Ryan Holiday's Blog, page 15

There Is No Such Thing as Normal— So Stop Waiting for It

We’ve heard it. 

We’ve said it.

When things go back to normal.

I found myself thinking that this very morning as I took my sons for our morning walk. How much longer is it going to go on like this?

It’s understandable of course. This all feels very strange. A pandemic that has disrupted our lives. Everything seems so polarized. The election is still being contested. This is not how stuff usually is, right?

But of course, that’s not true at all. Any student of history knows that 2020 is hardly abnormal.

A hundred years ago we had a pandemic much worse than this one…in the middle of a world war. We had a great depression after that. There was a pandemic in the ‘50s. In ‘68, not only were there massive civil rights protests and riots, but there was also a flu pandemic that killed some 100,000 people in the U.S. and over a million across the globe. In fact, I defy you to find me a single “normal” decade in American history.

The last two decades have hardly been peaceful and simple. They began with a contested election and legal challenges. They were followed by a terrorist attack that left 3,000 dead. Then we had a financial crisis on par with the Depression. Now here we are, simultaneously facing a pandemic, a nationwide protest movement, and an economic crisis.

The Stoics were fond of quoting Heraclitus: the only constant is change.

It’s true, but the funny thing is that even change seems to rhyme with itself, if not outright repeat.

As the Bible tells us, “The thing that hath been,” we read in one part, “it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun… That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past.”

Did Marcus Aurelius read Ecclesiates? Or did he discover for himself that, “Whatever happens has always happened and always will, and is happening at this very moment, everywhere. Just like this.”

“Time is a flat circle,” Rustin Cohle says in the first season of True Detective. “Everything we have done or will do we will do over and over and over again forever.” And so it was that another generation found out about Nietzche’s idea of “eternal recurrence.” Did Nietzsche read Marcus? Did Nic Pizzolatto read Nietzsche? Or Marcus? Or Ecclesiastes? 

Or is this realization just something you can’t help but pick up if you’re paying attention?

It’s interesting to observe that Marcus’s reign was not really that different from the reign of Vespasian. It was filled with people doing the same things: eating, drinking, fighting, dying, worrying, and craving. Can you imagine if, during the crises he faced, he chose to “just wait for things to go back to normal” instead of doing, well, anything?

Everything that happens is normal. There is nothing unusual about any of this. 

Life is life. The only surprise is that we’re surprised. 

Sure, you’d rather not be working from home. You’d love to be traveling freely. Maybe you would like anyone to have been president rather than Donald Trump. But who is to say having or not having these things is “normal?”

They just are .

And you can’t just wait them out. 

Because what you’re waiting to end…is life. It’s now. It’s the present moment. 

One of the reasons to study history is that it gives you perspective. Distance has the effect of sanding down the edges and smoothing the transitions between things. When you read about the Great Influenza, when you immerse yourself in the characters of Shakespeare, when you visit a Civil War battlefield or an ancient castle, you gain a better understanding of how similar the past was to the present. How the more things change, the more they stay the same—how our petty plans and projections have very little impact on the tides of time. There’s nothing to take personally. 

It just is. 

History is violent. History is hard. History is confusing and overwhelming. History didn’t care about the people who had to live through it. History is like this because history is just a recording of life, and life is like that. 

But does that mean we can’t have peace or happiness within this chaos? That because there is no such thing as “normal” we should be anxious and depressed?

On the contrary!

I remember once reading a book about the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann—the adventurer who found the lost city of Troy. In the 1860s, he immigrated to America and worked his way across the country on a variety of jobs. It was incredible to notice that this guy had lived through the Civil War, which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, and it never even appeared in his diaries or changed his plans. He had found his own personal normal inside the craziness of world events. He’d simply gone on with his life. 

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera writes, “No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, in Hitler’s time, in Stalin’s time, through all occupations… against the backdrop of blue hills, they were as beautiful as a lullaby.” 

That’s what I came to realize on my walk this morning. Yeah, this time is weird. It’s maybe not what I’d want, if I had a choice. But I don’t have a choice, because this is just life. 

Why should I pine for it to be over or different? What matters is right now. What matters is the quiet hour we had together on that road. What mattered was the sunrise coming up behind us. What matters is that the last eight months have been eight months of being alive—and I chose to live them.

How much longer will it be like this? How much longer until the next change? 

No one can say. Nobody knows anything for certain except that change will eventually come. 

If people could manage to find happiness and purpose and stillness amidst war, under the rule of tyrants, through plagues far worse than this one, what excuse do we have?

None. This is normal.

This is life. 

Accept it and love it. 

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25 Things I’ve Learned From a Decade of Podcasts

In his letters—the pre-digital medium for distant long-form conversation—Seneca instructs his friend Lucilius to find one thing each day that will fortify him against death, despair, fear, or adversity. Just one thing. One nugget. And that’s what most of Seneca’s letters to his friend are about. They have a quote in them. Or a little prescription. Or a story. But in each case, Seneca is explicit. Here’s your lesson for the day, he says. Here’s your one thing.

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

So today, I wanted to honor that Stoic process by sharing some of the lessons I’ve picked up over a couple thousand hours of listening to podcasts, being interviewed on podcasts, and interviewing people for the Daily Stoic podcast (which you can subscribe to here and here). And with over 30 million downloads of Daily Stoic’s episodes so far, I get really excited to think about how much cumulative knowledge that’s created for people.

But here’s some top-line stuff you can use right now:

