When I first moved in, six years ago.

If you walk into the locker room or practice facility for a professional sports team or elite college program, one of the things that strikes you is what they put up on the wall. 

The walls are tattooed with precepts. Every hallway and doorway is decorated with motivational quotes. There are statues of former players and coaches, the legends who set the standard. There are framed photographs of the greatest moments in the team’s history.

Why do they do this?

Because reminders are powerful. They make you better. They give you something to hold up and try to live up to each day. They turn the habits, standards, or values you’re trying to hold yourself to into something more than an idea, and that helps—a lot.

I do something similar in my office. It’s filled with little knicknacks and pictures. Reminders and totems. Things I’ve collected over the years that mean something to me. Objects that represent who I’m trying to be, what I’m trying to do, how I want to work and live.

Here are 13 of them—and what they’re there to remind me of.

1. A “No” Sign

A few years ago, Dr. Jonathan Fader, a sports psychologist who spent nearly a decade with the New York Mets, gave me this picture of Oliver Sacks in his office. Behind Sacks, who is speaking on the phone, is a large sign that just says, “NO!” I have it hanging between two pictures of my kids—a reminder that when I say no, I am saying YES to them. 

I have that photo hanging on the wall in my office, just a few feet from a couple of Truman memos. One, from 1969, politely explains his long-standing policy not to answer questions from every random person who contacts him—he was eighty-five, still working, sensing his time was limited. The other is a brief reply telling someone that their question would be answered in detail in his next book. But the one I like the most has Truman’s handwriting on it. Shortly after he became president, Truman was invited to the fifth annual Roosevelt Day in Chicago. His secretary wrote an inner-office memo to ask if they should start saying no to these sorts of requests with all the demands he had on his schedule. “The proper answer underlined, HST”, he wrote back.

I once heard someone say that early in our careers, we say yes to everything so that one day we can afford to say no. As I’ve been lucky enough to succeed as a writer, I’ve watched my inbound requests skyrocket. It is literally impossible to even read, let alone reply, to everyone and everything.

Life is about tradeoffs. It demands that we be a little selfish. It requires that we tune out and tune in. Otherwise we can’t do what we do.

The photos and letters are my constant reminders that everything I say yes to is taking me away from my family who I’ve already promised most of my time to. And from my writing, which is not only the thing that is most meaningful to me and how I make my actual living, but it’s how I can help the most people. So if I say yes to one random person, I’m saying no to a lot more people by taking that time and energy away from my writing.

2. Books. Books. Books.

This isn’t one object. It’s hundreds of them. Thousands, actually. I have books lining the walls, stacked on the floor, piled on my desk, crammed into every available surface.

It’s been said that a house without books is not a home. Cicero famously said that all that was needed for a happy life was a library and a garden. Aristotle filled his house with so many books that Plato nicknamed it “the house of the reader.”

I don’t know if my office qualifies as a proper library, but it’s close. And there’s a reason for that. I want to be surrounded by the best thinking of the last few thousand years. I want history’s greatest minds within arm’s reach. I want to be able to look up from my desk and see the spines of books that have shaped how I think, how I write, how I live.

In Wisdom Takes Work, I talk about how books allow us to talk to the dead. A shelf full of books allows us to create a room full of mentors, waiting patiently to be consulted.

They don’t demand anything. They just sit there, ready, until you need them. That’s the kind of company I want to keep.

3. My “Why”

This notecard is tapped to the wall next to my desk

I’ve been very lucky. I did not think when I started writing The Obstacle is the Way more than ten years ago that it would sell nearly as well as it did or that I would have anything close to the success—or platform—that I’ve somehow found myself with. I loved the ideas in Stoicism and was just trying to talk to people about them. I have no formal training or expertise, so I had no idea that I would somehow be identified with them, or seen as a representative of them. 

What this means to me then, as I look at the fact that the books have sold millions of copies and accumulated millions of followers, is that I have a certain responsibility and obligation. I did not invent this philosophy. It is not mine. So yes, writing books is a business. My bookstore, The Painted Porch, is a business. Daily Stoic is a business. But I always try to ask myself not if I am making good business decisions, but am I being a good steward of Stoicism, of the philosophy that’s given so much to me? Am I being honest and ethical and fair and reasonable and moderate?

That question guides everything we do. How we spend our time and money. The content we make. The decision to stop spending money on advertising. The causes we support. The injustices we speak out about. Not all of these decisions are good for business. Some are not popular. Some make people mad. Some have probably cost us business. 

But the filter isn’t if I am making good business decisions. It’s if I am being a good steward of Stoicism, of the philosophy that’s given so much to me. Am I being honest and ethical and fair and reasonable and moderate? Am I using the success that this philosophy has brought me to introduce more people to the philosophy? That’s my goal.

4. A Grammy?

Years ago, I was an associate producer on a jazz album that won a Grammy in 2017. I got to walk the red carpet and go onstage and accept it. It was pretty surreal. Afterwards, they gave us a paper certificate instead of actual trophies for everyone involved. So I had this one made with a special inscription on it: 

When you die, this will go in the trash alongside all your other “accomplishments”

It’s a reminder that awards, bestseller lists, medals, championship rings—none of it really matters. They’re just pieces of metal, bits of glass, plaques on a wall. Stuff that will end up in an estate sale or a box in an attic or a landfill.

In the end, what matters is who you were as a person. Did you do your best while you were in the game? Did you leave anything on the table creatively? Did you phone it in or did you give it everything you had?

That’s what matters. Everything else is garbage.

5. Joan Didion’s Chair

Speaking of estate sales…

After Joan Didion died, her estate auctioned off some of her belongings, and I bought her writing chair.

Last year, I was sitting in it, working on a chapter in Wisdom Takes Work about the importance of keeping a commonplace book. I pulled out my notecards and found an old, worn card referencing something Didion had written about notebooks in her book Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I walked over to the shelf, pulled it down, and there it was—a beautiful essay called “On Keeping a Notebook,” written in 1966.

I got goosebumps. Not just because it was exactly what I needed, but because I was sitting, at that very moment, in her chair. How did I know, nine years ago when I first read that book, when I took the time to jot that little reference on a notecard, that it would be of use to future-me?

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

Anyways, Didion was, like me, from Sacramento. And when I see her chair, I think about where I’m from and where it’s possible to go. I think about how I’m not alone in this work. How I’m part of a long tradition of writers and thinkers and note-takers stretching back centuries. How the craft has been handed down, and it’s my job to honor it.

6. Notecards and Notecards and Notecards

And speaking of the importance of keeping a commonplace book…

I think everyone should have a commonplace book, or, to use a more modern term, a second brain—a collection of ideas, quotes, observations, and information gathered over time. (Here’s a video on my commonplace book method).

Two thousand years ago, Pliny the elder said, “Never read without taking extracts.” Seneca put it another way: “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.”

That’s why I keep blank notecards everywhere. I’m constantly capturing quotes, stories, ideas, observations—anything that strikes me. 

Whether we’re beginning some creative work or we’re trying to solve some complex problem, we should never be starting from zero. Invariably, at some point in our lives, we have seen or read or heard something that would be of use in this situation. But will we remember it? Will we have access to it?

It happens to me all the time. I’m working on something, stuck, not sure where to go next—and I reach into a box and pull out a notecard I wrote five or ten years ago, and it’s exactly what I needed. And every time this happens, I’m grateful I took the few seconds to write the thing down.

7. The Four Virtues 

I mentioned earlier that sports facilities are filled with reminders—signs and symbols placed in spots where players can’t miss them. Above the tunnel. Outside the weight room. On the way to the field.

On the wall coming down the stairs from my office, I had the Four Virtues logo painted on the wall. Every time I leave to go down into to the bookstore or out into the world, I pass it.

Courage. Temperance. Justice. Wisdom.

The “touchstones of goodness,” Marcus Aurelius called them. They’re known as the cardinal virtues—not because they come down from church authorities, C. S. Lewis pointed out, but because the word comes from the Latin cardo, meaning hinge. They’re pivotal. The stuff that the door to the good life hangs on.

There’s a reason the four points on a compass are called the cardinal directions. North, south, east, west—these four virtues are a kind of compass (there’s a reason that the four points on a compass are called the “cardinal directions”). 

