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The (Very) Best Books I Read In 2021

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

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

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

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

Enjoy!

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

The fact that Marcus Aurelius was writing during the Antonine plague, that he may well have died of the Antonine plague created a different way for me to see and understand what Marcus was writing about. When he says “you could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think”—he was talking about that in a time when you really could leave life right now. When he talks about how there’s two kinds of plagues: the plague that can take your life and the plague that can destroy your character—he was talking about the things that we’re seeing in the world, that we saw on a daily basis in 2021. He was writing about a fracturing Rome, a contentious Rome when people were at each other’s throats, when things looked uncertain, when an empire looked like it was in decline. So I got a lot, as always, out of reading Meditations (the Gregory Hays translation), which I keep by my bedside table (here’s what mine looks like these days). But I was VERY excited this year because a new edition has come out, a fully annotated edition by Robin Waterfield, where for almost every passage, Robin provides the necessary context, gives insight into what Marcus was referencing, draws connections to other passages, etc. If you have not read Meditations, Robin’s translation might be the one to start with. I also did a two-hour interview with Robin, which you can listen to on the Daily Stoic podcast (Part 1, Part 2). But whichever translation you go with, the amazing thing about reading Marcus is, year after year, he feels both incredibly timely and incredibly timeless. There’s a reason this book has endured now for almost twenty centuries. 

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

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

The Choice: Embrace the Possible by Dr. Edith Eger

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

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

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

More…

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

Children’s Books

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

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

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

The post The (Very) Best Books I Read In 2021 appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

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

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

Who cares who made it? 

If something is good, it deserves an audience. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Instapaper is how I save and read articles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Write it down. Over and over again. 

Until you believe it.

________

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

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

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Work, Family, Scene: You Can Only Pick Two

When I first moved to Austin in 2013, I went out to lunch—fittingly—with a writer named Austin Kleon. I was a longtime fan of his book Steal Like an Artist (his book Keep Going is a new favorite). After we ate, he drove me around the city, showing me things and giving me advice. 

Austin was a little older than me and was already married with kids. 

I remember asking him how he made time for it all. “I don’t,” he told me. “The artist’s life is about tradeoffs.” And then he gave me a little rule that has stuck with me always:

Work, family, scene. Pick two.

Work—that is your creative output.

Family—that’s a spouse, kids, or any close personal relationships. 

Scene—that’s the fun stuff that comes along with success. Parties. Fancy dinners. Important friends. This is the stuff that looks good on Instagram, that you can brag about, that falls into your lap like a wonderful surprise. Offers, invitations, perks. 

It’d be wonderful if you could have it all…but you can’t. 

You can party it up and hang onto a relationship but you won’t have much time left for work. You can grind away at your craft, be the toast of the scene, but what will that leave for your family? Almost certainly it means they will be home, alone. If you’re as committed to the work as you are to a happy home, you can keep both but you will have no room for anything else—certainly late nights or hangovers or exotic trips. And if you try to have it all? Well, you won’t get any of it. 

I emailed Austin about this all recently and he pointed me to a poem by Kenneth Koch from the New Yorker that had inspired it for him. It had a great verse in it:

There isn’t time enough, my friends— 

Though dawn begins, yet midnight ends- 

To find the time to have love, work and friends. 

Pick two. 

I know you think you’re the exception, but you’re not. I wasn’t. I can tell you that from experience. I tried all the different variations. I’ve traveled too much…and family and work suffered. I’ve worked too much and family and connections have suffered. I’ve tried to cram it all in and ended up a burned out mess, as I wrote in the epilogue to Ego is the Enemy. Eventually, you come face to face with that hard choice of that epigram and choose your priorities. That’s just how it goes. 

In the years since that conversation with Austin, I’ve been very productive. I’ve written about a dozen books. I’ve sent out an email and a podcast episode every day for both Daily Stoic and Daily Dad. I’ve filmed over 250 videos for the Daily Stoic YouTube channel. I’ve read and recommended hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books to my Reading List Email and then opened a bookstore. I’ve also gotten married, had two kids, had wonderful moments with my family. 

I have not been to very many parties. 

I’ve said no to a lot of stuff. As I wrote recently, I’ve passed on everything from trips to the Super Bowl, a vacation on Necker Island, and more than a few different ghostwriting opportunities. A younger me would have thought these things crazy to pass up on. But that’s exactly what I did. 

I said no. 

I say no a lot. Not just to the big things but little things. Coffee, hangouts, a couple of us are going to dinner, group texts… People who know me, especially lately, find it hard to make plans with me. I’m not a jerk about it, but you can usually count on me to count myself out. 

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 in his office. Behind Sacks, who is speaking on the phone, 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. 

Does that mean I miss out on stuff? Really cool stuff, in some cases? Sure, I guess. But the person who tries to have it all will always end up with very little. Certainly very little of anything lasting or meaningful. 

The memory of the warm sun from a long weekend on Necker Island won’t last nearly as long nor sink nearly as deep as the hugs I get from my boys each morning. There’s no one I could meet at a party who, in the end, I’d want to spend more time with than my wife. Moving amongst tens of thousands of people during the super exclusive festivities of Super Bowl Week comes with its own kind of invigorating energy, but it pales in comparison to the inspiration and motivation I get from the emails and messages (both positive and negative) sent by the readers of my books. Inspiration and motivation that help bring the next book into being, and the book after that. 

Life is about tradeoffs. 

When we know what to say no to, and we know why, we can say yes with comfort and confidence to the things that matter. To the things that last.

Work, family, scene. 

You can have two if you say no to one. If you can’t, you’ll have none.

P.S. Thank you to everyone who has supported my newest book, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave . If you haven’t yet picked up a copy or if there is someone in your life who would benefit from it, you can get signed copies in time for the Holidays over in the Daily Stoic store . Of course, you can also get the book anywhere else books are sold, including Amazon , Barnes & Noble , iBooks , and Audible .