***

Interviewing is a skill like any other. It seems easy—aren’t we all good at having conversations? No we are not! I’m always looking to see masters at work and I try to learn from them when I get a chance to watch. Trying to myself, and seeing how hard it was, has been a great lesson.
Brian Koppelman’s podcast is called The Moment. It’s about the critical moment in every aspiring artist’s life. When the craft they have long elevated as magic or beyond their grasp suddenly becomes a bit more comprehensible. When they begin to see the medium in a new way. When they realize that on the other side of the work they admire and love is just another human being. And I’m a human being too—which means that if I work hard enough, I can do the same thing. I wrote about my moment here.
What should a person do after they screw up? What can they do? It occurred to me when I was asked to be on Lance Armstrong’s podcast a couple years back. What does Lance call his podcast? He calls it The Forward. Because that’s really the only thing you can do in life: go forward. That’s what Lance is trying to do with his life now. You don’t have to like him. You don’t have to forgive him. But move on and move forward, is all he can do.
It’s not fair. When I interviewed Tim Ferriss for the Daily Stoic podcast, he advised that we strip those three words out of our vocabulary. Because they are impotent and meaningless. Because they don’t do anything but make us upset or make us believe we don’t have options. We talked about that Epictetus line, “It is not things that upset us, but our judgements about those things.” “Fair” is an opinion we have about an objective reality we’re in.
Also from Tim. Tim has always stressed the value of evergreen long-form content. As he told me in my interview with him, “Long-form content isn’t dead; it’s simply uncrowded and neglected. I double-down when formats are out of favor.”
Matthew McConaughey told me why he shut down his production company and his music label. “I was making B’s in five things. I wanna make A’s in three things.” Those three things: his family, his foundation, his acting career.
Another from McConaughey. He told me he’s known in Hollywood as “a quick no and a long yes.” What a great expression! Before he says yes to doing a movie, he sleeps on it for ten days to two weeks in the frame of mind that he’s not going to do it. If he sleeps well, he doesn’t do it. If the thought that he has to do it wakes him up at night, he does it.
An amazing chat with James Altucher on his podcast inspired my piece on envy and jealousy and a thought exercise I still do. We’re usually envious of certain aspects of a person’s life. Instead, picture that you can change places with them in every way. Would you? The answer is always no. You gotta stay on your path. Don’t be distracted by others.
The legendary basketball coach George Raveling told me he sees reading as a moral imperative. “People died,” he said, speaking of slaves, soldiers, and civil rights activists, “so I could have the ability to read.” If you’re not reading, if books aren’t playing a major role in your life, you are betraying the legacy that they left for the generations after them.
An essential piece of advice I got from the author Steven Pressfield: There are professional habits and amateur ones. Which are you practicing? Is this a pro or an amateur move? Ask yourself that. Constantly.
I asked Jocko Willink what his advice would be for someone reeling from the events of the pandemic. “Really, it just comes down to having humility.” People who accept reality can change and adapt. People who let their ego get out of control and deny the severity? Those are the people he’s been seeing get their asses kicked.
Just a few more years, we tell ourselves. Just until I make enough money. These are the lies we all tell ourselves, the rationales for why we’re doing the thing we hate or being the kind of person we’d rather not be. The brilliant comedian and writer Pete Holmes called it the lie of the “One Last Job.” It’s the lie that bank robbers tell themselves, just as comedians or musicians do—one more tour, one more album, then I’ll slow down. But it never happens. You could leave life right now, Marcus Aurelius reminds us. We have to let that determine what we do and say and the jobs we take and the work we do.
Pop star Camila Cabello talked about that metaphor from Stillness about looking at the human race as a single person and yourself as an individual part of that person. Just like it’s not the hand’s job to be the best eye, Camilla said, “It’s not everybody’s job to be number one. It’s just your job to be you. The world needs you to be you.”
Wright Thompson’s book The Cost of These Dreams was one of the books I recommended everyone should read in 2020. I liked his line in our interview, “It’s over now—was it worth it?”
I was surprised to hear Olympic gymnast Dominique Dawes say that she doesn’t miss or reminisce on being at the Olympics or standing on the podium. “When I dream about exciting moments and memories in my life, those don’t come up… It’s those moments with your family. It’s those moments with your spouse. It’s those moments knowing you planted an amazing positive seed in a stranger’s life. Those are the moments that fulfill us.”
I asked one of my favorite writers, Rich Cohen, about how he’s able to be so consistently productive at such a high level. He said he approaches a big project like he approaches a cross-country road trip. “The way you deal with long road trips is you set yourself a minimum number of hours a day, no matter how you feel.” The point is that “not much” adds up if you do it a lot. That what Zeno said too: “Well-being is realized by small steps, but is no small thing.”
The great basketball coach Shaka Smart said something similar. He tells his players not to figure out their priorities, but to figure out their priority. “The root of the word ‘priority’ is singular… It was a singular word—the one thing. In modern times, we’ve turned it into ‘priorities,’ but then all of a sudden it turns into eight, ten, 15 things and that defeats the purpose.” Just do one high-quality thing every day, he said; it adds up.
Another great basketball coach, Buzz Williams, told me that he keeps a list of what-ifs. Ten times a day, he asks himself, “What if?” What if the college basketball season is canceled? What if we can’t travel for recruiting? What if I experimented with a new routine? “The what-if scenarios force me to think how I can be prepared no matter which way this all unfolds. Because on the other side of this… the people who are going to be the most successful are the ones that can pivot the quickest.”
One of the first greek words I ever came across was in a lyric of a MxPx song: “First step to Kairos is to take the shells out of our eyes.” I’ve always wondered, what the hell does that mean? I finally got to ask MxPx singer and songwriter Mike Herrera, what the hell does that mean? It’s his spin on the biblical line about hypocrites: “First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the splinter out of your brother’s eye.”
We do a bad job imagining ourselves on the other side of the judgment we swiftly render against other people. As Billy Bush told me, “We have to be able to fail. We have to tell our children, ‘It’s OK to fail and to not be at your best and to screw up, and then build yourself back up.’ People have to allow other people to do that. It’s not sustaining to not allow people to do that because, at some point, it’s going to be you looking for that welcoming, empathetic embrace.”
Along similar lines, Rich Roll said, “It’s only through weathering obstacles and grappling with difficulties and you know making mistakes that we truly learn who we are and as a consequence grow.” (Or the obstacle is the way …)
Austin Kleon talked about being a parent: “You have to be the kind of man that you want them to be. You have to become the kind of human being that you want them to become.” Marcus Aurelius was talking about being a human being: “Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.”
I loved what the philosopher Quill Kukla said on Tyler Cowen’s podcast about why they love boxing: “From a philosophical point of view, why is boxing good for me? I think philosophers who only do philosophy and nothing else tend to be bad, boring philosophers… I think that if you just do philosophy, you literally don’t have material… Imagine if you were a stand-up comic, and all you did is sit there and try to write comedy all day long. You wouldn’t have any material.”
Danica Patrick talked about the surreal reality that’s been her life as an international celebrity. “It made me realize that the stuff that we see—the celebrities, the magazines we pick up—we just think, ‘Oh, they’re famous.’ No, they’re being made famous. Somebody’s paying for that… So early on, I realized that there’s a lot of bullshit out there. And that there’s an agenda behind everything.” This is something I try to remember whenever I see someone getting attention and wonder, “Why am I not getting that?”
One of the great perks of my life is getting to have regular conversations with one of the great writers of our time, Robert Greene. We recently decided to record one of those conversations. I asked him about what I think is the thread through all his books, something which is also in short supply these days: an unflinching commitment to reality, even when it’s inconvenient. “Whenever I hold a belief, or I’m writing a book,” Robert explained, “I always start with the premise that I’m probably wrong, that i’m actually quite ignorant, that my idea is pretty stupid. And I look at the evidence on the other side and I examine it and I try to convince myself that my initial idea was right. And if it isn’t, then I change it.”

***

The line from Zeno was that we were given two ears and one mouth for a reason. That reason? To listen more than we talk.

Today and everyday, we should try to honor the Stoic virtue of wisdom. Get your one thing.

Two ears, one mouth.

Listen accordingly.

You can subscribe to the Daily Stoic Podcast here (Daily Dad here). Also, we have signed copies of all of my Stoic books (including the limited leatherbound edition of The Daily Stoic) available at Daily Stoic’s web store.

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This Is the Real Virus to Fear

I found out a few days ago that a friend caught the virus.

I was worried. I felt sorry for them. I was also frustrated. Because it wasn’t COVID they had been infected with, but a different virus related to it: the virus of conspiracy. 

Its symptoms presented almost immediately. Along with delusions were the corresponding symptoms of callousness and selfishness and deliberate ignorance. 

I was sad. 

This was a smart person. A good person! 

But here they were, telling me suddenly about their doubts on the efficacy of masks and sending me links to some discredited COVID denier. Over the coming weeks, I would watch them become increasingly radicalized and disconnected from reality; a process that while thankfully not nearly as deadly as COVID, was equally merciless and unstoppable. 

This idea that there are other forms of contagion to be worried about during a pandemic is, unfortunately, not a new one. Two thousand years ago, Marcus Aurelius, in the middle of the Antonine Plague, would say that “an infected mind is a far more dangerous pestilence than any plague. One only threatens your life, the other destroys your character.”

It strikes me that the last several months have revealed a few different forms of mental infections. 

The first, of course, is conspiracy theories. When we are overwhelmed, hurt, and scared, we tend to grasp for something, anything, that explains the unexplainable. There is a simplicity to the idea that the pandemic is really a hoax, or that 9/11 was an inside job. Somehow it’s actually less scary to believe that it’s all made up, or that your own government is out to get you, than it is to grapple with the idea that they fell down on the job. A world with a cabal of child traffickers operating in plain sight is somehow actually less terrifying than a world of senselessness and chaos and horrible things that happen for no reason. 

Are there such things as real conspiracies in the world? Of course. I wrote a book about an actual one! But I love the meme designed around a cartoon from the great Hugh MacLeod: 

Another common virus is the virus of radicalization. It is this insidious process, initiated by some foreign outside influence, by which we’re drawn into an increasingly opaque world of ideas—one video, one book, one sermon after another. It starts small, a couple of tweets here and there. But then they converge, like cells forming a tumor, and before you know it that tumor is cancer and it’s metastasizing. It’s attacking our body. It’s using our own brain against us. Suddenly, the information that contradicts what we’ve picked up is confirmation of it. They say sunlight is the best disinfectant, but now if you see the sun is shining it’s only proof that the darkness is everywhere. 

