before-published lectures and essays was discovered and published with the incredible title, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything (with a nice introduction from Daniel Goleman). And really, I think that’s what Dr. Eger did, that’s what Victor Frankl did, that’s what Marcus Aurelius did in the depths of the Antonine Plague and throughout what was an incredibly difficult and painful life—they said yes to life, in spite of everything. The world is hard, the world is unfair, the world can be horrendous—and certainly 2021 illustrated that in so many ways—but we say yes. We make the best of it. We choose our response to those conditions. It’s the last of human freedoms.

Indian Givers: How Native Americans Transformed the World by Jack Weatherford

I have raved before about Weatherford’s book on Genghis Khan (which I used in Ego is the Enemy), but I didn’t know this book existed until I saw it mentioned in Sebastian Junger’s Freedom. Then at the ranger station in Big Bend State Park in June, I saw the book in the gift store. It’s not the most politically correct title, I will grant you that, but this book is INCREDIBLE! It’s about the First Peoples, Native Americans, the people who were here first (in North and South America) and how our civilization has been shaped by their insights, by their ideas, by their innovations—all of which most of us completely take for granted. It’s very rare that I read a book where there is nothing in it that I at least hadn’t heard about before, but that’s what I felt was happening on page after page of this book. Weatherford talks about their breakthroughs in agriculture, their breakthroughs in building, their breakthroughs in hunting, animal husbandry, all these things that you didn’t know about. For instance, Benjamin Franklin gets the idea of a joining of all of the different colonies together from the Iroquois Confederacy at that time. How crazy is that? The idea behind the innovation that we in America take credit for actually belongs to the people who were here first. I sure didn’t hear about that in school…Anyway, Weatherford is a master of making poorly understood (or misunderstood) cultures inspiring and relatable. Read this book for sure. 

More…

I can’t leave it at just four books. I’ve always loved the “daily read” format, I’ve recommended some of my favorites here before, I’ve been lucky enough to publish one of my own, and this year I was even luckier to have been able to help Robert Greene bring The Daily Laws into existence. People ask me all the time, Where should I start with Robert Greene? This book is where (also we have a bunch of signed copies of his other books in the store too). I loved Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham by Agnes de Mille. My rule is that the older the biography, the better. New biographies tend to be trendy, they tend to be politically correct, they tend to focus less on what makes the person and more on a bunch of facts and details that don’t really matter. Martha is an in-depth exploration of Graham’s inspiration, of her excellence, of her practicing, of her obsession with craft. Next—I’m not a huge boxing fan, but I loved Victory Over Myself, the autobiography of Floyd Patterson—the first heavyweight champion to lose the belt and then win it back again, a civil rights activist, and someone who comes across as just a real stand-up human being. Reading Victory Over Myself then reminded me of another boxing book and another favorite, The Harder They Fall by Budd Schulberg. I’d read it at least two other times. The way I remembered it, when I read it the first time, I decided to quit my job in marketing, write my tell all book about it and become a better person. But as I re-read it, I went back to check when I actually bought it…it was in 2008. I stayed at my job for THREE MORE YEARS. I guess life does imitate fiction and growth is always more gradual than we’d like. As the Stoics talk about, it’s not enough to know what’s right, it’s not enough to talk about what’s right—ultimately, you have to do what’s right. Which brings me to my last recommendation. This year I put out Courage is Calling, which I think is my best piece of writing but also, it’s about exactly what Schulberg talks about. Courage isn’t just running into a burning building or fighting it out on the battlefield. It’s the courage to make that lifestyle change, to speak up about something that you know is right, to get involved, to do the hard thing, to do the unconventional thing. That’s what Courage is Calling is about. 

Children’s Books

And as far as kid’s books go, we read quite a few that really stuck with us. Her Right Foot, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, Outside, Inside, and What Does It Mean to Be an American? This was our second year of reading A Poem For Every Day of the Year by Allie Esiri. And it was one night as we were getting ready for bed that my oldest asked me to tell him the story of Marcus Aurelius. This is something I had been thinking about for a long time because a lot of people ask me how they should teach Stoicism to their kids. I started to tell my son a story that we came to call, The Boy Who Would Be King. 

You can pick up copies of many of the books recommended above at The Painted Porch*, Amazon, your local independent bookstore. But it doesn’t matter to me how you get these books, I just care that you read them, that you put the time into reading. And if you want some advice on how to be a better reader, how to really dig in and get the most out of the books you read, check out my video on how I break down books, take notes to remember everything I read, and use what I read in my own writing. 