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This Was The (Craziest) But Best Decision We Ever Made

As part of the launch of Courage is Calling, I wrote this piece for Inc. 

All of my biggest mistakes in business have been things my wife warned against.

So you might be surprised to learn that the idea to drop our life savings into a small-town book store shortly after our second child was born actually came from her — not from the writer in the family. As we sat at a café in Bastrop, Texas, looking across Main Street at an empty historic storefront, I was skeptical. But she was right. Even the pandemic, which forced us to sit unopened for nearly 12 months at great expense, hasn’t proved her wrong.

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 e-books — and the vast majority of all sales come through a certain trillion-dollar e-commerce behemoth. Most of the advertising campaigns I’ve designed appeared online. The startups I’ve invested in, the businesses I’ve created — all primarily digital.

With digital comes the opportunity, and seemingly the obligation, to pursue scale. A live event with 500 people is a huge success. An online video with 500 views is an embarrassing failure. Back in 2009, I started an email list to recommend books to people. This month, it will go out to more than 200,000 subscribers — and that’s relatively small compared with email lists such as Morning Brew or theSkimm, which hit millions of inboxes daily. Each morning I put out a podcast episode for my site Daily Stoic, which has now reached 50 million downloads and will do revenues in the mid-six figures this year…without having to leave my house.

The decision to open an actual bookstore in a town of 9,000 people, then, resulted in culture shock, as well as sticker shock and every other kind of shock. Running an email list is close to free. The expense of a podcast measures, after the purchase of a decent microphone, in the tens of dollars in monthly hosting fees. But a brick-and-mortar business is precisely the opposite. The total cost of opening The Painted Porch, from the building to the shelves to the inventory to the trademark work, will easily surpass $1 million. And, as any small-business owner can tell you — especially a small-business owner who survived Texas’s calamitous winter storm in February 2021 — costs are never frozen in place.

So you might think I am going to warn against the folly of brick and mortar. On the contrary. I have learned a lot of lessons worth sharing by doing this. It has been a chance to apply business and marketing thinking to a different scale of problems.

For one thing, 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.

Online, your customers are little blips on a screen (if they are even your customers and not just “traffic” that gets sold to advertisers). In a shop, you’re dealing with people. People who get upset if asked to wear a mask during a pandemic. People who accuse you of being a liberal if you display Michelle Obama’s book. But also people who just need a place to sit down for a minute. A kid sprinting into the store and making a beeline for one of the books you grew up loving as a child. A customer who recommends a book to another customer, and you watch a friendship emerge as they check out and go have lunch together. A few weeks ago, a father came in to buy a few books he wanted to leave to his children, as he was dying of cancer.

When we first decided to do this, I bought a course from a bookstore consultant. One of the first things that surprised me was being told that the average indie bookstore carries more than 10,000 titles. Ten thousand! As far as I could tell, it’s basically an unques­tioned assumption in the business. Not only did this strike me as expensive, but it also struck me as related to the biggest problems bookstores have, according to the con­sultant: hiring and managing employees. With 10,000 titles, you need an inventory manager. You need cashiers and sales associates. You need a place to store all those books. You need to constantly order and reorder books. You have to stay on top of every­thing new and popular coming out.

The first decision we made was to go in the exact opposite direction. At the Painted Porch, we carry roughly 600 titles. The vast majority of them are not new, but rather the so-called perennial sellers of the backlist. I have personally read nearly all of them. I also have room to put them all face out on the shelf. Do people sometimes come in and ask about titles we don’t have? Yes, and we can special order those books for them. But, more important, we can personally vouch for the volumes we do carry.

My thinking is simple: If people want a specific book, they’ll buy it on Amazon. They come to a bookstore to discover new books, to experience being in a bookstore. Amazon carries some 48 million titles. Barnes & Noble’s New York City flagship has four miles of shelving. Those com­panies get price breaks from publishers and can pass some of those savings on to customers. I can’t compete with any of that. But I can beat those companies at curation.

Having a physical space, I have found, is also a key efficiency. Having an office upstairs saves me the cost of my old office in Austin — and saves me time, the most valuable resource, on my commute. Having a beautiful space where I can host events, or make videos for the Daily Stoic YouTube channel, or shoot photos for the Daily Dad Instagram channel, is hugely beneficial. That I’m also selling books in the same space is extra.

Before we opened the store, I was in Bucharest, Romania, for a talk. My host took me into a local bookstore that had an enormous globe hanging from the ceiling. I watched as customer after customer came in to take pictures beneath it, before checking out with books. I recalled a particularly cool floor-to-ceiling tower of books about Abraham Lincoln in the museum attached to Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. Back home, I decided to surround an old, broken fireplace in our building with a tower of books. It took more than 2,000 volumes, 4,000 nails, and many gallons of glue to build this 20-foot spectacle. And now, almost every customer who comes in takes a picture of it. Some come in specifically because they heard about it.

The irony is not lost on me that the attraction of a physical space is the ability to take a picture that you can share on social media. But it’s also a focusing device for me. The Painted Porch can succeed not despite its having a physical store­front, but because of it. If all people cared about was price, they’d buy online. If they want to do something cool on a weekend, they come by.

From the moment my wife suggested we open a small-town bookstore, everything has taken longer and been harder than we expected. Besides the ongoing pandemic, we’ve had to deal with that freak winter storm and a $40,000 air conditioner replacement. But we grow from committing to crazy things and then adapting before they over­whelm us. I won’t say that the challenges helped our marriage — but we’re still standing, and that says something.

On the window of our shop, we have written in large letters: “Good things happen in bookstores.” I have repeatedly been reminded of this fact since we opened. I might even expand it: Good things happen in small businesses.

P.S. I would love it if you came and visited us at The Painted Porch. You can also support the store by picking up some books online. We have signed copies of all of my books, including Courage is Calling, The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy, and Stillness is the Key. If you buy from those links, your books will be shipped from us here in Bastrop, Texas!

