Ryan Holiday's Blog, page 14

This is the Secret to Business and Artistic Success

One of the strangest things about business to me has always been how damn far everyone is from the products they create and the customers who use them. 

You have a problem with a product you bought and you call customer service, but you’re not actually talking to an employee of the company who made it—you’re talking to a customer service contractor, who is employed by an agency that runs third-party customer logistics, who in turn was hired by the company you purchased from (if in fact you bought direct, instead of through a retailer). 

Whenever companies are investigated by labor activists, the story always follows a similar path of intermediation: Shoe Company X outsourced to Manufacturer Y who outsourced to Factory Z who in turn used slave labor to make shoes not just for Shoe Company X but for all their competitors too. 

“We had no idea that the workers were being treated so poorly,” a spokesperson for the company explains, who is often a crisis PR flak, not an employee. What’s more, they are usually not totally lying. Neither the company, nor their spokesperson.

Even my profession—books—is illustrative of this phenomenon. You walk into an independent bookstore in your town and purchase a book because you like to “support authors’’ or “support local small business.” But what actually happened is this: you bought a book from a shop, who in turn bought their books from a large distributor like Ingram (est. annual revenue of $2.4 billion), who in turn bought their books from a publisher like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (market cap of nearly $1 billion), who in turn had acquired the book from the writer. In the business of books, the creator and the customer (i.e. the author and the reader) are several steps removed from each other. Even a multi-billion dollar behemoth like my publisher, Penguin Random House, sells the vast majority of their books to Amazon, who in turn uses a complicated algorithm to decide what to show to customers, and what to charge them.  

This has always struck me as weird, as well as ethically fraught. On top of that, it’s also felt like bad business to me. We say marketing is important, that knowing your customer is key, but then businesses hand responsibility for those areas off to a bunch of contractors? And then use their insights and choices to decide what to make next? Imagine a sports team who doesn’t do their own scouting, player development or coaching! Who doesn’t interact with their own fans!

How can you do a good job of making stuff for your customers if you don’t have a relationship with them? The short answer is, you can’t. Publishers are quick to tell authors about what audiences like and don’t like, but where are they getting this information? Not from the source, that’s for sure! 

When I was in marketing, I loved talking to people with the same job at other companies and in different industries. Or, not really the same job, because the “Director of Marketing” at most companies is often supplemented by an outside advertising agency, a creative agency and a PR agency. Like The Bobs in Office Space, I’d ask my own version of their question: What would you say you do here? 

As the flywheel of my own books has begun to spin faster and faster—nearing 4 million copies sold—I have become increasingly less satisfied with this intermediated status quo. I remember once talking to an author who had sold a million copies of a book that was published seven or eight years previous. Ok, I asked them, what kind of email list have you got? They started telling me about how many contacts were in their Outlook. Meaning: They didn’t have an email list at all. They’d sold a million books… but that relationship was Amazon’s to own (or in their case, Borders, which had existed when their book came out).

Since my first book was published in 2012, I’ve made sure the last page of the book asked readers to send me an email to sign up for my list. Hundreds of thousands of people have done that. I have entered many of their emails into my list personally. Their names have passed from my eyes through my fingertips into my customer database. I have heard what they liked and don’t like about the books. I have seen what’s worked and what hasn’t. I have gotten to know them.

Of course, I have social media, too (you can follow me on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube). But in the last several years, I’ve decided that those communication channels were not sufficient. I needed to be in the business of transacting directly to my readers, as well.

I had Tobias Lütke, the founder of Shopify, on my podcast recently and we talked about the power of a platform like his, one that allows people to become their own retailers. In 2017, with DailyStoic.com, we opened our own store. We started with a print, then moved on to challenge coins and then online products and a premium leatherbound edition of The Daily Stoic too. Since we launched, we’ve directly sold to north of 100,000 customers. Or rather, to a whole football stadium worth of “true fans” who we now have a relationship with. 

Imagine standing on the 50-yard line of the Big House at the University of Michigan, packed with people to the very rim of the stadium, and knowing you’ve sold something to every single face staring back at you. It’s an immensely powerful feeling. 

Mostly though, it’s a liberating one. I’ve said before that I spell “success as a-u-t-o-n-o-m-y,” and this fits with that philosophy. I don’t want other people telling me what to do. I don’t want to be dependent on other people either. Yes, I work with a traditional publisher on my bigger books, but by choice.

Early in the pandemic, I started working on a fable about Stoicism that came out of stories I was telling my then 3-year old son. After I had finished the outline of the idea, I went to my publisher—who had done 10 books with me at that point—to see if they wanted to work on this one. They came back with terms that just made zero financial or creative sense for me. Part of me was frustrated, but I also believed that they had given me a great gift. Now I could do The Boy Who Would Be King myself. 

I did it faster. I did it cheaper. I did it with complete creative control. I even got to print it in the United States. In its first week, it sold more than 5,000 copies without a peep of external marketing or PR, just an email and a social post to my own fans, sold through my own store. It would have been enough to debut on any of the major bestseller lists—but of course, it didn’t appear on any because those lists had no way of tracking it. 

But what do I care? Well, let me tell you. I care about the fact that something I care about got into the hands of people who care about it. 

Isn’t that the whole point of art? Isn’t that the true basis of sustained (and sustainable) success in business?

Fewer middlemen. Fewer impediments. No delays in getting to market.

I did a talk for a fashion company a few weeks ago. When they started, they did 90% of their sales through retailers and 10% direct-to-consumer. That ratio has flipped as they have grown, based on the CEO’s strategic plan. Imagine if that hadn’t been the plan? They would have been destroyed during the pandemic, when physical retail was largely shut down or severely sidelined. And even without something like a pandemic, by going direct-to-consumer, they improved their margins, as well as the quality of their product… because, you know, they actually knew who their customers were and what those people liked. And by cutting out all those middlemen they could take the savings and apply it to the substance of the product itself.

Nobody knows what the future holds, that’s true. I will continue to traditionally publish many of my projects. My publisher helps me do things I can’t do and I help them do things other authors can’t do—which is why we choose to work together. Even right now, I am working on a distribution deal to get The Boy Who Would Be King sold through other stores. 

Still, I’m not sure how anybody goes broke working directly—as much as possible—with the audience and market they serve. Are there efficiencies that come from outside contractors and manufacturers? Of course. Are there great opportunities selling through other people’s platforms or stores or audiences? Obviously.

But if you’re not also cultivating a direct line to your people, what are you doing? Being arrogant and reckless is the answer, in my opinion. You’re gambling that the middleman will always need you, you’re gambling that your intuition will always land with the audience. You’re also giving up autonomy and creative freedom, too.

I’ll conclude with a great passage from The 50th Law by Robert Greene, as it defines the imperative for all creators perfectly:

Your goal must be to break down the distance between you and your audience, the base of your support in life. Some of this distance is mental—it comes from your ego and the need to feel superior. Some of it is physical—the nature of your business tends to shut you off from the public with lawyers of bureaucracy. In any event, what you are seeking is maximum interaction, allowing you to get a feel for people on this inside. You come to thrive off their feedback and criticism. Operating this way, what you will produce will not fail to resonate because it will come from the inside. This deep level of interaction is the source of the most powerful and popular works in culture and business, and a political style that truly connects.

The post This is the Secret to Business and Artistic Success appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

A Practical Philosophy Reading List: A Few Books You Can Actually Use in Real Life

You must know by now: I don’t believe that philosophy is something for the classroom. It’s something that helps you with life. It shouldn’t be complicated. It shouldn’t be confusing. It should be clear, and it should be usable. As Epicurus put it, “Vain is the word of the philosopher which does not heal the suffering of man.”

Some of the best philosophers never wrote anything down; they just lived exemplary lives and provided an example which we can now learn from. That was philosophy. It was practical and it was applicable and it made life better. But thankfully some philosophers were doers and writers, and the books below will help you understand the words that they lived by—and hopefully apply them to your own opportunities, obstacles, and experiences.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

It still strikes me now, some 15 years into reading this book, how lucky we are to even have it. Meditations is perhaps the only document of its kind ever made: the private thoughts of the world’s most powerful man about how to make good on the responsibilities and obligations of his positions. Marcus stopped almost every night to practice a series of spiritual exercises—reminders designed to make him humble, patient, empathetic, generous, and strong in the face of whatever he was dealing with. You cannot read this book and not come away with a phrase or a line that will be helpful to you next time you are in trouble. Read it, and then read it again as often as you can. (Note: I strongly recommend Hays’s translation above all others and you can also read my interview with him here.) And if you end up loving Marcus, try The Inner Citadel and Philosophy as a Way of Life by Pierre Hadot. Hadot is maybe one of the smartest people I’ve ever read. The Inner Citadel is mostly about Marcus Aurelius and the Stoic concept of the self as a fortress. Philosophy as a Way of Life is essentially a book about the wisdom of ancient philosophers cumulatively acquired and how we can use the same exercises in our struggles. Also Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar. There are not many great works of fiction about Stoicism, but this is one. Written from the perspective of Hadrian, the book takes the form of a long letter of advice to a young Marcus Aurelius, who would eventually succeed him as emperor. It’s somber but practical, filled with beautiful and moving passages from a man near death, looking to prepare someone for one of the most difficult jobs in the world.

Letters from a Stoic by Seneca 

Seneca, like Marcus, was a powerful man in Rome. He was also a great writer and from the looks of it, a wise man who dispensed great advice to his friends. Much of that advice survives in the form of letters, guiding them and now us through problems with grief, wealth, poverty, success, failure, education and so many other things. Seneca was a Stoic as well, but like Marcus, he was practical and borrowed liberally from other schools. As he quipped to a friend, “I don’t care about the author if the line is good.” That is the ethos of practical philosophy—it doesn’t matter from whom or when it came from, what matters is if it helps you in your life, if only for a second. Reading Seneca will do that. (Other collections of his thoughts are great too. Penguin’s On the Shortness of Life is excellent, and if you’re looking for an audiobook of Seneca, try Tim Ferriss’ edition of The Tao of Seneca: Letters from a Stoic Master.) I also recommend The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca by Emily Wilson. Wilson’s translations of Seneca are excellent and her insights are provocative. Must read for any student of history or philosophy. (Also, read the interview we did with Emily for DailyStoic.com.)

Enchiridion by Epictetus 

Unlike those two powerful Stoics, Epictetus overcame incredible adversity. A slave who was banished from Rome, he eventually became a philosopher and opened a small school. Notes from his classes survive to us in what is now called the Enchiridion, which translates as a “small manual or a handbook,” and it is exactly that. It is the perfect introduction to Epictetus as it is packed with short Stoic maxims and principles. Unlike both Seneca and Marcus, Epictetus is somewhat more difficult to read, and I recommend beginning with those two if you haven’t yet read them. The next step would be Epictetus’ Discourses, which are much longer and deserve a bigger commitment. And for more related to Epictetus, you can look into the short autobiography Courage Under Fire by James Stockdale.

That One Should Disdain Hardships: The Teachings of a Roman Stoic by Musonius Rufus

Unfortunately, most of the works of the Stoics not named Epictetus, Seneca or Marcus Aurelius have been lost to history. Others are poorly translated or organized. Musonius Rufus has been neglected for both these reasons, but this new book is a great step forward into making him accessible to modern readers. He’s very quotable and very direct—tellingly, the opening essay is That There Is No Need of Giving Many Proofs for One Problem. His most provocative belief in first-century Rome? That women deserved an education as much as men. Two of Musonius’s 21 surviving lectures (That Women Too Should Study Philosophy and Should Daughters Receive the Same Education as Sons?) come down strongly in favor of treating women well and of their capabilities as philosophers. He wrote movingly on companionship, love, and marriage (What Is the Chief End of Marriage and Is Marriage a Handicap for the Pursuit of Philosophy?). And he’s perfectly suited to this moment: Musonius was exiled at least three, possibly four times, so he knew about being locked down. He knew about losing your freedom. He knew that all a philosopher could do was respond well—bravely, boldly, patiently—to what life threw at us. That’s what we should be doing now.

