Ryan Holiday's Blog, page 13

These Are 23 Great Rules To Be A Productive Creative

Yesterday, I announced on Instagram that my newest book, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave, is available for preorder. It will be my 12th book in 10 years, and so there were a bunch of comments from people who wondered how I was able to get another one done so quickly. 

How do you write books faster than I read them? 

What’s your secret to writing so many books? 

The answer is that I have a system, a process that helps me be productive. It’s not my system exactly, as I’ve taken many strategies from the greatest writers to ever do it. Although I talk about the creative process at length in my book Perennial Seller (which for some reason is currently $1.99 everywhere you get your ebooks), I thought I would detail some of my rules that I follow as a writer. I think they can help anyone be more productive. 

[1] Read. Read. Read. 

A book is made of books. “The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading; a man will turn over half a library to make one book,” Samuel Johnson said. As I was putting together the bibliography for Courage, I counted something like 300 books I was directly sourcing from. 

[2] Always be researching

The bulk of the work is researching—collecting stories, anecdotes, and data to marshal your argument. The writing is stringing those pieces together. I’ve found stuff I’ve used in in-flight magazines, discovered snippets on social media, even heard things mentioned on TV. As Shelby Foote put it in an interview with The Paris Review: “I can’t begin to tell you the things I discovered while I was looking for something else.”

[3] Put good advice where you work

Print and put a couple of important quotes up on the wall to help guide you (either generally, or for a specific project). When I was working on Ego is the Enemy, I had this quote from Machiavelli on the wall to inspire its style and ethos: “I have not adorned this work with fine phrases, with swelling, pompous words, or with any of those blandishments or external ornaments with which many set forth and decorate their matter. For I have chosen either that nothing at all should bring it honor or that the variety of its material and the gravity of its subject matter alone should make it welcome.” I have another quote that I put up for this book from Martha Graham: “Never be afraid of the material. The material knows when you’re frightened and will not help.”

[4] Make commitments

I turn in a book proposal for my next book before my latest one comes out. When I have a commitment that I know I have to meet, Resistance doesn’t have the time or space to creep in. Right now I am on a book year path for the next four years. It keeps me honest and keeps me working. Meet deadline, or death. 

[5] Work with great people

Success requires greater investment in the creative process. Pay for professional help. There’s that saying: if you think pros are expensive, try hiring an amateur. 

[6] Have something to say

“To have something to say,” Schopenhauer said, “by itself is virtually a sufficient condition for good style.”

[7] Have a model in mind

Thucydides had Herodotus. Gibbon had Thucydides. Shelby Foote had Gibbon. Every playwright since Shakespeare has had Shakespeare. Everyone has a master to learn from. For me, it’s been Robert Greene

[8] Know where you’re going

You don’t “find the book as you write.” You have to do the hard work of solving the problem first. You have to figure out the best route, too. One of the best pieces of writing advice I ever got was to–before I started the process–articulate the idea in one sentence, one paragraph and one page. This crystallizes the idea for you and guides you—Nassim Taleb wrote in Antifragile that every sentence in the book was a “derivation, an application or an interpretation of the short maxim” he opened with. 

[9] Focus on What You Control

As Epictetus says, there’s some stuff that’s up to us, some stuff that’s not. The work is up to you. Everything else is not. If you’re in this for external rewards, god help you. A Confederacy of Dunces was rejected by publishers. After the author’s suicide, it won the Pulitzer. People don’t know shit. YOU know. So love it while you’re doing it. Success can only be extra.

[10] Embrace draw-down periods

You need what the strategist and theorist John Boyd called the “draw-down period.” Take a break right before you start. To think, to reflect, to let things settle. I started Courage is Calling on my birthday, but not before I took an extended period of just thinking. 

[11] Listen to the same song on repeat

I’ve found that picking one song—usually something I am not proud to say I am listening to—and listening to it on repeat, over and over and over again is the best way to get into a rhythm and flow. It not only shuts out outside noise but also parts of my conscious mind I don’t need to hear from while I’m writing. 

[12] Make little progress each day

One of the best rules I’ve heard as a writer is that the way to write a book is by producing “two crappy pages a day.” It’s by carving out a small win each and every day—getting words on the page—that a book is created. Hemingway once said that “the first draft of anything is shit,” and he’s right (I actually have that on my wall as a reminder). 

[13] Don’t let the tools distract you 

Great artists work. Mediocre artists talk a lot about tools. Software does not make you a better writer. If classics were created with quill and ink, you’ll probably be fine with a Word Document. Or a blank piece of paper. Don’t let technology distract you. Helen Simpson has “Faire et se taire” from Flaubert on a Post-it near her desk, which she translates as “Shut up and get on with it.”

[14] Get some strenuous exercise every day

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought of a great line or solved an intractable writing problem while running or swimming. Exercise is also an easy win every day. Writing can go poorly, but going on a run always goes well. 

[15] Write about the things you’re afraid to talk about.

James Altucher has a great rule that I have stolen: write what you’re afraid to say. If your stuff isn’t scaring you, you’re not pushing yourself enough. 

[16] Journal every morning

Each morning, I journal in three small notebooks. The whole ritual takes 15 minutes and by the time I am finished, I am centered, I am calm and most importantly, I am primed to do my actual writing.

[17] Don’t talk about the book (as much as you can help it)

Don’t talk about projects until you’re finished. Save that carrot for the end. Talking and doing fight for the same resources. 

[18] Stop on the “wet edge”

Hemingway advised fellow writer Thomas Wolfe “to break off work when you ‘are going good.’—Then you can rest easily and on the next day easily resume.” Brian Koppelman has referred to this as stopping on “wet edge.” It staves off the despair the next day.

[19] Make something that does a job

My editor Niki Papadopoulos once told me, “It’s not what a book is. It’s what a book does.” This is why musicians follow the “car test” (how does the song sound in a car driving down the highway). It’s just about whether you like it…but about what it does for the people buying it. 

[20] Cut out the jargon

This was Ogilvy’s rule: “Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.” The other one I like is: “Never use two words where one will do.”  

[21] Talk it out

When you get stuck, talk the ideas through with someone you trust. As Seth Godin observed, “no one ever gets talker’s block.”

[22] It’s OK that it’s hard

Thomas Mann described a writer as “someone to whom writing does not come easy,” he was putting it lightly. Walker Percy said “that writing is like suffering from a terrible disease for a certain period of time. Then when you finish you get well again.” That’s why there is the old saying: Painters like painting. Writers like having written.

[23] Remember … it’s all material

As Vivian Gornick explains, “What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.”

If all you do after reading this is start asking more often, “How can I use this to my advantage?”—your creative output will not only get better, your life will too.

I hope some of these help you become more productive, and if you want to really take your creative process to the next level, I do recommend my book Perennial Seller. As I said up top, the ebook is currently $1.99—I don’t know if it will ever be cheaper than that. 

And if you have gotten anything out of my writing over the years, I’d love for you to consider picking up my new book, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave. 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 wrote that it’s “a heartfelt and passionate book.”

To make it worth your while, we’ve put together a bunch of cool preorder bonuses—among them is something I’ve never given away: a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript of the book. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at dailystoic.com/preorder

The post These Are 23 Great Rules To Be A Productive Creative appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

Why We Need a Statue of Responsibility

I was honored to have been asked to write a piece for the By Invitation series in The Economist, they couldn’t run all of it, so I thought I’d send the longer version here. Enjoy!

The Statue of liberty was a gift from France to America, commemorating the two nations’ friendship and shared love of freedom. Completed in 1886, it marked one of the world’s first, successful crowdfunding projects. The famous poem “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus, mounted in bronze inside the pedestal (“Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”), was written for the campaign. Over $100,000 was raised from more than 120,000 donors, including schoolchildren who collected pennies.

The end result has towered not just over New York Harbour and the millions of immigrants who passed by, but also over Americans’ view of themselves. It is a symbolic representation of the country’s foremost ideal, individual liberty. That value of freedom undergirds every newspaper article, church sermon and street demonstration—and is invoked whenever someone refuses to wear a face mask during a pandemic or accept a vaccine.

And yet what most people don’t know is that around 75 years after the statue was inaugurated, another statue was proposed, its “twin” so to speak, to be erected on the other side of the country in San Francisco Bay. Called the Statue of Responsibility, it was meant to symbolise the flipside of America’s prized virtue, the inherent obligations that come with a free society.

The idea was the brainchild of Viktor Frankl. In 1942 at the age of 37, Frankl, a psychologist, was deported from Vienna to the first of four concentration camps, where his father died of pneumonia, his mother and brother were gassed and his wife died of typhus. He ended up in Auschwitz. Within months of his liberation, over a nine-day period, he wrote the book that became Man’s Search for Meaning. In it, he tried to make sense of the evil he experienced and articulated the importance of having a goal to live for.

In 1962, when he revised the book for an American edition and, with the passage of time, had reflected more on the experience, he wrote:

Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.

Since then, his vision has been taken up by two nonprofit groups, The Responsibility Foundation and the Statue Of Responsibility Foundation, both with the blessing of his second wife, Elly Frankl. Among the latter group’s backers was the late Stephen Covey, a business professor and author of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. Covey commissioned a sculptor, Gary Lee Price, who designed a 300-foot statue of two arms clasping each other by the wrist—a bond among individuals unshakably gripped together.

Several locations have been suggested. One is on Alcatraz Island (which as a former maximum-security prison probably provides the wrong symbolism). A more inspiring choice is Angel Island, which sits around four miles off of San Francisco and served as an immigration-processing centre for more than half a million new residents between 1910 and 1940. So far, both projects have stalled.