And so one conspiracy theory leads to another and another and the next thing you know, you’re a raving asshole at best, or worse, a dangerous lunatic. 

The irony should not escape us: In the early 2000s, after the heinous attacks of September 11th, the radicalization of young men and women by their exposure to extremist Islamic views became a major topic of discussion at Senate subcommittee hearings and on cable news roundtables. Today, radicalization has come home—brought ashore by our own technologies and media—and it’s just as close-minded, extreme, and violent. 

It’s also created people who are totally unreachable. That is how powerful cognitive dissonance can be—impervious to reason, to evidence, to moderation, to critics, to friends and family to get back to the real you. What started as a question or two becomes an elaborate universe, a false reality we inhabit. Some people end up so brainfucked, it’s likely we’ll never get them back. 

The problem with conspiracy theories and their radicalizing effect is how related they are to another infection—in fact, they are often comorbid with each other. I’m talking about the infection of cruelty and callousness. 

The cancer starts intellectually, but it does its real damage emotionally…

One would think that people who believe that COVID-19 was a biological weapon unleashed upon us by the Chinese would then be taking the risks very seriously, but somehow it’s the opposite: these are also the anti-maskers. (“But it’s uncomfortable!” “But I’m in good shape, why do I have to be inconvenienced?!” “You can’t make me!!!”) These are also the people trying to squint at the numbers to explain away the death toll. These are the ones saying, “Oh, but a lot of these people would have died anyway. They were old, you know.” 

Just open everything back up, they say, let the virus run its course…a course that will include many more freezer trucks full of bodies, that will include the preventable losses of so many loved ones. It’s insidious how the virus works, no matter the situation. Show somebody a video of a black man being gunned down in the street and instead of the normal, human reaction of pain and compassion, the mind now plugs in reasons they don’t have to care. What about black-on-black crime? Blue Lives Matter too! But did he have a criminal record?!

It’s the certainty. It’s the closed-offness. Just as COVID can take away your ability to taste or smell, others among us lose their ability to feel.

When Marcus Aurelius was talking about destroying your character, this is what he was talking about. To me, the people ranting at city council meetings, screaming at cashiers, or making up fake doctor’s notes to get out of wearing a mask seem far sicker to me than most of the people I know who have caught the virus. I have a friend whose husband, being overheard expressing some caution about COVID, had his face licked by a colleague who believed the whole thing to be a hoax. You know who does that? A sick person. A person who has not only been infected in a way that has made them deranged, but whose insecurity about that has turned them into a bully. 

That was the saddest thing about hearing that my friend had suddenly become an anti-masker. This is a good person. A decent Christian who has always been generous, kind, respectful. Yet they had picked up some beliefs—been corrupted—by something that now violates the most essential teaching in their religion: the commandment to love our neighbors. To love them as we love ourselves. To protect the sick and vulnerable and the meek.

Do not think you are exempt or immune from this corrupting virus. If ordinary people living on the same block as you can be radicalized by falling down internet rabbit holes, if the toxic media (and social media) culture we’re in can nurture and feed unfathomably dark and awful views, then what do you think it’s doing to you? Do you think you yourself might be getting radicalized by your own filter bubble? Are you doing a good enough job holding up every impression and opinion to be tested? Or are you, too, in a less dangerous way, being swept up in the passions of the crowd, however fringe or alt or mainstream that crowd may be?

Radicalization is the scourge of our time. Ordinary people who share an enormous amount in common are being turned against each other. People who are polite and friendly and would help a stranger change a tire on a rainy night on the side of the road are being turned into weapons in a war that helps no one but advertisers and trolls and power-hungry populists.

Of course, most of us are smart enough or emotionally stable enough that we can’t be deceived by the most absurd propagandists. There’s no spiritual hole in us, so we can’t be manipulated by an Alex Jones or whomever, right? Good. But there is another mental virus out there—one that the pandemic has brought out in otherwise smart and rational people. 

When things are hard, when things are scary, when we’re tired, when we’ve had a run of bad luck: magical thinking kicks in. 

This will all be over soon, we convince ourselves. This one thing will solve all our problems. Our ex is going to walk through the door any minute now. The pandemic will just disappear because we want it to. This kind of thinking makes us feel better, sure, but…that’s just not how it works.

Just ask Chris Christie. He knew he had a lung condition. He knew that testing was not perfect. He knew he should have been wearing a mask at the big White House event. But he told himself, “No, this is a safe space.” Like a lot of people, he probably thought, “This is important, I’ll make an exception.” Or he thought, “I don’t want to deal with the hassle or the awkwardness—I’ll just hope it works out.”

And for Chris Christie and the White House Rose Garden party, we can plug in: “But I really want to see my folks for the holidays.” “It was just a small get together with friends.” “But my kids miss going to school.” “I really want to believe that racism is a thing of the past.” 

Well, that’s not how it works. 

The last few months have been a great example of the costs that come when magical thinking doesn’t materialize and the chickens come home to roost. When hope is your strategy, you get caught unprepared. When you expect problems to solve themselves, you are disappointed. When you don’t listen to advice because it’s unpleasant or comes with difficult obligations, when you focus on short-term solutions or disregard risks, you’ll find even bad situations can be made worse.

I love this little video: Just because you’re over it, doesn’t mean it’s over yet. 

Marcus Aurelius reminds us that we have to see not what the enemy wants us to see, but what is really there. He works through, in Meditations, stripping things of “the legend that encrusts them,” of removing the magical thinking that distorts our picture of the world. You can’t go around expecting Plato’s Republic, he said—the world is harsh, problems are real and no amount of hope makes it otherwise.

We must be on guard.

Not just against COVID-19, but of the other illnesses that its stresses and uncertainty can bring about. What good is surviving the virus—and most people will survive COVID-19, thankfully—if the cost is being a horrible person? If, in so doing, you blatantly rejected your obligations as a human being? If you mocked and dismissed the suffering of the people who are not as fortunate as the rest of us? You think you’re dunking on the other side… really, you’re dunking on yourself. 

We have to be kind. We have to be thoughtful. We have to see through the haze. 

We can’t deny it, either. Or else we won’t be able to protect ourselves. 

Exciting news! We have signed and personalized copies of my books available in the Daily Stoic store. We’ve also got the leatherbound edition of The Daily Stoic back in stock, too. Check out my original trilogy on Stoicism, my latest bestseller Lives of the Stoics, and all the others.

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Here’s How to Give Thanks—Not Once a Year—but Every Day

The modern practice of this Thanksgiving holiday here in America is that we are supposed to take the time to think about what we’re grateful for. And the candidates are usually pretty obvious: We should be grateful for our families, for our health, that we live in a time of peace, for the good laid out in front of us. All the usual suspects.

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

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

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

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

A few months later, I came across a viral article about a designer who had gone through a painful divorce. Prompted by his work computer to change his password every 30 days, he decided to use this medium as a chance to change his life. The password he chose: Forgive@h3r. And at least once per day for the next month, often multiple times a day, he found himself typing in that phrase over and over. Each time he got to work, each day when he got back from lunch, when his computer would go to sleep while he was in a meeting or on the phone: Forgive her. Forgive her. Forgive her.

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

Now in the mornings, when I journal, I try to do this as often as I can. I try to find ways to express gratitude not for the things that are easy to be grateful for, but for what is hard. Gratitude for that nagging pain in my leg, gratitude for that troublesome client, gratitude for that delayed flight, gratitude for that damage from the storm. Because it’s making me take things slow, because it’s helping me develop better boundaries, because some flights are going to be delayed and I’m glad it wasn’t a more important flight, because the damage could have been worse, because the damage exposed a more serious problem that now we’re solving. And on and on.

Donald Trump once tweeted “Happy Thanksgiving to all–even the haters and losers!” I’m not a fan, but I must admit that he has a point. We should be giving thanks, even to the “haters and losers.” Actually, that’s who we should be thanking in particular. It’s the “haters and losers” who point out our flaws, keeping us humble if we have the sense to listen. It’s the “haters and losers” whose examples we heed, even if only as guides for what not to do. The point is: There is something to be thankful for in everything and everyone. Even the life of Donald Trump, itself filled with a lot of hating and losing, offers lessons to us all. Mostly, what kind of person not to be. What kind of person to raise our kids not to be. 

