Ryan Holiday's Blog, page 21

Why Everybody Needs An Inner Citadel

This is a piece from The Obstacle is the Way, which is $1.99 on Amazon right now as part of Kindle’s Daily Deal.

By age twelve, Theodore Roosevelt had spent almost every day of his short life struggling with horrible asthma. Despite his privileged birth, his life hung in a precarious balance—the attacks were an almost nightly near-death experience. Tall, gangly, and frail, the slightest exertion would upset the entire balance and leave him bedridden for weeks.

One day his father came into his room and delivered a message that would change the young boy’s life: “Theodore, you have the mind but haven’t got the body. I’m giving you the tools to make your body. It’s going to be hard drudgery and I think you have the determination to go through with it.”

You’d think that would be lost on a child, especially a fragile one born into great wealth and status. But according to Roosevelt’s younger sister, who witnessed the conversation, it wasn’t. His response, using what would become his trademark cheerful grit, was to look at his father and say with determination: “I’ll make my body.”

At the gym that his father built on the second-floor porch, young Roosevelt proceeded to work out feverishly every day for the next five years, slowly building muscle and strengthening his upper body against his weak lungs and for the future. By his early twenties the battle against asthma was essentially over, he’d worked—almost literally—that weakness out of his body.

That gym work prepared a physically weak but smart young boy for the uniquely challenging course on which the nation and the world were about to embark. It was the beginning of his preparation for and fulfillment of what he would call “the Strenuous Life.”

And for Roosevelt, life threw a lot at him: He lost a wife and his mother in rapid succession, he faced powerful, entrenched political enemies who despised his progressive agenda, was dealt defeat in elections, the nation was embroiled in foreign wars, and he survived nearly fatal assassination attempts. But he was equipped for it all because of his early training and because he kept at it every single day.

In short, the obstacle was the way. Those obstacles made him who he was, and prepared him for everything that lay ahead.

What about you? Could you actually handle yourself if things suddenly got worse?

We take weakness for granted. We assume that the way we’re born is the way we simply are, that our disadvantages are permanent. And then we atrophy from there.

That’s not necessarily the best recipe for the difficulties of life.

Not everyone accepts their bad start in life. They remake their bodies and their lives with activities and exercise. They prepare themselves for the hard road. Do they hope they never have to walk it? Sure. But they are prepared for it in any case.

Are you?

Nobody is born with a steel backbone. We have to forge that ourselves.

We craft our spiritual strength through physical exercise, and our physical hardiness through mental practice (mens sana in corpore sano—sound mind in a strong body).

This approach goes back to the ancient philosophers. Every bit of the philosophy they developed was intended to reshape, prepare, and fortify them for the challenges to come. Many saw themselves as mental athletes—after all, the brain is a muscle like any other active tissue. It can be built up and toned through the right exercises. Over time, their muscle memory grew to the point that they could intuitively respond to every situation. Especially obstacles.

It is said of the Jews, deprived of a stable homeland for so long, their temples destroyed, and their communities in the Diaspora, that they were forced to rebuild not physically but within their minds. The temple became a metaphysical one, located independently in the mind of every believer. Each one—wherever they’d been dispersed around the world, whatever persecution or hardship they faced—could draw upon it for strength and security.

Consider the line from the Haggadah: “In every generation a person is obligated to view himself as if he were the one who went out of Egypt.”

During Passover Seder, the menu is bitter herbs and unleavened bread—the “bread of affliction.” Why? In some ways, this taps into the fortitude that sustained the community for generations. The ritual not only celebrates and honors Jewish traditions, but it prompts those partaking in the feast to visualize and possess the strength that has kept them going.

This is strikingly similar to what the Stoics called the Inner Citadel, that fortress inside of us that no external adversity can ever break down. An important caveat is that we are not born with such a structure; it must be built and actively reinforced. During the good times, we strengthen ourselves and our bodies so that during the difficult times, we can depend on it. We protect our inner fortress so it may protect us.

To Roosevelt, life was like an arena and he was a gladiator. In order to survive, he needed to be strong, resilient, fearless, ready for anything. And he was willing to risk great personal harm and expend massive amounts of energy to develop that hardiness.

You’ll have far better luck toughening yourself up than you ever will trying to take the teeth out of a world that is—at best—indifferent to your existence. Whether we were born weak like Roosevelt or we are currently experiencing good times, we should always prepare for things to get tough. In our own way, in our own fight, we are all in the same position Roosevelt was in.

No one is born a gladiator. No one is born with an Inner Citadel. If we’re going to succeed in achieving our goals despite the obstacles that may come, this strength in will must be built.

To be great at something takes practice. Obstacles and adversity are no different. Though it would be easier to sit back and enjoy a cushy modern life, the upside of preparation is that we’re not disposed to lose all of it—least of all our heads—when someone or something suddenly messes with our plans.

It’s almost a cliché at this point, but the observation that the way to strengthen an arch is to put weight on it—because it binds the stones together, and only with tension does it hold weight—is a great metaphor.

The path of least resistance is a terrible teacher. We can’t afford to shy away from the things that intimidate us. We don’t need to take our weaknesses for granted.

Are you okay being alone? Are you strong enough to go a few more rounds if it comes to that? Are you comfortable with challenges? Does uncertainty bother you? How does pressure feel?

Because these things will happen to you. No one knows when or how, but their appearance is certain. And life will demand an answer. You chose this for yourself, a life of doing things. Now you better be prepared for what it entails.

It’s your armor plating. It doesn’t make you invincible, but it helps prepare you for when fortune shifts…and it always does.

***

The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday is $1.99 on Amazon right now for a very limited time. If you want to check it out, or give it as a gift, it’ll never be cheaper than that.

You can also check out our brand new The Obstacle Is The Way pendant, as well as The Obstacle is the Way medallion which is inspired by the same insights from Marcus Aurelius and is awesome for carrying with you everywhere you go.

 

“The First Draft of Anything Is Shit”

Writing gets all the attention and all the glamor.

Young aspiring writers love the story of Jack Kerouac, who supposedly wrote On the Road in a three-week drug-fueled blitz. What they know less about is the six years he spent editing and refining it until it was finally ready.

There’s a similar blind spot in all the creative fields. We listen to artists like Adele, who is famous for titling her albums after the age she was when they were made, and then we hear 25, but are too distracted by the fact that it sold 3.38 million copies in its first week to realize that it actually came out when she was 27. We gloss right over the discrepancy. As creatives, we don’t want to ask why it took two years longer than expected, because the answer might be as difficult to hear as the creative process can be to complete.

In Adele’s case? It was because her producer, Rick Rubin, had all but rejected her first submission of the album. “I don’t believe you,” he said after listening to it. There wasn’t enough heart in it. That undefinable, unquantifiable thing that made her first two albums, 19 and 21, so transcendently great simply wasn’t there. It took Adele two years longer to get the album to a place where Rubin believed her. And where she did too.

As a culture, we love flashes of inspiration and we love finished products. We have little interest and little understanding, however, of what goes on in between—of the essentialness of editing and improving and tweaking until whatever we are creating is just right.

But all the greats loved that space. That’s where they lived. That’s where they were most alive.

And that’s where you have to get comfortable as well, to create something of meaning and lasting value.

Why?

The famous Hemingway line on writing:

“The first draft of anything is shit.”

Although creators often dream of a world where no one can tell them what to do and where they get to release everything they make, this fantasy would actually be a nightmare. Because our first effort is rarely good enough. We are too close to our work to see it objectively. And whether we like it or not, the obstacles we jump through as part of the publishing and production processes are what make the work better.

Every creative medium has its own version of the editing process.

Authors submit their manuscript to an editor. There is no The Sun Also Rises or The Great Gatsby without Max Perkins.

Screenwriters attach producers with whom they develop a project. There is no Donnie Darko or Get Out without Sean McKittrick.

Musicians have an engineer, and a producer finishes an album with them (it’s also later mastered). There is no Nevermind or Siamese Dream without the legendary Butch Vig.

Even athletes watch hours of film of their own performance—under the unrelenting analysis of their coaches—before game day. There are not two Michael Jordan three-peats with the Chicago Bulls or the Kobe-Shaq three-peat with the Lakers without Phil Jackson.

All of this is there to take a crappy first draft—a middling first effort—and hone it into something usable. Something brilliant.

Another example: In 1956, a young writer named Harper Lee was given a year’s salary by her wealthy friends Michael and Joy Brown to spend the next twelve months writing the novel she had long put off. The Brown’s have long been considered the heroes behind To Kill A Mockingbird. But really, we know now, that the true hero was Tay Hohoff, the editor at J. B. Lippincott Company to whom Lee sent her manuscript in 1957.