*If you do buy online from The Painted Porch , your books will be packed and shipped by us here in Bastrop, Texas! Just remember, we’re a small shop…be patient and kind.

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32 Things I Love to Read, Listen to, Eat, and Carry With Me

One of the wonderful perks of having a platform is getting to share stuff that has improved your life with other people—knowing that it may well improve theirs. In fact, pretty early on in my writing career, I decided I wasn’t going to be precious about my own work but instead be an active cheerleader for stuff that I loved. 

Who cares who made it? 

If something is good, it deserves an audience. 

Anyway, I decided to put together a list of recommendations that hopefully answers some of the most common questions I get about the best books, podcasts, products, etc. 

– I can’t tell you how hooked I am on Ramit Sethi’s podcast about couples and their financial issues. Sometimes it’s a couple crawling out of debt, sometimes it’s a couple worth $8M who comparison shops for deals on strawberries. It’s riveting and also super educational—because we all have scripts about money (usually not helpful or healthy ones) and seeing other people wrestle with theirs helps us with our. I find pretty much every episode is, in the end, about communication…Highly recommend this show!

– I’m going to give you three narrative non-fiction books that will rip your face off. The first is The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant. Every person I have told about this book has loved it. If you haven’t read Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne (a gripping, unbelievable story about the clash between Comanche Indians and white settlers in the late 1800s over an empire of millions of square miles) then you are punishing yourself. It is SO good (we also have some signed copies at the Painted Porch). I also love, love, love The River of Doubt by Candice Millard (Teddy Roosevelt’s insane exploration of an Amazon river after his presidency) and interviewed her about it a while back. 

– The daily read/daily devotional genre was a game changer for me. It’s just something to chew on in the morning, an intention, an inspiration. Three favorites I pick up every day: A Calendar of Wisdom by Leo Tolstoy. A Poem For Every Day of the Year by Allie Esiri (we read this one as a family). The Daily Laws by Robert Greene. People ask me all the time, Where should I start with Robert Greene? This book is where. 

– Another everyday favorite—my wife and I take a scoop of AG1 by Athletic Greens in the morning. It’s got a ton of vitamins and minerals and other good stuff (it’s basically a multivitamin, multimineral, probiotic, and greens superfood blend). I first met Chris the founder like 11 years ago? It’s been a part of the routine for a long time. I reached out and they said they’d offer a FREE 1 year supply of immune-supporting Vitamin D AND 5 FREE travel packs with your first purchase.

– There is no blog I have read longer or more consistently than Marginal Revolution. Tyler Cowen is one of the G.O.A.Ts. If he’s not in your life, you’re missing out. 

– To me, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is the greatest book ever written. I’ve read it a couple hundred times. For me, it was what Tyler Cowen calls a “quake book”—shaking everything I thought I knew about the world. It is the definitive text on self-discipline, personal ethics, humility, self-actualization and strength. Usually I introduce people to Marcus through Gregory Hays’ translation, which I think is lyrical and beautiful, but a recent annotated edition by Robin Waterfield is right up there. With almost every passage, Robin provides the necessary context, gives insight into what Marcus was referencing, draws connections to other passages, etc. If you have not read Meditations, Robin’s translation might be the one to start with.

– Speaking of Marcus, in my left pocket, I carry a coin that says Memento Mori, which is Latin for ”remember you will die.” On the back, it has one of my favorite quotes from Marcus: “You could leave life right now.” I firmly believe the thought of our mortality should shadow everything that we do.

– In my other pocket, I carry a medallion with a custom-designed seal with four elements representing the four Stoic virtues: Courage, Temperance, Justice, and Wisdom. 

– My three favorite novels of all time: What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg, Ask the Dust by John Fante, and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. If you don’t read a lot of fiction, these three are the place to start. They teach you just as much as any non-fiction book.

– Another “book” I pick up each day is a journal. It’s a small blue gold leafed notebook called the One Line a Day journal, and it has spots for five years. I’m four years into the journal, where I write about what happened yesterday, so I can see what’s been going on for four years. It’s great. After, I pick up The Daily Stoic Journal, where I prepare for the day ahead by meditating on a short prompt, then set an intention or a goal for the day—just something to give myself something I can review at the end of the day, that I can evaluate myself against.

