Ryan Holiday's Blog, page 20

Do Yourself a Favor Today… and Go For a Walk

If you’ve ever doubted whether human beings are designed for walking, all you have to do is strap a fussy baby into a BabyBjörn and take them out for a stroll. The crying stops. With each step, the resistance and the kicking and the screaming fades away. It’s almost as if they enter a trance.

Hours can pass and, if you’re moving, whether they’re an infant strapped to your chest or a toddler in a stroller, even an ordinarily troublesome child turns into a dream.

We evolved this way. To travel by foot, to explore, to cover distances both short and long, slowly and steadily. Which is why my point here really has nothing to do with childcare.

Taking a walk works on a racing or miserable mind just as well as a colicky baby. We are an ambulatory species and often the best way to find stillness—in our hearts and in our heads—is to get up and out on our feet. To get moving. To take a damn walk.

For decades, the citizens of Copenhagen witnessed the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard embody this very idea. The cantankerous philosopher would write in the morning at a standing desk, and then around noon would head out onto the busy streets of Denmark’s capital city.

He walked on the newfangled “sidewalks” that had been built for fashionable citizens to stroll along. He walked through the city’s parks and through the pathways of Assistens Cemetery, where he would later be buried. On occasion, he walked out past the city’s walls and into the countryside. Kierkegaard never seemed to walk straight either—he zigged and zagged, crossing the street without notice, trying to always remain in the shade. When he had either worn himself out, worked through what he was struggling with, or been struck with a good idea, he would turn around and make for home, where he would write for the rest of the day.

In a beautiful letter to his sister-in-law, who was often bedridden, and depressed as a result, Kierkegaard wrote to her of the importance of walking. “Above all,” he told her in 1847, “do not lose your desire to walk: Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being,” he wrote, “and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.”

Life is a path, he liked to say, we have to walk it. He was by no means alone in believing that.

Nietzsche said that the ideas in Thus Spoke Zarathustra came to him on a long walk. Nikola Tesla discovered the rotating magnetic field, one of the most important scientific discoveries in modern history, on a walk through a city park in Budapest in 1882. When he lived in Paris, Ernest Hemingway would take long walks along the quais whenever he was stuck in his writing and needed to clarify his thinking. Charles Darwin’s daily schedule included several walks, as did those of Steve Jobs and the groundbreaking psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, the latter of whom wrote that “I did the best thinking of my life on leisurely walks with Amos.” It was the physical activity in the body, Kahneman said, that got his brain going.

Freud was known for his speedy walks around Vienna’s Ringstrasse after his evening meal. The composer Gustav Mahler spent as much as four hours a day walking, using this time to work through and jot down ideas. Ludwig van Beethoven carried sheet music and a writing utensil with him on his walks for the same reason. Dorothy Day was a lifelong walker, and it was on her strolls along the beach in Staten Island in the 1920s that she first began to feel a strong sense of God in her life and the first flickerings of the awakening that would put her on a path toward sainthood. It’s probably not a coincidence that Jesus himself was a walker—a traveler—who knew the pleasures and the divineness of putting one foot in front of the other. Indeed, it’s no coincidence that many of the greatest expressions of faith and devotion involve long walks (i.e. pilgrimages) to holy sites around the globe.

Why does walking work? Why has it worked for so many different kinds of people in some many different kinds of careers?

Walking is a deliberate, repetitive, ritualized motion. It is an exercise in peace.

The Buddhists talk of “walking meditation,” or kinhin, where the movement after a long session of sitting, particularly movement through a beautiful setting, can unlock a different kind of stillness than traditional meditation.

Personally, I’ve found that being aware on my walks—being present and open to the experience—has brought me closest to what I assume the Buddhists are talking about. I put the pressing problems of my life away, or rather I let them melt away as I move. I look down at my feet. What are they doing? I notice how effortlessly they move. Is that really me who’s doing that? Or do they just sort of move on their own? I listen to the sound of the leaves crunching underfoot. I feel the ground pushing back against me.

These are things anyone can do on a walk. Things you can do. Breathe in. Breathe out. Consider who might have walked this very trail in the centuries before you. Consider the person who paved the asphalt you are standing on. What was going on with them? Where are they now? What did they believe? What problems did they have?

But I don’t have time you say. Sure you do. Get up earlier. Take your phone calls outside, as I try to do. Do walking meetings instead of sitting ones. Do a couple laps around the parking lot before you go inside. Don’t call an Uber, walk there instead.

We aren’t that different from a baby. Stuff gets us stressed. We have feelings that we can’t quite find the words to explain and process. The world is overwhelming. Our needs aren’t being met. If we are allowed to simply stew in this, of course, we’ll cry and yell and get angry.

The adult must come in and break us out of this. The adult must take us outside and get us moving. Stimulate our senses. Calm our emotions and thoughts down by the rhythm of the walk, by reassuring firmness of the ground underfoot.

The poet William Wordsworth walked as many as 180,000 miles in his lifetime—an average of six and a half miles a day since he was five years old! It wasn’t for the physical fitness benefits that he put in these miles, though it certainly didn’t hurt. He did much of his writing while walking, as lines of poetry came to him, Wordsworth would repeat them over and over again, since it might be hours until he had the chance to write them down. Biographers have wondered ever since: Was it the scenery that inspired the images of his poems or was it the movement that jogged the thoughts?

Every ordinary person who has ever had a breakthrough on a walk knows that the two forces are equally and magically responsible.

Which is why whoever you are and whatever you do, you should do yourself a favor today and take a walk!

***

Learn How to Seek Out Stillness

Today’s article is about how one simple action—taking a walk—can bring you peace of mind and stillness, no matter who you are or where you live. If you want to learn more about the benefits of stillness and how to achieve it, check out Ryan Holiday’s latest book, Stillness Is the Key. It’s a #1 Bestseller in both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Get yours today.

You Could Have Today. Instead You Choose Tomorrow.

For me, the perfect Saturday involves getting up early. Not disgustingly early, just early enough that the morning is still fresh and young. I get my son dressed and we go for a long walk with the stroller while my wife gets much-deserved sleep.

Taking our time, we cover a few miles as the sun comes up, and then we come back home. I do a few pushups on the porch before coming back inside. (My son tries his best to do the same.) By now my wife is up, and we have a nice breakfast together as a family. Eggs from the chickens that graze on the grasses and grubs that grow around the coop behind the house, maybe some leftovers from the week thrown into something on the stove.

There’s nothing on the schedule or the calendar for the day. It’s Saturday, after all, and nobody else is working. The house is quiet. The phone hasn’t rung once. I head upstairs to my office and sit for a few minutes with my journal. And then, inspired by the stillness and the peace of the day, I usually do a little writing. Nothing super taxing, nothing that feels like hard work—something nice. Something like this piece. A riff on some topic that’s been bouncing around in my head during the week. Or maybe I just take notes on a book I read a while ago and wanted to review.

By the time I come downstairs an hour or two later, it’s just the best feeling. What I got done was a bonus. It didn’t feel forced, but it was still an accomplishment. And guess what? Now the whole rest of the day remains before me.

Sometimes we go into town. Or we hang out around the house. We go shopping or we play in the yard. We get the satisfaction of checking off little projects we’ve been meaning to finish. We watch college football. Or a movie. We read books. We jump in the pool. We go to the zoo or the grocery store. We get hay for the cows or feed them cubes. We go to the gym or for a run in the park. Or we do what seems like nothing for quite a long time.

It’s our day. Not anyone else’s. There’s no purpose to it. No real structure. And everything we do is by choice. No frenzy. No rush. No imposition. Just presence and peace.

Anyway, that’s what my perfect Saturday looks like. Yours may look very different. Maybe yours has a more leisurely morning or brunch with friends. Maybe there’s a 40-mile bike ride or hundreds of pages of scientific papers to be read. Maybe the concept of a “perfect Saturday” has never occurred to you because you work on weekends. Maybe your Saturday is actually Wednesday, your only day off, I don’t know. But if you do have a day off, it’s yours. And it should be whatever you want.

Callie Oettinger put it well:

You don’t have to do a lot every day, but you have to do something.

Something. Every day.

So what is that something?

When you know what that something is, suddenly you have power and clarity and control. You know what to say yes to. What to say no to. You know who you are and what your life needs to be built around.

***

One can’t design a life around what it’s like to be on vacation. Vacations are not real. They cost money. They happen somewhere far away from where you live. Life can’t be filled with the day of your greatest, most impressive accomplishment either. To be Tom Brady every day, coming back from 28–3 in the Super Bowl to pull off a surprise victory in overtime—that would be exhausting. That’s great once.

What we need is something sustainable. Something balanced. Something deliberate without being forced. Purposeful without being obsessed with productivity. We need something like a great Saturday—or one of those Mondays where you’re not sure if it’s part of a three-day weekend, resulting in just enough work that it’s productive, but not so much that it’s a chore.

