Ryan Holiday's Blog, page 5

Always Try To Do It The Hard Way

On stage in Sydney, Australia. Get tickets to see me live in Europe and Canada here.

I was coasting on fumes when he asked me the question, so I don���t think I got the answer right.

To be fair, I was 90 or so minutes into being on stage for my talk in Sydney when I was asked: ���If obstacles make us better, should we seek them out (or create them for our kids)?���

Like I said, I was a little fried, so I said something like: ���Life is full of obstacles already, I���m not sure we need to go around creating additional ones.���

It���s strange that I said this because I was in the middle of doing the exact opposite��� and it���s Chris Williamson���s fault.

He and I were talking in Austin back in May and he told me he had just gotten back from a speaking tour. ���What kind of presentation did you do? Did you have slides?��� I asked, curious because I was getting ready to head out of the country for my own set of theater dates (which, by the way, ���you can get tickets for my next stops in Europe and Canada here���) and Chris had spoken at some of the same venues I was going to be at.

���It was just me and a microphone,��� he said.

This struck me because most of the talks I do���usually at conferences or to companies or to sports teams or soldiers���are not that way. You���re expected to have a slide deck that walks the audience through what you���re talking about. This extra work can really help drive your points home, but it���s also a bit of a safety net because you never forget where you���re at and you always have something behind you to keep the audience���s attention.

In any case, I���ve been doing this so long, it���s what I���m used to. It���s what I���m comfortable with. I know that the material works and I know I have it down.

Which is precisely why when I heard Chris say he was doing it alone with a mic, I thought, I want to try it that way.

Because it seemed harder and different.

General Sherman, the great military strategist and Civil War hero once wrote in a letter to his friend that he had an ���old rule never to return by the road I had come.��� Meaning, he favored blazing new trails to retracing his steps, picking the more difficult journey over the easy and familiar.

This is a great rule for life.

In ���Meditations���, Marcus Aurelius writes about holding the reins in his non-dominant hand as both an exercise to practice and a metaphor for doing the difficult thing. He wanted to get good at doing things both ways, at developing the ability to thrive in any and all situations. Naturally, we���re more confident where we are dominant. But the problem is you become progressively weaker in the hands or the areas that you neglect through this favoring.

I felt like I���d gotten comfortable with one way of speaking. Why not change it up?

Well, one reason is that to fail in front of 2,000 people in Sydney would have been pretty mortifying. But that reason was also pretty motivating!

Epictetus said when a challenge is put in front of you, think of yourself as an athlete getting paired with a tough competitor or a sparring partner. You want to be Olympic-class? ���This is going to take some sweat to accomplish,��� he said.

It took a lot of preparation���much more so than if I had done what I normally do. It also meant settling a lot of nerves. But these are features, not bugs of picking the harder path.

The point is: If it���s easy, you���re not growing.

Not everything that���s hard is good of course, but almost everything good (and worth it) is hard.

Think about all the things you���re good at. There was a time when you weren���t good at them, right? When they were hard. But you chose to work at it despite that initial difficulty. Even though it was frustrating, even though you had to fight the urge to quit, you saw a glimpse of goodness, you clawed out a bit of progress, you felt a glimmer of confidence, and you chose to keep at it. To keep pushing. And you grew from the fight against the resistance.

Even more, you found something on the other side of it all���a you that you realized you didn���t entirely know and had possibly never met. You learned something incredibly valuable about yourself: you���re capable of more than you know.

This is why the Stoics urge us to fight our tendency toward complacency. We have to keep pushing, adapting, shaking things up. We have to seek out challenges. Because would we know anything about ourselves if we never did?

I don���t just mean in big ways, but in small ways, too. Every day, you stand at little crossroads���decisions about how to do things and what things to do. Should you walk the 15 minutes to your meeting or take an Uber? Should you pick up the phone and have that difficult conversation or leave it to an email? Can you choose to do kick turns in the pool instead of push off? Can you choose to pick up a journal instead of your phone first thing in the morning?

As you weigh these competing options, always lean towards the hard one. Don���t be that person that Seneca talks about, the one who skates through life without being tested and challenged, who deprives oneself of opportunities to grow and improve.

Jump into the colder water. Have that tough conversation. Use the weaker part of your game. Take ownership where you can. Choose the more difficult option. Seek out the challenge. Lean into it.

Iron sharpens iron, after all. Resistance builds muscle.

Sparring partners make us Olympic class.

You���ll be better for it���not only for the improvement that comes from the challenge itself but for the willpower you are developing by choosing that option on purpose.

So, to revise my response to the question I was asked in Sydney:

Life is full of obstacles already, but if you want to be more adept at overcoming them, you should always try to do it the hard way.

It wasn���t until I was off-stage, coming down from the rush of trying something new in front of that many people, that I could fully understand that.

And now���I���m on to figuring out how I can challenge myself in November on these other dates. ���See you there���!

You Don���t Have To Be Lucky, You Just Have To Be Good

These are strange times.

On one level, everything is wonderful���better than it ever has been. On another level, almost nobody feels that way. The world seems like it���s falling apart. It does not seem like there is much anyone can do about it. Most of us don���t feel like we���re in much of a position to do much about anything.

Sociologists and historians speak of something called ���moral luck.���

It���s sort of a confusing term but basically, it refers to being in the right place at the right time for heroics, for activism, for impact. Not everyone finds themselves in a position to reveal some world-changing government secret. Not everyone is there when somebody falls into the water and can���t swim. Not everyone was born emperor in a time of crisis (Marcus Aurelius) or an elected official in a moment of great consequence (Cato), not everyone was thrust into the presidency as Truman was in 1945 or into activism as Martin Luther King Jr and Rosa Parks were in 1955.

This is what Churchill was referring to when he noted, sadly, of the Earl of Rosebery, that the man lived in ���an age of great men and small events.��� We don���t all have the chance to be heroes on a grand scale. We don���t all get tapped on the shoulder by destiny (as Churchill was).

Or so we think.

We could also say that there is no such thing as ���small��� events, that we all have a chance���indeed, an obligation���to get involved in the issues of our time and to try to make a positive difference wherever it is in our control.

Besides, Churchill���s assessment of that period was laughably inaccurate. Rosebery lived from 1847 to 1929���slavery was still rampant around the world. For the entirety of Rosebery���s life, working conditions in England���s factories were heinous and awful. Britain���s colonial system and all its abuses carried on with few objections. The Irish question loomed over British politics and most leaders believed it hopeless. Countries regularly went to war for little reason and with little thought for the people affected. Millions starved. Millions were abused. Countless things went uninvented, unreformed, unchampioned.

And at a smaller level, surely, there were so many things that Rosebery could have done���that anyone could have done���that would not have felt small to the people who were on the other end of that kindness or sacrifice or service.

And the same is true for the moment we are in right now. Depending on where you live or what you do, things may seem relatively calm or even sunny. But the world was also just rocked by a pandemic that killed millions���what did you do to help? Income inequality. Climate change. Disruptive technologies like AI loom before us. Fascism is on the rise globally. More locally, there are people who are hungry, people who need a second chance, people who could use a friend, kids who need to be adopted, students who need mentorship, local offices that could be filled, abuses that could be called out.

Of course, we all have opinions about these big sweeping issues. The question is: Are you doing anything about them?

It doesn���t matter whether the events are big or small, what matters is if you are a big or small person, a ���brave��� and ���just��� person, or a cowardly and selfish person. How are you helping? What are you doing?

We like to let ourselves off the hook by assuring that if we were in charge, we would do things differently. If we were a multi��national conglomerate, we wouldn���t use chemicals that harm the environment. If we were the decision-makers, we���d have a diverse workforce, we���d be family-friendly employers, we���d speak out on political issues. We would pay a living wage. We wouldn���t do business with an overseas company that uses child labor. But then the order for company T-shirts comes across your desk and you suddenly have to choose between the $9 option from China and the $19 one manufactured in the U.S. The right thing is still obvious. It���s just harder.

And I mean it when I say it���s harder. I struggle with this with my own company, with my own decisions. I���m a very small fish and it���s exhausting and expensive to act as if your decisions matter. It���s harder to find suppliers, it takes longer to get things, your pricing is worse. But I try to remind myself: I don���t control what other people do. I don���t control the trends of the world or the market, but I do control the decisions I make. I control how I run my affairs.

I don���t always make the right choices. I look back and see the opportunities I���ve missed. People might not agree with all the decisions I make now. I may come to regret not going far enough on some���or too far on others. But I am doing my best not to think of any of these as small. This is my opportunity right now. I���ll take it.

Maybe it will inspire someone else, maybe it will be the first drip that starts the overflow. In the future, maybe I���ll get luckier���in the moral sense. Maybe I���ll find myself in some big, high-stakes situation. The decisions I���m making now will prepare me to meet that moment.

