Ryan Holiday's Blog, page 7

The Longer I Do This, The Less I Care About Results

I used to care a lot about how things did.

I think most people are that way.

I remember when my first book, Trust Me I���m Lying, came out I was probably 10% proud of what I���d done and 90% eagerly awaiting for the first week sales to tell me the rest of how proud I should be.

It was interminable, waiting to find out if I hit the bestseller lists.

But as I���ve gone on, I���ve become less and less this way.

It was a slow shift, I think, the product of getting skunked on the list more than a couple times. A result of realizing, as most creators eventually do, that sometimes the thing you think is your best work does the worst, and the thing you threw together in a few minutes suddenly does millions of views or outsells everything else.

I have this recurring image that plays in my mind these days, especially when I am working on a book or a particularly difficult article. I���d close my eyes, think about the project, and there it would be. The image is of an unidentifiable baseball player at the plate. It���s zoomed in like one of those SportsCenter closeups, and the batter is already mid-swing and connecting with the ball. It���s one of those beautiful, old-timey swings like Mickey Mantle or Ted Williams used to take. The front leg extended, the back leg all the way back, the bat coming up and hitting the ball perfectly.

That���s it. That���s the whole image.

I don���t see where the ball goes, whether it was a base hit or a grand slam. I suspect earlier in my career, I would have cared about the outcome. I would have cared about who the player was and what team he played for. I would have needed to know whether the ball went foul or found a fielder���s mitt or cleared the upper deck. But as I have gotten better as a writer, paradoxically, it doesn���t even occur to me that such a thing would matter.

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

It doesn���t seem like much but to hit a baseball is basically to defy physics. Very few people can time their swing just right to meet the ball and hear that satisfying crack as the ball heads back the other direction. It���s a miracle. It requires complete and total dedication.

And it���s no small feat in and of itself���whether it goes foul or over the outfield wall.

One of the things athletes learn is that if you let your mind wander, if you spend even a second thinking about where that ball is going to go, what you���re not doing is your next job: running.

I have a story about the great Frank Robinson that I tried to put into Discipline is Destiny but it ended up in the new book on justice.

In some ordinary, otherwise forgettable game Robinson heard that majestic crack of the ball leaving his bat, and was so positive it went over the left field fence at Fenway, that he ran at half-speed to first base. But then suddenly, the ball came up short, banging off Fenway���s iconic 37-foot tall ���Green Monster.��� Robinson, had to settle for a single.

His team won in a blowout, so it didn���t really matter. Yet after the game, Robinson walked in and slammed down $200 on the manager���s desk.

He was fining himself. He had been too certain of the outcome, too focused on it, and it had meant he hadn���t done his best, he���d let his team���and himself���down.

Anyway, I���ve always loved that story. To me it���s a kind of greatness bigger than hitting a home run���and it has lessons for all of us.

Of course, here in the real world, companies have to make payroll. Quarterly numbers count. Whether you work with a publisher or you work for sales commissions, you do have to care if you���re getting results or not. Robinson won MVP Awards in both the National and American Leagues (and a World Series MVP to top it off). Obviously this dude likes winning, and he knows his way around a stat sheet.

Yet, the longer you do whatever it is you do, the more you realize the truth of one of the basic principles of Stoicism���the part about how some things are in your control and some things aren���t.

Doing the work. That���s up to me. How the work is received? Less so. How well it���s appreciated? How it stacks up next to other people���s work���in quality or in revenue? Again, much less so. ���Ambition is tying your well-being to what other people do and say,��� Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations. ���Sanity is tying it to your own actions.���

When you���re sitting there hoping, expecting, needing to be validated by a certain kind of success, what that���s doing is taking you away from the process in front you. You���re taking yourself away from work you could be doing to make the thing better, work that actually will make a difference in the way that dreams and expectations do not.

It was worrying too much about things he couldn���t control, Ian Happ told me on The Daily Stoic Podcast, that got him sent back down to the minor leagues after a great rookie season with the Chicago Cubs in 2017. ���I was caring more about what the guy who made the decisions thought and got away from my process and what made me a good player,��� Happ explained. ���When you worry about the things that might get you put on the bench, the end result of that is always, you do the things that get you put on the bench.��� He shifted his focus back to the work. ���Instead of wondering why or trying really hard to impress a coach or the people who make the decisions, I said, ���you know what? I���m going to believe in myself, put in the work, and at some point, they���re not going to be able to keep me out of the lineup.��� With this approach, Happ worked himself back into the Cubs��� lineup and had a breakout season in 2022, making his first MLB All-Star team and picking up his first Gold Glove Award in the process (he kept that mindset and actually won his second Gold Glove a few weeks ago). That���s what happens when you care more about what you are doing and less about what others are thinking.

What you���re also doing is depriving yourself of the joy and gratitude of the specialness of getting to do it at all. It���s an incredible thing to be a professional baseball player or to get to write books or to do whatever is that we���re called to do in life. But being outcome oriented, results driven is to spit in the face of that. Instead of being present, you are basically thinking, ���I can���t wait for this to be over so I can find out whether it was worth it or not.��� And let me tell you, the world is not kind to that kind of neediness. It is not kind to that kind of ingratitude either.

I said that on Trust Me I���m Lying, I was 10% intrinsically secure and 90% waiting to be told my worth by the market. For Discipline is Destiny, I���d say that ratio has come almost entirely around. I didn���t think the book was perfect, but I had genuinely enjoyed doing it���been improved by doing it. I felt it was the best work I���d done, and while my publisher did send me my first week sales as they do for every author, I was genuinely shocked several months later when my agent told me it was my fastest selling book. What I was most pleased by though was the way this had snuck up on me and how little this news changed my opinion about the work, positive or negative.

I was just vibing still on that initial connection with the ball. The rest was extra.

As it should be.

27 Things I���ve Learned From 150 Million Podcast Downloads

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

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

It���s not much, but considering the scale of ���The Daily Stoic Podcast���, it���s actually added up quite a bit. I���ve interviewed roughly 200 people over the last five years. That���s maybe 300 hours of audio with people who���ve won Academy Awards, the Super Bowl, and sold millions of records. I���ve also probably appeared on ~250 shows myself since my first book came out in 2012. Here���s a list of stuff I have learned that I think is worth passing along���

��� The novelist Philipp Meyer (whose book ���The Son��� is an incredible read) ���said���, ���You have to be very careful about to what (and to whom) you���re giving the best part of your day.���

��� When I ���interviewed Gretchen Rubin���, one of the most thought-provoking and influential experts on happiness, she told me about one of the things she learned from her former boss, the Supreme Court���s first female justice, Sandra Day O���Connor. Shortly after Gretchen published ���The Happiness Project���, she asked O���Connor who she had clerked for, what is the secret to happiness? O���Connor replied, ���The secret to happiness is work worth doing.��� Perfect.

��� Something I���ve started implementing ���from Adam Grant���: in addition to coaches and mentors, you need to have judges. Adam was a competitive springboard diver growing up, ���and I found it enormously helpful to get a 0 to 10 score every time I came out of the water.��� When he transitioned from sports to the work world, he found it hard to get useful feedback. ���So I started asking people���I would give them drafts���and I���d ask, ���can you rate this 0 to 10?������ After a presentation���what would you score that 0 to 10? After giving a talk, after leading a meeting, after publishing a newsletter, whatever���ask, can you score this 0 to 10?

��� I got a cold plunge tub after ���talking to Joe Rogan on his podcast���. Before then, I thought all the data about the physical benefits of taking cold plunges was mostly bullshit. But Joe talked about the mental benefits������Difficult things are good for you,��� he said. ���They���re good for your mind.��� It echoes Seneca: ���We treat the body rigorously so that it will not be disobedient to the mind.���

��� The famous philosopher Diogenes the Cynic was once seen begging for money from a statue. What on earth are you doing, someone asked. ���I���m getting practice in being refused,��� Diogenes replied. I���ve talked to a couple professional baseball players on ���the podcast��� (���Ian Happ��� and ���Scott Oberg��� are both must listens) as well as professional basketball players (���Chris Bosh��� and ���Cuttino Mobley���) and entrepreneurs (���Tim Ferriss��� and ���Rob Dyrdek���). One thing they���ll all tell you is that a person who is afraid to strike out, afraid to miss, afraid to fail is a person who will not succeed.

��� After running 100 miles in less than 24 hours, Nate Boyer told me, ���the worst part was the expansive flat portions without the ups and downs���there might be a life lesson in that.���

��� My wife Samantha and I started recording conversations (���here���, ���here���, ���here���, and ���here���) for ���The Daily Dad Podcast���, and it���s become one of my favorite podcast formats. We talk about things we���re working on as parents, how we can better support each other, tips we���ve picked up from books or from other parents, phases our kids are going through, how to handle and adapt to those phases, and really just all things parenting.

��� ���The mental performance coach Greg Harden��� (who has worked with Tom Brady and Michael Phelps, among countless other top performers) had a great line: in the way that the ability to quickly recover after a workout is an indicator of physical fitness, ���People who are mentally fit recover faster than the average person.���

��� The serial entrepreneur ���Kevin Rose made a good point��� about how things don���t just cost you monetarily. They cost you mentally too. ���The thing that I���ve realized is that every object I own, every thing, is a subconscious mental burden. Without a doubt. It can be the wheel-barrow that has a flat tire sitting out in the backyard���some part of me is thinking about how I know I have to figure out how to get that fixed at some point. So I���ve reduced the stuff that I have by an order of magnitude.���

��� In August of 1967, Lieutenant Dave Carey was shot out of his A-4 Skyhawk over Vietnam. Soon enough, he found himself a prisoner in Hanoi, where he would subsequently be beaten, tortured and placed into solitary confinement. For six years, he languished there, kept going only by the comrades around him, and an occasional pick me up from the Stoics. As Carey ���told me in an incredible episode of The Daily Stoic Podcast���, fellow prisoners would tap, ���Stockdale wants you to remember what Epictetus said,��� from an adjoining cell. Carey came to understand this to mean ���focus on what you control���, focus on the choices you can make.

��� Related, ���I asked Jocko Willink��� what his advice would be for leaders during turbulent times. ���Really, it just comes down to having humility.��� It���s immediately and unflinchingly accepting the reality of the situation. Not denying the problem, running from it, or expecting magical thinking to rescue you.