The funny thing is, as much as I enjoy these days, they are fleeting and rare. Why is it that I allow Wednesday to suck? Why do I choose for Tuesday to be filled with meetings that I don’t remember agreeing to attend? Or phone calls that I answer?

Part of the answer is that yes, I must make a living, but the truth is, my best work never comes on those crappy days. In fact, the idea for the book project I am selling now came to me on one of those long walks. And that’s what pays for my house, not the emails I spend so much time responding to.

Earlier I said that those Saturdays were the kinds of days to build a life around. I think the mistake is that a lot of people try to build a life toward them instead. What’s that line from the famous Loverboy song?

Everybody’s working for the weekend.

Exactly. People think they have to live a life they don’t want for a long time so that eventually, off in the distant future, they can live a life they do want. They need to make millions or get famous or earn their big break. Then and only then can they…

I’ve always found it’s better to think about what I want my ordinary life to look like most of the time. Then I try to make decisions based on the simple metric of whether they allow for more or less of that right now. A really cool job opportunity? I’ll consider it. But wait, it means I have to move my family to D.C., wear a suit most days, and be on someone else’s schedule? And I won’t be able to write much? Never mind, sorry. Oh, I could make a lot of money investing in startups? I like the sound of that. But I’ll have to read lots of pitch decks and go to lots of meetings? You know what, I’ll pass.

I’m a firm believer that how long we live is outside of our control. I don’t feel comfortable trading the present for an uncertain future. “You could be good today,” the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote. “But instead you choose tomorrow.” That quote haunts me as much as it inspires me. And it does a lot of each.

You might ask: “But isn’t this a privileged way to live? It must be so nice only having to work a couple hours a day.” Yes, I do feel very privileged that for me happiness is relatively cheap. My ideal day doesn’t require me to be rich or powerful or important. It just requires that I be good enough at something to sell my services on the open market and strong enough to say no to things that are beyond my needs. That is a privilege, and it’s more accessible than we think. There are plenty of billionaires who don’t have it, plenty of ordinary people who have never lost it.

The poet Heraclitus said, “One day is equal to every day.” Today could be that amazing day for you. Today could be how you want life to be. You just have to choose for it to be. Or rather, stop choosing for it not to be.

***

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This Is What You Should Read Every Day

Reading is not just something you should do on vacation, or when you have free time. It should be, like all important things in your life, a daily practice, something you’re working to get better at. Although I certainly read on some days more than others, I work hard to make sure I read something everyday. 

That means I am spending time each day with whatever book I am trying to get through, but it means I spend time, daily, with a few specific books (and authors) that I benefit from each time I pick them up. Which is why I am sending this special Reading List Email with some recommendations of books (and sites) I try to look at every single morning.

And don’t tell me you don’t have time to read everyday. You do! 

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 comprised 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 as Socrates, Epictetus, Arnold, Parker… They tell us about what is most important for humanity, about the meaning of life and about virtue.” It would take seventeen years for this book to be published, then ninety-three more for the English translation, titled A Calendar of Wisdom. 

The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

Of course, I don’t actually read my own book each morning, but I did design that book to mimic a ritual I have, which is to pick up and read one passage from the Stoics each morning. Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, I want to put something from them in my brain each morning. Unfortunately, there was no book that put them all together until we made The Daily Stoic (which has now sold 500,000 copies and is translated in more than 30 languages). We also put out an email version (and a podcast) for DailyStoic.com that has continued the same service. More than 250,000 people check in with these texts this morning because it’s important. You want to start your day off with wisdom and when it comes to wisdom, there is nobody better than the Stoics. 

Marginal Revolution by Tyler Cowen

There is nobody who has exposed me to more books and ideas than Tyler Cowen. That’s why his blog MarginalRevolution.com is basically the only site I check every single day, without fail, sometimes multiple times a day. Tyler is a polymath, a diverse and contrarian thinker, who has incredible taste for interesting ideas, ways of thinking and modern and classical wisdom. If you are not reading this site everyday, you’re not learning as much as you can. I really like Tyler’s books as well, including Average is Over, The Complacent Class and Discover Your Inner Economist. I listen to his podcast weekly, and if Tyler had a page a day book, I’d read that each morning. 

Some other good daily reads:

Calling it a Day: Daily Meditations for Workaholics by Robert Larranaga

Marcus Aurelius was the Emperor, millions depended on him, he was famous, his face was literally on the coins of the currency—yet, he reminded himself in Meditations, not “to be all about business.” There is more to life than work: the most important work—becoming the person we need to be for the people who need it from us the most. 

Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations by Frederick Buechner

366 quotations culled from Buechner’s works—novels, sermons, lectures, autobiographical ruminations—by an admirer and elaborated on by Buechner himself, who wants everyone to “pay attention to the world and all that dwells therein and thereby learn at last to pay attention to yourself and all that dwells therein.”

You Are the Beloved: Daily Meditations for Spiritual Living by Henri J. M. Nouwen

There is a great line in a great song by The Head and The Heart: Until you learn to love yourself, The door is locked to someone else. “We are the Beloved,” Nouwen writes, “we are intimately loved long before our parents, teachers, spouses, children and friends loved or wounded us…That’s the truth I want you to claim for yourself.”

Journey To The Heart 

Bible In A Year 

Healing After Loss

Your True Home

365 Tao

The Everyday Torah

Journals

The other “book” I pick up each day is a journal. Actually, I pick up three. 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 where I prepare for the day ahead by meditating on a short prompt, then set an intention or a goal for the day—just something to give myself something I can review at the end of the day, that I can evaluate myself against.

For years, journaling has been the most important thing I do every morning. It takes all of maybe 15 minutes and then it’s done. But by the time I am finished, I am centered, I am calm, and most importantly, I am primed to do the actual creative work by which I make my living. It’s something countless writers, creators, thinkers and leaders have done for thousands of years. I’ve written, as far as I know, the most comprehensive guide on journaling—how to start journaling, the science-backed benefits of journaling, and much much more. You can read the whole article on DailyStoic.com.

Newsletters

I’m a big fan of newsletters, as well. Here are some that I subscribe to:

James Clear’s “3-2-1 Thursday”

Mark Manson’s “Motherfucking Monday”

Tim Ferriss’ “5 Bullet Friday”

Ramit Sethi’s “I Will Teach You To Be Rich”. 

Maria Papova’s “BrainPickings”

Matt Levine’s Money Stuff (which I heard about from Tyler Cowen) 

The last thing I’d like to mention is actually my favorite thing to write. It’s not a book yet but it will be soon. It’s called the Daily Dad, and it’s a daily email that goes out to 20,000 people each morning. Being a parent is without a doubt the hardest, most demanding thing I’ve ever done in my life. And being a great dad is without a doubt the most important thing I want to achieve in my life. So I read every dad book I could find looking for some help and guidance to get there. Unfortunately, I found that most published advice falls abysmally short. They are typically age-specific and only situationally applicable—useful in a window of time that closes before the back cover does. Inspired by the format of the daily reads listed above, I hunt out the greatest wisdom and lessons from history, science, literature and ordinary parents, to give you real advice and insight for being a great dad every day. It’s free and will be waiting in your inbox every morning. I hope you’ll check it out (Dr. Drew, Casey Neistat, Charlamagne tha God and Brett McKay are all advisors on the project). 

If you’re looking to read other books and written works about how to live well,  check out Scribd . You can get a one month  free trial of unlimited audiobooks and ebooks , plus subscriptions to a whole bunch of great places like The Atlantic and the New York Times.

How You Do Anything Is How You Do Everything

Whatever you’re doing right now, chances are you’d probably rather not be doing it. Even if you’ve got your dream job, it’s very likely that right now you could still be on a conference call you’d rather skip, scheduling some meeting you’re doing as a favor to someone else or dealing with some administrative detail you wish someone else would handle.

Or maybe you’re home from work and you’re picking up around the house. Maybe you’ve got some writing to do and the resistance is setting in. Or you’ve got homework, an application to fill out or someone to fire or need to have difficult conversation with your significant other.

It’s easy to blow these things off. It’s tempting to phone them in. But you can’t.

Because how you do anything, is how you do everything.

Long past his humble beginnings, President Andrew Johnson would speak proudly of his career as a tailor before he entered politics. “My garments never ripped or gave way,” he would say.

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

Another president, James Garfield, paid his way through college in 1851 by persuading his school, the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, to let him be the janitor in exchange for tuition. He did the job every day smiling and without a hint of shame. Each morning, he’d ring the university’s bell tower to start the classes — his day already having long begun — and stomp to class with cheer and eagerness.