At the very least, it will make a difference for the laborers, the vendors, the customers touched by my business.

An example I love: Pete Frates was just a guy who got hit by a baseball in an amateur league game. It was his good luck that it happened, and his bad luck because the trip to the doctor revealed he had ALS. It was his choice to decide to do something with this, to change the trajectory of the fight against that disease. Certainly, no one expected him to do anything. He had no duty, no obligation to do anything but live out the rest of his life and to struggle to stay alive. Instead, his fund-raising efforts would not just contribute awareness and $200 million to researchers but spark significant progress in a field that had seemed stalled for so long. Even when he was paralyzed, wheelchair-bound, without the ability to talk, and having to be fed through a tube, he never stopped. To the very end, he was not resigned. He fought. He helped. He made a difference. He did not give in to despair. He adapted and transformed his fate into something that mattered, something that will make the future better, even if he���s not around to enjoy it himself.

There is that expression about how the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice. I don���t think that���s really the right wording. It���s that the moral arc of the universe is bent toward justice. It���s bent that way by people who reach up and grab it, people with the ���courage��� to stand against the norms of what was and a steadfast commitment to what they knew was the ���right thing���. It was people who ignored the cynics, the people who told them it was hopeless, told them that one person could not make a difference.

As Marcus Aurelius writes, ���True good fortune is what you make for yourself. Good fortune: good character, good intentions, and good actions.���

Just because we don���t hear a voice, just because an election hasn���t thrown us into office, doesn���t mean we aren���t called to something, locally or globally.

Curse the darkness or light a candle? Bemoan the calm seas or build a motor?

You can make your own moral luck. In fact, you must.

And it���s not that hard.

You just have to do good.

For a stranger. For a cause.

We choose to be heroes, big or small. We choose to be a part of the problem or part of the solution.

And if we don���t, it���s on us.

This Is Why You Don’t Want To Tell Yourself Stories

The thing about success is that it messes with your brain. It messes with other people���s brains, too.

I���m not saying that it gives you amnesia, but it does change how you see yourself and the events that lead you to where you are. Basically, we start to tell ourselves stories about how it happened and why it happened���specifically, why it happened for us. And if what you did was public, then other people start to do the very same thing.

I���ll give you a story from my own life.

In 2012, I made an abrupt and dramatic turn in my life. I walked away from the marketing world and wrote a book about Stoicism called ���The Obstacle Is The Way���. A book that, against all odds, hit the bestseller list and went on to sell millions of copies. It���s landed in the hands of CEOs, athletes, entrepreneurs, musicians, and so many others. Since then, I���ve written 13 more books, 10 of which are about Stoicism. I spotted a nascent trend and turned it into an international phenomenon, reaching people all over the planet and bringing this obscure, ancient philosophy into the halls of power, boardrooms, Hollywood and professional locker rooms.

It���s a nice thought and it certainly doesn���t hurt my feelings that people are inclined to give me credit for planning and orchestrating the whole thing.

The problem is that it���s not true! No matter how many trend pieces or fans repeat it.

In fact, if I had even once expressed the slightest notion that Stoicism���or ���Daily Stoic������was going to be this popular, I should have been legally banned from writing ���Ego Is The Enemy���.

The reality is much simpler: I was excited about Stoicism. There was a book I wanted to write. I hoped it would do well, but I didn���t know. Neither did my publisher, although I���m sure the industry is inclined to give them credit too because my editor would tell me later that they were hoping I’d get over Stoicism and go back to marketing books. I found out later that someone I thought was a friend in the industry was privately predicting Obstacle would sell maybe 5,000 copies.

It was nowhere near a sure thing.

It���s funny how a success story can warp something as objective as the order of the books I���ve published. The great David Maraniss would write ���myth becomes myth not in the living but in the retelling.��� The actual order is that I wrote one marketing book (���Trust Me I���m Lying���) and very shortly after that came out���before we even knew how well ���Trust Me I���m Lying��� would sell���I sold the proposal for ���The Obstacle Is The Way���. Then, while I was working on Obstacle, I wrote an ebook called ���Growth Hacker Marketing���, which came out before Obstacle. But on paper, it looks like I did two successful marketing books and then gambled it all to write about Stoicism. Again, this is not true!

It wasn���t even a gamble! I kept my day job at American Apparel the whole time.

Nor was Obstacle some overnight hit. It came out in 2014 and did OK. It took five years to hit a national bestseller list. Shortly after the release, Tim Ferriss published the audiobook and told his audience about me (something I couldn���t have predicted until after I wrote it). We did a discounted promotion on the ebook during its first year out and Amazon kept the discounted price for something like the next 11 months. It was from this that it slowly, steadily acquired its audience.

Did I sense a huge trend? Or did I write a good book and catch a couple of lucky breaks?

What story I tell myself doesn���t change what happened in the past, but it does change how I regard myself now���it has the potential to change how I���ll act in the future.

The lesson I take from the success of my books is not that I���m a genius. It���s not that I can predict trends. It���s that following what you���re excited about is the best strategy (because I would have enjoyed the experience even if the book didn���t sell). It���s that trying experimental marketing ideas, like doing a BookBub and Amazon Goldbox deal (as unglamorous as that may sound) can pay off big-time. It���s that success usually takes longer than you expect, but after it happens, all that time disappears. It���s that by writing multiple books, instead of resting on my laurels, I put myself in a position to get lucky and stay busy.

Again, if I had known that this obscure school of ancient philosophy had the potential to sell so many copies, I would have self-published ���The Obstacle Is The Way���. I would have fought for a much bigger advance on ���The Daily Stoic���. I wasn���t thinking about the upside at the time���I was just happy to get paid at all!

Stories aren���t just dishonest. They can be dangerously misleading.

In ���Ego Is The Enemy���, I write about a talk I had seen where one of Google���s founders explained, inspiringly to a crowd, that the way he judges prospective compa��nies and entrepreneurs is by asking them ���if they���re going to change the world.���

Which is fine, except that���s not how Google started. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were two Stan��ford PhDs working on their dissertations. It���s also not how You��Tube started, whose founders weren���t trying to reinvent TV; they were trying to share funny video clips. Among their earliest ideas for the platform was to treat it like a dating site. Not to mention that Google didn���t even start YouTube, one of their most valuable properties. They bought it.

What followed in the mid-to-late aughts was Google repeatedly overreaching on a bunch of bold ���disruptive��� product ideas that went nowhere. Google Pages was a flop. Google Glass was a flop. Google Plus was a flop. These were huge bets that were actually largely outside Google���s core competence but fit nicely with the ���change the world��� narrative they had convinced themselves of.

The investor Paul Graham (who funded Airbnb, Reddit, Drop��box, and others) explicitly warns startups against having bold, sweeping visions early on. Of course, as a capitalist, he wants to fund companies that massively disrupt industries and change the world���that���s where the money is. He wants them to have ���frighteningly ambitious��� ideas, but explains: ���The way to do really big things seems to be to start with decep��tively small things.��� He���s saying you don���t make a frontal attack out of ego; instead, you start with a small bet and itera��tively scale your ambitions as you go.

His other famous piece of advice: ���Keep your identity small,��� fits well here. Make it about the work and the principles behind it���not about a glorious, aggrandizing vision.

Resisting the urge to tell yourself stories, to stay focused on what���s in front of you, not to be distracted by the glimmer of that glowing future you���ve painted in your mind���this is a difficult discipline. We want so desperately to believe that those who have great empires set out to build one. Why? So we can indulge in the pleasurable planning of our own. So we can take full credit for the good that happens and the riches and respect that come our way.

Narrative is when you look back at an improbable or unlikely path to your success and say: I knew it all along. Instead of: I hoped. I worked. I got some good breaks. Or even: I thought this could happen. Of course, you didn���t really know all along���or if you did, it was more faith than knowledge.

But who wants to remember all the times you doubted yourself?

The twentieth�� century financier Bernard Baruch had a great line: ���Don���t try to buy at the bottom and sell at the top. This can���t be done���except by liars.��� That is, people���s claims about what they���re doing in the market are rarely to be trusted.

Most stories are lies.

Most narratives leave the important things out.

I���m probably even getting some stuff wrong in this post! (It���s a story isn���t it?)

Most labels obscure too���filmmaker, writer, investor, entrepreneur, executive. These are nouns. But what gets someone to that position? Verbs.

We must resist the impulse to reverse engineer success from our understanding of other people���s stories. When we achieve our own, we must resist the desire to pretend that everything unfolded exactly as we���d planned. There was no grand narrative. You should remember���you were there when it happened.

Instead of pre��tending that we are living some great story, we must remain focused on the execution���and on executing with excellence. We must defer the credit or crown and continue work��ing on what got us here. Because that���s the only thing that will keep us here.

And whenever we can, we should acknowledge our lucky breaks. There were always more of them than we are inclined to admit.