They guide me. They show me where I am and where I’m trying to go.

8. First Draft Print

The famous Hemingway line on writing helps me through every book.

I’m in the middle of my next book right now, for instance. It’s natural to instinctively compare it to the ones that have been published. But that’s not a helpful comparison, and it’s not a fair comparison. Precisely zero of those other books were immediately accepted by my publisher. Every one of them went through countless drafts to get to where they needed to be.

So I can only compare this book I’m in the middle of against the middle of my other books—not what I eventually published. It’s helpful to have the constant reminder: every book—not just mine—looks and feels clumsy and awkward and imperfect at this point.

Precisely zero of my sixteen books were immediately accepted by my publisher—and they were right to kick them back at me. In being forced to go back to the manuscript, I got the books to where they needed to be.

9. A Very Special Pinecone

When I was reading John Vaillant’s book Fire Weather (he also wrote The Tiger), I learned about this conifer tree I’d never heard of before. 

It’s like any other pine tree: it drops its pinecone and the pinecone is what generates the next generation of trees. Except this species is different. The cone is sealed shut with resin, locking the seeds inside. It only opens up—only looks like the one I’m holding in the picture above—if it’s exposed to temperatures that the climate does not naturally reach. It’s only a forest fire, which seems destructive and merciless and awful, that can unlock this tree’s ability to spawn and grow. 

I have a few of these pinecones sitting on my desk. To me, they’re an illustration of the idea that the obstacle is the way. Unless we are exposed to difficulty and stress and adversity and situations that we did not want, we can’t fully become what we’re capable of becoming. We can’t fully unlock our potential.

10. Me, But Younger

On the back cover of Anthony Hopkins’ memoir (which, to my disbelief, I was mentioned in), there’s a photograph of him at three or four years old, on a beach with his father. Looking back at that photo eighty years later, Hopkins said, “I look now at my life, and I think, ‘We did ok, kid. We did ok.’”

That’s part of why I keep a few photos of younger me in my office. To remember to step back from time to time to see how far I’ve come. To look at that kid and say, We’re doing alright. We’re doing alright.

There’s another reason too.

In Stillness is the Key, I wrote about inner child work—the practice of staying aware of the younger version of yourself that still lives inside you. When you’re hurt or betrayed or unexpectedly challenged, pay attention to how you react. Notice the “age” of that reaction. Is it mature, measured, proportional? Or does it feel more like a wounded eight-year-old lashing out?

That’s your inner child—the pain you still carry from early experiences, hijacking your adult mind.

The photos help me stay aware of him. To notice when he’s the one reacting instead of me. To take care of him rather than let him run the show.

11. “Sense of Urgency” Signs

Preparation is important.

Planning is important.

Reflection is important.

I mean, I wrote a whole book on this because it’s true. 

At the same time, I put up two signs at The Daily Stoic offices and in the backstock of The Painted Porch that say, “Sense of Urgency.”

It’s something I cribbed from the kitchens of Thomas Keller, the creator of Per Se. He wanted his staff to understand that they weren’t waiting on customers…the customers were quite literally waiting for them. Sure, making great food takes time and it can’t be rushed…but it also can’t be slow-walked.

There is an old Latin expression that I think captures the balance here nicely: Festina lente. Make haste slowly. A sense of urgency…with a purpose. Energy plus moderation. Measured exertion. Eagerness, with control. 

That, to me, is what the “Sense of Urgency” sign is a reminder of—it’s about getting things done, properly and consistently.

12. Chunk of an Old Tombstone

I’ve talked before about the Memento Mori coin—I keep one on my desk and carry another in my pocket. On the front it has a rendering of Champaigne’s Still Life with a Skull painting. On the back, it has Marcus Aurelius’s quote: “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” Except I cut off the last part—as a reminder that there isn’t even time to go through the whole quote. 

I also have this chunk of an old Victorian tombstone. How it left that cemetery and came to be for sale, I don’t know and don’t want to know. 

But I know that it sobers me and sets me right each time I look at it. Because the piece had just one word on it. It says, “Dad.”

Somebody who so identified with that word they wanted it on their tombstone; who lived and died and whose gravestone eventually even fell into disrepair. Who were they? How did they pass? Are they missed? Were they famous? It doesn’t matter. They are gone now. Almost certainly, they were gone too soon. They left behind a family. They will never walk or speak or love or cry again. 

And so it will go for me. And so it will go for you. 

13. My Guiding Sentences

On every project I do, I print out a notecard with a sentence or an admonition that captures the essence of what I am trying to achieve on that project. 

When I was working on Ego is the Enemy, I had this quote from Machiavelli on the wall to inspire its style and ethos: “I have not adorned this work with fine phrases, with swelling, pompous words, or with any of those blandishments or external ornaments with which many set forth and decorate their matter. For I have chosen either that nothing at all should bring it honor or that the variety of its material and the gravity of its subject matter alone should make it welcome.”

When I was working on the Stoic Virtues series, I had a quote from Martha Graham: “Never be afraid of the material. The material knows when you are frightened and will not help.” 

One from Boccaccio: “Who in our day can penetrate the hearts of the Ancients? Who can bring to light and life again minds long since removed in death? Who can elicit their meaning? A divine task that—not human! It is, therefore, my plan of interpretation first to write what I learn from the Ancients, and when they fail me, or I find them inexplicit, to set down my own opinion.” 

And one from Bob Johnson to Johnny Cash: “You need to build a mausoleum in your head with big iron doors so that nobody can get in there except you. You don’t let me in there, you don’t let June in there, you don’t let your manager in there, you don’t let the record company people in there. You have to decide for yourself what you want to do with your music and not let anyone else tell you.”

And for the project I am working on now, it’s a quote from Paul Horgan, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and historian: “Historical writing which is not literature is subject to oblivion.”

—

I have all these reminders because I need them.

On the Daily Stoic podcast, I once asked Pau Gasol—two-time NBA champion, six-time All-Star—about the role these kinds of reminders play in sports. 

“Athletes appreciate pointers and directions,” he said. He mentioned the famous mantra displayed throughout the San Antonio Spurs facilities: Pound the rock. “That was a big one…Just keep pounding the rock. If you hit it a thousand times or two thousand times, you might not see a crack, but it’s that next hit, that next pound where the rock will crack. You just got to keep at it, keep at it, keep at it.”

Reminders matter. They make you better. They keep you centered. If life were easy, if we were perfect, we wouldn’t need them. But it isn’t, and we aren’t. Things get complicated. Things go awry. We get mixed signals and we get overwhelmed and we get knocked off course. In those moments, it helps to have a good reminder to fall back on.

So whatever form these things take for you—a sign, a notecard, a print, a picture, a quote on the wall, a pine cone on your desk—surround yourself with things that mean something to you. Tattoo your walls with precepts. Fill your shelves with totems. Put good advice on and around your desk.

It will make you better. 

Come see me in SF and Portland next month—Australia and the mid-west after that and then the east coast—as part of the Daily Stoic Live tour. Ask me questions, get your books signed, learn a little—should be fun. Grab tickets here!

When I started writing, I followed the advice a lot of writers follow: hit a word count. Write a thousand words a day. Two thousand. Whatever the number.

Then I came across what, for years, I thought was the single best rule for writers—that the way to write a book is by producing “two crappy pages a day.” Not brilliant pages. Not polished pages. Just two crappy ones. Give yourself permission to be bad.

But over time, I’ve come to lower the stakes even further.

Because even “two crappy pages a day” as a metric still creates a kind of perverse incentive. They say that what gets measured, gets managed, right? Metrics are a statement of your values and priorities. The problem with measuring output in pages is that it implies that adding pages is what you should be doing every day. Like that’s the job and it most certainly isn’t.

Now my writing habit is simpler, easier, and in a way, much better. My rule is just, make a positive contribution every day. The question I ask myself at the end of the day is simply, Did I make a positive contribution to my writing today?

That’s it.