The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus by Publius Syrus

A Syrian slave in the first century BCE, Publius Syrus is a fountain of quick, helpful wisdom that you cannot help but recall and apply to your life. “Rivers are easiest to cross at their source.” “Want a great empire? Rule over yourself.” “Divide the fire and you will sooner put it out.” “Always shun that which makes you angry.” Those are a few I remember off the top of my head. But all of them are good and worthy of re-reading in times of difficulty (or boredom or in preparation of a big event).

Fragments by Heraclitus

The Stoics, especially Marcus, loved to draw from Heraclitus, a mystic, ephemeral philosopher whose beautiful fragments are eminently quotable. My favorite line from Heraclitus is his line about how no man steps in the same river twice—because it is not the same river and he is not the same man. Another favorite: “Applicants for wisdom / do what I have done: / inquire within.” And of course, his most direct and timeless remark: “Character is fate.” If you’re looking for philosophy that is poetic but also practical, give Heraclitus a chance.

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

A man is sent to a concentration camp and finds some way for good to come of it. He uses it to fashion a set of principles for life: we have little control over our circumstances, complete control over our attitude, and the ability to make meaning out of the things which happen to us. In Frankl’s case, we are lucky that he was a brilliant psychologist and writer and managed to turn all of this into one of the most important books of the 20th century. I think constantly of his line about the man who asks, “What is the meaning of life?” The answer is that you don’t get to ask the question; life is the one who asks and we must reply with our actions. I was stunned to find that a new (lost) book from him was published in 2020, with a beautiful title worthy of a daily mantra, “Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything.” 

Essays by Michel de Montaigne

Montaigne was deeply influenced by some of the books I mentioned above. He was the epitome of Heraclitus’s line about “inquiring within,” so much so that he spent basically the entire second part of his life asking himself (and other people) all sorts of interesting questions and then exploring the answers in the form of short, provocative essays. (A favorite: Whether he was playing with his cat, or whether he was the toy to his cat.) These essays are always good for a helpful thought or two—be it about death, “other” people, animals, sex, or anything. Also, read Stefan Zweig’s Montaigne. I think it is one of the most beautiful biographies ever written. It’s a book about a man who turned inward as the world was tearing itself to pieces… written by a man forced to do the very same thing some 350 years later. It is timely and important. 

Nature and Selected Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

While Montaigne’s essays are good for making us think, Emerson’s essays make us act. They remind us that we are ultimately responsible for our own life, for making ethical choices and for fulfilling our potential. Unlike most classic writers, Emerson embodies that uniquely American mix of drive and ambition (but in a healthy way). If you have not read Emerson, you should. If you have—and you remember fondly his reminders about recognizing our own genius in the work of others, or his reminders to experience the beauty of nature—that counts as philosophy. See how easy it is? Also, read Walden by Emerson’s friend and protégé Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau did what everyone who has ever lived a normal life has considered doing at least once: he ran into the woods. He retreated into solitude on Walden Pond where he built himself a tiny cabin, in which he lived alone for two years. Thoreau immortalized those two years and the lessons he learned in Walden, concluding with why you can put to bed any considerations of escaping to the woods.

The Art of Happiness by Epicurus

Epicurus was a rival to the Stoics… and today, both schools rival each other for the title of most misunderstood school of philosophy. Epicureanism is not hedonism. In fact, Epicurus preaches restraint and self-discipline. “The pleasant life is not the product” of drinking and sex, Epicurus said; “On the contrary, it is the result of sober thinking—namely investigation of the reasons for every act of choice and aversion and elimination of those false ideas about the gods and death which are the chief source of mental disturbances.” That being said, Epicurus was much more explicit about joy and happiness than Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius. The Epicureans were less concerned about duty and honor and other earthly obligations—they were more Eastern in that way. They were also pithier, in my opinion. Which is probably why Seneca joked, after quoting Epicurus, “I don’t mind quoting a bad author if the line is good.” Anyway, read this… and it’s probably OK to skip the stuff about atoms. 

Plutarch’s Lives and Plutarch’s Moralia

Is there anyone better than Plutarch? No, there is not. I think he’s the best, most interesting, most accessible biographer to ever do it. There’s a reason he was the favorite of everyone from Napoleon to Alexander Hamilton right on down to people today. Funny enough, his grandson was one of Marcus Aurelius’s philosophy teachers. Anyways, I read mostly from his Lives of the Romans this month—Cato the Elder, Coriolanus, etc. He’s hard to beat. If you haven’t read Plutarch, do it! Try Penguin Classics; or the new little translation How to Be a Leader from Princeton Press is also good. 

The Tao Te Ching by Laozi

It’s fascinating that both Epictetus and the Tao Te Ching at one point use the same analogy: The mind is like muddy water. To have clarity, we must be steady and let it settle down. Only then can we see. Only then do we have transparency. Whoever you are and whatever you’re doing, you would benefit from having more of this clarity. The Tao Te Ching is made up of 81 short chapters, a mixture of poetry and prose aimed at giving you that clarity. Also read Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy by Philip J. Ivanhoe. Don’t dismiss it over the boring title! The book is an amazing anthology of the best of Eastern Chinese philosophy (most of it pre-Zen Buddhism). I folded so many pages reading it that I dreaded having to transfer my notes to notecards. It took forever, but it was worth it. This is a great introduction to Confucius, the Tao Te Ching, and other important texts. I also like Buddha by Karen Armstrong. It’s scholarly without being pedantic, inspiring without being mystical. Armstrong is actually a former Catholic nun (who teaches at a college of Judaism), so I loved the diverse and unique perspective of the author. And Armstrong never misses the point of a good biography: to teach the reader how to live through the life of an interesting, complicated but important person. 

Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel 

I was sitting back taking notes after my reading of both these books when my wife yelled “HOGS!” I rushed downstairs, grabbed my rifle, and as I walked slowly through the trees towards the small pack of wild hogs, I practiced both the breathing exercises in the book and the art of letting the shot fall from the weapon (rather than being forced). It was a rather perfect moment—and so too was the delicious boar sausage I had made afterwards. Of course, Master Kenzo would say that whether the shots hit their mark (three of four did) is irrelevant. What mattered was the moment and the practice. Because this is ultimately not a book about archery, but about zen, and the mastery of the soul. Also read The Way of Baseball: Finding Stillness at 95 mph by Shawn Green. It’s a great, accessible book about peace and peak performance that doesn’t hit you over the head with Buddhism, yoga, meditation or any of that. It’s about how Shawn Green struggled as a major league baseball player and through repetitive simple practice turned himself into one of the best home run hitters in the game. And Sadaharu Oh: A Zen Way of Baseball by Sadaharu Oh. As a testament to my embarrassing American-ness, I hadn’t heard of Sadaharu Oh until a baseball coach I know mentioned him (and therefore didn’t know he was a better home run hitter than Babe Ruth or Hank Aaron or Barry Bonds). It turns out that in addition to being an incredible athlete, he’s also a beautiful writer and storyteller. I’ve recommended and written about Musashi before—well, Sadaharu actually designed his infamous swing around the teaching of Musashi (famously practicing swinging at pitches with a sword). This book was great. It’s a memoir more than it is a book about baseball, so even if you don’t like sports, I promise you will get a lot out of it.

—

And one final recommendation…I’ve talked a bit about Marcus Aurelius here and why we should study the LIVES of the Stoics. Well, one more short read for you: The Boy Who Would Be King.

It’s one of the most incredible stories in all of history. A young boy, out of nowhere, is chosen to be the emperor of most of the known world. How did he do it? What did he need to learn? Who taught him? What do his experiences teach us? I answer those questions in my first illustrated fable, which I’m so excited to tell you is available for preorder: The Boy Who Would Be King. It’s an ageless story of Stoicism… for all ages… and it happens to be printed right here in the US. You can preorder it directly here, and there are signed copies as well.

The post A Practical Philosophy Reading List: A Few Books You Can Actually Use in Real Life appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

100 (Short) Rules for a Better Life

In his essay On the Happy Life, Seneca makes an extended list of rules for living a good life. Because it is everyone’s wish to live better, he says, but we are often in the dark on how to do so.

Except, we’re not…since so many people have struggled in the dark before us and their experiences create light.

With that in mind, here are 100 rules that have helped me live better based on my own experience, the advice I’ve been given and the things I’ve studied. Your mileage may vary, but hopefully some of these will help you in your own pursuit of living a good life. And in case you want to read further on any of the rules, I linked to where I’ve written about them in depth.

1. Wake up early.

2. Ask: Am I using this technology, or is it using me?

3. Forget about outcomes—focus on making a little progress every day.

4. Say no (a lot).

5. Read something every day.

6. Don’t watch television news.

7. Comparison = unhappiness

8. Journal.

9. Strenuous exercise every single day.

10. Character is fate.

11. Practice the law of action, not attraction.

12. Get up when you fall/fail.

13. Prove your philosophy more than you talk about it (and that’s not easy).

14. Don’t argue with reality (facts) you don’t like.

15. It’s not about routine but about practices.

16. Follow the canvas strategy.

17. Do a kindness each day.

18. Every situation has two handles—choose to grab the “smooth handle.”

19. Success = autonomy.

20. Pick up trash when you see it.

21. If you want to be good and feel good, you have to do good. There is no escaping this.

22. Deliberately think about death. Every day, multiple times a day.

23. “Trust the process.”

24. Do your job—whatever it is—well, because how you do anything is how you do everything.

25. Always choose “Alive Time.”

26. What’s a book that changed your life? is a question you can ask to change your life… if you read the books.

27. Forget “quality time”; embrace garbage time.

28. Do the verb, rather than being the noun.

29. Take walks.

30. The present is enough.

31. Fuel the habit bonfire.

32. Have a philosophy.

33. Make time for philosophy.

33. Don’t just read—you must read to lead.

34. Collect little sayings about how to live (keep a commonplace book).

35. Stop looking for shortcuts. Do the work.

36. Build an Inner Citadel.

37. Let it go—those who wrong you wrong themselves.

38. Spend time with old people.

39. When evaluating an opportunity, ask yourself: What will teach me the most?

40. Purpose, not passion. (One is about you, the other about something bigger than you.)

41. Have kids. (Being a parent is your most important job).

42. Read biographies—the best way to study the lives of the greats.

43. Don’t try to beat other people, try to be the only one doing what you’re doing (“Competition is for losers”).

44. Know why you do what you do.

45. Be strict with yourself and forgiving of others.

46. Don’t post pictures of your kids on social—they are not props for validation.

47. Practice the art of negative visualization.

48. Cut toxic people out of your life—life is too short.

49. Before starting any project, have a “draw-down period.”

50. “If you’ve been blessed, be a blessing.”

51. Don’t wait until later, do the thing now.

52. No day without some deep work.

53. Put yourself up for review (Interrogate yourself).

54. Ask yourself: How does this action I’m about to take affect other people?

55. Don’t take the money (see “success = autonomy”).

56. Always stay a student.

57. Break things down to see what they really are.

58. “If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.” — Nassim Taleb

59. Undersell and overdeliver.

60. You must tame your temper.

61. Never recline your seat on an airplane. (See also: “How do my actions affect others?”)

62. Belief in yourself is overrated. Generate evidence.

63. Never check the price on a book. Just buy it if you think you’ll read it.

64. Good things happen in bookstores.

65. See what you can learn from every person you meet—even people you don’t like.

66. Set a bedtime.

67. A successful marriage is worth more than a successful career.

68. “Go straight to the seat of intelligence.” — Marcus Aurelius

69. Human being, not human doing.

70. Amor fati.

71. Go the f*ck to sleep.

72. “Always say less than necessary.” — Robert Greene

73. Never take a phone call sitting down. Go outside and go for a walk.

74. Champion other people’s work (see my reading list email)

75. Make commitments—short, regular deadlines that you have to meet.

76. Animals make life better.

77. “Associate with people who are likely to improve you. Welcome those who you are capable of improving.” — Seneca

78. See the beauty in the mundane.

79. Print out good advice and put it right in front of your desk, or wherever you work everyday.

80. Remember: Nobody is thinking about you. They’re too busy thinking about themselves.

81. Don’t just read books, re-read books.

82. Make haste, slowly.

83. Don’t talk about projects until you’re finished.

84. Go into the wilderness.

85. Try to see opportunities where others see obstacles.

86. Inner scorecard vs. outer scorecard.

87. Have unrelated hobbies.

88. You don’t solve problems by running away. Travel will not make you happy. (“Wherever you go, there you are.”)

89. Seek out challenges.

90. “Whenever you are offended, understand that you are complicit in taking offense.” — Epictetus

91. Think progress, not perfection.

92. “Ask yourself at every moment, ‘Is this necessary?’” — Marcus Aurelius

93. Lighten up. Relax. (Whatever it is, you’re probably taking it too seriously.)

94. Focus on what you can control.

95. Wrap up each day as if it were the end of your life.

96. Live an interesting life.

97. Value the Four Virtues.

98. The obstacle is the way.

99. Ego is the enemy.

100. Stillness is the key.

The post 100 (Short) Rules for a Better Life appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

Fight to Be Who Philosophy Wants You to Be

Like all of us, there was a part of Marcus Aurelius that wanted to be good and a part that inclined towards something worse.