Within just one year of starting at the school he was a professor — teaching a full course load in addition to his studies. By his twenty-sixth birthday he was the dean.

This is what happens when you do your job — whatever it is — and do it well.

These men went from humble poverty to power by always doing what they were asked to do — and doing it right and with real pride. And doing it better than anyone else. In fact, doing it well because no one else wanted to do it.

Sometimes, on the road to where we are going or where we want to be, we have to do things that we’d rather not do. Often when we are just starting out, our first jobs “introduce us to the broom,” as Andrew Carnegie famously put it. There’s nothing shameful about sweeping. It’s just another opportunity to excel — and to learn.

But we are always so busy thinking about the future, we don’t take enough pride in the tasks we are given right now. Too often we phone it in, cash our check, and dream of some higher station in life. Or we think, This is just a job, it isn’t who I am, it doesn’t matter.

This is foolishness.

Everything we do matters — whether it’s making smoothies to save up money or studying for the bar — even after we’ve already achieved the success we sought. Everything is a chance to do and be our best. Only self-absorbed assholes think they are too good for whatever their current station requires.

Wherever we are, whatever we’re doing and wherever we are going, we owe it to ourselves, to our art, to the world to do it well. That’s our primary duty. And our obligation. When action is our priority, vanity falls away.

An artist is given many different canvases and commissions in their lifetime, and what matters is that they treat each one as a priority. Whether it’s the most glamorous or highest paying is irrelevant. Each project matters, and the only degrading part is giving less than one is capable of giving.

Same goes for us. We will be and do many things in our lives. Some are prestigious, some are onerous, none are beneath us. To whatever we face, our job is to respond with:

hard work
honesty
helping others as best we can

We should never have to ask ourselves, But what am I supposed to do now? Because we know the answer: our job.

Whether anyone notices, whether we’re paid for it, whether the project turns out successfully — it doesn’t matter. We can and always should act with those three traits — no matter the obstacle.

There will never be any obstacles that can ever truly prevent us from carrying out our obligation — harder or easier challenges, sure, but never impossible. Each and every task requires our best. Whether we’re facing down bankruptcy and angry customers, or raking in money and deciding how to grow from here, if we do our best we can be proud of our choices and confident they’re the right ones. Because we did our job — whatever it is.

Yeah, yeah, I get it. “Obligations” sound stuffy and oppressive. You want to be able to do whatever you want.

But duty is beautiful, and inspiring and empowering.

Steve Jobs cared even about the inside of his products, making sure they were beautifully designed even though the users would never see them. Taught by his father — who finished even the back of his cabinets though they would be hidden against the wall — to think like a craftsman. In every design predicament, Jobs knew his marching orders: Respect the craft and make something beautiful.

Every situation is different, obviously. We’re probably not inventing the next iPad or iPhone, but we are making something for someone — even if it’s just our own resume. Every part — especially the work that nobody sees, the tough things we wanted to avoid or could have skated away from — we can treat the same way Jobs did: with pride and dedication.

The great psychologist Viktor Frankl, survivor of three concentration camps, found presumptuousness in the age-old question: “What is the meaning of life?” As though it is someone else’s responsibility to tell us. Instead, he said, the world is asking you that question. And it’s our job to answer with our actions.

In every situation, life is asking us a question, and our actions are the answer. Our job is simply to answer well.

Right action — unselfish, dedicated, masterful, creative — that is the answer to that question. That’s one way to find the meaning of life. And how to turn every obstacle into an opportunity.

If you see any of this as a burden, you’re looking at it the wrong way.

Because all we need to do is those three little duties — to try hard, to be honest, and to help others and ourselves. That’s all that’s been asked of us. No more and no less.

Sure, the goal is important. But never forget that each individual instance matters, too — each is a snapshot of the whole. The whole isn’t certain, only the instances

How you do anything is how you can do everything. We can always act right.

***
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It’s Not Enough to Be Right—You Also Have to Be Kind

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

The typical response to this kind of innocent cheekiness is to pat the child on the head and tell them how smart they are. Bezos’ grandmother didn’t do that. Instead, she quite understandably burst into tears. It was after this exchange that Bezos’ grandfather took his grandson aside and taught him a lesson that he says has stuck with him for the rest of his life. “Jeff,” his grandfather said, “one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”

Some people might say that young Bezos did nothing wrong. They’re just facts, and the truth hurts. How else do you expect someone to recognize the seriousness of what they’re doing to themselves? There’s something to that, but it captures the central conceit of a dangerous assumption we seem to have made as a culture these days: that being right is a license to be a total, unrepentant asshole. After all, why would you need to repent if you haven’t committed the ultimate sin of being wrong? Some say there’s no reason to care about other people’s feelings if the facts are on your side.

The causes of this spreading through our culture are many. As we’ve become more polarized and more algorithmically sorted, we care a lot less about the people who think differently than us and put little effort into persuading them. That’s because persuasion is no longer the goal—it’s signaling. And with signaling, it’s vehemence that matters, not quality. The constraints of social media also reduce the space for any nuance or qualification you might be inclined to offer; 140 characters or even 240 does not leave much room for humility or kindness. And the desire for viral sharing heightens the need for aggressive, simplistic arguments.

This callous, call-out culture has completely infected both sides of the political aisle, corrupting normal people and pundits with equal viciousness.

The Donald Trumps and Stephen Millers of the world seem to think that that there is no level of personal attack or invective off-limits in the course of exposing liberal hypocrisy; and if it pisses off liberals in the process, all the better. Political correctness has become such a problem, they say, that the only solution is blunt, merciless honesty. Meanwhile, the John Olivers and Daily Show-type hosts of the world play to the left-wing blogosphere, which loves clips of them destroying and roasting and nailing the people on the right. (Jon Stewart famously “took down” Tucker Carlson on Crossfire in 2004.) It’s become a war to see who can be crueler or meaner in a headline: “Is Jordan Peterson the stupid man’s smart person?” and “Democrats Are coddling Ilhan Omar like she’s an idiot child, much like Republicans do with Trump.” Talking heads know that a really good insult or a sick burn will get them online pickups the next day, the same way that athletes know that an awesome dunk will get them on SportsCenter—or sports Twitter.

The ridiculous thing is that political correctness is a real problem. I’ve written about it before. No society can succeed if it runs from or denies uncomfortable truths. And just because a fact is inconvenient does not mean it is offensive. This game of “behalfism” where we are offended—often in advance—on behalf of other marginalized groups has become utterly absurd. A white woman can’t paint a picture of Emmett Till. Little girls can’t dress up as their favorite princess. A TV show has to get rid of a character that had been in the show for nearly 30 years. Young adult novelists get cast aside for not being woke enough.

Anti-intellectualism is also a real problem. We should be worried about the death of expertise. What we feel about an issue does not change the fundamental facts or dispute data. One in three citizens can’t name who the vice president is, one in three can’t identify the Pacific Ocean on a map, and more than one in three can’t name a single right protected by the First Amendment. Not reading is not a badge of honor. People think bringing a snowball to the Senate floor is an argument against climate change. There are politicians who think rape victims can’t get pregnant. Yet, no amount of yelling or condescension or trolling is going to fix any of this. It never has and never will.

When I look back at some of my own writing, I see versions of that same mistake Jeff Bezos made as a kid. I thought if I was just overwhelmingly right enough, people would listen. If I humiliated my opponent, they would have to admit I was right and they were wrong. I’ve even said in interviews that the goal of my first book was to rip back the curtain on how media really works so people could not turn away. But guess what? A lot of people still did. Of course they did. I was right, but I was also being an asshole.

Indeed, most of the writing that I look back on and regret is characterized by a similar tone that has way too much superiority and certainty and not nearly enough intellectual humility or empathy. It’s something I am guilty of in writing since and will be guilty of again—because it’s so much easier to be certain and clever than it is to be nuanced and nice.

You can see some version of this in a lot of the media opposition to populist politics (both left and right). There is this unshakeable assumption that if they can just present the right fact—if they can prove indisputably that Donald Trump is a liar or that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a Marxist—that people will change their minds. If they can just show you the right study that proves there is no link between vaccines and autism or that the planet is getting warmer, they’ll have to tap out and admit, “Okay, that was stupid. We’re wrong. We’ll agree with you now.” And when that doesn’t happen, that’s when the shaming and the humiliation and the personal attacks begin: “I showed you the study. It’s from Harvard. What more do you want, you inbred idiot?” “Face facts, you Hillary-loving socialist!”

After spending years and millions of words and hours of video on this, we’ve had almost zero success. Why? Because you can’t reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into. No one responds well to having their identity attacked. No argument made in bad faith—that the person on the other side is a moron or a dupe or a racist or a snowflake—is ever going to be received in good faith.