��� ���I had an incredible conversation with the historian Heather Cox Richardson���, who writes ���Letters From an American������the Substack newsletter with the most number of subscribers. This line stuck with me: ���it���s a truism in American history that if you have rights, you plead the Constitution. If you want rights, you plead the Declaration.���

��� One of the great perks of my life is getting to have regular conversations with one of the great writers of our time, Robert Greene. ���We recently decided to record one of those conversations���. I asked him about what I think is the thread through all his books, something which is also in short supply these days: an unflinching commitment to reality, even when it���s inconvenient. ���Whenever I hold a belief, or I���m writing a book,��� Robert explained, ���I always start with the premise that I���m probably wrong, that I���m actually quite ignorant, that my idea is pretty stupid. And I look at the evidence on the other side and I examine it and I try to convince myself that my initial idea was right. And if it isn���t, then I change it.���

��� The legendary music producer ���Rick Rubin��� (we actually did a ���fantastic double episode��� with him) talked about why he doesn���t try to chase trends: ���I love music that is outside of time. And one of the things about using organic instruments is, a piano a hundred years ago sounds like a piano today and it will sound like a piano in a hundred years. If you use the latest sounds, the newest sounds, the sounds of today���then tomorrow, they���ll sound like the sounds of yesterday���The newest of sounds can quickly sound very dated.���

��� In a classic episode of Seinfeld, George Costanza has great success doing the opposite of what his instincts tell him to do. This is now known as The Costanza Principle, and it turns out to be scientifically-sound advice. The positive psychiatrist ���Dr. Samantha Boardman told me���, ���There���s so much messaging today about how you always have to be yourself and trust your feelings. But I tell people, ‘be un-you.’ Like, what is the opposite of what you feel like doing right now? Or who is someone you really admire���what would they do in this moment? And I actually think that can get us closer to the versions of ourselves that we would like to be���Separating oneself from one���s impulse, taking a healthy step back and gaining some distance between what you feel like doing and what���s actually going to help you���you���ll make a better choice.���

��� At the beginning of my interview (���you can listen here���) with the peerless Dr. Edith Eger���Holocaust survivor and the author of one of my favorite books, ���The Choice������I asked her about something I regretted, a relationship I had messed up. She looked at me and said she could give me a gift that would solve that guilt right now. ���I give you a sentence,��� she said, ���One sentence���if I knew then what I know now, I would have done things differently.��� That���s the end of that, she said. ���Guilt is in the past, and the one thing you cannot change is the past.���

��� ���Matthew McConaughey told me��� why he shut down his production company and his music label. ���I was making B���s in five things. I wanna make A���s in three things.��� Those three things: his family, his foundation, his acting career.

��� ���The great basketball coach Shaka Smart said��� something similar. He tells his players not to figure out their priorities, but to figure out their priority. ���The root of the word ���priority��� is singular��� It was a singular word���the one thing. In modern times, we���ve turned it into ���priorities,��� but then all of a sudden it turns into eight, ten, 15 things and that defeats the purpose.��� Just do one high-quality thing every day, he said; it adds up.

��� ���Another from McConaughey���. He told me he���s known in Hollywood as ���a quick no and a long yes.��� What a great expression! Before he says yes to doing a movie, he sleeps on it for ten days to two weeks in the frame of mind that he���s not going to do it. If he sleeps well, he doesn���t do it. If the thought that he has to do it wakes him up at night, he does it.

��� Somewhat related: ���when I did Tom Segura���s podcast���, he told me he���s been trying to be a ���long yes��� when it comes to buying stuff. ���There���s a part of buying things that feels good. But I also feel like it���s sometimes good to deny yourself the thing you want in that moment. Instead of going, ���I want this, I���m gonna get it right now,��� why don���t I give it a month and then be like, ���do I still want that thing?��� or was that just a passing moment?���

��� ���The legendary basketball coach George Raveling told me��� he sees reading as a moral imperative. ���People died,��� he said, speaking of slaves, soldiers, and civil rights activists, ���so I could have the ability to read.��� If you���re not reading, if books aren���t playing a major role in your life, you are betraying the legacy that they left for the generations after them.

��� An essential piece of ���advice I got from the author Steven Pressfield���: There are professional habits and amateur ones. Which are you practicing? Is this a pro or an amateur move? Ask yourself that. Constantly.

��� Somewhat related, the NASCAR driver and student of Stoicism, ���Brad Keselowski, talked about��� what distinguishes a professional in his field (and it applies to most fields). ���If the conditions were always perfect, the average 12-year-old could do my job,��� Brad said. ���The problem is that those days are very seldom.��� Can you still show up and perform when the conditions aren���t perfect? That���s the question.

��� I was surprised to hear ���Olympic gymnast Dominique Dawes��� say that she doesn���t miss or reminisce on being at the Olympics or standing on the podium. ���When I dream about exciting moments and memories in my life, those don���t come up��� It���s those moments with your family. It���s those moments with your spouse. It���s those moments knowing you planted an amazing positive seed in a stranger���s life. Those are the moments that fulfill us.���

��� The great ���Sam Harris explained something similar���. He said it didn���t matter what peak experiences you���d had, what insights you���d been able to come up with while meditating, how enlightened you felt after all the years of practice and study. All that really counted, he said, was what you could muster in the course of ordinary, day-to-day life, or more specifically, in any one present moment.

��� ���Austin Kleon��� talked about being a parent: ���You have to be the kind of man that you want them to be. You have to become the kind of human being that you want them to become.��� ���Marcus Aurelius��� was talking about being a human being: ���Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.���

��� ���Danica Patrick��� talked about the surreal reality that���s been her life as an international celebrity. ���It made me realize that the stuff that we see���the celebrities, the magazines we pick up���we just think, ���Oh, they���re famous.��� No, they���re being made famous. Somebody���s paying for that��� So early on, I realized that there���s a lot of bullshit out there. And that there���s an agenda behind everything.��� This is something I try to remember whenever I see someone getting attention and wonder, ���Why am I not getting that?���

***

What I think is so incredible about podcasts is that other people may have listened to those same episodes and taken something totally different from them. In fact, I know they have because I���ve heard from them. But what gets me excited is thinking that across those hundreds of episodes and now cumulatively over 150M downloads (and many more views on video), that adds up to an unfathomable amount of wisdom that people have been able to add to their lives.

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

To learn from people who can teach us. To find something that makes us better.

12 Lessons From 7 Years Of The Daily Stoic

In 2015, my agent called me with an idea. I had published The Obstacle is the Way and was working on Ego is the Enemy, two books which were rooted in Stoic philosophy���but tried not to be too overt about it.

Steve, my agent, suggested I do the exact opposite. You should write a daily devotional about Stoicism, he told me, one page per day. It seemed crazy to me. Most people weren���t interested in philosophy (and most publishers weren���t either). Besides, I don���t speak Greek or Latin, so how would I do the translations? ���I���ll do them,��� Steve told me, ���and I promise it will be your bestselling book.���

This was preposterous to me on many levels. For one, Steve knew Greek and Latin? But it turns out he did���and he was right!

The Daily Stoic released on this day seven years ago and has gone on to sell over 2M English language copies, and it���s been translated into more than 30 languages. Here on the 7th anniversary of The Daily Stoic, I thought I would share some lessons from that book���or rather, lessons that came from writing and publishing it, because the whole process taught me as much about business and life as it did about philosophy.

���Take the assignment. As I mentioned, the idea for The Daily Stoic wasn���t mine. In fact, I wasn���t totally convinced the idea would have much appeal, but I was at a point in my career where I was taking assignments. It seemed like a challenge. I felt like I would get better for trying. Plus Steve had far more experience in publishing than I did, so I trusted him. You just never know. Certainly, I have been surprised time and time again where little opportunities, little suggestions have changed the trajectory of my career. But only because I showed up and did the work.

���There is something powerful about the ���daily read��� format. Tolstoy believed his most essential work was not his novels but his daily read, A Calendar of Wisdom (it���s since become an absolute favorite of mine). As Tolstoy wrote in his diary, the continual study of one text, reading one page at the start of each day, is critical to personal growth. Steve had published The Daily Drucker (which is also great). I didn���t understand until later how perfect this format is for Stoicism. It���s not something you read once and ���get.��� It���s a process. A ritual. I think everyone���s day should start with a daily read of some kind (The Daily Laws by Robert Greene is another I recommend).

���The work never stops. As I was writing the book, I got into it and decided I would just keep going. That���s what started the Daily Stoic newsletter. I���ve written and sent out a meditation on Stoicism every day since���I���d estimate that���s 750,000 words? Enough for seven more books. We���ve sent out just over 3,000 emails, which is just mind-blowing to me. The daily email continues to steadily grow, going out to over 760,000 people each day. And our open rate has basically been the same as when we started with just a few thousand subscribers in December 2016.

���Platforms are the priority. When Winston Churchill was driven from power, he could have wallowed. He could have retired. Instead, he became a one man media company. Between 1931 and 1939, Winston Churchill published 11 books, more than 400 articles, and delivered more than 350 speeches. He became more famous in the U.S. than he was in Britain. He cultivated power outside the system, delivered his message without intermediation. You could say they tried to cancel him, but it didn���t work. That���s what I���ve set up with The Daily Stoic. It���s not just an email list but also a YouTube Channel with 1.5M subscribers, an Instagram account with 2.7M followers, a Twitter account with 540K followers, a TikTok page with 655k followers, and a Facebook page with 861K followers. It���s Stoicism directly to the people.

���Give a lot of value away and capture a small percentage. I mentioned that we���ve essentially published seven books for free through the Daily Stoic email. On top of that, over the years, we���ve essentially created the largest Stoic library in the world. Hundreds of hours of video on the great Stoic works, the rules the Stoics lived by, Stoic habits, Stoic don���ts, and Stoic questions for a better life. Hundreds of thousands of words across articles on the Big 3 (Marucs Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus), timeless Stoic strategies for happiness, dealing with stress, getting and staying motivated, overcoming procrastination, and handling rude people. We���ve done something like 63 million views on YouTube (4.4 million hours watched). The podcast does around 5 million downloads a month (well over 150M lifetime downloads). The vast majority of people who have ever heard of or consumed anything from me, have done it for free. That���s absolutely cool with me. A very small percentage of people buy a book or a coin or whatever���my goal is to provide a lot of value to a lot of people and capture a tiny bit of it. That���s plenty for me.