He had ideals, he had a temper. He had ambitions—some of which were selfless and some of which were selfish. He made commitments—as a father, a spouse, a leader—and then he also had urges and drives as a human being. There was a part of him that was lazy and a part of him that was hardworking. He was a good person and then he was given absolute power… which we know has the incredible power to corrupt.

Martin Luther King Jr. would talk about how each of us has a Northern and Southern soul, and that these two halves, like America for most of its history, are in a war with each other. And if you know anything about the life of Martin Luther King Jr, you know that as great and magnificent and wise and brave and just as he was, there was a baser part of him, too. And these parts are in conflict with each other.

This was true for Marcus Aurelius. It’s true for you too.

In one of the notes Marcus writes to himself in Meditations, he captures the struggle perfectly. “Fight to be the person philosophy tried to make you,” he writes. Lately, I’ve taken to signing books with my own spin on it and I have the same thing written on a notecard on my desk: “Fight to be the person philosophy wants you to be.”

I guess the first step in winning that fight is defining our objectives. After all, the North won the Civil War because Lincoln and Grant actually had a strategy. So, who exactly are we fighting to be? What does philosophy want from us?

Who was that person Marcus was fighting to be? Who was he actively practicing his philosophy to become?

Marcus answers this later in Meditations, where he lists “epithets for the self,” which include:

Upright. 

Modest. 

Straightforward. 

Sane. 

Cooperative.

We could add the Four Stoic Virtues to that list too:

Courage.

Justice.

Temperance.

Wisdom.

That’s who philosophy wants us to be. That’s who we want to be–who we know we’re supposed to be. But that’s the easy part. The hard part is living up to those epithets. Epictetus, one of Marcus’ favorite philosophers, said, “Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.”

How do you do that? How do you embody your philosophy, especially when it’s tempting not to? I’ve found some ways in my own life, and in studying the lives of the Stoics.

The first: it’s important to have touchstones. I carry this coin in my pocket. The front features four elements representing the Four Virtues: a lion (Courage), a man sprinkling water into a jug of wine (Temperance), a set of scales (Justice), and an owl (Wisdom). It was actually manufactured at an old mint that first made the AA sobriety chips. Bill Westman’s advice when he created them was to carry one “in your pocket or purse and when temptation is great, reach into your pocket and feel the medallion and remember your struggle to get this far.”

I like that. When I reach into my pocket and feel the coin, it reminds me who I want to be. Those are the traits I want to embody in this decision that I’m making, this opportunity I’m pursuing, this risk I’m about to take, this stressful and difficult moment I’m in.

Next, Seneca said we have to choose ourselves a Cato. He says, “Choose someone whose way of life as well as words, and whose very face as mirroring the character that lies behind it, have won your approval. Be always pointing him out to yourself either as your guardian or as your model.” Choose someone who you want to be like, and then constantly ask yourself: what would they do in this situation?

In Seneca’s last moment, when Nero comes to kill him, it’s Cato that Seneca channels. It’s where he gets his strength. Even though Seneca had fallen short of his writings in a lot of ways, in the moment it mattered most, he drew on Cato and became as great as philosophy could have ever hoped for him to be.

Without a ruler, Seneca said, you can’t make crooked straight. This is what I was trying to write about in Lives of the Stoics. I wanted to show how the Stoics actually lived, so that we can try to make crooked straight against that. The quotes and the writings are one thing… I like to have a model. What would Marcus do here? What would Epictetus think? How would Cato have responded?  When we are trying to fight to be who philosophy wants us to be, it’s good to have somebody who embodied that, who lived up to it, who we can think about in those situations.

Another important part of this is stopping to reflect on your progress. If you’re just winging it through life, if you’re just going day-to-day, how are going to know if you are actually getting closer to who you want to be? For Marcus Aurelius, Meditations was his hand-to-hand spiritual sparring partner. It’s in that journal where we see Marcus trying to become who philosophy was trying to make him. He was writing in these pages every day about where he was falling short, about what he could do better, and reminding himself what his philosophy taught and wanted from him. We see his struggles. We see sometimes the Northern part of his soul won. But other times, the Southern part won. We see him fighting to get back to the Northern part, picking himself up when he fails.

This is important. It’s an ongoing war that you’re fighting. And it can’t just be in your head. Epictetus said, “Every day and night keep thoughts like these at hand—write them, read them aloud, talk to yourself and others about them.” That’s what journaling is. That’s how I think of journaling: it’s me actively fighting to be the person that philosophy wants me to be. So each morning, usually after a long walk, I go to my office and pull out three small notebooks. In the first one—a small blue gold leafed notebook—I write one sentence about the day that just passed. In the next, a black moleskine, I journal two quick pages about yesterday’s workout (how far I ran or swam), what work I did, any notable occurrences, and some lines about what I am grateful for, what I want to get better at, and where I am succeeding. And then finally, I pick up The Daily Stoic Journal, which was created around the Stoic methodology of preparing for your day in the morning and reviewing your day in the evening.

This is what Seneca did. In a letter to his brother, he said he waited for his wife to go to sleep before he journaled on a few questions: Did I do things I said I was going to do? Did I hold myself to the standard I said I was going to hold myself to? How can I be better tomorrow? He wasn’t doing this for career purposes. He was interrogating and analyzing and holding himself accountable and looking at what he could do better and where he’s not looking up to the philosophy.

These exercises are great, but there’s one other important thing: It’s easy to be the person philosophy wants you to be in your own little bubble. But can you do it in the real world? Can you do it when the world is fighting back against you?

It would have been easy for Marcus to just focus on his studies. He knew that more was demanded.  “Throw away your books,” Marcus wrote. Get active in life’s purpose now, he said. The Stoics talked derisively about the so-called “pen-and-ink philosophers”—the academic philosophers, the sophists. When Marcus is fighting to be the person philosophy tried to make him, it’s on the ultimate testing ground. It’s as the Emperor, the ruler of the known world. It’s against this force that never before hadn’t succeeded in corrupting absolutely. He’s not just talking about philosophy in the classroom. He’s having to actually live it. He’s actively engaged in the world.

If the purpose of Stoicism is to get to a place of equanimity and peace and poise and self-discipline, sure you can do that by retreating to a monastery. I get some semblance of that at my farm outside of town. But if I disengage from the world and retreat to my fantasy world, I’m not being the person Stoicism wants me to be. Stoicism says we have to be active—we have to participate in politics, we have to try to make the world a better place, we have to serve the common good where we can. You can’t run away from these things. The battle can’t just be an academic one. It can’t just be a battle in your mind. It has to be a battle you’re actively engaged in—in the world, in your job, in the community, in your neighborhood, in your country, in the time and place that you live.

We know what philosophy wants us to be—Upright. Modest. Straightforward. Sane. Cooperative. Courageous. Temperate. Just. Wise. We know who are inspirations are—we have a Cato, a Marcus Aurelius, a grandfather, a grandmother, a great athlete, a leader in your field. You know who you are trying to be.

The reality is: we will fall short. We all will. The important thing is that we pick ourselves back up when we do. As one Japanese proverb says: fall down seven times, get up eight. Marcus said it too. “When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstances,” he wrote, “revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help. You’ll have a better grasp of the harmony if you keep on going back to it.” You’re going to have an impulse to give in. Your temper is going to get the best of you. Fear will get the best of you. Ambition might lead you astray. But you always have the ability to realize that that is not who you want to be, that is not what you were put here to do, that is not who your philosophy wants you to be.

That’s when you fight your way back.

When you look at the great armies of history, it wasn’t victory after victory after victory. There’s a victory, then a setback, then a loss, then a moment where it looked like it was all going to go sideways. But they kept going. They didn’t quit.

That’s the real lesson: this is a lifelong fight we are in. Marcus even talks about it towards the end of Meditations. He asks himself, How old are you? How much longer are you going to keep falling short? When are you going to get this together? It was the battle of his life. Up until the day he died, he was struggling with this. But he always kept fighting.

And that’s what we have to do. That’s what I’m trying to do. That’s why I’ve taken to signing it in books. Fight to be the person philosophy wants you to be. Fight for those virtues. Fight against your Southern soul—it will win if you don’t give it everything you got.

I’ll leave you with one final reminder from Marcus:

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, because an artful life requires being prepared to meet and withstand sudden and unexpected attacks.

It’s just interesting to think that he was most worried about attacks not from the outside… but from the inside.

But it makes sense. Most failures in life, most evil, is not done to us but by us. We are our own worst enemies. The Southern soul is our worst enemy. You have to fight it. You have to fight to be the person philosophy wants you to be.

The post Fight to Be Who Philosophy Wants You to Be appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

How to Read More: 8 Reasons and 7 Strategies to Read More Books

I probably get asked this question more than any other: How do you read so much?

I don’t think the question is really about me. I’m an author. It’s my job to read a lot. I think what people are really asking is how they can read more. Because as wonderful as reading is, in a busy, distracting world, it’s hard to find the time. Or rather, it’s hard to make the time. 

So when people ask:

How can I read more?How can I read more books this year? What’s the secret to reading a lot? 

The short answer is just do it.  (Nobody asks, “How do you find the time to eat?”)

But obviously you know that. What it’s really about, then, is finding the motivation, finding the justification, and building a reading practice that will help you do what you already want to do. Below are some strategies, from my life and from history—because people have always struggled to read in a distracted world—that will help you become a power reader. 

8 Reasons to Read MoreReading Is Your Moral DutyReading Is the Way to Tell the FutureReading Prevents You From Being Functionally IlliterateReading Makes You an Informed CitizenReading Softens Your SolitudeReading Can Solve Your ProblemsReading Is a Conversation With the Wisest to Ever LiveAll Leaders Are Readers 7 Strategies To Read MoreRead First Thing in the MorningRead a Page a DayRead While You EatRead While You RelaxKeep a Commonplace BookRead the Masters Again and AgainRealize: You Are Not Too Busy8 Reasons to Read MoreReading Is Your Moral Duty 

As a young boy, the famed basketball coach George Raveling learned an invaluable lesson about the power of both knowledge and ignorance from his grandmother, who raised him. 

“Why did the slave masters hide their money in books, George?” she asked the young boy, standing together in her kitchen.

“I don’t know, grandma,” he said.

“Because they knew the slaves wouldn’t open them,” she said.

There’s a reason it was illegal to teach slaves to read. There is a reason that every totalitarian regime has burned and banned books. Knowledge is power. It sounds like a cliché, but clichés only sound that way because of the generally accepted truth at their core. What is less of a cliché, but actually more true, is the converse of that idea: A lack of knowledge is weakness—it engenders supplication and makes resistance harder. 