Because as nice and receptive as Hohoff was to the book, she made it clear that, in her opinion, this book would require significant reworking before being published. In Tay’s words, the book was “more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel.” Presumably, Lee’s intention had been to create a full novel, and we can assume she thought she had done so when she delivered the manuscript to her editor. Yet here she was, being told by someone she trusted that she may have failed.

So much in the history of art and culture hinges on moments like this. Faced with soul-crushing feedback or rejection, how does the creator respond? With petulance and anger? With open-mindedness and interest? With obsequiousness and desperation? Or careful consideration that parses the signal from the noise?

It is the creator’s choice at this critical juncture that determines so much—whether the project dies right there, whether it is changed beyond recognition by committee, or whether it is transformed from a decent first attempt into a masterpiece.

Fortunately for all of us, Harper Lee was wise enough to listen. Over the course of several rewrites that took more than two years—effectively producing an entirely new cast of characters and a new plot, while retaining her unique and essential perspective—Lee created To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the great works of American literature.

To the public, Mockingbird had been perfect all along. It’s so pure. So innocent. So heartfelt. That has to be natural right? It wasn’t until 2015, when that first draft was published as Go Set a Watchman, that we realized the truth: Without an editor, without a lot of hard work and a lot of editing, history may have never heard of Harper Lee. She wouldn’t have deserved for us to.

This is true for all the geniuses and masterpieces. Even the ones that came down as stream of consciousness. As a Kerouac scholar remarked on the 50th anniversary of On The Road:

“Kerouac cultivated this myth that he was this spontaneous prose man, and that everything that he ever put down was never changed, and that’s not true. He was really a supreme craftsman, and devoted to writing and the writing process.”

What are the chances that your prototype is perfect the first time? WD-40 is named after the forty attempts it took its creators to nail the working formula. The Great Gatsby was rejected several times. The script for Back To The Future was rejected over 40 times. The script for the Best Picture winner, American Beauty, was revised twice in consultation with the director, Sam Mendes, before it went out to actors, and then when Mendes got into the editing process of the film itself he ended up cutting together something nearly 180 degrees removed from what he thought he was making during principal photography. Precisely zero of my ten books were immediately accepted by my publisher—and they were right to kick them back at me. In being forced to go back to the manuscript, I got the books to where they needed to be. I know that now, but at the time it was infuriating to be told, “It’s not quite there yet.”*

As infuriating as it may be, we must be rational and fair about our own work. This is difficult considering our conflict of interest— which is to say, the ultimate conflict of interest: We made it. The way to balance that conflict is to bring in people who are objective. Ask yourself: What are the chances that I’m right and everyone else in the world is wrong? We’ll be better off at least considering why other people have concerns, because the reality is, the truth is almost always somewhere in the middle.

Every project needs to go through this process. Whether it’s with an editor or a producer or a partner or a group of beta users or just through your own relentless perfectionism—whatever form it takes is up to you. But getting outside voices is crucial. The fact is, most people are so terrified of what an outside voice might say that they forgo opportunities to improve what they are making. Remember: Getting feedback requires humility. It demands that you subordinate your thoughts about your project and your love for it and entertain the idea that someone else might have a valuable thing or two to add.

Nobody creates flawless first drafts. And nobody creates better second drafts without the intervention of someone else.

Nobody.

Not even you.

This  was originally published on Writing Routines.

•••

If you’re looking for a way to keep this maxim in mind, Writing Routines recently released a print version of Hemingway’s quote:

“The First Draft of Anything Is Shit”

Learn more here.

The (Very) Best Books I Read in 2018

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.

I know that people are busy, and we don’t always have time to read as much as we 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.

This list is now 125,000+ 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. But…before I get into my favorites this year, I wanted to tell you about something I’m really excited about for 2019. We are kicking the year off with a 14 Day—New Year, New You—Challenge for Daily Stoic. The one we did in October was awesome, and I had an amazing time doing it alongside thousands of you. This one is going to be even better and actually has some reading related challenges that I think you’ll love. Give it a look.

Also if you want signed or personalized copies of my books as Xmas gifts this year, BookPeople.com is offering those, and we also have some cool gift ideas in the Daily Stoic Store!

***

A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts To Nourish the Soul by Leo Tolstoy 

I read one page of this book every single day in 2018. It’s basically a collection of Tolstoy’s favorite passages from the ancient and classic texts, with excellent supplements from his own considerable wisdom. Each day draws on Chinese, Jewish, Stoic, Christian, Indian and Arabic sources (he quotes everyone from Emerson to Marcus Aurelius to Lao-Tzu) and manages to give good, actionable advice from all of these differing schools. It’s no wonder the Communists banned and suppressed this book, because it challenges everything they were trying to deny about human nature and the human experience. But luckily it did survive and has finally been translated into English. This book should be much, much, more popular and I promise your mornings will be improved if you start them with it.

The Captain Class: A New Theory of Leadership by Sam Walker

This was definitely the best business/leadership book I read this year. It was recommended to me by the lacrosse player Paul Rabil when I did his podcast. What a book! It proves that we have really missed what makes great teams and organizations work. It’s not star players, it’s not even how much they can spend–it’s whether they have great captains. Athletes like Bill Cartwright on the Chicago Bulls, Carla Overbeck on the US Women’s Soccer team, Yogi Berra of the New York Yankees and Jack Lambert of the Pittsburgh Steelers were not by any means the most famous or the most talented players, but they were the glue that held the team together. Walker’s chapter on “carrying the water” had some great insights re: Ego is the Enemy and I think this incredibly well-written book should be studied by anyone trying to build a great organization (or trying to find a role for themselves inside one). Related, and lesser known recommendation: Everyone should read Sadaharu Oh’s autobiography, A Zen Way of Baseball. He’s the greatest home run hitter of all time, a Zen master, and basically nobody outside of Japan knows who he is. Brilliant and beautiful book. 

Victoria: The Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire by Julia Baird and Clementine: The Life of Mrs. Winston Churchill by Sonia Purnell 

I read so many biographies this year and these two biographies of two extraordinary British women were two of my absolute favorites. I knew nothing about Queen Victoria but Julia Baird does an amazing job of making her accessible and interesting–and captures just what life was like for a woman in the 19th century, even if she was a queen! I knew a lot more about Churchill but Sonia Purnell’s examination of Winston’s better half was truly revelatory. (Churchill said the best decision he ever made in his life was marrying Clementine and this book make it clear just how many times she saved his ass). Both of these books are entertaining, insightful and teach a ton about the times the subjects lived in. Any other biographies I liked this year? Thank you for asking! I was riveted (and appalled) by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian’s biography of Tiger Woods and probably talked to more people about about this book than anything else I read this year. I got around to reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Da Vinci just in time to go see The Last Supper in Milan. Truly excellent book about one of history’s all time greats. Evan Thomas Being Nixon: A Man Divided is one of the best books I’ve ever read about a politician. It’s worth reading whatever country you live in and whatever your political beliefs are. A final book I’d add this collection would be Rosanne Cash’s memoir, Composed. I heard about it from Steven Pressfield and it’s excellent. 

Honorary Mentions: Robert Greene’s The Laws of Human Nature came out this year and it was well-worth the half-decade wait since Mastery. He is a living treasure and everyone should read this new one. I think the best book I’ve ever written, Conspiracy, came out this year as well (The New York Times said it was genius, so that counts for something…). Camus’ The Fall was the best novel I read this year. I really enjoyed the new series of translations that Princeton University Press has done of Cicero and Epictetus and Seneca. They are worth reading for sure. Kate Fagan’s book What Made Maddy Run? was one of the books I most recommended to sports coaches and parents I know. Finally, I made a concerted effort to read more eastern philosophy this year and really got a lot out of Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy by Philip J. Ivanhoe which is a collection of most of the classic Confucian and Taoist writings. After that I read The Bhagavad Gita, which is something I wasn’t ready for before, but glad to finally understand. 

Anyway, that’s a lot of books I just mentioned and they should keep you plenty busy. However, if you want more, you can check out the best of lists I did in 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011.

And of course, you can get a lot of these books on Scribd, which is basically unlimited ebooks and audiobooks (and a New York Times subscription) all in one app for one low monthly price. Worth trying for sure. 

Here’s How You Stop Anger From Making You Do Something Stupid

In February, during the launch of my last book, I had one of those experiences that explain why many people don’t like or trust the media. I’ll leave the details vague for reasons that the rest of this article will make clear, but suffice to say, a reporter acting in what was clearly bad faith, took their best shot at undermining the book. And then, when confronted, politely but firmly, by my publisher, they lied about it and refused to make even a token effort at righting the situation.

I was pissed.

Understandably so, I think.

I had worked ceaselessly for a year and a half on this book. I had gone to extreme measures to protect the exclusives and original reporting featured in its pages. Yet a chunk of that work was undone in a matter of seconds by a jealous and unethical person. A person I had taken pains to reach out to during the writing process and tried to treat with respect.