���Use your success well. My friend Casey Neistat once said something to me. ���You don���t make art to make money,��� he said, ���you make money to make more art.��� As Daily Stoic has captured some of the value it has created, you know what I���ve done with that money? I���ve made more stuff! It���s allowed me to start the podcast, to hire a video editor, etc etc. I have a little note card next to my desk that says ���Am I being a good steward of Stoicism?��� By that I mean, am I using the success that this philosophy has brought me to introduce more people to the philosophy, or am I buying fancy cars with it? My goal has been to re-invest most of what I have gotten back into making and doing cool stuff. That���s a privilege, but also an obligation.

���Commitments/deadlines make you better. It might seem like a lot of work to write and put out an email every day for seven years���and it is! But it���s also one of my favorite things to do, and it has made me so much better. Committing to do this has been a forcing function to my productivity. We all need reps. If I only published books, I wouldn���t get nearly as many reps as I have gotten from publishing these daily emails���each one making me a little better at my craft. It���s also kept me active and in good shape. No resting on my laurels, no off season. Every day I have a show to put on.

���Meet people where they are. We know that people don���t necessarily wake up and think, ���Today is the day I���m going to start looking into an ancient school of philosophy.��� In fact, that���s why I was skeptical about the book working in the first place. I say in the intro ���Stoic philosophy��� is not an appealing phrase in the English language. In order to make this all work, I���ve tried to never lose sight of that. I understand people are busy. I understand they���re not philosophy nerds. I try to meet them where they are. That means making stuff in lots of formats. That means giving stuff away for free. It also means trying to present what I know as solutions to their problems, trying to show how this philosophy helps them with their actual life.

���Think about how they���re interacting with what you do. Most books put the title on the top of every other page. For the second printing of The Daily Stoic, we put the title at the top of every page. We made that change because we realized people liked to take pictures or screenshots of that day���s page and share it���but then their friends had no idea what book it was from. Tolstoy didn���t have this issue/opportunity, but in the modern world we do.

���To everyone who hasn���t heard about you, you���re new. Even with the title at the top of every page, even though the book has been out for seven years, and even though it���s been read by millions���still, whenever we post a picture from the book on our own social accounts, people comment, what book is that from? It���s hard to remember when something is so familiar to you that it is still new to a lot of other people. I don���t expect people to have heard of me. I understand that the vast majority of people haven���t. I want to meet those new people.

���It takes time. Always remember that great things take time. They take longer than you think, even when you take that into account. The Daily Stoic took a while, years, even until it became a hit. I would walk into bookstores and they wouldn���t have it. The email list took years to reach what it is now. I���ve learned that patience is everything.

���Little things add up. Zeno said that greatness ���is realized by small steps, but is truly no small thing.��� Below is a look at some of the sales data for the hardcover and e-book in the U.S. You���ll notice that in most weeks it only sells a couple thousand copies and for many weeks at the beginning, it sold many fewer than that (those big spikes are the first week of January every year when we do a big discounted promo btw). But because I stuck with it, because the book was about something timeless, over the last seven years, those weekly sales have added up in a big way. Maybe other books sold more, faster, but I am confident that The Daily Stoic is going to keep going, like the tortoise, and in the end get very far.

Anyway, I can���t finish this piece without a note of gratitude. To Steve, who suggested the book and helped me write it. And to all of you who read it, watched one of the videos, forwarded one of the emails to a friend. As I said, I���ve gotten better for the opportunity (and privilege) to get to do this. Thank you!

These 14 Small Mindset Shifts Will Change Your Life

For the most part, we can���t change the world. We can���t change the fundamental facts of existence���like the fact that we���re going to die. We can���t change other people.

Does that mean that everything is hopeless and permanently broken?

No, because although we have that extreme powerlessness in one sense, we have an incredible superpower in another: We can change how we think about things. We can change how we view them, how we orient ourselves to them.

That���s the essence of Stoicism, by the way. The idea that we don���t control what happens, but we do control ourselves. When we respond to what happens, the main thing we control is our mind and the story we tell ourselves.

So one way to think about Stoicism itself then is as a collection of mindset shifts for the many situations that life seems to thrust us in. Indeed, Seneca���s Letters, Marcus Aurelius��� Meditations, and Epictetus��� Discourses are filled with passages, anecdotes, and quotes which force a shift in perspective.

Here are 14 that I have taken from the Stoics over the years that have changed my life. I think they���ll do the same for you.

Everything is an opportunity for excellence. The now famous passage from Marcus Aurelius is that the impediment to action advances action, that what stands in the way becomes the way. But do you know what he was talking about specifically? He was talking about difficult people! He was saying that difficult people are an opportunity to practice excellence and virtue���be it forgiveness or patience or cheerfulness. And so it goes for all the things that are not in our control in life. So when I find myself in situations big and small, positive or negative, I try to see each of them as an opportunity for me to be the best I���m capable of being in that moment. It doesn���t matter who we are, where we are, we can always do this.

Every event has two handles, Epictetus said: ���one by which it can be carried, and one by which it can���t. If your brother does you wrong, don���t grab it by his wronging, because this is the handle incapable of lifting it. Instead, use the other���that he is your brother, that you were raised together, and then you will have hold of the handle that carries.��� Another way to say that is that there are multiple ways to look at every situation, multiple ways to determine how you���re going to react. Some of them are sturdy and some of them are not. Some are kind and resilient, some are not. Which will you choose? Which handle will you grab?

The world is dyed by the color of your thoughts. Marcus said, ���The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes the color of your thoughts.��� He also said, ���Our life is what our thoughts make it.��� If you see the world as a negative, horrible place, you���re right. If you look for shittiness, you will see shittiness. If you believe that you were screwed, you���re right. But if you look for beauty in the mundane, you���ll see it. If you look for evidence of goodness in people, you���ll find it. If you decide to see the agency and power you do have over your life (which as we���ve said is largely in how we think), well, you���ll find you have quite a bit.

There is a tax on everything. Taxes aren���t just from the government. Seneca wrote to his friend Lucilius, ���All the things which cause complaint or dread are like the taxes of life���things from which, my dear Lucilius, you should never hope for exemption or seek escape.��� Annoying people are a tax on being outside your house. Delays are a tax on travel. Haters are a tax on having a YouTube channel. There���s a tax on money too���and the more successful you are, the more you pay. Seneca said he tried to pay the taxes gladly. I love that. After all, it’s usually a sign of a good problem. It means you had a killer year financially. It means you���re alive and breathing. You can whine about the cost. Or you can pay and move on.

Poverty isn���t only having too little. Of course, not having what you need to survive is insufficient. But what about people who have a lot���but are insatiable? Who are plagued by envy and comparison? Both Marcus Aurelius and Seneca talk about rich people who are not content with what they have and are thus quite poor. But feeling like you have ���enough������that���s rich no matter what your income is.

Alive time or Dead time? This isn���t from the Stoics exactly, but close enough. Robert Greene once told me there were two types of time in life: Alive time and Dead time. One is when you sit around, when you wait until things happen to you. The other is when you are using that time productively, actively. You���re stuck at the airport���you don���t control that. You decide whether it���s alive time or dead time (you read a book, you take a walk, you call your grandmother). I had a year left on a job when Robert gave me that advice. I could have just sat on my hands. Instead, it was an incredibly productive period of reading and researching and filling boxes of notecards that helped me write The Obstacle is the Way and Ego is the Enemy.

Anxiety isn���t escaped. It���s discarded. This was a breakthrough I had during the pandemic. Suddenly, I had a lot less to worry about. I wasn���t doing the things that, in the past, I told myself were the causes of my anxiety. I wasn���t having to get to a plane. I wasn���t battling traffic to get somewhere on time. I wasn���t having to prepare for this talk or that one. So you���d think that my anxiety would have gone way down. But it didn���t. And what I realized is that anxiety has nothing to do with any of these things. The airport isn���t the one to blame. I am! Marcus Aurelius actually talks about this in Meditations. ���Today I escaped from anxiety,��� he says. ���Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions���not outside.��� It���s not your parents that are frustrating you. They���re just doing what they do. You are the source of the frustration. That���s a little frustrating, but it���s also freeing. Because it means you can stop it! You can choose to discard it.

It���s the surprise that kills you. Stuff is going to happen, but what makes it harder is when it catches us off guard. The unexpected blow lands heaviest, Seneca said. That���s why we should practice the art of *premeditatio malorum���*essentially, a pre-mortem of the things that could happen in a day or a life. This takes the sting out of them in advance���it also lets us prepare and prevent. And for no one is this more important than parents and leaders. Seneca said that the one thing a leader is not allowed to say is, ���Wow, I didn���t think that was going to happen.���

You can���t learn what you think you already know. Conceit, Zeno said, was the enemy of wisdom and learning. This was the essential worldview of Socrates, the hero of the Stoics. Think of Socrates��� method. He didn���t go around telling people anything. He went around asking questions. That���s how he learned so much and ended up becoming so smart. If you want to get smarter, stop thinking you���re so smart. If you want to learn, focus on all the things you don���t know. Humility, admission of ignorance���these are the starting points. This is the attitude that gets you further in life.

What good is posthumous fame? Marcus Aurelius knew he was famous. He knew they were building statues of him. He knew he would have a legacy. He also knew this was basically worthless. What good is posthumous fame, he asks in Meditations, when you���re not around to enjoy it?! He reminded himself too that you know, it���s not like the people in the future were going to be way better than the people alive right now���there will be idiots in the future too. What do I care about how many people read my books in 100 years? What matters is if I am doing my best right now, if I am taking pleasure and pride from doing my best right now. So stop trying to live forever by achieving all this greatness, stop trying to get more than you need, stop trying to perform for history. Do the good you can do now. Stop chasing something you will never touch. Legacy is not for you. You���ll be dead. Leave it to others.

People are just doing their job. I don���t just mean at work. After bumping into a particularly frustrating person, Marcus Aurelius asks himself, ���Is a world without shamelessness possible?��� No, he answers. ���There have to be shameless people in the world. This is one of them.��� This is just someone fulfilling their role. Seeing things this way not only prevents me from being surprised, but it makes me sympathetic. This person has a crappy job. It���s not fun to be them���they have to be one of the jerks that exist in the world. And then I remind myself that I am lucky that my job is to try to be a good person.