This is part and parcel of living a life of amor fati. Where instead of fighting and resisting what happens to you, you accept it, you love it all. It’s easy to be thankful for family, for health, for life, even if we regularly take these things for granted. It’s easy to express gratitude for someone who has done something kind for you, or whose work you admire. We might not do it often enough, but in a sense, we are obligated to be grateful for such things. It is far harder to be grateful for things we didn’t want to happen or to people who have hurt us. But there were benefits hidden in these situations and these interactions too. And if there wasn’t, even if the situations were unconscionably and irredeemably bad there is always some bit of us that knows that we can be grateful that at least it wasn’t even worse.

“Let us accept it,” Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself in his own journal some two thousand years ago, “as we accept what the doctor prescribes. It may not always be pleasant, but we embrace it —because we want to get well.” The Stoics saw gratitude as a kind of medicine, that saying “Thank you” for every experience was the key to mental health. “Convince yourself that everything is the gift of the gods,” Marcus said, “that things are good and always will be.” This isn’t always easy to do, obviously, we should try to do it because the doctor asked us to try this experimental procedure—and because the old way isn’t working well either.

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

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

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

Whatever it is. However poorly it went. However difficult 2020 has been for you. 

Be grateful for it. Give thanks for it. There was good within it.

Write it down. Over and over again. 

Until you believe it.

P.S. Today’s article is brought to you by something I use and have used daily and weekly for going on two years: ButcherBox . ButcherBox delivers high quality, grass-fed meat to your doorstep once a month—my wife and I basically haven’t bought meat from the store since we started using it. We’re having a delicious turkey from ButcherBox at our dinner table this holiday . So I love it, and would definitely recommend it to anyone who likes to cook and eats meat. Sign up now and you’ll receive 6 free steaks in your first order—all 100% grass-fed, grass-finished New York strips and top sirloins. ButcherBox is all-natural, animal welfare certified and never ever given antibiotics. Plus, shipping is always free. Hard to beat. Enjoy!

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This Is Why Our Leaders Should Be Stoic

It was a dark time for the Republic. 

Institutions had stopped working. Interminable foreign wars dragged on. Norms—the old way of doing things—seemed to have broken down. There had been election fixing and the passage of preposterous legislation. Corruption was endemic. 

So when a certain popular politician reached out to a senator on the other side of the political aisle to dangle an offer that might make both of them more powerful, it might have seemed like more of the same. 

Not to Cato, a philosopher-cum-politician. He wanted nothing to do with the powerful general Pompey’s attempt at an alliance via marriage—perhaps to Cato’s daughter or niece. Although the ladies of Cato’s household were excited at the prospect, Cato was decisively not. 

“Go and tell Pompey,” he instructed the go-between, that “Cato is not to be captured by way of the women’s apartments.” 

It’s one of those moments that seems admirable through its purity, and high-handedness. Politics shouldn’t be done that way; good for him for staying above it. Yet on closer inspection, it’s one that leaves the historian with considerable doubt. It was principled, but was it politically wise? Was it effective?

Humiliated and angry, Pompey turned to Julius Caesar, who received him with open arms. United and unstoppable, conjoined through marriage to Caesar’s daughter Julia, the two men would soon overturn centuries of constitutional precedent. Civil war soon came. 

“None of these things perhaps would have happened,” Plutarch reminds us, “had not Cato been so afraid of the slight transgressions of Pompey as to allow him to commit the greatest of all, and add his power to that of another.” 

Rome during this storm is an increasingly cliché reference point these days, but we turn to it because the parallels are there. Thousands of years have passed, and people are still people. Politics is still the same business. Cato remains, as he was then, a complicated figure who should both inspire and caution us. 

Cato was a pioneer of the filibuster, blocking any legislation he believed contrary to the country’s interests—blocking even discussion of it. He condemned his enemies loudly and widely. He refused even the slightest political expediency. Cicero observed that Cato refused to accept that he lived amongst the “dregs of Romulus.” 

His overweening purity became a vice unbecoming of a philosopher. 

It also backed Caesar into a corner. It gave him the very evidence he needed to make his argument: The system isn’t working. I alone can fix it. 

Politics can sometimes seem, especially from a distance, like a Manichean struggle between good and evil. In truth, there is always gray—and the good, even the Catos, are not always blameless. Cato’s inflexibility did not always well serve the public good. 

At the same time, Cicero, a peer of Cato, provides an equally cautionary example. He was a believer in the republic, but he was also ambitious. He struggled to balance his personal ambitions with his love of Rome’s institutions. In politics, he said, it’s better to stand aside while others battle it out and then side with the winner. Yet he abhorred violence and corruption. After one brave citizen, an artist, stood up to Caesar’s face during a performance, Cicero offered to make room for him in the good seats. “I marvel, Cicero,” the man retorted, “you should be crowded, who usually sit on two stools.” Cicero tried to play it both ways and in the end, accomplished less than Cato—and still died just as tragically. 

Does that mean it’s hopeless? That the path for politicians or disgusted citizens is either martyrdom or Vichy-like collaboration?

No, and although we tend to see philosophers as abstract or theoretically thinkers, in fact the Stoics who would come to lead Rome in the years to come learned much from this turbulent period. 

Marcus Aurelius, who would step into Caesar’s shoes several generations later, wrote to remind himself that one could not “go around expecting Plato’s Republic.” He knew that it was essential to compromise and collaborate. For example, he historian Cassius Dio compliments Marcus Aurelius for his ability to get the best out of flawed advisors and reach across the so-called aisle to get things done. 

Arius Didymus was the Stoic entrusted with advising Caesar’s heir, Octavian. A key element of his instruction was in the virtue of moderation. Although we tend to see “moderate” as a political slur today—just as Cato sometimes did—in truth, it is the key to successful leadership. Moderates are the grease that the wheels of government depend on, and their ability to compromise and accomplish things prevents the ascendency of fringe groups from seizing power for their own ends. 

Seneca took this balancing act to even higher levels, managing to hold his nose well enough to get five productive and peaceful years out of the Nero regime. Nothing about that situation pleased him, yet it’s hard to argue that the period of Quinquennium Neronis, those first five years of Nero’s reign, wasn’t the best possible outcome of a bad situation. 

George Washington, who took Cato as a personal hero, worked hard to manage his temper better than his idol. The job of a leader, he said, was not simply to follow rigid ideology, but to look at all events, all opportunities, all people through the “calm light of mild philosophy.” This phrase, despite being a phrase from a play about Cato, was quite difficult for the real Cato to follow. It was key to Washington’s greatness, however. His moderation and his self-restraint were what guided America through the revolution and its first constitutional crisis. In a single, tumultuous two-week period in 1797, historians have pointed out, Washington quoted that same line in three different letters. And later, in Washington’s greatest but probably least known moment, when he talked down the mutinous troops who were plotting to overthrow the U.S government at Newburgh, he quoted the same line again, as he urged them away from acting on their anger and frustration.

Unfortunately, we have lost our ability to speak to and study this kind of wisdom. The last time Stoic philosophy was brought to the public political stage, by the brave Admiral James Stockdale, it was all but laughed off for not playing well on television. Today, leaders and the social media mob have absorbed Cato’s stridency without his principles, not realizing what fodder this is for the Caesar’s and would-be Caesar’s of our own time. 

It has been exciting to me to hear that a number of high ranking political leaders have been exploring Stoicism again. Former Secretary of Defense Mattis is said to travel with a copy of Meditations. I’ve been fortunate to discuss Stoicism with a number of senators in the Senate dining room and in the halls of Congress. But clearly, we remain amongst the dregs of Romulus, without a Washington or a Marcus Aurelius to lead us. 

Philosophy in the ancient world was not something distinct from politics, nor should it be today. Philosophy, properly seen, is a framework to help guide politicians and leaders through the trying, difficult profession upon which so much depended. Stoics advised kings and held public office. They led armies and argued cases in front of high courts. 