Mrs Frankl, at 95 and living in Vienna, notes that her husband’s idea for a statue was meant as a thought experiment. “He was surprised and flattered when he heard of the project. I don’t think he ever expected to be taken literally,” she said in an interview, conducted through Alex Vesely, their grandson and a board director of the Viktor Frankl Institute. “Many people talk for hours and say very little, but he had this gift of speaking the truth with a few simple words. He coined this phrase to make a point,” she said.

What makes Viktor Frankl’s idea so appropriate is that, as he understood, liberty begets responsibility; that with freedom comes the need for self-control and an obligation to think of others, not just oneself. That is what Frankl alluded to when he wrote that freedom is “only part of the story and half of the truth”.

The pandemic—with its ludicrous protests against face masks and vaccines in the name of freedom—has been a painful illustration of the costs to society when people fail to understand liberty’s flipside. Research has found, for instance, that private birthday parties were large drivers of COVID-19 infections and that the irresponsibility was not limited to one side of the political spectrum. People thought that because it happened behind closed doors…it didn’t count.

We don’t have a freedom problem: we have a responsibility problem.

What does it mean to be responsible? Perhaps no better explanation of this duty has been given than by Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear navy, who came to America through Ellis Island as an immigrant in 1906. “Responsibility is a unique concept,” the admiral said in testimony to Congress after decades of tireless service, “it may only reside and inhere in a single individual. You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you. You may disclaim it, but you cannot divest yourself of it. Even if you do not recognize it or admit its presence, you cannot escape it. If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, ignorance, or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”

Responsibility means understanding yourself as belonging to something larger than yourself: accepting a duty to do right regardless of the cost. To the Stoics, the branch of classical Greek and Roman philosophy that I study, our responsibility was to our character and to the common good—a dual loyalty, much in the way Frankl wanted two statues to commemorate two concomitant values.

Statues are totems to our values. We erect them not just to honour the past but to remind the present. The great Athenian orator Demosthenes once reminded an audience that previous generations did not put up monuments to recognise their own achievements but to spur people to greater deeds in the future. Yet sometimes the past and present collide.

Around the world, people have begun to look uneasily at the statues in their cities, parks and campuses. In Belgium, some monuments to Leo pold II, the coloniser king, have been removed. In Britain a heavy, bronze statue of Edward Colston—merchant, philanthropist, slave trader—was pulled down and pushed into Bristol Harbour. I was in New Orleans when enormous cranes removed the statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, which stood near the entrance to the French Quarter. And I spent considerable time and money to remove a loathsome, century-old Confederate monument (celebrating “our noble white souled Southland”) from the lawn of a county courthouse in the small Texas town where I live.

Although many of us can agree that statues of colonisers, murderers and traitors should go, it has long struck me as peculiar that we have little sense of what should be there instead. America in particular has struggled to put up statues of late. It took more than 20 years to plan and erect the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial, a set of bronzes in Washington, DC. The Martin Luther King Jr Memorial, in a park next to the National Mall, is not even ten years old—yet plans for it began shortly after his assassination in 1968.

Likewise, when it comes to a Statue of Responsibility, somehow no one is willing to be responsible. It is preposterous: there are more than enough tech entrepreneurs on a single block in downtown San Francisco capable of funding such a project. What is needed is a sense of urgency and the sense of responsibility to do this for future generations—and for this one as well. As the French writer André Malraux is said to have remarked: you can judge a society by the monuments it puts up. What does it say if a society is unable to build anything at all, let alone agree on what should be built? That Frankl’s lovely proposal has stood in the planning phase for seven decades, and one of the richest cities in the world stands impotent to erect anything that represents its aspirations or values? San Francisco apparently has the time and resources to rename schools named after Abraham Lincoln, and a mob can be whipped up to tear down a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, but when it comes to a Statue of Responsibility? Somehow, no one is willing to be responsible for that.

Reading to my four-year-old the wonderful children’s book about the Statue of Liberty, Her Right Foot by Dave Eggers, I was struck by his insight that Lady Liberty is depicted in motion, taking a step forward. Like him, I had seen the statue hundreds of times, but never noticed that her feet are not stationary but striding. Liberty is on the move—she uses her freedom. There’s no time for standing still, she’s got work to do.

So too the Statue of Responsibility should be active, symbolising what we ought do, individually and collectively, to act cooperatively on the major challenges of our time. “We are humans, given a heart and a brain. This makes us responsible,” says Mrs Frankl. “There are tasks waiting for us.”

Amid covid-19, some people ran away from their responsibilities while others ran toward them—selflessly, courageously. Millions did their duty quietly and without complaint and never ended up in the news. We should celebrate and immortalise the values that create a responsible society. We should bind it to our cultural consciousness as we did liberty. Those who proclaim their freedom but ignore their responsibility aren’t being heroic but self-centred and irresponsible. They are misusing the gift they have been given.

That is what lies behind Viktor Frankl’s observation that “freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.” Imagine how different the response to the pandemic might have been if the value that Americans looked up to wasn’t just liberty for themselves but responsibility for each other.

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Believing In Yourself is Overrated. This is Better.

“If I don’t believe in myself, who will?”

It’s a good question.

A seductive one. An empowering but innocuous phrase has been inscribed on a million inspirational quote images, been the subject of countless self-help books and TED Talks. 

Believe in yourself! Fake it until you make it!

The problem is that it’s bullshit.

Great people don’t have to believe in themselves. They don’t have to fake anything. They have evidence.

A few years ago, an interviewer asked Jay Z about his incredible self-assuredness. It’s a good question. He does seem like a person with unending faith in himself. How else could he rap the things that he raps? How else could he have gone from the Marcy Projects to Madison Square? (Great book on this by the way, Empire State of Mind by Zack O’Malley Greenburg) 

I’d argue it wasn’t belief. As Jay Z explained,

People don’t realize I’ve put a lot of my life into what I’m doing right now. I didn’t just have a hit record and get lucky. I put a lot of my life into it so the things that come out of it is not due to bravado and arrogance. I have confidence because of the work that I’ve put in, and I’ve put in so much work.

On a regular basis, I get emails from people who are trying to do big things. They are convinced they have some multi-billion dollar idea, a genius pitch, some brilliant artistic concept. They also have complete certainty that it will be a success (“I just need you for the marketing”). It’s always fascinating to see what this certainty is based on, because it almost always turns out to be, well, nothing. Mostly just wishful thinking, that idea that they can manifest this into being. 

They haven’t put in the work. They haven’t even started the work!

They think their success is written in cursive, when really, success and confidence are carved from effort and results. In gradual relief as the evidence comes in, reassessed at every turn. And while it’s perfectly possible that believers may turn out to be right, it’s the latter type, the evidence-based community, as the saying goes, who will enjoy their success more and find it considerably less precarious and fleeting.

This plays out well on the basketball court. Based on what they’ve done in practice, based on their stats, players have a sense of the probabilities of given shots. When Damian Lillard took that 37-foot shot in Paul George’s face to knock the Thunder out of the playoffs in 2019, it wasn’t about belief. He knew he shot 43% from that spot on the floor. Steph Curry knows he’s in range just about anywhere inside of half court. It’s not arrogant when he takes those shots, it’s based on the numbers…but it took years of play and deliberate practice for those numbers to exist. Like Jay Z, they put in the work. 

The great military strategist B.H. Liddell Hart compared two different types of generals. The first was the Napoleon types—those who believe they are destined for greatness, who have an unswerving faith in their own specialness and importance. The second, someone like William Tecumseh Sherman, he says, is defined by a “slow growth dependent on actual achievement.” Which is happier? Which is better? I won’t make a joke about how the Napoleons and the Pattons of the world inevitably overreach and are often the source of their own disasters. Hart’s analysis makes a better argument:

To the men of the last type their own success is a constant surprise, and its fruits the more delicious, yet to be tested cautiously with a haunting sense of doubt whether it is not all a dream. In that doubt lies true modesty, not the sham of insincere self-depreciation but the modesty of “moderation,” in the Greek sense. It is poise, not pose.

When I left what was a very good job to write my first book, I didn’t believe I could do it. That would have been absurd. What would that belief have been based on? I had never done it before. What I did have was evidence of the traits necessary for success. I had put in the training as a research assistant on other books. I had written on a regular basis for many years (every day for six years in fact). I knew I wasn’t a quitter. I knew I had mentors I could go to for advice when I felt in over my head. 

Same goes for when I opened my bookstore. Plenty of people told me it was a bad idea, but, it wasn’t my belief in myself that motivated me to push past this. I listened to them. I listened carefully. I also looked at the numbers, looked at my track record, looked at the traits I knew I was bringing to the table. I had a case—I had evidence that I could do it and I was willing to test that assumption. No more, no less.

Several times now I have tasted that fruit that Hart was talking about—the sweetness of gradual accomplishment. The immense gratification of looking at something you created and thinking, “Where did that come from?” And being able to answer that it came from you. Not because you were born with it, because you are inherently or intrinsically entitled to it, but because you created it from nothing.

This is a feeling that can only be earned. To take it on credit in advance, to steal it, to pretend, is to miss the point. It deprives you of all the pleasure of the actual accomplishment.

The Bible describes faith as “the assurance of what we hope for and the certainty of what we do not see.” Whatever you want to do with your spiritual life is up to you, but that way of thinking is about as dangerous as it gets when it comes to one’s profession. Hope is not a strategy for writing a book or starting a company. It’s not something to bet your career on.