They don���t want you to be miserable. It���s strange that Stoics have the reputation for being unfeeling when Seneca wrote three very beautiful essays on loss and grief called Consolations. I read these essays whenever I lose someone or miss someone who I loved. Anyway, one of the lessons that hit me the most is when he is writing to the daughter of a now-deceased friend. He brings up a great point, basically saying, look, your dad loved you so much. Of course, he would be honored that you miss him, but do you think he would want his death to make you miserable? Would he want the mere mention of his name to bring you pain? No, that would be his worst nightmare. He would want you to be happy. He would want you to go on with your life. He wouldn���t want his memory to haunt you like a ghost���he would want the thought of him to bring you joy and happiness. Of course, we���re always going to feel sad when we lose someone, but then we can remind ourselves of this and try to smile too.

Opinions are optional. ���Remember, you always have the power to have no opinion,��� Marcus says. Do you need to have an opinion about the weather today���is it changing anything? Do you need to have an opinion about the way your kid does their hair? So what if this person likes music that sounds weird to you? So what if that person is a vegetarian? ���These things are not asking to be judged by you,��� Marcus writes. ���Leave them alone.��� Especially because these opinions often make us miserable! ���It���s not things that upset us,��� Epictetus says, ���it���s our opinions about things.��� The less opinions you have, especially about other people and things outside your control, the happier you will be. The nicer you���ll be to be around too.

__

The last one is the most powerful one, I think. And it���s about the thing we have the least amount of power and control over: the fact that we���re all going to die.

But the Stoics want us to think about it differently���

Death isn���t in the future. It���s happening now. It���s easy to see death as this thing that lies off in the distant future. It���s a fixed event that happens to us once���at the end. This is literally true but it���s also incorrect. ���This is our big mistake,��� as Seneca points out, ���to think we look forward toward death. Most of death is already gone. Whatever time has passed is owned by death.���

It���s better to think of death as a process���something that is always happening. We are dying every day, he said. Even as you read this email, time is passing that you will never get back. That time, he said, belongs to death. Powerful, right? Death doesn���t lie off in the distance. It���s with us right now. It���s the second hand on the clock. It���s the setting sun. As the arrow of time moves, death follows, claiming every moment that has passed. What ought we do about it? The answer is live. Live while you can. Put nothing off. Leave nothing unfinished. Seize it while it still belongs to us.

24 Leadership Principles From The Greatest Business, Military, Political and Sports Leaders

People think that leadership is something that just happens. One is anointed a leader. One is promoted to leadership. One is born into leadership. And of course, this is not the case.

���Leadership,��� Eisenhower said, ���is the art of getting someone else to do something that you want done because he wants to do it.��� Which means that, like any art, leadership is something that has to be studied. No one comes out of the womb a leader. And yet we���re all leaders in one way or another���of families, of companies, of a team, of an audience, of a group of friends, of ourselves. So there���s no one who wouldn���t benefit from learning some essential leadership principles from some of history���s greatest leaders. These 24 by no means make a complete list���that���s why we built The Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge (registration is currently open for this year���s LIVE 9-week course) but if you implement even a couple of them, I���m comfortable guaranteeing you���ll be a better leader for it. But perhaps the first and most important lesson we learn from the leaders I talk about below is that leadership is a skill that one could refine over multiple lifetimes���so the sooner you start the better.

A Leader Is A Reader. Harry Truman famously said that not all readers are leaders but all leaders are readers���they have to be. And they certainly aren���t reading to impress people or for the mental gymnastics. It���s to get better! It���s to find things they can use. Not at the dinner table or on Twitter, but in their real lives. A leader must learn from the experiences of others. A leader must be challenged. A leader must prepare themselves for the things they���ll only be able to experience once, by learning from the experiences of others. To paraphrase the soldier-philosopher General James Mattis, it is unconscionable to fill up body bags while you get your education solely by experience, one mistake at a time. A leader must be a reader. It���s not just the best way, it���s the only way.

A Leader Puts Everything In The Calm and Mild Light. In Thomas Rick���s wonderful book Waging a Good War, he looks at what made Bob Moses one of the best (yet lesser known) of the civil rights leaders. Moses was quiet and calm. He did not seek out the spotlight. He did not make decisions out of emotion. Instead, Ricks says, quoting a colleague of Moses, he had a ������capacity for reflection and distance from the thing that you are very much in the midst of and even leading.������ The job of a leader, George Washington similarly said, is to look at all events, all opportunities, all people through the ���calm light of mild philosophy.��� As leaders, we will have good days and bad, moments of heartbreak and bad luck, as well as strokes of good fortune and good timing. What matters is how we respond to these swings of fate. (That���s why we dedicate week two of The Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge to mastering your emotions.)

A Leader Always Looks For Teachable Moments. In the 1960s, IBM CEO Tom Watson supposedly called an executive into his office after his venture lost $10 million. The man assumed he was being fired. Watson told him, ���Fired? Hell, I spent $10 million educating you. I just want to be sure you learned the right lessons.���

A Leader Finds A Teacher. Eisenhower was mentored by George Marshall and Fox Conner (and learned a lot about what not to do spending time under Douglas MacArthur). Marcus Aurelius spend two decades under Antoninus Pius (Hadrian had at best hoped Antoninus could offer Marcus a few years of tutoring). It was really an incredible and formative experience for him���it���s part of what we tried to distill down in the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge, especially with the experts we brought in to talk to us. The idea is, as Marcus said of his own development as a leader, to go ���straight to the seat of intelligence.���

A Leader Is Imperfect. Bad leaders think that they have to appear perfect, that they have to have all the answers, that they have to cover up their weaknesses. Great leaders do the opposite. Gandhi, once being interviewed by a reporter, said, ���I am very imperfect. Before you are gone you will have discovered a hundred of my faults and if you don���t, I will help you to see them.��� Why would he do such a thing? Because he knew that as a leader, egotism and an outsized sense of one���s abilities is dangerous and destructive.

A Leader Seeks Out Advice And Feedback. ���It is impossible to learn that which one thinks one already knows,��� Epictetus says. When a leader lets their ego tell them that they have arrived and figured it all out, it prevents them from learning and it leads to mistakes. As Dwight D. Eisenhower, one of the best commanders of the last century, said of the necessity of listening to feedback: ���I have no sympathy with anyone, whatever his station, who will not brook criticism. We are here to get the best possible results.���

A Leader Doesn���t Tell People What To Do. Gandhi���s friends always appreciated the grace he gave them, not judging them for their choices or for the less-strict lives they led. In one of the deep dives in the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge, General Dan Caine recounted that he has maybe given two direct orders in his entire 33 year career. Like Eisenhower said, a leader persuades, a leader motivates. A leader is a strong, inspiring example. They don���t bully and yell. They earn their authority. They are strict with themselves and tolerant with others.

A Leader Gets The Best Out of People. Lots of brilliant leaders and talented people have made the same mistake through the centuries: they expect of others what they expect of themselves, so they are constantly upset and let down. We know that Marcus Aurelius found a better way through. ���So long as a person did anything good,��� Cassius Dio wrote, ���he would praise him and use him for the service in which he excelled, but to his other conduct he paid no attention.��� That���s key for anyone in any position of leadership. Your standards are for you. You only control your behavior. You have to meet everyone else where they are. Get as much as you can from them and of them. See the good in them. Lean into their strengths rather than disdain their weaknesses. Focus on what is special and unique about them instead of zeroing in on the ways they are not as good as you. That���s not only the kind way to lead, it���s the only effective way.

A Leader Can Do Anything But Not Everything. In 1956, Harry Belafonte called Coretta Scott King. With her husband arrested once again, he wanted to check in with her and see how she was doing and what the movement might need. Except they could barely carry on a conversation, because Coretta kept being pulled away from the phone to attend to one of the children, to check on dinner, to answer the door. Belafonte politely asked why the Kings did not have any help at home. Because, Coretta said, Martin was worried other people would think he was enriching himself at the expense of the cause, living the high life while millions of blacks suffered. Belafonte was baffled, ���He���s here in the middle of this movement doing all of these things, and he���s going to get caught up in what people are going to think if he has somebody helping you?��� Then he said he was going to personally pay for staff���and that Martin had absolutely no say in the matter. This wasn���t just a nice gesture to an overworked family. It was also a strategic move. What Belafonte was buying Martin and Coretta was time, peace of mind, and more energy and more focus for the cause. “A leader,��� Plutarch said, ���should do anything but not everything.”

A Leader Prepares For The Inevitable Chaos. As the legendary coach Phil Jackson would explain, ���Once I had the Bulls practice in silence; on another occasion I made them scrimmage with the lights out. Not because I want to make their lives miserable but because I want to prepare them for the inevitable chaos that occurs the minute they step onto a basketball court.���

A Leader Thinks Long Term. In his 1997 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos said, ���We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term.��� For companies���as is the case for individuals���there are always pressures to be narrow in our focus and vision. Bezos, unlike most business leaders, refused to play that game. ���Rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions,��� Bezos said, the real value lies in thinking decades ahead. His maxim for business opportunities is also relevant here: ���Focus on the things that don���t change.���

A Leader Prioritizes Stillness. Randall Stutman has been a coach to some of Wall Street���s biggest CEOs for decades. His clients have included Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America. His consulting and advising agency, CRA, has worked with thousands of executives at hundreds of hedge funds and banks. These are people whose entire livelihood depends on them being perpetually ready to respond to the daily, hourly, sometimes even minute-by-minute volatility of the world���s financial markets. Stutman surprised me when he told me that he often asks these very busy executives how they recharge, given the all-consuming nature of their work. The best, he found, have at least one hobby that gives them peace ��� things like sailing, long-distance cycling, listening quietly to classical music, scuba diving, riding motorcycles, and fly fishing. There is a surprising commonality between all the hobbies: An absence of voices. For leaders, people who make countless high-stakes decisions in the course of a day, a couple hours without chatter, without other people in their ear, where they can simply think (or not think), is essential.

A Leader Has a Guiding Philosophy. Football coach Bill Walsh took the 49ers from the worst team in the league to Super Bowl champions in just three years thanks to his ���Standard of Performance��� philosophy. Seahawks coach Pete Carroll is known for his ���Win Forever��� philosophy���the winning mindset he aims to instill in his staff and players. The great coach John Wooden had his ���Pyramid of Success��� philosophy. These philosophies and frameworks are critical as they codify the principles and rules by which a team will make decisions and operate on a day-to-day basis. If you don���t have a philosophy, how do you expect to know what to do in tough situations? Or when things are confusing or complicated? Being reactive is never a position of strength. It is not a position a leader should find themselves in.