From this early lesson, George Raveling came to see reading as a moral duty. To not read, to remain in ignorance, was not only to be weak—it was to ignore the people who had fought so hard, who had struggled at such great cost to read and to provide for future generations the right and the ability to do so. It was to spit in the face of Frederick Douglass, of Booker T. Washington, and, of course, of Martin Luther King, Jr. who Raveling had gotten to know. 

It is worth pointing out today that money is still hidden in the pages of books—though not because someone put it there in order to keep it from you. Think about how many people want to get better at something, anything, everything. Look at how many people are desperate to be successful, or to extricate themselves from this cycle of mediocrity that has trapped so many of our generation. These people look everywhere for the solution to their problems. They seek out secret formulas, shortcuts, gurus. They will turn their entire world upside down before they stop and look at the one place where you can always be sure to find answers—the book shelf. 

We read because it makes us powerful. When we don’t read, we become weak—easy to manipulate, less than what we are capable of being. It’s in our self-interest to read (there’s money in it), but it’s also our moral duty. 

Reading Is the Way to Tell the Future

Let’s imagine a scenario in which almost all our modern scholarship was lost. Imagine if some great fire at the Library of Alexandria wiped away the last few hundred years of breakthroughs in psychology and biology. Suddenly, countless research papers and books and discoveries were turned to ash. The cost would be immense, no question.

And yet, somehow, we’d be fine. Even if all that remained were just the writings of Marcus Aurelius and Seneca and Epictetus. Because as much as our species craves newness, the truth is that most truths are very old. In fact, it’s these timeless truths that teach us more about the future and about our current times than most of our contemporary thinking. 

As Douglas MacArthur wrote in the early 20th century, speculating about the future of warfare, the best lessons about what’s coming next come not from the recent but from the distant past. “Were the accounts of all battles, save only those of Genghis Khan,” he said, “effaced from the pages of history, and were all the facts of his campaigns preserved in descriptive detail, the soldier would still possess a mine of untold wealth from which to extract nuggets of knowledge useful in molding an army for future use.“

Of course, one should always avail themselves of the latest research and the newest books. The problem is that, for far too many people, this comes at the expense of availing themselves of wisdom from the wisest minds who ever lived. 

The Stoics say over and over that it is inexcusable not to learn from the past. As Marcus Aurelius wrote in his diary at some point during the Antonine Plague, the future is the past repeated. “Look at the past,” he says in Meditations, “and from that, extrapolate the future: the same thing. No escape from the rhythm of events.”

It is from this learning, from the learning of the distant past, from the wisest minds who ever lived, that we can know how to prepare for the future. Everything else is noise. Everything else should be ignored. 

Reading Prevents You From Being Functionally Illiterate

General James Mattis is part of a long line of tradition of Stoic warriors. Just as Frederick the Great carried the Stoics in his saddlebags as he led his troops, or Cato proved his Stoicism by how he led his own troops in Rome’s Civil War, Mattis has long been known for taking Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations with him on campaign. 

“Reading is an honor and a gift,” he explains, “from a warrior or a historian who—a decade or a thousand decades ago—set aside time to write.” Yet many people spurn this gift and still consider themselves educated. “If you haven’t read hundreds of books,” Mattis says, “you’re functionally illiterate.” Channeling Marcus Aurelius, Mattis notes that human beings have been fighting and dying and struggling and doing the same things for eons. To not avail yourself of that knowledge is profoundly arrogant and stupid. To fill up body bags of young soldiers while a commander learns by experience? It’s worse than arrogant. It’s unethical, even murderous. 

Well, the same is true for much less lethal professions. How dare you waste your investor’s money by not reading and learning from the mistakes of other entrepreneurs? How dare you take your marriage or your children for granted, thinking that you can afford to figure this out by doing the wrong things first? What is the upside of trying to make it in the NFL all on your own, and not looking for shortcuts and lessons from seasoned pros and students of the game who have published books? There is no real job training for an emperor or the advisor to the emperor, but you can imagine both Marcus Aurelius and Seneca read heavily from and about their predecessors. The stakes were too high for them not to. 

In Mattis’ view, no Marine, nor any leader, is excused from studying. Consider this your assignment as well. It’s wonderful that you’re reading this article, but more is demanded of you. Drink deeply from history, from philosophy, from the books of journalists and the memoirs of geniuses. Study the cautionary tales and the screw ups, read about failures and successes. Read constantly—read as a practice.

Reading Makes You an Informed Citizen

When people hear Epictetus quoted to justify not watching the news—“If you wish to improve, be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters”—they get upset. It’s understandable. For generations, especially in America, people have been conditioned to think that consuming journalism, be it in newspaper or television or online form, is the duty of every informed citizen. 

Unfortunately, only the second half of this supposition is correct. Yes, it is the duty of every citizen—especially those with voting rights—to be informed. No, the news is not the way to do that. In fact, in today’s world of clickbait and sensationalism it may be the worst. 

The best way to be an informed citizen is to follow the path of the Stoics, who had no such thing as real-time journalism. You should study history. You should study the law. You should study human nature. The early American founders said it, too. “There is no History, perhaps, better adapted to this useful purpose than that of Thucydides,” as John Adams wrote to his son in 1777. “You will find it full of Instruction to the Orator, the Statesman, the General, as well as to the Historian and the Philosopher.” 

If you want to be an informed citizen, if you want to actually understand—rather than know trivia about—what’s going on in the world, then pick up a biography. Pick up Thucydides. Pick up Plutarch. Pick up Robert Caro or Doris Kearns Goodwin. Forget tweets about political witch hunts, read Stacey Schiff’s book about actual witch hunts. Read Machiavelli. Read Seneca. Read psychology. Go read the actual constitution of the country you live in. Read The Federalist Papers or Magna Carta. 

Go deep. Go backward. Go to the real truths. That’s what informed people do. And they are fine being seen as ignorant about every other silly thing.

Reading Softens Your Solitude

In The Library Book, her beautiful book about the Los Angeles Public Library fire, Susan Orlean captures the magic of what libraries can offer. She describes walking through the empty library in Downtown LA, not a soul in sight, and feeling connected to all the different voices represented on the millions of pages that surround her. 

“A library is a good place to soften solitude,” she writes, “a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you’re all alone. The library is a whispering post. You don’t need to take a book off the shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen.” 

Books, in this way, are wonderful friends. They are always there. They speak wisdom, but offer their advice quietly. They have an unlimited capacity for listening. They offer so much and ask for essentially nothing in return. They don’t yell. They level no personal attacks. No, they just call upon you to be better. They are there whenever and wherever you need it. They soften our solitude. They are true friends. 

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” James Baldwin said in a 1963 profile in Life magazine. “But then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”

Books, especially those about philosophy, are that friend who should always be within arm’s reach, who we should turn to constantly. Today, when we have some downtime. Next week when we run into some trouble. In the morning when we are lonely or struggling to start the day. Pick up a book. Read a passage. Listen to the person who truly believed that if they spoke—if they wrote—someone would listen and that it would make a difference. 

They weren’t wrong.

Reading Can Solve Your Problems

Maybe you’re having a difficult time in your relationship. Or work has worn you down. Maybe things have gone exceedingly well in your business and now you’re dealing with opportunities you never thought possible. Or you’re trying to figure out what to do with your life. Or trying to figure out how to help your kid—who has struggled for a long time now—to figure out what to do with their life.

These are tough situations. Just a sample of what the days can throw at us… on top of all the things the world likes to throw at us, from economic instability to brutal wars, to snarling traffic and bafflingly incompetent governance.

Solving all these problems is probably impossible. Which is why most of us would likely settle for their proper management or at least some amount of pain reduction.The good news is that this stop-gap remedy is readily at hand. It’s just a book or a letter or a lecture away. As Seneca writes, “Would you really know what philosophy offers to humanity? Philosophy offers counsel.”

For thousands of years, the wisest minds have been offering counsel and wisdom to those who seek it out, those who go forth to look for it. Will you be one of those people? Or will you keep doing things the way you’ve always done them? Will you endure the same trials just hoping one day they will magically change? Will you stick to your own guidance? Will you stumble through life as, to borrow Mattis’ term again, a functional illiterate?

Or will you let those wise minds help you out?

Your problems—our problems—are not new. They are not different. They are the same things humans have always struggled with, just dressed up in modern language and contemporary garb. They fall neatly in the same category that problems have always fallen into (what’s in our control and what isn’t), which means they present the same opportunities that every problem offers (to become better for it… or worse for it), and require the same virtues that all problems require (justice, temperance, wisdom, courage).

Fortunately, a guide for this gauntlet exists and has for thousands of years: Philosophy. It offers counsel. It offers you help. But only if you avail yourself of it. If you make use of it… and actually listen.

Reading Is a Conversation With the Wisest to Ever Live

Zeno was a young man when he was given a cryptic piece of advice. “To live the best life,” the Oracle told Zeno, “you should have conversations with the dead.”

What does that mean? Like with ghosts and goblins? Go spend time chatting in a cemetery?

No, of course not. The Oracle was talking about reading. Because it’s through books that we really talk to people who are no longer with us. Their bodies may be rotting in the ground, or long since turned to dust, but in the pages of a book, they are alive and well. 

Harry Truman was one of the greatest readers to ever occupy the White House. As a friend observed, to Harry “history was the men who made it, and he spoke of Marcus Aurelius or Henry of Navarre or old Tom Jefferson or old Andy Jackson as if they were friends and neighbors with whom he had only recently discussed the affairs of the day, their day.” 

That’s the beauty and the power of books—they can bring the past to life; they can annex, as Seneca said, all ages into your own. 

You can put yourself in the same room as Lincoln. You can chat with Shakespeare. You can be inspired by Porcia Cato. To do this isn’t scary, in fact it’s the opposite. It’s incredibly reassuring, because it means you have permanent access to the wisest men and women who ever lived. 

It’s also an incredible opportunity to learn. To ask questions. To be taught. If there is anything at all scary about this, it’s that millions of people decline to do this every day, day after day, for the balance of their natural lives. They reject this superpower. They decide to be illiterate. They ignore the dead, choosing to listen to the chattering voices on their television and their Twitter feed. 

Be smart, be brave, talk to the dead. 

All Leaders Are Readers

A friend stopped Marcus as he was leaving his home one morning. Where are you going? To handle business? No, Marcus was on his way to attend a philosophy lecture. “Learning is a good thing, even for one who is growing old,” Marcus told the stunned man. “From Sextus the philosopher I shall learn what I do not yet know.”

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. 

The same must be true to us. We have to learn how to read to be better leaders, better people, better citizens. We must learn how to read for our own benefit—and so that we might have aid to offer to a friend in pain, or a soul in crisis. Seneca’s point was that only knowledge that does us good is worth knowing. Everything else is trivia. 

7 Strategies to Help You Read MoreRead First Thing in the Morning

A good morning, according to the Stoics, was one that would “shake the laziness out of [your] system.” Seneca believed that reading was an indispensable part of the daily routine, particularly early in the day, because “reading nourishes the mind and refreshes it.” He’s right. Who doesn’t feel better after they’ve read? Who ever regrets picking up a book? And how much better are our days when we frontload them with good inputs (and how miserable are they when we kick things off with bad choices?) 

Another recent student of Stoicism agrees: Hugh Jackman reads right after he wakes up (early) in the morning. As he explained: 

I read a book with my wife. So we get up and we read to each other for half an hour. It’s the best. I recommend it to anyone…It’s the greatest way to start the day. Right now I’m reading Stillness Is the Key, by Ryan Holiday… I’m really into philosophy. So we read, and we talk, because stuff’s on your mind. You don’t realize how much has been on your mind overnight, and it comes out in the morning. That way, no matter what happens through our day, we know that we’ve had quality time together. You always think, tonight; after work; after this; when we put the kids to bed, but that doesn’t always happen. 

The day so easily gets away from us. Well-intentioned plans fall apart. Our willpower evaporates. So it’s key that we prioritize the important things and it’s key that we habituate doing them early. 

This way, we’ll, you know, actually do them. This way we can make sure we have a successful day. 