Reason is easy. Being clever is easy. Humiliating someone in the wrong is easy too. But putting yourself in their shoes, kindly nudging them to where they need to be, understanding that they have emotional and irrational beliefs just like you have emotional and irrational beliefs—that’s all much harder. So is not writing off other people. So is spending time working on the plank in your own eye than the splinter in theirs. We know we wouldn’t respond to someone talking to us that way, but we seem to think it’s okay to do it to other people.

There is a great clip of Joe Rogan talking during the immigration crisis last year. He doesn’t make some fact-based argument about whether immigration is or isn’t a problem. He doesn’t attack anyone on either side of the issue. He just talks about what it feels like—to him—to hear a mother screaming for the child she’s been separated from. The clip has been seen millions of times now and undoubtedly has changed more minds than a government shutdown, than the squabbles and fights on CNN, than the endless op-eds and think-tank reports.

Rogan doesn’t even tell anyone what to think. (Though, ironically, the clip was abused by plenty of editors who tried to make it partisan). He just says that if you can’t relate to that mom and her pain, you’re not on the right team. That’s the right way to think about it.

If you can’t be kind, if you won’t empathize, then you’re not on the team. That team is Team Humanity, where we are all in this thing together. Where we are all flawed and imperfect. Where we treat other people’s point of view as charitably as we treat our own. Where we are civilized and respectful and, above all, kind to each other—particularly the less fortunate, the mistaken, and the afraid.

***
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A Radical Guide to Spending Less Time on Your Phone

It’s there: in your pocket. On the desk. In the cup holder of the car.

You want to use it. Just grab it and alleviate the boredom or discomfort. Might as well check the headlines instead of struggling to type words on a blank screen. And why stay in this tense argument with your spouse when you can see what’s new on Instagram? “Hey, sorry buddy, I can’t play dinosaurs right now — I have to answer this email.”

That’s what our phones have become. An instant escape, and a constant burden. I remember when I got my first BlackBerry. It was an exciting and surprisingly moving moment. Not because of the technology, but because of what it meant: Someone at my job thought I was important enough to need one of these.

Over the years, though, that pride has worn off. My phone, once a source of liberation — I could check my email without having to go home, which meant I could spend more time out doing things — eventually became a weight that tied me down. Instead of making me better at my job, it started preventing what Cal Newport calls “deep work” — focused, dedicated, creative time. Instead of helping me have fun, it was making me miserable.

So recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to use it less. About how to get the benefits from the technology without all the downsides.

If that’s what you’re looking for, too, these strategies might help you. Some of them are easy. Others are tougher, and you’ll probably think some of them are nuts. Maybe they are. But they work.

Turn off all alerts

My lock screen is almost always blank. It’s not because nothing is happening or nobody needs me. It’s because I went into the general settings on my phone and turned off all alerts by default, with the exception of texts and alarms for literal emergencies. (In Texas, we have flash floods and tornadoes.) Even once I unlock my phone, I don’t see any red circles showing me how many messages or notifications I have. I don’t need Strava to tell me I need to check Strava. I definitely don’t allow anything to make noise or buzz me. (I turned off vibrate for texts as well.) No alerts means fewer things to check and a lot less FOMO.

Decide how you’re going to be reachable

One of the best decisions I made a few years ago was to limit how people can get in touch with me. Some people have email, text, phone calls, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Messenger, Twitter and Instagram DMs, LinkedIn messages, Slack, Telegram, and God knows what else. No wonder they’re overwhelmed.

I basically limit myself to three: You can text, email, or call me. Email is day-to-day work stuff, texts are for friends and family, and when my phone rings, it’s usually something important from either one of those groups. I no longer feel the need to check 20 different apps and inboxes 50 times a day, because I know everything that actually matters will come in through one of those three channels.

Sleep with your phone in the other room

Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska is known for giving his young staffers old-school alarm clocks — not because he wants to make sure they’re on time for work, but so they don’t have an excuse to sleep with their phone on the nightstand. If you have an alarm that’s not your clock app, your phone can go in the other room, and if your phone is in the other room, you can’t check it at night.

This means you won’t know if you get a text message or an email. It means you won’t be tempted to scroll through social. It means you’ll have to lie there with your own thoughts, read a book, or maybe even go to sleep at a reasonable time.

Start phone-free mornings

About six months ago, I was invited to a challenge on the habit-building app Spar 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. 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.

Get a smartwatch

I’m not a big fan of the “solve a device problem with another device” logic, but in this case, it’s really worked. Having a watch that connects to my phone — but that I don’t use as a phone — has substantially reduced the amount of time I spend on my phone, and helped me curb the desire to always have it near me. The only alerts I allow on my watch are calendar reminders and phone calls, which keeps me at least somewhat tethered to my work life. I can reject calls from my wrist, too, without having to go into my pocket.

Get AirPods, too

Not having a physical cord tethering me to my phone makes a huge difference. I want to listen to music. I don’t want to be tempted by my email. I want to talk to this person on the phone. I don’t want to be scrolling at the same time.

Get rid of social apps

I am old enough to remember the days when you checked Facebook and Twitter on your computer instead of carrying the apps around on your body 24 hours a day. That world was slightly less awful than the one we’re in today. Twitter used to be fun. Facebook used to have photos of people’s lunches. Now they’re both filled with constant arguing.

The decision to remove social media from my phone radically reduced the role these apps played in my life. Twitter is fine as a social diversion from time to time. As a thing you can access every time a thought pops in your head? Not so much.

Don’t use your phone for entertainment at all

Why do cellphone companies strike deals with Netflix? Why did AT&T buy DirecTV? Because they want to turn your phone into your television. They want you to mainline data and entertainment. This is good for them, but not good for you. When I’m on a plane, I don’t pull up my phone and watch movies; I read books. When I want to watch TV, I have to sit down on the couch and use a remote.

While we’re on the subject, delete your games, too. Really smart psychologists, designers, and marketers have figured out how to make them as addictive and immersive as possible, and cutting them out is one easy way to use your phone less. My phone is for communication, not entertainment, and maintaining this distinction helps subordinate its role in my life.

Carry two devices

Chris “Drama” Pfaff, founder of the clothing brand Young & Reckless, once told me he carries two phones: one for work and one for fun. The fun one — the one with all his social media and other apps he likes — stays in the car while he’s at work. People laugh at him when he has to walk down to the garage to send a message, but it works. If you can afford it, this strategy is a good one.

Don’t sync your computer and phone

If your phone is a distraction machine, your computer should be a tool for focus — and the more you keep them separate, the better. The last thing I want is my computer to start ringing. What the hell do I need texts on my desktop for? The more you can minimize interruptions, the better.

Print your tickets at the airport

When I fly somewhere, the first thing I do is print my ticket at the self-check-in monitors. Why? First off, the bar code thing never works and I hate people who hold up the line trying to position their phone properly. Second, and more importantly, I don’t want to give myself an excuse to keep my phone at hand — the piece of paper in my pocket tells me everything I need to fly, and now I can zip my phone into my backpack and not check it. A minor reduction in phone time, sure, but I’ll take it where I can get it.

Use child protection settings

You know you can block certain sites on your phone, right? So if you deleted Facebook but still check it in your browser, you can use parental controls to protect yourself from yourself. There are a number of sites I wanted to stop checking, so I made it harder for me to do so.

Go on a purge

Delete contacts you don’t use. Delete apps you don’t need. Clear your cookies. Do you need the Macy’s app? Do you actually need both Lyft and Uber? Simplify. Your phone wants to remember everything to make your experience using it more seamless. Don’t let it.

“Do Not Disturb” is your friend

Use this feature all the time. Whenever you sit down to a meeting. Whenever you got into a movie. Whenever you’re doing something nice with your family. Put up a wall that prevents people, emails, and texts from getting through. Protect your space. Be in the moment.

Whenever possible, replace your phone with another solution

If you read news on your phone, try subscribing to a newspaper or a magazine. If you want a restaurant recommendation, ask a friend. If you use a countdown app with your kids, get a kitchen timer. Yes, the phone can be easier for all these things, but what we don’t factor in is the mindless scrolling that we slip into once the task at hand is done. The less you use your phone to deal with trivial matters or minor conveniences, the less dependent you’ll be on it.

Okay, but what do you use your phone for, then? Well, lots of helpful things. It’s a calculator. It lets me look up information I need on the go. I can take pictures. I can listen to music and podcasts. I get directions. I can call an Uber to pick me up anywhere in the world. I manage my schedule. I write notes to myself. I record my runs and my swims. I FaceTime my kids when I’m away.

My life is better because of the ability to do these things. It’s the stuff that prevents me from doing them that I want to get rid of.

Because it’s my life and it’s ticking away every second. I want to be there for it, not staring at a screen.