So, like I said, I was upset.

I also had the goods. I had clear proof of their wrongdoing and a big enough platform that I was able to make a public case for it. For anyone who has had the experience of calling someone out, you know that as mad as you are there is an odd pleasure in anger. The sweet part of the bittersweetness of being wronged is the adrenaline rush of obsessing and defending yourself. In a way, a “justified” evisceration is a writer’s dream because to successfully ether someone calls up all of one’s writing talent. Seeing it all land exactly as planned? Intoxicatingly satisfying.

Yet as I rushed to put this all together and assemble a reply which I fantasized would right all the wrongs that had been inflicted upon me (and be followed by reams of publicity), I was stopped cold by three things I read over the next three days. They were short questions that I came across in the normal course of my morning and evening ritual of quiet reading and journaling.

Here they are in order:

Why get angry at things, if anger doesn’t change it?

Why am I telling myself that I’ve been harmed?

Will I even remember this fight in a few months?

Now if you’re a follower of mine, those questions might sound familiar. Because I wrote them. They are in fact the prompts of The Daily Stoic Journal, which I, along with many people all over the world, journal to every day.

I’m not one who throws around the idea of things being fated or of divine providence too often, but in this situation, I couldn’t help but be struck by the timing of it all. I was spoiling for a fight, about to angrily and aggressively escalate a conflict with an uncertain ending, and there, filtering back to me were my own words — my own criticisms — in exactly the moment, in exactly the tone, addressing the exact situation that I had found myself in.

Emerson talked about how we come back to our own rejected thoughts with a kind of “alienated majesty,” but in this case, the thoughts were not rejected. They had simply been written long enough ago (first as part of my book The Daily Stoic and then as questions in the journal) that I had forgotten about them. Yet the perfection of their ordering from February 22 to February 24th — first questioning the efficacy of anger, then questioning the perception of the slight itself, and the finally, a question of perspective, of how much this will matter in just a short while — could not have been more suited to my situation. Of course, as the person who had chosen this ordering I knew there had been no foresight but the randomness had worked out as if it had been selected only for me.

It might seem weird to have learned something from my own writing, but that thought misses what Stoicism really is. Stoicism is a practice as much as it is a philosophy. Like most people, I know you’re not supposed to react emotionally to things, but again, like most people, that rarely stops the anger from rising up inside us and fantasizing about revenge. Nor is there any “ownership” of the ideas. It is instead a tradition where one repeats and refines the same basic premises as we struggle to understand and apply them.

In my case, I was just a few seconds away from hitting “publish” on my reply, one I knew would do well, and perhaps stand as an indelible black mark on the career of the person who had thrown the first punch. But it was the practice of the philosophy that acted as the check to my anger. Stoicism is a philosophy you engage with daily, or repeatedly throughout the day. In my personal routine, I begin each day with my journal, spending time thinking deeply about the day’s prompt and then I revisit it again in the evening as a final reflection before bed.

There, even in the sway of my rage, my routine forced me (on a quiet Saturday morning) to sit with the question, “Why get angry at things, if anger doesn’t change it?” Then 12 or so hours later that same day, I was there again with that same question, and already I was having second thoughts about my plan. By Sunday, forced to ask myself twice why I was so convinced I had been harmed, I was leaning towards calling the plan off. And then on Monday, when reckoning whether I would even care about any of the things I was upset with in the future, whether I would even remember it, the answer was clearly no.

The right choice for me was clear too: Let it go. Move on.

It was Epicurus, Seneca’s favorite philosopher to quote despite their disagreements, who had said that vain was the word of the philosopher that does not heal the suffering of man. Anger, as we all know, is something we suffer like a fever. It consumes us, takes over our body, and changes the very temperature at which we operate. I was very much in the throes of a feverish anger in late February. I had been wronged and I wasn’t going to let that go unpunished, even at the risk of escalating the very kind of feud and conflict my book Conspiracy was partly a warning against.

Philosophy was designed to help us break the fever of our destructive emotions and impulses.

When you’re sick, you take aspirin, you lay down, you put a cool rag on your forehead and you rest while you give your body room to do what it needs to do. In the same way, philosophy is a kind of balm, a process that gives our ruling reason the space it needs to do what it needs to do. You let your mind question and then override your impulses.

All I had needed was a day or two for that process to happen. By the third day, I was over it and had redirected my energies at something productive. My suffering had ended and I had no desire to create more suffering by getting into some pointless shouting match.

Besides, a few days later I came again across something else the Stoics had written which confirmed to me who had really been harmed in the whole experience.

“The person who does wrong, does wrong to themselves. The unjust person is unjust to themselves — making themselves evil.”  Marcus Aurelius

So why would I need to punish the person who had hurt me? They had taken care of it themselves.

This  was originally published  on Thought Catalog.

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How Your Daily Routine Can Turn Into Your Biggest Enemy

Routine and ritual are everything, including, if you’re not careful, a dangerous weakness.

A few weeks ago, I got a letter — yes, an actual letter — from an NCAA player who will probably go pro. His question was a simple one: Like many basketball players he was big on pregame rituals and routines, but he was worried that these patterns made him vulnerable to being disrupted. What if the team plane was late and he had to rush his usual warmup? What if his headphones were dead or he forgot to pack his gameday socks?

Would his competitive edge — the comfort and confidence he took from these practices — suddenly turn into a liability?

This is a perfectly reasonable concern. Because while rituals can be a source of strength to an athlete or a writer, they can also be a form of fragility. Take Russell Westbrook, who is famous for his pregame routine, which begins three hours before a game. It starts with him warming up exactly three hours before tipoff. Then one hour before the game, Westbrook visits the arena chapel. Then he eats the same peanut butter and jelly sandwich (buttered wheat bread, toasted, strawberry jelly, Skippy peanut butter, cut diagonally). At exactly 6 minutes and 17 seconds before the game starts, he begins the team’s final warm up drill. He has a particular pair of shoes for games, for practice, for road games. Since high school, he’s done the same thing after shooting a free throw, walking backwards past the three point line and then walking back to take the next shot. At the practice facility, he has a specific parking space, and he likes to shoot on Practice Court 3. He calls his parents at the same time every day. And on and on.

The point is, while this process is likely very calming and reassuring in an entirely chaotic and emotional game, it also reads like a recipe for how one might throw someone off their game. A teammate vying for Westbrook’s playing time, a competitor who will stop at nothing, or just Murphy’s Law could all wreak havoc on that system and get inside his head. All it takes is “accidentally” parking in the wrong spot, or the right insult right before a free throw to send the whole thing sideways. And what if the trainer is sick and can’t make the sandwich? Or what if the arena chapel is closed due to a leaky ceiling?

Any routine junkie can tell you what happens when your routine gets messed up: Your thoughts race. You get frustrated. You feel what is almost like withdrawals. I can’t do this. This isn’t right. Something bad is going to happen. You doubt yourself. Then all of a sudden you aren’t getting warmed up or falling into the zone as easily as you usually do.

This problem is compounded the more successful you get or the more you specialize in a certain feild, because you get used to and feel entitled to have things your way. People enable this dependence because they want you to be your best, which makes it all the more frustrating and surprising if the script is suddenly deviated from.

I came face to face with this reality with the birth of my son in 2016. A few months before he was born I was profiled for the New York Times, and as part of the article, the reporter had me walk her through my fairly extensive set of morning and daily routines (what time I got up, how I journaled, where I sat, what my workout was, etc). She remarked that it would be interesting to see how this would all hold up with a newborn. Confidently, I told her nothing would change.

Ugh.

But of course she was right — because kids are, if anything — wrecking balls for the carefully built order of our lives.

The first couple months of his life, I struggled. It actually wasn’t the lack of sleep that was the problem. It was the unpredictability of that lack of sleep. Some mornings I was up at 5am. Some at 10am. Sometimes there was a baby I was supposed to quietly take care of while my wife slept, other times we were all up, other times it was just me while they slept. Was he napping at 2pm or not at all? Did I need to get home early for his dinner and bath or was the whole schedule blown apart by something that happened earlier in the day?

All of a sudden quiet time every morning, not checking email, going for a long run or swim in the afternoon, writing from 8–12am every day — this was not possible. At least not possible to do in the same way in the same order each day.

I experienced something similar years before when my career took off. I was used to working at home and then suddenly I was on the road a lot. Lot of flights. Living out of suitcases. Meetings and events that I had to go to. But early on I could compensate for this by spacing the trips out, setting up camp in each city for a few days and approximating some version of my normal routine there. As the trips increased and I got older, this became less tenable (even more so after accumulating a wife and a kid), and my reliance on my capital-R Routine became a weakness. A couple days on the road would completely set me back. It would also make me frustrated — even though I had chosen to say yes to these opportunities.