Read a Page a Day

A lot of people think that finishing a certain number of books is the mark of a good reading habit. I am going to read 100 books this year. I am finally going to finish the entire works of Howard Zinn. 

The Stoics might urge caution. 

They would encourage you to think not in terms of reading widely, but reading deeply. To dive into a handful of the wisest texts and come to know the authors like you had lived with them. As Seneca advised Lucilius in one of his letters: 

Everywhere means nowhere… And the same thing must hold true of men who seek intimate acquaintance with no single author, but visit them all in a hasty and hurried manner… There is nothing so efficacious that it can be helpful while it is being shifted about. And in reading of many books is distraction.

I encourage you to follow that timeless wisdom. Listen to David McCullough’s advice, too. “Study a masterpiece,” he says, “take it apart, study its architecture, its vocabulary, its intent. Underline, make notes in the margins, and after a few years, go back and read it again.” 

While I’d never claim that The Daily Stoic is a masterpiece, it is one of those books you can return to again and again. It’s designed that way, in fact. Of course, I don’t read my own book, but I do read a page from several daily devotionals every day. I love Tolstoy’s A Calendar of Wisdom, which is basically a collection of his favorite passages from the ancient and classic texts, with excellent supplements from his own considerable wisdom. And I recently added two new books to my page-a-day routine, both edited by Allie Esiri: A Poem for Every Night of the Year—a wonderful mix of old and new, classical and didactic poems from authors all over the world, and Shakespeare for Every Day of the Year—a sort of greatest hits of Shakespeare, tied well to each date with a nice intro that either reminds you of the plays you’ve read or gives you a nice path into the ones you haven’t. 

You could also break down Seneca’s letters this way—read one letter a day. Or one passage from Marcus each morning. Or one poem from Emily Dickinson each day. Or one page of the Bible each evening before bed. For thousands of years, the Jewish people have divided up the Torah in what they call Parashat HaShavua (portion of the week) to be read aloud at synagogue, so that the entire Torah can be cycled through annually. 

Beautiful. 

Read While You Eat

If you want to read more, you should always have a book with you. Always. 

People often assume something about me: that I’m a speed reader. It’s the most common email I get. They see all the books I recommend every month in my reading newsletter and assume I must have some secret. They want to know my trick for reading so fast. 

The truth is, even though I read hundreds of books each year, I actually read quite slowly. In fact, I deliberately read slowly. But what I also do is read all the time. I always carry a book with me. Every time I get a second, I crack it open. I don’t install games on my phone—that’s time for reading. When I’m eating, on a plane, in a waiting room, or sitting in traffic in an Uber—I read. 

If there’s any trick, it’s to stop thinking of reading as some activity that you do. Reading must become as natural as eating and breathing to you. It’s not something you do because you feel like it, but because it’s a reflex, a default.

Read While You Relax

The great William Osler (a founder of Johns Hopkins University and a fan of the Stoics) told his medical students it was important that they turn to literature as a way to nourish and relax their minds. “When chemistry distresses your soul,” he said, “seek peace in the great pacifier, Shakespeare, ten minutes with Montaigne will lighten the burden.” Shakespeare’s plays are free online to print out. Montaigne’s essays are a couple bucks as used copies on Amazon. Both of these writers have provided centuries of pleasure and wisdom to minds even more stressed than yours. 

We know that Seneca and Marcus were big readers. Their works abound with quotes and allusions to plays and poets and the stories of history. They read to relax and to be at leisure. It kept their minds strong and clear. How could you not do the same? Why do you turn instead to the TV, or to Twitter?

Let us follow Osler’s advice:

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

Get to it!

Keep a Commonplace Book

In a way, Meditations is really Marcus’s commonplace book—a central depository for ideas, quotes, anecdotes, observations and information he came across in his reading. He twice quotes from the comedies of Aristophanes, the Athenian comic playwright. Half a dozen times, we see him quote the tragedies and plays of Euripides, as well as the teachings of Epictetus. He quotes philosophers like Epicurus and Plato, as well as poets like Empedocles, Pindar, and Menander. As Seneca wrote:

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

Petrarch kept a commonplace book. Montaigne, Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon, Ronald Reagan, Charles Darwin, Mark Twain, Ludwig van Beethoven—they all kept a commonplace book.

In the book Old School, Tobias Wolf’s semi-autobiographical character takes the time to type out quotes and passages from great books to feel great writing come through him. Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Ricks wrote something similar in his book charting the intellectual development of America’s founders. On “Jefferson’s literary commonplace book, into which he copied passages from authors who had caught his attention,” Ricks adds: “There are few better ways to study a literary passage than to write it out in one’s own hand, feeling each word and following the flow of thought.”

You might be saying, But I don’t write and speak about things for a living. I don’t need this resource. But you do. You write papers, memos, emails, presentations, notes to friends, birthday cards. You give advice. You have conversations at dinner. You console loved ones and tell someone special how you feel about them. All these are opportunities to use the wisdom you have come across and recorded—to improve what you’re doing with what you’ve read, with the knowledge passed down through history.

Read the Masters Again and Again

Do you know the investment Warren Buffett considers to be the foundation of his multi-hundred billion dollar empire? A book. Buffett can’t put an exact number on the number of times he’s reread The Intelligent Investor since he first read it at the age of 19. And “I can’t remember what I paid for that first copy,” he explained in his 2013 letter to shareholders, but “of all the investments I ever made…[it] was the best.”

In the late 1940s, that book would have cost a dollar or two at most. That’s a pretty good ROI. 

You don’t have to read hundreds and hundreds of books. In fact, most people who make it their goal to read a certain amount of books each year inevitably fall off pace, get discouraged, and stop reading altogether. You’ll both read more and get a better return on your investment if you do what Buffett did and what the Stoics advised. As Seneca put it, “You must linger among a limited number of master-thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind.”

Over and over again, the Stoics pored over the same texts. So the ideas could take firm hold. So they could be absorbed. So it could become muscle memory, infused into their DNA. 

Once? Ha! That’s not enough. It’s about the reading and the re-reading. Writing, journaling, discussing, reflecting, experiencing. As Epictetus commanded: “Every day and night keep thoughts like these at hand—write them, read them aloud, talk to yourself and others about them.”

Marcus would later talk about how the philosopher is one with their weapon—like a boxer, more than a swordsman. A boxer just clenches a fist and has their preferred weapon; a fencer has to pick something up. That’s what we’re trying to do as we study: we’re trying to create a practice—get the reps—that fuses us with our philosophy. That makes us one with it. That inserts it into our DNA so that we are forever changed by it. 

Make that your reading goal. It’s not about skimming. It’s not about having done it once. It’s not about “getting the gist of it,” as Marcus derided. It’s about making it a part of your life and your mind. It’s about lingering and digesting until it takes firm hold, never to be dislodged. 

Realize: You Are Not Too Busy

You have kids. You have a job—maybe two. You have these things you are trying to accomplish. You have to get to the gym. You have a long commute. You have all these projects around the house. 

With all this, you say, I just don’t have time to read.

Which of course is ridiculous. It’s not true. It’s not even remotely true. Marcus Aurelius had all those same kinds of goals and responsibilities. Seneca did, too. You know what you don’t see in their writings? Complaints about not having time to read. In fact, if anything, they chide themselves for spending too much time with their books.

The fact is, people much busier than you have been prioritizing reading for centuries. They have been making wisdom part of their daily lives, no matter what’s going on in the world or in their jobs. As Andrew Roberts (listen to our discussion with him on the Daily Stoic podcast) writes in his epic biography of Napoleon, on his Egypt campaign,

[Napoleon] took 125 books of history, geography, philosophy and Greek mythology in a specially constructed library, including Captain Cook’ three-volume Voyages, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, and books by Livy, Thucydides, Plutarch, Tacitus, and of course Julius Caesar. He also brought biographies of Turenne, Condé, Saxe, Marlborough, Eugène of Savoy, Charles XII of Sweden and Bertrand du Guesclin, the notable French commander in the Hundred Years War. Poetry and drama had their place too, in the works of Ossian, Tasso, Ariosto, Homer, Virgil, Racine and Molière.

If Napoleon, commanding an army of 40,000 men, could find time to read on a march over 1,600 miles from home, you can find it. If Marcus could read while he was ruling the world, if Seneca could do it while studying the law, suffering from tuberculosis, while in exile, in the Senate, as consul, while he dealt with Nero’s insanity, you can, too. 

Leaders must be readers. There is no good life without study and practice and wisdom. Don’t find the time. Make the time. You’re not too busy. 

Nobody is.

The post How to Read More: 8 Reasons and 7 Strategies to Read More Books appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

Now Is the Time to Have a Civic Backbone

Things are bad. 

Or at least, things are strange.

A pandemic, impeachments, riots, murder hornets, earthquakes, fires, record-setting unemployment, a contested election, whales swallowing kayakers. And that’s just what’s happened in the news.

In your own life, your parents are acting weird. Your neighbor believes in conspiracy theories, and your boss is blowing it.

You’ve probably found yourself asking: What does it all mean?

That’s the wrong question.

The right question—per the Stoics, per Viktor Frankl, per common sense—is What am I going to make it all mean?

It was a decade or so ago now, in the depths of the global financial crisis, that the great Henry Rollins offered a prescription that once again feels relevant. Indeed, it feels relevant because his timely advice was timeless in its character, applicable in ordinary and extraordinary times alike.

As unemployment spiked and markets crashed, Rollins wrote:

People are getting a little desperate. People might not show their best elements to you. You must never lower yourself to being a person you don’t like. There is no better time than now to have a moral and civic backbone. To have a moral and civic true north. This is a tremendous opportunity for you, a young person, to be heroic.

Well, here we are in rough and uncertain times again (though one could argue that we never left them). And once again people are not showing their best selves. You’ve seen some things you don’t like, to put it mildly. You saw armed insurrectionists storm the United States Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of a legitimate democratic election. Someone did it in a Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt, standing shoulder to shoulder with another man in a “6MWE” shirt (6 Million Wasn’t Enough). You saw someone walking through the halls of the Senate with a Confederate flag flying over their shoulder. You saw Congressional members and staffers evacuating, running for cover, putting their hands over their heads. And then, you saw a number of Capitol police officers politely escort these traitors out of the building and the president call them “very special people.”

You saw all of this. Sure, you could deny its importance. You could delude yourself with the succor of “whataboutism.” But whatever your party, whatever your beliefs, whatever your frustrations, there is no way around the reality that these events occurred. No way to make them unhappen.

So what are you going to make it all mean? 

You could decide not to care. But even in this, you are choosing a certain meaning. You are choosing to consent to what happened, to at least tacitly agree that what happened is OK.

I urge you to consider the statesman Pericles’ warning: “One person’s disengagement is untenable unless bolstered by someone else’s commitment.” If you decide to ignore your human obligation, to ignore what’s happening in the world because it doesn’t seem to affect you directly, it might make your life a little more peaceful, but the result is an incremental increase in the suffering of others—whether that is the additional burden placed on others to carry your part of the load or an elongation of the injustice they are trying to ameliorate.

Every riot, every plague, every genocide, every repressive regime that has terrorized a part of the globe since the end of World War II and the reorganization of the world order, one could argue, owes the length of its reign to just the kind of disengagement Pericles was talking about. At the core of each one, whether it was the collapse of the Roman Republic or the rise of fascism or Jim Crow, was a citizenry who had lost their sense of a moral and civic true north.

Yes, there is a lot going on in the world. Yes, things are complicated.

But also, things are simple.

We are all in this together. Character counts. State violence against innocent citizens is unacceptable. Racial hatred is a plague. Selfishness—be it refusal to wear a mask or failure to follow protocols in a pandemic—is pestilence. Political violence based on a lie must be condemned and the guilty parties driven from public life.

Ulysses S. Grant wrote to his father in 1861 that there are only two sides: traitors and non-traitors. Good and evil exist. “Are we the baddies?” is a question we must constantly ask ourselves.