– With two young boys, I also pick up a kids book every night. Our favorites: What Does It Mean to Be an American?, Her Right Foot, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, Most People, and Here We Are. And it was one night as we were getting ready for bed that my oldest asked me to tell him the story of Marcus Aurelius. This is something I had been thinking about for a long time because a lot of people ask me how they should teach Stoicism to their kids. I started to tell my son a story that we came to call, The Boy Who Would Be King. 

– I’m a big fan of newsletters, as well. Here are some that I subscribe to: James Clear’s “3-2-1 Thursday,” Mark Manson’s “Motherfucking Monday,” Tim Ferriss’ “5 Bullet Friday”, Maria Popova’s “The Marginalian”, Emily Oster’s “Parent Data”, Matt Levine’s “Money Stuff”, and Billy Oppenheimer’s “SIX at 6”. 

– Some of my favorite social accounts to follow are: HilariousHumanitarian, TankSinatra, Jessica Yellin, bigtre1000, DailyStoic, DailyDad, and DailyPhilosopher.

– I’m not a big fan of the “solve a device problem with another device” logic, but the Apple Watch has substantially reduced the amount of time I spend on my phone, and helped me curb the desire to always have it near me. Airpods too—they are as magical as anything Apple has ever made.

– MagicSpoon Cereal. LOVE this enough to have invested in it. My favorite dessert is MagicSpoon + wild blackberries we pick on the farm. My father in law is hooked on them too. (use code RYANHOLIDAY at checkout for $5 off).

– Something I use and have used daily and weekly for going on three years: ButcherBox. ButcherBox delivers high quality, grass-fed meat to your doorstep once a month—my wife and I basically haven’t bought meat from the store since we started using it. 

– Sad that I have to put this but…here we are, two years into a pandemic with a new, hyper contagious variant. If you’re still using a cloth mask, you’re doing it wrong. You need an N95 or KN95. You can get them basically anywhere at this point, but it’s good to check the manufacturer with Project95 to make sure you’re not getting scammed. Considering Marcus died of the plague, I think it’s safe to say he’d wear a mask…Also these at-home COVID tests we use when getting our employees together or meeting people who have been traveling, etc. $12 a test roughly…it’s not cheap but if you can afford it, safe is better than sorry (and it helps others too).

– I run just about every day. I have different loops I do depending on where I am and La Sportiva’s have been my main shoe for the last 5-6 years. I usually push the kids in a side by side running roller on our walks and run but even though I have 3 of them…I wouldn’t recommend any enough to give you a name (you’ll see why here). 

– My two favorite charities are Feeding America (we just raised almost $200k for them) and Against Malaria (which can save a life for $3,340). I also love GiveWell, which helps you rate and evaluate the ROI of various causes. Another cause close to my heart is the Uyghur Human Rights Project, which has been at the forefront of drawing both resources and attention to the plight of millions of people in Xinjiang. I had Uyghur activist Ferkat Jawdat on the Daily Stoic podcast—if you don’t know about the horrendous situation in Xinjiang, give that conversation a listen.  

– One decision I’ve eliminated from my life is what to have for lunch. Across the street from The Painted Porch is Base Camp Deli, and if I am not bringing something from home (usually leftovers)I get a Turkey & Havarti sandwich or the Chicken Pesto, and salt & vinegar chips with a Topo Chico.

– Whenever someone visits us in Bastrop, I like to take them to dinner at Store House Market & Eatery, which is just down the street from The Painted Porch. With eighteen 18-wheelers, Chef Sonya Cote and her husband David Barrow moved their Eden East farm from Austin to Bastrop. We love to start with the butternut queso and the pork terrine & pickles, then I always get the Grass Fed Burger or the steak.

– When I find a song I like, I listen to it over and over again. Alone in my office or on my phone, I play songs on repeat over and over and over again. Loudly, as my wife and anyone who works for me can unfortunately attest. Here’s some all-time favorites I picked when I was a guest DJ recently on KUTX. 

– Instapaper is how I save and read articles.

– Being able to wear and dress as I please is important to me—at least the freedom of it is. So I am in a T-shirt most days. I basically live in an American Apparel Power Wash Tee, which is the standard American Apparel T-shirt but treated so it mimics a shirt that has been washed roughly 50 times. If I’m not wearing one, I usually wear vintage concert t-shirts, either that I bought myself or I found on Etsy.