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How the Pandemic Changed Me as a Parent

Quick exciting news: I just found out that my new book, Courage is Calling , debuted on the New York Times bestseller. Thank you to everyone who supported it. If you haven’t already picked up your copy, you can still get signed copies and a bunch of cool bonuses over in the Daily Stoic store . 

This piece was originally published in USA TODAY .

In September, as I traveled for the first time in almost exactly 18 months to spend the first night away from what had been 535 consecutive bedtimes with my boys, it struck me how much I had changed as a parent.

I entered the pandemic as a driven young writer and entrepreneur, who happened to be the parent of two kids under 4. If you had asked if it was possible, in March of 2020, to go even a few months with no travel, no ability to speak to groups, to consult with clients or organizations? I would have told you absolutely not, financially or professionally. And if we’re being honest, I suspect my wife would have said it wasn’t possible maritally either.

Like so many people, but especially parents, I have been profoundly changed by the events of the last year and half. The biggest reason was precisely the passage of all that time … together.

There is no such thing as parental leave in my line of work. And, like a lot of driven people who work for themselves, I’m not sure if I could have taken time off, that I would have let myself. Instead, I worked constantly for the first years and months of my young children’s lives, accepting and chasing opportunities – even though that meant many nights in hotel rooms and on airport benches. This, in addition to those ordinary work from home days that all writers know, where you are technically home but are, in fact, very far away.

Suddenly, every single day, rain or shine, I was able to take my boys for a long walk in the morning. Most days, we also did their nap in the running stroller or a bike trailer. In the evening we walked again – picking wild blackberries in the spring, splashing in puddles in the winter and summer showers. As I do the math, I’d estimate we covered somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 miles together.

Never before and perhaps never again will we get to spend that amount of uninterrupted time together. Certainly, never at this age.

It was on those many walks that something slowly began to seep in. Namely, that this was what I wanted my life to look like. Not just being outside, but not being rushed, not having so many things in the calendar, no meetings, no waking up in hotel rooms or eating food from airport kiosks.

From my many conversations with other parents and the daily email I send out each morning, amid the complaints and frustrations about COVID policy and failures, I have heard many similar awakenings.

I suspect this is why many people have decided to move during the pandemic or change careers. Forced to actually slow down for a minute, they got a better sense of what they actually wanted their lives to look like.

Because we almost always have a career and a life before we have children, we usually try to find a way to make the latter fit in with the former. I have come to see the pandemic as the largest lifestyle experiment in human history. It stripped everything down, broke it all apart and left so many of us, especially in the early months of the first and second surges, clinging tightly to our children and thinking about how we would restructure our lives around them.

Surely, there is some privilege in being able to do this. But this luxury is also insidious, because you know what choosing family over work will cost you, in real dollars.

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. This was something that came back to me at countless vexing decisions we had to make as parents during the pandemic. 

Can we see people? Are we comfortable sending the kids to school? What activities are essential? Should we find child care or a nanny-share? Should we lift the mask mandate in the bookstore my family runs now that all the other businesses on the street have?

An ordinary person has to think only of themselves; a parent has to put somebody else first.

I still find myself shuddering every time I hear someone point out that the chances of a child dying of COVID are very low. What kind of standard is that? And yet it is shocking and painful to me in retrospect to consider how often I must have brought home bugs and viruses from the road – including mono in 2018 – without much of a thought.

At the top of my list of changes in my parenting style is a clearer understanding of both risk as well as responsibility. No longer can I be “too busy” to think about this or that. Certainly, I can never go back to trusting that someone else – politicians or school boards or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – is on top of it for us.

It was the highly transmissible delta variant that obliterated the one of the only silver linings for parents – that there seemed to be few cases in children. Now as hospitals and ICU beds nearly fill up in Texas, I find myself thinking not just of that wonderful streak of consecutive bedtimes but its relation to an exercise practiced by Stoic parents in the ancient world, which involved privately meditating on your child’s mortality as you tucked them into bed at night.

While this was something I understood intellectually, it was not until there was a deadly virus that the weight and power of this practice truly hit me. The purpose of this memento mori is not detachment but the exact opposite. It’s about connection. It’s about presence. It’s about gratitude.

There’s no reason to rush through bedtime. There’s no reason to rush through anything or to anywhere. Because what we’re rushing from is our children and the limited time we get with them – the amount of which is never guaranteed.

It was another reminder to slow down, to take a few more minutes with them, another book with them, another night where they fell asleep on my chest or next to me, unknowingly turning this difficult, painful pandemic into what a POW survivor, Admiral James Stockdale, would describe as a “defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”

I know my kids wouldn’t either.

One of my favorite things to do each day is to sit down and write the Daily Dad email . It’s one piece of wisdom from history, science, literature and other ordinary parents. You can join over 60,000 parents and get it delivered to your inbox every morning by subscribing at email.dailydad.com .

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15 Ways To Overcome The Fear That’s Killing Your Potential

We’re afraid.

We know what we want to do, what we could do, what we should do. 

It’s an idea for a new business. It’s dropping out of college. It’s telling someone how we feel. It’s trying something radically different. 

But something gets in the way. The voice in our head. The voice of others inside our head. People tell us that our idea is crazy, that the odds are slim, that people like us do things like this, not like that. 

Oh, what this costs us. “Apprehension, uncertainty, waiting, expectation, fear of surprise, do a patient more harm than any exertion,” Florence Nightingale, a woman who resisted her calling for a good chunk of the first thirty years of her life, once wrote. Yet these pedestrian but powerful fears—they keep so many of us from our destiny. They give us a million reasons why. Or why not. 

But it must be said that greatness is impossible without taking the risk, without leaping into uncertainty, without overcoming fear. Name one good thing that did not require at least a few hard seconds of bravery. If we wish to be great, if we wish to realize our potential, we must learn how to conquer fear, or at least rise above it in the moments that matter. So here, adapted from my just-released book Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave, are 15 ways to do just that…and to hopefully get a little closer to reaching your potential. 

