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24 Books To Hone Your Strategic Mind

Strategy isn’t something that’s taught well in school. Hell, most people probably couldn’t tell you the difference between “strategy” and “tactics” (or even know there is a difference.)

This is unfortunate, because strategy is something that is critically relevant to all of us – not just those with careers in the military. We all have goals, we all have obstacles to those goals and we all live in a world we do not control. Those things combine to create the necessity of strategy.

The better we are at it – the better we are at doing what we want and need to do.

How do I accomplish what I need to accomplish? How do I find my way, deliberately, instead of stumbling around, in a reactionary fashion? Too many of us live our lives in a sort of haze, acting without a plan or guidance. Too many of us make unnecessary mistakes (costly ones at that), because we lack the ability to craft a strategic vision and a plan.

Like I said, this isn’t exactly our fault. No one taught us explicitly how to do things differently. But the good news is that such instruction is out there. Wise thinkers have been writing and teaching strategic expertise for thousands of years. The problem is knowing where to start.

In this list I want to give you some of the best (and most accessible) books, essays and documents about strategy. Used properly they will help you craft your strategic mind. You were born to be a strategist, it’s up to you to become that destiny.

1. History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides

This book – of a long forgotten war – really functions as a biography and strategic analysis of some of the greatest minds in the history of war. We have Pericles, Brasidas, Alcibiades and many others.

The anecdotes and the stories in this book are timeless. If you make your way all the way through it, I promise you will not forget it. Because the war was so long, involved so many different countries and was so varied (sea, land, siege, politics), it basically covers every type of situation you can think of.

Think of this book as a textbook. Read it. (But it is dense so if you need some help, try this.)

2 & 3. Rules for Radicals, Reveille for Radicals by Saul Alinsky

Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama studied Alinsky extensively as they mapped their individual paths to power. He is the real originator of the concept of community organization.

Alinsky was also a die hard pragmatist, a man who had ideals but also a sense for working with and through the system to get what he needed. In fact, his best examples in these books is actually how to use the system against itself to get what he needed. These two books are classics and woefully underrated. Read them now.

4. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro

This is probably the most definitive and comprehensive narrative of power ever written.

It maps the entire career of the city planner Robert Moses. I know that doesn’t seem like a particularly illustrative case study for power and strategy but Robert Moses lived power. He controlled the expansion and the building of civilization’s most advanced and important city–and he did it because he was a strategic genius (and of course, a power addict).

This book will take weeks to read but it will stick with you forever. After you are done, I promise you will not forget or ever underestimate the importance of hidden influence, power and levers again.

4 & 5. The 33 Strategies of War, The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene

Of course, I am biased because I trained under Robert. But if I had not, these books still would have given me a priceless education (as they have for millions of other people).

Robert is a crack researcher and storyteller – he has a profound ability to explain timeless truths through story and example. You can read the classics and not always understand the lessons. But if you read Robert’s books, I promise you will leave not just with actionable lessons but an indelible sense of what to do in many trying and confusion situations. Also the extra benefit of reading Robert is that you get mini-bios of strategic geniuses like Napoleon, Edison, Machiavelli, Caesar, Cortez, and others.

6. How To Profit By One’s Enemies by Plutarch

This short essay from Plutarch is about an important strategic (and life) lesson. Our enemies and our obstacles are always teaching us. There is always some lesson or advantage we can derive from them. But we must make ourselves open to this. We must cultivate an attitude that welcomes these lessons rather than fights against them.

7. The Works of BH Liddell Hart

I recommend ALL of Hart’s books, from Strategy to Why Don’t We Learn From History to his excellent biographies of strategic geniuses like William T. Sherman.

Like Greene, Hart has the ability to communicate and explain timeless truths about strategy and power. Reading one of his books is the equivalent of reading many other primary texts because he so expertly synthesizes and communicates what lies within them. He is also eminently quotable–which makes the lessons that much easier to recall. For instance, he reduced Sherman down to a simple line: Attack along the line of least expectation, and tactically along the line of least resistance.

8. Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War by Robert Coram

Boyd was a world class fighter pilot who changed warfare and strategy not just in the air, but on the ground and by sea. His concepts pioneered the modern concept of maneuver warfare (and were used for the First Gulf War). His method of problem solving and problem analysis – known as the OODA Loop – is now used in boardrooms and everywhere else. He also perfected the art of “Getting Things Done” whether that was in war or in the bureaucracy of the Pentagon. You need to know and understand John Boyd.

9. The Book of Five Rings by Musashi

Musashi was a different kind of strategist, which is why his book is so important. Most of us won’t find ourselves leading armies anytime soon. As a swordsman, Musashi fought mostly by himself, for himself. His strategic wisdom, therefore, is mostly internal. It’s about the mindset, the discipline, and the perception necessary to win in life or death situations. He tells you how to outthink and outmaneuver your enemies. He tells you how to fend for yourself. And isn’t that precisely what so many of us need help with everyday?

10. The Prince by Machiavelli

Of course, this is a must read. Machiavelli is one of those figures and writers who is tragically overrated and underrated at the same time. Unfortunately that means that many people who read him miss the point and other people avoid him and miss out altogether. Take Machiavelli slow, and really read him. Also understand the man behind the book–not just as a masterful writer but a man who withstood heinous torture and exile with barely a whimper.

Machiavelli is a glimpse into a time when power was literal and out for public viewing–when he talks about making an example of someone, he doesn’t mean calling them out, he means putting their head on a pike. Don’t let that scare you because we’re not as far from that world as we’d like to think. Deny that at your own peril.

11. The Strategy Paradox: Why Committing to Success Leads to Failure (And What to do About It) by Michael Raynor

I don’t have a lot of modern books on this list, but this is an excellent one.

We tend to wrongly think that strategy is about coming up with a genius plan and then committing to it. In fact, this is often a recipe for disaster, particularly in business.

Though success often requires a total investment in a particular strategy, this is also the recipe for extreme failure. It’s a paradox.

Michael Raynor’s book has important thoughts on this inherent paradox as well as approaches for mitigating and avoiding it.

12. Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success by Phil Jackson

Phil Jackson is a master strategist and leader. You don’t win 13 championships in multiple cities if you’re not.

What’s interesting about Jackson’s approach is how eastern it is–he guides by giving up control, he leads by encouraging other leaders, he favors movement over resistance. He has articulated these concepts in an incredibly accessible way in his most recent book and I strongly suggest everyone read it.

13 & 14. Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate — The Essential Guide for Progressives by George Lakoff and Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear by Frank Luntz

These two books are the two best books of political thinking and theater from both the left and the right.

Regardless of ideologies, both are experts in influencing and leading public perception through image and words. It actually matters whether we’re talking about illegal immigrants or undocumented workers, or whether we describe the problem as climate change or global warming.

Strategists need to understand the power of language and framing–it doesn’t matter how right you are, if you lose this battle it can be impossible to rally people to your cause. Read both these books.

15. Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow

I just finished this book and, goddamn, Washington’s status as an icon shamefully understates his genius as a strategist.

The man had an impeccable intuition for timing, for gestures, for politics, for the moment to strike, not just on the battlefield but in relationships, in office and in his private life.

We must study Washington not only for his nearly unbelievable military victory over a superior British Army, but also for his strategic vision which quite literally was responsible for many of the most enduring American institutions and practices.

I admit this book is long, but it is so good. It is packed with illustrative examples, analysis and stories. Read it.

16 & 17. The Art of War by Sun-Tzu and On War by Carl Von Clausewitz

I know this will offend many strategy purists, but for most audiences I recommend these two books only with a pretty strong disclaimer.

While both are clearly full of strategic wisdom, they are hard to separate from their respective eras and brands of warfare. As budding strategists in business and in life, most of us are really looking for advice that can help us with our own problems. The reality is that Napoleonic warfare does not exactly have its equivalents in today’s society.

On the other hand, Sun-Tzu is so aphoristic that it’s hard to say what is concrete advice and what is just common sense. But the books are so convincing that you might still end up leaving thinking that they can be easily applied. So, again, check these books out if you’re really interested, but I think some of the other books are much better places to start.

18. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard B. Thaler & Cass R. Sunstein

This might feel like a weird book to include, but I think it presents another side of strategy that is too often forgotten.

It’s not always about bold actors and strategic thrusts. Sometimes strategy is about subtle influence. Sometimes it is framing and small tweaks that change behavior.

We can have big aims, but get there with little moves. This book has excellent examples of that kind of thinking and how it is changing politics, government and business. My favorite example is about the bumblebee that they started putting on urinals–which drastically reduced the amount of spray and spillage because it changed where men aimed when they peed. It’s not exactly the coolest strategy but it solved a problem. So we can learn from it.

19. Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Past 25 Years by Paul B. Carroll & Chunka Mui

I am putting this book on here as a cautionary tale for all the supposed business strategists out there. Because it turns out that most (if not all) genius business strategies are totally misguided and lead to catastrophic failure.

Your planned merger, roll up, pivot–it’s probably got glaring strategic flaws in it. Why? Because you’re too caught up in your own vision to see what can go wrong, to see where you’ve been overly optimistic, to accept how little you control.

Pairing this book with some of the books on war is a good idea. It will humble you and keep you conservative–which all good strategists are. “Boldness” should be used sparingly because it’s often actually just stupidity in disguise.

20, 21 & 22. The Big Con: The Story of Confidence Men, Whiz Mob: A Correlation of the Technical Argot of Pickpockets with Their Behavior Pattern by David W. Maurer and The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists by Neil Strauss

It probably seems weird to recommend books on pickup artists, pick pockets and con men (nor am I necessarily equating the three groups) but it fits.

Though I would accept that most of what these guys do is tactical rather than strategic—they are still quite excellent at identifying opportunities and weaving such flawless, enveloping plans that the marks often have no idea that anything is actually occurring.

A favorite con example is the one where the con man sets up a fake boxing match that he agrees to “fix” with his mark. Taking the marks money, he then fakes the fake boxing match so that it appears that one boxers kills the other in the ring. He and the mark then flee the scene in opposite direction to avoid the police–the mark thinking he got away with murder, when really he was robbed.

The Game is about seduction, literally, but the other two books are about seduction in their own way as well. These books are all classics and will help you, no matter what you do.

23 & 24. The Memoirs of Ulysses S Grant and Williams T. Sherman(Library of America)

These two men won the Civil War despite numerous obstacles.

In many ways, the war was the South’s to lose–they possessed all the territory they wanted at the beginning of the war, they faced a divided enemy, and all they had to do was wait the North out.

The America we live in today is what it is because of the strategic genius and partnership of the Grant and Sherman. Sherman understood the grand strategy of the war–that it depended on crushing the morale of the Southern cause. Grant understand and held the determination required to muddle through battle after battle (along with the destructive politics).

Sherman’s march through the South was a masterwork of planning and vision. Grant’s slow maneuvering of Lee, meant that Lee (who I think is massively overrated) could do nothing to stop it. These two books, written by the men themselves, are about totally unique and priceless historical documents.

***

Strategy is a rabbit hole that never ends. I am not saying that my list is conclusion–I know it doesn’t even come close. I am just trying to get you started.

I hope these books help. I hope they begin to bring out the strategist inside you. Because there is one there–and whatever you’re working on it will benefit from cultivating that side of yourself.