Sometimes a “positive contribution” means writing a bunch of new pages. Sometimes it means editing a chapter. Sometimes it’s adding. Sometimes it’s deleting. Sometimes it means I just have a really good phone call about the book with someone whose opinion matters. Maybe I read something good. Maybe I went for a long walk and thought of something that excited me about it. Maybe I met someone who can help me when it comes out. 

This is something I can do anywhere…it’s something I can do any day. I can do it when I’m sick. I can do it when I’m motivated. I can do it from my office or a hotel room or on the road. It can be a little contribution or a big one.

And at some point it hit me—this isn’t a practice for writing. It’s a practice for life.

Every year, as part of the New Year, New You Challenge we do over at Daily Stoic, we do weekly live calls. And year after year, one of the clearest patterns in the questions people ask is the struggle with all-or-nothing thinking. Not just with the challenge itself, but in their day-to-day lives. 

One person talked about abandoning a creative project because their schedule didn’t allow for the long, uninterrupted sessions they felt was required. Another talked about feeling like they had a terrible reading year because their (arbitrary) goal was to read fifty books, and they only read thirty-three. Several talked about how they don’t exercise, meditate, or journal at all because if you only have five or ten minutes, what’s the point? 

It’s the same binary, all-or-nothing trap, again and again. Either I’m all in, or I’m out. Either I can commit fully, or I shouldn’t bother at all. Either I did the thing perfectly, or it was a complete failure.

In ​Discipline Is Destiny​, I write about the practice of Kaizen, the Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement. Always finding some way to make a little progress. Focusing on the joys of getting a little bit better, day after day.

Because over time, it accumulates and compounds into impressive outcomes. 

Think about it: Most people don’t even show up. Of the people who do, most don’t really push themselves. So to show up and be disciplined about daily improvement? You are the rarest of the rare.

That’s the question you want to consider. Not, what does the perfect, optimal, most ideal version of this look like? But, How much progress could I make if I made just a small positive contribution each day over the course of an entire life?

In one of his most famous letters to Lucilius, Seneca gives a pretty simple prescription for the good life. “Each day,” he wrote, “acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes, as well and after you have run over many thoughts, select one to be thoroughly digested that day.” 

One gain per day. Or not even that—just spending some time seriously thinking one thing over per day. That’s it. 

George Washington’s favorite saying was “many mickles make a muckle.” It was an old Scottish proverb that illustrates a truth we all know: things add up. Even little ones. Even at the pace of one per day. 

The Stoics believed it was the little things that added up to wisdom and to virtue. What you read. Who you studied under. What you prioritized. How you treated someone. What your routine was like. The training you underwent. What rules you followed. What habits you cultivated. Day to day, practiced over a lifetime, this is what created greatness. This is what led to a good life.

“Well-being is realized by small steps,” Zeno would say looking back on his life, “but is truly no small thing.”

So as a writer and as a person, I try to focus on just making a small contribution every day. I know that cumulatively this has an enormous impact. It’s not as glamorous as transformative reinvention or bold, dramatic leaps. But it’s dependable and it works. It’s something I control. 

“Do the best you can,” the emperor says in Marguerite Yourcenar’s beautiful novel Memoirs of Hadrian. “Do it over again. Then still improve, even if ever so slightly those retouches.” 

It’s a beautiful irony: You’re never content with your progress and yet, you’re always content . . . because you’re making progress.

You’re making a positive contribution.

Every day.

I’m going on tour next month (Portland and SF) and then a bunch of other places around the world in the early fall. Come see me talking Stoicism—grab tickets here. 

I hated writing essays in high school, but they changed my life.

Not because of the subject matter or anything. With one exception, I can’t remember what any of them were about.

The one I remember is an 11th-grade English assignment. My teacher had us write an essay on this prompt: “Analyze how and why The Great Gatsby is an exploration of the American Dream as it exists in a corrupt period.” 

The day after I handed in my essay, Mrs. Kars printed it out and we spent the entire period reviewing it with the class.

It was the first time anything I had ever written had been recognized. Now that I think about it, it may have been one of the first times in my life that I had ever felt like I might be anything but average. 

I would later ask Mrs. Kars ​for a letter of recommendation​ to a college I did not get accepted to, but I can still remember a line from it. “I have no doubt,” she said, “that Ryan will someday be a literary giant.”

I don’t know about that. But I can say that that essay—which upon re-reading is not that good—and the many others I had to write did what essays have done for generations of young people: they taught me how to use my brain. In having to write them, I learned how to think, I learned to think hard about something and then most importantly how to articulate what I thought about it.

This is slow, tedious, difficult work. It takes discipline and patience. The hours and hours of sitting with frustration and confusion. It takes trial and error. 

In Wisdom Takes Work, I tell a story about Eisenhower when he was a promising young general. Just days after Pearl Harbor in 1941, he was called in to see George Marshall, the chief of staff of the US Army. Japan was going to seize the Philippines and dozens of other islands in the Pacific, Marshall explained. America faced a war in two theaters with supply lines stretching thousands of miles. “What should be our general line of action?” Marshall asked Eisenhower.

A certain type of officer would have started thinking out loud, riffed, brainstormed. Not Eisenhower. His career and potentially millions of lives hung in the balance. 

“Give me a few hours,” he said. At a spare desk in the War Plans Division, Eisenhower requisitioned paper, a pen, and a typewriter and got to work. What did Marshall want to accomplish? What was possible? What was of the highest priority? What risks were acceptable? 

After a period of reflection, he wrote his thoughts out. What Marshall needed was “short, emphatic…reasoning,” not “oratory, plausible argument, or glittering generality.” The writing exercise helped him synthesize ideas from conversations he’d had with his mentor General Fox Conner, from books he’d read, from courses at the Army War College, and from his three decades in uniform. As dusk fell, Eisenhower handed Marshall a three-hundred-word briefing on yellow lined paper titled “Assistance to the Far East/Steps to Be Taken.”

Almost certainly Marshall had already considered most of what Eisenhower had written. The assignment was, in a way, a test. What kind of a thinker was this young officer? How did he approach problems? How good was he at responding under pressure? Could he see the big picture? Could he effectively communicate what he knew and what he wanted to do?

“I agree with you,” Marshall eventually replied about Eisenhower’s plan, and then told him to execute it. Thus began one of the most effective partnerships of the war, propelling Eisenhower to the presidency. 

Successful campaigns and careers—whether they involve leading people into battle or saving their souls or selling them things—depend on this kind of thinking process.

This is what worries me about what AI is doing to writing—and the school essay especially. 

As I write this line, not only does software make suggestions on spelling and help me eliminate errors, it suggests how I might finish sentences or word them better. If I want, I could simply click over to other software and ask it to write the draft for me. But these fast, easy ways to produce what resembles a finished piece of writing would defeat the purpose. Which is to engage and struggle with the material for an extended period of time. To take my time. To go over things again and again. To be immersed. To be focused, patient, and disciplined. To come to understand things deeply. 

A couple of years ago, I asked Robert Greene what ​he thought about AI. “I think back to when I was 19-years-old and in college,” Robert said. It was a class where they were  to read and translate classical Greek texts “They gave us a passage of Thucydides, the hardest writer of all to read in ancient Greek,” he explained. “I had this one paragraph I must have spent ten hours trying to translate…That had an incredible impact on me. It developed character, patience, and discipline that helps me even to this day. What if I had ChatGPT, and I put the passage in there, and it gave me the translation right away? The whole thinking process would have been annihilated right there.”

For an entire generation of young people, the whole thinking process is being annihilated. How will they figure out what they think? How will they develop critical thinking skills? How will they develop focus, patience, discipline? How will they come to understand things deeply?

We think as we write. Indeed, we cannot finish a sentence until we have carried the thought all the way through. We ponder opposing ideas as we pause between keystrokes, the pen becomes our third eye. On the page we see the pattern. Transcribing the passage or a quote, we get to feel real genius and insight pass through our mind and our fingers, processing each word, weighing and understanding the wisdom. We see what we didn’t see before. And when we take edits and feedback from others, we see even more, because editing is a kind of interrogation, a process by which we are refining and sharpening our thinking, a way to get our story straight. 

Joan Didion described writing as a “hostile act.” By that she meant that the writer is trying “to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture.” But Keynes was even closer to the mark when he referred to writing as the “assault of thought on the unthinking.” A battle against our own wild thoughts, against the preconceived assumptions of others, against all the alternative ideas (and tempting facts) out there. 