***

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The (Very) Best Books I Read in 2019

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

I know that people are busy, and we don’t always have time to read as much as we’d like. Nothing wrong with that (though if you want to read more—don’t look for shortcuts—make more time!). What matters is that when you do read, you pick the right books. 

My reading list is now 200,000+ 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.  

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

This is by far the book I have recommended to the most people this year—and it’s the one I have come back to and thought about most. I’ve heard from many important and interesting people in business, sports and politics who have said the same thing. In this well-written and entertaining book, David makes a convincing case for the benefits of generalization and experimentation, particularly early on in one’s career and life (Roger Federer being a great contrast to Tiger Woods). I don’t think I would be a good writer if I had trained in it from childhood—it was the experiences that I had in business, in marketing, as well as in researching that converged to give me a broad range of successful skills. Today, I am a proud multi-hyphenate and believe this book can help you become one too. I will also say that this book also doubly functions as a parenting book and is a must read for anyone with kids. 

The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote by Elaine Weiss

Last year, one of my favorite books was Stephen Greenblatt’s Tyrant, which somehow, despite being a book entirely about Shakespeare’s plays, manages to open a real window into what is happening politically and culturally right now, all around us. Elaine Weiss has done something similar and much more inspiring—in these chaotic, divisive and polarizing times, her riveting biography of how activists passed the 19th Amendment  (the right for women to vote), shows us how hard and incremental transformational change actually is. It took suffragettes roughly 100 years to win their battle and even then, it nearly didn’t happen. Their fight took real guts, strategy, compromise, and brute force. It took brave women (and men) who put it on the line to make it happen. This wasn’t garbage social media virtue signaling. It wasn’t fait accompli because it was right. It wasn’t made to happen. It was willed into existence…against all sorts of reservations. I wrote this year about how poorly anger works as a political strategy (ironically, it made a lot of people angry). This book makes a better argument than I did and hopefully provides a road map to future generations of people trying to make the world a better and fairer place.

Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

One thing I committed to doing this year was re-reading, specifically re-reading some fiction. I’m so glad I did because it meant getting to dive back into this book, which I loved and enjoyed even more the second time. This novel—it’s written as if it were the memoirs of the Emperor Hadrian speaking to his successor, Marcus Aurelius—is just an utterly beautiful book. Hadrian was complicated, as all people drawn to power are. Yet somehow he managed to identify and cultivate not just one but two heirs who were much better than he was, and for this, all of history owes a debt of gratitude. How did he do it? The message of this novel pretends to know, which makes it perfect for leaders, for parents, and for anyone thinking about their legacy. I can only imagine how much more beautiful the book is in its original French. In any case, if you haven’t read this book, do so. If you have, do it again. 

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

What’s the second mountain? It’s what you starting thinking about once you have made it to the top of your field, once you have realized that material success or fame or recognition from your peers is not nearly as satisfying as you thought they would be. For Brooks, the second mountain is where we start thinking less about ourselves and more about other people. It’s the decision to leave Wall Street to move to your hometown and be a part of a community. It’s the choice to start a charity or to go back to school to become a teacher. It’s running for mayor or volunteering in a soup kitchen. To say this book will make you think about your life is an understatement. It will make you question everything in your life. Do read it. I know reading it has greatly shaped what I plan to do in 2020, so stay tuned!

Honorable mentions: I loved David Roll’s George Marshall: Defender of the Republic and I also liked General Mattis’ memoir, Call Sign Chaos. We need more leaders like those two. Cal Newport’s book Digital Minimalism was critical in my design to radically scale back social media use this year and Austin Kleon’s book Keep Going was an inspiration for me as a creative—these two books make a great pair. If you’re interested in the Stoics, I strongly recommend Donald Robertson’s biography of Marcus Aurelius How to Think Like a Roman Emperor. And How To Keep Your Cool, a short selection of important passages from one of Seneca’s greatest works (On Anger), is worth reading for anyone with a temper (that is to say, everyone). I probably got more quotes from Juan Ramon Jimenez’s The Complete Perfectionist than I did from any other book I read this year. Did you know Herbert Hoover wrote a book about fishing in 1963? It’s called Fishing for Fun: And to Wash Your Soul—I loved the subtitle and this short book. I read some epic biographies this year including William Manchester’s biography of Douglas MacArthur and T. R. Fehrenbach’s biography of Texas. These two writers were flawed but undoubtedly masters of their craft. I also really liked Daniel Immerwahr’s book How To Hide An Empire, which is about the “greater” United States. Finally, Susan Orlean’s The Library Book is another classic from one of my favorite journalists. A must-read for any book lover. 

Anyway, this is just a sampling of what I read this year. I’m very lucky that I get to read for a living and can afford to go down rabbit holes and read leisurely. If you’re looking to read great stuff in 2020, I think you’ll like everything I recommended. And if you want to become a better reader this year, we’ve come up with a challenge at Daily Stoic that’s perfect for you:

Read to Lead: A Daily Stoic Reading Challenge

Harry Truman once said that “not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” It’s true.   

To be a leader you have to have a ceaseless appetite for learning, for self-improvement, for wisdom. The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius prized the ability to “read attentively,” and used this skill to reign masterfully over his domain. Reading is the shortest, most established path to total self-improvement. We know intuitively that this is true. The question is: what active steps are we taking toward our better selves, to improve every aspect of our lives, to ensure success? We created the Read To Lead challenge as a way to give you an answer to that question.

What Are Your Rules for Life? These 11 Expressions (from Ancient History) Might Help

In one of my favorite novels, The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, Aunt Emily is famous for asking a question. It’s a simple one, but I think an eye-opening one. Aunt Emily, the wisest character in the book, likes to ask,

What do you live by? 

As in, what are your principles? What are the Ten Commandments that rule your life? Who’s the animating force behind what you do and why you do it? 

You’d think most people would know the answer to this question, but of course they don’t. Seattle Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll likes to tell a story about how long he managed to coach football without actually knowing what he believed in as a coach. It was only after another disappointing season with the New England Patriots—some 15 years into his career—that it struck Carroll that he had no real coaching philosophy, no real belief system. Inspired by John Wood, Carroll got to work, “writing notes and filling binders”—on nailing down his core values, his philosophy, what exactly he believes in. It was a transformative decision: He would go on to win two National Championships and win a Super Bowl with the Seattle Seahawks.

Now when he gives talks, he likes to open with that question: What’s your philosophy? What do you live by? He told me once, when I asked him about it, how shocked he is, on a regular basis, how many CEOs and generals and investors and coaches at the highest levels reveal, accidentally, that they have just been winging it. 

That’s crazy! 

In light of that fact, I thought I would look backwards to history, when the idea of a code—the Romans called it mas morium—was more common. The “old ways” come down to us in the form of some wonderful Latin expressions that remain, thousands of years later, very much worth living by. 

Festina Lente (Make Haste Slowly)

From the Roman historian Suetonius, we learn that festina lente was the motto of Rome’s first emperor, Augustus. “He thought nothing less becoming in a well-trained leader than haste and rashness,” Suetonius writes, “And, accordingly, favourite sayings of his were: ‘More haste, less speed’; ‘Better a safe commander than a bold’; and ‘That is done quickly enough which is done well enough.’”

Faster is not always better. In fact, it’s often the slowest way to accomplish anything. Great leaders throughout history have known this. There is a quote ascribed to Lincoln about how the way to chop down a tree is to first spend several hours sharpening your axe. Kennedy used to talk about using time as a tool, not as a couch. 

It’s easy to rush in. It feels good to start doing. But if you don’t know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how to do it? Well, it’s not going to go well. If you’re going quickly for the sake of speed, you’re going to make costly mistakes. You’re going to miss opportunities. You’re going to miss critical warnings. 

Each of us needs more clear thinking, wisdom, patience, and a keen eye for the root of problems. “Slowly,” Juan Ramon Jimenezas put it, “you will do everything quickly.” 

Festina Lente.

Carpe Diem (Seize The Day)

Locked in prison by Henry Bolingbroke (Henry IV) in Shakespeare’s Richard II, Richard II gives a haunting speech about his hopeless fate. One line stands out, as it captures perfectly the reality of nearly every human being—indeed, it sounds like it was cribbed from Seneca’s On The Shortness of Life. 

“I wasted time,” Richard II says, “and now doth time waste me.”

Isn’t that beautiful? And terribly sad? It was some 1500 years before Shakespeare that the poet Horace wrote in book 1 of Odes, “carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero” (seize the day, trust tomorrow e’en as little as you may).

We think that time is ours to waste. We even say, “We have two hours to kill” or speak of dead time between projects. The irony! Because time is the one that’s killing us. Each minute that passes is not just dead to us, it brings us closer to being dead.

That’s what Richard II realizes in that prison cell. He had wasted time and now, by a stroke of bad luck and evil, he is now wasting away. Only now is he realizing that each second that ticks by is a beat of his heart that he won’t get back, each ringing bell that marks the hour falls upon him like a blow. 