This Is The Secret To Sanity And Success

People fail for a lot of reasons.

People do crazy things for a lot of reasons.

But one reason we don���t talk about enough is sleep.

I watched this at American Apparel.

There were a lot of problems at that company.

It borrowed too much money. It had a toxic workplace culture. It was besieged by lawsuits. It opened too many stores. This was all written about many times during the company���s public disintegration in 2014.

As I talked about in Ego is the Enemy and in Stillness is the Key, Dov Charney, the founder, was a remarkably accessible boss. A lot of leaders talk about being reachable, having an open-door policy, but he really did.

Not just open-door but phone and email too. Any employee, at any level of the company, from garment sewer to sales associate to photographer, could reach out whenever they had a problem. For good measure, during one of the company���s many public relations crises, Charney posted his phone number online for any journalist or customer who had an issue as well. The upside of this was that he was constantly in tune with what was happening in the company. He could solve problems as they happened, sometimes even before they happened. He had eyes and ears everywhere. He could notice and respond to sales trends. He could jump on every opportunity.

The downside of this was the same as the upside. Because by 2012, the company had 250 stores in 20 countries. Charney was sleeping only a few hours a night. By 2014, he wasn���t sleeping at all. There was always someone with a problem, always someone with an idea, always something to do. There was always someone somewhere in some distant time zone taking him up on the open-door policy.

It was this extreme, cumulative sleep deprivation that was the root of so much of the company���s catastrophic failure. How could it not be? Research has shown that as we approach twenty or so hours without sleep, we are as cognitively impaired as a drunk person. Our brains respond more slowly and our judgment is significantly impaired.

I knew this was a problem at the time, but it was only a few years later when I had kids that I fully understood. He was slowly killing himself through sleep deprivation. It wasn���t simply that he was making bad, even reckless decisions, it���s that his sleep deprivation was depriving him of the ability to make good decisions.

You want to think you can function on little to no sleep, but you just can���t. Not on a sustained basis, anyway.

American Apparel ultimately careened in a catastrophic mess of its own making. The decision to open up a new distribution facility was rushed, the timeline impulsively moved up. And when it started to go poorly, Charney moved into the shipping and fulfillment warehouse, installing a shower and cot in a small office. To him and some diehard loyalists, this was proof of his heroic dedication to the company. In truth, he was doubling down on what had created the problem, and ensuring it would be made worse.

Dov descended into madness in front of us. Unshaven. Bleary-eyed. Incapable of controlling his temper, or of even the slightest bit of patience or propriety. Issuing orders that contradicted orders he had issued just minutes before, he seemed almost hell-bent on destruction. It came soon enough���

Two things stand out to me from this period. The first is when he would call to talk very late at night, sometimes staying on the phone until he drifted off to sleep. It was as if he was terrified of having even the slightest down period, so he actively fought sleep until it eventually just took over. And then, oftentimes, there would be calls or texts early in the morning. He���d barely stayed asleep.

The other standout moment was reading reports from the famous board meeting after he had agreed to some financing terms that diluted his control of the company. His board watched, in horror, as Dov mixed package after package of pure Nescafe�� powder in cold water���essentially mainlining caffeine to stay awake. By the time he left the meeting, he no longer had a job. Within a few months, his shares were worthless.

Although this failure was particularly epic and played out in the headlines, it���s actually fairly common. The overworked person creates a crisis that they try to solve by working harder. Mistakes are piled upon mistakes by the exhausted, delirious mind. The more they try, the worse it gets and the angrier they get that no one appreciates their sacrifice.

Elon Musk has been doing some version of it (to slightly better results so far) for years now. Stimulants to stay awake. Ambien to crash. Careering from crisis to crisis, urgent deadline to urgent deadline, tweeting at all hours, a cycle which makes it all the more impossible to enjoy his success or plan for the long-term future. Arianna Huffington tells the story of waking up on the floor of her bathroom as she was building her company, covered in blood. She had passed out from sheer exhaustion and shattered her cheekbone on the way down. Meanwhile, a friend of Churchill���s said ���He made in Cuba one discovery which was to prove far more important to his future life than any gain in military experience, the life-giving powers of the siesta.���

People say, ���I���ll sleep when I���m dead,��� as they hasten that very death, both literally and figuratively. They trade their health for a few more working hours. They trade the long-term viability of their business or their career before the urgency of some temporal crisis.

If we treat sleep as a luxury, it is the first to go when we get busy. If sleep is what happens only when everything is done, work and others will constantly be impinging on your personal space. You will feel frazzled and put upon, like a machine that people don���t take care of and assume will always function.

It takes discipline to put your phone down and go to sleep. It takes confidence to manage your schedule in a way that protects your health. It takes self-awareness to know when you are not at your best, your mind is not operating right, and to step away.

The philosopher and writer Arthur Schopenhauer used to say that ���sleep is the source of all health and energy.��� He said it better still on a separate occasion: ���Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death. The higher the interest rate and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.���

Are you going to wait for a literal wake-up call? Are you going to keep working yourself to the bone, trading sleep for an extra conference call or a few minutes on television or a meeting with an important person?

That���s not success. It���s torture. It���s a prison experiment.

And no human can endure it for very long.

Happiness? Stillness? Enjoying the solitude or beauty of your surroundings? All of that is out of the question for the exhausted, overworked fool. The bloodshot engineer six Red Bulls deep is doing it wrong. The recent grad���or not-so-recent grad���who still parties like she���s in college is not cool.

I try to remind myself that having to stay late at the office to write, trying to push through on no sleep, is disrespectful to the craft. When I spend that extra time on my phone instead of going to bed, when I plan a trip or a week poorly, I am cheating my work, cheating my family. I���m doing something unfair to the stranger I happen to bump into.

Mostly, I am cheating and harming myself. A 2017 study actually found that lack of sleep increases negative repetitive thinking. Abusing the body trains the mind to abuse itself.

Sleep is the other side of the work we���re doing���sleep recharges the internal batteries whose energy stores we need in order to function and thrive as a person. It���s a meditative practice. It���s stillness. It���s the time when we turn off. It���s built into our biology for a reason.

If you want peace, there is just one thing to do.

If you want to be your best, there is just one thing to do.

Go to sleep.

37 (Or So) Lessons From A 37 Year Old��

Earlier this month, I gave a talk in Colorado. I got in late, but it was OK because I knew they were putting me up in a really nice hotel, one I remembered staying in before. As I walked to my room, I was struck by how run down the hotel was. The furnishings seemed staid. The walls were scuffed. The decor was tired. Even the electronics in the room were old.��

Weird, I thought, this hotel used to be new and trendy.��

Then it hit me: It used to be. Time had passed. I might have been in my twenties the first time I stayed there! And then it really hit me: I used to be new and trendy. I���m pretty worn down myself! Those same years have been working on me, too.��

There is a similar observation from Seneca. He���s visiting the house he grew up in and is lamenting the poor state of the landscaping. All the trees that lined the road on the way in were dying. Then he realized, this wasn���t a maintenance issue. The trees, which he had planted himself were dying���of old age. And he himself was not in much better shape.��

I���m writing this birthday post���my 37th birthday and my 12th post in this series���in a COVID brain fog (I picked it up on my book tour). I���m not great at math, but when I was born, life expectancy was roughly 75 years���that puts me at the halfway point. I know medicine is better these days but that still hits me. It hits me like the vibe of that hotel hallway.��

Not that I feel old. If anything, I feel like I am at the height of my powers creatively. I love my life. I love my work. If you told me that this was the halfway point of my life, I���d be grateful. In fact, if you told me this was the end, I���d feel pretty good about that too���I have well more than 37 years to show for the 37 years I���ve gotten.��

So with that in mind, I thought I���d pass along some lessons I���ve learned this year (and beyond) as I have in previous years (check out 36, 35, 34, 33, 32, 31, 30, 29, 28, 27, and 26).

1. ���We���ve got nowhere to be and nothing to do,��� my seven-year-old said a couple of weekends ago when we tried to prod him to finish something up. He was right and I���m trying to make this a little bit of a mantra. It���s not exactly true but it���s a nice counterbalance to my more natural inclination of doing, doing, doing.

2. I���m not sure I���ve ever opened a social media app and then after logging off thought, ���Wow, I���m so glad I did that.���

3. Conversely, I have never taken a walk without thinking, after, ���I am so glad I did that.���

4. George Raveling told me that when he wakes up in the morning, he says to himself, ���George, you���ve got two choices today. You can be happy or very happy. Which will it be?���

4b. Voltaire put it another way I love: The most important decision you make is to be in a good mood.