A Leader Always Keeps Their Cool. The journalist and author of The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel, Kati Marton, told me on the Daily Stoic podcast that she once got to sneak into Merkel���s office. On her desk, there was a plexiglass cube with the words, In der ruhe liegt die kraft (���in calm, there is strength”) ���Which is truly her mantra,��� Marton said. ���That is among her superpowers: she does not lose her cool.��� Remaining cool-headed in times of crisis and adversity is one of the most critical skills. ���The first qualification of a general is a cool head,��� Napoleon once said. The worst that can happen is not the event itself, but the event and you losing your cool.

A Leader Stays Humble. Success, money and power can intoxicate a leader. Right before he destroyed his own billion-dollar company, Ty Warner, creator of Beanie Babies, overrode the objections of one of his employees and bragged, ���I could put the Ty heart on manure and they���d buy it!��� A leader benches the ego. A leader never believes they have the Midas touch.

A Leader Does The Right Thing. ���Just that you do the right thing,��� Marcus Aurelius told himself, ���the rest doesn���t matter.��� That would be his legacy, that would be his source of pride, not the buildings he erected or the conquests he made. A leader means making hard but costly decisions���like Marcus Aurelius making the decision to sell off palace jewels when the Antonine plague wiped out much of the Roman army. The people couldn���t afford to pay taxes for new troops. ���So Marcus held a vast auction of contents of the imperial palace, Brand Blanshard writes in Four Reasonable Men, ���and sold gold, crystal and myrrhine drinking vessels, even royal vases, his wife���s silk and gold-embroidered clothing, even certain jewels in fact, which he had discovered in some quantity in an inner sanctum of Hadrian���s.���

A Leader Seizes The Opportunity for Greatness. In early April 2020, Queen Elizabeth II gave a rare public speech with essentially that message. One of Britain���s last living links to World War II, the Queen compared it to the way she today can look back with admiration for those who acted bravely. ���I hope in the years to come, everyone will be able to take pride in how they responded to this challenge,��� the Queen said, ���and those who come after us will say that the Britons of this generation were as strong as any. That the attributes of self-discipline, of quiet good-humored resolve, and of fellow-feeling still characterize this country.��� When the Stoics say the obstacle is the way, this is what they were talking about���it���s an opportunity to be great.

A Leader Knows How to Prioritize. One of the great lessons from Eisenhower is his decision matrix that helps separate and distinguish immediate tasks from important ones. It asks you to group your tasks into a 2��2 grid deciding whether a task is either important or not and whether it is urgent. Most of us are distracted by what���s happening right now���even though it doesn���t matter���and as a result neglect what is critical but far in the future.

A Leader Makes People and Situations Better. Seneca said, ���Happy is the man who can make others better, not merely when he is in their company, but even when he is in their thoughts!��� That is the essence of being a great leader, a great Stoic, a great human being. As Randall Stutman told us in week one of the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge. ���At the base of leadership, what all great leaders have in their heads and their expressions is the idea that they want to make people and situations better.���

A Leader Is Rarely Surprised. Seneca said every leader needs to regularly practice premeditatio malorum���a meditation on all that could go wrong���before it goes wrong. He liked to quote Fabius: the only inexcusable thing for a commander to say was, ���I did not think that could happen.��� And of course, he is right: The job of the leader is to be prepared, to have a plan, to anticipate all possible and probable outcomes. Whether it���s a military campaign, a creative project, or a business negotiation.

A Leader Keeps The Main Thing The Main Thing. John DeLorean was a brilliant engineer but a poor manager (of people and himself). One executive said he was always ���chasing colored balloons������he was constantly distracted and abandoning one project for another. It���s just not enough to be smart or right or a genius. Conversely, Jony Ive, the top designer at Apple would recount how Steve Jobs was always asking Ive and other Apple employees about what they were focused on and specifically, ���How many things have you said no to?��� because to focus on one thing requires not focusing on other, less important things. Jobs would have liked the motto of Los Angeles Rams GM Les Snead: keep the main thing the main thing.

A Leader Trusts, But Verifies. Samuel Zemurray���s line���per Rich Cohen���s amazing book The Fish That Ate the Whale���was ���Never trust the report.��� He went to South America or Boston or wherever the business was being done and saw the situation for himself. He wanted first hand knowledge so as a leader he could make the right decisions. A leader can���t simply accept whatever trickles up from below them���they have to see for themselves. They have to, as the Russian proverb goes, ���trust, but verify.���

A Leader Has The Courage To Stand Apart. The lesser known philosopher Agrippinus talked about how people are like threads in a garment. Most people see it as their job to match the other threads in color and style. They want to blend in, so the fabric will match. But ���I want to be the red,��� Agrippinus said, ���that small and brilliant portion which causes the rest to appear comely and beautiful������Be like the majority of people?��� And if I do that, how shall I any longer be the red?��� That���s the leader���s job. It is not to go along to get along. It is not to default to the status quo. It is not to be another replaceable thread in an otherwise unremarkable garment. The leader���s job is to stand up. To stand out. To speak the truth. As Sam Walker writes in his wonderful book The Captain Class about the unsung leaders who have taken their teams on incredible championship runs, one of the traits great leaders share is they have ���strong convictions and the courage to stand apart.���

A Leader Assumes Formlessness. Cato, one of the most vaunted and towering Stoics, built a reputation and a career out of his refusal to compromise his principles. But Cato���s inflexibility did not always best serve the public good. Indeed, no one did more than Cato to rage against his Republic���s fall, but few did more to bring that fall to pass. Cato���s refusal to compromise was driven by moral principles but ultimately hastened the end he so dreaded. A leader learns from Cato���s fatal mistake. A leader obeys Robert Greene���s 48th law of power: Assume Formlessness. ���Accept the fact that nothing is certain and no law is fixed,��� Robert writes. ���The best way to protect yourself is to be as fluid and formless as water.��� While we admire the high integrity and uprightness of the Catos of the world, the truth is that the inflexible, uncompromising, ���pure��� person who cannot adjust, who cannot conceive of doing things anyway but their own, is extremely fragile.

As I said, leadership can’t be distilled down into some list. It’s a process. It’s a mindset. It’s a lifelong commitment. That’s what we’ve been trying to do for the last few years now with the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge, our most in-depth (and most popular) course.

We designed this 9-week challenge to mirror the kind of education that produced historically great leaders like Marcus Aurelius. Specifically, we built it around one of the key lessons from Marcus���s own development: the idea that leadership is less a position and more a process.

This is our first live version of this course since 2021, so we���ve got some great leadership experts lined up for FIVE Deep Dive sessions. It���s a great opportunity to hear from some of the best, and get your questions answered.

I really hope you join us for this leadership masterclass. Registration is now open, and the course begins on September 25. Head over to dailystoic.com/lead today to enroll!

These 38 Reading Rules Changed My Life

It’s a weird thing to say, but I guess I’m a professional reader. That’s really what authors are. A book is made of books. ���The greatest part of a writer���s time is spent in reading; a man will turn over half a library to make one book,��� Samuel Johnson said.

I���ve written 15 books now, which has meant reading many thousands of books in the process. Once a month for the last 15 years, I���ve recommended many of those books in the Reading List Email. And in 2021, I opened my own bookstore filled with my all-time favorites.

So the question I am asked most often is:

How do you read so much? What���s the secret?

The answer is not ���I���m a speedreader.��� As I���ve written before, speed reading is a scam. The answer is that I have a system, a process that helps me be a productive reader. It���s not my system exactly, as I���ve taken many strategies from history���s greatest readers. Nor is this a system designed around speed or quantity. Reading is wonderful in and of itself, why would I try to rush through it? No, I try to do it well. I try to enjoy it.

In this email, I thought I would detail some of the rules I���ve come to follow over the years. They don���t all make me faster, but they do make me better.

���Do it all the time. Bring a book with you everywhere. I���ve read at the Grammy���s and in the moments before going under for a surgery. I���ve read on planes and beaches, in cars and in cars while I waited for a tow truck. You take the pockets of time you can get.

���Physical books only.

-It���s not that I have a problem with audiobooks���if it gets you reading, I���m all for it. I just think there���s something very special about the physical form. I just read a great book about this actually called Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf.

���Hardcover over paperback.

���Bring a pen with you too. Reading is better if you���re taking notes.

���Keep a commonplace book. As Seneca wrote: ���We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application���not far far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech���and learn them so well that words become works.��� (Here���s a video on my commonplace book method).

���Err on the side of age. Classics are classics for a reason.

-Beat them up. Books are not precious things. As an author, I love it when people hand me a book to sign that has had real miles put on it. When people hand me a pristine copy and tell me it���s their favorite, I assume they are just flattering me. It���s obvious what my favorite books are���because they���re falling apart (here���s my copy of Meditations for instance).

���In every book you read, try to find your next one in its footnotes or bibliography. This is how you build a knowledge base in a subject���it���s how you trace a subject back to its core.

-Same goes when you find an author you love, read them ALL. I read Cecil Woodham-Smith���s book on the charge of the Light Brigade���only to find she had also written a biography of Florence Nightingale. It was that discovery that shaped a full third of my book Courage is Calling.

-That comment from (the disgraced and indicted FTX founder) Sam Bankman Fried about how every book could be a 900 word blog post is preposterously stupid. The whole point of reading is to really understand something. So if all you���re after is the ���gist,��� skip books and stick with blog posts.

���If you see a book you want, just buy it. Don���t worry about the price. Reading is not a luxury. It’s not something you splurge on. It’s a necessity. Even if all you get is one life-changing idea from a book, that���s still a pretty good ROI.

-That might sound privileged, but Warren Buffett considers the foundation of his multi-billion dollar empire to be a book. At 19-years-old, he bought a copy of The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. We don���t know exactly what he paid for it, but in the early 1950s, a hardcover typically went for $1.30���the best investment he ever made, he���s said. Today, Buffett���s worth $108.7 billion, having given away some $37 billion to charitable causes. Not a bad ROI!

���Some people might recoil at categorizing a book that way, but as a lover of literature, I have no problem with it. I myself wouldn���t be writing this to you today if I hadn���t bought a paperback of Meditations in 2006 for $8.25 on Amazon. That book of philosophy taught me not just about life, but also schooled me in the art of writing, in working with and managing people, and gave me the speciality which I now write my own books about. Again, not a bad ROI.