Now get reading and then get working. Because every word you read in these books become more valuable the more experience you combine it with. Don’t just read about strategy, live it.

This post appeared originally on Thought Catalog. 

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An ancient guide to solving all work problems once and for all

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 ones well-suited for “philosophy,” but they are. And so are you. For in even the most modern seeming professions, a Stoic is able to achieve 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 a 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 straight to the sources. Below are 7 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.

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 Brevity 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.

For a bit of Stoic wisdom every single day right in your inbox, sign up for the Daily Stoic email. Over the first 7 days you will also receive a number of bonuses including an introduction to Stoicism, the best books and resources to read, Stoic exercises and much more!

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100 Things I Learned in 10 Years and 100 Reads of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations

Almost exactly ten years ago, I bought the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius on Amazon. Amazon Prime didn’t exist then and to qualify for free shipping, I had to purchase a few other books at the same time. Two or three days later they all arrived.

It’s a medium sized paperback, mostly white with a golden spine. On the cover Marcus is shown in relief, pardoning the barbarians. “Here, for our age, is Marcus’s great work,” says Robert Fagles in his blurb. I was 19 years old. I didn’t know who Marcus Aurelius was (besides the old guy in Gladiator) and I certainly didn’t know who Robert Fagles or Gregory Hays, the translator, was. But something drew me to this book almost immediately. I suppose it was luck that brought me to the specific translation I’d chosen (Modern Library Edition)—though the Stoics would call it fated—but what arrived would change my life.

It would be for me, what Tyler Cowen would call a “a quake book,” shaking everything I thought I knew about the world (however little that actually was). I would also become what Stephen Marche has referred to as a “centireader,” reading Marcus Aurelius well over 100 times across multiple editions and copies.

In the course of those readings and my study of stoicism, a lot has changed. Marcus Aurelius has guided me through breakups and getting married, through being relatively young and poor and relatively older and well-off. His wisdom has helped me with getting fired and with quitting, with success and with struggles. I’ve carried him to close to a dozen countries and moved him to multiple houses. I’ve turned to him for articles and books and casual dinner conversation. The one pristine white cover is now its own shade of tan, but with every read, every time I’ve touched the book, I’ve gotten something new or been reminded of something timeless and important.

Now with the release of my own translation and compendium, The Daily Stoic (and a daily email newsletter at DailyStoic.com), I wanted to take the time to reflect on what I’ve learned in ten years with one of the greatest and most unique pieces of literature ever created.

-It was the opening passage of Book 5—about our reluctance to get out of bed and get moving in the morning—that struck me most on my first read. As you can see, I wrote “FUCK” with a highlighter and you can see how important that passage was to me at the time in a 2007 blog post. Later, I would print out this passage and put it next to my desk and bed. I think it was that as a college student I needed that extra motivation. I was a little lazy and entitled. I needed to seize life and take advantage of it—and Marcus served me well in that regard for a long time.

-Though I will say that today, I think less about the passage that motivates me to do more and be more active. If I was to put a different one on my desk, I’d choose from Book Ten, “If you seek tranquility, do less.”

-In my first read of Meditations, I highlighted the line “It can ruin your life only if it ruins your character.” In a later read I added brackets around that line, just for more emphasis. And I underlined in pen what came after, “Otherwise, it cannot harm you—inside or out.”

-Pages XXVI and XXV of Hays’s introduction is where I was first introduced to the distillation of Stoicism into three distinct disciplines (perception, action, will). It was this order that eventually shaped both The Obstacle is the Way and The Daily Stoic. When I get asked to explain the three disciplines, this is usually my short answer: See things for what they are. Do what we can. Endure and bear what we must.

-Hays’s introduction also lists Alexander Pope, Goethe and William Alexander Percy as students and fans of Marcus Aurelius. Reading works by all of these individuals—especially Percy (and his adopted son, Walker Percy)—sent me down a rabbit hole that would be one of the most enjoyable of my reading life. I encourage everyone to read Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee.

-In Book Four, Marcus reminds himself to think about all the doctors who “died, after furrowing their brows over how many deathbeds, how many astrologers, after pompous forecasts about other’s ends.” In black pen—somewhat recently it looks like—I added “or plotters, schemers and strategists, outsmarted, outmaneuvered and destroyed.” I suppose that was a dig at myself and other smart people. None of what we do lasts, no matter how clever or brilliant. It’s good to remember that.

-“So we throw out other people’s recognition. What’s left for us to prize?” I answer in blue pen in one read, “To embrace and to resist our nature.” What do I—what did Marcus—mean by that? I think it’s encouraging what is good about us and to fight against what is bad. To encourage the parts of ourselves that are moral, helpful, honest and aware and to fight against what is selfish, petty, shortsighted and wrong. It’s to live by what Warren Buffett calls the “inner scorecard” and ignore the outer one (other people’s recognition).

-In that same passage, Marcus also writes “If you can’t stop prizing a lot of other things? Then you’ll never be free—free, independent, imperturbable.” I have in my copy a jotted note from Fight Club, “Only when you’ve lost everything, you are free to do anything.”

-When I first read Meditations, I was in the middle of some ridiculous drama with my college roommates. I won’t bore you with the details, but at the time, I was frustrated, disappointed and miserable about where I was living. I think this was the reason that I latched on the the meditation in Book Six, about how if you were sparring with someone and they hurt you, you wouldn’t yell at them or whine or hold it against them—you’d just make a mental note about it and act accordingly in the future. I can see where I actually wrote the name of my roommates down to explicitly make this connection. “Do not hate them,” I wrote to myself, “remain aloof.”

-I said earlier that all I’d originally known of Marcus Aurelius was that he was the “old guy in Gladiator.” Future research taught me that depiction was even more interesting than the movie presented. First off, Maximus (Russell Crowe’s character) was based on a real Roman story—the general Cincinnatus, who saved Rome but wanted simply to return to his farm. Second, Marcus’s son Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) was real too—and probably even more horrible in real life. He was in fact, killed by a gladiator and he did enjoy torturing and hurting people. It makes you think: How could such a great man have had such an awful son? What does that say about his teachings?

-Marcus writes “Mastery of reading and writing requires a master. Still, more so life.” I wrote “Tucker, R.G” in the margins next to that passage. R.G stands for Robert Greene—who was and is my master in writing and, more, in life. Tucker refers to Tucker Max, who was a mentor of mine in writing and business. It occurs to me now that I understood this passage only partway—I was focused on the first half, when really the “more so life” line is the most important. Understanding this could have saved me a lot of trouble.

-In Book Twelve, as Meditations is wrapping up, Marcus writes “It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.” This passage struck me early on, I can tell. But it struck me hardest in 2014, when I was re-reading the passage. I know this because I wrote an article with that line as the title, as I was dealing with the fact that my book had just been snubbed by the New York Times Bestseller list and I was dealing with the fallout. It was helpful to ask: Why do I care what these people think again? Why does their opinion matter to me? Understanding the words is not always enough, sometimes we have to really feel them—to have their meaning forced upon us. This was one of those events.

-Going back through my copy to write this post, I found a white notecard with some bullet points written on it. At first I couldn’t figure out what these were about. Then I realized they were notes I’d written down before my conversation with Greg Bishop, a reporter for Sports Illustrated, when he interviewed me for a story he was doing on stoicism and the NFL. One bullet is a line from Arnold Schwarzenegger, “always stronger that we think we know.”

-On what I would guess is my third or fourth read, I marked this passage: “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” There are not many reminders of your own mortality at 20. This was one of my first.

-There’s no question that for every first time reader of Meditations, it’s the opening line of Book Two is one of the most striking: “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly.”

-And then the passage which follows is great—if not a bit contradictory: “Throw away your books; stop letting yourself be distracted.” Did he mean the very book I was reading?

-One of my favorite lines: “To accept without arrogance, to let it go with indifference.” Another translation of the same: “Receive without pride, let go without attachment.”

-In one passage, Marcus justifies his love of art. He points out that tragedies (plays) help remind us of what can happen in life. He also makes an interesting point—“If something gives you pleasure on that stage, it shouldn’t cause you anger on this one.” If you can appreciate it in fiction, you can appreciate it in life—and learn from both.

-In Book Five, I learned what philosophy really was. It’s not an “instructor,” as Marcus put it. It’s not the courses I was taking in school. It is medicine. It’s “a soothing ointment, a warm lotion.” It’s designed to help us deal with the difficulties of life—to heal, as Epicurus said, the suffering of man.

-It wasn’t until last week, re-reading Marcus that I noticed the word “stillness” as it appears in Book Six, 7: “To move from one unselfish action to another with God in mind. Only there, delight and stillness.” Stillness was something I had been thinking about a lot—how to find it, how to get it, why it’s superior to activity. I was looking for it in Eastern texts and here it has been in Stoicism the entire time.

-Book Nine, 6 I found not only a potential epigraph for my book The Obstacle is the Way (which I noted in blue pen in 2013) but the best possible summation of Stoicism there is:

“Objective judgement, now, at this very moment.

Unselfish action, now, at this very moment.

Willing acceptance—now, at this very moment—of all external events.

That’s all you need.”

-At some point after I read the Hays translation, I picked up another translation of Marcus—probably one by George Long or A. S. L. Farquharson, that was free online. I was immediately struck by how the beautiful, lyrical book I loved had become dense and unreadable. It struck me that if I had cheaped out and tried to get for free what I’d bought instead, my entire life might have turned out differently. Books are investments. Be glad to put in your money.

-Marcus has a wonderful phrase for the approval and cheering of other people. He calls it “the clacking of tongues”—that’s all public appraise is, he says. Anyone that works in the public eye, who puts their work or their life out there for consumption, could use to remember this phrase.

–“Often injustice lies in what you aren’t doing, not only in what you are doing.” Or, as we say more modernly, ‘The only thing required for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing…’

-Don’t try to get even with other people, Marcus says at one point. Just don’t be like that.

-“The student as a boxer, not a fencer.” Why? Because the fencer has a weapon they must pick up. A boxer’s weapons are a part of him, he and the weapon are one. Same goes for knowledge, philosophy and wisdom.

-Marcus commands himself to winnow his thoughts. He has a great standard. If someone were to ask you right now, “What are you thinking about?” could you give a concise answer? If not, you’re daydreaming and wandering too much.

-“It stares you right in the face,” Marcus writes. “No role is so well suited to philosophy as the one you happen to be in right now.” Was he referring specifically to the role of emperor? Did he mean that any and every role is the perfect one for philosophy? I prefer to think it is the latter.

-I’ve been lucky enough that some generous fans have sent me rare old copies of Meditations. They’re falling apart, worn with age. It strikes me what a Stoic would have thought if given a book that was then a couple hundred years old. They’d think about the person who owned it and what became of them (dead), they’d think about all the things the person did other than study philosophy (mostly pointless stuff), and they’d also think of the difficult times that the wisdom contained within may have helped them (which is what I think now). And then they’d consider how we are all subject to the rhythm of events and that someone may pick up this book after them and have the same thoughts.

-Going through one copy of the Hays translation a few years ago, I found a receipt. It said January 2007 and it was from a Borders in Riverside, California. I’d bought mine on Amazon, so I knew it wasn’t mine. Then I realized, this was my wife’s copy. She’d bought the book shortly after we’d met, on my recommendation. That she’d read it after I mentioned it in passing, made me think our feelings might be mutual. It was one of the first things we’d connected over. Ten years later we are still together.