In both cases, my cherished routines either crumbled or were blown apart. But I still had to do my job (writing) and if anything, the stakes were higher than before. Which meant I’ve spent a lot of time thinking routine ever since.

What I’ve come up with might not seem that profound but the impact has been enormous for me: It’s not about having a routine. It’s about having routines.

I no longer have a writing routine or a morning routine. I have several. I have a routine when I get up early on the farm (We go for a walk, then I write until breakfast, and then resume writing). I have a routine for when I am on the road (run or exercise early, slot writing/work in as the top priority between whatever the scheduled events for the day are). I don’t have one shirt I wear each time I give a talk, I have a set of 3–4 that I choose from. Depending on what city I am in and what time of year, I have different mornings and plans that I’ll do. When I fly, I either read, answer old emails from starred folder, or sleep. I don’t eat before I perform, but if I do, I eat the same thing. If I get interrupted and can’t journal the way I want for a morning or two, so be it — but I’ll make sure I quickly resume my old habit. And on and on.

Depending on circumstances, I have strategic flexibility. I’m not winging it, but I am not such a creature of habit that I am flustered when disrupted (or can I really even be disrupted since I am indifferent to Plan A, B, C, D, E). Think about musical scales — the notes themselves are fixed but they can be played in a limitless amount of combination. This allows the musician to improvise while still maintaining a base they can return to and derive confidence and comfort in. That’s how you want to be with your routine. Not so rigid that you can’t respond to the moment, not so free that you can do everything in the moment.

There is a line from the Super Bowl-winning coach Bill Walsh about how most individuals are like water, they naturally seek out lower ground. By that he meant that without discipline or order, we are not our best selves. Ultimately, this is what routine is about: creating practices and habits and rules that force us to be better.

Without a routine of any kind, Resistance is given too much room to operate. Doubt, chaos, laziness — if you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile. Routines are essential in that battle.

In creative or athletic or entrepreneurial fields, the uncertainty and stress of the endeavor makes us crave simplicity and dependability. When Russell Westbrook was asked the reasons behind his many specific, very detailed practices, he replied, “No particular reason. I just do it.” Actually there is a reason. The reason is reassurance. As a player, Westbrook is emotional, chaotic, intense. The game he plays is random, difficult and overwhelming. Doing the same things the same way at the same time, creates comfort and order as well as superior performance.

We can get addicted to that. In fact, it may actually take more discipline to be moderate in your discipline than to be insane about it. There is an interesting Michael Lewis article about the NFL kicker Adam Vinatieri who actually works at making sure he doesn’t wear the same socks twice or having too many rituals because of how easily this can descend into superstition and thus psyching oneself off. But without this work, we end up beating on ourselves for falling short.

It’s better to remember Marcus Aurelius’s line…

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

In a way, this is what I’ve worked on most with my routines lately. Can I purposely disrupt them? What happens if I change things up? Am I still me? Am I still able to do what I do well? I want to be sure that the tail is not wagging the dog, that I am in control of the routine and not the other way around. Because the last thing you want to do is become ossified and unable to handle change.

Because life is change. Murphy’s Law is real, and you will drive yourself insane thinking you can simply outwill or white knuckle your way through the inevitable tendency for things to go exactly the way you’d rather they not go.

Discipline is a form of freedom, but left unchecked becomes a form of tyranny.So the key is the ability to rotate from routine to routine, discipline to discipline, according to the needs of the day and the moment.

Otherwise you’re not only going to be miserable…you’re an easy opponent to defeat.

This  was originally published  on Thought Catalog.

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The Most Successful People Are The Ones You’ve Never Heard Of (And Why They Want It That Way)

The vast majority of successful people who ever lived are people you’ve never heard of. If we are to drill down further and consider happy successful people, it’s almost certain that we haven’t heard of them.

The reason for that is something called the survivorship bias. Only a very small number of stories and identities make their way into the history books or into legend, and by definition, those that sought fame and fortune beyond what any human could possibly enjoy, are often overrepresented among them.

Even my own writing is guilty of this. I tell stories about Rockefeller and Grant and Alexander the Great. I don’t talk about the people who were talented but had a better sense of what was enough. Or the ones who were happy to let others get all the credit while they played for the love of the game and the craft.

This is true of the Stoics too, who I have helped to popularize. It’s only possible to write about the extremely successful ones — the emperors and the writers, the playwrights and the generals — because those are the ones whose names were etched into the record. But given the popularity of Stoicism in Rome and throughout history, the vast majority of Stoics would have been ordinary people living ordinary lives of discipline and virtue. Fathers, mothers, businessmen, diplomats and blacksmiths. There would have been literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Stoics, over the last 2500 years, and many of them were arguably better and more admirable than Marcus Aurelius. Or Seneca. Or Cato.

It might also be said that the ones we’ve never heard of — those were the lucky ones. It wasn’t fun to be the head of state. It wasn’t fun the be executed by a head of state either. It wasn’t as fun as you think to be Rockefeller or Kennedy or Lance Armstrong.

In a famous profile in The Atlantic on Saddam Hussein, Mark Bowden wrote that “one might think that the most powerful man has the most choices, but in reality he has the fewest. Too much depends on his every move.” This is true not just for dictators, but for anyone in a position of power, influence or responsibility.

For instance, the now standard prescription for an American president after he leaves office — the former most powerful person in the world — is sign a book deal, relegating them, no, obligatingthem, to slock it on television shows and an endless series of hostile interviews. Then they have to raise the money for their own monument to their own honor, the Presidential Library. And it’s all downhill from there. See: Bill Clinton, the most powerful man in the world a couple terms removed, as just another lame guest on Pittsburgh’s 96.1’s Morning Freak Show with Mikey and Big Bob.

Listen to a CEO answering dumb questions from shareholders during conference calls with resigned disdain. Watch celebrities gain the love of the world only to lose the ability to ever be in a loving relationship with one person. See the endless reunion tours and un-retirements of athletes and artists who just can’t walk away. Now, it doesn’t have to be like that — there’s no law mandating the story go that way — but the fact that it almost always seems to, tells us something. It’s what Seneca, a man who knew power and wealth in many domains, meant when he said that “slavery dwells beneath marble and gold.”

Along with extreme success comes extreme costs — it is often an all consuming drive that draws one to the spotlight…and inevitably to dark places as well. Alexander the Great died at age 32, after he’d driven himself and his men to the ends of the earth. Joseph Kennedy, who created a multi-generational legacy of powerful, brilliant children…also lobotomized his own daughter because she couldn’t quite measure up. And what of the countless successful people who lost their privacy, spouses, or youth in the pursuit of dominance in some sport, or in business, or politics? What of those who kept reaching and reaching after they had success, and destroyed everything they had built with the final overstretch?

What does this have to do with you? Isn’t there someone whose status and success you envy? Someone who has gotten more recognition, who has sold more books or widgets or real estate, who has won more medals or set more records? And when we think of these people, we think, “Oh, they’re the lucky ones. They got what I should have gotten.”

But is that really true? Maybe the lucky ones are the hidden figures. The people who don’t suffer the burdens of a public office or a clique of hangers or the anxiety of a reputation to uphold or the chorus of critics, they’re the ones who were deprived? Please.

Most people with a public persona tell you that the downsides outweigh the upsides. They have a target on their back from critics. They have less creative freedom. They feel irresponsiblewhen they turn down opportunities because they know other people would kill for the chance. It’s not all bad of course, but there are real problems that go along with fame and fortune.

Meanwhile, several studies have shown that there are diminishing returns to happiness the higher you get in the income tax bracket. Once your basic needs (and then some) are taken care of, money may actually make things harder. You know the song lyric: Mo’ money, mo’ problems. But the same is true for other forms of success. A mayor doesn’t usually see their hair turn grey as fast as a president. A working character actor doesn’t have to deal with being typecast. The creator who never quite becomes the next big thing might actually have a longer, more enduring career than the debut artists who is feted about town.

It’s why a few years ago the notoriously private, but still wonderfully popular musician and songwriter Sia, would write, “If anyone besides famous people knew what it was like to be a famous person, they would never want to be famous.” There’s an old joke along those lines: The best way to punish someone is to give them exactly what they wish for.

The key then, when you find yourself wanting more, feeling inferior because you don’t have more, is to think about that. Don’t give the fantasies more weight than they deserve. See them for what they are. When you find yourself pining for fame and recognition, stop and consider what it might actually feel like when you get it — why you think you’ll be the exception to the rule and will find happiness in what nearly everyone else in history has found to be a chimera.

The motto of the philosopher Epicurus, which was taken up by the great essayist Montaigne as well, was lathe biōsas. Live in obscurity. The French saying, Pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés: “In order to live happily, live hidden.”