���Don���t just read books, re-read books. There’s a great line the Stoics loved���that we never step in the same river twice. The books don���t change, but you do.

���As I said, speed reading is a scam. You just have to spend a lot of time reading.

���If a book sucks, stop reading it. The best readers actually quit a lot of books. Life is too short to read books you don���t enjoy reading.

���The rule I like is ���one hundred pages minus your age.��� Say you’re 30 years old���if a book hasn’t captivated you by page 70, stop reading it. So as you age, you have less time to endure crap.

-Embrace serendipity. So many of my favorite books are just random things I grabbed at bookstores (this is why I say don���t sweat buying a book���just roll the dice). That���s what bookstores are for, what I���ve tried to build mine around. It���s a discovery engine better than any algorithm.

-Don���t just build a library, build an anti-library���a stack of unread books that humbles you and reminds you just how much there is still to learn. It���s a sign of what you don���t yet know. It���s also a resource there whenever you might need to do a deep dive into that topic.

���Emerson���s line was, ���If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.��� When I was a teenager, I got in the habit of doing this. Every time I would meet a successful or important person I admire, I would ask them: What���s a book that changed your life? And then I would read that book (in college, for instance, I was lucky enough to meet Dr. Drew, who was the one who turned me on to Stoicism).

���Speaking of Emerson���in his essay ���Reading,��� he put down his three rules: ���1. Never read a book that is not a year old [because only good books survive]. 2. Never read any but famed books [same reason]. 3. Never read any but what you like.���

���Whenever I���m in a reading funk/dry spell (most commonly, around book launches), I find I���m able to get back into a groove by re-reading some of my favorite novels. What Makes Sammy Run? The Great Gatsby. Ask the Dust. The Moviegoer.

-Speaking of Ask the Dust, I read that because my friend Neil Strauss said in an interview it was his all-time favorite novel. He also turned me onto Knut Hamsun���s Hunger, which he had also raved about. When people rave about something, don���t dismiss it. If someone says a book changed their life? Consider it seriously. They���re talking about something powerful.

-I find myself sometimes reluctant to read something that���s super popular. That snobbishness never serves me well. More often than not, when I get around to those bestsellers I kick myself���they were bestsellers for a reason! They���re great! Don���t be a book snob.

���You say you don���t have time to read but what does the screen time app on your phone say? What does your calendar say?

���If you want to understand current events, don���t rely on breaking news. Find a book about a similar event in the past. Read history. Read psychology. Read biographies. Go for information that has a long half-life, not something that���s going to be contradicted in the next bulletin.

-Examples: Read The Great Influenza to understand COVID. Read It Can���t Happen Here to understand modern threats to democracy. Read First Principles to understand American politics.

���Ruin the ending. I almost always go straight to Wikipedia and figure out the plot���especially if I am reading something tough like Shakespeare or Aeschylus. Who cares about spoilers? Your aim as a reader is to understand WHY something happened, the what is secondary.

���One of the things that people in publishing know is that readers tend to skip prefaces and forewords. This is crazy! Those things are there for a reason. They often have a ton of helpful and interesting stuff about the context around when the person was writing, who the work ended up influencing, and other tidbits that sometimes stick with you longer than even the work itself.

-���Don���t be satisfied just getting the ���gist��� of things,��� is what Marcus Aurelius learned from his philosophy teacher Rusticus. One of the reasons I try to spoil the plot, make my way through the intro and the preface, read reviews and articles about the books I���m reading, watch videos about them, and read other books on the topic is because I want to really understand what I���m dealing with. If I don���t, if I only want a surface take, why read a book at all?

���When intelligent people read, they ask themselves a simple question: What do I plan to do with this information?

-My favorite line from Harry Truman is, ���not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.��� When we read, we aren���t learning to impress people, to win some game of mental gymnastics. It���s to get better, to find things you can use in your real life. If you���re looking to expand what you do with the books you���re reading, I highly recommend our Read to Lead course. It���s been taken by over 10,000 people, and is our most popular for a reason.

���Read widely and from people you disagree with. The Stoics believed that we should actively engage with anyone who can be a source of wisdom to us, regardless of their origin. If there is wisdom out there to be had, we���d be wise to avail ourselves of it.

-Pretentiousness is bullshit. Epictetus once heard a student talking proudly about having made their way through the dense works of Chryssipus. You know, Epictetus told him, if Chryssipus had been a better writer, you���d have less to brag about.

���Look for wisdom, not facts. We���re not reading to just find random pieces of information. What���s the point of that? We���re reading to accumulate a mass of true wisdom���that you can turn to and apply in your actual life.

-Another line from Seneca is about how people get too caught up in the facts and figures and they miss the message. I totally agree. On the literary snobs who speculate for hours about whether The Iliad or The Odyssey was written first, or who the real author was (a debate that rages on today), he said, ���Far too many good brains have been afflicted by the pointless enthusiasm for useless knowledge.���

���If a book is good, recommend it and pass it along to other people.

It���s the last one that I follow the most. I���m proud of the books I���ve been able to champion and turn people onto over the years. I feel like I am paying forward what the Gregory Hays translation of Meditations did for me (I loved it so much I put out my own edition you can grab here).

I love looking around my bookstore and seeing titles that I don���t see in other bookstores very often. Just recently, Ann Roe���s publisher of Pontius Pilate told us they had to do another printing because we���d raved about it too much. I heard something similar about William Seabrook���s Asylum. That���s the job of a reader and a writer���to find great stuff and suck everything you can out of it as you read it and re-read it.

And to help others do the same.

I hope these rules help you help yourself and help others.

No You Can���t Have It All (Especially as a Parent)

Parenting is all about discipline. It���s about being strict and firm and unrelenting.

Not with your kids, to be clear. That���s being a disciplinarian.

When I say parenting is all about discipline, I���m talking about the only form that matters: self-discipline.

There is a story about one of those legendary Beat parties in the early 1960s. Allen Ginsberg was hosting. Jack Kerouac was there holding court. There were drugs and ideas and romance. There was effortless cool and artistic genius on display. The kind of thing a young artist would dream of being invited to, and once in attendance, never wanted to leave.

Then all of a sudden a twenty-something poet named Diane di Prima got up to do just that, heading out right as things were getting started. The babysitter was waiting, she explained sheepishly.

���Unless you forget about your babysitter,��� Keroauc said to her in front of everyone, echoing the famous belief that the stroller in the hallway was the death knell of creativity, ���you���re never going to be a writer.��� Yet di Prima, not interested in being lectured to by a deadbeat father in the midst of drinking himself to death, left anyway.

���She believed she wouldn���t have been a writer if she���d stayed. To write and come home on time, she argued, required ���the same discipline throughout���: a practice of keeping her word,��� Julie Phillips writes about di Prima in her fascinating book on creatives and parenting, The Baby on the Fire Escape.

Before my two boys, now 4 and 6, were born, a writer gave me similar advice, much more succinctly. ���Work, family, scene,��� he said. ���Pick two.���

You cannot have it all. You have to choose.

These choices take discipline.��.��.��constantly.

In fact, hanging on the wall next to my desk, between two pictures of my kids, is a little sign that just says ���NO.��� It���s a reminder: when I say no���to a request to get coffee, to the offer to go speak somewhere across the country, to appear on the podcast (it���s always podcasts)���I am saying yes to the two most important people in the world to me. I���m saying yes to a moment in their childhood that won���t exist ever again. And the opposite is also sadly true: when I say yes���especially to things in the evening or things that involve getting on airplanes, I am by definition saying no to them, to the people I claim to put first.

The tragedy is that we all know this on some intellectual and emotional level. But it doesn���t make it easy.

There are invites in my inbox right now that I know I should pass on, but the best I can bring myself to do is ignore them and hope the silence will take care of it for me. It���s a certainty that at some point in the future I will undoubtedly be willing to trade anything for one more minute with my kids, yet here in the moment, they���re fighting against other people who are asking me if they can ���pick my brain.���

Love, I���ve heard it said, is best spelled T-I-M-E. So yes, we love our families, but who do we give our time to? Them? Or random impositions? And how much of it do we waste���out of a lack of self-control, out of insecurity?

One of my favorite bits from the comedian Tom Segura is the one where he says that since becoming a parent, he���s decided he has no time for arguing. Like most comedians, he���d always been opinionated, a conversational brawler, even with strangers. But not anymore. If he expresses an opinion to someone and they say, ���I disagree,��� he immediately changes his position and agrees with them���whatever it takes to avoid a pointless argument. To some this might sound weak, but actually it���s a strength that parents have to muster. His time, his energy, his patience belong to someone else. And nowhere, he says, is this truer than with his own parents���whose bait he now refuses to take.

I think about this when arguing with my own children. Is this actually something I need to be right about? Am I so insecure that I have to one-up a six-year-old? Do I really need to make him accept defeat in this discussion about whether dragons exist? ���If you say so��� is a magic phrase. So is ���Sure, suit yourself.��� My favorite is ���Alright,��� because it is. It���s alright if you let this go. It���s alright if they think that. It���s alright if they want to do it their way.

But man, it���ll test you. I sometimes look at the Twitter feeds of very important and busy people���people who I know have babies at home or teenagers in high school���and I wonder what they���re doing. Forget all the companies he runs, Elon Musk has 9 kids, ages 1 to 18, and he���s got time to tweet 30 times a day? He���s seeking out culture war issues to get sucked into?

Alright.

���Things are not asking to be judged by you,��� Marcus Aurelius writes in his Meditations. ���Remember, you always have the power to have no opinion,��� he says. That���s not just a philosopher and an emperor talking, it���s a man with a wife of 30 years and 14 children. He knew that the only way to make it through was to shut up. To let it go. Ignore it. Focus his energy where it had real impact, on his own behavior and his own choices.

So much of good parenting, like discipline itself, is about restraint���and you���ll find that the further upstream you go, the better you���ll be at it. The person who doesn���t fill up their pantry with junk food is less likely to grab it as a midnight snack. Deleting the app means you���ll spend less time on it. Setting up hard and fast rules means you don���t have to think about the decision. Hiring an assistant means some of the stress never even gets to you. Avoiding the provocation means you already won the argument.

These decisions help us be the person and the parent we aspire to be.