5. I was talking to a friend and he said something I can���t stop thinking about: ���Having a contrarian view that turns out to be correct can be a brain-destroying experience.���

6. One more from George: he told me a story from when he was a kid������George,��� his grandmother asked him, ���do you know why slave owners hid their money in their books?��� ���No, Grandma, why?��� he said. ���Because they knew the slaves would never open them,��� she told him. To me, the moral of that story is not just that there is power in the written word (that���s why they made it illegal to teach slaves to read), but also that what���s inside them is very valuable. And the truth is that books still have money between the pages. My entire career has been made possible by what I read.

7. There is a fine line between complacency and using your success to be more deliberate and intentional. Or maybe it���s not such a fine line���that���s why I���m trying to use that advice from my 7-year-old to remind myself that if success doesn���t afford you the luxury of picking your shots (or some autonomy over your schedule), what good is it?

8. Epictetus said that an athlete doesn���t think about whether a throw is good or bad. They just catch it and throw it back. This is life. Everything is a catchable throw. You gotta get there and then you gotta toss it back.

9. Another sports analogy���the great ones tune out the crowd. It���s been a journey for me to wrap my head around tuning out not just the cheers but the reality of the fact that the bigger your audience is, by definition the bigger the amount of people who don���t like you also. (I shudder to think how many people out there think I suck���so I don���t think about it!)

10. ���������Rich������ is how much you see your kids,��� I���ve been saying at Daily Dad. ���������Power������ is how much power you have over your own schedule.���

11. I don���t have any goals. None. I have things I like doing���writing, running, etc���and I do them. My only goal is to keep doing those things. Results and accomplishments are the byproduct of this process.

12. Gandhi was once asked what worried him most. His reply? ���Hardness of heart of the educated.��� When I look around right now, I think of this hardness of heart���the embrace of cruelty, ���owning the libs,��� etc���as one of the big problems of our time. But that���s always been there. There has always been dark energy in human affairs. What is more alarming is the way that good people have become utterly exhausted and detached as a result of going on eight years of resisting this energy.

13. By the way, that���s what the dark energy is after. They don���t actually hope to convince a majority of anything. They hope to exhaust a majority and then grab the steering wheel for a bit (again or for a bit longer). That���s what happened during Reconstruction. That was what Southern politicians hoped for during Civil Rights. That���s the movement afoot right now (both candidates are the same et al).

14. ���You just have to keep going back,��� the civil rights attorney John Doar said. You can���t let them wear you down. You can let them make you give up.

15. If success���more knowledge, more ability, more money, a promotion, whatever���doesn���t make you a better person, it���s not success.

16. Along similar lines, a friend of mine was torn about leaving a very important job that a lot of people would kill for, but made him miserable. I told him, ���If you can���t walk away, then you don���t have the job���the job has you.���

17. It���s amazing the amount of work we���ll put into humoring other people. It���s amazing what we���ll put up with from other people. It���s amazing how patient (or how many times we���ll repeat ourselves) we can be with a clueless colleague or client. Yet we just cannot bring ourselves to figure out how our own children can stand to watch YouTube videos of people playing video games. We can���t bear to ask them to do something a third time. We just cannot remember the names of our spouse���s friends or that thing they were telling us about. What the hell?

18. Speaking of hotels, you know you can just leave when you���re ready to go. Checking out is for amateurs���

18b. What I���m really saying is figure out how the pros���the people who do whatever you���re doing, be it travel or banking or shopping for a car or whatever���do it and see what efficiencies you can pick up. See what assumptions can be questioned.

19. I struggle with calibrating how to have high standards without hanging oneself on them. Of course, deciding willy-nilly what time you start each day is a recipe for slowly, steadily drifting towards starting later and later. On the other hand, sweating five minutes here or there���especially when what you���re rushing through is school dropoff or traffic that���s outside your control���is a recipe for misery and missing the point. A book, for instance, is a project that takes months and years. Pace yourself accordingly.

19b. This is what John Steinbeck was talking about when he talked about the ���indiscipline of overwork.��� It was, he said, the falsest of economies (���more about that here���).

20. Why did it take so long for me to get a water bottle to carry around? What percentage of my issues as a child���and arguments I���ve gotten into as an adult���were the result of mild dehydration?

20b. The other day I had just enough ice in there that the water and the ice had sort of combined into a slush. It just hit me that this was the kind of pleasure that Epicurus was chasing. It���s not much���but it���s so wonderful.

21. Like a lot of men of my generation, I���ve learned about this concept of ���mental load��� in relationships (the way, unthinkingly, a lot of responsibilities, emotional obligations and tasks are placed on women). This has necessitated a lot of changes in my life, not all of which have been easy. But I will say this concept has also helped me as a boss, realizing ways in which I was carrying mental loads for people/projects and allowed me to make changes in how I manage and what my expectations are for my employees.

22. Which brings me to something I talked about in ���Ego Is The Enemy���. Almost invariably, making improvements in your personal life or your self-development will make you better professionally. The converse is less often true���getting better and better at what you do is not necessarily going to make you a better spouse, parent, citizen.

23. At Per Se, Thomas Keller put up signs that say ���A Sense of Urgency.��� While I may need to work on slowing down a bit, I���d say most people could use a little speeding up. One of the things I say at work is ������Start the clock������ or sometimes, out of frustration, ���Why the fuck have we not started the clock on this?��� The point is: Stuff takes time. When you add time in front (by taking too long to start) or in the middle (by taking too long to reply) or at the end (by taking too long to process and start the next thing) you are making it take longer. How long other people take to do their parts is not up to you, how long you take to do your stuff is.

24. All success (indeed all failure, too) ���is a lagging indicator���. What are the choices you���re making now to give you what you want later?

25. Sometimes I���ll take a caffeine mint right before I go for a run or a bike ride. I have a lot of reasons to be glad I���m alive, but that right there is one of them. Epicurus would be jealous.

26. How does this stop you? This was the question the Stoics asked. How does this situation stop you from acting with ���courage���, ���discipline���, ���justice��� and wisdom? How could it?

27. I am getting better at recognizing when my brain is not functioning optimally. So like, I can say, when someone tries to explain something to me, ���Sorry, I am not in a position to understand this right now.��� Or, I can recognize, hey, this is not a good time to have this discussion with my wife. I used to brute force everything, even when I was tired or burned out, but what you find is that this itself just requires more work later, when you have to undo the mistakes you made because you were too fried to think clearly.

28. You are almost certainly not saying enough positive stuff. You���re not saying ���good job��� enough. ���Thank you��� enough. ���I love you enough.��� You are not complimenting, congratulating, or appreciating enough.

29. The fewer opinions you have, the happier you���ll be. Or at least, if you do have to have opinions about things that don���t really matter, hold them lightly and in good humor.

30. Everybody thinks Jimmy Carter was a bad president because he was too nice or too idealistic or whatever, that he should have waited until reelection to do some of the things he did. Turns out the real reason he struggled (and why he wasn���t re-elected) was that he tried to get away with not having a Chief of Staff (read Chris Whipple���s book ���The Gatekeepers���). This is an important lesson, I think: At the end of the day, it comes down to how well-organized you are and how tight a ship you run. Most everything else is secondary.

31. If you want to understand the present moment, go read about the past. Read something about a similar moment from a long time ago. ���The Great Influenza��� is an amazing book to understand the pandemic. ���It Can���t Happen Here��� and ���All The Kings��� Men��� are two great novels to understand the political moment. ���Invisible Man��� is a great way to understand the conversation about race. ���Jan Morris��� memoir��� from 1974 helped me understand what it means to be transgender.

32. I posted ���a picture of my positive COVID test��� and a bunch of people got extremely upset. This struck me as really weird because one of the things I have learned as a parent is anything you can do to avoid getting your family sick, you should probably do.

33. But this is just a life lesson too: Not just, why should my kids have to miss out on things they were looking forward to this week because I picked up something on my book tour? Not just why should my wife be rewarded with a fever for holding down the fort while I was gone, but why should my employees have to take something home to their kids, why should an old person I stood next to at CVS end up in the hospital when I could have worked from home and gotten things delivered? And this has nothing to do with this very specific (and strangely controversial) virus but has to do with all colds, bugs, and illnesses, it has to do with how you choose to drive on the road, it has to do with all sorts of little choices we make. The ���virtue of justice��� is considering how your actions impact other people. The only positive we should take from the pandemic is how interconnected and interdependent we all are.

34. And by the way, if you look back at COVID���something that killed more than 1.2 million Americans and at least 7 million people worldwide and you think we overreacted, I just don���t know what to say to you.

34b. Should we have done a bunch of things differently? Did the government make a bunch of indefensible mistakes? Did a lot of the assumptions turn out to be incorrect? Yes. But the indefensible reality is that we could have and should have done more, and when we look at this period as a historical moment, that���s what our children and grandchildren will say to us.

35. At the beginning of 2023, I made the decision to push ���the book I was working on��� an extra year. It was the first time I���ve ever done that. I think maybe I thought that it would be a nice chill and easy year but if anything, it was much harder. This is a good reminder: We often work and stay busy as an excuse to not deal with harder problems at home and with ourselves.