This is not to say you must be poor or a failure. You can still be extraordinary. You just don’t have to be the most extraordinary. You don’t have to strive to beat out all the other broken people, to be the most well-known out of everyone who ever wanted to be known. Because what is that actually worth in the long run? Do you think you’ll appreciate your fame and money after you die? You think Alexander the Great knows that Alexandria is still standing?

So that’s the recalibration. There is a big difference between having enough that all your needs are met and being a billionaire. Between being Taylor Swift, the global superstar, and Sia. And those differences are not all good. In fact, many of them are objectively not good.

The next time you feel screwed that you haven’t gotten your big break, or watch as some potential life-changing opportunity to level up escapes your grasp, ask yourself if that’s really the case. Is it really bad luck? Or has Fortune done you a kindness?

On the contrary, the life just below that top, the middle class life, the just-enough-success-but-not-too-much? That’s the real blessing.

This  was originally published  on Thought Catalog.

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13 Life-Changing Habits To Try And Do Every Single Day

Why does one day matter? Why does what you do today matter in the scheme of your whole life?

Because our life is made up of days. Days like today.

The poet Heraclitus said that “one day is equal to every day.” By that he meant that every day is the same length, comprised of the same amount of hours, the same sunup and sundown. Yet, he also meant it in the sense that philosophers have always meant that same idea — that if you can get one day right, you have a shot at getting your life right (and that you should try to get todayright, because tomorrow is no guarantee). Or as my friend Aubrey Marcus put it wonderfully in the title of his new book, own the day, own your life.

Earlier this year, I published “12 Questions That Will Change Your Life.” In the vein, here are 13 things you should do and think about every day to change your day — and by extension, your life as well.

Some are easier than others, but each one matters.

[*] Prepare For The Hours Ahead — Each morning you should prepare, plan and meditate on how you aim to act that day. Don’t wing it. Don’t be reactionary. Have a plan. Marcus Aurelius rose in the morning and did his journaling — preparing himself for what he was likely to face in the hours ahead. He thought about the people he was likely to face, difficulties he might encounter (premeditatio malorum), and what he knew about how to respond. The morning is the perfect time to journal and to use the pages in that journal to set yourself up for a successful day. Remember: If you do the tough planning in the morning, nothing can happen during the day contrary to your expectation or too tough for you to handle.

[*] Go For a Walk — For centuries, thinkers have walked many miles a day because they had to, because they were bored, because they wanted to escape the putrid cities they lived in, because they wanted to get their blood flowing. In the process they discovered an important side-effect: it cleared their minds and helped them make better work. As Nietzsche would later say: “It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.” You should go for a walk every single day not only for exercise but for the philosophical and psychological benefits. Experience nature. Experience the quiet of the world around you. Take a break. If you’re too busy, multitask: Take a walking meeting. Do your phone call on the move around the parking lot. Get out of doors and move.

[*] Do The Deep Work — So much of our day is spent at the surface. Skimming this and that. Vaguely paying attention to this conversation or that one. This is not what we were put here for. You must make time — preferably an hour or more a day — for what Cal Newport calls the “deep work.” The type of intense concentration and cognitive focus where real progress is made — on whatever it is that we happen to do, be it writing or thinking or designing or creating. Elite work takes deep work. The amount of deep work you get done is on you. It starts by closing your browser (after you finish reading me, of course) and getting to it. If you don’t make time for this — if it’s not a box you check every day — it won’t happen.

[*] Do A Kindness — The Boy Scouts motto was to do a good turn every day. Seneca wrote that “Wherever there is a human being, we have an opportunity for kindness.” Yes, even rude people. Even people you’re in competition with. As well as the people you love and are connected to. Your co-workers are a chance for kindness. Your spouse is a chance for kindness. The mailman is a chance for kindness. It will make you feel better to take advantage of that chance. It will make your day better if you do. It will make the world better if you do. Only a saint or a sage can fully meet every opportunity and every encounter with kindness. So don’t whip yourself if you can’t muster that. Start with one. Practice one kindness every day. See what happens.

[*] Read. Read. Read. — Pick up a book every day. Even for just a few pages. As Emerson says, every book is a quotation — of other books, of experience, of the humans and civilizations that came before it. How could you not expose yourself to this? And yes, you do have time! Meals, before bed, on the train, in the waiting room, even on your phone or desktop. Read a few pages, read a whole book, but make a real and unending commitment to reading. Because there is so much out there that you can benefit from: Biographies. Little-known gems. Life-changers. Philosophy. The classics. Self-improvement. Books about war. Fiction. Even marketing and business books. All of these will widen your perspective, help you with problems, give you inspiration and let you benefit from the accumulated wisdom and knowledge of the centuries.

[*] Find True Quiet — Every single day you should find a way to disconnect and unplug, even for a few minutes. I try to swim as often as I can, not only for the exercise but because nothing can get to me there. I don’t have my phone. There’s no noise. Just calmness and peace. Ask yourself: How often am I unreachable? The answer is: Not often enough. Build some of this time into your daily practice. You’ll be better for it. And the world will not notice, I promise.

[*] Make Time for Strenuous Exercise — It’s become a cliche to say this but when scientists consider exercise to be the ‘single thing that comes close to a magic bullet, in terms of its strong and universal benefits,’ and it’s Richard Branson’s #1 piece of advice to entrepreneurs, it can’t be overstated. We need it — far more than you think. Don’t put it off. Do it. Be in shape and be healthy. And what I personally find is that it is important to have goals with your exercise. Why? So that no matter what happens that day — at work, at home, in the economy — you can have something that went well. You improved your mile time, you swam three more laps than usual, you squatted a new weight.

[*] Think About Death — Shakespeare said that every third thought should be of our grave. Perhaps that’s too much. One thought per day is plenty. The point isn’t to be morbid, but to remember that you are mortal. How much time do we waste on things that don’t matter? And why? Because we think we can afford it! Memento Mori. You will die. Live while you can. Live your life as if you have died and come back and all of this is extra. I keep a coin in my pocket to remind meof this and touch it at least once a day. Death doesn’t make life pointless but rather purposeful. And fortunately, we don’t have to nearly die to tap into this.

[*] Seize the Alive Time — What does every day seem to be comprised of? Too much dicking around. People are just killing time (remember Raymond Chandler’s line “and it dies hard.”) We get to where we were going and walk into the lobby and check our watch. It says we’re a few minutes early, so we reach into our pocket to grab our phones. Is this act not the expression of so much of what’s wrong with modern life? The entitlement. The resignation of it. How much better we would be and the world would be if we never did this again. If we chose alive time over dead time. There’s so much you could do in those few minutes. Face fears. Reach out and connect with someone. Do something you’ve been putting off. Expose ourselves to sunlight and nature. Be still and empty. Prepare for what lies ahead. Or just live because who knows how much time we have left.

[*] Say Thanks — To The Good and Bad — The Stoics saw gratitude as a kind of medicine, that saying “Thank you” for every experience was the key to mental health. “Convince yourself that everything is the gift of the gods,” was how Marcus Aurelius put it, “that things are good and always will be.” Say thanks to a rude person. Say thanks to a bungled project. Say thanks to a delayed package. Why? Because for starters it may have just saved you from something far worse, but mostly because you have no choice in the matter. Epictetus has said that every situation has two handles: Which are you going to decide to hold onto? The anger or the appreciation? The one of resentment or of thanks?

[*] Put The Day Up For Review — We prepared in the morning, now we reflect in the evening. The best way to improve is to review. So, each evening you should, like Seneca did, examine your day and your actions. As he put it, “When the light has been removed and my wife has fallen silent, aware of this habit that’s now mine, I examine my entire day and go back over what I’ve done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by.” The question should be: Did I follow my plans for the day? Was I prepared enough? What could I do better? What have I learned that will help me tomorrow?

[*] Find a Way To Connect To Something Big — The worries and anxieties of daily life seem to fall away when we stand next to the ocean or walk through a beautiful park. We shouldn’t wait for our annual vacation to get this kind of relief and perspective. We need to get it every single day. The Stoics had an exercise for doing this. Marcus Aurelius would look up at the stars and imagine himself running alongside them, he’d see them for their timelessness and infiniteness. Try that tonight or early in the morning and try to make it a daily practice. A glance at the beautiful expanse of the sky is an antidote to the nagging pettiness of earthly concerns, of our dreams of immortality or fame. But you can find this connection from many sources: A poem. A view from the top floor. A barefoot walk across the grass. A few minutes in a church pew. Just find something bigger than yourself and get in touch with it every single day.

[*] Get Eight Hours of Sleep — “Sleep when you’re dead,” we say. Like it’s some badge of honor how little time we allot to it. Bullshit. The body needs its rest. Schopenhauer said that sleep is the interest we pay on the loan of life. Be glad to pay it. It’s what keeps us alive. Guard your sleep carefully, it’s an obligation. All the other habits and practices listed here become irrelevant if you don’t have the energy and clarity to do them.