-In Gregory Hays’s intro he says that “an American president” claims to re-read Marcus Aurelius every year. Some research turned up that Bill Clinton was that president. Was that where I got the idea to keep reading and re-reading the book? To use it as a reminder of all the lessons that success would bring?

-Absolute power corrupts absolutely is what we say. But Marcus had absolute power. To me, his writing and his life are proof that the right principles and the right discipline—if followed rigorously—can help buck this timeless trend.

-Marcus reminded himself: “Don’t await the perfection of Plato’s Republic.” He wasn’t expecting the world to be exactly the way he wanted it to be, but Marcus knew instinctively, as the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper would later write, that “he alone can do good who knows what things are like and what their situation is.”

-It’s funny to think that his writings may be as special as they are because they were never intended for us to be read. Almost every other piece of literature is a kind of performance—it’s made for the audience. Meditations isn’t. In fact, their original title (Ta eis heauton) roughly translates as To Himself.

-It’s also interesting to think that we have no idea if the meditations were once ordered differently. All we have now are translations of translations—no original writing from his hand survives. It all could have been arranged in an entirely different format originally (Did all the books have titles originally—as the first two do? Are those titles made up? Were they all numbered originally? Or were even the breaks between thoughts added in by a later translator?)

-Who hasn’t used the expressions “I’ll be honest with you” or “With all due respect” or “I’ll be straight with you.” It wasn’t until I read Marcus’s specific condemnation of these phrases that I really thought about what they were saying—honesty, respect, straightforwardness should be the default. If you have to specifically preface your remarks with it, that’s a sign something is wrong with your normal speech and your normal habits.

-“But if you accept the obstacle and work with what you’re given, an alternative will present itself—another piece of what you’re trying to assemble. Action by action.” There’s no question that we’re going to be stopped from what we’d like to do, or even desperately need to do from time to time. Money will be lost. Plans will be frustrated. Long held dreams will be broken. People (including us) will be hurt. And yet, as bad as these situations are and will be, I think you’ll have to admit, they don’t prevent everything. You can still practice honesty, forgiveness, friendship, patience, humility, good spirit, resilience, creativity, and on and on.

-It must have been many reads in before I came to understand that many of the admonishments—Don’t waste time, Don’t lose your temper, Stop getting caught up in things that don’t matter—must be there because Marcus had recently done the exact opposite. Remember, this was essentially his journal, the meditations are reflections written after a long hard day. They are not abstractions, they are notes on what he can do better next time.

-There is a line in Joseph Brodsky’s essay about the famous equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius (which I went to Rome a few years ago to see). “If Meditations is antiquity,” he says, “then it is we who are the ruins.” What I think he means by that is that when you compare the strength and power and rigorous self-honesty of Marcus’s writings to now, all you can feel is a sense of decay. It feels like we have regressed instead of progressed.

-A great rhetorical exercise from Marcus goes essentially like this: “Is a world without shameless people possible? No. So this person you’ve just met is one of them. Get over it.” It’s a good thing to remember every time you meet someone who frustrates or bothers you.

-One of the benefits of reading a book so many times is that it starts to feel like it’s following you everywhere. It’s like when you get a new car and all of a sudden you start seeing that car everywhere—it’s like you and those drivers are suddenly on the same time. I remember reading East of Eden shortly after Meditations, and guess who is quoted everywhere? Then I read John Stuart Mill, and Marcus appeared again. Then on a trip to New York City I was walking up 41 St and there’s a plaque with a quote from Marcus. It’s one of the most amazing feelings, you find the thread of the work everywhere and it’s like you’re both on the same team, with the same message to propagate.

-One of the most practical things I’ve learned from the Stoics is an exercise I’ve come to call “contemptuous expressions.” I love how Marcus would take fancy things and describe them in almost cynical, dismissive language—roasted meat is a dead animal and vintage wine is old, fermented grapes. He even describes the Emperor’s purple cloak as just a piece of fabric dyed with shellfish blood. The aim was to see these things as they really are, to “strip away the legend that encrusts them.” I try to use this exercise every day.

-The short lines are the best:

 

“Discard your misperceptions.

Stop being jerked like a puppet.

Limit yourself to the present.”

 

-Imagine the emperor of Rome, with his captive audience and unlimited power, telling himself not to be a person of “too many words and too many deeds.” How great is that? How inspiring?

-It wasn’t until working with Steve Hanselman on the translations in The Daily Stoic that I was made aware of just how malleable translation was. I assumed that Hays was capturing the inherent beauty in Marcus. In some sense he was, but he was also choosing to write beautifully—someone could just as easily decide to be blunt and literal. It gave me a new appreciation for the art of translation—and how much room for interpretation there is in all of it.

-If there was one translation I would love to read it would be the late Pierre Hadot’s. In his excellent book The Inner Citadel about Marcus Aurelius and Stoicism, Hadot did original translations for the passages he quotes—but sadly he died without publishing a full translation of Marcus for wider consumption.

-It was in reading Hadot that I first got an explicit explanation of what he calls “turning obstacles upside down.” I’d obviously read the original passage he quotes several times in Hays, but Hadot’s translation was different, it made it clearer. The original title of my book was “Turning Obstacles Upside Down.” It was only in reading The Dictionary of Modern Proverbs that I found the Zen saying, “The obstacle is the path” that I was able to combine it all and come up with the book.

-“Everything lasts for a day, the one who remembers and the remembered.” That means something special coming from a guy whose face you can still see on Roman coins you can buy on Etsy.

-From Marcus I learned who Heraclitus was (Marcus quotes him a lot). “No man steps in the same river twice,” is one of the line he quotes. What a beautiful idea. I loved it so much that when I was in college I added a special “Quote of the Week” section to the student newspaper—just so I could use it.

-After I read Marcus, I immediately read Epictetus (Lebell’s The Art of Living translation), then Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic, then back to the Penguin translation of Epictetus, then Seneca’s On The Shortness of Life. It’s been a ten year journey now, and I still feel like I am at the very beginning of it. Or at least, there is so much further left to go.

-How crazy is it that not only does Marcus’s “journal” survive to us, so do the letters between him and his rhetoric teacher, Cornelius Fronto? The Stoics might say that such an event was “fated” but I’d say we are incredibly lucky that chance did not destroy these documents and deprive humanity of them.

-Marcus talks about the logos—essentially the force of the universe—repeatedly. That word seemed familiar to me when I first read it. Then I made the connection, Viktor Frankl, the psychologist and Holocaust survivor named his school of psychology logotherapy.

-Still, I was a bit confused as to what the logos was. Hays—and many writers—have used the analogy of a dog tied to a cart to explain our connection to the logos. The cart (the logos) is moving and we are pulled behind it. We have a little slack to move here and there, but not much.

-I think instinctively at 19 years old, I rejected this idea. Predetermination? No free will? Please. That sounded religious. College kids are often attracted to atheism for precisely the freedom and empowerment it implies. But as I have gotten older, I’ve started to understand how much we are shaped by chance and forces beyond our control. It strikes me, then, that the debate is not whether we are in fact the dog tied to the moving cart but rather, just how long the rope is? How much room to we have to explore and determine our own pace? A lot? A little?

-Marcus’s Meditations are filled with self-criticism. It’s important to remember, however, that that’s as far as it goes. There was no self-flagellation, no paying penance, no self-esteem issues from guilt or self-loathing. This self-criticism is constructive.

-There is a passage is Marcus where he talks about sitting next to a smelly, rude person. It must have been just a couple months after I first read that that I was on a flight from Long Beach to New York. I was stuck in the middle seat. The person next to me was horrible. They were imposing in my space. They were being obnoxious. I was stewing. Then this hit me: Either I say something or I let it go. All the anger left me. I went back to what I was doing. I probably think of that line every other time I get on a plane now.

-As a reminder of the man and the principles in the book, I ended up buying a marble bust of Marcus carved in 1840 that sits on my desk where I can see it daily. It’s probably the most expensive piece of “art” I own—it cost $900. But for the reminders it’s given me and the calming presence it has had, it’s worth every penny. To think that 3 or 4 generations of people may have owned this thing. That someone will own it after I die.

-Years later, one of my readers created and sent me two 3D printed busts of both Marcus and Seneca which sit in my library. They’re a lot cheaper and they weigh a lot less but they have the same impact.

-I set out to learn everything I could about Marcus Aurelius. At one point, I found an old academic paper that suggested Marcus’s writing was shaped by an addiction to opium—why else would have written down extended, cerebral reflections about spinning away from the earth and looking at things from far above? The answer is because this is a Stoic exercise that goes back thousands of years (and in fact, has also been observed by astronauts thousands of years later). All the things that people do hallucinogens to explore, you can also do while sober as a judge. It just takes work.

-Explicitly setting standards for himself in Book 10, Marcus extolls himself to be: “Upright. Modest. Straightforward. Sane. Cooperative. Disinterested.” In a blog post in 2007, I added the following for myself: Empathetic. Open. Diligent. Ambitious.

-I wrote a piece about Peter Thiel’s long campaign for revenge against Gawker earlier this year. As I was writing it, a line from Marcus came rushing back from the recesses of my memory: “The best way to avenge yourself is to not be like that.”

-In writing The Daily Stoic, I got to parse the words of Marcus Aurelius (and his translators) in ways I otherwise never would have done. I’ve always liked the line, “How trivial the things we want so passionately are.” In my initial readings, I’d always thought it was beautiful the way he was saying “passionately are.” Upon later reflection, I realized Hays/Aurelius were saying “the things are want so passionately, are” which has its own beauty.

-You also come to realize and understand the deeper historical references. For instance, in one passage, Marcus writes “To escape imperialization, that indelible stain.” I know, obviously, what “imperialism” and “imperial” mean but it wasn’t until many reads later that I came to understand he meant to escape the trappings of his office. He was saying: I must avoid being changed and corrupted by my office. Not all of us hold executive power, but we all can use that advice.

-When translating for The Daily Stoic, our editor asked about a line where Marcus says “enough of this whiny, miserable life. Stop monkeying around!” Would Marcus have ever seen a monkey, she asked? Or is this a modern line? Of course he would have! In fact, his psychopathic son probably killed a bunch of them in the coliseum. Marcus supposedly hated the gladiatorial games but he definitely would have been familiar with a shocking amount of African wildlife.

-Another interesting factoid about Marcus—proof, I think that he lived his philosophy. He was selected for the throne by Hadrian who set in line a succession plan that involved Hadrian adopting the elderly Antoninus Pius who in turn adopted Marcus Aurelius. When Marcus eventually ascended to the throne, what was his first decision? He appointed his step-brother Lucius Verus co-emperor. He was given unlimited, executive power and the first thing he did was share it with someone he was not even technically related to? That’s magnanimity.

-His advice on change is amazing. We’re like rocks—we gain nothing by going up and lose nothing by coming back down.

-“Don’t allow yourself to be heard any longer griping about public life, not even with your own ears!” You chose this life, he is telling himself, and that means you don’t get to complain about it.