This is a moment to decide what side you are on. A moment to be heroic. To think about others. To serve. To prepare. To keep calm. To reassure. To protect. This is a time to reevaluate our priorities. To ask ourselves what’s important, what are we working toward, how can we turn all of this into an opportunity?

Courage is calling you. Self-discipline is essential. We need your moral and civic backbone. We need wisdom. And man, do we need you to embody those things right now, more than ever.

The post Now Is the Time to Have a Civic Backbone appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

If You Only Read a Few Books in 2021, Read These

It was a rough year.

All of us were tested. Many of us failed.

Those failures were big and small. 2020 made some of us callous. It infected others with conspiracy theories. Others gave into apathy and chaos, losing all sense of routine and structure. Some of us spent hours watching Netflix. Others far too many hours glued to the news and twitter.

Now, with a new year in front of us—one that has already revealed that challenges don’t simply stop or reset when the calendar turns over—we have to get serious. We have to get serious about reading, the tried and tested way to wisdom, so that we might gain easily what others have gained by difficult experience.

“I’m not saying that you have to be a reader to save your soul in the modern world,” the great novelist Walter Mosley reminds us. “I’m saying it helps.”

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

With that in mind, here are 18 books—some new, some old—that will help you meet the goals that matter for 2021, that will help you live better and be better.

Discipline Equals Freedom: Field Manual by Jocko Willink

Maybe right now you’re stuck at home, maybe you’re not working. Your kids might be home with you. Certainly the normal way of doing things has been significantly altered. Well, it’s when things are chaotic and crazy, when the world feels like it’s falling apart, that we need to create structure, better habits, limits and order. But you can’t create any of those things without discipline.

Why Don’t We Learn from History? by B. H. Liddell Hart

I’ve come to believe that one of the best ways to become an informed citizen in the present, to understand what’s happening in the world right now, is not to watch the news, but to read history. As Bismarck said, “Fools say they learn by experience. I prefer to profit by others’ experience.” This book is very short, but will help you understand the history more than thousands of pages on the same topic by countless other writers. In my view, Hart is unquestionably the best writer on history and strategy. Another important book to read re: history and this moment is The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, which if more people had read it, even as late as this spring, might have saved the US this horrific second wave of the virus we experienced (if you don’t learn your history, you’re doomed to repeat it).

Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything by Viktor E. Frankl and The Choice: Embrace the Possible by Dr. Edith Eva Eger

Nobody knows more about suffering and finding meaning in suffering than Viktor Frankl. From his experiences in the Holocaust, we got Man’s Search For Meaning. I was stunned to find that a new (lost) book from him was published this year, with a beautiful title worthy of a daily mantra: Say yes to life. Dr. Edith Eger was also sent to Auschwitz. She also not only endured unimaginable suffering, but found meaning in it. Dr. Eger went on to become a psychologist. She met and studied under Frankl, and survives to this day, still seeing patients and helping people overcome trauma. On the one hand, this is a book about the darkness of the human race… and on the other about the uncrushable spirit that allows us to survive and triumph over it. Incredibly, this book only came out in 2017. It’s sure to be a classic.

That One Should Disdain Hardships: The Teachings of a Roman Stoic by Musonius Rufus

Musonius was exiled at least three, possibly four times, so he knew about being locked down. He knew about losing your freedom. He knew that all a philosopher could do was respond well—bravely, boldly, patiently—to what life threw at them. That’s what we should be doing now. Musonius compared it to the way acrobats “face without concern their difficult tasks”—we don’t actually disdain hardships, we welcome hardship, even seek it out, “ready to endure hardship for the sake of complete happiness.”

The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life by David Brooks

Chasing personal success is the first mountain. But what happens when you find out, as many of us do, “Oh wait… this is not nearly as satisfying as I thought it would be. It did not magically solve all my problems and unhappiness”? That’s when we begin to look for what David Brooks calls the Second Mountain… and no, it’s not just a taller version of the first one. This is the one where we start thinking less about ourselves and more about other people. “True good fortune is,” as Marcus Aurelius reminded himself at the height of his power and fame, at the summit of his first mountain, “good character, good intentions and good actions.” True good fortune is you doing stuff for other people. For your community. For your country. For the world. This book won’t just make you think about your life, it will make you question everything in your life.

How to Be a Leader by Plutarch

One of the best leadership books I’ve read in a very long time—and not surprisingly, it was written a very long time ago. There’s a reason Plutarch has been a favorite of thinkers and doers since the days of Ancient Rome. He’s insightful. He’s funny. He’s a great storyteller. He wasn’t just a writer either, but like the best historians and philosophers, a practitioner of what he talked about. Highly recommend. And it will help you relax, it will help you ratchet down the noise, and hopefully inspire you to make your own mark. Plutarch, I might also add, was the inspiration and a main source of my latest book: Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius.

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

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

Florence Nightingale by Cecil Woodham-Smith

Robert Greene told me a lot time ago to err on the side of age for biographies and it’s usually a pretty good rule. Biographers used to try to teach their readers things; they actually admired their subjects and didn’t get bogged down in endless amounts of facts. In any case, I got a lot out of this biography. When you think Florence Nightingale, you don’t think “hero’s journey,” but her life maps pretty perfectly on it. Also re: history providing perspective, the intense bureaucracy and institutional stupidity she fought against maps well to what we’re seeing today with the fight against COVID-19.

Everything Is Figureoutable by Marie Forleo

There’s a story that occurs constantly in the biographies of brilliant people. As a kid they had a question—maybe about how car engines work, or what Antarctica is like. Their mom or dad had the same response, “I don’t know, but let’s go figure it out!” So they went to the library or the computer until they found the answer. And they learned an essential lesson—one that we should all teach our kids—well-expressed in the title of Marie Forleo’s book: Everything is Figureoutable. Problems can be solved. Answers can be tracked down. The unknown can be made familiar. This is figureoutable. Everything is.

A Poem for Every Night of the Year (edited by Esiri Allie)

We’ve been reading this together every night as a family. The poems are all well-chosen and just short enough to keep my kids interested. It also serves as a nightly reminder of something I wrote about in Lives. Cleanthes—the founder of Stoicism’s successor—believed we are like half-completed poems, and our job in life is to work to make a complete and beautiful poem. We may face terrible circumstances and obstacles along the way, Cleanthes wrote, but it’s no different than how the constraints and “fettering rules” of poetry give the art its beauty.

A Calendar of Wisdom by Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy believed his most essential work was not his novels but his daily read, A Calendar of Wisdom. As Tolstoy wrote in his diary, the continual study of one text, reading one page at the start of each day, was critical to personal growth. “Daily study,” Tolstoy wrote in 1884, is “necessary for all people.” So Tolstoy dreamed of creating a book composed of “a wise thought for every day of the year, from the greatest philosophers of all times and all people… Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Pascal.” As he wrote to his assistant, “I know that it gives one great inner force, calmness, and happiness to communicate with such great thinkers… They tell us about what is most important for humanity, about the meaning of life and about virtue.” As you can imagine, I am a big fan of daily devotionals. Check out DailyStoic.com and DailyDad.com for the free daily email versions I do.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

I joked in February that I was deliberately not going to read this book because of the pandemic. In truth, I got it down from my shelf and sat on my bedside table while I worked up the courage to read it again. My feelings were well-founded, because on the night I finished, all I could do was walk quietly into my son’s room and sob while he slept. The Road is just one of the most beautiful and profound depictions of struggle and sacrifice and love ever put down on the page. Worth reading again!

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.

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

The future belongs to those with the ability to focus, be creative, and think at a high level. This is a book that explains how to cultivate and protect that skill—the ability to do deep work. The type of intense concentration and cognitive focus where real progress is made — on whatever it is that we happen to do, be it writing or thinking or designing or creating. Elite work takes deep work.

The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene

“If I had to say what the primary law of human nature is,” Greene has said, “the primary law of human nature is to deny that we have human nature, to deny that we are subject to these forces.” The reality is, humans do have aggressive, violent, contradictory, emotional, irrational impulses. And we have to understand them if we want to rise about them. Greene’s pieces on internet trolls, on passive aggressive arguers, on identity politics, and this monologue on irrationality are good previews of lessons that we’d all be better for understanding this year.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Reading this book, first published in 1952, in light of the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd was terribly sad. How little has changed. How callous and awful people are to each other. How crushing it must be to live in a world that strips you of your dignity, that uses you, that subjects you to violence and unfairness. There are many “anti-racist” reading lists floating around, but how many of the books on those lists will still be readable in 70 years? Do yourself a favor and read this. It’s not going anywhere because it is timeless and sadly, very timely.

Montaigne by Stefan Zweig

There are two kinds of biographies: Long ones which tell you every fact about the person’s life, and short ones which capture the person’s essence and the lessons of their life. This biography by Stefan Zweig is a brilliant, urgent and important example of the latter. It is what I would call a moral biography—that is, a book that teaches you how to live through the story of another person. If you’ve been struggling with the onslaught of negative news and political turmoil, read this book. It’s the biography of a man who retreated from the chaos of 16th century France to study himself, written by a man fleeing the chaos of 20th century Europe. When I say it’s timely, I mean that it’s hard to be a thinking person and not see alarming warning signs about today’s world while reading this book. Yet it also gives us a solution: Turn inward. Master yourself. Montaigne is one of humanity’s greatest treasures—a wise and insightful thinker who never takes himself too seriously. This book helped me get through 2020, no question.

**

As I have published different versions of this piece over the last couple of years (2018, 2019, 2020), I made one final recommendation worth repeating: Pick 3-4 titles that have had a big impact on you in the past and commit to reading them again. Seneca talked about how you need to “linger among a limited number of master thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind.”

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

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

The post If You Only Read a Few Books in 2021, Read These appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

From America’s Oldest Veteran, Here Are 9 Lessons On Living

This article was originally published in February 2017. Richard Overton passed away on December 27th, 2018 at age 112 . R.I.P.

Richard Overton is the oldest living veteran in the United States. 110 years old. He was drafted at age 36 in 1942 at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. He fought in the Pacific—Hawaii, Guam, Palau and Iwo Jima—in World War II. He also happens to live down the street from me. Still.

When I saw online that he was having trouble affording the cost of an in-house nurse and care that would allow him to continue living at home (in the house he partly built with his own hands after returning from the war), I of course, donated and then I reached out to his third cousin to see if I might be able to come by and meet this great man.

There was a generation of Americans who used to sit on their porch and enjoy life as it happened. Richard is one of the last living members of that generation. Sitting on that porch with him, shooting the shit, I picked up a few things I wanted to share with you. He ate ice cream out of a coffee cup, I asked questions.

He humored me, I tried to be as little of a bother as possible. I won’t pretend we had a particularly deep conversation, though I think anything that comes out of the mouth of a person older than a century has a certain intrinsic wisdom to it.

I walked away that afternoon with a feeling of having experienced something very special. It made me hopeful, to be around a man who had seen and lived through so much and was still sitting there on his porch. It made me sad too (what would it have been like to have another 20 years with my own grandfather?). Mostly, I just wanted to share what I learned with you.

The man’s a treasure. I hope you’ll help keep him on that porch for as long as he wants to sit there.

Take It Day By Night

I asked Richard, other than God—he’s a faithful man—if he had a secret for living this long. “A secret? No, no secret,” he said. “Just live it.” Day by day?, I asked. He shook his head. At 110, day by day is too long. “Take it day by night,” he said.

Forget What The Doctors Say

Everyone I know that aspires to live for a very long time is obsessive about their health. Everyone I know that’s actually lived for a very long time doesn’t seem to think about it at all.

I realize that’s purely anecdotal but it’s hard to sit next to a man who has been alive 110 years old and still smokes 10 to 12 cigars a day and not think maybe it’s all a bit of a crapshoot. The man drinks his whiskey, smokes his cigars, eats his ice cream. He does what he wants. And he’s still here. Good for him.

It’s All Very Simple

How does it feel to be the oldest veteran? “Never think about it.” You seem very calm and relaxed. Have you always been that way? “Yes.” Do you think about dying? “Nothing I could do about it.”