For instance, when I look back on a day that didn���t go well in our house���where tempers were lost, where things went sideways, when I wasn���t present enough, where we didn���t eat well or spent too much time on screens���they tend to all have one thing in common: I screwed up my morning. If I sleep well, wake up early, and get some exercise in, if I don���t get immediately sucked into my phone or some work issue that can wait, if I spend a few minutes with my journal, then it really doesn���t matter if the rest of the day blows up. I will have the capacity to deal with it. I can be what they need.

Yet again, discipline.

The other thing my wife, Samantha, and I are working on is just doing less. That was the word we set out as our intention for 2023: less. Less commitments. Less drama. Less busyness. Less screen time. Just less.

Part of the reason I want less is so I have room for more. More stillness. More presence.

The other day my family of four went into town for a children���s birthday party, and when we wrapped up, we decided to head down the street for dinner. It was going to be tight with bedtimes coming up, but it might be fun? Then we caught ourselves: less means trying to squeeze less stuff in. Discipline meant heading home, being content with the fun and relaxed day we���d already had. Especially when there were already signs of fatigue and the exhaustion of personal reservoirs. Discipline meant being fair to the kids, setting them (and us) up for success by not overdoing it, not trying to see how many straws the camel���s back can hold.

It���s easy to focus on the disciplinarian side of being a parent: These are the rules*. Listen to me.* In reality, we have so much less control than we think. What we truly have control over is ourselves, our choices, our decisions.

The most basic premise of Stoicism is the ���dichotomy of control,��� knowing what���s up to us and what isn���t. In fact, Epictetus, one of the great Stoic philosophers, would say that this is the chief task of the philosopher:coming to terms with what you have control over and what you don���t.

As the Stoics say, first you decide what you want to be. Then you need the discipline to make that happen.

This piece was originally published for The Free Press here. You can subscribe at thefp.com.

 

What To Do When War, Climate Change, And Other Global Threats Inevitably Hit Your Startup

I wouldn’t have thought that a book about an obscure school of ancient philosophy would put me in the manufacturing business, but life is full of surprises. Several years ago, after writing a book called The Daily Stoic, I started an email list that delivered one philosophical meditation each day. From there, I expanded the business into prints and then into an e-commerce company that sells all sorts of physical products���statues, coins, printed books���all over the world.

The Daily Stoic Store is a small business in the sense that there are only six or seven of us in the office every day���and yet it’s not really small at all, ranking in the top 1 percent of all Shopify stores. The result has been a surprising thrust into a world I had experienced before only from the outside. Labor practices, manufacturing practices, environmental practices–these were no longer abstract issues that other companies grappled with. They were things that I had to face, firsthand.

We all have opinions about big sweeping issues. We tell ourselves 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.

I’ll give you an example: At Daily Stoic, we sell challenge coins inspired by philosophical concepts (one says Memento Mori, another Amor Fati). After receiving many bids, I learned that it would be significantly cheaper to manufacture those coins in China than in the United States. Although I might have previously nodded my head in agreement with people who criticized outsourcing, now the tradeoffs directly affected my own bottom line.

Suddenly, it was ethics versus expenses: It was out of my wallet that the higher cost per unit would come. I would be the one who would have to go to customers and ask them to pay a higher price. It was me they might balk at.

Eventually, I made the difficult decision to go with a U.S.-based company called Wendell’s (in business since 1882). Then, a few months later, I stumbled across something else I could not ignore. The coins were going straight from the manufacturer to the third-party shipping contractor and then to the customer. And it wasn’t until an order got shipped to me that I realized each coin came shrink-wrapped in its own plastic covering.

How much of this plastic was being produced for my company? How much ended up in the trash���or, worse, in the ocean?

Wendell’s explained the protective benefits of the plastic���and I’m sure 95 percent of the world’s excessive packaging exists for that reason. The company also explained the plastic bags weren’t really costing me anything; this was just the way it had been doing things for a very long time. But, in this case, the environmental footprint was on my conscience, and only I could make it go away.

In our inter��connected world, we entrepreneurs have more power than we think we do, and more than we might have had in earlier eras.

I say ���could��� because I wasn’t obligated to reduce the plastic my products were adding to the world. It’s not illegal to seek cheaper labor overseas. Most of my customers probably wouldn’t have noticed a change. But how could I have justified sorting my recycling at home if I was sending little plastic sheaths into thousands of homes every year? I asked Wendell’s to stop using the plastic. And if making that decision caused damage to a product during shipping, we’d deal with it. Nobody threw me a parade, but I, for one, felt better.

When John Mackey, co-founder of Whole Foods, espouses conscious capitalism���the idea that the purpose of business is creating value not simply for shareholders but also for employees, consumers, suppliers, and the planet���it’s easy to assume he’s talking to other powerful captains of industry. But, no, he’s talking to all of us.

As the great novelist and political theorist Leo Tolstoy once suggested, we all feel qualified to reform humanity’s issues���but we are less inclined to reform ourselves. The Stoic school of philosophy, the thinkers whose ideas are the foundation of my business, would say that talking about what you believe in is much less important than embodying that belief, filtering your basic daily actions and choices through your philosophy. We can despair at the enormity of the world’s problems, or we can get to work where we work.

The truth is that in our interconnected world, we entrepreneurs have more power than we think we do, and more than we might have had in earlier eras. With a click of a button, we have unprecedented reach. We can plug into international supply chains. We can access the kinds of resources that compel great powers to go to war.

Just over a year ago, I watched horrified as Vladimir Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine. And, as the geopolitical experts and military leaders explained Putin’s strategy, it wasn’t a bunch of unpronounceable words and distant places to me. I found myself understanding exactly what was happening, ��because I had recently purchased the rights to publish a leather-bound edition of one of my books and had begun working with a small company in Texas to do it���a company that had also been manufacturing Bibles in Belarus for decades.

Belarus sits above Ukraine, and the Dnipro River winds its way through the country and down through its southern neighbor, past Kyiv, entering the Black Sea not far from Crimea. Alexander Lukashenko, the leader of Belarus, is one of Russia’s closest allies, and in the early days of the war, Lukashenko seemed likely to get involved at any moment; both he and Putin hope to gain control of a valuable shipping route, which in turn would make their countries more attractive to businesses like mine and much bigger ones. For a year and a half, I had been using raw materials that came in through this area and then trucking finished books to a port to be shipped out. This meant the invasion mattered to me as an American not just from a logistics standpoint���how our goods might manage to get through a war zone from printer to customers���but also from an ethical standpoint.

I spoke with a handful of experts, including two members of Congress. Their answer was quite clear: It may not have been illegal to do business with Belarus, but it was effectively the same as doing business with Russia. Is that what I wanted to do? Is that what I should be doing?

This was not the answer I wanted to hear. Further, a solution to the problem was not exactly obvious. I liked the people I was working with in Belarus. The bids I got from manufacturers in the U.K. were as much as 200 percent higher. It struck me, however, that the very book I was printing included a relevant line from Marcus Aurelius, the great Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor: “Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter.”

I decided I didn’t want any part of contributing to the economy of a country that does the bidding of China or Russia. I couldn’t change the world, but I could change this. I could get as far away as possible from something I found abhorrent.

Sure, it was more expensive. It would take long��er. Almost no one would have known if I had simply continued with what I’d been doing. But that doesn’t matter. I would have known.

In the end, it wasn’t a cost-benefit analysis that swayed me. The math wasn’t in my favor. I think you have to start with what you believe is right, and then try to make the math work from there.

I’m not McDonald’s or Apple or General Motors doing business overseas. And I’m not saying that I always make the right decisions, or that I have examined every inch of the supply chain and personally vetted every person or company involved. I haven’t. But, like many other entrepreneurs, what I’m doing is my best.

Each of us has the power to contribute to a problem or to be part of the solution. The decision to reform oneself is not an isolated one. It may matter only a tiny bit in the big scheme of things, but it does matter. All the decisions we make as business owners matter. We have agency, we have a say.

The question we all face, then, is obvious: How will we use it?

This piece was initially published in the May/June 2023 issue of Inc. Magazine and can be found on their website here .��

 

24 Things I Wish I Had Done Sooner (or my biggest regrets)

Of all the things in life we don���t control, the past is the clearest. It already happened. It���s done. It���s set in stone.��

Perhaps we could have controlled and changed it, but the fact is, we didn���t. And now it is what it is, forever a was.��

For this reason, the Stoics were not big on regret. Neither am I. There���s no reason to whip yourself or be paralyzed by the ���What Ifs��� of life. Still, we can learn and grow, and in fact, we must.��

I once interviewed the peerless Dr. Edith Eger, Holocaust survivor and the author of one of my favorite books, The Choice. At the beginning of the podcast (you can listen here), I ask her about something I regretted, a relationship I had messed up. She looked at me and said she could give me a gift that would solve that guilt right now. ���I give you a sentence,��� she said, ���One sentence���if I knew then what I know now, I would have done things differently.��� That���s the end of that, she said. ���Guilt is in the past, and the one thing you cannot change is the past.�����

So below are some things that, while I try not to regret, I do wish I had done differently or sooner or better. I think you might benefit from doing them sooner too���

-I look back at stuff I was so worked up about, things I fretted about, fought about, took personally, held onto, and now think, WHAT? If I had to go back and give a younger version of myself one word of advice it would be: ���Relax.���

-This line from Bruce Springsteen captures, in retrospect, almost every argument or grudge I���ve held onto: We fought hard over nothin��� / We fought till nothin��� remained / I���ve carried that nothin��� for a long time. There are very few arguments I���ve had with my wife that I care that much about anymore.

-Writing Trust Me I���m Lying, I was 90% conscious about what other people might think and 10% following what was in my heart as an artist. The book I am most proud of is my book Conspiracy. The only parts of it I wish I could do differently are the few instances which, in retrospect, I was too conscious of what other people might think (particularly journalists). I���ve flipped the ratio by this point, but I wish I had gotten to that happier place sooner.

-I also should have fought harder on the title of my first book (I wanted to call it Confessions of a Media Manipulator, not Trust Me, I���m Lying), and I should have stuck to my guns about the prologue of Ego is the Enemy (I didn���t want to be in it, they wanted me in it). In creative disputes, the publisher/studio/investors/etc are not always wrong, but often they are. And even when they���re not, you have to remember, that whatever the decision, you have to live with it in a way they do not. I���ve regretted anytime I did not go with what was in my heart as an artist.