Seneca writes that we think life is short, when in reality we just waste it. Marcus admonishes himself to not put off until tomorrow what he can do today, because today was the only thing he controlled (and to get out of bed and get moving for the same reason). The Stoics knew that fate was unpredictable and that death could come at any moment. Therefore, it was a sin (and stupidity) to take time for granted. 

Today is the most valuable thing you own. It is the only thing you have. Don’t waste it. Seize it.

Carpe Diem . 

Fac, si facis (Do It If You’re Going To Do It)

The painter Edgar Degas, though best known for his beautiful Impressionist paintings of dancers, toyed briefly with poetry. As a brilliant and creative mind, the potential for great poems was all there—he could see beauty, he could find inspiration. Yet there are no great Degas poems. There is one famous conversation that might explain why. One day, Degas complained to his friend, the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, about his trouble writing. “I can’t manage to say what I want, and yet I’m full of ideas.” Mallarmé’s response cuts to the bone. “It’s not with ideas, my dear Degas, that one makes verse. It’s with words.” 

So yes, deliberation and patience are key. You don’t want to rush into things. That’s what festina lente is about. But at some point the rubber has to meet the road. 

“I should start a company.” “I have a great idea for a movie.” “I would love to write that book one day.” “If I tried hard enough, I could be ______.” How many of those people actually go through with building the company, releasing the movie, publishing the book, or becoming whatever it is they claim they could become? Sadly, almost none.

“Lots of people,” as Austin Kleon puts it, “want to be the noun without doing the verb.” It doesn’t matter where we are; to get to wherever we want to go, to implement all 11 of these expressions to live by, it is works, not words, that are required. “You must build up your life action by action,” Marcus Aurelius said. You must get started. 

Fac, si facis.

Quidvis recte factum quamvis humile praeclarum (Whatever Is Rightly Done, However Humble, Is Noble)

The youngest of five children, Sir Henry Royce’s father died when he was just 9 years old. He went to work to alleviate his family’s financial burdens, so if his dreams of being an engineer were to be realized, it’d be without any formal education. Royce took jobs selling newspapers, delivering telegrams, making tools, and fixing street lights. At the age of twenty-one he started his own company making electric fittings. At twenty-six his interests shifted to the emerging automobile industry, and soon thereafter, he created Rolls-Royce Motor Cars.

It might seem like there is an enormous difference between those professions but in fact, they are related. It was his experiences doing that manual labor, doing those seemingly insignificant tasks that cultivated Royce’s commitment to and understanding of excellence. In fact, he later had a version of it inscribed on the mantle over his fireplace: Quidvis recte factum quamvis humble praeclarum. 

Whatever you do well, however lowly, is noble. 

There is no such thing as a job or a task that is beneath us. How we do anything is how we do everything. And if we can truly internalize and believe that, it will help us do the important things better. That’s why we love luxury items and pay so much for them, isn’t it? Because of their insane attention to detail, because how they refused to settle, how they did everything right? 

Quidvis recte factum quamvis humile praeclarum.

Semper Fidelis (Always Faithful)

Otto Frank was late coming home from the First World War. No, it wasn’t because he was injured. Nor was he detained by a girl he’d fallen in love with or waylaid by traveling he decided to do. He was delayed for weeks because during the war his unit had commandeered some horses from a small farm in Pomerania and, after the hostilities had ended, he felt duty bound to return them. 

When the war ended, nearly every soldier wanted nothing more than to rush home and see their families. Otto Frank did too. But he had borrowed something that wasn’t his and he was determined to honor his obligation, even if that meant delaying the homecoming he craved so much. The farmer, for his part, was shocked to see the horses again. Otto Frank’s mother, who assumed the worst of his absence, was so angry when she heard why he was late that she hurled a coffee pot across the room. She couldn’t understand the selflessness of his actions because in her case, since it had deprived her of her son a little longer, almost felt like selfishness.

“Cold or warm. Tired or well-rested. Despised or honored,” Marcus Aurelius wrote. “Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter.” It isn’t easy. It can mean adding on top of already considerable burdens. Other people won’t always understand or take notice. They may be exasperated with you. They might be driven into a rage which you can neither control nor assuage. But none of that matters, and that’s why Semper Fi is the motto of the US Marine Corps. “It is not negotiable,” one Marine puts it. “It is not relative, but absolute…Marines pride themselves on their mission and steadfast dedication to accomplish it.” Not just to the mission, but to each other, and to their country. 

You do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. It is the ultimate tautology, but that’s the point. Doing the right thing is all that matters. It is its own reward. 

Semper Fidelis.

Per Angusta Ad Augusta (Through Difficulties To Honors)

Look, nobody wants to go through hard times. We’d prefer that things go according to plan, that what could go wrong doesn’t, so that we might enjoy our lives without being challenged or tested beyond our limits. 

Unfortunately, that’s unlikely to happen. Which leaves us with the question of what good there is in such difficulty and how we might—either in the moment or after the fact—come to understand what it is that we’re going through…today, tomorrow, and always. 

This passage from Sonia Purnell’s wonderful biography of Clementine Churchill, wife of Winston Churchill, is worth thinking about:

“Clementine was not cut out from birth for the part history handed her. Adversity, combined with sheer willpower, burnished a timorous, self-doubting bundle of nerves and emotion into a wartime consort of unparalleled composure, wisdom, and courage. The flames of many hardships in early life forged the inner core of steel she needed for her biggest test of all. By the Second World War the young child terrified of her father…had transmogrified into a woman cowed by no one.” 

The Stoics believed that adversity was inevitable. They knew that Fortune was capricious and that it often subjected us to things we were not remotely prepared to handle. And this is not necessarily a bad thing. Because it teaches us. It strengthens us. It gives us a chance to prove ourselves. “Disaster,” Seneca wrote, “is Virtue’s opportunity.” The obstacle is the way, was Marcus Aurelius’s expression. 

And so the same can be true for you and whatever it is that you’re going through right now. 

Per Angusta Ad Augusta.

Amor fati (Love Of Fate)

The writer Jorge Luis Borges said:

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

Everything is material. We have to learn to find joy in every single thing that happens. We have to understand that certain things—particularly bad things—are outside our control. But we can use it all—if we learn to love whatever happens to us and face it with unfailing cheerfulness. And again, not just artists. Issues we had with our parents become lessons that we teach our children. An injury that lays us up in bed becomes a reason to reflect on where our life is going. A problem at work inspires us to invent a new product and strike out on our own. These obstacles become opportunities. 

The line from Marcus Aurelius about this was that a blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it. That’s how we want to be. We want to be the artist that turns pain and frustration and even humiliation into beauty. We want to be the entrepreneur that turns a sticking point into a money maker. We want to be the person who takes their own experiences and turns them into wisdom that can be learned from and passed on to others. 

Nietzsche said, “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it…but love it.” Use it all. Find purpose in all of it. Find opportunity in everything. Love it. 

You love everything that happens. Because you make use of it. 

Amor Fati

Fatum Ingenium Est (Character Is Fate)

When he was in college and struggling to live up to the expectations of his illustrious family, Walker Percy wrote a letter to his uncle and adopted father, Will Percy. He probably expected to receive a lecture about his grades in reply. Or be admonished for letting the family down. Or perhaps to be sent money for a tutor. 

But the reply surprised him. Because there wasn’t any of that. Instead, Will waved those concerns off. “My whole theory about life,” Will told his beloved nephew and son, “is that glory and accomplishment are of far less importance than the creation of character and the individual good life.” 

It was Heraclitus who said that character is fate. Or character is destiny, depending on the translation. What he meant was: Character decides everything. It determines who we are/what we do. Develop good character and all will be well. Fail to, and nothing will.

It can be easy to lose sight of this. Because we know how competitive the world is. Because things aren’t exactly going our way. Because we want to reach our full potential. But ultimately, we only need to care about our character. The rest is fated from it.  “Life is short,” Marcus Aurelius said, and “the fruit of this life is a good character.”

It’s true in reverse too: A good life is the fruit of good character. 

Fatum Ingenium Est.

Semper Anticus (Always Forward)

The wisdom of the ancient world comes down pretty hard and pretty universally against looking back. No one, Jesus said, who looks backwards as they plot is fit for the kingdom of God. Even before Jesus, Cato the Elder—the great-grandfather of the Stoic Cato the Younger—wrote in his only work, On Agriculture, “The forehead is better than the hindhead.” Meaning: Don’t look back. Look forward. 

It’s easy to want to look back at the past. To reflect on what’s happened. To blame. To indulge in nostalgia. To wistfully think of what might have been. To inspect and admire what you’ve done. But this is pointless. Because the past is dead. It’s lost. We had our shot with it. Now, all that remains before us is the present—and if we are lucky, the future. 