P.S. If you want to get more practical about these things, check out Aubrey’s book  Own The Day, Own Your Life .

This  was originally published  on Thought Catalog.

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Here’s The Technique That Ambitious People Use To Get What They Want

In every off-season teams in every sport begin a strange ritual. Prospective coaches are flown in to meet with management about open positions — sometimes they convene at the stadium, in nondescript conference rooms, or the cabin of the owner’s plane. Whatever the locale, the scene is usually thus: The ambitious coach strides in, sits down, and reveals themselves to be one of two types.

There is the type who expects to be asked a number of questions from management. And then there is the type who expects not only to do most of the asking, but to put on a presentation. It is the first type that sees the situation as an interview, and it is the second who sees it not as an interview, but as an audition.

In 1994, the relatively young Nick Saban, then the defensive coordinator under head coach Bill Belichick for the Cleveland Browns, presented himself at 5 pm sharp to a conference room at the Detroit airport. Inside, Michigan State Spartans key personnel had one question on their mind: Is this our guy? Saban’s biographer then explains what happened: “He placed a yellow legal pad filled with pages of handwritten notes on the table, and immediately took control of the interview.” Saban was in charge and detailed exactly what he was planning to do, to the point of specifically listing the assistants he was going to hire. It was all part of the elaborate program he had in mind for the team.

Similarly, as Ray Didinger and Robert S. Lyons write in their book about the Philadelphia Eagles, coach Andy Reid showed up to his interview with the owner and president of the team with,

“a six-inch-thick binder full of detailed notes on everything from how to organize a training camp to what players should wear on team charters. Reid collected the notes over his 16 years as a coach, starting in 1982 as a graduate assistant at Brigham Young under LaVell Edwards and continuing through his seven seasons in Green Bay […] Everything those coaches did well, Reid wrote down and studied, hoping one day he would have a chance to run his own show. When Lurie called, Reid was ready.”

Needless to say, both men got the positions.

Ramit Sethi has called this the “Briefcase Technique,”saying that the best job applicants wait for a moment right after the pleasantries have ended and the basic information about the position has been explained. It is here, after they have answered just enough questions to establish comfort and trust, that they reveal how much research they have done prior to showing up, by explaining all the things they’ve learned about the business, how they intend to improve it and exactly why they’re the right person for the job. This move, done politely but confidently, immediately separates them from all the other potential hires.

Why? Because most of those hires just showed up and sat in that exact same chair and did nothing remarkable. They did what most of us for most of our lives do: wing it. They reacted. They made up their answers on the spot. They let the interview dictate events rather than seize control of it — rather than earnestly make a pitch for what they think they can do.

I think another part of this is that we are often afraid of putting ourselves out there and being rejected, so we think, “Well, I’ll just go and see what happens, but I won’t really try. I’ll wait until they hire me.” None of this is conscious of course. We tell ourselves we don’t have time to prepare too much because we have other things going on, or we tell ourselves we’re not going to prepare because we haven’t been paid yet. Better to improvise, to tell yourself you don’t really care either way, and then see what happens, than it is to really wantsomething, to prepare and fail.

Yet the fact is that our lives can be defined by these moments of earnest ambition.

When researching for my book Conspiracy, which details a nine-year conspiracy by the billionaire Peter Thiel to destroy a media outlet, I was shocked to find that this nearly incredible process was put in motion by a 26-year-old taking out and opening a metaphorical briefcase on a table at a fancy restaurant in Berlin. It was on April 6th, 2011, that a young man (who I refer to in the book as “Mr. A”) lucked into a meeting with Peter Thiel. As soon as the food had been ordered and the butterflies had settled, he seized the moment.

It would have been an intimidating moment to grab ahold of. He’s sitting down for a one-on-one evening with a man worth, by 2011, some $1.5 billion and who owns a significant chunk of the biggest social network in the world, on whose board of directors he also sits. Thiel is a man who is notoriously averse to what a friend would deem “casual bar talk.” He’s a critical thinker, a certified genius and a wily contrarian. With his stomach tight and every nerve and synapse firing, Mr. A would go for it.

Unlocking that figurative briefcase on the table, he begins, “Okay, I know what you think about Gawker, here’s what I am proposing. . . .” Ambition and opportunity have collided and the kid in front of Thiel is proposing a solution to that problem that Thiel has set upon trying to solve: Peter should create a shell company to hire former investigative reporters and lawyers to find causes of action against Gawker, the media outlet in question. Gawker has written thousands of articles about thousands of people; it must have made a mistake somewhere. Mr. A’s proposal is more than just an idea, it’s a comprehensive, structured plan: he has researched some names, he had a timeline and a budget.

Three to five years and $10 million.

And when Peter pauses to think the idea over, his initial reaction is not positive — it’s too hard, the situation is too complex, nothing can be done — Mr. A had the stones to double down and call him out: “Peter, if everyone thought that way, what would the world look like?”

Peter would tell me how refreshing it was to hear that, how he more or less decided on the spot to back this kid — to give him $10 million dollars of a budget and a $25,000 a month salary — because of that response. Everyone else Peter had talked to had been thinking incremental, they had been defeatists and Thiel had almost come to internalize their view. Yet Mr. A had a big idea, and he’d put the work into figuring out how to make it a reality.

So while this meeting is an interesting footnote in an insane series of events, it should also prompt some questioning. Or at least it does for me. When I hear stories like this, I like to consider: How differently it might have gone if he had showed up at the meeting unprepared? What if Mr. A had just thrown out some ideas off the top of his head and let that be it? What if Nick Saban had let Michigan State take control of the interview, if he hadn’t spent those hours filling out those legal pads? The answer, I think, is obvious: Their careers would have not turned out the same way. We would not be talking about them here in this article — or more importantly, on the world’s stage where their work is so often done.

The question those questions then provoke is this: What opportunities have we left on the table in our own lives by failing to do the same? I can think of an easy one off the top of my head. In college, I interviewed at a powerhouse music PR firm. I remember very vividly going and buying a suit, taking it to be tailored, asking my parents for money to pay for it all. And as laughable as wearing a suit to that interview was, the most laughable thing was that I thought thatwas what mattered. Preparing for the interview, by actually putting something together to say in the room? I don’t think the thought even occurred to me. I remember another job interview, at the talent agency where I would get my start, when I showed up (thankfully) more casually attired, but also essentially winged it. I ended up getting the job, but what if my future boss had been in a bad mood, what if he had been more skeptical of me than he was, I would have been screwed! I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this to you. Even though it worked out, I cringe now at the stupid risk I took.

More ruefully, I also think about how many dinners I’ve been to over the years with powerful and important people. I think now about the times I have been in Mr. A’s shoes, whether it was a randomly scheduled phone call or a green room before a talk. I think about the incredible people whose company I have been lucky enough to be in. In all those encounters, most of which I had plenty of advance notice of, many times did I do anything more than breeze in and hope my winning personality was enough? In how many of them did I really put myself out there?

Not that I am disappointed with where I am, it’s just that this is something we don’t think about enough. We might regret missed opportunities here or there, but rarely do we have the self-awareness and insight to see the opportunities we missed turning into opportunities because we were too lazy, too scared, too entitled to do the work to turn them into opportunities in the first place.

They were trees falling in the woods we never heard. Paths that might have made all the difference but whose forks we were too blind to see.

I love the Briefcase Technique because, sure, it’s about confidence and about knowing your shit, but mostly it’s about being willing to actually take a swing at something. To truly put yourself out there — to try.

And not just try how other people try, but to try way harder. Every day I get emails from kids who want a mentor or a job or want to know how to get those things. On the one hand I am impressed that they took the risk to send the note, that’s something. But it also surprises me how similar the notes are. They said, “I want to work for you for free.” Or “I would like for you to be my mentor.” They rarely say what the person thinks they can do, or where they think my needs overlap with their skills. They don’t have specific questions they think I could help them answer (which is what mentoring is), they just thought the note was enough. I remember one well-meaning young guy who flew to Austin from Australia to meet me. I was disturbed by that, and yet disturbed even more when I gave him a few minutes and he asked me things I had answered thirty times already on podcasts. I would never have flown across the world to unpleasantly surprise someone at home…but if I did, you can believe my briefcase would have been filled with questions that justified the trip.

Now, it’s not always going to work. You’re still going to get the door slammed in your face. You’re going to get get blown off or politely listened to and then ignored. In fact, most of the time this is probably what will happen. There are just as many stories about coaches or ambitious upstarts who were laughed out of the room or passed over for someone more qualified, more connected, more “deserving.”

But when it does work? Well, your whole life will change.