The purpose of the school essay—of any piece of writing at all—is not the end product on the page. It’s the person YOU are on the other side of having done it. It’s the thinking long and hard about something. It’s the slow, tedious, difficult work of figuring out what you actually work. And the equally hard work of finding the words for what you think. 

AI can you give you an essay, an article, a book, or a briefing.

What it can’t give you is the person you can only become by doing the writing yourself.

Quick note: I’m hitting the road for a Stoicism speaking tour throughout the rest of the year. So far, dates are set for Portland, SF, Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Australia, and New Zealand, with more to come. Get tickets (and updates when new dates are added) here!

Sitting on my desk as I write this is a book I paid $8.25 for nearly twenty years ago.

The cover is taped back on. Nearly every page is marked or folded. They have yellowed with age, in some cases becoming almost translucent. Nearly every passage has something noted or underlined. There are spills and stains everywhere. 

I bought it when I was 19 years old. I had been invited to a small, private summit of college journalists that Dr. Drew, then the host of Loveline, was hosting. After it ended, he was standing in the corner and I cautiously made my way over to nervously ask if he had any book recommendations. He said he’d been studying a Stoic philosopher named Epictetus and that I should check it out.

I went back to my hotel room, and I can’t remember why, but I didn’t order the Epictetus book. Maybe I did a quick search about Stoic philosophy and learned that Marcus Aurelius was also a Stoic, and since I knew him from Gladiator, I decided to start there? I don’t know. But I ended up ordering Marcus’ Meditations, along with a couple other books I’d had my eye on to qualify for free shipping (Amazon Prime didn’t exist back then).

I seem to remember my copy arriving right away after I purchased it, but recently searching my email for the order number, I found an angry customer service ticket, where teenage-me is angrily complaining about a few days’ shipping delay.

How badly I needed the words I would find in Book 6 of Meditations! “You don’t have to turn this into something,” Marcus writes. “It doesn’t have to upset you.”

I had no idea that the money I spent on that book—and the couple days of waiting—would become the single best time and money I ever spent. I had no idea that it would change the course of my life. And I had no idea that I was just another link in a multi-century chain of people discovering that the right book at the right time is a powerful thing.

In fact, it can change the whole course of your life.

Marcus Aurelius himself would probably understand my feelings here, for he himself notes in the opening pages his gratitude to his philosophy teacher, Rusticus, “for introducing me to Epictetus’s lectures—and loaning me his own copy.” The life of a future king was changed by the wisdom of a Greek slave who had triumphed over torture and exile, whose lectures were fortuitously recorded by a student in the early second century A.D. (and, just as unpredictably, survive to be read by us today).

Epictetus himself found freedom from slavery, long before he was legally free. How? In the writings of the Stoics, in the words of Musonius Rufus. He read his way to freedom, literally and figuratively, as Frederick Douglass would do in America two thousand years later. 

The late basketball coach George Raveling tells the story in his book What You’re Made For about his grandmother, who raised him. One night, as they were cooking dinner, she told him that back in the days of slavery, plantation owners would hide their money in the books on the shelves of their libraries.

“Why did the slave masters hide their money in books, George?” she asked him.

“I don’t know Grandma,” George replied, “why did they do that?”

“Because they knew the slaves couldn’t read,” she said, “so they would never take the books down.”

It’s a dark subject to bring up with a young boy. But George—who would go on to become the first African American basketball coach in what’s now the Pac-12, win 2 Olympic medals, and earn a Hall of Fame induction—said it was this early lesson that began his lifelong “love affair with books.”

To me, the moral of that story is not just that there is power in the written word (that’s why they made it illegal to teach slaves to read), but also that what’s inside them is very valuable. And the truth is that books still have money between the pages, though not because someone put it there in order to keep it from you. 

Think about how many people want to get better—at something, anything, everything. Look at how many people are desperate to be successful, or to extricate themselves from this cycle of mediocrity that has trapped so many of our generation. These people look everywhere for the solution to their problems. They seek out secret formulas, shortcuts, gurus. They will turn their entire world upside down before they stop and look at the one place where you can always be sure to find answers—the book shelf. 

Warren Buffett is one of the richest men in the world, today worth $140 billion. Do you know what he traces his fortune back to? His single best investment decision? A book! The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham, which he first read at the age of 19. We don’t know exactly what he paid for it, but in the late 1940s, a hardcover typically went for $1.30. “Of all the investments I ever made,” he said, “[it] was the best.” In the late 1940s, books would have cost perhaps a dollar but even if Buffett had paid millions for it, it’d have still been a pretty good ROI.

I myself wouldn’t be writing this to you today if I hadn’t spent that $8.25 back in 2006. That book didn’t just teach me about life. It taught me how to write. It schooled me in the art of working with and managing people. It gave me the subject that I’ve now spent nearly two decades writing my own books about—books that have somehow sold millions of copies and helped bring this two-thousand-year-old philosophy back into the world.

Again, not a bad ROI!

And of course, the real investment wasn’t the money I spent on the book. It’s the time I’ve spent and continue to spend on it. The time spent reading it. The time spent rereading it. The time spent reading Gregory Hays’s peerless introductory remarks that preface his translation. The time spent reading other editions (e.g. Robin Waterfield’s fully annotated edition). The time spent reading other books (e.g. Pierre Hadot’s Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius) and essays (e.g. Matthew Arnold’s Marcus Aurelius) about the book. The time spent reading biographies about Marcus (e.g. Donald Robertson’s Marcus Aurelius: The Stoic Emperor). The time spent tracking down and interviewing people like Hays, Waterfield, and Robertson. The time spent traveling to Rome to immerse myself in the world he lived in (see the picture at the top of this article). 

In one of the first passages in Meditations, Marcus said one of the things he learned from his philosophy teacher Rusticus was “to read attentively—not to be satisfied with ‘just getting the gist of it.’” If I’d stopped at “just getting the gist” of Meditations, my entire life would have turned out differently.

Buffett didn’t just stop at “the gist” either. He didn’t just read The Intelligent Investor. He read it and reread it and reread it. And a few years later, he decided to apply to Columbia Business School where Graham was a teacher. He went “straight to the seat of intelligence,” as Marcus wrote of his own development as a leader, and struck up a friendship with Graham, who later hired Buffett.

It’s not enough to read—you have to go down rabbit holes, look up words you don’t know, reach out to experts, share interesting ideas with others, earmark pages, and make notes in the margins. 

FYI: This is the idea behind the Daily Stoic How to Read Meditations Guide we put together—a digital guide that distills all of my reading, rereading, and rabbit-holing of Meditations into a kind of roadmap designed to help you get out of the book in a few weeks what took me twenty years. As part of Meditations Month, as we refer to April over at Daily Stoic, get the guide before April 26th—Marcus’s birthday—to join us in the live Q&A I’m hosting on the 27th!

Some people might recoil at all this talk categorizing books as investments, as things that owe us a return of some kind. But that’s exactly what books are. That’s exactly what makes them unique. In Book 1 of Meditations, Marcus himself writes that it was one of the great lessons he learned from his great-grandfather—to invest in learning “and to accept the resulting costs as money well-spent.”

It’s why one of my reading rules is, 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 investment. 

Have I applied this rule and bought books that turned out to be duds? Hundreds of times. Maybe thousands. But that’s how any investment strategy works. The winners pay for the losers, and then some. 

So never forget that it’s in your self-interest to read. There’s incredible power and money hidden in books.

But only if you spend the time. 

Only if you go way beyond the “gist.”

P.S. As I mentioned briefly above, April has been Meditations Month over at Daily Stoic, where I’m rereading Meditations alongside our Daily Stoic Community as part of our How to Read Meditations Digital Guide. 

In addition to the 11 in-depth modules of the guide, we’re having discussions on our private platform and I’m hosting a live Q&A on April 27th, where I’ll take your questions. 

Just get the guide before April 26th (Marcus Aurelius’ birthday) to receive your invite to the Q&A.