-As far as saving and investing money goes, there are so many different automatic transfers I should have set up earlier. I don���t know what my block was, but I stuck with doing things by hand for too long. Meanwhile, every account I have and did eventually set up scheduled transfers for���for my retirement, for my kids college, rainy day fund etc���constantly surprises me with how large the balances have been. Set it and forget it���the sooner you do it, the more you���ll have. You won���t regret compound interest.��

-Man, I ate like garbage for so long. When you���re young you can get away with it. Mostly, I just didn���t know any better. But when I started cutting stuff out? Soda, lots of carbs, most sugar, etc etc, I just felt incredible. I look at pictures of myself in my early twenties and even though I was a runner, I was just doughy. But mostly I think about how crappy I must have felt and not even knowing that I was feeling crappy or why I was feeling crappy.��

-There are many books I regret powering through, far fewer that I regret quitting. Life is too short to put up with bad writing���bad anything really. If the food sucks, don���t finish it. If the speaker is boring, get up and leave. If the party is no fun, go home. Stop powering through crap.

-Maybe it���s because I���m a 90s kid, but there���s a part of me that is instinctually a little bit skeptical of stuff that���s popular. If a book really pops or I hear a bunch of people tell me it���s a classic, part of me goes: ���Well, I���m not going to read that!��� Yet almost every time I have pushed through that, I���m more than pleasantly surprised: David McCollough���s biography of Truman is as good as everyone said it was. Malcolm Gladwell has sold millions of books for a reason. Erik Larson too.��

-People are waiting longer and longer to have kids. I wish we���d have done it earlier. Having kids at 29 has changed my life for the better in almost every single way���I���m glad I didn���t do it at 19. But there were a couple years there where I was ready, I was just telling myself I wasn���t.��

-I should have taken care of my skin more when I was younger. I should have worn sunscreen more. So should you.��

-Do I regret writing Trust Me I���m Lying? Like I said, regret is a tricky word. I wouldn���t be here if I hadn���t. It was the only first book I could have written. I don���t like all the ways it was received and used, but the main thing I wish is that I had been compelled to write it earlier���or more accurately, I wish I had been aware enough to question my life and my choices and my industry sooner. That might have actually made the book impossible, the stories less interesting, but I would have been a better person. I was just too blind, too caught up at being good at something to figure out it wasn���t a good thing to be good at.��

-I also distinctly remember as I sold that book to my publisher feeling so rushed. Like it had to come out right away, or I would miss the window, that the ideas wouldn���t hold true. Lol. It was a book about ���fake news��� before that phrase even existed! I wasn���t late, I was early. I have since learned the importance of being patient, that taking your time, getting it right instead of first, is much less likely to be something that leads to regret than the alternative.��

-In the afterword of Courage is Calling, I tell the story about being asked to do something terrible at American Apparel. I didn���t do it, but I also didn���t take much of a stand about it. Why? I didn���t want to get fired. Only much later did it fully occur to me how ridiculous that is: A job where you have to be worried about getting fired for not wanting to do something wrong is not a job worth keeping!

-I���ve made a few very costly mistakes as an entrepreneur/business person. I noticed one trend: My wife was against them all at the time. It took me longer than it should have to notice this very illuminating signal.��

-I should have drawn better boundaries with my parents sooner.��

-It���s clear to me in retrospect that my desire for approval, for being seen, for being a part of something important or newsworthy or exciting, blinded me to the character of certain people I worked for. Of course, this was something those people understood and exploited in me and lots of other more vulnerable victims, but it���s still on me. You have to wake up to the ways that the wounds you experienced as a kid make you a mark, or create patterns in your life. It���s not your fault things happened to you, it is your fault if you don���t learn how to adjust accordingly.

-You know deep down that accomplishing things won���t make you happy, but I think I always fantasized that it would at least feel really good. I was so wrong. Hitting #1 for the first time as an author felt like���nothing. Being a ���millionaire������nothing. It���s a trick of evolution that drives us, and no one is immune from making this mistake. The mistake to really avoid though is the one that comes after the anti-climatic accomplishment, the one where you go: ���Ah, it���s that I need to repeat this success, it���s that I didn���t get enough. More will do it.��� You know this but then you act otherwise���

–In many interpersonal conflicts over the years I have come to rue acting quickly, responding emotionally or getting personal. I have never regretted taking my time, being firm but still understanding, and trying to give the other person a way out, a way to save face.

-With 36 years of data now, I can confidently say that I have never once lost my temper and afterwards said, ���I���m so glad I did that.�����

-When I look back at my old writing, the main thing I regret is usually tone. Certainty does not age well. Life is complicated. Situations are nuanced. My books have gotten longer as I���ve gone on. I don���t think I���m being self-indulgent, I think I am being more fair, more compassionate, more truthful.��

-If you keep having to put down your horses, it���s because you���re riding them too hard. Unfortunately, I have lost a lot of otherwise great talent because I put too much on them. Just as athletes have to think about personal load management, coaches and GMs have to think about it for the whole team (and understand that every person has a different threshold).

-With the exception of the kind of people for whom no contact is a necessary strategy, I have never regretted the impulse to send someone a check-in text or call. And I have twice regretted neglecting the impulse to reply or reach out to my friends Seth and Bret, because I never got another chance, as I detailed here.

-Every repair or improvement I put off doing for my house, when necessity eventually came around and I had to do it anyway, I���ve thought: What did I put this off for? It cost the same and I deprived myself of the enjoyment in the interim. I���m trying to get better at not kicking cans down the road.��

-Most of all, I wish that I had enjoyed my work sooner. A few years ago, I was talking to a retired pro athlete and they were telling me how they regretted not enjoying the game as much when they played, that they hadn���t had more fun while they played. It wasn���t a particularly unique insight. I���ve heard it in a million speeches and interviews, but I was in the middle of a particularly hard writing project at the time and not having much fun. I remember thinking: I���ve made it. I���m a pro at this really cool job���why am I not enjoying myself?��

I���ve made a conscious effort since to consciously appreciate that I get to do this, to not let it turn into a grind or a slog. You don���t know if you���ll actually make it to publishing a book���you could die, the book could die���so why not have fun while you���re doing it? Why not make each day the win, the joy, the experience as opposed to the end result?��

As Marcus Aurelius said, it���s insane to tie your wellbeing to things outside of your control. Success, mastery, sanity, Marcus writes, comes from tying your wellbeing ���to your own actions.��� If you did your best, if you gave it your all, if you acted with your best judgment���you���ve won.

It Always Takes Longer Than You Expect (Even When You Take This Into Account)

When I finished my first book, I hired a publicist.

I was 25.

It cost $20,000 and was, to that point, the most money I had ever spent in my life.

As part of the scope of work, they had me put together a list of my top twenty or so media targets������what I thought I had a reasonable shot of getting and what would be good platforms with the book.

Pretty much none of those opportunities happened. It wasn���t the publicist���s fault���they did a good job. It was that I had been preposterously unrealistic. You have these high hopes, you think this is my shot and of course, it turns out that the world has other plans.

You���re going to get everything you want when you want it?

GTFO.

If you really want something, you better be ready to hurry up and wait.

That was especially true for me then, since I was a kid, already getting to publish my first book far earlier than most people get to dream of.

All of this came back to me as I was flying home from New York from the launch of The Daily Dad. I had just done The Daily Show, CBS This Morning, and a daytime talk show in the span of a week. Which meant that 11 years and 14 books later, I was finally making a serious dent in the list that I had made back then. It had sometimes seemed like slow going, but then in the span of just a few days I had crossed off the best and hardest-to-get outlets.

There is this law called Hofstadter’s Law which says it always takes longer than you think it���s going to take. Even when you think it���s going to take a long time. Even when you take Hofstadter���s Law into account.

I started blogging in 2005. My first book came out in 2012. The Obstacle is the Way came out in 2014���and took six years for it to hit any bestseller list. I didn���t hit the New York Times Bestseller list until 2019, on my 13th book.

If you had told me that���s how long it would have taken, I might have been able to endure it. But Tom Petty was wrong. Waiting is not the hardest part. It���s the not knowing when the waiting is going to end.

But that���s life. That���s how success works.

It takes longer than you want. It takes longer than you expect. It takes longer than you���re willing to wait.

In any case, it takes however long it takes.

Talk to parents who had trouble conceiving. Talk to people waiting for their immigration papers to come through. Talk to scientists taking a drug through clinical trials and regulatory approvals.

This isn���t to say there isn���t good news along the way, that there aren���t trending signs and little hits that keep you going. There will be. I���m not sure I would have kept going if there hadn���t been.

But it���s going to take a while to get what you want.

Interminably longer.

It just will.

I thought opening my bookstore would take a few months���COVID delayed it a full year.

On February 25th, 138AD, the emperor Hadrian adopted a 51-year-old man named Antoninus Pius on the condition that he in turn adopt Marcus Aurelius. Given life-expectancy statistics of the time, Hadrian figured Marcus would be at the helm in three or four years, max. All was well, except Antoninus lived and ruled���for twenty three years.

In 1971, at the age of 26, Ed Catmull defined his dream: to make the first computer-animated feature film. He accomplished it when Toy Story was released���twenty-four years later.

The writer Steven Pressfield published his first novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance, in 1996���after twenty-seven years of trying to get a novel published.

I thought it was a matter of hiring the right publicist and having a good product. How entitled and naive. If that was all it took���there aren���t enough media slots in the world to satisfy all the people who satisfy that criteria.

No, I had to go out and earn my spot many times over. I had to prove that I had great stuff. I had to demonstrate that I had an audience. I had to prove that I wasn���t going away. I had to prove I was good on camera. I probably even had to reassure some skeptics or critics who I pissed off with my first book.

That took time, a lot of time. A decade!

We conceived and raised a six year old in less time than it took me to earn my spot.

Intersecting with Hofstadter’s Law. is Murphy’s Law. Things go wrong. There are delays. There are mistakes. Communication breaks down. The market shifts. Lucy yanks the football away right as you���re about to make contact. The outfielder robs you of a home run. They sell out right before your turn in line.

Are there exceptions to these rules? Are there people who get it all faster, quicker? Are there times when all the greenlights line up?

Maybe.

Sure.

OK.

But you are probably not that person. You are probably not on that path, and that will not be your fate.

Which means you���re going to have to buckle up.

You���re going to have to learn patience, humility, perseverance.

You���re going to have to find other ways to measure your progress and your success.

You���re going to have to put that energy into getting better, into understanding the game better.

You���re going to have to wait, and then wait some more���and then wait more after that.