It is a recipe for potentially catastrophic failure. Cheney believed we would be greeted as liberators in Iraq. Trump believed that being president would be easy. What evidence did they have for these assumptions? Very little. Worse than nothing actually, they had plenty of people telling them how hard it would be, how it would actually go. But they couldn’t listen. They had too much faith, too much belief in themselves, too much certainty in what could not be seen. Instead of tasting the sweet fruit of gradual accomplishment, they drank the bitter brew of abject failure. 

You cannot will evidence into existence. If you think you can fake it until you make it, well…that’s just another way to describe fraud. 

For the Shermans of the world, their rise was more gradual but it was based on what was real. His famous March to the Sea was military genius but hardly some flash of inspiration. It was the slow accumulation of his deep study of the country, of the failures and difficulties he faced in battle, of his insight into the Southern mind, his collaborations with Grant, and then his willingness to test the theory, city by city, town by town across rebel territory, even as the newspapers called him a madman, an idiot, and predicted his failure. It wasn’t faith in himself, it wasn’t belief that he was chosen by God, it was rational, operational, iterative. And it worked and it saved America.

It also saved himself—he knew when to stop the war, he knew how to end it peacefully, and he knew when it was time for him to walk away. (“I have all the rank I want,” he would say). That’s the other part of it. Somebody believes they can jump off a cliff and live—and if they do survive, that doesn’t mean it was a good idea. It just means they’ll keep doing it until, eventually, they don’t.

Is that what you want? Who do you want to listen to? The gamblers? Or the workers? The hustlers who sell hope as a product? Or the doers who don’t traffic in any of that?

As crazy as it sounds, you don’t need to believe in yourself. That’s not what’s holding you back. Whether you think you can do something is so much less important than whether you actually can or can’t do that thing. You need to assemble a case that proves you can. You need to do the work that stands as evidence for what you’re capable of.

So you can walk by sight, not by faith.

That’s how you actually end up achieving the things that other people are too busy believing they can do.

In my book, Ego is the Enemy, I further explore how a delusional belief in oneself poses a threat to one’s goals—whether you’ve achieved some success or hit rock bottom. If you want to be an achiever instead of a believer, I encourage you to check it out. And you can now get copies of Ego over in the Daily Stoic store, where you can also get them signed and personalized!

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This is The Real Plague To Avoid

Last week I did a piece for the New York Daily News, they couldn’t run all of it, so I thought I’d send the longer version here. Enjoy! It’s alarming to see how relevant Trust Me I’m Lying has turned out to be, but here we are…

At the first vaccine clinic I worked at here in a small town outside Austin, Texas, the county vaccinated more than 2,000 people in one day. The last clinic I volunteered at, which closed because they no longer put volunteers to use, I checked less than 15 people in for their shots. 

It was actually a good day. The day before, they had done five. 

This was not because there was a shortage of people who needed these miraculous mRNA vaccines. We, like much of the rural South, have barely cracked a 40% vaccination rate for adults. 

How could this be? Bastrop County is the kind of place where people will pull over and change a tire for you. Where we just banded together to pull each other out of the snow during a freak Texas freeze. We’re part of a state where flooding and hurricanes bring out the so-called Cajun Navy to rescue neighbors from danger, often at grave risk. 

What could have happened to make people so indifferent to their own health–let alone to the health of the most vulnerable in our community? People who I know are good people are not only doing a stupid thing by not getting vaccinated, some are actively trying to convince others to follow their lead. What’s gotten between them and their better angels?

Well, the answer to this trick question is of course that nobody thinks that’s what they’re doing. 

What’s happened is that otherwise good people have been grossly deceived, they have been infected with a different kind of virus, one that takes otherwise smart and caring people and turns them against their own interests and the people they love. 

It should be said that this is not a new phenomenon. Two thousand years ago, in the depths of the Antonine Plague, Marcus Aurelius wrote “an infected mind is far more dangerous pestilence than any plague–because one threatens your life, the other destroys your character.” Yet the mentally infected in the Roman Empire were effectively quarantined from each other by time and distance. When I posted a version of this quote on Instagram last week to my one million followers, the comments section was immediately besieged by anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers and COVID-deniers who have been empowered and enabled by technology to infect others with their ignorance and conspiracy theories. 

These angry posters are nothing like my politely vaccine-hesitant neighbors, the problem is that the message they are spreading is what has trickled down to the folks I share a fence line with and contributed to a cultural consciousness where a solid quart of the population is declining to protect themselves from a virus that has killed 610,000 of their fellow citizens. Rural America has proven to be particularly fertile ground for the doubt and denial these messages sow, dramatically lagging behind the rest of the country in vaccination rates. Talk to anyone about why they haven’t been vaccinated and they will inevitably lead you back to something they heard about on social media. 

Due to the abysmal failures of platforms like Facebook and Twitter, it has fallen on content creators, Nextdoor neighbors and social media users to block and report misinformation in an endless game of whack-a-mole. (Or worse, getting sucked into pointless, circular arguments) Is this efficient? Or fair? I have to either sit idly by as my own audience is targeted by brigands of COVID-deniers or I have to bail out an ocean of untruth with a thimble.

Couldn’t these platforms just, you know, plug the hole in the boat?

Make no mistake, Facebook and Twitter and even Nextdoor–which collectively employ tens of thousands of people–each has the tools to dramatically decrease the spread of misinformation on their platform. There’s a reason one can spend hours on Instagram without seeing a naked breast. Facebook is able, magically, to know whether you’re using your real name for your account. Content on YouTube is instanted vetted against vast databases of copyrights for infringements. Because it is in the financial (or legal) interests of these companies to filter this way, they do. 

There is almost no feature on social media that was not intentionally designed and no piece of content surfaced to the user that is not selected purposefully by their algorithms. The most brilliant designers, behavioral scientists and engineers have spent decades perfecting a system optimized for engagement and virality. It’s not an accident that Facebook’s Newsfeed is the most popular news platform in the world. Literally, the smartest people in the world worked to make it so…and are paid gobsmacking amounts of money to fine tune it.

They can do something about this problem. They haven’t. Why?

It just happens that misinformation, like political polarization, tends to be very good for business. As I wrote about in Trust Me, I’m Lying, outrage is a feature, not a bug of our online world. Infected minds–be they by conspiracies, misinformation or outright malevolence–are active minds that love to post, comment, share…with an almost inhuman intensity. A recent report has shown, the majority of anti-vaccine sentiment can be traced back to twelve individuals, who source and spread bad science, in bad faith or stupidity or most likely a combination of the two. Just like whales and compulsive gamblers are the most profitable customers for casinos, these super spreaders keep engagement high. 

The way to protect the public is obvious: Ban them. Algorithmically-punish accounts which share their content. Quarantine accounts infected until this temporary fit of insanity passes. Artificially boost the information that vulnerable members of society desperately need to hear until they’ve heard it. Political parties on both sides of the aisle use social media data to target prospective voters and corporations use the same tools to turn those people into customers. It’s time to demand these platforms use their own tools to save lives and serve the common good in what is clearly the crisis of our lifetimes. 

Might that be bad for business? Might it upset some culture-warriors?

Perhaps. But Marcus Aurelius, who led brilliantly and selflessly during the Antonine Plague, has a reminder that Zuckerberg and Dorsey and Silicon Valley needs to hear:

Just do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter.

There are real consequences to allowing this to continue. Not in the abstract, not statistically, but with your neighbors and loved ones, as we just experienced here in my town where a beloved food truck owner died of COVID.

Where could she have possibly been convinced to reject a life-saving vaccine?

And so another preventable casualty must be laid to rest at the feet of social media…and by no means the last unless we do something. 

If you’re not vaccinated, you’ve never been more vulnerable. If you don’t care about that, think of the millions of children who can’t be vaccinated, the people in nursing homes, cancer wards, etc. 

P.S. If you haven’t read Trust Me I’m Lying, I encourage you to read it. You can pick up a copy at my bookshop, The Painted Porch. You can also get a signed copy here. 

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18 Things I Stole From Some of History’s Greatest Leaders

People think that leadership is something that just happens. One is anointed a leader. One is promoted to leadership. One is born into leadership. And of course, this is not the case.

“Leadership,” Eisenhower said, “is the art of getting someone else to do something that you want done because he wants to do it.” Which means that, like any art, leadership is something that has to be studied. You have to practice and develop skills. Like an apprentice, you have to get yourself in the vicinity of the greats. You have to, as Marcus Aurelius wrote of his own development as a leader, “go straight to the seat of intelligence.”

No one comes out of the womb a leader. And yet we’re all leaders in one way or another—of families, of companies, of a team, of an audience, of a group of friends, of ourselves. So there’s no one who wouldn’t benefit from learning some of the essential lessons on the art of leadership from some of history’s greatest leaders. Lessons on how to inspire people, lessons on how to survive crises, lessons on how to treat people, lessons on how to learn. These 18 by no means make a complete list, but if you implement even a couple of them, I’m comfortable guaranteeing you’ll be a better leader for it. But perhaps the first and most important lesson we learn from the leaders I talk about below is that leadership is a skill that one could refine over multiple lifetimes—so the sooner you start the better.