– We shoot everything for Daily Stoic’s YouTube Channel on a Sony A7 III with a Rode VideoMicPro as well as two more when recording a video podcast. When I’m traveling I always bring along a couple of the GoPro HERO9’s to shoot b-roll, also most of the clips I record for TikTok are using one of these.

– When I’m recording for the Daily Stoic Podcast or the Daily Dad Podcast I use a Zoom H6 with a Shure SM7B running through a Cloudlifter for some added gain. When I do virtual podcasts or online talks, I use a Rhode USB mic and Sony MDR7506 Professional Large Diaphragm headphones.

– My kids are obsessed with Brent Underwood’s ghost town YouTube videos and we watch one before bed each night. 

– I don’t drink coffee, soda or energy drinks. Neuro mints are my go-to caffeine substitute. (My wife likes SuperCoffee, I will add). 

– For years, I’ve advocated keeping quotes on your desk. Something to chew on. A thought to guide the day. Now I keep the Daily Stoic page-a-day calendar on my desk, so I can have a new quote for every day of the year. 

– Everything I do, I do on index cards. They are the building blocks for my whole life. Notecards are where I sketch out ideas. They’re where I record quotes that I want to save for later use. It’s how I outline my own writing and where I take notes. They’re where I jot down stories, and where I workshop points I want to make. They’ve helped me create talks and articles. For a while, I used generic ruled 4-by-6 notecards. But now I print my own specific to the project I am working on. 

– I carry books, notecards, and pens everywhere I go. I use this Carhartt bag that is actually a tool bag, but also happens to be perfect for the tools of my craft. 

– Nothing. Is there anything better than sitting down, doing nothing, holding nothing and just being? Sometimes the best things are the things you get rid of or say no to. Remember...the things you own should not own you. 

***

I’ve written before about one of my favorite quotes from Robert Louis Stevenson: To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom. I make a point to find the stuff I like and stuff that lasts (it’s a basic thing you can do to reduce your footprint, if you care about the environment) because when you stock your life with things you can depend on, it frees up precious resources. 

But I also always like to remind myself with all of these things that—much like existence—they are transitory. The Stoics talk a lot about not getting too attached to anything, loosening the hold that possessions have on us, embracing the truth of uncertainty, having the ability to enjoy whatever is in front of you. “He is a great man who uses earthenware dishes as if they were silver,” Seneca wrote, “but he is equally great who uses silver as if it were earthenware.” 

The post 32 Things I Love to Read, Listen to, Eat, and Carry With Me appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

One Day Of Thanks Is Not Enough: Gratitude is a Daily Practice

The modern practice of this Thanksgiving holiday here in America is that we are supposed to take the time to think about what we’re grateful for. And the candidates are usually pretty obvious: We should be grateful for our families, for our health (especially through a pandemic), that we live in a time of peace (the first Thanksgiving America has not been at war in 21 years), for the food laid out in front of us. All the usual suspects.

I agree, these are important things to recognize and appreciate. It’s also good to have a specific day dedicated to that occasion. So by all means, celebrate.

But over the last few years, I have come to practice a different form of gratitude. It’s one that is a little harder to do, that goes beyond the cliche and perfunctory acknowledgment of the good things in our lives, but as a result creates a deeper and more profound benefit.

I forget how I came up with it exactly, but I remember feeling particularly upset—rageful, if I am being perfectly honest—about someone in my life. This was someone who had betrayed me and wronged me, and shown themselves to be quite different from the person that I had once so respected and admired. Even though our relationship had soured a few years before and they had been punished by subsequent events, I was still angry, regularly so, and I was disappointed with how much space they took up in my head.

So one morning, as I sat down early with my journal as I do every morning, I started to write about it. Not about the anger that I felt—I had done that too many times—but instead about all the things I was grateful for about this person. I wrote about my gratitude for all sorts of things about them, big and small. It was just a sentence or two at first. Then a few days later, I did it again and then again and again whenever I thought about it, and watched as my anger partly gave way to appreciation. As I said, sometimes it was little things, sometimes big things: Opportunities they had given me. What I had learned. A gift they had given me. What weaknesses they had provided vivid warnings of with their behavior. I had to be creative to come up with stuff, but if I looked, it was there.