-I was lucky enough to interview Gregory Hays in 2007. I asked him what his favorite passage was. He quoted: “Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone–those that are now and those to come. Existence flows past us like a river: the ‘what’ is in constant flux, the ‘why’ has a thousand variations. Nothing is stable, not even what’s right here. The infinity of past and future gapes before us—a chasm whose depths we cannot see.” I have to admit I missed the brilliance of that one the first time, but it’s stuck with me ever since.

-Did you know that Ambrose Bierce, the amazing Civil War-era writer and Mark Twain contemporary, was a big fan of the Stoics? Clearly his grandparents were too since his father was named Marcus Aurelius Bierce and his uncle, Lucius Verus Bierce (Marcus’s step brother and co-emperor).

-When I interviewed Robert Greene for The Daily Stoic’s companion website, I was surprised to hear he also loved the passage about “seeing roasted meat and other dishes in front of you and suddenly realizing: This is a dead fish. A dead bird. A dead pig.” As he explained to me: “I’ve tried to bring that across in my writing. For instance, to deconstruct things like power and seduction and to see the actual elements in play instead of the legends surrounding them.”

-During our interview he actually showed me his own copy of the Meditations and could remember the camping trip when he had written all the notes on the pages. On several of them he had marked AF in the marginalia, a shorthand for amor fati—a love of one’s fate. As he explained the idea, “Stop wishing for something else to happen, for a different fate. That is to live a false life.”

-The best way to learn and to lead is by example. I think that’s why I liked Marcus’s book so much—he was showing me (us) what is possible. As he put it “Nothing is as encouraging as when virtues are visibly embodied in the people around us, when we’re practically showered with them.”

-In my own education I’ve always followed Marcus’s dictum to “go straight to the seat of intelligence—your own, the world’s, your neighbors.” He also writes that learning to read and write requires a master—and so does the art of life. To me, people like Robert Greene were that master and so were people like Marcus. You have to go straight to the sources of knowledge and absorb what you can from them.

-During one of his most dangerous and threatening adventures, the journey down the “River of Doubt,” Teddy Roosevelt carried with him a copy of Meditations. I would kill to flip through his copy! Did he sit down at night and read few pages? Are there interesting notes in the margins? What were his favorite passages? A more Stoic question: How many other famous or important men and women have sat down with a copy of Marcus? And where are they now? Gone and mostly forgotten.

-In my work with bestselling authors and creatives there is one line from Marcus that I am often tempted to quote: “Ambition,” he reminded himself, “means tying your well-being to what other people say or do…Sanity means tying it to your own actions.” Doing good work is what matters. Recognition and rewards—those are just extra. To be too attached to results you don’t control? That’s a recipe for misery.

-Despite his privileges, Marcus Aurelius had a difficult life. The Roman historian Cassius Dio mused that Marcus “did not meet with the good fortune that he deserved, for he was not strong in body and was involved in a multitude of troubles throughout practically his entire reign.” But throughout these struggles he never gave up. It’s an inspiring example for us to think about today if we get tired, frustrated, or have to deal with some crisis.

-From the Stoics, I learned about the concept of the Inner Citadel. It is this fortress, they believed, that protects our soul. Though we might be physically vulnerable, though we might be at the mercy of fate in many ways, our inner domain is impenetrable. As Marcus put it (repeatedly, in fact), “stuff cannot touch the soul.”

-Right after the 2008 presidential elections, I remember connecting Obama’s “teachable moment” about the Reverend Wright scandal and how it illustrated Marcus’s principle of turning the obstacle upside down. As Obama put it, turning the negative situation into the perfect platform for his landmark speech about race, he would be “missing an important opportunity for leadership.” It’s something I try to think about in my own life as a boss and as a soon-to-be-father.

-Bill Belichick tells his players: “Do your job.” Marcus makes it clear what that job is: “What is your vocation? To be a good person.”

-Marcus is a beautiful writer, capable of finding beauty in strange places. In one passage, he praises the “charm and allure” of nature’s process, the “stalks of ripe grain bending low, the frowning brow of the lion, the foam dripping from the boar’s mouth.” As a writer, I’ve learned a lot from this skill of his. As a person, I’ve learned more. It’s about looking for majesty everywhere and anywhere.

-At one point Marcus tells himself to “Avoid false friendship at all costs.” I think he’s right, but we can take it a step further: What if, instead, we ask about the times that we have been false to our friends?

-Marcus constantly points out how the emperors who came before him were barely remembered just a few years later. To him, this was a reminder that no matter how much he conquered, no matter how much he inflicted his will on the world, it would be like building a castle in the sand—soon to be erased by the winds of time. The same is true for us.

-It’s interesting how much of Meditations is made up of short quotes and passages from other writers. In a way, it’s really Marcus’s commonplace book (and he’s inspired me to keep my own). One of my favorites is Marcus quoting a lost line from Euripides: “You shouldn’t give circumstances the power to rouse anger, for they don’t care at all.”

-I’ve talked a little bit about my tendency to overwork and to compulsively do. Marcus has a good reminder: “In your actions, don’t procrastinate. In your conversations, don’t confuse. In your thoughts, don’t wander. In your soul, don’t be passive or aggressive. In your life, don’t be all about business.”

-Marcus was one of the first writers to articulate the notion of cosmopolitanism—saying that he was a citizen of the world, not just of Rome. Which is an interesting and impressive thought…considering his job was as the first citizen of Rome.

-Marcus had many responsibilities, as those who hold executive power do. He judged cases, heard appeals, sent troops into battle, appointed administrators, approved budgets. A lot rode on his choices and actions. He wrote this reminder to himself which beautifully illustrates the kind of man he was: “Never shirk the proper dispatch of your duty, no matter if you are freezing or hot, groggy or well-rested, vilified or praised, not even if dying or pressed by other demands.”

-In the first book of Meditations, Marcus thanks Rusticus for teaching him “to read carefully and not be satisfied with a rough understanding of the whole, and not to agree too quickly with those who have a lot to say about something.” It’s a reminder for us in this busy media world of liars and bullshit artists. Don’t be satisfied with the superficial impression. Don’t be reactive. Know.

-How was Marcus introduced to the Stoics? We’re not quite sure but we do know that he got his copy of Epictetus from Rusticus (and in fact, Rusticus may have provided him his own notes from attending Epictetus’s lectures). A number of my favorite books came to me from my teachers. In fact, I was introduced to the Stoics by asking Dr. Drew for a book recommendation. Who did he recommend? Epictetus.

-Marcus writes, “Don’t lament this and don’t get agitated.” It calls to mind the motto of another statesman, the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli: “Never complain, never explain.”

-Long before modern discussions of self-talk, Marcus understood the notion: “Your mind will take the shape of what you frequently hold in thought.”

-At one point, Marcus essentially says to not ever do anything that we would be worried might remain ‘behind closed doors.’ It’s easy to say, but hard to do. Who wouldn’t be embarrassed if their email account was leaked or if a fight with their spouse was made public? We all do things in private that we would never do in front of other people. Which is a good thought/test to evaluate our behavior before we embark on something.

-In Book Six we find one of the strongest encouragements that Marcus gives himself. He says, basically: If someone else has done it—then it is humanly possible. If it’s humanly possible, then of course you can do it too.

-I’ve found over the years that jealousy is a toxic emotion. We want so desperately what others have that we lose the pleasure of the things we already have. Marcus provides a solution: “Don’t set your mind on things you don’t possess…, but count the blessings you actually possess and think how much you would desire them if they weren’t already yours.”

-Repeatedly Marcus warns himself that anger and grief only serve to make bad situations worse. Being pissed off that someone was rude to you isn’t soothing—it’s agitating. Being sad that you’ve lost something doesn’t bring it back, it exaggerates your sense of loss. It’s like the first rule of holes: When you’re in one, stop digging.

-When I was on the Tim Ferriss podcast this summer I learned that he had one of my favorite quotes from Marcus taped to his fridge: “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 grasp of the harmony if you keep going back to it.”

-What is tragic about Marcus, as one scholar wrote, is how his “philosophy—which is about self-restraint, duty, and respect for others—was so abjectly abandoned by the imperial line he anointed on his death.” As I said, Marcus’s terrible son, is an important reminder that it doesn’t matter how good you are at your job, if you neglect your duties at home…

-“We are what we repeatedly do,” Aristotle said, “therefore, excellence is not an act but a habit.” The Stoics add to that that we are a product of our thoughts (“Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind,” is how Marcus put it).

-Marcus consistently admonishes himself to return to the present moment and focus on what’s in front of him. This idea of being “present” seems very Eastern but of course it’s central to Stoicism too. “Stick with the situation at hand,” he tells himself, “and ask, “Why is this so unbearable? Why can’t I endure it?” You’ll be embarrassed to answer.” Yup.

-In Meditations we find one of the most helpful exercises when seeking perspective: “Run down the list of those who felt intense anger at something: the most famous, the most unfortunate, the most hated, the most whatever: Where is all that now? Smoke, dust, legend…or not even a legend.” Eventually, all of us will pass away and slowly be forgotten. We should enjoy this brief time we have on earth—not be enslaved to emotions that make us miserable and dissatisfied.

**

I’ll leave you with one final lesson, in fact, it’s the lesson we chose to close The Daily Stoic with. Marcus was clearly a big reader, he clearly took copious notes and studied philosophy deeply. Yet he took the unusual step of reminding himself to put all that aside.

“Stop wandering about!” he wrote. “You aren’t likely to read your own notebooks, or ancient histories, or the anthologies you’ve collected to enjoy in your old age. Get busy with life’s purpose, toss aside empty hopes, get active in your own rescue—if you care for yourself at all—and do it while you can.”

At some point, we must stop our reading, put all the advice from Marcus and the other stoics aside and take action. So that, as Seneca put it, the “words become works.”

That’s what I have tried to do over the last ten years. To alternate between the reading and the doing. I’m not perfect at it. I’m not even as far along as I’d like to be. But I am making progress.

I hope you are too.

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It’s Not About Stoic WEEK, But Life

Here we are, with Stoic Week upon us once again.

This is exciting to me because thousands of new people will be exposed to philosophy for the very first time. I say that half-jokingly, knowing that many people including some who majored in it, think they studied philosophy in school. They didn’t–what they read about and did was an interesting intellectual stimulation but it was not philosophy.

Philosophy, as the Stoics saw it, was not abstraction. It was not theoretical. It was designed to help with the problems of life. And in Ancient Greece and Rome, the problems of life were quite real: murderous tyrants, war, plague, civil strife and banishments existed as very real and daily threats–alongside all the other things we deal with today like jealousy, injuries, greed, sickness, envy, and fear.

The Stoics developed a practical philosophy to make sense of this world, one designed to help its adherents thrive, succeed and live good lives. In my eyes, stoicism posits a very simple premise: We do not control the world around us; we control only how we respond. And so we may as well respond well–respond virtuously.

Stoicism, as passed down to us by Zeno, Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and a host of other ancients, is a tool for that response. Epictetus’s “handbook” was picked up by everyone from James Stockdale to George Washington. Seneca was widely admired by the Christians, Thomas Jefferson and the thinkers of the Enlightenment. Marcus Aurelius proved to be equally inspirational to writers like Ambrose Bierce and Robert Louis Stevenson as he has been for statesmen like Theodore Roosevelt, Wen Jiabao and Bill Clinton.