A Leader Is A Reader

Harry Truman famously said that not all readers are leaders but all leaders are readers—they have to be. And they certainly aren’t reading to impress people or for the mental gymnastics. It’s to get better! It’s to find things they can use. Not at the dinner table or on Twitter, but in their real lives. “One common characteristic of virtually all great leaders I have known is that they have been great readers,” Richard Nixon would write later in life. “Reading not only enlarges and challenges the mind; it engages and exercises the brain. Today’s youth who sits mesmerized by a television screen is not going to be tomorrow’s leader.” Great advice… that a reader of history also knows that Nixon did not quite live up to. In all, Nixon watched over 500 movies while in office in less than 6 years. Might he have been better served by engaging and exercising his brain? Might he have been better off if he’d had more of his assumptions challenged? A leader must learn from the experiences of others. A leader must be challenged. A leader must prepare themselves for the things they’ll only be able to experience once, by learning from the experiences of others. Because, to paraphrase the soldier-philosopher General James Mattis, it is unconscionable to fill up body bags while you get your education solely by experience, one mistake at a time. A leader must be a reader. It’s not just the best way, it’s the only way. 

A Leader Knows What They Stand For

There’s a story of Mattis, as a very senior officer, who took over guard duty on Christmas so a soldier could be home with his family. These types of gestures abound in the lore around Mattis. There’s the story of Mattis exposing himself to the elements and danger in Iraq like a common soldier and countless other incidents. With modesty, he would attribute these examples of leadership to a philosophy he picked up in his early years as a Marine. “Know what you will stand for and, more important, what you won’t stand for,” Mattis wrote. “State your flat-ass rules and stick to them.” Marcus Aurelius called them “epithets for the self.” Upright. Modest. Straightforward. Sane. Cooperative. Disinterested. Those were his non-negotiables. “If you maintain your claim to these epithets,” Marcus wrote, “without caring if others apply them to you or not—you’ll become a new person, living a new life.” That’s what Mattis believed too. He said having character is harder than having physical courage. The less disciplined, more self-centered, more power-obsessed types of people are everywhere and try everything to make you those things too. Draw the bottom line, Mattis said, remove any uncertainty, clear out the ambiguity until they don’t “come as a surprise to anyone.”

A Leader Accepts Reality On Reality’s Terms

When James Stockdale was shot down over Vietnam and taken prisoner, he knew he would be the highest-ranking POW the North Vietnamese had ever captured. That meant that at the Hỏa Lò Prison, victory for his captors was getting Stockdale to break. He was deprived and tortured and beaten and stripped of his possessions and forced to wear leg irons in solitary confinement for two of the seven years he ultimately spent in solitary confinement. But when later asked if he had it the worst in Hỏa Lò, Stockled said no. Who could have possibly had it worse? “Oh, that’s easy,” Stockdale answered, “the optimists…The ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.” When things are hard, when things are scary, when we’re tired, when we’ve had a run of bad luck, that’s what happens: magical thinking kicks in. This will all be over soon, we convince ourselves. Great leaders resist this kind of thinking. Whether they’re facing a crisis or a downturn or a disruptive competitor or a spectacular losing streak, hope and denial and running away are never part of their strategy. As Jocko Willink told me on the Daily Stoic podcast a few months into the pandemic, the only type of people among his client base of businesses and nonprofits and military leaders who had managed to thrive were the ones who accepted the reality of the situation immediately. Unflinchingly. That’s what Stockdale said too:  “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” It doesn’t matter if you’re in the Hỏa Lò Prison or the midst of the biggest economic crisis of our generation, that’s the only way through. 

A Leader Puts Everything In The Calm and Mild Light

The job of a leader, George Washington said, was to look at all events, all opportunities, all people through the “calm light of mild philosophy.” The phrase comes from the play Cato, about the Roman Senator and Stoic philosopher by Joseph Addison. In a single two week period in 1797, Washington quoted that same line in three different letters. And later, in Washington’s greatest but probably least known moment, when he talked down the mutinous troops who were plotting to overthrow the U.S government at Newburgh, he quoted the same line again, as he urged them away from acting on their anger and frustration. “It shapes and builds up the soul,” Seneca wrote of the calm lights of mild philosophy, “it gives order to life, guides action, shows what should and shouldn’t be done—it sits at the rudder steering our course as we vacillate in uncertainties…Countless things happen every hour that require advice, and such advice is to be sought out in philosophy.” 

A Leader Seeks To Serve Others

Eleanor Roosevelt said that the surest way to happiness was to seek it for others. She was referring to doing good, to being of service. It’s how she found happiness despite the tragic loss of her father, her painful childhood, her troubled marriage. And it’s how she became one of the most powerful and influential female activ­ists in history and America’s most important First Lady. She did good. She made herself useful. She sought relief for others. Marcus Aurelius said that his only job was to do works for the common good. That is: a leader’s only job is to do good. To help others. To be of service. To think less of your problems and try to help others with theirs.

A Leader Is Not Passionate 

A young basketball player named Lewis Alcindor Jr., who won three national championships with John Wooden at UCLA, used one word to describe the style of his famous coach: “dispassionate.” As in not passionate. Wooden wasn’t about rah-rah speeches or screaming from the sidelines. He saw those extra emotions as a burden. Instead, his philosophy was about being in control and doing your job and never being “passion’s slave.” The player who learned that lesson from Wooden would later change his name to one you remember better: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. 

A Leader Knows What To Prioritize

Success, money, and power can intoxicate a leader. The great ones stay sober because they know what to prioritize. One look at Angela Merkel, one of the most powerful women on the planet is revealing. She lives in an apartment rather than a palace. She is plain and modest—one writer said that unpretentiousness is Merkel’s main weapon—unlike most world leaders intoxicated with position. Or look at Warren Buffett, whose net worth is approximately $65 billion, lives in the same house he bought in 1958 for $31,500. Or San Antonio Spurs star Kawhi Leonard, who gets around in the 1997 Chevy Tahoe he’s had since he was a teenager, even with a contract worth some $94 million. Why? It’s not because Merkel, Buffett, and Leonard are cheap. It’s because the things that matter to them are. It’s not an accident that they’ve become who they are. It’s the result of prioritizing, which allows them the freedom to pursue the things they most care about.

A Leader Sets High Standards 

Football coach Bill Walsh took the 49ers from the worst team in the league to Super Bowl champions in just three years. How? He created a culture of excellence and instilled what he called his “Standard of Performance.” That is: How to practice. How to dress. How to hold the ball. Where to be on a play down to the very inch. Which skills mattered for each position. He knew that by upholding these standards, “the score would take care of itself.”

A Leader Persists 

“Two words,” Epictetus says, “should be committed to memory and obeyed by alternatively exhorting and restraining ourselves, words that will ensure we lead a mainly blameless and untroubled life.” Those two words were ‘persist and resist.’ A leader knows that an obstacle standing in their way isn’t going anywhere on its own. A leader is in it for the long haul. Others might give up but the leader says, as Margaret Thatcher famously did: “You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.” A leader knows that genius often really is just persistence in disguise.

A Leader Does The Right Thing

When the Antonine Plague hit Rome and plunged its economy, fundraising efforts began with a masterstroke of inspirational leadership. As one biographer wrote, the emperor Marcus Aurelius “conducted a two-month sale of imperial effects and possessions, putting under the hammer not just sumptuous furniture from the imperial apartments, gold goblets, silver flagons, crystals and chandeliers, but also his wife’s silken, gold-embroidered robes and her jewels.” Funerals for plague victims were paid for by the imperial state. He audited his own officials and allowed no expenditures without approval. In a crisis, people must trust that their leaders are doing the right thing and that they are bearing the same burden as the citizens—if not a greater one.

A Leader Listens To Feedback

The great ancient Roman historian Cassius Dio contrasted Marcus Aurelius’ greatness against his son Commodus’ fatal flaw. Marcus famously surrounded himself with brilliant public servants and talked about how he would gladly change if anyone could show him he were looking at things the wrong way. Commodus, on the other hand, had “many guardians, among whom were numbered the best men of the senate. But their suggestions and counsels Commodus rejected.” Dio adds that “[Commodus] was not naturally wicked, but, on the contrary, as guileless as any man that ever lived.” This innocent young man became one of history’s most wicked beings because he made the deliberate decision to reject his advisors advice and feedback. As Dwight D. Eisenhower, one of the best commanders of the last century, said of the necessity of listening to feedback: “I have no sympathy with anyone, whatever his station, who will not brook criticism. We are here to get the best possible results.”

A Leader Stands Up and Stands Out

In a famous exchange, the lesser known philosopher Agrippinus said he was spurning an invitation to attend some banquet being put on by Nero. A fellow philosopher, one who had felt inclined to attend, asked for an explanation. Agrippinus responded with an interesting analogy. He said people are like threads in a garment. Most people see it as their job to match the other threads in color and style. They want to blend in, so the fabric will match. But “I want to be the red,” Agrippinus said, “that small and brilliant portion which causes the rest to appear comely and beautiful…’Be like the majority of people?’ And if I do that, how shall I any longer be the red?” He wanted to be red even if it meant being beheaded or exiled.  Because he felt it was right. Because he wouldn’t be anything other than his true self. That’s the leader’s job. It is not to go along to get along. It is not to be another replaceable thread in an otherwise unremarkable garment. The leader’s job is to stand up. To stand out. To speak the truth. As Sam Walker writes in his wonderful book The Captain Class about the unsung leaders who have taken their teams on incredible championship runs, one of the traits great leaders share is they have “strong convictions and the courage to stand apart.

A Leader is Always Composed 

“The first qualification of a general is a cool head,” Napoleon once said. Remaining cool-headed in times of crisis and adversity is one of the most critical skills. The worst that can happen is not the event itself but the event and you losing your cool.