Like I said, there is a certain sagacity to anything uttered by someone who has been alive that long. There is also a simplicity and a finality to the answers. A younger person would pontificate, would chatter, would argue this way or that way. Richard gives you his one-word answer.

Maybe it’s because he’s old and tired, but it just as easily might be the fact that after all those years complicated things become very simple. No reason to think about dying.

Of course you learn how to forgive people. Sure, he’s calm and relaxed, it’s the only way to be. A couple words is all you need when you’ve seen it all.

Just Sit There

I’ve mentioned Richard’s porch a couple times. It’s a wonderful thing. In East Austin, they’re tearing down most of the old houses and building cool looking new ones.

You know what they’re not putting back on them? Porches.

You can’t even see the street from my house; the builder put a 10 foot fence around the whole thing. But Richard spends four or five hours a day out on his, on a chair he refers to as his throne.

He showed me the railing that rings the porch and the waist-high plants which go around it. Want to know why they’re there, he asked? It was because women used to wear skirts and he wanted them to be able to sit comfortably and privately.

The man just enjoys life on that porch, enjoys the present moment, maybe remembers the past a little. I asked him what he thinks about up there. “Different things,” he said. “I look at the trees.” I did too. It was nice.

History Is Very Short

It’s fascinating to think that when Richard was born, Theodore Roosevelt was president. Overton is the oldest living American veteran now, but when he was born, Henry L. Riggs was still alive.

Riggs was a veteran of the Black Hawk War (1832) and he was born in 1812… and Conrad Heyer, the Revolutionary War veteran and the oldest and earliest person to be photographed (born in 1749) was still alive when Riggs was born. Three overlapping lives: that’s all it took to get back to before even the idea of founding the United States.

Richard’s brother fought in the first World War. He told me he remembered seeing Civil War veterans around when he was a kid. Not many, but they were there. It was Texas—those men fought to keep his mother in slavery. How long ago all that horribleness seems.

How recent it is at the same time. I’m bringing my son over to meet Richard soon. He’s three months old. I want him to shake hands with a man who walked the earth when TR was in the Oval Office, who shook hands with Obama, who lived through the Spanish influenza, who stepped foot on more Japanese islands than he should have had to, who came home after fighting for this country and had to put up with segregation, who bought a house for $4,000 and lived in it for 70 years (it’s now worth more than 100x that), who worked for some of the most famous governors in Texas (Ann Richards was his favorite), who at 110 is still going strong.

A Wise Man Knows Nothing

Another observation about really old people: They’re never the ones that try to tell you what to do. A 40-year-old will stop a stranger on the street and tell them to pull up their pants or remind a young woman she needs to smile more.

An octogenarian and beyond just lets people do what they do. I asked Richard if he had any advice for young people: “I don’t know.” I asked him again later, “Never get in trouble.” They say that Socrates was wise because he knew how little he knew. I think that’s the real lesson in aging, a certain humility and indifference.

An acceptance of other people, that they’ll find their own way and they don’t need your moralizing. Besides, staying alive is a full time job.

Know What You Like (And Hold Onto It)

I mentioned it above, but Richard has been living in the same house in Austin since coming home at the end of World War II. He refuses to leave, either—he likes it there.

He’s got a couple of old cars in the driveway too. Knowing what you like is the first step to wisdom and old age, said Robert Louis Stevenson. There’s something comforting in the thought of Richard being happy and active in his community, enjoying life and sitting on the same porch for over seven decades.

In an age that promotes constant change, Richard’s message in a way is the opposite. Find what you like and stick with it.

Community Is the Key to Everything

Richard pointed across the street—the cactus, he planted that. The porch across the street? He helped build that. The electrical pole on the corner—it used to have an unsafe number of houses connected to it until he called and called and the power company finally fixed it.

He told me the story of a woman who fell into the cactus and how he helped her out and helped her pull out the thorns. A woman drove by while we sat there and waved. For over half a century, he’s been a watchdog in that neighborhood, helping people, making it better.

Now that he’s outlived nearly every relative on earth, the community is helping take care of Richard. His third cousin—do you even know your third cousin, would they help you?—comes by almost everyday to sit with him and talk.

His third cousin is the one who is keeping Richard in his home and looking out for him. That’s community. That’s family.

Enjoy the Absurdity of Life

The most animated Richard ever got was when he told me a story about the enormous pecan tree in his front yard. It seemed like an ordinary tree to me, until he told me his dog planted it seventy years ago. They had a pecan tree in the back, and the dog would grab the nuts and bury them in the front yard.

With glee, Richard told me how eventually the tree grew and now it’s so big it’s nearly pushing up the foundation of his house. He loved the absurdity of it—a dog planting a tree! He was laughing at it still, seven decades later. The philosopher Chrysippus supposedly died laughing at a donkey eating his figs.

It occurred to me that it wouldn’t be a bad way for Richard to go someday either, sitting on his porch, thinking about his dog, laughing at the tree that’s going to outlast all of them, and many of us.

It’s a shame on this nation to me that Richard Overton, at 110 years old and as our oldest living veteran, is having to ask for money on the internet to stay in his home and pay for medical care.

Who doesn’t agree that our oldest living hero deserves to be taken care of?

It’s been my belief that America has always been great and it’s great because of men like Richard. It’s great because when his third cousin created a GoFundMe campaign, thousands of people do show up to help. But they shouldn’t have to.

Richard and his family shouldn’t even have to ask. (I’ll ask for them though: Please keep helping!)

But I don’t want to end this on a negative note. Because political dysfunction aside, Richard is still here and he doesn’t look like he is going anywhere. I was lucky to meet him and learn from him. I hope I’ve been able to pass along a little of what that was.

I have no idea how long I will live for, or what old age will look like for me, but I feel more connected to the past after meeting Richard. I could feel his wisdom and his energy and am better for it. Meeting him was one of the treats of my life.

So I’ll end this piece by thanking him—for that—and for what he’s done for the rest of us the 110 years he has been on this planet.

The post From America’s Oldest Veteran, Here Are 9 Lessons On Living appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

The Secret to Better Habits in 2021

There’s nothing like a global pandemic to obliterate your habits. 

When you’re locked in your house, working from home, when your routine is disrupted, when everything that’s happening in the world seems to be negative, it’s easy to say screw it. Or, it’s easy to tell yourself—as I wrote about recently—that you’ll get back on track when things go back to normal.

It’s understandable. It’s widespread. We’ve all made compromises in the last year—we’ve had to. The problem is the promises we’ve made to rationalize those decisions, to keep them going even though we know they aren’t serving us well. 

I’ll start eating salads for lunch when I’m back at the office. I’ll stop snacking when the kids are back on a schedule. I’ll get back to working out when I can safely go to the gym. I’ll get off social media when there is less news to follow—then, I’ll start reading books again. 

The Stoics—who survived their own plagues and exiles and moments of crisis—knew that this was no way to live. How much longer are you going to wait, Epictetus would ask? You could be good today, Marcus Aurelius reminded himself, but instead you choose tomorrow. 

Now is now. Now is the time to live well, to bring arete (excellence and virtue) into our lives. To make it a habit. We all want better habits—and if we want to be better people, we’ll have to have better habits. And as we start a new year, there’s never a better time. 

Think Small

One of the best pieces of advice from Seneca was actually pretty simple. “Each day,” he told Lucilius, you should “acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes, as well.” Just one thing. One nugget. This is the way to improvement: Incremental, consistent, humble, persistent work. Your business, your book, your career, your body—it doesn’t matter—you build them with little things, day after day.  Epictetus called it fueling the habit bonfire. The filmmaker, entrepreneur, author, former governor of California, professional bodybuilder, and father of five Arnold Schwarzenegger gave a similar prescription for people trying to stay strong and sane during this pandemic: “Just as long as you do something every day, that is the important thing.” Whether it’s from Seneca or Epictetus or Arnold, good advice is good advice and truth is truth. One thing a day adds up. One step at a time is all it takes. You just gotta do it. And the sooner you start, the better you’ll feel… and be. 

Think Long-Term

In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear talks about something he calls “The Plateau of Latent Potential.”  This plateau can be likened to bamboo, which spends its first five years building extensive root systems underground before exploding 90 feet into the air within six weeks. Or to an ice cube, which will only begin to melt once the surrounding temperature hits 32 degrees (or the resulting water that only boils at 212 degrees). Just because it sometimes takes longer than we’d like to see the results of our efforts doesn’t mean that our efforts are going to waste. In fact, most of the important work—the build up—won’t seem like it’s amounting to anything, but of course it is. Plutarch tells the story of Lampis, a wealthy ship-owner who was asked how he accumulated his fortune. “The greater part came quite easily,” Lampis supposedly answered, “but the first, smaller part took time and effort.” Any goal we have will take time and effort to accomplish, and beginning it will most likely be harder than finishing. But we have to keep going, because habits and hard work compound. Remember always that greatness takes time. Most importantly, remember what Zeno said: that greatness “is realized by small steps, but is truly no small thing.”

Develop the Muscle

As part of one of the Daily Stoic challenges, I quit chewing gum. Gum is probably the least bad habit you could possibly have. But I wanted to flex the muscle; I wanted to prove that I could quit something just for the sake of quitting it. And every time I see gum, or I think about wanting to have gum but don’t give in—that helps reinforce for me that I’m the kind of person that can decide to stop doing things that I don’t want to do anymore. So if you want to become a person that can do something hard like giving up alcohol, start by doing something easy like giving up gum. The logic applies to good habits. If you want to become a person that writes books, for instance, start by becoming a person that writes in a journal for 15 minutes every morning. As Epictetus said, “Capability is confirmed and grows in its corresponding actions, walking by walking, and running by running… therefore, if you want to do something, make a habit of it.” There is nothing more powerful than a good habit, nothing that holds us back quite like a bad habit. We are what we do. What we do determines who we can be. So if we want to be happy, if we want to be successful, if we want to be great, we have to develop the capability, we have to develop the day-to-day habits that allow this to ensue.

Use Good Habits to Drive Out Bad Habits

When a dog is barking loudly because someone is at the door, the worst thing you can do is yell. To the dog, it’s like you’re barking too! When a dog is running away, it’s not helpful to chase it—again, now it’s like you’re both running. A better option in both scenarios is to give the dog something else to do. Tell it to sit. Tell it to go to its bed or kennel. Run in the other direction. Break the pattern, interrupt the negative impulse. The same goes for us. As Epictetus said, “Since habit is such a powerful influence, and we’re used to pursuing our impulses to gain and avoid outside our own choice, we should set a contrary habit against that, and where appearances are really slippery, use the counterforce of our training.” When a bad habit reveals itself, counteract it with a commitment to a contrary virtue. For instance, let’s say you find yourself procrastinating today—don’t dig in and fight it. Get up and take a walk to clear your head and reset instead. If you find yourself cutting corners during a workout or on a project, say to yourself: “OK, now I am going to go even further or do even better.”

Build A Routine  

It’s strange to us that successful people, who are more or less their own boss and are clearly so talented, seem prisoners to the regimentation of their routines. Think about Jocko Willink waking up at 4:30 a.m. every morning. Isn’t the whole point of greatness that you’re freed from trivial rules and regulations? That you can do whatever you want? Ah, but the greats know that complete freedom is a nightmare. They know that order is a prerequisite of excellence. They know that in an unpredictable world, a good routine is a safe haven of certainty. They know that when you routinize, disturbances give you less trouble… because they’re boxed out—by the order and clarity you built. Well, it’s when things are chaotic and crazy, when the world feels like it’s falling apart—this is when we need routine more than ever. Follow the kind of routine that Marcus Aurelius followed every day (like I detail in this video) or the practice that Seneca followed with his evening journaling. Get up early. Be deliberate. Exercise. Set up and stick to a diet. Create limits and order. Clean your house. Attack problems or projects that have piled up. Eisenhower famously said that freedom was properly defined as the opportunity for self-discipline, and so it is with disorder—it’s an opportunity to create order. 