The name of Lance Armstrong’s podcast is called what? The Forward. Because he can’t go back and change what happened, just like in a race, you can’t go backwards and you can’t stop either. All you can do is keep going. All you can do is keep trying to get better. 

We must seize this opportunity while we still can. We must give it everything we have. No matter what has happened before—whose fault it was, how much pain it caused us, what regrets we have, or even how triumphant it was—all we can do is move forward. All we can do is act now, with the virtues we hold dear: courage, temperance, wisdom, justice.

Semper Anticus. 

Vivere Militare Est (To Live Is To Fight)

Odysseus leaves Troy after ten long years of war destined for Ithaca, for home. If only he knew what was ahead of him: ten more years of travel. That he’d come so close to the shores of his homeland, his queen and young son, only to be blown back again. That he’d face storms, temptation, a Cyclops, deadly whirlpools, and a six-headed monster. Or that he’d be held captive for seven years and suffer the wrath of Poseidon. And, of course, that back in Ithaca his rivals were circling, trying to take his kingdom and his wife. 

He fought his way home. Marcus Aurelius once described life as warfare and a journey far from home. That was Odysseus’s experience certainly. To the Stoics, one had to go through life as a boxer or a wrestler, dug in and ready for sudden assaults. 

That’s life. It kicks us around. The stuff we expected to be simple turns out to be tough. The people we thought were friends let us down. A couple storms or unexpected weather patterns just add a whole bunch of difficulty on top of whatever we’ve been doing. Seneca wrote that only the fighter who has been bloodied and bruised—in training and in previous matches—can go into the ring confident of his chances of winning. The one who has never been touched before, never had a hard fight? That’s a fighter who is scared. And if they aren’t, they should be. Because they have no actual idea how they’re going to hold up.

We have to have a true and accurate sense of the rhythms of the fight and what winning is going to require us to do. We have to be ready for the fighting life. We have to be able to get knocked around without letting it knock us out. We have to be in touch with ourselves and the fight we’re in.

Vivere Militare Est.

Memento Mori (Remember Death)

A person who wraps up each day as if it were the end of their life, who meditates on their mortality in the evening, Seneca believed, has a super power when they wake up. 

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

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

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

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

”You could leave life right now,” Marcus Aurelius wrote, “let that determine what you do and say and think.”

Is there better advice than this? If so, it has yet to be written. Keep it close.

Memento Mori .

— 

The power of an epigram or one of these expressions is that they say a lot with a little. They help guide us through the complexity of life with their unswerving directness. Each person must, as the retired USMC general and former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, has said, “Know what you will stand for and, more important, what you won’t stand for.” “State your flat-ass rules and stick to them. They shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.”

Least of all to you. 

So borrow these eleven, or dig into history or religion or philosophy to find some more. 

And then turn those words…into works.

Your Work Is the Only Thing That Matters

There is a story about an exchange between Jerry Seinfeld and a young comedian. The comedian approaches Seinfeld in a club one night and asks him for advice about marketing and getting exposure.

Exposure? Marketing? Seinfeld asks. Just work on your act.

Seinfeld, a pure stand-up, a comedian’s comedian, is appalled by the question. It’s offensive to his legendary heads-down work ethic. But to the kid, this was a surprise. Isn’t that the kind of question you’re supposed to ask? Isn’t that how you get ahead?

He’s not alone. Certainly, I myself wasted many chances to learn about how to improve my craft by instead asking people I admire for superficial hacks and career opportunities. I see the same mistake repeated in subreddits and forums and blogs and Facebook groups that (aspiring) creative professionals — writers, designers, startup founders — use as networking vehicles and support systems. If Seinfeld ever saw them, he’d cringe at every word.

Because these often closed groups are self-selected communities of ambitious, motivated go-getters, there is a tendency to skip the slow and immeasurable creative process and go right to the tactics for getting attention or catching a break. They want tricks and tips for getting ahead, hacks for advancing their careers. Even amongst the more advanced or already successful, the questions posed to the group are mostly technical: How do you guys like to negotiate contracts? How can I sell more copies or increase my fees? Who is the best agent?

Not that these things aren’t important. Certainly I’d like to know the answers myself but judging by the amount of time people spend asking them, or talking about their complicated Evernote systems or their preferred deal terms, or the readiness with which they are willing to share their elaborate rituals and routines, the less cynical person would assume that everyone must have already mastered their craft and the only thing left for them to worry about is mopping up a few minor details at the margins.

If only…

Because if that were even remotely true, we wouldn’t be drowning in so much mediocrity — if not outright garbage. The reason it’s not true is that nobody in these forums, really no one pursuing an artistic career, wants to hear what sits at the core of Seinfeld’s advice: Your work isn’t good enough. Keep your head down. You still have a long way to go.

To me, one of the root causes of this situation is the economic transformation that creative industries have gone through over the last twenty years. There used to be publishers, art dealers, investors, managers, and record labels that handled the majority of the business side of the equation. But increasingly, the relevance of those partners has fallen away, and the number of hats a creator wears has increased. The artist can’t just be an artist — they also have to know how to upload YouTube videos, use GIFs, promote gigs, and figure out how to get followers on various platforms. The artist has far more visibility into their earnings and their distribution, than ever before. With that comes more leverage, all of which is a good thing.

But the unintended consequence of, what one might call, total brand and business control, is that it diverts attention away from the most essential part of any creative profession. You know, making great stuff.

It’s hard to do that under ideal circumstances; harder still when you’re tweeting or visualizing your next Instagram story or flying to some industry conference. And podcasts…every one of them takes an hour. If you’re lucky. And more are created every single day and again, if you’re lucky, people will want to have you on theirs.

Earlier this month, NovelRank.com, a site which let authors track their sales rank on Amazon across all regions, was shut down by Amazon. The “official” reason had something to do with the terms of service of their affiliate program. I’d never cheer someone losing their business, but secretly, I’m quite grateful to whoever made that call at Amazon. I have spent way too much of my time refreshing that site, checking how my books were selling in Germany or trying to figure out why the rank of one of my older books suddenly shot up.

A line from Phil Libin, the founder of Evernote, is “people who are thinking about things other than making the best product, never make the best product.” I’m willing to overlook the fact that Evernote is too often a shiny distraction for creatives — a black hole into which time is thrown under the auspices of “research” and “organization” — because he’s totally right.

It echoes an even more poignant sentiment from Cyril Connolly which I quoted in Perennial Seller: “The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.”

An artist’s job is to create masterpieces. Period.

Everything else is secondary.

About a year ago, my mind began to construct this recurring moving image that would play on a loop whenever I was working on a book or a particularly difficult article. I’d close my eyes, think about the project, and there it would be. The image is of an unidentifiable baseball player at the plate. It’s zoomed in like one of those SportsCenter closeups, and the batter is already mid-swing and connecting with the ball. It’s one of those beautiful, old-timey swings like Mickey Mantle or Ted Williams used to do. The front leg extended, the back leg all the way back, the bat coming up and hitting the ball perfectly.

That’s it. That’s the whole image.

I don’t see where the ball goes, whether it was a base hit or a grand slam. I suspect earlier in my career, I would have cared about the outcome. I would have cared about who the player was and what team he played for. I would have needed to know whether the ball went foul or found a fielder’s mitt or cleared the upper deck. But as I have gotten better as a writer, paradoxically, it doesn’t even occur to me that such a thing would matter.

The image is just the connecting. The bat and the ball. The thing that is supposed to be all but physically impossible — hitting a rock coming at 90 miles per hour, that traveled from an elevated mound down to the batter in less than 400 milliseconds. Over and over again. The connecting.

Very few of us can do that impossible thing. Can connect like that. Can cut it in the big leagues, where the ball looks like a marble as it comes over the plate and pitchers put it in a spot the size of a croquet ball… at 90+ mph. Very few can time their swing just right to meet the ball and hear that satisfying crack as the ball heads back the other direction. And to do it more than once? To do it game in and game out, day in and day out? It’s a miracle. It requires complete and total dedication.

If you cease practicing for a second, if you let your mind get wound too tight or simply allowed to drift elsewhere, you will lose that ability. Your bat will stop connecting with the ball, your batting average will drop and soon enough you yourself will be dropped, first from the majors and then the sport altogether.

That’s what I think the image is supposed to be a reminder to me of. Writing of course is all about a kind of consistent connection: with the audience, with yourself, with something that goes to the essence of the human experience. Really, that’s all art and commerce are, too. Not to put too fine a point on it, but they are about swinging at the right pitches too.

When a business is perfectly lined up with the needs of the market. When a song taps into some wave of emotion you didn’t know was there. When a painting or a poem shoves you in your solar plexus. When an article touches on some truth about the world that needed to be said.