A Leader Makes Doesn’t Make Problems Worse

Chris Hadfield, the astronaut, reminds us that there is “no problem so bad that we can’t make it worse” (and panicking is often a way to do that). Yet how many of us have had bosses we didn’t want to keep informed about problems because if we did, they’d only make solving them harder? Leaders have to be a source of good energy and solutions. They can’t make hard things harder—they need to make hard things easier for their employees or followers. That’s the job.

A Leader Prepares  for Chaos 

As the legendary coach Phil Jackson would explain, “Once I had the Bulls practice in silence; on another occasion I made them scrimmage with the lights out. Not because I want to make their lives miserable but because I want to prepare them for the inevitable chaos that occurs the minute they step onto a basketball court.”

A Leader Has a Guiding Philosophy

I mentioned Bill Walsh’s “Standard of Performance” philosophy above. Seahawks coach Pete Carroll is known for his “Win Forever” philosophy—the winning mindset he aims to instill in his staff and players. The great coach John Wooden had his “Pyramid of Success” philosophy. These philosophies and frameworks are critical as they codify the principles and rules by which a team will make decisions and operate on a day-to-day basis. If you don’t have a philosophy, how do you expect to know what to do in tough situations? Or when things are confusing or complicated? Being reactive is never a position of strength. It is not a position a leader should find themselves in.

A Leader Gets The Best Out Of People

Aside from Marcus Aurelius’ 3-page recount of everything he learned from his mentor, Antoninus Pius is largely forgotten by history. Ernest Renan wrote that if he hadn’t groomed Marcus so successfully, his name would today be to us what Marcus’ is. All his adult life, Marcus strived to be a disciple of his adopted step-father, to whom he saw, according to the french philosopher Ernest Renan, as the “the most beautiful model of a perfect life.” What was the most important lesson he learned from Antoninus? “This in particular,” Marcus said, “his willingness to yield the floor to experts—in oratory, law, psychology, whatever—and to support them energetically, so that each of them could fulfill his potential.” This in particular because it would have been more natural for him to have often been frustrated and disappointed with people. It’s something that lots of brilliant leaders and talented people have wrestled with through the centuries—they expect of others what they expect of themselves, so they are constantly upset and let down. We know that Marcus found a better way through. “So long as a person did anything good,” Cassius Dio wrote, “he would praise him and use him for the service in which he excelled, but to his other conduct he paid no attention.” That’s key for anyone in any position of leadership. Your standards are for you. You only control your behavior. You have to meet everyone else where they are. Get as much as you can from them and of them. See the good in them. Lean into their strengths rather than disdain their weaknesses. Focus on what is special and unique about them instead of zeroing in on the ways they are not as good as you. That’s not only the kind way to lead, it’s the only effective way.

A Leader Isn’t All About Business

Randall Stutman has been a coach to some of Wall Street’s biggest CEOs for decades. His clients have included Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America. His consulting and advising agency, CRA, has worked with thousands of executives at hundreds of hedge funds and banks. These are people whose entire livelihood depends on them being perpetually ready to respond to the daily, hourly, sometimes even minute-by-minute volatility of the world’s financial markets. Stutman surprised me when he told me that he often asks these very busy executives how they recharge, given the all-consuming nature of their work. The best, he found, have at least one hobby that gives them peace — things like sailing, long-distance cycling, listening quietly to classical music, scuba diving, riding motorcycles, and fly fishing. There is a surprising commonality between all the hobbies: An absence of voices. For leaders, people who make countless high-stakes decisions in the course of a day, a couple hours without chatter, without other people in their ear, where they can simply think (or not think), is essential.

P.S. On Monday, we announced what is the longest and most in depth course ever built over at Daily Stoic. It’s one I’ve been working on for 6 months, The Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge: Ancient Wisdom For Modern Leaders . It features 63 total emails, packed with the best wisdom from the Stoics on what it takes to become a great leader. I also assembled some of today’s great leaders to be for you what Antoninus was for Marcus, as I mentioned above. Once a week, there will be a Leadership Deep Dive—a live video session where I’ll be interviewing a guest with expertise on that week’s theme before we open it up to questions from course participants. Randall Stutman is actually one of those leadership experts. He’s been a coach and a mentor of mine over the years, so I’m excited to be able to bring him—as well as military generals and pioneering businesswomen and CEOs of professional sports teams, among others—into the Daily Stoic community. I’m really excited about this course. I think it’s going to be one of our best. I would love to have you join us—you can learn more at dailystoic.com/leadershipchallenge

 

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Everything You Say Yes To Is Saying No To Something Else

It is with some pride that I can think of some “big” things I have passed on doing.

Tickets to the Super Bowl.

A trip to Necker Island.

More than a few different book deals.

I’m not proud because I think I am better than those things, it was just that I had better things to do with that time, at that time. Sometimes it was family, sometimes it was cooler work opportunities, sometimes it was just because I was exhausted and I needed to rest. 

Just because you’re offered something that might be good for your career, that would definitely feel good to your ego, that most people would have said yes to, doesn’t mean you have to listen to your ego and accept the offer. You can say NO.

It’s easy to forget that, especially with peer pressure and FOMO, but it’s true. 

There’s a great quote from Nassim Taleb:

“You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.”

I didn’t need it. I had competing interests. I could say “No,” so I did. 

That’s a rich feeling, that’s only tangentially related to money.  

Yet if I am being honest, like most people, it’s not one I indulge myself in enough.

In the last year, as the pandemic radically reoriented so many parts of everybody’s lives, I was reminded painfully of what economists call opportunity costs. I’ve always been productive and disciplined, so I was under the impression that even with all my traveling and various projects, I wasn’t suffering much for it. 

I was producing books, after all. I spent lots of time with my kids. I was exercising. I was writing my daily emails for Daily Stoic and Daily Dad, my Reading List Email each month and this email each week. Obviously there was no problem with the things I had been accepting to that point. But in having so much suddenly taken away, I was given the gift of seeing what all the busyness was actually costing me.

The last twelve months have been the most creatively fulfilling and productive months of my life. It turns out (surprise!) that being home for bath and dinner every single night had a massive impact on my relationship with my young children, their behavior and my marriage. 

Obviously the costs of this had been there all along, I just wasn’t aware of them—or I was denying them. Even if you’re aware that you’re, say, 80% as effective while on the road as you are when you’re at home, in your routine, it’s easy to miss the simple math: Four days of traveling is the equivalent of taking a full day off…without the benefits of, you know, a day off. 

So while I do take pride in some of the things I’ve said no to over the years, the reality is that I have been undisciplined more often that I was disciplined. I may have been producing…but it wasn’t as good as it could be. And when it didn’t feel like work was suffering, it was only because other parts of life were.

All those meetings I didn’t really need to go to. Those clients I really didn’t respect or like that I worked with anyway. Interview or press that I did because it was flattering. The time when my kid wanted my attention, but I was glued to my phone, to some email—so glued that my “no” was implicit. I didn’t have to be somewhere else. I was home…and yet I was gone all the same. 

You have to understand: Everything you say “YES” to in this life means saying “NO” to something else. 

The decision to agree to that coffee meeting means saying no to an hour of reading. The decision to hop on this Zoom call means not hopping on the bike and getting some exercise in . The decision to stay up late to watch another episode of some mindless television show or scroll on your phone is saying no to a productive early morning. The decision to go to some conference across the country means missing one of those meaningful developmental moments with your young kids right there at home.  

Which of these will you get more out of? Which will produce the growth you seek? Which will you remember ten years, ten weeks, hell, ten days from now?

Why is it so hard for us to see this? Inertia for one. Ego for another. We identify with being busy, we think it’s taking a step towards our best work, but that’s because we’re blinded to the long-term costs. 

There is a haunting clip of Joan Rivers, well into her seventies, in which she is asked why she keeps working, why she is always on the road, always looking for more gigs. Telling the interviewer about the fear that drives her, she holds up an empty calendar. “If my book ever looked like this, it would mean that nobody wants me, that everything I ever tried to do in life didn’t work. Nobody cared and I’ve been totally forgotten.” 

That’s an attitude that creates a lot of work, but does it create anybody’s best work? No, desperation stinks. It corrupts. It wears you down. 

What kind of rich life is that? 

You have to be able to say no. You have to be able to pick your shots. And if success doesn’t earn you that right, what kind of success is it? If you’re not strong or free enough to pass on things, are you really that strong or free?

In fact, really caring about your work is a great reason to need to be able to say no to stuff. 

A pilot gets to say, “Sorry, I’m on standby,” as an excuse to get out of things. Doctors and firemen and police officers get to use being “on call” as a shield. But are we not on call in our own lives? Isn’t there something (or someone) that we’re preserving our full capacities for? Are our own bodies not on call for our families, for our self-improvement, for our calling? 

I want to remind you (and myself) to always think about what you’re really being asked to give. Because the answer is often a piece of your life, usually in exchange for something you don’t even want. Remember, that’s what time is. It’s your life, it’s your flesh and blood, that you can never get back.

And when we get better at saying “No,” we get to experience the benefits of the flip-side of what I said above. Because everything we say “No” to means you’re saying “Yes” to something else. 

To your important work.

To your health.

To the people you love.

Even to just a moment of stillness in a busy life.

You deserve that. You’ll be proud of yourself if you do it. 