This month only, you can also purchase the leatherbound edition of ​Meditations to get the digital guide and access to the Meditations Month exclusives FREE. Just head to dailystoic.com/meditations. 

I hope to see you on the 27th!

I’m going to be on a Stoicism speaking tour this summer and fall—Portland, SF, Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit plus a bunch of dates in Australia and New Zealand. Come see me!

I’ve brought it to the Grammys.

I’ve brought it to NFL games…and kids BJJ practices. 

I’ve brought it into the green room backstage before talks.

I’ve brought it to restaurants and bars.

I’ve carried it into museums and meetings and to Disneyland. 

I’ve brought it to use before surgery, on planes, beaches, in cars, lines, waiting rooms, helicopters, at the White House, at the DMV, to zoos and parks, car dealerships and shopping malls, while waiting for a movie to start, and on and on.

I bring it everywhere. Phone, wallet, keys—as Adam Sandler says—and a book. 

I am always carrying one and so should you. 

People often assume something about me: that I’m a speed reader. It’s the most common email I get. They see all the books I recommend every month in my reading newsletter and assume I must have some secret. They want to know my trick for reading so fast. 

The truth is, even though I read hundreds of books each year, I actually read at a pretty normal pace. In fact, I deliberately read slowly. But what I also do is read all the time. I always carry a book with me. Every time I get a second, I crack it open. I don’t install games on my phone—that’s time for reading. When I’m eating, on a plane, in a waiting room, or sitting in traffic in an Uber—I read. 

It’s an old habit actually. For centuries, busy people have made sure they always had a book within reach.

In her book The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism, Doris Kearns Goodwin writes about how Roosevelt prioritized his reading time, “snatching moments while waiting for lunch or his next appointment.” “He always carried a book with him to the Executive Office,” Taft recalled, “and although there were but few intervals during the business hours, he made the most of them in his reading.”

Before the Vietnam War, James Stockdale was given a copy of Epictetus by one of his professors at Stanford. Soon after, in a three-year span, Stockdale spent three seven-month missions in the waters off Vietnam. He was flying in combat near daily, “but on my bedside table, no matter what carrier I was aboard,” Stockdale said, “were my Epictetus books…I didn’t have time to be a bookworm, but I spent several hours each week buried in them.”

Those weren’t consecutive hours, one must imagine, but little chunks here or there, stolen away—turning dead time into alive time, as Robert Greene famously said.

Look, I get it. You have kids. You have a job—maybe two. You have these things you are trying to accomplish. You have to get to the gym. You have all these projects around the house. 

With all this, you say, I just don’t have time to read. And maybe it’s true that you don’t have time to be buried in a book several hours a day. Who does? But you can snatch a few pages here, a few pages there—on your commute, while the coffee brews, between meetings, over lunch, every time you’d otherwise reach for your phone. Use every pocket of time you get!

And if you never crack it open—well, books make great accessories. My wife has a tote bag with a cartoon of a guy packing a book before leaving the house, captioned: “I better bring my book just in case I want to spend all day carrying my book.” I have plenty of those days. I lug around a four-pound, 900-page biography and the book never leaves my bag. Or I end up taking it for a walk, tucked under my arm, and never actually get time to open it. But I’ve never regretted bringing it. I’ve only ever regretted leaving it behind. It’s like a little Flat Stanley that I show the sights too…or like a handweight to add some resistance to my everyday activity. 

Does it mean they get dirty and beaten up? That the corners fray and the covers get a little battered? Yes, but that’s what books are for. Books are not precious things. They are durable, well-designed pieces of technology. 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. A well-worn book is a well-loved book. It’s obvious what my favorite books are…because they’re falling apart (here’s my copy of Meditations for instance) or filled with food stains (lol, here are some pictures).

Is your phone also a book? Sure. But the point is, we all want to spend less time on the phone and in front of screens. There is something about a physical book that your phone will never replicate—the weight of it, the feel of the pages, the fact that it does exactly one thing. It doesn’t buzz with notifications. It doesn’t tempt you to swipe over to social media the moment your attention wavers. It doesn’t have an algorithm deciding what you see next. And isn’t that the irony? We all say we don’t have time to read…but the screen time app on our phone sure proves otherwise. 

There’s something else too. Reading a book on a phone doesn’t look like you’re reading a book. It just looks like you’re on your phone. Some of my favorite random encounters have started with someone asking what I’m reading, or me asking them. I’ve discovered so many great books that way. I’ve gotten to recommend ones I love. I just had a nice conversation at my son’s lacrosse practice last week. A guy was reading The Count of Monte Cristo and I turned him onto a book that deserves to be better known, Tom Reiss’ The Black Count, which is about Dumas’ father (I was reading The Best and the Brightest, which I’ve dragged around so much recently—including on a camping trip—that the paperback is warped and bent). All of that is lost if you’re just sitting there staring at a screen. 

Elsewhere in The Bully Pulpit, Goodwin tells the story of a journalist commissioned to write a profile of Roosevelt. At his office in the New York City police department, in the few moments between one meeting ending and the next beginning, Roosevelt picked up a book on the culture of Sioux Indian tribes. The journalist was amazed. It was only enough time to read a page, maybe two. 

“It is surprising,” Roosevelt told the journalist, “how much reading a man can do in time usually wasted.”

That’s exactly right. 

Stop wasting time. 

Bring a book with you everywhere. 

My wife and I were sitting at a cafe in Bastrop, Texas, looking across Main Street at an empty historic storefront.

“You know what would be amazing there?” she said. “A bookstore.”

We started construction on The Painted Porch the first week of March 2020.

Somehow, we didn’t lose all our money. It didn’t blow up our marriage. It’s actually been a great experience and, even more surprising, a pretty good business too.

Five years in, I’ve learned a lot—about business, about books, about myself. Here are some of those lessons:

Crazy can be a competitive advantage. Opening a physical bookstore in 2020 seemed crazy. Not just to me—everyone said so. Retail was shifting online, books were becoming digital, the pandemic was raging, bookstores were closing—not opening. But that’s exactly why it worked. It was crazy because no one else was doing it. It stands out. It’s different.

Look for disconfirmation. As I was thinking about doing the bookstore, I asked a lot of people why I shouldn’t do it. Not that I was looking to be talked out of it. I was asking so I could hear the concerns, the objections, the risks I hadn’t considered. Every one of them raised something I hadn’t thought of and then was then able to address before opening. 

Take some risk off the table. Most big, cool, intimidating things in life comes with a certain amount of risk. But just because you take a big risk doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to take risk off the table. A great piece of advice I got from Allison Hill, who owns Vroman’s and Book Soup in Los Angeles, was to make the bookstore a multipurpose space. The Painted Porch is of course not just a bookstore—it’s my office, my employees’ office, the place where we record podcasts and film YouTube videos. So if nobody comes in and buys books, we’re not necessarily losing money. Multi-use allows you to do more than you ordinarily would—across the board.

Think of it as an experiment. When I was kicking around the idea, Tim Ferriss told me to think of it as an experiment. Try it for two years, he said, and if you hate it at the end or it’s failing, then walk away. This piece of advice was so freeing. It gave me an out—which allowed me to bravely dive in. Because I wasn’t betting my whole life on something, just a contained time commitment. Thinking of every venture, every project as an experiment is a great way to go through life. It lowers the stakes. It minimizes the downside. It lets you take a shot on something that otherwise might be way too intimidating.

Don’t trust conventional wisdom. One of the things I did while I was kicking around the idea is I looked up how expensive it is to start a bookstore. Search results said it was hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars—way more expensive than I was interested in. But then I wanted to question whether that number was real. So then I went and looked up how expensive it was to start an ecommerce business—something like Daily Stoic. Search results said it was hundreds of thousands of dollars more than I’d spent to start Daily Stoic. That was really helpful—to learn, oh, these people don’t really know what they’re talking about. Or that there’s a cheaper way, a different way to do it. You don’t have to do it the way that everyone else does it.

Be okay with mediocrity at first. A problem with having really high standards or when you expect a lot of yourself is that it can be hard to start something new. It’s hard to be comfortable with something that’s kind of crappy or mediocre or not all the way there. But there’s a reason most tech start ups think in terms of a minimum viable product. There’s a great Hemingway line—we actually have a shirt with it, and I have a print of it on my wall—it’s one of my all-time favorite quotes: the first draft of everything is shit. I love how The Painted Porch is now, but it took years to get it to where it is. It’s been a continual process of improvement and growth and making changes.