What does this all mean? It means that whatever problem you’re dealing with this week–or in this life–stoicism can be of help.

A few favorites:

On Ambition:

“Ambition means tying your well being to what other people say or do.

Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you.

Sanity means tying it to your own actions.” – Marcus Aurelius

On Temptations:

“No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be good. Like the gold or emerald or purple repeating to itself, “No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be emerald, my color undiminished.” – Marcus Aurelius

On Self-Criticism

“What progress have I made? I am beginning to be my own friend.’ That is progress indeed. Such a people will never be alone and you may be sure he is a friend to all.” – Seneca

On Other People:

“It’s silly to try to escape other people’s faults. They are inescapable. Just try to escape your own.” – Marcus Aurelius

On Distractions:

“Stick to what’s in front of you—idea, action, utterance.” – Marcus Aurelius

On Objectivity

“Don’t let the force of an impressions when it first hit you knock you off your feet; just say to it: Hold on a moment; let me see who you are and what you represent. Let me put you to the test.” – Epictetus

On Success or Failure:

“To accept it without arrogance, to let it go with indifference.” – Marcus Aurelius

“It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.” – Epictetus

On Fortune

“The wise man looks to the purpose of all actions, not their consequences; beginnings are in our power, but Fortune judges the outcome, and I do not grant her a verdict upon me.” – Seneca

On Endurance

“Life’s no soft affair. It’s a long road you’ve started on: you can’t but expect to have slips and knocks and falls, and get tired and openly wish–a lie–for death.” – Seneca

**

I was fortunate enough to be introduced to stoicism when I was 18 or 19 years old. Not during a week of practice and contemplation, but a week where I nonetheless needed it very badly. I was going through a terrible break up. I was stuck in this apartment with some roommates who I absolutely detested. I was in my second year of college, not sure in which direction to take my life.

A chance encounter led to me picking up Marcus Aurelius and his wonderful Meditations. The wisdom in this book not only helped me with my immediate problems–helped me see some perspective about my romantic woes and helped me realize there was no reason to resent these people I was living with. But more importantly, it set me on an intellectual journey (going “directly to the seat of knowledge” as Marcus put it) that changed my life and set me on a course I never would have expected.

In the years since, stoicism has something that strengthened me in failure, comforted me in pain, gave meaning to events and cautioned humility and conservatism in moments of success. It helped me publish five books—one of which, I can proudly say, is about stoicism. How this all would have played out otherwise, I really have no idea. But what stoicism teaches is that it doesn’t matter. What matters is what happened and that we must be grateful for it–the good and bad alike.

I am. I am so grateful for the windows and doors that stoicism opened. And I hope for everyone participating in 2016’s Stoic Week that you feel the same. And don’t let it stop after 7 days either.

For more on Stoicism visit The Daily Stoic. 

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Here’s Why Smart People Believe The Nonsense That Trump Might Win

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore

Even after two disastrous debate appearances, overwhelming poll numbers and one of the worst campaign scandals in modern history, if you talk to many reasonable people you’ll still hear this whisper: I really think he might win.

It’s the fear of an electoral surprise—that the pollsters are wrong, that faith in logical, rational voters is faith without evidence. Post-Brexit this sort of skepticism seems even more reasonable. In light of recent events—after all the predictions that were wrong before—how do we even know what everyday people even think these days?

I’ll tell you this attitude is absurd and wrong.

It reminds me of a story that Ulysses S. Grant tells in his memoirs about a night he spent on the wild prairies of East Texas. He and a fellow officer were near Goliad when they heard “the most unearthly howling of wolves” directly in front of them. They couldn’t see the wolves through the tall prairie grass, but the men knew they were near. The other officer asked Grant how many wolves he thought were in the pack. Grant, not wanting to seem afraid, tried to lowball the number at twenty—knowing well enough, he said later, that it was still enough “to devour our party, horses and all, at a single meal.” Grant thought that maybe they should turn around, but the other officer, having come from a part of Indiana where the wolves hadn’t been completely driven out, smiled and pushed on.

The men arrived to find just two lone wolves sitting on their haunches. These were the sole animals who had made all the noise that had scared Grant so badly, that had convinced him he was overwhelmingly outnumbered. Four decades later, after a full life in public service and politics, Grant would relate that he often thought of this incident when he heard of a group changing course due to criticism or someone giving up because they were deterred by an unseen enemy. The lesson in such situations, he concluded, was this: “There are always more of them before they are counted.”

Which brings us to a lesson we would do well to remember in modern media when it comes to politics: There is always less behind the noise than you think.

Certainly this is true in our current election, where the media had tried to convince us that behind Donald Trump is an overwhelming mass of white male blue collar workers who will be rising up as one (or in more extreme characterizations, a raging army of white supremacist lunatics who will riot in the streets if he’s not elected.) Conversely, we’re expected to believe that the unexciting Hillary Clinton is supported by no one, that she’s a candidate created by vested interests, defended by “the media”, and propped up by illusory political correctness—but insufficient votes. The results on election day, the narrative goes, may just shock us.

However alarming these scenarios may be, it belies the objective electoral and demographic facts of this race: That Hillary has a much clearer path to 270 electoral votes than Trump. That, as many smarter people than I have pointed out, there isn’t even enough uneducated white men in America to earn Trump the popular vote either. When a candidate has alienated literally every significant minority voting bloc in this country—African Americans, Latinos, as well as alienating Asian-Americans at an unprecedented rate as the New York Times has shown—they cannot win an election. When they have pissed off huge chunks of their own party—especially the elites, the power brokers, their own running mate and now the dozens who have withdrawn endorsements—they cannot win. And that doesn’t even get into what happens when you run a mismanaged, shoestring campaign.

As David Plouffe, President Obama’s former campaign manager and current informal advisor to Hillary’s campaign, has observed:

“This race is being covered in a way that suggests it’s a dead heat. And it’s not…Some polls closely capture where the race stands. But they’re very incomplete. The Clinton campaign is doing large samples for modeling surveys of everybody on the voter file. So you have a very good understanding of how you believe 100 percent of the electorate will be allocated on election day. When you look at how 100 percent of the vote is likely to be allocated in Florida, I get very optimistic….I can get Donald Trump to within two or three in Pennsylvania, but I can’t get him to a win number. The same is true in Virginia and Colorado. I know everybody goes crazy about the latest Cheetos poll, but I feel very confident about both New Hampshire and Florida. So that puts her over 300 [in the electoral college]. Trump has to pull off a miracle in the electoral college.”

To think that since Plouffe wrote that, Trump not only hasn’t pulled off any miracles, he was caught in one of the most embarrassing hot mic scandals since the invention of recorded sound.  

But I actually want to put that aside for a second so we can look at the boom-and-bust cycle of political movement in this country, particularly as it pertains to the media. Because it, as opposed to the surprising results of Brexit, is a far more predictable historical record to study.

We seem to have forgotten the burst of enthusiasm and interest in the largely internet and college-driven campaign of Howard Dean in 2004 (then he finished third in Iowa). We forget Ron Paul at the beginning of the 2008 election as another internet-driven sensation which caused many to ask whether we’d finally found a viable outsider candidate. If you spent any time online in 2007, it was really made to look like we might have (when the reality, of course, was we hadn’t). Very few seem to remember that the 2012 election was presented as a horse race (and in fact, Romney so believed it, he thought he might win!) Of course, the results were anything but close, with Obama securing 332 electoral votes and nearly 5 million more popular votes. How quickly we forget just months ago that Sanders was on the rise, that he was activating loyal young voters who would drive him past Hillary (and then, if they didn’t, at the very least wouldn’t back the ultimate nominee)? And let’s not even get into the Gary Johnson and other third party candidate nonsense of earlier this summer.

All these failed movements were defined by their claims to an ascendent voter bloc—one that the elites didn’t understand, that hadn’t been tracked before, that was going to surprise everyone. The only real surprise was how much none of this materialized.

Yet here we are again.

I think it’s about time we start to recognize that in an insatiable media system, fringe candidates—from Dean to Ron Paul to Sanders to Trump—operate a lot like those wolves that Grant met out on the plains. It’s a fact that in a system which favors extreme views and has an insatiable need for conflict, extreme and conflicting stories will be overrepresented. When candidates without a coalition see the bandwagon effect as their only hope, they will attempt to exaggerate their reach and the size of their base. They will over-rely on the rabidity of their fans to compensate for the big gaps in the lines. It will seem like there are many millions of them…until they are ultimately counted. Because noise carries further than signal right up until the point that the signal gets dialed in.

I’m not saying there were no Sander supporters and certainly no one denies that millions of people will be voting for Donald Trump. It’s just that enough non-stop coverage can skew the estimates and expectations of even the most rational observers. When you’re on Reddit or Facebook and every reasonable comment is followed up by dozens of intensely argumentative responses from Bernie Sanders or Gary Johnson supporters it can start to feel like there are a lot of them out there—that there is a real movement afoot.

Certainly, the Republican party fell for this in the primary, mistaking the fact that Trump seemed louder and bigger than his early opponents for a realistic chance of putting enough electoral points on the board to win. In fact, Trump has often touted—and exaggerated—the sizes of his rallies, as if that stat mattered. Today, Republicans and Democrats are falling for it again.

When you go on Facebook and see endless amounts of anti-Hillary memes, you might start to think: Man, people really hate her. Sure some do—and many polls show that Americans have trouble finding her trustworthy—but even her “unpopularity” is not as unclear as it looks. The Daily Beast recently outed the almost-billionaire and founder of Oculus, Palmer Luckey, for secretly “putting money behind an unofficial Donald Trump group dedicated to “shitposting” and circulating internet memes maligning Hillary Clinton.” There are also the reports that have shown how potentially a significant number of Trump’s Twitter followers are fake accounts. And of course, there were the internet trolls of suspected Russian origin which broadcast pro-Donald support and propaganda. In Business Insider’s piece on astroturfing, they quote Adrian Chen, who researched Russian trolls for a New York Magazine story in 2015, talking on the Longform podcast,

“I created this list of Russian trolls when I was researching. And I check on it once in awhile, still. And a lot of them have turned into conservative accounts, like fake conservatives. I don’t know what’s going on, but they’re all tweeting about Donald Trump and stuff.”

I don’t know if those were the people who started tweeting at me when I wrote two Trump pieces over the summer, but I can tell you, I don’t normally receive many responses to my writing from people with 7 followers (in one case, the “person” had literally zero followers—which I didn’t know was even possible). I do know that the people who disliked the article were far more vocal and loud and obnoxious that the ones who agreed. I happened to have a pack of coyotes living near my house—which can often sound like they’re right next to my window—and the upside is that I’ve gotten good at ignoring empty noise.

Another version of this throwing of sound is in internet polls, which candidates like Ron Paul, Donald Trump and even Bernie Sanders have often dominated. People don’t understand that this is often deliberate manipulation. For instance, Trump’s fans on 4chan and reddit made an explicit effort to have Trump win in every online poll around the outcome of the first debate—which Trump excitedly tweeted the results of—with users explaining how to cheat the system and vote again and again in each poll. Philip Bump in The Washington Post has compared this online behavior to a Trump rally: “These online polls are, again, garbage, no more representative of the population as a whole than is the crowd at a Trump rally. That comparison is very apt, in fact. The crowd at a Trump rally 1) is open to all comers, 2) is geographically isolated, meaning that while anyone can attend, it doesn’t include a huge swath of people who vote, and 3) it rewards enthusiasm in a way that tends to obscure actual interest.” (I’d also add that many attendees admit to showing up to Trump rallies “for the spectacle.”)