But who advises our politicians today? What code do they consult?

The Stoics in Rome and Greece experienced all the civil strife and difficulties that we are experiencing now (including, in Marcus Aurelius’s case, a decade and a half of a global pandemic). They didn’t always succeed, but they tried and they tried to learn from history—they studied history so they could better practice their philosophy with the lessons learned from the actions of others 

“It shapes and builds up the soul,” Seneca writes of philosophy, “it gives order to life, guides action, shows what should and shouldn’t be done—it sits at the rudder steering our course as we vacillate in uncertainties… Countless things happen every hour that require advice, and such advice is to be sought out in philosophy.” 

Now, more than ever, what Stoicism can teach us is that art of moderation. 

We can seek progress without being perfectionists and we can be pragmatic without being unprincipled. 

It’s not an easy task, but lest we go the way of Rome, we’ll need the calm, mild light of philosophy to guide us.

My new book, Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius, is a debut #1 best seller at The Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Check it out if you want to learn not only why we should not cancel the Stoics, but how urgent their lessons are to us in modern times.

If you do, I’ll still send over these pre-order bonuses which include three extra chapters I couldn’t fit in the book.

Thank you!

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It’s Not About Intention, It’s About Action

It’d be wonderful if it were true. 

If we could, by the power of our thoughts, shape the world around us. 

If we could manifest the reality we wanted, if “like attracted like” in our lives, just as opposites attract in magnets. 

Needless to say, this is not true.

Actually, not “needless to say,” because the “Law of Attraction” is something that millions of people do believe in, despite that fact that it is, to put it mildly, complete horseshit. And it needs to be said.

My favorite example: In 2014, Rhonda Byrne, the author of The Secret—the famous book about the Law of Attraction—listed her Santa Barbara mansion for sale for some $23.5 million. A year later, she reduced it to $18.8. Then again to $14.9. Finally, after languishing for over five years, it sold for $13.6. 5 million less than she paid for it. 10 million less than she wanted for it. 

Byrne still walked away with a lot of money, to be sure; but she also, as it happens, walked away with unfortunate proof that reality—in this case “manifesting” as the market—doesn’t care what you think. No amount of manifesting changes what something is worth. In fact, a reporter at The Wall Street Journal asked Rhonda Byrne why she didn’t just wish for her home to get the full asking price. It wasn’t a priority, she said, so she hadn’t “put in the time and energy.” 

I guess that answer is a bit more palatable than admitting you’re a con artist. 

Dave Chappelle’s joke was that Rhonda Byrne should fly to Africa and tell those starving children her secret. That all they need to do is just visualize some roast beef, some mashed potatoes, and some gravy. They’d beg her to stop filling their minds with delicious impossibilities. “No, no, no,” Chappelle says, pretending to be Byrnes, “the problem is you have a bad attitude about starving to death.”

There’s no science that says your thoughts can will reality into behaving how you wish it to. Or that thinking negative thoughts will invite negative outcomes. In fact, literally all of science contradicts this. 

BUT…

Here’s the tricky part: Our thoughts are extremely powerful. Our worldview does influence what we see. Telling yourself that something is possible or impossible can function as a kind of effective truth. 

Much more rigorous and less mystical thinkers than the Secret gurus have known this for centuries. Marcus Aurelius said, “The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes the color of your thoughts.” He also said, “Our life is what our thoughts make it.” 

To the Stoics, the discipline of perception was essential. If you saw the world as a negative, horrible place, if you saw other people as your enemies, if you believed that you were screwed, you were right. Marcus Aurelius didn’t believe you manifested the future through “energy,” but he did believe that you had the power right here and now to determine whether you’d be “harmed” by something. If you decided to see what happened as good, you could make it good. 

The Stoics would say that our thoughts determine the character of the reality we live in. If you see the awfulness in everything, your life will feel awful—even if you are surrounded by wealth and success. If you have a growth mindset, if you consider the very real chance of adversity, you won’t be easily discouraged when you fail. If you find something to be grateful for in every situation, you will feel blessed and happy where others feel aggrieved or deprived. 

The problem with the Law of Attraction is that it cuts both ways. By believing that thinking positively produces positive outcomes, it actually makes practitioners very vulnerable—because they will deliberately avoid thinking of potentially negative outcomes. And then guess what? When these outcomes do happen—because, well, life—they’re caught off guard. 

That’s why the exercise of premeditatio malorum (“the premeditation of evils”) is not dangerous, as many Secret manifesters might fear, but the epitome of safe. “Rehearse them in your mind,” Seneca said, “exile, torture, war, shipwreck. All the terms of our human lot should be before our eyes.” The unexpecting are crushed, he said, the prepared, resolute. 

Marcus Aurelius, via something he learned from Epictetus, would take a moment before he tucked his children in at night to linger briefly on their mortality. Writing in Meditations, he reveals that even two thousand years ago, some foolish people worried that this would be “tempting fate.” In fact, Marcus did tragically lose children, in line with the horrifying infant mortality rates of his time. But because he took the time to love his family, to be with them, while he had the chance, bottomless regret was not piled on top of unfathomable loss. In part because the loss was indeed fathomable, and Marcus had fathomed it on a nightly basis. 

That is actually the key: The discipline of perception is worthless on its own. What matters is what follows—the discipline of action. 

A Stoic is able to think positively because they know they can create positive outcomes with their actions. A Stoic isn’t afraid to think negatively either, because these thoughts help shape the actions they’re going to take (again, to create a positive outcome). They don’t wait for The Universe to line up perfectly with their vibrations and visualizations. They get moving. They assert agency. Action by action, Marcus said, no one can stop you from that. 

Which is the part that people who believe in positive visualization ironically seem to miss. I always laugh when I see authors I know in the self-help world point to the successes they have manifested… when I saw how it actually happened: Hustle. Creativity. Commitment. The publicist they hired… 

Russell Wilson is a big proponent of visualizing the outcome he wants to see. Is that what put a Super Bowl ring on his finger? No, it was the work. It was pass after pass after pass in practice. It was the hundreds of hours of film. It was pushing through injuries and doubters and losses. 

Which does the credit lie? In the thoughts? Or the action?

Positive thinking won’t magically give you more. It won’t magically make you famous or sell your house for 10% above asking. It won’t prevent pain or tragedy either. 

But it will help you appreciate your life. It will help you endure adversity that others can’t handle. It will put you in the right mindset to act. 

The best part of this is that it’s no secret either. It’s just common sense. 

So let’s practice that—the law of action.

To me, it’s all about habits. The actions you take every single day. I built Daily Stoic’s Habits for Success, Habits for Happiness Challenge to help people build better systems for a better life. It’s an awesome, six-week experience—inspired by the best habits from Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus and my own life—that will help you ditch your bad habits for good and get you great new ones to replace them. Join us here.

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Should We Cancel the Stoics?

By most of what seems like the current criteria, the ancient Stoics are ripe targets for cancellation. 

They were white. They were rich. They wrote about being “manly.” They even referred to foreigners as barbarians! Inexcusably, the philosophy at times argues for the now-heretical idea of accepting that certain parts of life—like other people’s opinions—may in fact be, gasp, outside our control. 

But even allowing for this political incorrectness, it’s indisputable: The Stoics owned slaves. They fought in wars of aggression. They were implicated in the persecution of Christians. It’s hard to defend Seneca’s years inside Nero’s regime. 

So should we cancel them? Ban them from schools? Do the students at Brown know that the replica of Marcus Aurelius which sits on their campus was put there by a Gilded Age robber baron? Maybe the Twitter mob will demand action.

Thankfully, there haven’t been too many calls to do this… yet. I suspect it will come soon enough. After all, The New York Times is already worried about the trend of wealthy entrepreneurs “determined to make themselves miserable” via Stoicism. A Quartz headline claimed that Silicon Valley is “using an ancient philosophy designed for Greek slaves as a life hack,” egged on by a Cambridge professor who seems intent to link Stoicism to Donald Trump. Even the Ayn Rand Institute has joined in, not just writing a piece titled The False Promise of Stoicism, but spending a sizable ad budget to promote the piece to any curious soul who dares google Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus. 