Doing interesting things usually pays off. When I was starting out as a writer, an author gave me a piece of advice I’ve never forgotten: If you want to be a great writer, go live an interesting life. He was right. Great art is fueled by great experiences—or, if not “great” experiences, at least interesting ones. That was in the back of my mind with the bookstore. Even if it failed, I knew the experience of trying to open a small business in rural Texas during a pandemic would be filled with stories. And it has been. I’ve drawn on it constantly—in my writing, my talks, in conversations with people on the podcast. So when you have the choice between the safe, boring path and the interesting one, take the interesting one. It always pays off.

Have a unique proposition. Most bookstores carry thousands of titles. The best one in Austin, BookPeople, stocks over 100,000. We carry about 1,000. It was one of the best decisions we made. We only carry books we love. Not only did this make it cheaper and easier to run the bookstore, it makes us stand out. If people want a specific book, they go to a certain trillion-dollar e-commerce behemoth. If people want to discover new books and have a unique experience, they come to us. We are the only bookstore in the world with our selection.

Create spectacles. Before we opened the store, I was in Bucharest, Romania for a talk. My host took me into a local bookstore that had an enormous globe hanging from the ceiling. I watched as customer after customer came in to take pictures beneath it, before checking out with books. This inspired our now infamous book tower, which I designed to be built on top of an old, broken fireplace. It’s 20 feet tall and made of some 2,000 books, 4,000 nails, and 40 gallons of glue. It was not cheap. It was not easy. But it’s probably one of the single best marketing decisions we made. Invariably, almost every customer that comes in takes a picture of it—plenty more come in because they heard about it and wanted to see it.

The positive externalities are the best part. I’ve gotten a lot out of the bookstore. I’ve learned a lot…about business, about books, about what I’m capable of. Sales have been strong. But the most rewarding part has been what it’s done for other people. Putting books we love out in the world. Creating a gathering place for the people in our community. Building something that makes our small town a little better, a little richer, a little more interesting than it was before. 

Beware of mission creep. Our original plan was that we’d have only a couple hundred books, only my absolute favorite books. But I’m always reading and discovering new favorites. So the temptation to add and add and add is always there. In the military, they call this mission creep—a gradual broadening of objectives as a mission progresses. If you are setting out on a project, it’s something to be aware of.

For everything you add, take something away. There’s a great story of Mark Parker who, just after he became CEO of Nike, called Steve Jobs for advice. Is there anything Nike should do differently? Parker asked. “Just one thing,” Jobs said. “Nike makes some of the best products in the world. Products that you lust after. But you also make a lot of crap. Just get rid of the crappy stuff and focus on the good stuff.” “He was absolutely right,” Parker said. “We had to edit.” Because we’ve always done it this way, is not a good reason. Or in our case, because we’ve always carried this book, is not a good reason. We have to edit.

Have the discipline to not scale. At least once a week, someone asks if we’re going to open a second location. And at least three struggling bookstores have reached out about us acquiring them. The answer is a polite no. “Do Not Go Past The Mark You Aimed For” is one of the most important laws in The 48 Laws of Power. Know when you’ve won. Know what enough is. Know your limits.

Behind mountains are more mountains. That’s a Haitian proverb I love. My wife suggested opening the bookstore in the fall of 2019. Then COVID delayed us a year. Then we didn’t feel right opening for another year. Then a freak storm and some political incompetence shut down the power grid—burst pipes, busted roof. Then a global supply chain crisis made books hard to get. There’s the day-to-day stuff too: employees get sick, the internet goes out, shipments arrive damaged, a toilet leaks, the door won’t shut properly all of a sudden. But that’s how it goes. With most things in life, you don’t overcome one obstacle, you don’t get through the first, second, or third year of your business, and then suddenly you’re magically done with obstacles. No, it’s one damn thing after another. Expect it. Work through it. Keep going.

Learn from the cats. When we were thinking about opening a bookstore, I bought a course from a bookstore consultant. I talked to friends. I talked to bookstore owners while on a book tour. I got a lot of advice, gathered best practices, and learned what worked for others. And yet, the single most popular thing about The Painted Porch is something that never came up…the cats. In 2021, we took a family road trip to Cerro Gordo, the ghost town Brent Underwood has been restoring—my kids are obsessed with his YouTube videos—and came home with two cats who have lived at the bookstore ever since. They’re literally the most popular thing about the store. As one Yelp reviewer put it: “Nice collection of books, clean, very comfy atmosphere, but I’m not going to lie to the great people of Bastrop…I come for the cats.” Lol. So yes, do your research. Yes, learn from others. But keep in mind, some of the best parts of any project are things you can’t possibly predetermine.

Don’t overlook simple solutions. There’s a tendency—especially when you care a lot about something—to overthink it. To assume everything has to be big, polished, expensive, professional. But great ideas can be cheap and easy too. One of my favorite bookstores in the world, Gertrude & Alice in Bondi Beach, puts sticky notes inside their books. Just little handwritten notes from employees about why they liked this or that book. No fancy plaques. No expensive signage. We started doing it at The Painted Porch too. It’s fun, it’s human, and customers love it.

Do things only you can do. Something that’s happened with Daily Stoic over the years is as it has grown, so has the number of copycats. And so we’re constantly asking, what can only we do? With the bookstore, we’re lucky to have authors constantly passing through to record the podcast. While they’re here, they sign books. Sometimes we do live events with them. Those books, those experiences—you can’t get them anywhere else. With AI tools making it easier and easier to copy and replicate and reproduce, it’s more important than ever to find and focus on the things only you can do.

Zoom out. When we were doing a small construction project at the bookstore recently, we moved an old antique bar and found some paint on the wall, covered in plaster. Carefully scraping it away, we found a date: January 16, 1922. What was happening in the world that day? Who were the people who stood there and supervised it being painted? What kind of business was in this space a hundred years ago? How many others have come and gone since? It was a humbling reminder: we’re not the first people to try something in this building, and we won’t be the last. Every project, every place, every person is part of something much bigger—something that started long before us and will continue long after.

If you’re successful, your people should be successful. Nothing feels better than distributing profits or raises to the team. If you don’t take pleasure in that, you’re doing it wrong, prioritizing the wrong things.

If you’ve always wanted to do it…do it. This has happened to me more than once. When my wife and I moved to a farm, I couldn’t believe how many people said, “I’ve always wanted to do that.” Same with opening the bookstore. People hear you have a small-town bookstore and they light up—“I’ve always wanted to do that.” Casey Neistat has a great line: “The right time is right now.” If you’ve always wanted to do something, do it. Stop romanticizing it. Stop overthinking it. Try it. Do it small. Do it your way. But do it.

There are many ways to measure success. One of the first things people want to know is how the bookstore is doing, whether it’s a success. I like to joke, my wife and I are still together, so yes, that’s a big win. We survived. We kept ourselves together despite it all.  

The real answer is that early on, we asked ourselves, what does success look like? And we decided that success was going to be: becoming more community minded, becoming more responsible, becoming better organized, having more fun, making a positive contribution.

With any project or endeavor, there are many ways to measure success. Has it made you a better person? Has it made your community better? Did it challenge you in ways you needed to be challenged? What metrics actually matter to you? Remembering why you did something—and how you defined success at the start—helps you calibrate your decisions along the way. 

It helps you know when you’ve won.

A few weeks back, I was down near Phoenix and swung out to talk to the Chicago Cubs and the Arizona Diamondbacks who were in the middle of Spring Training.

These are elite athletes. Preparing for the talk, I was thinking about just how hard it is to do what these professional baseball players do. Hitting a baseball almost defies physics. The amount of time you have between when you decide to swing and when the ball crosses the plate is almost nothing. It is nearly physically impossible. That’s why so few people can actually do it. And even the people who can do it can only do it maybe three or four out of ten times. It is one of the hardest things in sports.