Defeat Fear With Logic

In sobriety circles they use the acronym F.E.A.R. “False Evidence Appearing Real.” That’s what fear is. False impressions that feel real. We must break fear down logically. Go to the root of it. Explain it. Tell yourself: It’s just money. It’s just a bad article. It’s just a meeting with people yelling at one another. Is that something you need to be afraid of? “There are more things,” Seneca wrote, “likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” Break it down. Really look at the facts. Investigate. Only then can we really see.

Block Out Other People’s Opinions 

Almost everything new, everything impressive, everything right, was done over the loud objections of the status quo. Most of what is beloved now was looked down on at the time of its creation or adoption by people who now pretend that never happened. When I talked to the rapper Logic on the Daily Stoic podcast, he talked about how every time he puts out a new album, the haters come out in droves. When he put out his first album, they wanted the sound and style of his mixtapes. When he put out his second album, they wanted the sound and style of his first album. When he put out his third album, they wanted the sound and style of his second album. And on and on. This is how it goes. This is how it has always gone. Some two thousand years, Cicero wrote about the haters, the gossipers, the side-line commentators. “Let other people worry over what they will say about you,” he said. “They will say it in any case.” Don’t value the opinion of faceless, unaccountable strangers above your own considered judgment.

Question Your Extrapolations

In Courage is Calling, I tell the story of Ulysses S. Grant early in his military career on a long journey across East Texas. It was just him and one other man crossing creeks and rivers in hostile territory filled with thick scrub bush and rattlesnakes and “the most unearthly howling of wolves.” Grant wanted to turn back and prayed that his companion would suggest it. The other officer, a little more weathered and experienced than Grant, smiled and pushed on. “Grant, how many wolves do you think are in that pack?” he asked. Not wanting to seem stupid or a coward, Grant tried to casually underestimate the threat that terrified him. “Oh, about twenty,” he said with nonchalance that betrayed his racing heart. Suddenly, Grant and the officer came upon the source of the sound. There, resting comfortably, with mischievous confidence, were just two wolves. So unnerved by a danger with which he was unfamiliar, it had never occurred to him to question the racing of his heart or the extrapolations of his mind. The night is dark and full of terrors. We face many enemies in life. But you have to understand: They are not nearly as formi- dable as your mind makes you think.

Define Your Fears

What we fear, we do not exactly know. We never actually define what so worries us. Our fears are not concrete, they are shadows, illusions, refractions. The entrepreneur and writer Tim Ferriss has spoken of the exercise of “fear setting”—of defining and articulating the nightmares, anxieties, and doubts that hold us back. Indeed, the ancient roots of this practice go back at least to the Stoics. Seneca wrote about premeditatio malorum, the deliberate meditation on the evils that we might encounter. Vague fear is sufficient to deter us; the more it is explored, the less power it has over us.

Focus On The Other Side Of Fear

Don’t worry about whether things will be hard. Because they will be. Instead, focus on the fact that these things will help you. This is why you needn’t fear them. Our bruises and scars become armor. Our struggles become experience. They make us better. They prepared us for this moment, just as this moment will prepare us for one that lies ahead. They are the flavoring that makes victory taste so sweet. If it were easy, everyone would do it. If everyone did it, how valuable would it be? The whole point is that it’s hard. The risk is a feature, not a bug. Nec aspera terrent. Don’t be frightened by difficulties. Be like the athlete, knowing what a hard workout gives you: stronger muscles.

Find Your Agency

Fear determines what is or isn’t possible. If you think something is too scary, it’s too scary for you. If you don’t think you have any power…you don’t. If you aren’t the captain of your fate…then fate is the captain of you. We go through life in two ways. We either choose that we have the ability to change our situation, or that we are at the mercy of the situations in which we find ourselves. We can rely on luck…or cause and effect. It’s said that in the midst of adversity, there’s two types of people. There’s the type who asks, What’s going to happen to me? And then there’s the type who asks, What action am I going to take? Or as General James Mattis often reminded his troops: “Never think that you are impotent. Choose how you respond.”

Fear What You Won’t Become

All growth is a leap in the dark. If you’re afraid of that, you’ll never do anything worthwhile. If you take counsel of your fears, you’ll never take that step, make that leap. There’s no way around it—there is no progress without risk. If fear is to be a driving force in your life, fear what you’ll miss. Fear what happens if you don’t act. Fear what they’ll think of you, what you’ll think of yourself, down the road, for having dared so little. Think of what you’re leaving on the table. Think of the terrifying costs of playing small.

Take Heart From This Tradition

People who walked over land bridges to new continents, who rebuilt after fires, who cinched on armor and ran into battle, who demanded inalienable rights from their governments, who stared down mobs, who stole away from slavery or lack of op- portunity in the dead of night, who explored the frontiers of science—those people, eventually, indirectly and directly cre- ated you. Their blood surges through your veins. Their DNA is infused in yours. You come from fighters and survivors. You come from people who squared up against fate, took her punches, threw their best shot. They failed, they made mistakes, they were knocked down, but they survived. They survived long enough to put in motion the events that carry us forward today. When we are afraid, we can look up at those who came before us.

Replace Fear With Confidence

“Know-how is a help,” opens the Army Life handbook that the U.S. Army brass handed to each of its millions of soldiers in the Second World War. Although fear can be defined and explained away, it’s more effective to replace it. With what? Competence. With training. With tasks. With a job that needs to be done. Training is not just something that athletes and soldiers do. It is the key to overcoming fear in any and all situations. Confidence is a simple matter of knowing your shit.  As Epictetus says, the goal when we experience adversity is to be able to say, “This is what I’ve trained for, for this is my discipline.” What we are familiar with, we can manage. Danger can be mitigated by experience and by good training. Fear leads to aversion. Aversion to cowardice. Repetition leads to confidence. Confidence creates the opportunity for courage.

