Ryan Holiday's Blog, page 11

The Things You Think Matter…Don’t

I dropped out of college.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

None of that external stuff matters.

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

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

***

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The Best Parenting Advice I���ve Ever Gotten

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Routine is EVERYTHING.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[ Pre-order The Girl Who Would Be Free ]

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35 Lessons on the Way to 35 Years Old

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

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

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

So���enjoy.��

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We fought hard over nothing

We fought ’til nothing remained

I’ve carried that nothing for a long time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

The post 35 Lessons on the Way to 35 Years Old appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

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

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

He teaches me something new.��

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

The post 20 Things You Didn���t Know About Marcus Aurelius appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read Like A Spy

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

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

Keep A Commonplace Book

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

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

Re-Read The Masters

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

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

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

Read Fiction

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

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

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

Read Before Bed

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

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

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

Ask People You Admire For Book Recommendations

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

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

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

Look For Wisdom, Not Facts

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

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

Don���t Just Learn From Experience

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

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

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

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

Study The Past To Understand The Present

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

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

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

Aim For Quality, Not Quantity

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

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

Get Out Of A Dry Spell

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

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

Join A Program

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

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

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

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18 Little Stories That Will Have Massive Impact On Your Life

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

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

Enough.

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

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

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

How you do anything is how you do everything.

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

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

Just work.

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

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

Always stay a student.

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

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

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

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

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

Your work is the only thing that matters.

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

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

Just work on your act, Seinfeld said.

Get moving.

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

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

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

They still hide money in books.

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

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

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

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

How to create anything of consequence.

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

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

Be the red.

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

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

Use it all as fuel.

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

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

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

Do what you have to do.��

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

Never question another man���s courage.

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

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

Alter your approach.

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

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

You only control the effort, not the results.

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

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

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

Good things happen in bookstores.

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

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

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

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

Follow the process.

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

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

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

Remember that you will die.

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

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

***

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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!

 

The post Here’s Your Secret To Success: Go The F*ck To Sleep appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

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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