But it struck me, as I was sitting in the cafeteria after, helping myself to a prepared, perfectly portioned, macro-balanced plate of eggs with turkey bacon and fresh fruit, and chatting with some of the players, that while they spend enormous amounts of time thinking about their diet and nutrition and they have some of the best people in the world helping them optimize what they put in their bodies, they think a lot less about what goes into their brains. 

In fact, many of them—like the rest of us—are injecting straight garbage on a daily basis.

We are, after all, flooded with more information than entire civilizations could have produced, let alone imagined. 

The key practice in the modern world is not how to consume all of it, but how do we decide what not to consume? How do we stay informed about what’s happening without overwhelming ourselves with distractions? How do we manage our information diet with the same discipline that we would put towards our actual diet? Because just as what we put in our bodies matters, what we put—or fail to put—in our minds matters too. 

Presidents of the United States face this problem most acutely. The president famously gets what is known as the Presidential Daily Briefing, typically three pages of top-secret information about international developments and concerns, delivered, as the name implies, daily, with in-person explanations and summaries. The best presidents listen intently, ask questions, and then apply what they’ve learned to their day-to-day decisions.

But we live in a world where the President doesn’t read this carefully curated document assembled by intelligence agencies and experts, and instead prefers to get his news from social media…and not just any social media network but one made up of his biggest, more ideologically zealous fans. If this bubble were not enough, there are also reports that he employs a special assistant whose job it is every day to bring him printed-out positive articles about himself to keep his spirits up.

Elon Musk is another example of how what you consume can warp you. He went from reading rocket manuals and reasoning from first principles to obsessively refreshing his Twitter feed. A man who could pay for a daily briefing rivaling even the most powerful heads of state instead mainlines information from trolls and pundits and conspiracy theorists.

This mirrors the problem we all face. We have access to the kind of information that emperors could have only dreamed of. This is real power, but as always, power corrupts and disorients and distracts. We have more information than emperors could have dreamed of. We are also subjected to more misinformation than they could have conceived of in their worst nightmare. 

Audio. Video. Text. It comes at us at incomprehensible speeds. 

It takes discipline and wisdom to manage your information diet properly, to be a discerning and selective conduit for everything that’s coming at you. 

Almost certainly, your information diet has too much real-time information in it. The news. The feeds. The notifications. Almost certainly, you would be better off if you read more books. If you focused on information with a longer half-life.

Personally, I prefer a steady diet of books about history and human nature (here’s a list of timely books I put together for 2026). They’re not all fun and sunshine—there’s plenty of darkness, too—but I learn far more from that than from endless scrolling. I’m deliberate about which chats and texts I participate in and who I spend time with. In programming, there’s a saying: “garbage in, garbage out.” I try to let in the opposite of garbage, because that leads to the opposite of garbage out.

“The art of not reading is a very important one,” Schopenhauer said of avoiding popular rubbish. It’s not how much you know, but that you know the right things. It’s not that you read, it’s what and how you read. “Do not be eager to know everything,” Democritus reminded himself in the fifth century BC, “lest you become ignorant of everything.” 

Go straight to the source when you can. Check sources always. 

Choose quality over quantity. 

Find experts you can trust. Verify them first.

Favor information that has staying power over what is “developing” or “just in.” Try to get the big picture. Try to make connections between what’s happening now and what has happened before. 

Seek out things that challenge you. Hear what the other side has to say. 

Pay attention to where misery, negativity, dysfunction, and chaos sneak into your life. Ask yourself, when was the last time X or Instagram left you feeling informed. Reddit? Cable news in an airport? If it isn’t leaving you calmer or wiser, maybe it’s time to cut it off at the source. 

You don’t have to be uninformed—just be intentional about what you consume and who you engage with. 

The best hitters in baseball will tell you that what separates the good from the great, at the highest level, is plate discipline. It’s the ability to lay off pitches. To not swing the bat. To be discerning.

That skill applies here too. The feeds. All the hot takes. The notifications. The group chats. The breaking news. Most of it is designed to get a reaction out of you, not to make you wiser or better informed. You need to cultivate the discipline to lay off the junk. To not take in everything thrown on your plate. To discern what’s worth your time and what’s designed to get a rise out of you. To swing only at the right pitches. 

Because you are what you eat. And what you read, what you watch, what you let into your information diet.

So choose wisely.

It was a long winter. 

You got sick. You lapsed on a resolution. You slipped up. You’re tired, distracted, out of sorts. 

So you’re going to write off the rest of 2026?

That’s crazy.

In one of my favorite passages in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius writes, “When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstances, revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help.”

I think that word “unavoidably” is key. Slipping up, getting knocked off course, falling off the wagon—it happens. 

And that’s what I want to talk about in today’s email: some rules for a reset. Here—already a couple of months into 2026—is the perfect time. For getting back to first principles, to the things that you said you were going to do, to the person that you know you want to be.

(And by the way, I’m getting together with thousands of Stoics from around the world to do a reset as part of ​The Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge​ on March 20. It’s a set of 10 daily, actionable challenges designed to help you clean up your life and spring forward without the weight of bad habits and vices. ​You can learn more and sign up here​. I hope to see you there!)

Focus on what you can control. You’re rattled by what’s going on in the world. The economy. The news. The possibility of AI taking your job. Whatever outrage is dominating the social media feeds this week. In short, you’re spending enormous amounts of time and energy on things you cannot control. Revert to what Epictetus described as our “chief task in life”—getting real clear about what’s up to us and what isn’t. Our actions, our thoughts, our feelings—these are up to us. Other people, the weather, external events, these are not. But here’s the thing: our responses to other people, the weather, external events are in our control. To reset your life, the best place to start is with making this distinction and then choosing to focus on the things that are in your control. If only because it concentrates your resources in the places where they matter.

Wake up early. No one likes getting up early in the winter. Because it’s cold. It’s dark. That’s the famous passage from Meditations: he knows he has to get out of bed, but so desperately wants to remain under the warm covers. “Is this what I was created for?” he asks himself. “To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?” No, it’s not what we were created for. We were made to be up and “doing things and experiencing them.” So we must reclaim the morning hours, the most productive hours in the day. Hemingway would talk about how he’d get up early because early, there was, “no one to disturb you.” Toni Morrison found she was just more confident in the morning, before the day had exacted its toll and the mind was fresh. Like most of us, she realized she was just “not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.” Who can be? After a day of banal conversations, frustrations, mistakes, and exhaustion. If you want to get back on track, if you want to start executing at a higher level, then you have to get in the habit of waking up early.

Protect the best part of your day. Waking up early is critical, but even more so is what we do in those early hours. Waking up early just to get straight into scrolling social media, checking email, watching the news—this is not a reset. You’ve handed the best part of your day to other people’s emergencies, other people’s opinions, other people’s agendas. The novelist Philipp Meyer​ (whose book ​​The Son​​ is an incredible read) told me on the Daily Stoic podcast, “You have to be very careful about to what (and to whom) you’re giving the best part of your day.” Well-intentioned plans fall apart as the day progresses. Our willpower evaporates. The world makes its demands. So it’s key that we prioritize the important things and that we habitualize doing them early. Personally, I fiercely protect my mornings—family first, then writing. My assistant knows not to schedule anything before mid-morning because early calls and meetings don’t just take time—they sap the energy needed for the essential work. I want to give my best self to my most important things. Everything else can come after.

Do less, better. Your calendar is filled up. Your inbox is flooded. Your to-do list is overflowing. You’re doing too much. When I talked to the great Matthew McConaughey on the Daily Stoic podcast, he told me the story about a moment a few years ago when he realized he was doing too much. “I had five proverbial campfires on my desk,” he said. He had a production company, a music label, a foundation, his acting career, and his family. “What I did was I got rid of two of the campfires.” He called his lawyer and shut down the production company and the music label. “I was left with the three things that were most important to me. And those three campfires turned into bonfires…I had been making C’s in five things, but when I concentrated on three things, I started making A’s.” A reset requires concentration. It requires elimination, Seneca said: “He who is everywhere is nowhere.” Remember: Everything you say yes to means saying no to something else. And conversely, everything you say no to means saying yes to something else. When you say no, when you cut out the inessential, the Stoics say, it allows you to double down on what is truly essential.