Start Small

The French speak of petites actions— those first small steps, the builders of momentum, the little things that add up. We would do well to think of that concept when we feel afraid or when we despair in the face of an enormous problem. We don’t need to lead a grand charge. Put aside thoughts of some death-defying gesture. Sometimes the best place to start is somewhere small. “Never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small,” Florence Nightingale said, “for it is wonderful how often in such matters the mustard-seed germinates and roots itself.” Eliminate one problem. Move things one iota. Write one sentence. Send one letter. Make a spark. We can figure out what’s next after that.

Just Do. Just Go

How do you get over the fear? All the reasons not to do whatever it is you’re thinking about setting out to do? In the words of the decorated Navy SEAL Jocko Willink, to get over fear, you go. You just do. You leap into the dark. It is the only way. Because if you don’t, what looms? Failure. Regret. Shame. A lost opportunity. Any hope of moving forward. Fear wants you to spend the day in deliberation, courage knows you have to get on with it, you have to get going. “In matters like this,” de Gaulle once explained to some reticent members of his administration, “one must move or die. I have chosen to move; that does not exclude the possibility of also dying.” No one can guarantee safe passage in life, nothing precludes the possibility of failing or dying. But if you don’t go? Well, you ensure failure and suffer a different kind of death. Later, you’re going to wish you did something. We always do. Which means, right now, you gotta go.

Make Courage A Habit

There is that clichéd bit of advice: Do one thing each day that scares you. As it happens, it’s not bad. How do you expect to do the big things that scare you—that scare others—if you haven’t prac- ticed them? How can you trust that you’ll step forward when the stakes are high when you regularly don’t do that even when the stakes are low? So we must test ourselves. We seek out challenges. “Always do what you are afraid to do,” Ralph Waldo Emerson said. Or as William James wrote, we want to “make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.” We must make courage a habit. 

Associate with Brave People

When another country called on Sparta for military help, the Spartans wouldn’t send their army. They sent one Spartan commander. This was all it took. Because courage, like fear, is contagious. One person who knows what they are doing, who isn’t afraid, who has a plan is enough to reinforce an outnumbered army, to buck up a broken system, to calm chaos where it has taken root. And so a single Spartan was all their allies needed. So it goes for you. Courage is contagious. Who are you catching it from? Like a virus, courage spreads by contact. It spreads through the air. So get yourself in the vicinity of that person who exudes it. Let their excess strength shed onto you. 

Love Arms Us Against Fear 

It is almost too perfect that the root word of “courage” means “heart.” James Stockdale and his fellow POWs would signal back and forth to one another the letters U and S. What did it mean? United States? No: Unity over Self. They would say that to one another when they were lonely, when they were pulled away to be tortured, and when they sat in the cells beating themselves up for what they might have said under torture. What unified whole are you a part of? What is the love that’s powering you? Who are you brave for? Country? Cause? Comrade? Family? That’s the flip side of what about me. That’s how we rise above our limits.

Ask For Help

Sometimes that’s the strongest and bravest thing to do. “Don’t be ashamed to need help,” Marcus Aurelius wrote. “Like a soldier storming a wall, you have a mission to accomplish. And if you’ve been wounded and you need a comrade to pull you up? So what?” Exactly. So what? It’s okay to need a helping hand. To need reassurance, a favor, forgiveness, whatever. Need therapy? Go! Need to start over? Okay! Need to steady yourself on someone’s shoulder? Of course! We’re in this mission together. We’re comrades. Ask for help. It’s not just brave, it’s the right thing to do.

—

Whatever it is you are trying to do, whoever it is you dream of becoming—there will be so many reasons why this will feel like the wrong thing to do. There will be incredible pressure to put these thoughts, these dreams, this need, out of our mind. That’s what Florence Nightingale went through. For 30 years, her family, society, pressured her into deferring, ignoring her calling. How many lives did that cost? How wrong did they turn out to be? Depending on where we are and what we seek to do, the resistance we face may be simple incentives . . . or outright violence.

Fear will make itself felt. It always does.

Will you let it prevent you from answering the call? Will you leave the phone ringing?

Or will you inch yourself closer and closer, will you steel yourself, prepare yourself, until you’re ready to do what you were put here to do?

As of yesterday, my newest book, Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave is available everywhere books are sold! I am so proud of this book—if fear is killing your potential, I know this book will help you answer the call to do what you are meant to do. That’s what many of the early reviews of the book have said. General Jim Mattis said it’s “a superb handbook for crafting a purposeful life.” The great Shadi Bartsch called it a “clarion call to act on your convictions.”

If you have enjoyed my writing, if you have gotten anything out of my writing, I’m confident in telling you that you will love Courage is Calling . I believe it’s my best book yet. We are still offering bonuses to everyone who orders over in the Daily Stoic store . 

 

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This Little Decision Changed The Course of My Career

In the summer of 2019, my wife and I took our two sons for a hike in the Lost Pines Forest in Bastrop, Texas. It was a Saturday or a Sunday. I had a bunch of articles to write, but I put it aside and decided to spend some time outside with the kids in the shade of the prehistoric loblolly forest about thirty minutes from our house. 

It was a lovely afternoon, despite the heat. I always love Lost Pines because it’s a freak of nature. The trees appear here in the middle of Texas, hundreds of miles further east than most of their counterparts. Two horrible fires in the last ten years have only added to the mystique, making parts feel like a haunted elephant graveyard. 

As we wrapped up the hike and took the kids to the playground, suddenly, it hit me. It was a feeling that most creative people experience from time to time. You’re in the middle of not working and boom, you get hit with an idea. I have run many hundreds of miles in Lost Pines so it was a familiar feeling—I’ve sold business problems and writing problems and personal problems on the trails there. 