So try it.

This  was originally published  on Thought Catalog.

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25 Ways To Kill The Toxic Ego That Will Ruin Your Life

The artist Marina Abramović has said that the moment we begin to believe in our own greatness, that we kill our ability to be truly creative. What she is talking about is ego — the way that self-absorption ruins the very thing it celebrates.

So how do we keep this toxic ego and selfishness at bay? How do we prevent ego from “sucking us down like the law of gravity?” The primary answer is simple: awareness. But after that, it’s a matter of hard work.

In the course of researching Ego is the Enemy I was exposed to many strategies for combatting our arrogant and selfish impulses. Here are 25 proven exercises from successful men and women throughout history that will help you stay sober, clear-headed, creative and humble. They work if you work them.

1. Adopt the beginner’s mindset. “It is impossible to learn that which one thinks one already knows,” Epictetus says. When we let ego tell us that we have arrived and figured it all out, it prevents us from learning. Pick up a bookon a subject you know next to nothing about. Walk through a library or a bookstore — remind yourself how much you don’t know.

2. Focus on the effort — not the outcome. With any creative endeavour at some point what we made leaves our hands. We can’t let what happens after that point have any sway over us. We need to remember famous coach John Wooden’s advice: “Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.” Doing your best is what matters. Focus on that. External rewards are just extra.

3. Choose purpose over passion. Passion runs hot and burns out, while people with purpose — think of it as passion combined with reason — are more dedicated and have control over their direction. Christopher McCandless was passionate when he went “into the wild” but it didn’t work well, right? The inventor of the Segway was passionate. Better to have clear-headed purpose.

4. Shun the comfort of talking and face the work. “Void,” Marlon Brando once said, “is terrifying to most people.” We talk endlessly on social media getting validation and attention with fake internet points avoiding the uncertainty of doing the difficult and frightening work required of any creative endeavour. As creatives we need to shut up and get to work. To face the void — despite the pain of doing so.

5. Kill your pride before you lose your head. “Whom the gods wish to destroy,” Cyril Connolly wrote, “they first call promising.” You cannot let early pride lead you astray. You must remind yourself every day how much work is left to be done, not how much you have done. You must remember that humility is the antidote to pride.

6. Stop telling yourself a story — there is no grand narrative. When you achieve any sort of success you might think that success in the future is just the natural and expected next part of the story. This is a straightforward path to failure — by getting too cocky and overconfident. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, reminds himself that there was “no aha moment” for his billion-dollar behemoth, no matter what he might read in his own press clippings. Focus on the present moment, not the story.

7. Learn to manage (yourself and others). John DeLorean was a brilliant engineer but a poor manager (of people and himself). One executive described his management style as “chasing colored balloons” — he was constantly distracted and abandoning one project for another. It’s just not enough to be smart or right or a genius. It’s gratifying to be the micromanaging egotistical boss at the center of everything — but that’s not how organizations grow and succeed. That’s not how you can grow as a person either.

8. Know what matters to you and ruthlessly say no to everything else.Pursue what the philosopher Seneca refers to as euthymia — the tranquility of knowing what you are after and not being distracted by others. We accomplish this by having an honest conversation with ourselves and understanding our priorities. And rejecting all the rest. Learning how to say no. First, by saying no to ego which wants it all.

9. Forget credit and recognition. Before Bill Belichick became the four-time Super Bowl–winning head coach of the New England Patriots, he made his way up the ranks of the NFL by doing grunt work and making his superiors look good without getting any credit. When we are starting out in our pursuits we need to make an effort to trade short-term gratification for a long-term payoff. Submit under people who are already successful and learn and absorb everything you can. Forget credit.

10. Connect with nature and the universe at large. Going into nature is a powerful feeling and we need to tap into it as often as possible. Nothing draws us away from it more than material success. Go out there and reconnect with the world. Realize how small you are in relation to everything else. It’s what the French philosopher Pierre Hadot has referred to as the “oceanic feeling.” There is no ego standing beneath the giant redwoods or on the edge of a cliff or next to the crashing waves of the ocean.

11. Choose alive time over dead time. According to author Robert Greene, there are two types of time in our lives: dead time, when people are passive and waiting, and alive time, when people are learning and acting and utilizing every second. During failure, ego picks dead time. It fights back: I don’t want this. I want ______. I want it my way. It indulges in being angry, aggrieved, heartbroken. Don’t let it — choose alive time instead.

12. Get out of your own head. Writer Anne Lamott knows the dangers of the soundtrack we can play in our heads: “The endless stream of self-aggrandizement, the recitation of one’s specialness, of how much more open and gifted and brilliant and knowing and misunderstood and humble one is.” That’s what you could be hearing right now. Cut through that haze with courage and live with the tangible and real, no matter how uncomfortable.

13. Let go of control. The poisonous need to control everything and micromanage is usually revealed with success. Ego starts saying: it all must be done my way — even little things, even inconsequential things. The solution is straightforward. A smart man or woman must regularly remind themselves of the limits of their power and reach. It’s simple, but not easy.

14. Place the mission and purpose above you. During World War II, General George Marshall, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for the Marshall Plan, was practically offered the command of the troops on D-Day. Yet he told President Roosevelt: “The decision is yours, Mr. President; my wishes have nothing to do with the matter.” It came to be that Eisenhower led the invasion and performed with excellence. Marshall put the mission and purpose above himself — an act of selflessness we need to remind ourselves of.

15. When you find yourself in a hole — stop digging. “Act with fortitude and honor,” Alexander Hamilton wrote to a distraught friend in serious trouble of the man’s own making. “If you cannot reasonably hope for a favorable extrication, do not plunge deeper. Have the courage to make a full stop.” Our ego screams and rattles when it is wounded. We will then do anything to get out of trouble. Stop. Don’t make things worse. Don’t dig yourself further. Make a plan.

16. Don’t be deceived by recognition, money and success — stay sober.Success, money and power can intoxicate. What is required in those moments is sobriety and a refusal to indulge. One look at Angela Merkel, one of the most powerful women on the planet is revealing. She is plain and modest — one writer said that unpretentiousness is Merkel’s main weapon — unlike most world leaders intoxicated with position. Leave self-absorption and obsessing over one’s image for the egotists.

17. Leave your entitlement at the door. Right before he destroyed his own billion-dollar company, Ty Warner, creator of Beanie Babies, overrode the objections of one of his employees and bragged, “I could put the Ty heart on manure and they’d buy it!” You can see how this manifestation of ego can lead you to success — and how it can lead to downright failure.

18. Choose love. Martin Luther King understood that hate is like an “eroding acid that eats away the best and the objective center of your life.” Hatred is when ego turns a minor insult into a massive sore and it lashes out. But pause and ask: has hatred and lashing out ever helped anyone with anything? Don’t let it eat at you — choose love. Yes, love. See how much better you feel.

19. Pursue mastery in your chosen craft. When you are pursuing a craft you realize that the better you get, the humbler you are. Because you understand there’s always something you can learn and you are inherently humbled by this fascinating craft or career you’re after. It is hard to get a big head or become egotistical when you’ve decided on that path.

20. Keep an inner scorecard. Just because you won doesn’t mean you deservedto. We need to forget other people’s validation and external markers of success. Warren Buffett has advised keeping an inner scorecard versus the external one. Your potential, the absolute best you’re capable of — that’s the metric to measure yourself against.

21. Paranoia creates things to be paranoid about. “He who indulges empty fears earns himself real fears,” wrote Seneca, who as a political adviser witnessed destructive paranoia at the highest levels. If you let ego think that everyone is out to get you you will seem weak…and then people will really try to take advantage of you. Be strong, confident and forgiving.

22. Always stay a student. Put yourself in rooms where you’re the least knowledgeable person. Observe and learn. That uncomfortable feeling, that defensiveness that you feel when your most deeply held assumptions are challenged? Do it deliberately. Let it humble you. Remember how the physicist John Wheeler put it, “As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.”

23. No one can degrade you — they degrade themselves. Ego is sensitive about slights, insults and not getting their due. This is a waste of time. After Frederick Douglass was asked to ride in a baggage car because of his race, someone rushed to apologize for this mistreatment. Frederick’s reply? “They cannot degrade Frederick Douglass. The soul that is within me no man can degrade. I am not the one that is being degraded on account of this treatment, but those who are inflicting it upon me.”

24. Stop playing the image game — focus on a higher purpose. One of the best strategists of the last century, John Boyd, would ask the promising young acolytes under him: “To be or to do? Which way will you go?” That is, will you choose to fall in love with the image of how success looks like or will you focus on a higher purpose? Will you pick obsessing over your title, number of fans, size of paycheck or on real, tangible accomplishment? You know which way ego wants to go.