P.S. For a limited time, the ebook edition of my book Stillness is the Key is nearly 90% off! Whether you want to get better at saying NO or at knowing what to say YES to, whether you’re overwhelmed with opportunities or with problems and uncertainties and emails and notifications and alerts and one thing after another—Stillness is the Key is for you. It is a formula for keeping steady, disciplined, focused, and at peace, so you can access your full capabilities. It was an instant #1 bestseller and will not be on sale for long so grab it now! Or if you prefer hardcover, you can order those in the Daily Stoic store, where you can also get a personalized signed copy.

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Don’t Go To Business School. Read These 18 Books Instead

Warren Buffett considers the foundation of his multi-billion dollar empire to be a book. At 19 years old, he bought a copy of The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. We don’t know exactly what he paid for it, but in the early 1950s, a hardcover typically went for $1.30. Today, Buffett’s worth $108.7 billion, having given away some $37 billion to charitable causes. 

Not a bad ROI!

Some people might recoil at categorizing a book that way, but as a lover of literature, I have no problem with it. I myself wouldn’t be writing this to you today if I hadn’t bought a copy of Meditations in 2006 for $8.25 on Amazon. That book of philosophy taught me not just about life, but also schooled me in the art of writing, in working with and managing people, and gave me the speciality which I now write my own books about. Again, not a bad ROI!

One of the questions I get most is about business and marketing books specifically. In school, kids are already assigned literature and history. But about books that teach you about business? About money? About building something? About getting people interested in what you’ve built? 

There are some amazing, life-changing books in these categories, some of which also rank among the best investments I’ve made in my life. I returned to many of them during the crazy twelve months of renovating and opening our new bookstore during the pandemic. And now, we carry many of the books below at The Painted Porch.

If you’re looking for a business education, these 18 books are a lot cheaper than an MBA.

Enjoy!

Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years by Paul B. Carroll and What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars by Jim Paul and Brendan Moynihan 

Any fool can learn by experience, I prefer to learn by the experiences of others, is how Bismark put it. Most business books are about what went right. This one isn’t. It’s about painful failures. The ones that get repeated over and over and over. This book will humble future CEOs and keep them conservative—which is an important balance for any ambitious person. Pair Carroll’s book with the story of Jim Paul, who made some successful moves to become the Governor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which convinced him that he was special, different, and exempt from the rules. Once the markets turned against his trades, he lost it all — his fortune, job, and reputation. That’s what makes this book a critical part in understanding how letting arrogance and pride get to your head will ruin your business. Learn from stories like this instead of by your own trial and error. Think about that next time you believe you have it all figured out. (Tim Ferriss produced the audiobook version of this, which I recommend.)

The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King by Rich Cohen  

This book tells the incredible story of Sam Zemurray, the penniless Russian immigrant who, through pure hustle and drive, became the CEO of United Fruit, the biggest fruit company in the world. The greatness of Zemurray, as author Rich Cohen puts it, “lies in the fact that he never lost faith in his ability to salvage a situation.” For Zemurray, there was always a countermove, always a way through an obstacle, no matter how dire the situation. That’s why, although he was a morally complicated man, I used his story in The Obstacle is the Way. You can listen to my interview with Rich Cohen here as well.

Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight  

This is the memoir of the founder of Nike, it’s really the story of a lost kid trying to find meaning in his life and it ends with him creating a multi-billion dollar company that changes sports forever. What I love about this book is that 90% of it is about the early years. It’s not about how to sign Jordan, but about how he sold shoes out of the trunk of his car. The main thing I took from it? You actually have to love the thing you’re going into business to sell. Live and love it and breathe it.

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown  

This is a book that focuses you, that makes you question many of the projects and commitments and assumptions you’ve said yes to over the years. Though the book is about applying design-style thinking to your life, I really think it is just a solid book of philosophy, stories and anecdotes that make you reconsider your priorities. That’s all you can hope for from a book and it more than delivers, as Greg did when he came on the Daily Stoic podcast.

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t by Jim Collins 

There is a little pseudo-science to Collins’ research but I don’t care about that. This is a great book. He creates a framework for how to think about building a great company. You get the right people on the bus, you spend time and energy winding up the flywheel and if you’re lucky you break through. It’s not a complicated formula but the examples in this book are helpful. Even if you don’t read it, the title is helpful. You don’t want to be good, you want to be great.

Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin 

You wouldn’t tell anyone that you saw a cow. You would tell them if you saw a purple cow. Seth wrote this book many years ago but it’s a classic because it says something basic, timeless and important. Make remarkable things, do remarkable marketing. It’s the best way to grow. It’s the best way to sell. Even Jay-Z has recommended this book—to Oprah no less! As a marketer, the clearest takeaway from the book is: Represent people who stand out, it makes it easier to do what you do. 

The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk! by Al Ries and Jack Trout 

It’s a quick read, but I think you’ll come away with one or two key lessons that with stick with you. Personally, I found the valuable lessons were a bit front loaded (the first couple laws are the best). In short: turns out the best “marketing” decisions you’ll make come long before the paint is dried (or even applied) to the product. Forget the notion that marketing is something that is applied after the product is completed and aim to achieve Product-Market Fit. As I write in Growth Hacker Marketing, the single worst marketing decision you can make is to work on a product that nobody wants.

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant and Blue Ocean Shift: Beyond Competing – Proven Steps to Inspire Confidence and Seize New Growth by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne  

The best law in the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing is “invent your own category.” Well, Blue Ocean Strategy is entirely about that. It’s about competing where there is the least amount of competition. It teaches you how successful businesses focus on being different, about carving out a new space for themselves. Instead of battling numerous competitors in a contested “red ocean,” it’s far better to seek fresh, uncontested “blue” water. If Blue Ocean Strategy is the what behind the theory of creating new markets rather than competing in crowded ones, then Blue Ocean Shift is the how and the mindset required to do so. Lots of good examples in this book, including a bunch that are not from business (“blue ocean” thinking also applies to government, NGOs, leadership, etc.).

The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future by Chris Guillebeau

This book is my favorite of Chris’s and a must read. You don’t have to have a lot of money to start a company, and not every idea has to be some massive world changing thing. Start small. Be smart. Be creative. I talked about those themes and more when I interviewed Chris in early April of 2020 while he was feeling the fresh sting of having to cancel a 40-city tour for his then just-released book, The Money Tree.

Leadership: In Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin

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

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building A Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz 

Ben Horowitz wrote a fantastic book. If it was the only thing he’d ever done, I’d consider him a master. But it’s not. Building billion-dollar companies, slogging through the depths of multiple recessions, mentoring hundreds of entrepreneurs—these are the things Ben does for his day job. Writing for him is just a side project distilling that hard won experience into lessons we can use. This book is inspiring, it’s honest, it’s practical and it’s actually real. There’s a reason Horowitz’s essays have taken hold online second only to those of Paul Graham. 

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Tim Ferriss  

We talked about ROI at the beginning of this piece. The question to ask yourself with this book is, What’s one life-changing tool worth? What’s one solid new habit worth over the course of a life? Because that’s what you will find in here. Emerson talked about how we can learn something from everyone we meet, because everyone is better than us at something. Tim is a master at learning something from everyone he meets, interviews, works with and then sharing that wisdom with us. 

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller Sr. by Ron Chernow

I found Rockefeller to be strangely stoic, incredibly resilient, and, despite his reputation as a robber baron, humble and compassionate. Most people get worse as they get successful, many more get worse as they age. In fact, Rockefeller began tithing his money with his first job and gave more of it away as he became successful. He grew more open-minded the older he became, more generous, more pious, more dedicated to making a difference. And what made Rockefeller stand apart as a young man was his ability to remain cool-headed in adversity and grounded in success, always on an even keel, never letting excessive passion and emotion hold sway over him. That’s why I used his story to open the discipline of perception section of The Obstacle is the Way. 

The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success by William N. Thorndike

This book is also one of Warren Buffett’s favorite books. Instead of focusing on celebrity business figures who were good at self-promotion, it studies the heads of companies like the Washington Post, Berkshire Hathaway, General Dynamics, Capital Cities Broadcasting, TCI, and Teledyne who created billions of dollars of wealth through a series of unorthodox business and leadership strategies we can all learn from. I discovered the book after reading Katharine Graham’s epic autobiography—an exceptional leader and CEO.

Empire State of Mind: How Jay Z Went from Street Corner to Corner Office by Zack O’Malley Greenburg

This is a biography that also functions as a business book. It shows how as a young man in Brooklyn, Jay applied hustling techniques to the music business and eventually built his empire. A true hustler, he never did only one thing — from music to fashion to sports, Jay dominated each field, always operating on the same principles. As he puts it, “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man!” And related to that, I also recommend The 50th Law, which tells the stories of many such individuals and will stick with you just as long.

Oh and one more book…by me.

Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work That Lasts by Ryan Holiday

Perennial sellers are books like What To Expect When You’re Expecting, Good to Great, The Great Gatsby, movies like “The Shawshank Redemption” or “A Christmas Story,” or songs like “Happy Birthday” or “Candle In The Wind.” It’s products like Red Wing’s 1907 Work Boot (which confusingly only dates back to the 1950s) or restaurants like The Original Pantry, which has been open every single day since 1924. People think that perennial sellers are created by accident. The truth is that when you study them, there are all sorts of lessons to be learned from the classics, there are timeless principles to be applied in your own pursuit to make something that lasts.

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Of course there are many other books that belong on this list. If you want some more related book recommendations, here is a list of essential strategy books, biographies and you can get books recommended each month by signing up here.

The post Don’t Go To Business School. Read These 18 Books Instead appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

34 Mistakes on the Way to 34 Years Old

The great Hyman Rickover used to say that success teaches nothing, only failure is educational. I don’t know if that’s completely true, but I will say that my own short time on this planet has had its share of teachable moments rooted in mistakes, usually of my own making. 