As I was carrying my son in the backpack, my mind had drifted briefly to the fact that my book Stillness is the Key would soon be released and it would mark the end of what had become a three-book trilogy. What would I tackle next, I thought. A book about courage would be cool. 

A few days later, we were on vacation in the panhandle in Florida. I was building a sandcastle with my son. Then the second lightning strike. Not just a book about courage, a series on the four virtues, starting with courage! And like that, the next four years of my life, my next creative mountain had been laid out in front of me. 

I tell this story in part because that first book, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave is now available for preorder (to be released almost two years exactly to the day the idea appeared to me). But also because it illustrates something that I learned when I was writing Stillness is the Key: our biggest breakthroughs often come when we are working on them the least, that stillness really is an important part of moving forward. 

John Cage, the composer, liked to hunt for mushrooms in the woods. Musashi, the samurai, was also an avid painter and poet. Socrates liked to relax by playing games in the street with children from his neighborhood in Athens. Nietzche said that it’s only ideas that come from walking that have any worth. Dorothy Day was a lifelong walker, and it was on her strolls along the beach on Staten Island in the 1920s that she first began to feel a strong sense of God in her life and the first flickerings of the awakening that would put her on a path toward sainthood. The choreographer Twyla Tharp talks about going for “mindless mental wanderings” each day. 

In my life, I’ve been repeatedly gifted with ideas—from the muses, from my own subconscious, I don’t know—when I least expected it. Running. Swimming. Playing with my kids. My wife can recognize it in my eyes and knows not to say anything when I rush into the house and head to the pile of notecards I have on the counter at all times. He’s probably come up with something…don’t interrupt or he’ll lose it and be a mess after. 

This is also an important lesson, at least for me, about work-life balance. We think that to be great at what you do, it requires complete and total dedication. That there’s no time for anything else. Nonsense. I owe this four-book deal I’m now mid-way through writing—a career securing project—to the fact that I went on vacation! Don’t have time for family? I wouldn’t have the book I’m releasing next month if I had stayed home and worked. I owe it to our wonderful hike. 

As excited as I am to tell you about this new book (pre-order bonuses and details here) mostly I wanted to share those insights—because they were life-changing for me. In Zen, they talk about the problem of “too much willful will,” basically, trying too hard, being too intentional. Real breakthroughs come when you’re not so controlling, when you let go. By not putting my work first, by not taking it all so seriously, I’ve found I’ve been able to reach for and hold on to more than I was with a very tight grasp. 

I hope this can give you something to think about as well. Of course, executing the project required incredible amounts of work and focus. It required being at the office. It required trying very hard to get it right. But none of that would have been possible without first letting go a little, without deciding to take a hike or go to the beach. 

You never know when an idea can change the course of your life or your career. You never know when that thing is going to come to you. So it’s really a matter of putting yourself in a position for that to happen. 

I just want you to realize—or to remember—that may well just mean being present. It may mean rolling around in the grass with your kids or taking the dog out for a walk. It could be a long dinner with friends. It could be any number of things we’re so often too busy to do or can’t be bothered to do. 

If only we had the courage to let go…what we might be able to find. 

P.S. If you haven’t already, I’d love for you to pre-order Courage is Calling . Pre-orders make a huge difference for authors as they try to get a book off the ground. And to make it worth your while, I’ve put together a bunch of cool pre-order bonuses , including signed pages from the drafts of the book as I wrote them. Click here to learn more about all the bonuses and how to receive them!

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Life Happens in Public. Get Used to It.

This piece is excerpted from my forthcoming book, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave . Part 1 of the book is about the forces that stand between you and doing what you want, can, and should. It’s about the battle we all fight—the battle against fear. Because real greatness is impossible if we don’t win that battle, if we don’t learn how to conquer fear. 

Jerry Weintraub wanted to be an actor.

He made it into the Neighborhood Playhouse. He studied under Sandy Meisner. One of his classmates was James Caan. There’s a reason you’ve seen movies with James Caan and none with Jerry Weintraub, and that reason is fear.

Or rather, fear by its other identity: Shame.

Sent to get clothes for a dance class—taught by Martha Graham, no less—Jerry and Hames went to a store on Broadway. As he tried on tights, Jerry, a tough kid from the Bronx, took one look in the mirror and knew there was no way he’d ever let himself be seen this way in public. James Caan, who came from the same neighborhood, whose father had been a butcher, who had the same view of himself as a tough guy, looked in the same mirror. He did not let self-consciousness win.

As the author Rich Cohen writes, “This was the dividing line, the moment of truth. Jimmy Caan put on the slippers and tights, so his name appears in the credits as, say, Sonny Corleone in The Godfather. Jerry Weintraub, because he was filled with normal, decent human shame, did not put on the slippers and tights, so his name appears in movie credits as producer.”

One would be nominated for Academy Awards, the other would package The Karate Kid. Both would be successful, but only one realized that shared early dream—only one was able to stand boldly, bravely in front of the camera, and own it.

While most of us will not make our living on the screen, we all have to face this reluctance to be seen. Our fear of what other people think, of embarrassment or awkwardness, is not the same fear that holds a man back from running into battle, but it is a limitation, a deficiency of courage that deprives us of our destiny all the same.

There is no change, no attempt, no reach that does not look strange to someone. There’s almost no accomplishment that is possible without calling some attention on yourself. To gamble on yourself is to risk failure. To do it in public is to risk humiliation.

Anyone who tries to leave their comfort zone has to know that.

Yet we’d almost rather die than be uncomfortable.

The comedian Jerry Seinfeld once noted that people rank public speaking as worse than the fear of death, which means, quite insanely, that at a funeral the average person would rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy.

In ancient Rome, there was perhaps no better orator than Crassus, famed for his brilliant speeches and prosecutions of the corrupt and the evil. At least that’s how he appeared to his audiences. You would not have known, as he later admitted, that at the outset of every speech he would “Feel a tremor through my whole thoughts, as it were, and limbs.” Even as a master, he still experienced doubt—still felt waves of overwhelming anxiety and fear crash over him before he went onstage.