36. One of my favorite chapters in ���Right Thing, Right Now��� is the one on ������coaching trees.������ A successful coach or leader should not just be judged on what they achieve, but also on what the people they discover, scout, hire, and develop are able to achieve. At the end of your life, you���re going to be most proud of the impact you���ve had on people.

36b. I can���t pay Robert Greene back for things he did and the doors he opened for me, but I can pay it forward.

37. Remember, you don���t die once at the end of your life. You are dying every second that passes. We are going in one direction. Don���t rush through it. Don���t miss it. Have something to show for it.

This Is What You Belong To

 

In 1950, a man grieving his young son who had just died of polio got a letter from Albert Einstein. Now, one might think that as a man of science, Einstein would have had a rather resigned view of the tragic nature of the human condition.

We���re born. We���re buffeted by forces beyond our control, beyond our comprehension, and then we die. Often for no reason, leaving profound suffering in its wake.

Given the immensity of the events of the middle of the twentieth century���the Holocaust and the violence of the atomic age���it was quite reasonable that Einstein might be inured to the loss of a single child to whom he had no relation.

Instead, Einstein���s letter was one of profound and philosophic condolence.

���A human being,��� he wrote, ���is a part of the whole, called by us ���Universe,��� a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest���a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.���

Einstein was expressing one of the few things that physics and philosophers and priests seem to agree on: That everything and everyone is far more connected than we are prone to think. We shared an animating force, an energy, a unity that no matter what happens or how different things seem is always there. Even in our suffering, in our grief, we are tapping into something eternal and vast, something that makes us realize we are very much not alone.

���You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,��� James Baldwin wrote, ���and then you read.��� It was books, history, philosophy, Baldwin said, that taught him that ���the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.���

We are all one. It���s so easy to forget it, but it���s true.

The virtue of justice���what my new book Right Thing, Right Now��is all about���is this idea that because of interconnectedness and interrelatedness, we have an obligation. Stoicism is not lone-wolfness. It���s the understanding that we are one single organism and that the fate of one is the fate of all.

As I wrote in Stillness is the Key, no one has felt this more profoundly than the astronauts who had the unique experience of seeing the Earth from space. Whether they were American or Russian or Chinese, they were all overwhelmed by what has been called the ���overview effect,��� an instantaneous global consciousness, an inescapable sense that everyone is in the same boat, no matter where they live or what they believe.

What they experienced looking at the ���Blue Marble��� that is our planet was the exact thing that Hierocles, the 2nd century Stoic, was trying to teach people about two thousand years ago. Yes, we naturally think of ourselves and the people we love first, but with work, we can expand that circle of concern larger and larger until we see everything that is alive as one enormous organism. Astronauts experience the exact same thing that Gandhi, who never even flew in a plane, never saw humanity from above more than a few stories up in a building, called the great oneness.

Realizing this, letting it wash over us, sitting in awe of it���it���s more than just humbling. It also makes us more generous, more courageous, more committed to what���s right. It makes us less concerned with petty nonsense, with meaningless distinctions, with grudges or our own pain.

It���s euphoric. It can also be existentially devastating.

The actor William Shatner, after a lifetime of exploring space on film, finally visited the cosmos at age ninety. He thought he���d marvel at the beauty of all that he beheld. Instead, looking at the Earth from afar, all he felt was sadness.

Because, he realized, everything that mattered was down there on Earth and everyone was taking it for granted. They were destroying this thing of beauty, abusing it, stealing it from generations unborn.

The garment of interdependence, the great bundle of humanity that Frances Ellen Watkins Harper spoke of, it���s real. But what kind of shape is it in these days? The environment is reeling. Billions live in poverty. Millions perish of totally preventable causes. Injustice tears at the fabric that binds us together.

How long can it go unchecked before everything comes apart?

I am convinced that people are much better off when their whole city is flourishing than when certain citizens prosper but the community has gone off course. When a man is doing well for himself but his country is falling to pieces, he goes to pieces along with it, but a struggling individual has much better hopes if his country is thriving.

Is that the lament of a modern politician? The manifesto of some early-twentieth-century socialist revolutionary?

No, it���s Pericles in 431 BC.

The whole point of government and the social contract is built around this idea. All government, it was said by one of the Founders, have as its sole goal the common welfare.

What good is our success if it comes at the expense of others? How safe are we if our safety leaves others vulnerable? What good are we if we can���t help others? We are all bound up in this thing called life together. We share this planet together. When we forget that, or lose track of how our own actions affect others, that���s when injustice flourishes.

Marcus Aurelius���s line that ���what���s bad for the hive is bad for the bee��� could just as easily be a quip in an upcoming political debate as it could be a New York Times op ed. It���s something that he needed constant reminders of, just as we do. He strove to see the world ���as a living being���one nature and soul . . . [where] everything feeds into that single experience, moves with a single motion. And how everything helps produce everything else. Spun and woven together.��� Did his policies and decisions always reflect that? No. And his biggest failings���the persecution of the Christians by the Romans at that time���are a reflection of what happens when we lose track of that ultimate north star.

���I am not conscious of a single experience throughout my three month stay in England and Europe,��� Gandhi observed after one of his visits, ���that made me feel that after all East is East and West is West. On the contrary, I have been convinced more than ever that human nature is much the same, no matter what clime it flourishes.���

This was why he couldn���t hate. Why he couldn���t turn his back. Why he dreamed of a better world with fewer divisions, where problems were never solved by violence or domination. ���Life will not be a pyramid with an apex sustained by the bottom,��� he explained, sounding like Hierocles. ���But it will be an oceanic circle whose centre will be the individual always ready to perish for the village, the latter ready to perish for the circle of villages, till at last the whole becomes one life composed of individuals, never aggressive in their arrogance but ever humble, sharing the majesty of the oceanic circle of which they are integral units.���

This is what the last years of his life were dedicated to, why he was willing to die not just for independence but for equality for the untouchables and for Muslim and Hindu peace. ���I am a Muslim,��� he said, ���a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Christian, a Jew, a Parsi.���

And so are you. We all are.

We are one and the same. All mortal. All flawed. All gifted with incredible potential. All deserving of justice and respect and dignity. All unique individuals and yet an inseparable part of humanity, of the past, present, and future.

Truman kept a line from a Milton poem in his wallet that read simply:

The parliament of Man, the federation of the world.

That���s what we belong to. That���s what we must protect.

This article is actually a chapter from the third book in my Stoic Virtues Series, Right Thing, Right Now: Good Values. Good Character. Good Deeds. which is officially available wherever books are sold! This is a book I���ve been thinking about for five years and writing for two. I���m really proud of it and hope you���ll check it out.

If you missed out on preordering, we���re still honoring bonuses (including signed and numbered pages from the original manuscript, bonus chapters, and even an invitation to a long book-themed dinner at The Painted Porch) at dailystoic.com/justice for a limited time.

Character Is Fate: 10 Habits That Will Help You To Live And Be Better

There aren���t too many of us who are satisfied with the person we currently are.

That is, we know we could be better. We know we should be better.

And by better, we don���t mean at our jobs, at lifting weights, or looking better, or having more money.

We know we could be better people���that is to say, kinder, more generous, more patient, more thoughtful, more reliable.

But how many of us actually do anything about this? How many of us are as focused on being good?

���A better wrestler?��� Marcus Aurelius asked himself, rhetorically, referring to the time he spent improving at one of his hobbies. ���But not a better citizen, a better person, a better resource in tight places, a better forgiver of faults?���

What is your most important job? he emphasizes. ���To be a good person.���

When the Stoics talked about the virtue of justice, they weren���t talking about a legal system of rules and codes. They were talking about what Marcus was talking about���actively working to be a better citizen, a better person, a better resource, a better forgiver of faults.

That���s what I spent a lot of time thinking about as I wrote my newest book, ���Right Thing, Right Now��� (…which you can ���preorder���right now���). It���s about this key Stoic virtue, the virtue that challenges us to put in the work to be good, not just to be great. You know, values, character, deeds.