For going on ten years now, I have done a piece on my birthday around the idea of lessons learned, either from preceding twelve months or over the course of my life up to that point. This year, at 34, I thought I’d focus exclusively on my failures and what they’ve taught me. And I can assure you, ten years into my career as a published author, ten years into entrepreneurship, and going on fifteen years with my now wife, five years into having a family, I have made lots of mistakes. 

If I have been successful at all, it’s been through learning from these mistakes (painfully) and by benefiting from the mistakes of others (a less painful way to learn). With that, I share these things I learned the hard way…or continue to struggle with.

Also check out my pieces from 33, 32, 31, and however else long I have been writing this annual piece.

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[*] If I had to go back and give a younger version of myself one word of advice it would be: “Relax.” It’s almost preposterous how intensely, passionately, anxiously I was worked up about certain things—how seriously I took things that, in retrospect, matter so little that I don’t even remember them. Of course, earnestness, commitment, and ambition are virtues (more so than their opposites, anyway) but taken too far they become liabilities, to happiness and objectivity most of all. 

[*] When I look back on my own writing, the stuff that makes me cringe isn’t necessarily even stuff I was wrong about. What disturbs me is the certainty. I thought I knew, but I didn’t really know. I wasn’t even close to knowing. Ego never ages well, even if it was correct in a narrow instance. As I get older, I’d like to think I am more open to nuance, less prone to black and white statements, and humbler in how I come off. 

[*] My first book was an exposé about media manipulation and fake news. I was convinced that if it didn’t come out right away, I’d get scooped, or miss my window of opportunity. This is what I was anxiously insisting to my publisher…in 2011! I thought I was out of time, in fact I was probably a half decade early (it’s second best sales week was in 2017!). Stuff is better when you don’t rush. If you think you have to rush, you’re either whipping yourself for no reason, or pursuing something too ephemeral to begin with. 

[*] I also should have fought harder on the title of my first book (I wanted to call it Confessions of a Media Manipulator, not Trust Me, I’m Lying), and I should have stuck to my guns about the prologue of Ego is the Enemy (I didn’t want to be in it, they wanted me in it). In creative disputes, the publisher/studio/investors/etc are not always wrong but they often are. And even when they’re not, you have to remember, that whatever the decision, you have to live with it in a way that they do not. I’ve regretted anytime I did not go with what was in my heart as an artist.

[*] The book I am most proud of is my book Conspiracy. The only parts of it I wish I could do differently are the few instances which, in retrospect, I was too conscious of what other people might think (particularly journalists). I should have just played it exactly how I felt like playing it. Again, do what’s in your heart. 

[*] Why did I move to New York? I guess I thought I was supposed to. It wasn’t a mistake exactly, but it’s definitely not the right place for me to live—not permanently anyway. Life is too short to live somewhere that doesn’t make you happy. 

[*] As I explained on reddit a while back, I wish I had gotten married and had kids earlier. I wasn’t really late for my age bracket (29 and 30), but when I look back at the last few years—including even the pandemic—I’m not sure what I waited for. Elizabeth Bruenig’s New York Times piece on having kids at 25 expressed this better than I can, but I think I was worried I wasn’t ready, but the truth is you’re never ready. You learn by doing. You’re only putting off the thing that will provide you the most meaning and joy in your life. 

[*] In 2013, I started a business with a partner that my wife warned me against working with. I remember explaining to her why she was wrong and that I couldn’t possibly not do this because of some vague gut instinct of hers. It would turn out to share a commonality with almost all my mistakes and regrets: Not listening to my wife from the beginning. Anyway, this business turned into a nightmare, and it turned out that this partner was not someone I should have worked with. Who knew?

[*] Why have I so often expected differently of people who have already shown me who they are? Character is fate. Character is fate. 

[*] I bought my first bitcoin somewhere under $500. I’m still here working for a living, so that should tell you all you need to know about what kind of investor/gambler I am. It’s not that I’m afraid of risks, it’s that I have trouble putting the right amount behind risks when I take them. 

[*] Most of my regrets—things I wish I’d done, things I wish I’d said, stands I wish I’d taken—have one thing in common: Fear. We worry about what will happen if… But Marcus Aurelius has the answer: “You’ll meet tomorrow with the same weapons you have now.” I should have quit certain jobs sooner, I should have come out and said what I thought more clearly, I should have believed that I’d figure out how to get through it, even if things went wrong. 

[*] If you’d asked me in January 2020, if I could survive—professionally and personally—with no travel, no events, no dinners out, no get-togethers, I’d have said absolutely not. As it turns out, the last fifteen months have been not only rewarding but immensely productive in every sense. Why? Because clearly, those things I thought I had to do, I didn’t not actually have to do. I’m actually better and happier when I don’t. 

[*] That’s another lesson learned the hard way: Don’t say “Maybe” when you really want to say “no.” Just say no. The only person making a big deal about it is you. Just say no. How many events/meetings/wastes of time are you going to agree to and then regret before you learn this?

[*] It was sweetly painful over the fifteen months of the pandemic to get more than a year of consecutive bedtimes with my kids, to get an uninterrupted streak of morning walks and afternoons in the pool. It was sweet because I loved every minute of it. It was painful because I had chosen not to have this before, I had so often chosen the other things, the less important things we throw into that bucket of “work responsibilities.” It is intimidating to contemplate how easily it will be to slip back into the old way of doing things too. 

[*] It’s clear to me in retrospect that my desire for approval, for being seen, for being a part of something important or newsworthy or exciting, blinded me to the character of certain people I worked for. Of course, this was something those people understood and exploited in me and lots of other more vulnerable victims, but it’s still on me. You have to wake up to the ways that the wounds you experienced as a kid make you a mark, or create patterns in your life. It’s not your fault things happened to you, it is your fault if you don’t learn how to adjust accordingly. 

[*] Of all the people (or types of people) I’ve had strong negative opinions or judgements about from afar, only few turned out to be even close to as obnoxious or stupid or awful as I thought. In fact, more often than not, I ended up liking them quite a bit. The world works better when we get to know each other. 

[*] You know deep down that accomplishing things won’t make you happy, but I think I always fantasized that it would at least feel really good. I was so wrong. Hitting #1 for the first time as an author felt like…nothing. Being a “millionaire”…nothing. It’s a trick of evolution that drives us, and no one is immune from making this mistake. The mistake to really avoid though is the one that comes after the anti-climatic accomplishment, the one where you go: “Ah, it’s that I need to repeat this success, it’s that I didn’t get enough. More will do it.”

[*] There have been a lot of problems I could have solved earlier if I’d been more willing to seek out experts on the topic. It’s funny, that’s clearly what sports teams and military leaders and politicians were doing when they emailed me after having read one of my books. How much growth have I left on the table, how much pain have I needlessly endured by not picking up the phone myself?

[*] Somewhat less related but still related: It’s good to be frugal, but if you don’t spend your money to make your life or your relationships or your work easier, what exactly are you going to spend it on? Actually, what I’ve found is that it is very expensive to be cheap. You just pay for it in the form of a frustrated spouse or a stressful life or with shit that never works and you have to end up replacing a bunch of times anyway. Don’t grit your teeth and bear it. You can only get so far white knuckling things. Remove the friction, improve the system—and money (not a lot usually) should help you do that. I thought of this just the other day as I reached for a Sharpie that was nearly dry, that I had clearly put back in the drawer in my desk for like the fifth time instead of buying a new one (and there was still a part of me that hated throwing it away). Replace your dull tools! Upgrade your workshop! Find quality help! You are expending energy in the wrong places.  

[*] There’s a great Kurt Vonnegut story about marriage. He realized, fighting one day with his wife, that what they were really both saying was, “You’re not enough people.” You can only expect so much from a person. They can only deliver so much. When I think of relationships that have not worked out, or near breaking points of others, at the root of them was that: Expecting them to be too many people. 

[*] With 34 years of data now, I can confidently say that I have never once lost my temper and afterwards said, “I’m so glad I did that.” A corollary to this: I don’t recall the last time I spent time on social media and felt better after either. A corollary to this corollary: I regret almost every time I have expressed an opinion on social media. I don’t necessarily regret the opinion, I regret the lapse in self-control that culminated with me shouting into the void. 

[*] There are many books I regret powering through, far fewer that I regret quitting. Life is too short to put up with bad writing—bad anything really. If the food sucks, don’t finish it. If the speaker is boring, get up and leave. If the party is no fun, go home. 

[*] Needing things to be a certain way has continually prevented me from enjoying them as they are. 

[*] I’ve been lucky enough to sit across the table, literally, from some incredible people. Astronauts, musicians, athletes, entrepreneurs, politicians. The mistake I’ve made far too many times? Talking more than I listened. You get nervous, you want to impress, so you open your mouth. I tend to forget: Two ears, one mouth for a reason. In thirty years, are you going to want to look back on this chance encounter and think about what you said, or what you got them to say? So shut up!   

[*] I’ve done it so many times it’s now embarrassing but this is a pattern: I have an opinion or a frustration or a need that I don’t speak up about. It builds. By the time it finally does come to a head, the situation is past resolving. I’ve lost agents because of this, employees because of this, friends because of this. You have to speak to be heard. You can’t wait. You can’t let resentments pile up. Communication is not conflict. It preempts and prevents conflict. Everytime I forget this, it has cost me. 