At the beginning of his career, it was even worse. He recounts his eternal debt and gratitude to a judge who, at one of Crassus’s first public appearances, could tell how “absolutely disheartened and incapacitated with fear” the boy was, and adjourned the hearing until a later date. We can imagine those merciful words from the judge, sparing Crassus as he no doubt prayed he would be spared, as we have prayed a thousand times, second only to his hope that he might be struck down and killed rather than have to go on.

Yet we would not be talking about Crassus had he not pushed through that fear.

Would he have rather practiced law from the privacy of his study? Sure, just as Serpico probably wished he could’ve dressed as he liked without comment. Such is life. It doesn’t care about our rathers. You will have to stand alone from time to time. If you can’t even do that to deliver a talk, how will you possibly have the courage to do it when it counts?

You put on the tights. You push through the stage fright—the fright that persists even after you’ve mastered the art of public speaking. You enter the witness stand. You deliver the hard news to the assembled employees. You just learn to stop thinking about what they think. You’ll never do original work if you can’t. You have to be willing not only to step away from the herd but get up in front of them and say what you truly think or feel. It’s called “public life” for a reason.

We don’t get to succeed privately.

It’s ironic, the Stoics would say, that for all our selfish cares about ourselves, we seem to value other people’s opinions about us more than our own. The freed slave Epictetus says, “If you wish to improve, be content to appear clueless or stupid.” Can you do that? You’ll have to.

When we flee in the direction of comfort, of raising no eyebrows, of standing in the back of the room instead of the front, what we are fleeing is opportunity. When we defer to fear, when we let it decide what we will and won’t do, we miss so much. Not just success, but actualization.

Who might we be if we didn’t care about blushing? What could we accomplish if we didn’t mind the spotlight? If we were tough enough to put on the tights? If we were willing not only to fail but to do so in front of others?

P.S. If you have gotten anything out of my writing, I’d love for you to consider pre-ordering  Courage is Calling . Pre-orders make a huge difference for authors as they try to get a book off the ground. And to make it worth your while, I’ve put together a bunch of cool pre-order bonuses , including signed pages from the drafts of the book as I wrote them. Click here to learn more about all the bonuses and how to receive them!

The post Life Happens in Public. Get Used to It. appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

The Perfect Day Begins with a Good Evening (or My Night Time Routine)

All the talk about morning routines makes it easy to overlook that a good morning is impossible without a good evening. 

I am reminded just how essential a good evening routine is as I write this from an RV in Balmorhea, Texas—as I drive across the country to do some media for my new book, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave (awesome pre-order bonuses here).

It was one of Seneca’s observations—that nearly everything in life is circular: there’s an opening and a close, a start and a finish. Life, he says, is a collection of large circles enclosing smaller ones. Birth to death. Childhood. A year. A month. “And the smallest circle of all,” he writes, “is the day; even a day has its beginning and its ending, its sunrise and its sunset.”

To the Stoics, every day was to be lived as if it closed the story, every night ended as if it was the last night we had. They’re right. How we close out the day matters. The decisions we make. The reflection we encourage. The time we drift off to sleep. All of it is about finishing well…because then and only then can we start tomorrow better too. 

So what does a good evening routine look like? Whether I’m home or on the road, these are the 9 things I try to do every evening. Each is rooted in the wisdom of the ancient Stoics and when applied, as Seneca said, “let us go to our sleep with joy and gladness.” 

Make Time For Leisure

The opposite of work is not laziness or lounging around, it’s leisure. 

In the ancient world, leisure meant scholé. School. But not the get good grades and get ahead kind of school. No, in the ancient world, it meant learning and studying and pursuing higher things to enrich one’s soul and spirit.

Seneca wrote thoughtful letters to friends. Zeno gathered at the Stoa Poikile to discuss ideas. Marcus Aurelius attended philosophical lectures. My family reads together. 

Marcus said it was a requirement to “Give yourself time to learn something new and good, and cease to be whirled around.” And as Seneca wrote in his essay On the Tranquility of the Mind, “We must be indulgent to the mind, and regularly grant it the leisure that serves as its food and strength.” 

After indulging the mind, you’ll have worked up the appetite to… 

Enjoy A Philosophical Dinner

Some people watch TV at dinner. Some people eat at their desk and answer emails between bites. Some people eat as fast as they can so they can get back to work.

In The Learned Banqueters, written just after the time of Marcus Aurelius, we learn that the sixth Stoic scholarch Antipater routinely invited friends over for dinner and long discussions about philosophy. 

A few decades after Antipater, Cato would become famous for his philosophical dinners. Even his last meal—before his famous suicide—he was debating the very implications of life and death, good and bad, at such a dinner.

More recently, the philosopher Agnes Callard told me on the Daily Stoic podcast 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. 

(Speaking of which we are hosting a philosophical dinner at The Painted Porch as part of a pre-order bonus for Courage is Calling . Learn about how to attend that here .)

After filling up our stomachs, it’s time to…

Go For A Walk

After a meal, but before it’s dark, it is a wonderful time to get active.

Seneca wrote about taking a walk outdoors as a kind of medicine. In a notoriously loud city like Rome, peace and quiet would have been hard to come by. The noises of wagons, the shouting of vendors, the hammering of blacksmiths—all filled the streets with piercing violence. So Seneca said, “We should take wandering outdoor walks, so that the mind might be nourished and refreshed by the open air and deep breathing.” 

Marcus Aurelius too talked about the cleansing effects of a walk in nature. On his evening walks, he liked to take a moment to look up at the stars to “wash off the mud of life below.” Freud was known for his walks around Vienna’s Ringstrasse after his evening meal. David Sedaris likes to take nighttime strolls on the back roads of his neighborhood in the English countryside and pick up garbage. Dan Rather talked about how “One of my favorite things long has been taking a leisurely stroll with wife Jean at twilight time.”