So here, riffing on some ideas from the ���new book���, are 10 habits that will make you better at your most important job���being a good person:

Tell the truth. ���I���m going to be honest with you������. How many times have you heard this phrase or said it yourself? It seems casual or like a way to establish trust. But beginning a remark by claiming we’re going to give it to you straight is of course implying that most of the time we���re not doing that. Honesty should not need a preface, Marcus Aurelius would say. An honest person should be like a smelly goat in the room���you know when they���re there. In matters big or small, public or private, convenient or inconvenient, tell the truth. Don���t be a jerk about it. Don���t give everyone your unsolicited opinion about how they should live or look or act. ���Speak the truth as you see it,��� Marcus reminded himself, ���but with kindness. With humility. Without hypocrisy.��� Be honest, not hurtful. Be a bastion of truth in a time of lies. This is more than just the right thing to do, it���s your job. As a friend. As a parent. As an employee. As a human being.Respect others. Clementine Churchill once left a note for her husband. ���My Darling Winston,��� she wrote, ���I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not so kind as you used to be.��� Yes, he had power, she noted, but if you keep disrespecting people, ���You won���t get the best results.��� The way you treat others sets off a chain reaction that shapes your life in profound ways. Disrespect, rudeness, pettiness, jealousy���these things repel. But dignity, equanimity, politeness, calm���they attract. They draw people in. They bring the best out of others. Choose wisely.Give, give, give. When Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote a book, he avoided procrastination and overthinking. His only ritual before starting was to make a small donation to a charity he and his wife supported. Like ancient sacrifices to gods before battle, the rabbi waged the war of art by first striking with an act of kindness. Generosity is admirable, and many of us wish we could be better at it. There���s only one way to improve, and it happens to be the same way one gets better at writing or any other craft: by doing it. Not later, once we���re better off or once somebody really needs it. But consistently, regularly, habitually. Money is not the only currency of generosity. You can give your time, your energy, your words of encouragement, your patience, your kindness. Seneca reminds us that every person we meet is an opportunity for kindness. For expressions of generosity. How are you doing? Do you need anything? Can I help you with that? These opportunities are everywhere, every day. Start to seize them. Make a habit of it.Find the good. During one of his many stints in prison, Gandhi made a pair of sandals for General Jan Smuts, the prime minister of South Africa, who put Gandhi in jail. Somewhere in Smuts, despite his complicity in a racist and exploitative system, there was goodness, Gandhi believed. Smuts wore the sandals and thought of Gandhi’s grace and goodness as he did. Smuts eventually tried to return them, saying he felt unworthy to stand in the shoes of such a great man. To his credit, he made an effort to fill those shoes. He contributed to the founding of the League of Nations, drafted the UN Charter, and helped find a homeland for Jews after the Holocaust. He said Gandhi inspired him to redeem himself. Each of us, the Holocaust survivor Edith Eger would later write, has both a Hitler and a Corrie ten Boom (one of the Righteous Among the Nations honorees) inside us. Which one are you letting out? Which one are you seeing in others? Choose a north star. I watched Dov Charney go from a hero in the fashion business to one of its villains. In the early days, he was focused on challenging the broken assumptions of the business. He cared about his workers. He cared about the environment. Later, it became all about him, all about his urges, all about his power. This is the power of a north star. It can take you on an amazing journey or get you hopelessly lost. Your values, your aspirations, the things pushing and pulling you���whatever they are, they foretell a prophecy. They determine where you���ll end up���and who you���ll be when you get there. Cash is a bad but easy north star to default to. Same with ego, fame, power, a desire for revenge or dominance���they will lead you astray. Loyalty, mastery, a love of the game, a desire to keep your hands clean, to be an open book, have a clear conscience. These things take you north. They lead you forward. They cut through the noise. Of the cardinal directions, justice is the clearest, the Stoics said���it points you north, shows you where to go. Follow it, and you���ll end up in a good place���and you���ll be a good person when you get there.Hold the line. Your north star will illuminate a line in your life. That is, the line between good and evil, right and wrong, ethical and unethical, fair and unfair. Courage requires you to put your ass on that line. Self-discipline tells you to get your ass in line. Justice is holding that line. It���s what you will do and what you won���t. What you will stand for and what you won���t stand for. It���s the decisions you make, the actions you take. Indeed, all the philosophical and religious traditions���from Confucius to Christianity, Plato to Hobbes and Kant���are best preached not with words but with actions. Each action is like a lantern that hollows darkness and uncertainty. Each decision to do the right thing is a statement that our peers, children, and future generations will hear. So draw the line and hold it.Develop competence. Keeping your word, taking responsibility, having compassion, good intentions, and good values are great. So is wanting to change things, to take on evil or injustice. But these feelings are worthless without competence. Florence Nightingale is often portrayed as an angelic nurse gliding through the halls of hospitals. The reality is much more impressive. She was a tireless seeker of knowledge, a stern teacher and trainer of a generation of talented nurses, a fierce advocate for resources, a diligent fundraiser, and a skilled steward of that money. If a problem is to be solved, it must be studied. If progress is to be made, if positive change is to happen, it will be paved not with good intentions but rock-hard competence. It will require courage, discipline, and wisdom. Of course it will. If change, if being of service, if developing smarts, capability, and competence were easy, everyone would do it and no one would be impressive.Love. In the struggle against injustice, it���s easy to let bitterness and hatred harden your heart. As Marcus Aurelius wrote: “What doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness.” When we close ourselves off to love and hope, we naturally experience less love and hope. The Bible reminds us that “whoever hardens their heart falls into trouble.” And James Baldwin, that ���hatred���has never failed to destroy the men who hated.��� Hatred corrodes. It takes you south, backward, down, down to depths. Love, on the other hand, protects, trusts, hopes, preserves. Love does not fail. It takes you north, it leads you forward. It always wins. Which way are you going? Is your heart growing or shrinking? Is your love and compassion and connection for other people, your hope for a better future, growing or shrinking? Just be kind. How did Hadrian know that Antoninus would be a worthy mentor to Marcus Aurelius? That he could give his absolute power to another man with only a promise that Antoninus would protect and guide Marcus to one day rule in his place? Because he felt he had glimpsed into Antoninus��� true character when he had once watched Antoninus help his elderly stepfather up a flight of stairs. He didn���t know anyone could see. It wasn���t a performance. It wasn���t ���virtue signaling��� as we call it today. It was actual virtue���what Antonius brought to his twenty years as Marcus��� guardian and to the Roman people as their leader. Character is fate, the Stoics said. Small acts are no small thing, they said. A helping hand, a smile, a door held open, a favor rendered���you never know who might be watching. You never know what low moment you might be rescuing a person from. You never know the ripple effect your small gesture can have. But that’s not why we do it. We do it because it’s right���because people deserve kindness and because kindness makes us better. We do it because it’s the discipline we practice. Leave this place better than you found it. There���s a sign at the track I used to run at in Austin that reads: ���Leave This Place Better Than You Found It.��� It was put up by the Hollywood Henderson, who paid for the track (and made the neighborhood better). You don���t have to save the planet. You don���t have to save someone���s life. Can you make sure you pick up a piece of trash when you see it? Can you do something nice for a stranger? Can you just make things a little bit better every day?

Life is short.

Be good. Do good. Find the good.

Draw the line and hold it. Be respectful, kind, competent. Love and be loved.

Do the right thing.

Right now.

If you enjoyed this article, then I promise you���ll like my new book: ���Right Thing, Right Now���. This book comes out June 11th, but it would mean the world to me if you could preorder the book from ���dailystoic.com/justice���. Preordering a book is the number one thing you can do to support an author as they get a book off the ground. It���s how publishers determine how many copies to print, whether they���ll give an author a book tour, and where the book will land on the bestseller list.

To make ordering it early worth your while, I put together a bunch of bonuses like signed and numbered first editions, a signed page from the original manuscript, bonus chapters, and a bunch of other stuff. Just head to ���dailystoic.com/justice��� before June 11th to claim your bonuses.

And one last thing before I go��� I���m celebrating the launch of ���Right Thing, Right Now��� in New York City at the ���Barnes & Noble Union Square��� on June 11th. I���d love for you to join me. There will be a live Q&A, book signings, and more. Learn more and register ���here���.

This is the Best Career (Life) Advice I Ever Got

Any fool can learn by experience, the saying goes. It���s vastly preferable to learn from the experiences of others.

This is what mentors are for.

They���ve been where you���ve been.

They���ve done what you���ve done.

They���ve made mistakes that you don���t have to make.

This is what books do also. They allow you to benefit from the experiences of others���successful and not-so-successful, happy and deeply broken people alike.

My whole life I���ve sought out that kind of advice, explicit and deduced. I���ve benefited from being pointed in the right direction and warned when I was heading in the wrong direction. I���ve picked up lessons in the books that I���ve read���I���ve highlighted and printed out passages of advice that I���ve tried to live by.

I���ve tried to do this in all aspects of life, but in today���s article, I wanted to talk specifically about the best career advice I���ve gotten.

1. Credit is Worthless

One of my first real jobs was as an assistant for a powerful movie producer. He was one of those guys in LA who had a lot of influence but you could hardly find out anything about him���his IMDB page was scant, he was never in the press, and he didn’t have some fancy title. I asked about this once and he told me that if ever offered the choice between credit and money, only an idiot takes the credit. He was talking specifically about the movie business which has a lot of inflated titles and credits on projects, which egotistical people gravitate towards as compensation. Why do you need to be recognized? he was telling me.