25. Focus on the effort — not the results. This is so important it is appearing twice. If you can accept that you control only the effort that goes in and not the results which come out, you will be mastering your ego. All work leaves our hands at some point. Ego wants to control everything — but it cannot control other people or their reactions. Focus on your end of the equation, leave them to theirs. Remember Goethe’s line: “What matters to an active man is to do the right thing; whether the right thing comes to pass should not bother him.”

This  was originally published  on Thought Catalog.

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A Stoic Guide To Navigating The Modern Workplace

The image of the Zen philosopher is the monk up in the green, quiet hills, or in a beautiful temple on some rocky cliff. The Stoic, on the other hand, is the antithesis of this idea. The Stoic is the man in the marketplace, the merchant on a voyage, the senator in the Forum, the soldier at the front. In other words, they are like you.

Those jobs might not seem like one well-suited for “philosophy,” but they are. And so are you. For in even the most modern seeming professions, a Stoic is able to find peace and clarity. For thousands of years, Stoicism has been a tool for the ordinary and the elite alive — from slaves to emperors — as they sought wisdom, strength and the ‘good life.’ It was philosophy designed for action — for doers — not for the classroom.

Which is why it has been popular with everyone from Marcus Aurelius and Seneca (one of the richest men in Rome), to Theodore Roosevelt, Frederick the Great and Michel de Montaigne. More recently, Stoicism has been cited by investors like Tim Ferriss and executives like Jonathan Newhouse, the CEO of Condé Nast International. Even football coaches like Pete Carroll of the Seattle Seahawks and baseball managers like Jeff Banister of the Texas Rangers have recommended Stoicism to their players.

How can we follow in their timeless footsteps? How can we reap the benefits of this operating system in our own workplace? It’s simple. Go to straight to the sources. Below are Stoic exercises and strategies, pulled from the new book The Daily Stoic (and daily email at DailyStoic.com), that will help you navigate your workplace with better clarity, effectiveness, and peace of mind.

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DON’T MAKE THINGS HARDER THAN THEY NEED TO BE

“If someone asks you how to write your name, would you bark out each letter? And if they get angry, would you then return the anger? Wouldn’t you rather gently spell out each letter for them? So then, remember in life that your duties are the sum of individual acts. Pay attention to each of these as you do your duty . . . just methodically complete your task.”

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6.26

Here’s a common scenario. You’re working with a frustrating coworker or a difficult boss. They ask you to do something and, because you dislike the messenger, you immediately object. There’s this problem or that one, or their request is obnoxious and rude. So you tell them, “No, I’m not going to do it.” Then they retaliate by not doing something that you had previously asked of them. And so the conflict escalates.

Meanwhile, if you could step back and see it objectively, you’d probably see that not everything they’re asking for is unreasonable. In fact, some of it is pretty easy to do or is, at least, agreeable. And if you did it, it might make the rest of the tasks a bit more tolerable too. Pretty soon, you’ve done the entire thing.

Life (and our job) is difficult enough. Let’s not make it harder by getting emotional about insignificant matters or digging in for battles we don’t actually care about. Let’s not let emotion get in the way of kathêkon, the simple, appropriate actions on the path to virtue.

IMPOSSIBLE WITHOUT YOUR CONSENT

“Today I escaped from the crush of circumstances, or better put, I threw them out, for the crush wasn’t from outside me but in my own assumptions.”

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 9.13

On tough days we might say, “My work is overwhelming,” or “My boss is really frustrating.” If only we could understand that this is impossible. Someone can’t frustrate you, work can’t overwhelm you-these are external objects, and they have no access to your mind. Those emotions you feel, as real as they are, come from the inside, not the outside.

The Stoics use the word hypolêpsis, which means “taking up” — of perceptions, thoughts, and judgments by our mind. What we assume, what we willingly generate in our mind, that’s on us. We can’t blame other people for making us feel stressed or frustrated any more than we can blame them for our jealousy. The cause is within us. They’re just the target.

A PROPER FRAME OF MIND

“Frame your thoughts like this — you are an old person, you won’t let yourself be enslaved by this any longer, no longer pulled like a puppet by every impulse, and you’ll stop complaining about your present fortune or dreading the future.”

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 2.2

We resent the person who comes in and tries to boss us around. Don’t tell me how to dress, how to think, how to do my job, how to live. This is because we are independent, self-sufficient people.

Or at least that’s what we tell ourselves.

Yet if someone says something we disagree with, something inside us tells us we have to argue with them. If there’s a plate of cookies in front of us, we have to eat them. If someone does something we dislike, we have to get mad about it. When something bad happens, we have to be sad, depressed, or worried. But if something good happens a few minutes later, all of a sudden we’re happy, excited, and want more.

We would never let another person jerk us around the way we let our impulses do. It’s time we start seeing it that way — that we’re not puppets that can be made to dance this way or that way just because we feel like it. We should be the ones in control, not our emotions, because we are independent, self-sufficient people.

KEEP IT SIMPLE

“At every moment keep a sturdy mind on the task at hand, as a Roman and human being, doing it with strict and simple dignity, affection, freedom, and justice — giving yourself a break from all other considerations. You can do this if you approach each task as if it is your last, giving up every distraction, emotional subversion of reason, and all drama, vanity, and complaint over your fair share. You can see how mastery over a few things makes it possible to live an abundant and devout life — for, if you keep watch over these things, the gods won’t ask for more.”

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 2.5

Each day presents the chance to overthink things. What should I wear? Do they like me? Am I eating well enough? What’s next for me in life? Is my boss happy with my work?

Today, let’s focus just on what’s in front of us. We’ll follow the dictum that New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick gives his players: “Do your job.” Like a Roman, like a good soldier, like a master of our craft. We don’t need to get lost in a thousand other distractions or in other people’s business.

Marcus says to approach each task as if it were your last, because it very well could be. And even if it isn’t, botching what’s right in front of you doesn’t help anything. Find clarity in the simplicity of doing

NEVER DO ANYTHING OUT OF HABIT

“So in the majority of other things, we address circumstances not in accordance with the right assumptions, but mostly by following wretched habit. Since all that I’ve said is the case, the person in training must seek to rise above, so as to stop seeking out pleasure and steering away from pain; to stop clinging to living and abhorring death; and in the case of property and money, to stop valuing receiving over giving.”

— Musonius Rufus, Lectures, 6.25.5–11

A worker is asked: “Why did you do it this way?” The answer, “Because that’s the way we’ve always done things.” The answer frustrates every good boss and sets the mouth of every entrepreneur watering. The worker has stopped thinking and is mindlessly operating out of habit. The business is ripe for disruption by a competitor, and the worker will probably get fired by any thinking boss.

We should apply the same ruthlessness to our own habits. In fact, we are studying philosophy precisely to break ourselves of rote behavior. Find what you do out of rote memory or routine. Ask yourself: Is this really the best way to do it? Know why you do what you do — do it for the right reasons.

YOUR CAREER IS NOT A LIFE SENTENCE

“How disgraceful is the lawyer whose dying breath passes while at court, at an advanced age, pleading for unknown litigants and still seeking the approval of ignorant spectators.”

— Seneca, On the Shortness of Life, 20.2

Every few years, a sad spectacle is played out in the news. An old millionaire, still lord of his business empire, is taken to court. Shareholders and family members go to court to argue that he is no longer mentally competent to make decisions — that the patriarch is not fit to run his own company and legal affairs. Because this powerful person refused to ever relinquish control or develop a succession plan, he is subjected to one of life’s worst humiliations: the public exposure of his most private vulnerabilities.

We must not get so wrapped up in our work that we think we’re immune from the reality of aging and life. Who wants to be the person who can never let go? Is there so little meaning in your life that your only pursuit is work until you’re eventually carted off in a coffin?

Take pride in your work. But it is not all.

PROTECT YOUR PEACE OF MIND

“Keep constant guard over your perceptions, for it is no small thing you are protecting, but your respect, trustworthiness and steadi- ness, peace of mind, freedom from pain and fear, in a word your freedom. For what would you sell these things?”

— Epictetus, Discourses, 4.3.6b–8

The dysfunctional job that stresses you out, a contentious relationship, life in the spotlight. Stoicism, because it helps us manage and think through our emotional reactions, can make these kinds of situations easier to bear. It can help you manage and mitigate the triggers that seem to be so constantly tripped.

But here’s a question: Why are you subjecting yourself to this? Is this really the environment you were made for? To be provoked by nasty emails and an endless parade of workplace problems? Our adrenal glands can handle only so much before they become exhausted. Shouldn’t you preserve them for life-and-death situations?

So yes, use Stoicism to manage these difficulties. But don’t forget to ask: Is this really the life I want? Every time you get upset, a little bit of life leaves the body. Are these really the things on which you want to spend that priceless resource? Don’t be afraid to make a change — a big one.

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