When we’re home, we get the kids in the stroller and do as much as three miles on the dirt road around our house, or in the backwoods and pastures on our farm. We see rabbits and deer and cows and armadillos. We stop and pet the donkeys. Like Sedaris, we pick up garbage. These are some of the very best moments in life. When it’s quiet. When we’re fully present and there. When we’re around people we love. As Rather said, “I gently recommend it. Just walk slowly in the time after the sun sets and before night descends.” 

Once back from a walk, we…

Tuck The Kids In 

Not everyone has kids, but everyone can learn from this exercise. Marcus Aurelius, borrowing from Epictetus, tells us that…

As you kiss your son good night, whisper to yourself, “He may be dead in the morning.” Don’t tempt fate, you say. By talking about a natural event? Is fate tempted when we speak of grain being reaped?

What is the point of this morbid exercise? It’s not about trying to reduce the affection you feel for the people you love. It’s not about preparing for the pain of losing a child (nothing can prepare you for that). It’s about not wasting a single second of the time you do get with the people you love. 

A person who faces the fact that they can lose someone they love at any moment is a person who is present. Who loves. Who isn’t rushing through moments. Who doesn’t hold onto stupid things. 

Marcus lost 5 children. 5! It should never happen, but it does. There’s nothing we can do about that. We can, however, drink in the present before we…

Review The Day

Winston Churchill was famously afraid of going to bed at the end of the day having not created, written or done anything that moved his life forward. “Every night,” he wrote, “I try myself by Court Martial to see if I have done anything effective during the day. I don’t mean just pawing the ground, anyone can go through the motions, but something really effective.”

In a letter to his older brother Novatus, Seneca describes the exercise he borrowed from another prominent philosopher. 

“When the light has been removed and my wife has fallen silent,” Seneca wrote, “I examine my entire day and go back over what I’ve done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by.”

Every night, Seneca sat down and forced himself to questions like these:

What bad habits did I cure?

What temptations did I resist?

In what specific way am I now better than I was yesterday?

Success and happiness require self-awareness. Self-reflection. Be unflinching in your assessments. Notice what contributed to your happiness and what detracted from it. Write down what you’d like to work on or quotes that you like. 

Writing, analyzing, reflecting, interrogating, taking inventory of how you spent the day—this is how you continue improving. Asking yourself questions. Questioning every experience, every day. 

Did I follow my plans for the day? Was I prepared enough? What could I do better? What have I learned that will help me tomorrow? These simple questions make an enormous impact. So I spend some time every night answering them.

After this reflection, my evening routine is drawing to a close. It’s time to…

Count Your Blessings

This is another exercise from Seneca. He said we should wrap up each day as if it were our last. The person who does this, who meditates on their mortality in the evening, Seneca believed, has a super power when they wake up. 

“When a man has said, ‘I have lived!’” Seneca wrote, then “every morning he arises is a bonus.” 

Think back: to that one time you were playing with house money, if not literally then metaphorically. Or when your vacation got extended. Or that appointment you were dreading canceled at the last moment. 

Do you remember how you felt? Probably, in a word—better. You feel lighter. Nicer. You appreciate everything. You are present. All the trivial concerns and short term anxieties go away—because for a second, you realize how little they matter. 

Well, that’s how one ought to live. Go to bed, having lived a full day, appreciating that you may not get the privilege of waking up tomorrow. And if you do wake up, it will be impossible not to see every second of the next twenty-four hours as a bonus. As a vacation extended. An appointment with death put off one more day. As playing with house money. 

And now, as the day comes to a close, it is time for the most important part, to…

Go To Bed At A Set Time

All the other habits and practices listed here become irrelevant if you don’t have the energy and clarity to do them. What time you wake up tomorrow is irrelevant…if you didn’t get enough sleep tonight. 

One thing every parent knows is that kids are a mess when they don’t sleep. But for some reason, we think we’re different. We think we can get away with pulling an all-nighter here and there. We think we can substitute stimulants for sleep. 

Nonsense. 

We only have so much energy for our work, for our relationships, for ourselves. A smart person understands this and guards their sleep carefully. The greats—they protect their sleep because their best work depends on it. The clearer they can think and the better their mental and physical state—the better they perform. In other words, the more sleep, the better. 

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.”

Me? I get my 7-8 hours every night. Sleep is one of the most important parts of my work routine, period. All-nighters are for people who don’t know how to plan, who put things off to the last minute. 

If you want to be great at what you do, start going to bed earlier. Give yourself a bedtime that you honor and respect and enforce. Value sleep. Take care of yourself. Put yourself in a good spot to…

Start Again

As I say in the title of this piece, the perfect day begins with a good evening. A good evening routine is just priming us to have a great day—there is still work to be done when we wake up. It’s for a reason that one of our fifty rules for life from the Stoics is “own the morning.” Well-begun is half done, as they say. Fortunately, the Stoics—in their writing and in their example—left us even more wisdom on what a good start to the day looks like. I’ve written about that here and then adapted it into a video that now has over a million views. 

P.S. If you have gotten anything out of my writing over the years, I’d love for you to consider pre-ordering my new book, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave . It’s being released in less than a month on 9/28. I’m confident it’s one of my best and I think the blurbs and early reviews already hint that it is. Academy Award Winning Actor Matthew McConaghey called the book an “urgent call to arms for each and all of us.” General Jim Mattis called it “a superb handbook for crafting a purposeful life.” And Classics Professor Shadi Bartsch was nice enough to say it’s “a heartfelt and passionate book.”

Pre-orders make a huge difference for authors as they try to get a book off the ground. So it’d really mean a lot to me if you pre-ordered…and to make it worth your while, I put together a bunch of cool preorder bonuses, including signed and numbered pages from the original manuscript of the book as I worked on it. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at dailystoic.com/preorder

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