That’s the job.

Selecting and Connecting.

We need to forget about tertiary concerns and stop fiddling with shit that doesn’t matter.

We need to keep our eye on the ball.

We need to work on our act.

Nothing else is of any consequence.

***

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How To Digest Books Above Your “Level” And Increase Your Intelligence

The best advice I’ve ever got about reading came from a secretive movie producer and talent manager who’d sold more than 100 million albums and done more than $1B in box office returns. He said to me one day, “Ryan, it’s not enough that you read a lot. To do great things, you have to read to lead.”

What he meant was that in an age where almost nobody reads, you can be forgiven for thinking that the simple act of picking up a book is revolutionary. It may be, but it’s not enough. Reading to lead means pushing yourself—reading books “above your level.”

In short, you know the books where the words blur together and you can’t understand what’s happening? Those are the books a leader needs to read. Reading to lead or learn requires that you treat your brain like the muscle that it is—lifting the subjects with the most tension and weight.

For me, that means pushing ahead into subjects you’re not familiar with and wrestling with them until you can—shying away from the “easy read.” It means reading Feynman over Friedman, biographies over business books, and the classics over the contemporary.

It worked wonders for me: at 19, I was a Hollywood executive. At 21, I was the director of marketing for a publicly traded company. And at 24, I’d worked on 5 bestselling books and sold my own to the biggest publisher in the world. I may have been a college dropout, but I have had the best teachers in the world: tough books.

My apartment is filled with such books that on paper, I never should have been able to understand. It wasn’t easy to crack them, but with the secrets below, I was able to. And the process starts before you even crack the spine of a new book.

Before the first page…

Break out of the School Mindset

The way you learn to read in the classroom is corrupted by the necessity of testing. Tests often have very little to do with proving that you know or care about the material but more about proving that you spent the time reading it. The easiest way to do this is picking obscure things from the text and quizzing you on them: “Name this passage,” or “What were the main characters in Chapter 4?” We carry these habits with us. Remember: now you’re reading for you.

Let’s say you’re reading the History of the Peloponnesian War. That there was once a conflict between Corinth and Corcyra is not really worth remembering, even though the proxy fight kicked off the war between Athens and Sparta.

(To write this, I had to look the names up myself, I only recalled that they started with a C)

What you should latch onto is that as the two fought for allied support from Athens, one took the haughty—“you owe us a favor”—route, and the other alluded to all the benefits that would come from aiding them. Guess who won? Place. Names. Dates. These are unimportant. The lessons matter.

From Seneca:

We haven’t time to spare to hear whether it was between Italy and Sicily that he ran into a storm or somewhere outside the world we know—when every day we’re running into our own storms, spiritual storms, and driven by vice into all the troubles that Ulysses ever knew.

Forget everything but the message and how to apply it to your life.

Ruin the Ending

When I start a book, I almost always go straight to Wikipedia (or Amazon or a friend) and ruin the ending. Who cares? Your aim as a reader is to understand WHY something happened, the what is secondary.

You ought to ruin the ending—or find out the basic assertions of the book—because it frees you up to focus on your two most important tasks:

What does it mean?
Do you agree with it?

The first 50 pages of the book shouldn’t be a discovery process for you. You shouldn’t be wasting your time figuring out what the author is trying to say with the book.

Instead, your energy needs to be spent on figuring out if he’s right and how you can benefit from it. Plus, if you already know what happens, you can identify all the foreshadowing and the clues the first read through.

Read the Reviews

Find out what the people who have already read it felt was important. From Amazon to the New York Times, read the reviews so you can deduce the cultural significance of the work—and from what it meant to others. Also, by being warned of the major themes, you can anticipate them coming and then actually appreciate them as they unfold.

Tip: if you agree with someone’s assessment of the work, go ahead and steal it once you’ve finished. You can’t copyright an opinion—this isn’t school, this is life.

The book itself…

Read the Intro/Prologue/Notes/Forward

I know, I know. It infuriates me too when what looks like a 200-page book turns out to have 80 pages of translator’s introduction, but that stuff is important.

Every time I’ve skipped through it, I’ve had to go back and start over. Read the intro, read all the stuff that comes before the book—even read the editors notes at the bottom of the pages. This sets the stage and helps boost your knowledge going into the book.

Remember: you need every advantage you can get to read a book above your level. Don’t skip stuff intended to add context and color.

Look It Up

If you’re reading to lead, you’re going to come across concepts or words you’re not familiar with. Don’t pretend you understand. Look it up. I like to use Definr or I use my phone to look stuff up on Wikipedia. With Military History, for instance, a sense of the battlefield is often necessary. Wikipedia is a great place to grab maps and to help understand the terrain.

I was once trying to read some books on the Civil War and got stuck. 10 hours of Ken Burn’s documentaries later, the books were easy to breeze through (see, looking stuff up can be as easy as watching TV). That being said, don’t get bogged down with the names of the cities or the spelling of names, you’re looking to grasp the meta-lesson: the conclusions.

Mark Passages

I love Post-It Flags. I mark every passage that interests me, that makes me think, or that is important to the book. When I don’t have them, I just fold the bottom corner of the page. (I actually folded the corner of every page of Heraclitus’ Fragments). If there is something I need to look up, I fold the top corner of the page and return to it later.

I carry a pen with me and write down whatever thoughts, feelings, or connections I may have with a passage.

It’s much better to do it in the moment than to risk losing the contemporaneous inspiration. Don’t be afraid to tear the book up with tags and notations—books are a cheap. Plus, you’ll get more for your money this way.

After you finish…

Go Back Through

I have the same schedule with every book I read. After a mandatory 1–2 week waiting period after finishing, I go back through the book with a stack of 4×6 index cards. On these cards, I write out—by hand—all the passages I have noted as being important.

It might seem strange, but it’s an old tactic used by everyone from Tobias Wolff to Montaigne to Raymond Chandler, who once said, “When you have to use your energy to put those words down, you are more apt to make them count.” Each one of these cards is then assigned a theme and filed in my index card box.

The result of 4–5 years of doing this? Thousands of cards in dozens of themes—from Love to Education to Jokes to Musings on Death. I return to these pieces of wisdom when I am writing, when I need help or when I am trying to solve a business problem. It has been an immense resource.

Read One Book from Every Bibliography

This is a little rule I try to stick with. In every book I read, I try to find my next one in its footnotes or bibliography. This is how you build a knowledge base in a subject—it’s how you trace a subject back to its core.

Keep a running list through Amazon’s Wish List service (here is mine). Last month, I read a book on Evolutionary Psychology and discovered that I’d read almost 80% of its sources because I’d been pulled down the rabbit hole of a predecessor.

Apply and Use

You highlight the passages for a reason. Why type the quotes if you aren’t going to memorize and use them?

Drop them in conversation. Allude to them in papers, in emails, in letters, and in your daily life.

How else do you expect to absorb them?

The more fulfilling an outlet you find for the fruit of your database, the more motivated you will be to fill it. Try adding a line to a report you’re doing. Find solace in them during difficult times. Add them to Wikipedia pages. Do something.

I give you Seneca again:

My advice is really this: what we hear the philosophers saying and what we find in their writings should be applied in our pursuit of the happy life. 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.

Remember: we read to lead for moral and practical lessons. The point is to take what we’ve read and turn the words, as Seneca says, into works.

Conclusion: It’s on You…

Of course, none of this is easy. People always ask me if the books I carry around are for school because they’re full of notes, flags, and folded pages—why would anyone work so hard on something they were doing on their own? Because I enjoy it, and because it’s the only thing that separates me from ignorance.

These are the techniques that have allowed me to leap years ahead of my peers. It’s how you strike out on your own and build strength instead of letting some personal trainer dictate what you can and can’t be lifting.

It’s also expensive, I’ve purchased thousands of books and invested hours upon hours of time learning them. But how expensive is going back for an MBA? Or attending TED? I think there is more wisdom in the timeless books of the last 5,000 years than a conference or two—if you do it right and push yourself.

So try it: Do your research, read diligently without getting bogged down in details, and then work to connect, apply, and use. It’s your job as a leader. And I think you’ll find that you’re able to read above your supposed “level” and that people will follow your example. If you put in the work, books, as the great writer and voracious reader Petrarch once said, will pay you back:

“Books give delight to the very marrow of one’s bones. They speak to us, consult with us and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.”

Enjoy the journey.

***
Read To Lead

If you’re looking to use reading to advance your life and career, check out a course I helped create called Lead To Read: A Daily Stoic Reading Challenge.

It’s a 13-day challenge that shows you exactly how to find great books to mine for wisdom and to use to build the beginnings of a great library with. You’ll learn to dissect a book like a pro, to remember more of what you read, to apply it to your life, and much more. Learn more here.