I hope we do not cancel the Stoics, and not only because this is the philosophy I have been lucky enough to write about and introduce to groups from NATO forces to NFL teams. I say this because the more I study Stoicism, the more I find that it possesses the exact formula for getting society out of this polarized, selfish, and deranged mess in which it’s currently submerged. 

First, we should stop with this “old white guys” stereotype, because it’s not even true. The Stoics, unique among the philosophers, hailed from the far-flung corners of the known world, from Cyprus, Turkey, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Spain, and Iraq. Some were rich, but many were poor. Epictetus was a slave. Cleanthes made his living as a manual laborer. He also wrote a book titled On the Thesis That Virtue Is the Same in a Man and a Woman, a tradition that modern female Stoics like Arianna Huffington, Michele Tayofa, and the musician Camila Cabello help prove today. 

But the primary knock against Stoicism—often propagated by academics who should know better—is that the philosophy is apathetic. Sure, Marcus Aurelius talked about the “art of acquiescence,” but that was to things—like the weather or the loss of a loved one—outside our control. But he also spoke of the importance of serving and protecting the common good more than eighty times in his brief Meditations. The idea that the Stoics were indifferent to current or political events is preposterous, not only because Cato held multiple public offices, Panaetius was a diplomat, Publius Rutilius Rufus was an anti-corruption crusader, and more recently Admiral James Stockdale ran for Vice President. 

Seneca and Thrasea and Helvidius all died defying Nero’s tyranny (and Porcia Cato, daughter of Cato the Younger, committed suicide rather than submit to the Second Triumvirate). In fact, it was their example, alongside the earlier example of Cato, that inspired the Founding Fathers to start the American Revolution. George Washington even put on a play about him in the bitter winter at Valley Forge. It was a translator of Epictetus, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who raised and led one of the first black regiments for the Union in the Civil War. 

The image of the resigned Stoic, indifferent to suffering and injustices of the world, is a preposterous strawman that modern critics of Stoicism have repeated enough times that it feels true… when really, all the evidence is to the contrary. (The third of Stoicism’s four main virtues is literally “justice.”) 

So if the Stoics were not just rich white guys dedicated to preserving the status quo, who were they? 

They were flesh-and-blood human beings—good ones, ones we should be trying to model ourselves on and inspiring our children to do the same. One of Seneca’s best quotes echoes down to us today: “Wherever there’s another human being, there is an opportunity for kindness.” This was a man born just four years before Jesus, who in the same empire as Christ, was saying things like “Nature bore us related to one another… She instilled in us a mutual love and made us compatible… Let us hold everything in common; we stem from a common source.” 

Epictetus’s lectures on mental freedom, developed while he himself was a slave, would go on to inspire James Stockdale while he was a POW as well as the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture. Marcus Aurelius remains one of history’s few exceptions to the idea that absolute power corrupts absolutely. This was a man who sold off the treasures of the imperial palace during the Antonine Plague in order to pay off Rome’s debts. This was a man who opens Meditations by thanking one of his Stoic teachers for helping him understand the importance of a “society of equal laws, governed by equality of status and of speech, and of rules who respect the liberty of their subjects above all else.” This leadership was also deeply instructive to General James Mattis, who carries a copy of Meditations with him always. As he told a group of cadets at the Virginia Military Institute, 

Marcus Aurelius had a very tough life… He’s the Emperor of Rome but he’s got everything going wrong in his home life. His wife and his son were not people that you’d want to spend much time with. He spends almost all of his time up on the fringes of the Empire trying to protect the thing and the one time he leaves the German forest seems to be to go kill one of his friends who’s revolted against him in another place. It was a tough life and yet the humility and the dignity with which he conducted his life—the commitment to his country, to his troops, really comes through as you read those pages.

In short, he did the best he could. Just like you and I are trying to do. 

The purpose of Stoicism was to help human beings become better, to rise above their circumstances. Did they always succeed? Were they perfect practitioners? Did they manage to meet our modern expectations and morals always? Of course not. 

But who has time to complain or judge that? Instead, we should remember Marcus Aurelius’s famous dictum—edited only to be slightly less gender-specific—that we must “waste no more time arguing what a good person should be. Be one.”

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Dear Dad, Please Don’t Vote For Donald Trump This Time

Hey Dad,

Our relationship is strained.

It feels like it has been for a while. For the last four years, there has been an elephant in the room—I’d joke and call it an orange elephant, but I’m nervous that might end this earnest conversation before it even begins.

Have I changed? I mean, yes, of course I have. I’ve gotten older. I’ve had two children. I’ve tried to read and learn as much as possible, just as you taught me.

In fact, that’s sort of the weirdest thing. I don’t think I’ve changed much. I still believe, deep in my bones, all the fundamental things you not only talked to me about, but showed me when I was little.

I believe in character.

I believe in competence.

I believe in treating people decently.

I believe in moderation.

I believe in a better future and I believe in American exceptionalism, the idea that the system we were given by the Founding Fathers, although imperfect, has been an incredible vehicle for progress, moral improvement, and greatness, unlike any other system of government or country yet conceived.

I believe this exceptionalism comes with responsibilities.

Politically, I’m pretty much the same, too. Government is best when limited, but it’s nonetheless necessary. Fair but low taxes grow the economy. Rights must be protected, privacy respected. Partisanship stops at the water’s edge. No law can make people virtuous—that obligation rests on every individual.

So how is it even possible that we’re here? Unable to travel, banned from entry by countless nations. The laughingstock of the developed world for our woeful response to a pandemic. 200,000 dead. It hasn’t been safe to see you guys or grandma for months, despite being just a plane ride away. My children—your grandchildren—are deprived of their friends and school.

Meanwhile, the U.S., which was built on immigration—grandma being one who fled the ravages of war in Europe for a better life here—is now a bastion of anti-immigrant hysteria. Our relatives on your side fought for the Union in the Civil War. Great-grandpa fought against the Russians in WWI, and granddad landed at Normandy to stop the rise of fascism. And now people are marching with tiki-torches shouting, “the Jews will not replace us.” What is happening?! Black men are shot down in the streets? Foreign nations are offering bounties on American soldiers?

And the President of the United States defends, rationalizes, or does nothing to stop this?

I’d say that’s insane, but I’m too heartbroken. Because every step of the way, I’ve heard you defend, rationalize, or enable him and the politicians around him. Not since I was a kid have I craved to hear your strong voice more, to hear you say anything reassuring, inspiring, morally cogent. If not for me, then for the world that will be left to your grandchildren. This does not feel like a good road we are going down…

Look, I know you’re not to blame for this. You hold no position of power besides the one we all have as voters, but I guess I just always thought you believed in the lessons you taught me, and the things we used to listen to on talk radio on our drives home from the lake. All those conversations about American dignity, the power of private enterprise, the sacredness of the Oval Office, the primacy of the rule of law.

Now Donald Trump gushes over foreign strongmen. He cheats on his wife with porn stars (and bribes them with illegal campaign funds). He attacks whistleblowers (career army officers, that is). He lies blatantly and habitually, about both the smallest and largest of things. He enriches himself, his family members, and his business with expenditures straight from the public treasury. And that’s just the stuff we know about. God knows what else has happened these last four years that executive privilege has allowed him to obscure from public view.

I still think about the joke you made when we walked past Trump Tower in New York when I was kid. Tacky, you said. A reality show fool. Now that fool has his finger on the nuclear button—which I think he thinks is an actual button—and I can’t understand why you’re OK with this. I mean, the guy can’t even spell! You demanded better of me in the papers I turned in when I was in middle school.

I know you don’t like any of it. If you’d have had your choice, any other Republican would have been elected but Trump. You’re not an extremist, and you’ve never once said anything as repulsive as what people now seem comfortable saying on TV and social media (and in emails to your son, I might add). Four years ago, I wrote to you to ask you not to vote for Donald Trump. But this time around, that’s no longer enough.