I took this in a couple of ways that shaped my career. First off, I understood quickly and early that my job as an assistant���and later in other positions���was to do work that others could take credit for. (This is a law in the ���48 Laws of Power���). My job was to be a source of ideas and problem-solving that I could surface to my boss so that they could surface to their boss or clients. This might seem thankless, but it���s actually a powerful place to be if you do it right. (Make others dependent on you is another ���law of power���). I would later come to call this ���the canvas strategy���, which I write about in ���Ego is the Enemy���. You find canvases for them to paint on. You clear the path for them…and as a result, influence the direction they go.

At all my jobs, I focused on coming up with ideas for projects and on working on as many projects as possible. I wanted to learn. I wanted to see how things worked. I made sure no one saw me as a threat���on the contrary, that they saw me as someone who was a team player, who worked hard for others (and the business) to succeed. All the while, I was getting what really mattered to me.

Later, it was thinking this way that made me a successful ghostwriter. Most of my fans don���t even know that I have written many books for other people, re-written and edited others. In fact, my first couple of appearances on the New York Times bestseller lists were for projects like this. The reason people don���t know about this is that not only do I not talk about it, but I never put my name on them. When it came to collaborating, it was always a breeze because the books were not about me���I saw my job as helping them make their book, not that we were making our book. It also gave me a leg up in negotiations with the agents and publishers because I didn���t use my leverage to discuss where my name would appear or how big it might be, I asked for my percentage instead.

I don���t do many projects like this anymore, but the books I worked on helped set me up financially. I also learned so much. I have way more ���reps��� than the average author and many of the painful lessons I have learned about publishing happened when I was not the person on stage.

I���m so glad I learned this early. Forget credit. If you want to get ahead, think about somebody other than yourself.

2. Seize The Alive Time

I���ve talked many times about how when I was stuck at American Apparel and dreaming about leaving to become a writer, Robert Greene gave me his amazing advice about ������Alive Time vs Dead Time���.��� Dead Time is when you���re sitting around waiting for things to happen to you, and Alive Time is when you���re in control, making every second count, improving, learning, and growing. But perhaps the reason this advice landed so much is that shortly after I had that conversation over lunch with him, I had dinner in Downtown Los Angeles (I remember it was at Wurstkuche in the Arts District) with Ben Smith, an early Google and YouTube executive. He had just left Google to start his own company and I asked him what he wished he���d done differently in the time before he left. I wished I���d used my Google email address more, he said. Meaning, he wished he���d taken full advantage of the unique status/reputation of Google at that time. He wished he���d taken more meetings, reached out to more people, agreed to speak at more events and attended more conferences. He wished he���d built his network more when he was in a position of demand.

Having dropped out of college myself a few years earlier, I immediately knew what he���d meant. While I was a student, I had all these opportunities to go to office hours with important professors and participate in subsidized activities. People were eager to help me out. But the moment I left, I became just another face in the crowd. Worse, I was their competition. People like to help students out. Now? Now I was on my own.

So, taking Robert���s advice about Alive Time and Ben���s advice about using my business card, I spent a good chunk of my last year at American Apparel inviting everyone I could to come tour the factory. I jumped at every chance to travel for work. I took on extra projects. I sponsored events. I developed relationships inside the company and with people who wanted stuff from the company. It seems crazy, but I am still benefiting from that work today. (That���s how I���d met Ben in the first place).

If it wasn���t for this advice, I might have spent my last days at American Apparel thinking, This is just a job, this is just a crappy couple of months, I just have to wait it out and get through it. I could have chosen Dead Time unknowingly, wishing for better circumstances and ignoring the opportunities right in front of me. I would���ve been much worse off.

In life and in your career, you have to be the driver of your own advancement. When conditions aren���t ideal, you can���t just sit around waiting for things to happen. If you do that, they never will. There is always something you can learn, always some opportunity to take advantage of.

We have to choose to make every moment a moment of Alive Time. We have to decide to be present, to make the most of whatever is in front of us.

Open your eyes. Open your ears. Open your mind. Find the advantage.

3. Build Your Own Platform

I���ve been fired. I���ve had projects and ideas not work. I���ve never been canceled, but I���ve been seriously criticized. I get that these things keep people up at night���but they don���t need to. Because there is a way to insulate yourself from it: Build a platform.

When I was working as a research assistant to Robert Greene for ���The 50th Law���, he had me read a bunch about Eleanor Roosevelt. I was struck by how she entered the White House as First Lady���it was with a magazine column that asked readers to write in to her. She didn���t want to become isolated by her husband���s success. She also didn���t want to be dependent on him. She built a massive audience as a writer and thinker and public figure���and this was an incredible form of power for her to have at that time.

In fact, the only person comparable really was Winston Churchill. Most people are unaware that Churchill made his living as a writer. He published more than ten million words in his lifetime across hundreds of publications and published works. Between 1931 and 1939���when he was stuck in the so-called political wilderness���Winston Churchill published 11 books, 400+ articles, and delivered more than 350 speeches. The result of this was an enormous worldwide platform that allowed Churchill not only to survive financially but wield influence that kept him relevant and guided policy and opinion across the globe. Under ordinary circumstances, a politician would have been powerless when pushed out of office or driven to the fringes by political enemies. But Churchill���s extensive platform���based on his editorial contacts, extraordinary gift with words, and relentless energy���saved his career���and as a result, the free world.

My first editor gave me similar advice. You don���t want to be dependent on PR and publicity to sell your books, she said. You need to have a direct connection to your audience. I���d already been doing that with my ���Reading List Email���, but ���The Daily Stoic���, which I launched in 2016, had meant that every day I talk to my readers���who now number more than one million. I talk to them on ���Facebook��� and ���Instagram��� and ���Twitter��� and ���TikTok��� and ���YouTube��� and on our ���podcast���. If any one of these channels were to ban me or go under, that would suck, but I���d be fine. Another example, if Amazon or Barnes and Noble closed, I���d be fine. I own my own ���bookstore���! My editor was telling me to be like Eleanor Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. To have power outside the system as an insurance policy.

We talk today about ���cancel culture���, but this is mostly a problem for people who have things that can be taken from them, who rely on ���permission��� and ���greenlights��� to make their work. If you have developed an independent platform, you have an insurance policy. You have security. Not just against what other people might do to you, but also against changes in the trends or the marketplace.

Whether you���re an entrepreneur or an author or a filmmaker or journalist, it doesn���t matter. You should build a platform.

To do work without it is to be at the mercy of too much that���s outside of your control. To a creative person, to a free thinker, that is death. Having a megaphone that we own? That we can use when we need it? I���ll tell you having a platform������my reading list newsletter��� for instance���helped me in negotiations on the ghostwriting projects, for sure. Would ���my bookstore��� have succeeded if I was wholly dependent on walk-up traffic in the small town where it’s located? I don���t think so!

At some point, you���re going to have something you need to communicate to the world, you���re going to need distribution���and when you need it, it will be too late to start building.

So don���t wait. Build your platform now.

This is The Accomplishment That Matters Most

A few years ago, Tim Ferriss asked if I would come over for dinner. It was clear he wanted to ask me something, although he wouldn���t say what. I really could not have guessed that he was asking permission to hire away my research assistant Hristo Vassilev to run his podcast, which Hristo has done ever since.

A couple years later, Tim would poach my actual assistant, Loni, too.

The reason for the dinner is that Tim is a good guy and more, Hristo had told Tim he would only accept the job if I was OK with it���but neither of them needed to worry. You should absolutely take the job, I said to Hristo. This is the kind of thing I was training you for.

I���m of course very proud of the books I have written and the things I���ve been able to do. I like accomplishing things. I like my success. But anyone who has seen someone they���ve discovered or mentored or opened doors for knows that there is something truly amazing about watching them succeed, when they go on to bigger and better things.

I just had this experience last month. Brent Underwood started as my intern more than a decade ago at the marketing company I was building. Actually, I hired several interns but he was the one that stuck.

Last month, I interviewed him on a very special day: He had just released his first book with Penguin Random House. That would have felt surreal enough if it weren���t for the fact that the book was about a town he owned and had turned into a hugely popular YouTube channel called Ghost Town Living. I have a bunch of plaques on my wall for my appearances on the bestseller list���but I took an incredible amount of pleasure and pride in designing one for his book (which debuted on the New York Times, USA Today and Publisher���s Weekly lists). It won���t hang on my wall, but it will look great on his.

To be clear, I���ve had some assistants and employees that didn���t work out. I���ve had some who I wouldn���t recommend to anyone and others who have just gone on to live normal lives. I���m by no means a perfect picker of talent or potential. But I think I���m pretty good. My last assistant currently runs a large nonprofit.�� My current researcher, Billy Oppenheimer, now also works for Rick Rubin and sold his first book last year (he has a great newsletter I read every Sunday).