It’s those last few points that are most interesting to me—in fact, they point to a fundamental reality of the internet. Not only does research show that anger is the most viral and provocative emotion—meaning that angry Trump supporters are going to be far more active than a resigned Clinton voter—but silence is often misinterpreted. Going back to what one programmer defined as Warnock’s Dilemma, it’s very hard to know what to make of a lack of response. The media’s typical reaction is to cater to active audiences. If something is being shared, they cover it more. There is no positive sign of people simply nodding their head and moving on—a common reaction to common sense, middle of the road content—so there is no way to skate to that puck. By definition, normal, reasonable people are not an audience you can pander to.

In the same way that no amount of media fawning makes HBO’s Girls more popular than The Big Bang Theory, no amount of Trump media coverage changes his fundamental demographic issues. It has been the inability of his now alt-right driven campaign to realize this that doomed him from truly capitalizing on voter’s real desire for change. It’s what makes his most recent debate performance irrelevant. He landed plenty of punches on Hillary…but it pleased the crowd and not the referee-like undecided voters he needed so desperately to add to his base.

Yes, it seems like there are huge amounts of Trump supporters out there. They are by definition louder and more motivated. They are naturally more compelling to cover. They are also engaged—or complicit—in forms of manipulation designed to create the sense of a movement which can’t be stopped. Clinton hides from media coverage and doesn’t make herself available even to be interviewed. Both approaches create feedback loops in which support for the former appears greater than support for the latter, because one is vocal and loud while the other is implicit and begins and ends at the ballot box.

All of which brings us to where we are now. A good portion of Trump’s supporters are not dumb—just as Sanders and Dean and Romney’s weren’t. Like Grant, they’ve just fallen for the noise. Some are excited by it, some are scared, some just don’t know what to believe anymore. But it’s all the same fundamental mistake.

The underlying numbers haven’t changed. We’ve just been gaslighted. The path to a Trump victory remains as unlikely—if not impossible—as it always was. Not only electorally, but personally—because every time Trump does get momentum, like clockwork, he rips off his Hannibal Lecter mask and says what he really thinks, ruining the very momentum his discretion had created. The only rotating variable is the media’s interest in keeping things interesting and the natural phenomena of how noise carries.

Hillary Clinton will almost certainly win. It is not a surprise. The only part likely to change is by how much or by how little.

I’m not just telling myself that so I’ll feel better. I’m not hoping that’s the outcome. I know the dangers of that. I’m also not running around getting worried and anxious as a form of virtue signaling.

Both are pointless exercises rooted in the same bad assumption. The Stoic philosopher Hecato has said that hope and fear were the same. They are both based on irrational projections—of following the noise and ignoring the tricks that noise can play on you.

What’s better is truth. What’s better is counting the voices, not measuring their volume.

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Podcasts & Interviews for Ego is the Enemy

Ego is the Enemy came out exactly three months ago and I want to thank you for your support. The book was an immediate Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller (it also hit a few lists abroad) as well as receiving 4.6 out of 5 stars on Amazon with nearly 300 reviews so far. I want to thank you again for your support and especially the many of you who took part of the preorder campaign. I’m blown away by the support you all gave the book and I am having a wonderful time finishing the strategy calls with many of you who preordered more than 50 copies of the book.

Aside from the preorder campaign and the usual press around a book launch, I was interviewed at a number of podcasts and I thought I’d put a list together of some my favorite ones:

[*] I did a podcast with Dr. Michael Gervais of the Seahawks. As I said when the episode came out, it was like a 2 hour therapy session.

[*] My friend Lewis Howes interviewed me for his show and you can watch the entire episode below:

[*] I was in the UK promoting the book and had my second appearance on London Real:

[*] Tim Ferriss not only interviewed me but also posted two chapters from the audiobook on his podcast as he holds the audio rights to the book.

[*] I was also interviewed by Jordan Harbinger from the Art of Charm.

[*] Back in May I had the pleasure to be interviewed by Brian Koppelman (the screenwriter behind Ocean’s Thirteen, Rounders, Billions, etc.) for his podcast The Moment.

[*] It was my second appearance on Rich Roll’s podcast (the first one was during the launch of The Obstacle Is the Way).  

[*] I also got to sit down and chat with my friend Aubrey Marcus (the man behind Onnit):

[*] Scott Barry Kaufman from the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania interviewed me for The Psychology Podcast.  

[*] The hilarious and amazing guys behind the ETC Show invited me for an interview. Watch below:

[*] I also had the opportunity to chat with Russ Robert from EconTalk who also happens to be the author of one of my favorite books, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life.

[*] I had an amazing chat with James Altucher on his podcast and our conversation after the episode inspired my piece on envy and jealousy.

[*] I want to thank Todd Henry from The Accidental Creative for inviting me for a second round for his podcast.

[*] Few weeks before the book came out, Gerard Adams came over and we filmed a little segment for Leaders Create Leaders. You can watch below:

[*] The Art of Manliness is one of my favorite sites out there (I have written a number of pieces for them) and you can listen to our interview together.

[*] I also had great conversations with both Brian Johnson and Shane Parrish for their respective shows.

[*] I was lucky to go back and speak at Google again and you can watch my entire presentation below:

[*] I collaborated with FightMediocrity for this animated prologue of the book:

[*] I also had a great chat with Nathan Chan from Foundr magazine.

[*] I had the honor to make an appearance and join Maddox on his podcast.

[*] Julien Blanc interviewed me for his YouTube channel and you can watch below:

[*] I was also on NPR’s On Point with guest host Sacha Pfeiffer.

[*] I was at the NASDAQ offices where we recorded a short interview about the book.

Thanks to everyone for having me and if I missed anyone let me know and I’ll add them to the list.

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The fascinating and ego-killing existence of human wormholes

A few months ago, Chief Medicine Crow, one of the last remaining links to the Native American tribes of the Wild West died at age 102. He had grown up hearing stories about George Armstrong Custer from his grandfather, who’d been a scout for the doomed general at Little Bighorn in 1876. A soldier himself in the Second World War, Medicine Crow was one of the last Crow people to ever accomplish the four deeds required to be considering a war chief (command a war party, steal an enemy horse, touch an enemy without killing him and taking an enemy’s weapon).

He was a fascinating man, not just for what he did but also for what he represents to us now. He was, to use a phrase coined by Jason Kottke, a “human wormhole.” His unusual and long live is a reminder to how connected the past and present really are.

A curator at the Smithsonian described meeting Medicine Crow as “you’re shaking hands with the 19th century.” Which an amazing concept. A few intrepid historians on reddit recently discovered an even more amazing one, calculating that it would take a chain of just six individuals who shook hands with one another to connect Barack Obama to George Washington across the centuries (Obama ->Queen Elizabeth II -> Herbert Hoover -> William H. Taft -> Benjamin Harrison -> William Henry Harrison -> Benjamin Harrison V -> George Washington).

I’ve become fascinated with discovering and tracking some of these reminders. For some time now, I’ve kept a file of them on 4×6 notecards in my house. My friends and I email these moments to each other as we find them — some absurd (Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman may have hooked up), coincidental (Orson Welles claimed to have been in the Biograph Theater in Chicago where John Dillinger was killed by the FBI) and some that are so unbelievable that they might just blow your mind (there’s a video from a 1956 CBS game show, “I’ve Got a Secret,” with a very old guest whose secret was that he was in Ford’s Theatre when Lincoln was assassinated. Appearing with him on the show? Lucille Ball.)

Here in modern life, it’s easy to think the past is dead and distant, until we bump up against the reality of Faulkner’s admonition that it’s not really even past. England’s government only recently paid off debts it incurred as far back as 1720 from events like the South Sea Bubble, the Napoleonic wars, the empire’s abolition of slavery, and the Irish potato famine — meaning that for more than a decade and a half of the twenty first century there was still a direct and daily connection to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (The US is still paying pensions related to both the Civil War and the Spanish-American War.)

I’ll share a few more wormholes before I get to my point — because I promise there is more to this than just strange trivia.

Did you know that Tom Pratt, a football coach whose team the Arizona Cardinals narrowly missed going to the Super Bowl in 2015, was also on the coaching staff for the Kansas City Chiefs in the very first Super Bowl fifty years ago? Or that there are whales alive today who were born before Melville published Moby Dick? Or the world’s oldest tortoise, Jonathan, lives on an island in the Atlantic and is 183 years old? Or that President John Tyler, born in 1790, who took office just ten years after little Jonathan was born, still has living grandchildren?

War is perhaps the strangest source of these anomalies. Did you know that Winston Churchill and James Bond creator Ian Fleming’s father fought in the same unit in WWI? When Fleming’s father was killed, Churchill wrote his obituary. General Simon Bolivar Buckner was a Confederate general in the Civil War (he surrendered to Grant at Fort Donelson). His son Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr also became a General, and he died at Okinawa some 83 years later. General MacArthur — his father, Arthur MacArthur, Jr. — was a Civil War hero for the Union. Stonewall Jackson had a granddaughter who lived to be 104. She died in 1991.

In high school, a promising young student at the Virginia Military Institute named George Marshall petitioned the president for a military commission. Which President did the creator of the Marshall plan petition? William McKinley (just months before man’s life was cut short by an assassin’s bullet.) And most unbelievably, what of the fact that Robert Todd Lincoln was present as his father died of assassination, was at the train station with President James Garfield was assassinated, and was in attendance at the event in which McKinley was assassinated? Three assassinations, spread out over 40 years. Robert Todd Lincoln himself lived to be 82, dying in 1926. He could have read stories published by F. Scott Fitzgerald. He drove in a car. He talked on the telephone. He would have heard jazz music.

And these are just the events of the so called modern history.

We forget that woolly mammoths walked the earth while the pyramids were being built. We don’t realize that Cleopatra lived closer to our time than she did to the construction of those famous pyramids that marked her kingdom. We forget that Ovid and Jesus were alive at the same time. When British workers excavated the land in Trafalgar Square to build Nelson’s Column and its famous bronze lions, in the ground they found the bones of actual lions, who’d roamed that exact spot just a few thousand years before.

The effect of these stories — after the novelty wears off — is an intense humbling. We like to think that we are special — that we live in blessed, unprecedented times. It’s this self-absorption that disconnects us from the universe we belong to. It’s unthinking ego that makes us assume that because the photos of the past were in black and white, that the past itself was too.

Obviously, it wasn’t — their sky was the same color as ours (in some places brighter than ours), they bled the same way we did, and their cheeks got flushed just like ours do. “Think by way of example on the times of Vespasian,” wrote the wise Marcus Aurelius some 1900 years ago, “and you’ll see all these things: marrying, raising children, falling ill, dying, wars, holiday feasts, commerce, farming, flattering, pretending, suspecting, scheming, praying that others die, grumbling over one’s lot, falling in love, amassing fortunes, lusting after office and power. Now that life of theirs is dead and gone… the times of Trajan, again the same… ”

Again the same for us now. However much we celebrate our own exceptionalism.

In Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (which was a favorite of Napoleon’s) there is a scene in which Werther writes to a friend about his daily trip to a small, beautiful spring. He sees the young girls coming to gather water and thinks about how many generations have been doing that — have come and had same thoughts he is having. “When I sit there the patriarchal ways come vividly to life about me,” he says, “and I see them all, the ancestral fathers, making friends and courting by the spring, I sense the benevolent spirits that watch over springs and wells. Oh, anyone who cannot share this feeling must never have refreshed himself at a cool spring after a hard day’s summer walking.”

That’s the feeling most of us miss. Even if we don’t see it, it’s there. The whispers and the smoke and remnants never disappear. Goethe was born in 1749, wrote his first bestseller which contained those words in 1774 before America was a country, and would live well into the 19th century (overlapping briefly with Jonathan the Tortoise). A hundred years after that, another famous German writer, Stefan Zweig, would be stunned to find that his elderly upstairs neighbor was the daughter of Goethe’s doctor, who had vivid memories of meeting Goethe as a young girl. In fact, Goethe had attended her christening.

Sorry, I’m getting distracted. I have too many of these wormholes and I don’t know where to put them all.

Back to the point, Ernest Hemingway opens The Sun Also Rises with a bible verse: “One generation passeth, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever. The sun also riseth, and the sun goeth down, and resteth to the place where he arose.” It was this passage, his editor would say that “contained all the wisdom of the ancient world.”

And what wisdom is that? That we all flow into each other as part of an endless stream (slavery, Louis C.K. observed is just two old ladies back to back). It seems slow and long to us because we’re in it. It seems distant to us because it wasn’t our problem, it wasn’t us that did that terrible deed we’d like to forget. In fact, time whips by in a blur. Wounds barely have time to heal. They don’t recognize the passing of generations. Because generations don’t really exist. It is instead an endless parade.

When I lived in New Orleans, my apartment was partitioned out of 19th century convent. When I would head uptown to write what became my first book, I’d hop on the longest continually running streetcar in the world — some 181 years it had been traveling the same tracks. How many millions of people had ridden those same rails? Sat, even, in the same seat. Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy, Shelby Foote, George Washington Cable, Edgar Degas — could have looked out these very windows. They, along with so many others not as easily remembered — but who lived and hustled and struggled just as I was trying to.

In moments like that, one cannot help but know what Pierre Hadot has referred to as the “oceanic feeling.” A sense of belonging to something larger, realizing that “human things are an infinitesimal point in the immensity.” And when one gets this feeling, we ask ourselves important questions about who we are and what we are doing.

On the other hand, nothing draws us away from those questions like material success — when we are always busy, stressed, put upon, distracted, reported to, relied on, apart from; when we’re wealthy or told that we’re important or powerful. Ego tells us that meaning comes from activity, that being the center of attention is the only way to matter. When we lack a connection to anything larger or bigger than us, it’s like a piece of our soul is gone. Like we’ve detached ourselves from the tradition we hail from — forgetting that we’re just like the people who came before us, and we’re but a brief stopover until the people just like you who will come after. The earth abideth forever, but we will come and go.

History on the other hand, gives us perspective. As I said, it has the power to humble us. Specifically, these wormholes — illustrating the “great span” as they do — are instant humility in bite-sized pieces. It’s proof that others have been here before you, generations of them, and that they can almost reach out and touch you. In those moments, we have a sense of the immensity of the world and also its smallness. Ego is impossible, because we realize, if only fleetingly, what Emerson meant when he said that “every man is a quotation from all his ancestors” or what John Muir tried to convey to us about his epic experiences in nature. Yes, we are small. We are also a piece of this great universe and a process.

Baldwin wrote that “if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too.” I actually think it’s the reverse. If you can examine and face the connection between other lives, and other eras, only then can you begin to understand and appreciate your own.

This post appeared originally on Boing Boing. 

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The Maxim For Every Successful Person; ‘Always Stay A Student’

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Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The legend of Genghis Khan has echoed throughout history: A barbarian conqueror, fueled by bloodlust, terrorizing the civilized world. We have him and his Mongol horde traveling across Asia and Europe, insatiable, stopping at nothing to plunder, rape, and kill not just the people who stood in their way, but the cultures they had built. Then, not unlike his nomadic band of warriors, this terrible cloud simply disappeared from history, because the Mongols built nothing that could last.

Like all reactionary, emotional assessments, this could not be more wrong. For not only was Genghis Khan one of the greatest military minds who ever lived, he was a perpetual student, whose stunning victories were often the result of his ability to absorb the best technologies, practices, and innovations of each new culture his empire touched.

In fact, if there is one theme in his reign and in the several centuries of dynastic rule that followed, it’s this: appropriation.

Under Genghis Khan’s direction, the Mongols were as ruthless about stealing and absorbing the best of each culture they encountered as they were about conquest itself. Though there were essentially no technological inventions, no beautiful buildings or even great Mongol art, with each battle and enemy, their culture learned and absorbed something new.

Genghis Khan was not born a genius. Instead, as one biogra­pher put it, his was “a persistent cycle of pragmatic learning, experimental adaptation, and constant revision driven by his uniquely disciplined and focused will.” He was the greatest conqueror the world ever knew because he was more open to learning than any other conqueror has ever been.

Khan’s first powerful victories came from the reorganization of his military units, splitting his soldiers into groups of ten. This he stole from neighboring Turkic tribes, and unknowingly converted the Mongols to the decimal system.

Soon enough, their expanding empire brought them into contact with another “technology” they’d never experienced before: walled cities. In the Tangut raids, Khan first learned the ins and outs of war against fortified cities and the strategies critical to laying siege, and quickly became an expert. Later, with help from Chinese engineers, he taught his soldiers how to build siege machines that could knock down city walls. In his campaigns against the Jurched, Khan learned the importance of winning hearts and minds. By working with the scholars and royal family of the lands he conquered, Khan was able to hold on to and man­age these territories in ways that most empires could not.

Afterward, in every country or city he held, Khan would call for the smartest astrologers, scribes, doctors, thinkers, and advisers — anyone who could aid his troops and their efforts. His troops traveled with interrogators and translators for precisely this purpose.

It was a habit that would survive his death. While the Mongols themselves seemed dedicated almost solely to the art of war, they put to good use every craftsman, merchant, scholar, entertainer, cook, and skilled worker they came in contact with. The Mongol Empire was remarkable for its reli­gious freedoms, and most of all, for its love of ideas and con­vergence of cultures. It brought lemons to China for the first time, and Chinese noodles to the West. It spread Persian carpets, German mining technology, French metalworking, and Islam. The cannon, which revolutionized warfare, was said to be the resulting fusion of Chinese gunpowder, Mus­lim flamethrowers, and European metalwork. It was Mongol openness to learning and new ideas that brought them together.

As we first succeed, we will find ourselves in new situations, facing new problems. The freshly promoted soldier must learn the art of politics. The salesman, how to manage. The founder, how to delegate. The writer, how to edit others. The comedian, how to act. The chef turned restaurateur, how to run the other side of the house.

This is not a harmless conceit. The physicist John Wheeler, the physicist who helped develop the hydrogen bomb, once observed that “As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.” In other words, each victory and advancement that made Khan smarter also bumped him against new situations he’d never encountered before. It takes a special kind of humility to grasp that you know less, even as you know and grasp more and more. It’s remembering Socrates’ wisdom lay in the fact that he knew that he knew next to nothing.

With accomplishment comes a growing pressure to pre­tend that we know more than we do. To pretend we already know everything. Scientia infla (knowledge puffs up). That’s the worry and the risk — thinking that we’re set and secure, when in reality understanding and mastery is a fluid, con­tinual process.

The nine­-time Grammy– and Pulitzer Prize–winning jazz musician Wynton Marsalis once advised a promising young musician on the mind­set required in the lifelong study of music: “Humility engenders learning because it beats back the arrogance that puts blinders on. It leaves you open for truths to reveal themselves. You don’t stand in your own way. . . . Do you know how you can tell when someone is truly humble? I believe there’s one simple test: because they consistently observe and listen, the humble improve. They don’t assume, ‘I know the way.’” No matter what you’ve done up to this point, you better still be a student. If you’re not still learning, you’re already dying.

It is not enough only to be a student at the beginning. It is a position that one has to assume for life. Learn from everyone and everything. From the people you beat, and the people who beat you, from the people you dislike, even from your supposed enemies. At every step and every juncture in life, there is the opportunity to learn — and even if the lesson is purely remedial, we must not let ego block us from hearing it again.

It’s something I’ve had to learn as an author, personally. Just because one book does well, doesn’t mean that the next one will. It certainly doesn’t mean that everything that I’ll write is good or that I know everything there is to know about this profession either. Thinking that way is a recipe for falling off and disappointing both publishers and audiences. A better attitude is to start from scratch with each project — to focus on all there is left to learn and all the room we have left improve. That’s what I’ve tried to do with each subsequent project, including this most recent one (appropriately about ego).

Too often, convinced of our own intelligence or success, we stay in a comfort zone that ensures that we never feel stupid (and are never challenged to learn or reconsider what we know). It obscures from view various weaknesses in our under­ standing, until eventually it’s too late to change course. This is where the silent toll is taken.

Each of us faces a threat as we pursue our craft. Like sirens on the rocks, ego sings a soothing, validating song — which can lead to a wreck. The second we let the ego tell us we have graduated, learning grinds to a halt. That’s why UFC champion and MMA pioneer Frank Shamrock said, “Always stay a student.” As in, it never ends.

The solution is as straightforward as it is initially uncom­fortable: Pick up a book on a topic you know next to noth­ing about. Put yourself in rooms where you’re the least knowledgeable person. That uncomfortable feeling, that defensiveness that you feel when your most deeply held assumptions are challenged — what about subjecting your­self to it deliberately? Change your mind. Change your sur­roundings.

An amateur is defensive. The professional finds learning (and even, occasionally, being shown up) to be enjoyable; they like being challenged and humbled, and engage in education as an ongoing and endless process.

Most military cultures — and people in general — seek to impose values and control over what they encounter. What made the Mongols different was their ability to weigh each situation objectively, and if need be, swap out previous prac­tices for new ones. All great businesses start this way, but then something happens. Take the theory of disruption, which posits that at some point in time, every industry will be dis­rupted by some trend or innovation that, despite all the resources in the world, the incumbent interests will be incapable of responding to. Why is this? Why can’t businesses change and adapt? A large part of it is because they lost the ability to learn. They stopped being students. The second this happens to you, your knowledge becomes fragile.

The great manager and business thinker Peter Drucker says that it’s not enough simply to want to learn. As people progress, they must also understand how they learn and then set up processes to facilitate this continual education.

Oth­erwise, we are selling ourselves — and our careers — dreadfully short.

This piece is adapted from Ryan Holiday’s book Ego is the Enemy , published by Penguin Portfolio

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The 3 Ways Ego Will Derail Your Career Before It Really Begins

“Among men who rise to fame and leadership two types are recognizable—those who are born with a belief in themselves and those in whom it is a slow growth dependent on actual achievement. To the men of the last type their own success is a constant surprise, and its fruits the more delicious, yet to be tested cautiously with a haunting sense of doubt whether it is not all a dream. In that doubt lies true modesty, not the sham of insincere self depreciation but the modesty of “moderation,” in the Greek sense. It is poise, not pose.” – B.H. Liddell Hart

When we’re young and just setting out in our careers we tend to assume that the greatest impediments to our progress and success are external to us. We blame our bosses and “the system” but we rarely think that we might be our own worst enemies, sabotaging ourselves right when we are beginning on our path.