[*] If you keep having to put down your horses, it’s because you’re riding them too hard. Unfortunately, I have lost a lot of otherwise great talent because I put too much on them. Just as athletes have to think about personal load management, coaches and GMs have to think about it for the whole team (and understand that every person has a different threshold).

[*] Good enough is usually good enough…except when it’s not. When I was in high school, I ran a 5:04 mile in one of my last races senior year. I remember thinking, “Well, that’s pretty good!” No part of me (nor did anyone around me) pressed to see if I could shave those few extra seconds off. I was so close! Why did I settle? Only later did I come to regret it…and of course, every day that passed made it more difficult to ever get back there. In my mid-twenties, I did finally break five minutes but mostly as a reminder to myself: Don’t be satisfied with getting close enough. Go all the way. “Almosts” are the most painful regrets. Especially almosts where you didn’t do your best. 

[*] My anxiety has brought about exactly the kind of stress or frustration I was hoping to avoid infinitely more times than it has prevented it from happening. Don’t ride out to meet your ruin...

[*] Epictetus says, “You can’t learn that which you think you already know.” Evaluating my response to the early warning signs of the pandemic, or why I missed taking advantage of certain investing opportunities (see crypto and housing mistakes above, among others), invariably it was my certainty or smugness that blocked me from seeing what a more open, curious person would have seen. 

[*] Just because someone you don’t respect holds a certain position, doesn’t mean the position is incorrect. And vice versa. One of the toughest things to do in this life is to think for yourself, to come up with your own judgements on issues, stripped of bias or preconceived notions. Almost every time I have looked for a shortcut—whenever I have not done the work—I’ve come to regret my views. 

[*] I grew up in a mostly conservative household, one that internalized a lot of that Reagan-esque suspicion of governing. But of course, this suspicion—especially when widely held—contributes to poor governance. Government is not a thing, at least in America. We are the government, just as much as we are traffic, we are culture, we are media. A line I heard that changed my worldview: “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.” I wasted a lot of time seeing politics as something you consume, when of course politics—going back to Aristotle—is always something we do. 

[*] Related, if success is not making your life easier—or at least, providing you more autonomy—what good is it? This was learned the hard way in our house. You’re not a beast of burden. Don’t treat yourself like one!

[*] This line from Springsteen captures, in retrospect, almost every argument or grudge I’ve held onto.

We fought hard over nothin’

We fought till nothin’ remained

I’ve carried that nothin’ for a long time

[*] This idea of “Fuck Yes…or No” is far too simple and has caused me quite a lot of grief. Dropping out of college, I was maybe 51/49 on it. Leaving my corporate job to become a writer, maybe 60/40. Right now I’m about to do something big that I am both excited and terrified about. The point is: The certainty comes later. The truly life-changing decisions are never simple. If I had only ever done things I was absolutely certain about, I’d have missed out on experiences I love. Conversely, I regret a good chunk of my “Fuck yes’s” because I was caught up in a fit of passion or bias. The whole point of risk is that you don’t know.

**

So here I am at 34 with many more mistakes than these to my name. But the key to progress, I have found, is relatively simple. It’s not to avoid error…but to avoid making the same error more than once. Or, more realistically, fewer times than you might ordinarily be inclined to.

Because the only way to compound an error, to add to the suffering caused by its consequences, is to refuse to see them. To refuse to heed their lessons. 

And so, if I am lucky enough to make it another year, I hope to write to you again in 2022, a tad wiser and as always, grateful for the time and experiences I’ve been lucky enough to have. Even the not so glamorous ones. 

P.S. Seneca said a lot of people don’t have any proof for their age but a number of years. To avoid that mistake, 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 Aurelius: “You could leave life right now.” That is how I try to go through life—not taking time for granted, not leaving anything undone, not wasting time on making the same mistake twice, not ever thinking tomorrow is a given. If you want to create more priority and appreciation in your life, get a Memento Mori coin and carry it in your pocket everywhere you go.

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50 (Short) Rules For Life From The Stoics

What is the job of a philosopher?

“When the standards have been set,” Epictetus said, “the work of philosophy is just this, to examine and uphold the standards, but the work of a truly good person is in using those standards when they know them.”

Pretty straight forward then: Define your rules. Live by them. 

But of course, the Stoics were not quite so direct in practice. One Stoic, Chrysippus—supposedly wrote 500 lines a day…the vast majority of which are lost. The Stoics spoke, wrote, debated, but nowhere did they put their “commandments” down in one place. Not at least in any form that survived. 

Having thought about this, and trying to get them all straight for my own practice, here are 50 rules from the Stoics, gathered from their immense body of work across two thousand years. These rules functioned, then, as now, as guides to what the ancients called “the good life.” Hopefully some of them will illuminate your own path.

Focus on what you can control.You control how you respond to things. Ask yourself, “Is this essential?” Meditate on your mortality every day.Value time more than money/possessions.You are the product of your habits.Remember you have the power to have no opinion.Own the morning.Put yourself up for review (Interrogate yourself).Don’t suffer imagined troubles.
Try to see the good in people.
Never be overheard complaining…even to yourself.
Two ears, one mouth…for a reason (Zeno)There is always something you can do. Don’t compare yourself to others.
Live as if you’ve died and come back (every minute is bonus time).
“The best revenge is not to be like that.” Marcus Aurelius
Be strict with yourself and tolerant with others.
Put every impression, emotion, to the test before acting on it.
Learn something from everyone.
Focus on process, not outcomes.
Define what success means to you.
Find a way to love everything that happens ( Amor fati ).Seek out challenges.
Don’t follow the mob.Grab the “smooth handle.”Every person is an opportunity for kindness (Seneca)Say no (a lot).Don’t be afraid to ask for help.Find one thing that makes you wiser every day.What’s bad for the hive is bad for the bee (Marcus Aurelius)Don’t judge other people.Study the lives of the greats.Forgive, forgive, forgive.Make a little progress each day.Journal.Prepare for life’s inevitable setbacks ( premeditatio malorum )Look for the poetry in ordinary things.To do wrong to one, is to do wrong to yourself. ( sympatheia )Always choose “Alive Time.”Associate only with people that make you better.If someone offends you, realize you are complicit in taking offense. Fate behaves as she pleases…do not forget this. Possessions are yours only in trust.Don’t make your problems worse by bemoaning them.Accept success without arrogance, handle failure with indifference. Courage. Temperance. Justice. Wisdom. (Always).The obstacle is the way.Ego is the enemy.Stillness is the key.

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I’ll leave you with the one rule that captures all the rules. It comes from Epictetus: “Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.” 

Don’t talk about it, be about it. The whole point of Stoicism is what you do. It’s who you are. It’s the act of virtue, not the act of talking about virtue. Or reading about it. Or writing about it. It’s about embodying your rules and principles. Letting your actions speak for you. So, Marcus Aurelius reminded himself and now us, “Waste no more time talking about what a good man is like. Be one.” 

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P.S. If you want to learn more about Stoicism, read the originals. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius , Letters From A Stoic by Seneca, and Discourses by Epictetus are some of the most accessible philosophic works ever published. AND we carry all of them in my new bookstore, The Painted Porch . It’s just outside Austin, Texas—all are welcome! Or you can support the store by picking up a book in The Painted Porch online store. If you buy from those links, your books will be shipped from us here in Bastrop, Texas. Just remember, we’re a small shop and just getting going…be patient and kind. We appreciate your support!

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Opening a Small-Town Bookstore During the Pandemic Was the Craziest Thing We Ever Did

This is a piece I just wrote for Texas Monthly. Yes, I just opened my own bookstore outside Austin, Texas. If you want to support the store, you can follow us on Instagram, sign up for our email list or pick up a book online !

When you tell people you’re thinking about opening a bookstore, they’re quick to respond, I’ve always wanted to do that. 

It’s every book lover’s fantasy. Yet nothing can quite prepare you for the reality of starting any business, even under normal conditions. Certainly, few dreamers think to prepare for the nightmare of a global pandemic that shutters most brick-and-mortar retail, disrupts supply chains, and kills hundreds of thousands of your fellow citizens. 

In January of last year, my wife and I put our life savings down on a 140-year-old building on Main Street in Bastrop, a small town outside Austin—East of Weird goes the slogan—where we’ve lived since 2015. We’d spotted the storefront, which is part of the National Register of Historic Places, while having breakfast one morning at Maxine’s Cafe, just across the street and a few doors down. By February we’d hired our first employees and started renovations. We envisioned hosting events, welcoming customers from the community, and drawing people to this beautiful street on the bluffs of the Colorado River.

Yet by the first week of March, what began with such excitement found me, for obvious reasons, standing between the empty brick walls thinking of that Arrested Development line: I’ve made a huge mistake. 

I thought I had some sense of what could go wrong with the venture. Whenever I’m considering an idea I’m excited about, I like to ask friends to talk me out of it. In late 2019, I was cautioned with plenty of pessimistic scenarios and potential difficulties. It’ll take longer than you think. It will cost more than you think. It will be more work than you think.

All of this was correct. 

That it would take longer, cost more, and require more work I understood. But that it would then sit unopened for months?

CONTINUE READING ON TEXAS MONTHLY: Opening a Small-Town Bookstore During the Pandemic Was the Craziest Thing We Ever Did

If you want to support The Painted Porch, these are the three most popular books in the store: The Library Book, The Boy Who Would Be King, and Empire of the Summer Moon. If you buy from those links, your books will be shipped from us here in Bastrop, Texas! Just remember, we’re a small shop and just getting going…be patient and kind.

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