At some point, just finding it all unpleasant and shaking your head at the tweets, while saying or doing nothing more about it, is moral complicity. You told me that as a kid! That the bad prevail when good people do nothing.

A while back I emailed a friend of mine who is an advisor to the administration. I said to him, why do you think my dad’s support of Trump bothers me so much more than yours? Because it does. This is someone who helped put Trump in office and wants to keep him there, but we’re still friends. Talking to him doesn’t hurt my heart the way it does when politics come up over family meals.

The man’s answer was telling, and I am quoting. He said, “Because I am irredeemable, but your dad ought to know better.”

Does that register with you at all?

One of the things you taught me well was how to spot a scam. Double check everything, you said. Do your research. Look at what the people around them say. Look at their history. Remember when you used to quote Reagan’s line to me, “Trust, but verify”?

I’ve been lucky enough to make a few trips to Washington the last few years. I’ve sat across from Senators and Congressmen. I’ve talked to generals who have briefed the president, and business leaders who worked with him before the election. This is a guy who doesn’t read, they said, a guy with the attention span of a child. Everybody avoided doing business with him. Because he didn’t listen, because he stiffed people on bills, because he was clueless. He treated women horribly. He’s awful, they said. I thought this was a particularly damning line: If Donald Trump were even half-competent, one elected official told me, he could probably rule this country for 20 years. I have trouble figuring what’s worse—that he wants to, or that he wants to but isn’t competent enough to pull it off. Instead, Washington is so broken and so filled with cowards that Trump just spent the last four years breaking stuff and embarrassing himself.

I learned from you how to recognize a dangerous or unreliable person. If you don’t trust the news, could you trust what I’m bringing you, right from the source? Let’s trust our gut, not our political sensibility. Based on what I’ve told you, and what you’ve seen: Would you let him manage your money? Would you want your wife or daughter to work for him without supervision? I’m not even sure I would stay in one of his hotels, after what I’ve read.

Watching the RNC a few weeks ago, I wondered what planet I was on. What’s with all the yelling? How is this happening on the White House lawn? Why are his loser kids on the bill? His kid’s girlfriend??? And what is this picture of America they are painting? They are the ones in charge! Yet they choose to campaign against the dystopian nightmare that is 2020… which is to say, they are campaigning against themselves.

Look, I agree there is crazy stuff happening in the world. The civil unrest is palpable, violence is on the rise, and Americans have never been so openly divided. Sure, rioting and looting are bad. But who is to blame for all the chaos? The President. Remember what you told me about the sign on Truman’s desk? The buck stops here. (May we contrast that with: “I don’t take responsibility at all.”)

In any case, what some crazy people in Portland are doing is not ours to repeatedly disavow. What the president does? The citizens are complicit in that. Especially if we endorse it at the ballot box come November 3rd.

Besides, what credibility do we have to insist on the ‘rule of law’ when eight of the president’s associates have faced criminal charges? His former lawyer went to jail, too! And then the president commutes their sentences, dangles pardons to keep them quiet, or tries to prevent them from cooperating with authorities? When he’s fined millions of dollars for illegally using his charity as a slush fund? When he cheats on his taxes? When he helped his parents avoid taxes, too?

I remember you once told me the story of a police officer in your department who was caught filling up his personal car with gas paid for by the city. The problem, you said, wasn’t just the mistake. It was that when he was confronted by it, he lied. But the cameras showed the proof and so he was fired, for being untrustworthy most of all.

Would you fire Trump if he worked for you? What kind of culture do you think your work would have had if the boss acted like Trump?

As for the lying, that’s the craziest part, because we can, as the kids say, check the receipts: Was it bad enough to call John McCain a loser? Yes, but then, of course, Trump lied and claimed he didn’t. Bad enough to cheat on his wife? Yes, but of course, he lied about it, and committed crimes covering it up (which he also lied about). Was it bad enough to solicit help from Russia and Wikileaks in the election? Yes, but then he, his son, and his campaign have lied about it so many times, in so many forums, that some of them went to jail over it. Was it stupid that, in February, Trump was tweeting about how Covid-19 was like the flu and that we didn’t need to worry? Yes, but it takes on a different color when you listen to him tell Bob Woodward that in January he knew how bad it was, how much worse it was than even the worst flu, and that he was deliberately going to downplay the virus for political purposes.

I’m sure we could quibble over some, but The Fact Checker database currently tallies over 20,000 lies since he took office. Even if we cut it in half, that’s insane! It’s impossible to deny: Trump lied, and Americans have died because of it.

A friend of mine had a one-on-one dinner with Trump at the White House a while back. It was actually amazing, he said. Half the evening was spent telling lies about the size of his inaugural address. This was in private—not even for public relations purposes, and years after the controversy had died down. That’s when he realized: The lying is pathological. It can’t be helped. Which is to say, it makes a person unfit to lead.

Politics should not come before family. I don’t want you to think this affects how I feel about you. But it does make it harder for us to spend time together—not just literally so, since Trump’s bumbling response to the pandemic has crippled America and made travel difficult.

It’s that I feel grief.

I feel real grief—were the lessons you taught me as a kid not true? Did you not mean them? Was it self-serving stuff to make sure I behaved? Was I a fool for listening?

Or is it worse, that my own father cares more about his retirement accounts—and I’ll grant, the runup of the market has been nice for me, too—than the future he is leaving for his children? Are you so afraid of change, of that liberal boogeyman Limbaugh and Hannity and these other folks have concocted, that you’d rather entrust the country to a degenerate carnival barker than anyone else? I see all this anger, what is it that you’re so angry about? You’ve won. Society has worked for you. My own success is proof.

So what is it? Because it can’t possibly be that you think this guy is trustworthy, decent, or kind. It’s definitely not about his policies… because almost every single one is anathema to what Republicans—and you—have talked about my entire life.

The one thing I hold onto is hope. I believe in America. I believe in the goodness of hardworking people like you and Mom. I know that this is not what you wanted to happen, that this is not the America you grew up in nor the one you would like for me and my kids to grow up in.

I hold onto hope that you’re tired enough to draw the line. That you are not irredeemable as that Trump advisor allowed himself to become. The right thing is always the right thing, you’ve said. Even when it’s hard. Even when it goes against what your friends think, or what you’ve done in the past.

The right thing is obviously to end this. To cancel this horrendous experiment with its cavalcade of daily horrors and vulgarities and stupidities and historical humiliations.

America is a great nation. The world depends on us being great. Your grandchildren deserve that greatness.

You know this has not been it. You know this goes against everything you’ve ever asked or expected of yourself, and your children, and anyone you’ve ever led or worked for.

I need you not just to not vote for Trump this year, Dad. I need you to speak up. I need you to do something.

Your loving son,

Ryan

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The post Dear Dad, Please Don’t Vote For Donald Trump This Time appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

This Thing Predicts Everything

Something went wrong for Kyrie Irving in Cleveland, despite three trips to the Finals and one championship. 

Then, what could have been a great team fell apart in Boston.

So far, Brooklyn has been a dud. One coach has already been driven away. Now the most recent, just hired, is already being set up to fail, with heavy handed assertions about who is actually in charge.

Who could have seen this coming? 

Well, Kyrie could have… by looking in the mirror. 

Indeed, just about any casual observer knows what to expect at this point. 

The secret is explained by an old Greek saying, popular with the Stoics: ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων. 

Character is fate.

Not simply that good people do well and bad people fail—we know life is more complicated than that. The proverb means that character traits predict the kind of actions we’ll see. 

The selfish person may succeed… but it will be a lonely, isolated success. The corrupt will end up corrupting the institutions and people around them. The ignorant will end up missing some critical piece of information that costs them. The paranoid will create the enemies they worry are out to get them. The egotistical will ignore the warnings that could have saved them.  

Who we are, what we believe, the standard we hold ourselves to, the things we do regularly, our personality traits—ultimately these are all better predictors of the trajectory of our lives than talent, resources, or anything else. 