���Let the honor of your students be as dear to you as your own,��� Rabbi Elazar famously said. It���s a wonderful little line, a thought I return to often.

In sports, a ���coaching tree��� is defined by the coaches and players and executives that a coach has discovered, hired, and mentored and what they go on to do in their careers. That���s a concept I���ve been thinking about a lot. I ended up doing a chapter on it in the new book, actually (BTW���you can preorder Right Thing, Right Now��� right here if you want to take advantage of some of the awesome preorder bonuses we���re doing), because it deserves to be recognized outside of sports.

It���s just a wonderful way to measure a life.

By all-time wins, someone like Gregg Popovich of the San Antonio Spurs is a great coach. Five NBA championships, twenty-two winning seasons, two Olympic medals (one gold, one bronze) and a winning percentage of .657 But his coaching tree is unreal. Players like Tim Duncan and Tony Parker and Manu Gino��bili and Patty Mills and Kawhi Leonard and now Wemby. At one point, nearly 30 percent of all the coaches in the NBA had worked for or played under Popovich, and his prote��ge��s have, independently, won eleven championships as head coaches (and one G League championship). Five times, someone from his tree has been named the NBA Coach of the Year. Of the current twenty-three black head coaches and GMs in the NBA, seven spent time under Popovich at the Spurs. Becky Hammon, the 2022 WNBA Head Coach of the Year, spent eight years with the Spurs, where she was the first female assistant coach in the NBA and the first to serve as an acting head coach after an ejected Popovich designated her his replacement (she won two-straight WNBA titles as a coach too).

Gregg Popovich���s coaching tree is so extensive, as one sportswriter put it, that it���s actually more like a coaching forest.

What a legacy! Because each one of the coaches and players he shaped has shaped and helped others, starting their own coaching trees that continue on.

Emerson wrote a lot of wonderful things, but one of his sentences is stuck permanently in my head for its sweetness and generosity and prescience. ���I greet you at the beginning of a great career,��� Emerson gushed in a letter to a struggling Walt Whitman in 1855 (which Whitman promptly added as a blurb to the front of his then undiscovered, self-published masterpiece Leaves of Grass).

How lovely is that?

Without Emerson, the careers of Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Ellery Channing, Amos Bronson Alcott, and later William James (Emerson���s godson) and Alcott���s daughter Louisa May Alcott, would have gone very differently. And what of the people their work inspired? Who became poets because of Whitman or because they read Emerson���s essays 100+ years later?

Socrates had a coaching tree of about thirty-three students that we know of. We are all footnotes to Plato, it has been said, but Plato was himself a footnote to Socrates. There was a guy named Thomas Wentworth Higginson who translated Epictetus into English and led one of the first black regiments in the US Civil War. These are incredible accomplishments. But what a feather in his cap that he also helped discover and publish the poetry of Emily Dickinson.

That���s what I like about Popovich���s coaching tree. He didn���t just create a bunch of replicas of himself. Steve Kerr is a very different coach. Becky Hammon and Monty Williams look very different and come from very different places. Nor are all the coaches people he ���discovered.��� Some are people he gave second chances to. Or gave a safe landing in San Antonio. Maybe he gave them a job or recommended them for one somewhere else. Maybe he spoke up for them during a controversy. The point is, he used his clout, his resources, and his organization���a lot of time to mutual benefit, but sometimes out of pure kindness. That���s a powerful thing.

I can���t write about coaching trees without mentioning my mentor, Robert Greene, who taught me so much about not only writing, but life. It���s funny, Robert talked about ���never outshining the master��� and ���let others do all the work but take all the credit��� in the 48 Laws of Power, yet in reality, he���s generous, patient and supportive. No one has helped me more in my career.

How can I possibly repay him? I can���t���all we can do for a great mentor is to pay it forward.

I carry a debt now and I am only able to discharge it through Hristo or Brent or Billy or the random people who email me and ask for advice. I pay it forward through the work that I do. I pay it forward through writing this article if one person supports one person after reading it.�� That���s the thing about coaching trees: they���ll die if you don���t tend to them, they survive through grafting and through reproduction.

At the end of your career and your life, you���re going to look back and be proud of your accomplishments. If these were achieved selfishly or solitarily though, it will seem empty and sad. At the end, you���ll be thinking about people. You���re going to think about what your kids have been able to do. You���ll be just as proud of what other people have done, what you���ve been a part of and connected to.

But only if you put the work into it now���working as hard to help others as you do yourself.

This is The Only Way (I Know Of) To Travel Through Time

I had the most magical experience a few weeks ago.

It wasn���t exactly time travel, but it felt like something close.

I was sitting down to work on a chapter for my next book (btw, ���the third book��� in the Stoic virtue series comes out in June. I���m working on the fourth now). I had decided to write a chapter on the importance of keeping what���s called a ���commonplace book���.

I sat down at my desk, pulled out my notecards, and found an old, worn notecard mentioning something that Joan Didion had written about notecards from a chapter in her book ���Slouching Towards Bethlehem���. I walked over to the shelf and pulled it down and of course, there it was, a beautiful essay in that book called ���On Keeping a Notebook���, written in 1966.

I got goosebumps, not just because it was exactly what I needed, but because I happened to be sitting, at that very moment, in Joan Didion���s chair (���I bought it at a charity auction��� after her death). How did I know, nine years ago when I read ���Slouching Towards Bethlehem���, when I took the time to jot that little reference, that it might be of use to future-me?

���Why did I write it down?��� Didion herself asks in that essay. ���In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember?���

I don���t know, you never really do, but the process of finding, years later, the perfect thing that I had recorded in the margins of a book or a notebook, has happened to me so many times now that I���ve begun to question the time-space continuum.

When I was writing ���Courage is Calling���, for instance, I decided I would write about the Spartans at Thermopylae. I went to my shelf again and found there, in my ���Penguin Classics edition��� on page 477, what was effectively a highlighted outline of everything I needed to write this section���which had sat there silently for nearly twenty years. I didn���t even think I would be a writer when I read that book! I was just reading something that I thought was interesting!

This happens time and time again. One of my favorite books to re-read is F. Scott Fitzgerald���s ���The Great Gatsby���. I love ���Gatsby��� not just because it���s an incredible book, one of the great works of the English language. I love it because it was one of the first books I ever loved. I was assigned to read and write an essay on ���Gatsby��� in my sophomore English class and I still have that copy. So when I re-read ���Gatsby���, I���m not just talking to Nick Carroway and Jay Gatsby and Meyer Wolfsheim and Scott Fitzgerald himself, I am also talking to 16-year-old me. I can see the food I spilled while I read it at the kitchen table of my parent���s house. I can see my teenage handwriting in the margins.

I can also see the things I noted when I re-read it in college. I can see the notes I took when I read it in my twenties. I can see how I barely noticed the passages on page 73 the first few times I read it and I can see myself flipping back through the book to find them in 2016 when it suddenly hit me that the scene with Meyer Wolfsheim���a stand-in for the gangster Arnold Rothstein, fixer of the 1919 World Series���would be perfect for the opening of the book I was writing about Peter Thiel���s secret lawsuit, the book that would become ���Conspiracy���.

Even as I write this paragraph right now, I have ���Gatsby��� on my desk to revisit some of my favorite pages. I’m struck again by those first few sentences that I’ve read dozens of times: “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. Wherever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just remember that all people in this world haven’t had the advantages you’ve had.” Those words have different meaning to me today than they did five years ago, let alone when I first read them at 15. Now I have kids, now I have a better sense of my own advantages in life, now I know how hard it is to write something that good without sounding preachy or lame.

The poet Heraclitus talked about how we never step into the same river twice. By that he meant that the river is always changing, glowing evermore towards the sea, and we ourselves are changing, growing, getting older. The pages of a book don���t change, but we change, the world changes around them���we���re able to see and perceive things differently.

That���s one of the things that Didion notes in her essay on notebooks. Notebooks, she said, are a way ���to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be.��� They are blasts from the past, reminders of how easily ���we forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.���

I���ve talked before about my notecard system���which I learned from Robert Greene���so I won���t bore you with it here (���here���s a video about it���). But the reason I try to be an intentional reader, why I try to take notes and record and store what I read, is because I have seen the magic that comes from it, personally and professionally.

The best time to have started a notebook or a commonplace book would have been many years ago, but the second best time would be now. Start small���record what strikes you, quotes that motivate you, stories that inspire you. Don���t think too hard, just follow your curiosity. When you read a book, write in it, fold the pages, really engage with the material. Preserve this moment in time. Capture what you���re thinking and feeling. Your future self will thank you.

���It all comes back,��� Didion writes at the close of her essay. More often than not, it will come back to you in ways that you couldn���t have planned for, but that you prepared for.

As a fellow time-traveler, I can tell you she���s right.

So start.