Too often the obstacle that impedes our progress the most is internal—our own ego.

Yes, all of us, with all our talent and promise and potential, if we don’t control our ego, risk blowing up before we start. Talent, as Irving Berlin put it, is only the starting point. What we also need is self-management, self-control and humility.

Here are three ways that ego is the enemy of those important traits.

1. Talk, talk, talk.

At the beginning of any path, we’re excited and nervous. So we seek to comfort ourselves externally instead of inwardly. There’s a weak side to each of us, that—like a trade union—isn’t exactly malicious but at the end of the day still wants to get as much public credit and attention as it can for doing the least. That side we call ego.

The writer and former Gawker blogger Emily Gould—essentially a real-­life Hannah Horvath—realized this during her two-­year struggle to get a novel published. Though she had a six-­figure book deal, she was stuck. Why? She was too busy “spending a lot of time on the Internet,” that’s why.

“In fact, I can’t really remember anything else I did in 2010. I tumbld, I tweeted and I scrolled. This didn’t earn me any money but it felt like work… It was also the only creative thing I was doing.”

She did what a lot of us do when we’re scared or overwhelmed by a project—she did everything but focus on it. In fact, many valuable endeavors we undertake are painfully difficult, whether it’s coding a new startup or mastering a craft. But talking, talking is always easy. So we do that instead.

It’s a temptation that exists for everyone—for talk and hype to replace action.

Doing great work is a struggle. It’s draining, it’s demoralizing, it’s frightening—not always, but it can feel that way when we’re deep in the middle of it. We talk to fill the void and the uncertainty.

The question is, when faced with your particular challenge—­whether it is researching in a new field, starting a business, producing a film, securing a mentor, advancing an important cause—do you seek the respite of talk or do you face the struggle head­-on?

2. Early pride.

At 18, a rather triumphant Benjamin Franklin returned to visit Boston, the city he’d run away from. Full of pride, he had a new suit, a watch and a pocketful of coins that he showed to everyone he ran into. All posturing by a boy who was not much more than an employee in a print shop in Philadelphia.

In a meeting with Cotton Mather, one of the town’s most respected figures, Franklin quickly illustrated just how ridiculously inflated his young ego had become. As they walked down a hallway, Mather suddenly admonished him, “Stoop! Stoop!” Too caught up in his performance, Franklin walked right into a low ceiling beam.

Mather’s response was perfect: “Let this be a caution to you not always to hold your head so high,” he said wryly. “Stoop, young man, stoop—as you go through this world—and you’ll miss many hard thumps.”

The problem with pride is that it blunts the instrument we need to succeed—our mind. Our ability to learn, to adapt, to be flexible, to build relationships, all of this is dulled by pride. Most dangerously, this tends to happen either early in life or in the process—­when we’re flushed with beginner’s conceit. Only later do you realize that that bump on the head was the least of what was risked.

The question to ask, when you feel pride, then, is this: What am I missing right now that a more humble person might see? What am I avoiding, or running from, with my bluster, franticness, and embellishments?

It is far better to ask and answer these questions now, with the stakes still low, than it will be later.

3. Don’t be passionate.

Early on in her ascendant political career, a visitor once spoke of Eleanor Roosevelt’s “passionate interest” in a piece of social legislation. The person had meant it as a compliment. But Eleanor’s response is illustrative. “Yes,” she did support the cause, she said. “But I hardly think the word ‘passionate’ applies to me.” As a genteel, accomplished, and patient woman born while the embers of the quiet Victorian virtues were still warm, Roosevelt was above passion. She had purpose and direction.

Today it’s all about passion. Find your passion. Live passionately. Inspire the world with your passion.

People go to Burning Man to find passion, to be around passion, to rekindle their passion. Same goes for TED and the now enormous SXSW and a thousand other events, retreats and summits, all fueled by what they claim to be life’s most important force.

Here’s what those same people haven’t told you: your passion may be the very thing holding you back from power or influence or accomplishment. Because just as often, we fail with—no, because of—passion. To be clear, this is not about caring. This is passion of a different sort—unbridled enthusiasm, our willingness to pounce on what’s in front of us with the full measure of our zeal, the “bundle of energy” that our teachers and gurus have assured us is our most important asset.

Instead, what we require in our ascent is purpose. Purpose, you could say, is like passion with boundar­ies. Passion is form over function. Purpose is function, function, function. The critical work that you want to do will require your deliberation and consideration. Not passion.

Passion is about. (I am so passionate about ______.) Purpose is to and for. (I must do ______. I was put here to accomplish ______. I am willing to endure ______ for the sake of this.) Actually, purpose deemphasizes the I.

Purpose is about pursuing something outside yourself as opposed to pleasuring yourself. “Great passions are maladies without hope,” as Goethe said. Which is why a deliberate, purposeful person operates on a different level, beyond the sway or the sickness.

It’d be far better if you were intimidated by what lies ahead—humbled by its magnitude and determined to see it through regardless. Leave passion for the amateurs. Make it about your purpose: what you feel you must do and say, not what you care about and wish to be. Then you will do great things. Then you will stop being your old, good-­intentioned, but ineffective self.

Early on in our careers we are setting out to do something. We have a goal, a calling, a new beginning. Every great journey begins here—yet far too many of us never reach our intended destination. Ego more often than not is the culprit.

We build ourselves up with fantastical stories and talk, we pretend we have it all figured out, we let our star burn bright and hot only to fizzle out, and we have no idea why. These are symptoms of ego, for which humility and reality are the cure.

Do not let ego derail your career—before it even begins.

This piece is adapted from Ryan Holiday’s book Ego is the Enemy, published by Penguin Portfolio.

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13 Moral Biographies That Make You A Better Person And Teach You About Life

Sometimes there is nothing like a 900-page biography. Most of the time though, nobody has time for such a thing. Especially with many modern biographers who refuse to take a stand that resembles judgement towards their subjects.

After all, we read biographies to learn and improve ourselves, not to simply accumulate facts about someone we’ll never meet.

This leads to one of my favorite categories of books I like to recommend: moral biographies. That is, short biographical sketches about great men and women in history, written with an eye towards practical application and advice. As in, have a moral rather than about morality. They are often more anecdotal than historical, apocryphal than accurate but they get the job done. (Incidentally, this was the model I tried to base my book The Obstacle Is The Way on, though I hardly consider myself in the same league.)

Below are some of my favorites. I hope you enjoy them.

How They Succeeded: Life Stories of Successful Men Told By Themselves by Orison Swett Marden Written in 1901 these are uplifting business oriented biographies of men like Marshall Field, John D Rockefeller, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison and women like Helen Gould and Julia Ward Howe (creator of Battle Hymn of the Republic). I was referred this book by Maria Popova over at Brainpickings and loved it—I’ve referred to it many times since reading it.

Lives of Eminent Philosophers Volumes I & II by Diogenes Laertius Ironically, Diogenes’ most famous biography in this collection is of the other Diogenes—Diogenes the Cynic. Other excellent and illustrative sketches include Zeno, Ariston, Cleanthes and Chrysippus the Stoic. Heraclitus is another great biography. All of these vary in length. Zeno is over 150 pages, Herillus (not to be confused with Heraclitus) is 2 pages. But regardless of length, they are all quite good. My favorite little quirk of the book is Diogenes’ weird poem that he writes about each philosopher and of course the credulity with which he reports on their unusual deaths (on that note, you may also like the book The Book of Dead Philosophers, a book on how many of the world’s most famous philosophers supposedly died.)

Lives of the Later Caesars by Anonymous Written by an anonymous author (possibly multiple) in the 4th century, these biographies are a mix of myth, legend and fact about some of the most powerful men who ever lived: the Roman emperors. We have Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, Trajan, Avidius Cassius, Severus and countless others. I’m sure you can guess my favorite subject. Also try The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius, translated by the peerless Robert Graves, these are more biographies of the Roman emperors—from Julius Ceasar to Domitian.

Plutarch’s Lives Clearly the master of this genre, Plutarch wrote biographies of famous Greeks and Romans around the year 100 AD. As always, I tend to default to the Penguin collections. I strongly recommend Plutarch’s Lives Vol. I & II, Essays, and The Makers of Rome: Nine Lives. His book On Sparta is also a collection of biographies (and aphorisms) from the famous Spartans. There is a reason that Shakespeare based many of his plays on Plutarch—not only are they well-written and exciting but they exhibit everything that is good and bad about the human condition. Greed, love, pain, hate, success, selflessness, leadership, stupidity—it’s all there.

The Works of Robert Greene You can argue that the master heir to this tradition is Robert Greene. What is the 48 Laws of Power but a series of biographies—moral lessons—from interesting figures in history? Naturally when I say moral I don’t mean morality, I mean the stories have a moral. From Robert Greene you can learn about Napoleon, Machiavelli, Cortez, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, FDR, Temple Grandin, PT Barnum, and 50 Cent in an accessible way that is really quite difficult to replicate anywhere else.

Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy Written by President Kennedy when he was bedridden after back surgery, Profiles in Courage recounts the inspiring acts of eight different American Senators, including John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Sam Houston, and Robert A. Taft. Kennedy had recently been elected as the junior Senator from Massachusetts and was inspired to write a book after reading a passage from The Price of Union about an act of courage by John Quincy Adams while serving in the Senate. It was heartening to read about Senators willing to cross party lines and stand up for their principles given the current state of our Congress.

The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects by Giorgio Vasari A friend and peer of Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Raphael Titian and all the other great minds of the Renaissance sat down in 1550 and wrote biographical sketches of the people he knew or had influenced him. What I like about this book is that the profiles are not about statesmen or generals but artists. There are so many great lessons about craft and psychology within this book. The best part? It was written by someone who actually knew what he was talking about, not some art snob or critic, but an actual artist and architect of equal stature to the people he was documenting.

Founders At Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days by Jessica Livingston Now this one is certainly a little less historical than the others, if only because most of the profiles are about companies founded in the last ten years. Written by Jessica Livingston, a founder of YCombinator, the book profiles some of the hottest and most successful startups in Silicon Valley history. It shows how the founders managed to create massive growth, usually with very few resources. Now I’m not saying that companies like Hot or Not compare with the accomplishments of Pericles or Da Vinci, but you can certainly see how this book captures a moment in time—and its leading men and women—and what that means. This is the most current book on the list (besides mine) but I think many of you will like it. Plus you can learn a lot about the tech scene in one swoop.

If you never took a history course, hell if your parents never taught you anything, these little books could help. They show us how to live and how not to live. And best of all, you can read about a bunch of different people in one book.

What we choose to do with that information is up to us, of course. I hope you all use it wisely and get as much out of it as I did.

And if you have room for another book of such stories, try my book The Obstacle Is The Way for stories about Amelia Earhart, Arthur Ashe, Thomas Edison, John D. Rockefeller, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Abraham Lincoln.

This post was published originally on Thought Catalog. 

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