Use Incentives

Around the time I wanted to become someone who spends less time on their phone, I was invited to a challenge on the habit-building app SPAR!, which is basically the most addictive and rewarding app I’ve ever downloaded, to not touch my phone for at least 10 minutes after I woke up. I’d been sleeping with it in the other room for years, but I still usually grabbed it first thing in the morning. The challenge came with a powerful incentive — each time I failed, I’d have to pay $10. At first you do the daily deed just so you don’t lose money. But the real draw was that it meant I could focus on being present with my son in my first waking moments. Soon, I started challenging myself to stretch 10 minutes into 30, then 45, then an hour. Now some mornings, if I am writing, I might not touch my phone until lunch. On those days, I’m happier and more productive.

Put Up Reminders

I’m not sure where I stole the idea from, but I’m a big proponent of printing out good advice and putting it right in front of your desk, or wherever you work everyday. So you cannot run from the advice, so you see it enough times that it becomes imprinted in your mind. The first quote I ever did this with was an admonishment from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. I was 19 years old and it was exactly what I needed to be told—it was how I reminded myself to get off my ass, to stop being lazy, and to work hard. Now, over my desk I have a picture of Oliver Sacks. In the background he has a sign that reads “NO!” that helped remind him (and now me) to use that powerful word. If you walk into the locker room of any professional sports franchise or elite D-1 level program, you’ll see the walls are tattooed with precepts and reminders (The Pittsburgh Pirates even have “It’s not things that upset us, it’s our judgement about things” in their clubhouse in Florida. Iowa football has “Ego Is the Enemy” in their weightroom.”) On the Daily Stoic podcast, I asked 2x NBA champion and 6x All-Star (and fan of Stoicism) Pau Gasol about the role these precepts play in sports:

Athletes appreciate pointers and directions. Quotes kind of hit home, as far as there’s a message, like “Pound the rock.” As far as resilience, you just keep pounding the rock. That was a big one for the spurs. Just keep pounding the rock. If you hit it a thousand times or two thousand times, you might not see a crack, but it’s that next hit, that next pound where the rock will crack. You just got to keep at it, keep at it, keep at it. So pound the rock. It’s something that a lot of other coaches have acquired and then shared in their locker rooms.

Reminders are powerful. They make you better. They give you something to rest on—a kind of backstop to prevent backsliding.

Choose Your Surroundings Wisely

Who we are surrounded by influences more than any other factor, who we will become. Goethe once said “Tell me who you spend time with and I will tell you who you are.” As Seneca wrote, “Even Socrates, Cato, and Laelius might have been shaken in their moral strength by a crowd that was unlike them; so true it is that none of us, no matter how much he cultivates his abilities, can withstand [the influence of their surroundings.]” We seem to understand that a young kid who spends time with kids who don’t want to go anywhere in life probably isn’t going to go anywhere in life, either. What we understand less is that an adult who spends time with other adults who tolerate crappy jobs, or unhappy lifestyles is going to find themselves making similar choices. Same goes for what you read, what you watch, what you think about. Your life comes to resemble its environment (Ben Hardy calls this the proximity effect). So choose your surroundings wisely.

Hand Yourself Over to a Script

In 2018, we did our first Daily Stoic Challenge, full of different challenges and activities based on Stoic philosophy. It was an awesome experience. Even I, the person who created the challenge, got a lot out of it. Why? I think it was the process of handing myself over to a script. It’s the reason personal trainers are so effective. You just show up at the gym and they tell you what to do, and it’s never the same thing as the last time. Deciding what we want to do, determining our own habits, and making the right choices is exhausting. Handing the wheel over to someone else is a way to narrow our focus and put everything into the commitment. That’s why Whole30 is so popular. You buy a book and follow a regimen, and then you know what you’re doing for the next month.

To kick off 2021, we’re doing another Daily Stoic Challenge. The idea is that you ought to start the New Year right—with 21 great days to create momentum for the rest of the year. If you want to have better habits this year, find a challenge you can participate in. Just try one: it doesn’t matter what it’s about or who else is doing it.

Keep Going Back to It

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

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

In other words, when you mess up, come back to the habits you’ve been working on. Come back to the ideas here in this post. Don’t quit just because you’re not perfect.

—

No one is saying you have to magically transform yourself in 2021, but if you’re not making progress toward the person you want to be, what are you doing? And, more important, when are you planning to do it?

As Epictetus famously said 2,000 years ago: “How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself?” He’s really asking, how much longer are you going to wait until you demand the best of yourself? How much longer are you going to wait to start forming the habits that you know would be responsible for getting you to where you want to go?

With that, I’ll leave you with Epictetus once more. It’s the perfect passage to recite as we set out to begin a new year, hopefully, as better people:

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

There’s only 24 hours left to sign up to join me in the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge . 

New Year, New You is a set of 21 actionable challenges—presented one per day—built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. Each challenge is specifically designed to help you:

Stop procrastinating on your dreams


Learn new skills


Quit harmful vices


Make amends


Learn from past mistakes


Have more hope for the new year


And much much more…

21 challenges designed to set up potentially life-changing habits for 2021 and beyond.

There are over 30,000 words of exclusive content that I don’t post anywhere else. Each day also has an audio companion from me, weekly group Zoom calls, a Slack channel for accountability, and a lot more. 

It’s one of my favorite things I do each year and really enjoy interacting with everyone in the challenge. Click here to learn more .

The post The Secret to Better Habits in 2021 appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

The (Very) Best Books I Read in 2020

We are doing a 2021 New Year New You Challenge . Please join us !

Man. What a year. 

There’s not much you can say about 2020 that doesn’t include some curse words, but I will say this: It provided plenty of time for reading. It provided plenty of things that needed to be read about—from leadership to pandemics to civil rights to elections—this was one of those years that sends you to… well, I would say “the bookstore,” but that was hard, too.

Anyway, I read a lot. As I’m sure you did too. 

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

My reading list is now ~250,000 people, which means I hear pretty quickly when a recommendation has landed well. I promise you—you can’t go wrong with any of these.

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry

There is something surreal about reading a book published 15 years ago about an event 100 years ago that just happens to nail exactly what’s happening in this moment (his book Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America is also good and equally timeless.) Barry’s haunting book covers in definitive, gripping detail the Spanish flu: a global pandemic which staggered nations and cities and the brightest medical minds of the time. “It’s only the influenza,” confident officials repeated. “It’ll be over soon,” they reassured. And then the President of the United States caught it… (I’m talking about Woodrow Wilson, of course). Because the more things change, the more they stay the time. Because history is the same song happening on repeat. Anyway, reading this book at the beginning of the pandemic was not only educational, but it has helped shape my family and businesses’ responses to the crisis. Barry writes of the relief people felt when the Spanish flu seemed to be winding down. They thought it was over, but actually only the first wave was done. “For the virus had not disappeared. It had only gone underground, like a forest fire left burning in the roots, swarming and mutating, adapting, honing itself, watching and waiting, waiting to burst into flame.” You cannot relax yet. You cannot drop your shield, as the Spartans would say. You must continue to protect the line. The health of your neighbors depends on it. And I joked in February that I was deliberately not going to read The Road by Cormac McCarthy this book because of the pandemic. In truth, I got it down from my shelf and sat on my bedside table while I worked up the courage to read it again. My feelings were well-founded, because on the night I finished, all I could do was walk quietly into my son’s room and sob while he slept. The Road is just one of the most beautiful and profound depictions of struggle and sacrifice and love ever put down on the page. Worth reading again!

Leadership: In Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin 

This is an absolutely incredible book. I think I marked up nearly every page. The book is a study of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR and Lyndon Johnson, and it is so clearly the culmination of a lifetime of research… and yet somehow not overwhelming or boring. Distillation at its best! I have read extensively on each of those figures and I got a ton out of it. Even stuff I already knew, I benefited from Goodwin’s perspective. This is the perfect book to read right now—a timely reminder that leadership matters. Or as the Stoics say: character is fate. Or as I wrote about in this piece about leadership during the plague in ancient Rome: when things break down, good leaders have to stand up. After Goodwin, I picked up Leadership in War: Essential Lessons from Those Who Made History by Andrew Roberts, who I find to be funny, insightful and quite good at capturing the essence of unique historical figures. I also recommend Roberts’ biographies of Churchill and Napoleon (you can listen to my interview with Roberts here). As I said, now is the time to get perspective and to learn from the past.

Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 by Taylor Branch

I’ve raved about some of my favorite epic biographies before: Robert Caro’s LBJ, William Manchester’s Churchill, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Well, add another to the list. Taylor Branch’s definitive series on Martin Luther King Jr. and the American civil rights movement has not only been riveting, eye-opening and humbling, it’s been the perfect vehicle to help me understand what’s happening in the world right now. I finished Parting the Waters and immediately picked up Volume II, Pillar of Fire. I’ve come to believe that one of the best ways to become an informed citizen in the present is not to watch the news, but to read history. The actor Hugh Jackman said in an interview a few months ago that he’s been getting his news by keeping his eye on the big picture—going through the Ken Burns catalog and reading books like Meditations. “That’s the way you should understand events and humanity,” he said, “with that sort of 30,000-foot view.” If you want to understand what’s happening in the United States right now as it pertains to race, get off Twitter and read these books. On that note, I re-read Invisible Man, first published in 1952, in light of the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. There are many “anti-racist” reading lists floating around, but how many of the books on those lists will still be readable in 70 years? Do yourself a favor and read this. It’s not going anywhere because it is timeless—and sadly, very timely. I also learned so much from Edward Ball’s Life of a Klansman (and when I interviewed him) and just as much from Albion W. Tourgee’s A Fool’s Errand (Albion was one of the legal advisors in Plessy v. Ferguson). Strongly recommend one or both of these books to anyone who wants to become better informed instead of more partisan. My study of this history has been ongoing, but I feel I have learned far more these books than I have from the trendy white fragility books going around. Also if you’re interested, here’s a step I have taken in regards to Confederate monuments (that is: literal white supremacy monuments, as you’ll learn in these books and some of my interviews on the topic) in my town. 

More…

I really can’t leave it at just three books. I loved Cecil Woodham Smith’s books, Florence Nightingale and The Reason Why: The Story of the Fatal Charge of the Light Brigade. I loved Julian Jackson’s biography of de Gaulle and McCullough’s biography of Truman. I loved even more Wright Thompson’s The Cost of These Dreams. The best thing I read about writing was Steinbeck’s Journal of a Novel. The best two bits of philosophy I read were Plutarch’s How to Be a Leader and Carlin Barton’s Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones (an expensive primer on the Stoics, really—but very good). As far as kid’s books goes, we read The Scarecrow together many times. Every night we read A Poem for Every Night of the Year (edited by Esiri Allie). We’ve also done several tours through the stories in Fifty Famous Stories Retold by James Baldwin. Finally, I spent a lot of time with Marcus Aurelius during the pandemic… because he himself lived through one. The big thing I took away, which pertains to so much of what’s in these books: “You can commit injustice by doing nothing. “Be free of passion but full of love.” “No, it’s not unfortunate that this happened, it’s fortunate that it happened to me.”

Of course, I also put out a book this year, Lives of the Stoics , which debuted at #1. I also released a box set of The Obstacle Is the Way , Ego Is the Enemy and Stillness Is the Key . You can get them anywhere books are sold OR we have signed, personalized editions in the Daily Stoic store . They make great gifts!

But most importantly, I hope you join me in the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge . 

New Year, New You is a set of 21 actionable challenges—presented one per day—built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. Each challenge is specifically designed to help you:

Stop procrastinating on your dreams


Learn new skills


Quit harmful vices


Make amends


Learn from past mistakes


Have more hope for the new year


And much much more…

21 challenges designed to set up potentially life-changing habits for 2021 and beyond.

There are over 30,000 words of exclusive content that I don’t post anywhere else. Each day also has an audio companion from me, weekly group Zoom calls, a Slack channel for accountability, and a lot more. It’s one of my favorite things I do each year and really enjoy interacting with everyone in the challenge. Click here to learn more .

The post The (Very) Best Books I Read in 2020 appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.