Kyrie is, from all reports, sweet and serious and often generous. It’s just also not surprising that a guy who at one point believed the world was flat—despite literally all evidence and information to the contrary—would be a difficult guy to coach. The impulse that broke apart a relationship with the maybe greatest basketball player of all time is not a singular one, it’s one that will repeat itself again and again. 

What should surprise us is how many people failed to see this, or managed to convince themselves that it would be different this time. 

It’s a phenomenon we see play out in the market, in politics, in relationships all the time. We want to see the best in someone, so we ignore the obvious. We really want something, so we deny the contrary evidence or the risk factors. Sports is such a great example of this, Antonio Brown being the most recent bit of proof. 

When people show you who they are, Maya Angelou said, believe them.

But we don’t… and it bites us in the end. 

I remember at American Apparel being amazed that these financiers kept giving the company money, expecting it to be different, thinking that their investment would be the lone exception, believing the CEO when he explained that he’d changed. At the same time, I stayed longer than I should have, because I often blamed fate or circumstances for problems at the company that were, in retrospect, obviously rooted in character and cultural flaws. I kept my stock longer than I should have, too…and it cost me. 

It was funny, I was right in the middle of researching Ego Is the Enemy and I didn’t quite get it. But Cyril Connolly was correct: Ego sucks us down like the law of gravity. 

Character is fate. 

But it’s important that we don’t use this rule just to judge other people. 

As Seneca said, the purpose of philosophy was to scrub off your own faults, not the faults of others. 

The bad news is we are all like Kyrie. The good news is we also have the ability to determine our own character—to address our traits and change them—and therefore chart the course of our destiny. 

Are you going to be someone that values the right thing? Are you going to be honest with yourself? Are you going to keep your ego in check? Are you going to respect your fellow human beings? Are you going to take responsibility? Are you going to be someone others can depend on, trust, believe? Or are you only going to look out for number one? Are you going to make excuses for liars and cheats and egomaniacs because they agree with you, or might benefit your business or help your cause in the short term? Are you going to blame fate or the gods or the Chinese when things don’t go your way?  

The answers to these questions influence more than just whether you’re pleasant to be around. If you get them correct, you’ll be resilient, reliable, adaptable; you’ll learn, you’ll grow, you’ll be able to collaborate with others. If you get them wrong, you’ll be fragile, stupid, and selfish, incapable of integrating feedback, shifting course or generating sympathy. 

One gives you a chance at success. One guarantees—on a long enough timeline—that you’ll fail. 

Quite possibly in a catastrophic way.  

The post This Thing Predicts Everything appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

It’s the Little Moments That Make the Big Lessons

My new book Lives of the Stoics is out now!

Small events—a single moment, a simple exchange, an unremarkable decision—are what change the world.

On a fateful day late in the fourth century BCE, after a disastrous voyage on the Mediterranean, the Phoenician merchant Zeno washed up penniless in Athens. He could have despaired. Instead, he studied philosophy and ended up founding a school known as Stoicism. “I made a prosperous voyage,” Zeno would later say, “when I suffered a shipwreck.”

In the first century BCE, Pompey tried to corrupt Marcus Porcius Cato by dangling a marriage alliance. “Go and tell Pompey,” he instructed the go-between, that “Cato is not to be captured by way of the women’s apartments.” A few years later, his daughter, collaborating in an attempt to overthrow Julius Caesar, would stab herself in the leg to test her ability to withstand torture. Able to successfully bear the pain, she and her husband Brutus went ahead with the conspiracy. Several generations would pass and eventually place Marcus Aurelius at the head of the Roman empire. 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.”

These little moments—these are insights into the lives of what made the greats great. 

This, the great moral biographer Plutarch said, is why you can often learn more from a single anecdote than a sweeping historical portrait. Unlike the biographers of our time, who publish big, thick books filled with footnotes and postmodern digressions, Plutarch included only the essence of great men and women, so that he might inspire us to follow in their footsteps. He was obsessed by what we could learn from the figures he wrote about. 

“It is not histories I am writing,” Plutarch would write, “but lives; and in the most glorious deeds there is not always an indication of virtue or vice, indeed a small thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of a character than battles where thousands die.”

This distinction is core to Stoicism. Study the philosopher, they said, not the philosophy. Unlike the so-called “pen-and-ink philosophers”—as the type was derisively known even 2000 years ago—the Stoics said not to pay so much attention to what philosophers have thought or written because what counts is what they do. The choices they made, the causes they served, the principles they adhered to in the face of adversity. They cared about what you did, not what you said. 

“Don’t talk about your philosophy,” Epictetus would say, “embody it.” That’s why he would become so frustrated with his students who congratulated themselves on being able to read the obscure writings of Chrysippus: they were missing the point. Philosophy wasn’t about big words or complicated texts. It was about applying concepts to the real world. It was about living a happy and resilient and purposeful life. 

“I know,” Seneca wrote in 55 CE in a book on mercy written for the young emperor Nero, “that the Stoics have a bad reputation among the uninformed for being too callous and therefore unlikely to give good advice to kings and princes: they’re blamed for asserting that the wise man does not feel pity and does not forgive… In fact, no philosophical school is kinder and gentler, nor more loving of humankind and more attentive to the common good, to the degree that its very purpose is to be useful, bring assistance and consider the interests not only of itself as a school but of all people, individually and collectively.” 

It’s on these models that my latest book is written: Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius. With Stephen Hanselman, my co-author on The Daily Stoic, we pored over hundreds of ancient texts and modern scholarship to bring you 26 biographies of the most important—and most interesting—Stoics from history. Inspired by Plutarch, we wrote Lives of the Stoics with an eye towards practical application and advice. We wanted to leave you not only with some facts about these figures, but with a fuller sense of their essence and the aspects of their lives that teach us the most about the art of living. 

That’s the only reason to study philosophy—to become a better person. 

Anything else, as Nietzsche said, is merely a “critique of words by means of other words.” It’s empty talk. Schopenhauer called it “fencing in the mirror.”

This is, unfortunately, the role philosophy plays in the modern world. Today it’s about what smart people say, what big words they use, what paradoxes and riddles they can baffle us with. 

No wonder we dismiss it as impractical. It is!

 “To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school,” Thoreau said. “It is to solve some of the problems of life, not theoretically, but practically.”

That’s what the Stoics were after, what we remain interested in to this day: lights to illuminate the path in life. They wanted to know, as we want to know, how to find tranquility, purpose, self-control, and happiness. This journey, whether it begins in ancient Greece or modern America, is timeless. It is essential. It is difficult. Which is why we ask, as the Stoics asked: Who can help me? What is right? Where is true north? 

“You’ve wandered all over,” Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself in Meditations, “and finally realized that you never found what you were after: how to live. Not in syllogisms, not in money, or fame, or self-indulgence. Nowhere.” 

If philosophy is anything, it’s an answer to that question—how to live. It’s what we have been looking for. “Would you really know what philosophy offers to humanity?” Seneca asks in his Letters from a Stoic. “Philosophy offers counsel.” Seneca said that was the most powerful lesson he learned from his childhood tutor, Attalus the Stoic. The purpose of studying philosophy, of reading about the great men and women who lived and died before you, of learning about that simple question Zeno asked, that small decision Cato made, that one passage that guided Marcus was to “take away with him some one good thing every day: he should return home a sounder man, or on the way to becoming sounder.”

You must heed this counsel and struggle with what Seneca described as the most important job of a philosopher—the act of turning words into works in the real world. To study the lives of the men and women who came before us for the same reason Plutarch (who wrote about many of the Stoics as well) did: to turn the lessons of the lives, their living and their dying, their succeeding and their failing, into actions in the real world. 

For it is this, and nothing else, that earns one the title: Philosopher.

My new book Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius is finally out. I can’t wait for you to read it. If you’ve gotten anything out of these emails over the years, it would mean a lot to me if you could support this book, which I have been working on for a long time. It’s worth your time, I promise. 

If you do, I’ll still send over these pre-order bonuses which include three extra chapters I couldn’t fit in the book. 

Thank you!

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