In his book, Comedy Sex God (as well as on his wonderful podcast and on his HBO show) the comedian Pete Holmes talks about the aftermath of the dissolution of his marriage. After his wife cheated on him and their subsequent divorce, he was hit with a long developing crisis of faith in the religion he had grown up with. He describes this period as many nights on the road. Lots of work. Lots of drinking. Lots of crying. Lots of Counting Crows songs on repeat. Then he came up with a mantra that lifted him above his pain, that shifted his world view, that restored his hope and happiness. All with just three simple words: “Yes, thank you.” 

Your crying baby wakes you up at 3am? Yes, thank you. I know she is alive and now I get to spend time with her, just she and I.

Flight gets delayed? Yes, thank you. Now I can sit and read.

Show gets cancelled? Yes, thank you. Now I can do something else instead. 

It struck me that there was something similar about Pete’s gratitude mantra and the small success I had. It’s easy to think negative thoughts and to get stuck into a pattern with them. But forcing myself to take the time not only to think about something good, but write that thought down longhand was a kind of rewiring of my own opinions. It became easier to see that while there certainly was plenty to be upset about, there was also plenty to be thankful for. Epictetus said that every situation has two handles; which was I going to decide to hold onto? The anger, or the appreciation?

Now in the mornings, when I journal, I try to do this as often as I can. I try to find ways to express gratitude not for the things that are easy to be grateful for, but for what is hard. That nagging pain in my leg—yes, thank you, it’s making me take things slow. That troublesome client—yes, thank you, it’s helping me develop better boundaries. The mistake I made–yes, thank you, for reminding me to be more careful, for teaching me a lesson. That damage from the storm—yes, thank you, the damage exposed a more serious problem that we’re now solving. And on and on.

This is part and parcel of living a life of amor fati. Where instead of fighting and resisting what happens to you, you accept it, you love it all. You’re grateful for it. No matter how tough it is. 

It’s easy to be thankful for family, for health, for life, even if we regularly take these things for granted. It’s easy to express gratitude for someone who has done something kind for you, or whose work you admire. We might not do it often enough, but in a sense, we are obligated to be grateful for such things. 

It is far harder to say thank you to the things we didn’t want to happen. Or to people who have hurt us. Or to having our life disrupted by a pandemic. Or to be out of work. Or to lose money or people we love. Who would choose the events of the last two years? I certainly would not. But they have also not been without their benefits, as I have written. The time with family, the lifestyle changes they forced, the opportunities to do the right thing, to help others–these were things I have incredibly grateful for. 

Even if some situations unconscionably and irredeemably bad—as some events in recent days have been—there remains this advice from the writer Jorge Luis Borges:

A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

How can we not be grateful for these raw materials? Where would we be without them?

The Stoics saw gratitude as a kind of medicine, that saying “Thank you” for every experience was the key to mental health. “Convince yourself that everything is the gift of the gods,” Marcus Aurelius wrote, “that things are good and always will be.” 

I’m not saying it will be magic but it will help.

So as you gather around your family and friends this Thanksgiving or even an ordinary evening at home, of course, appreciate it and give thanks for all the obvious and bountiful gifts that the moment presents. Just make sure that when the moment passes, as you go back to your everyday, ordinary life that you make gratitude a regular part of it. Again—not simply for what is easy and immediately pleasing.

That comes naturally enough, and may even go without saying. What is in more desperate need of appreciation and perspective are the things you never asked for, the things you worked hard to prevent from happening in the first place. Because that’s where gratitude will make the biggest difference and where we need the most healing.

Whatever it is. However poorly it went. However difficult 2021 has been for you. 

Be grateful for it. Give thanks for it. Say yes, thank you for it. There was good within it.

Write it down. Over and over again. 

Until you believe it.

________

P.S. Daily Stoic is trying to provide 2 million meals for families facing hunger. Did you know that more than 950 million people are food insecure, more than 38 million people in America still face hunger, and some 1.5 million children lost their primary or secondary caregiver from COVID-19 and now, those children don’t know where their next meal is coming from?

Last year, the Daily Stoic community came together and raised over $100,000 together, providing some 1 million meals. This year we’re trying to go twice as big. We donated the first $20,000 and we’d like your help in getting to our goal of $200,000 —which would provide over 2 million meals for families across the country! Head over to dailystoic.com/feeding and help us make a small dent in a big problem. Even $1 helps provide at least 10 meals!

The post One Day Of Thanks Is Not Enough: Gratitude is a Daily Practice appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.