Just make a little progress every day. For a long time, my writing habit was all-or-nothing—either I wrote a lot of words or I didn’t. Over time, I’ve lowered the stakes: now the question is simply, “Did I make a positive contribution to my writing today?” Sometimes that means writing, sometimes editing, adding, deleting. Sometimes I’m home and it’s in my office, sometimes I’m on the road and it’s on a plane or in a hotel room. Sometimes it’s a big contribution, sometimes it’s a little contribution. “Well-being is realized by small steps,” Zeno would say looking back on his life, “but is truly no small thing.” Focus on that—just making a little progress each day. 

Focus on process, not goals. When most people think about resetting their life, they think about setting a goal—lose 20 pounds, read 30 books, write a book. But goals are just finish lines—they’re about achieving something specific, often external, and usually out of your control. A better approach is to focus on the process: the daily work and the practices that will move you forward, regardless of the outcome. As I wrote about recently, I don’t have goals. When I write, I don’t focus on finishing books—that would be overwhelming. Instead, I focus on my notecard system and writing for a couple hours every day. The books emerge from that process naturally, over time. Any time you want to reset things in your life, instead of fixating on specific outcomes, focus on the process that will guide you. The results will take care of themselves.

Make amends. This is actually one of the challenges in the upcoming ​Spring Forward​: to apologize or make amends with someone. Years ago, there was someone I got into a big fight with over one of my books. I eventually emailed them, saying, “Hey, here’s what I’ve been carrying, and I wish I’d done it differently. I feel bad about the consequences for you. I’m sorry.” I’d love to say we became friends afterward, but they didn’t accept my apology—instead, they hurled more anger at me. It was obvious they still carried a lot of resentment, but making amends is also a gift you give yourself. I said what I needed to say, so I’m no longer ruminating or carrying it around. I owned my role in it. I tried to be who I want to be. If they aren’t there yet, that’s okay—I did what I could. As Marcus Aurelius said, the best revenge is not being like the person who wronged you. Maybe they’ll never see your side, but at least you won’t turn into them. We can’t change the past, but we can take responsibility: acknowledge our mistakes, own the pain we caused, learn from it, practice empathy, and try to repair it. This is a kind of deep clean for your life, allowing you to start fresh and move forward without the weight of that emotional clutter.

Discard anxiety. You’re anxious about politics. About flying. About the state of the world. About your kids. The one thing all causes of anxiety have in common? US! The airport is not making you anxious. You are making yourself anxious in the airport! Marcus Aurelius 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 a little frustrating, but it’s also freeing. Because it means you can stop it! You can choose to discard it.

Find a scene. You’re hanging out with the same people you’ve always hung out with. The same circle, the same conversations, the same comfortable group that never quite challenges you or pushes you or expects anything different from you. And then you wonder why you keep ending up in the same place. “Tell me who you consort with,” Goethe said, “and I will tell you who you are.” You need to find a scene that challenges you, inspires you, exposes you to new ideas, holds you accountable, and pushes you beyond your limits. The Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus introduced the common mess hall and required that all citizens eat together. It was harder to eat more than your fair share, more than your healthy share, when you were surrounded by your comrades in battle.

Quit your vices. There’s a story I tell in ​Discipline is Destiny​ about the physicist Richard Feynman feeling a sudden midday pull to have a drink. On the spot, Feynman gave up drinking right then and there. Nothing, he felt, should have that kind of power over him. Ask yourself: What has control over me? Is it caffeine, social media, Netflix, junk food—something more serious? I once heard addiction described as losing the freedom to abstain. Where have you lost the freedom to say no to? And how can you reclaim your power by refusing to feed that habit? If you want a happier, more fulfilling life, decide which vices you’re no longer willing to let rule you.

Do hard things. Making a life change, adopting new habits, doing anything challenging requires courage. As I write about in Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave, we can’t just hope to be brave when it counts. Courage has to be cultivated. To do the big things that scare you, start with smaller things—start with developing the ability to push yourself to do stuff you’re reluctant to do. To be able to endure the cold reception of a bold idea, start with enduring a cold shower. To be able to step forward when the stakes are high, regularly do that when the stakes are low. To be able to embrace the discomfort of a major life change, accustom yourself to minor discomforts. We treat the body rigorously, Seneca said, so that it may not be disobedient to the mind. We push ourselves in little ways so the big ways stop seeming quite so big, quite so out of character.

Don’t be ashamed to ask for help. Whenever I speak to military groups, I like to share one of my favorite lines from Meditations: “Don’t be ashamed to need help. Like a soldier storming a wall, you have a mission to accomplish. And if you’ve been wounded and you need a comrade to pull you up? So what?” I love how Marcus Aurelius delivers that line—with a shrug. So what? There’s no shame in needing help. Whether it’s therapy, asking for advice, or hiring someone to support you, seeking help is often the key to breakthroughs, growth, and success. Tim Ferriss has a great question that ties into this: What would this look like if it were easy? Often, the answer involves creating support systems or finding the right kind of help. Resetting your life isn’t something you have to do alone.

Get back up when you fall. It’s wonderfully fitting that in both the Zen tradition and the Bible, we have a version of the proverb about falling down seven times and getting up eight. Marcus Aurelius said it was inevitable to be jarred by circumstances, but the key was to get back the rhythm as quickly as possible, to come back to yourself, rather than giving in.

Be kind to yourself. The Stoic philosopher Cleanthes was once walking through the streets of Athens when he came across a man berating himself for some failure. Seeing how upset he was, Cleanthes—normally one to mind his own business—could not help himself but to stop and say kindly, “Remember, you’re not talking to a bad man.” Often, the desire for a reset comes packaged with self-contempt, with some judgment of the version of us who got off track. But this isn’t about beating yourself up. After a lifetime of study of Stoicism, this is how Seneca came to judge his own growth: “What progress have I made?” he wrote. “I have begun to be a friend to myself.” Be kind to yourself. Celebrate your decision to make a change, to get back on track, to make yourself better. That’s what friends do. 

Go the f*ck to sleep. All the other habits and practices listed here become irrelevant if you don’t have the energy and clarity to do them. We have to follow the advice of a book I love to read to my kids: Go the F*ck to Sleep! In the military, they speak of sleep discipline—meaning it’s something you have to be good at, you have to be conscious of, something you can’t let slip. We only have so much energy for our work, for our relationships, for ourselves. A smart person knows this and guards it carefully. A smart person knows that getting their 7-8 hours of sleep every night does not negatively affect their output, it contributes crucially to their best work.

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

***

Those are some things I come back to whenever I need a reset.

If you’re ready to take your own efforts to the next level, I’d love for you to join me in the ​Spring Forward Challenge​ from Daily Stoic.

It’s packed with powerful exercises rooted in the best Stoic insights and strategies, and thousands of people around the world will be participating.

Sign up at ​dailystoic.com/spring​—we start on March 20th. I hope to see you there, ready to clear out the clutter and make room for what truly matters.

Honestly, it’s been so bad for so long, I didn’t even notice. 

When we moved out to rural Texas in 2015, there was basically no cell phone service at our house or on our dirt road. We tried to fix it at first—I even put a booster on the roof—but it didn’t work. I suppose we could have switched providers…but that seemed like a pain.

We had a landline and wifi-calling, though both were unreliable, especially in storms or when one of our neighbors would cut the AT&T line while grading the road. So we got used to it. We accepted that when we were out and about at home, our phones couldn’t make calls or send texts…for over ten years. It was almost predictable, I’d be back somewhere on my property and some incredibly important call would come through…with just enough service for me to answer and not be able to talk.

That’s why it sort of snuck up on me the last couple months that my phone had full reception when I was out checking on the cows. Or when I was walking the dog. Or even out in the garage. 

An inconvenience that had been part of our lives for so long just suddenly went away. 

And it took me some time to notice it.

Which is something life does, by the way, it gets better and we don’t notice. 

Because we’re so focused on what’s going wrong. Because we’re not paying attention. Because the algorithm and the news cycle is biased. 

I thought the same thing as I was passing through the Austin airport this morning. For the last two years or so, security had been a mess because of a major construction project. As I landed at the American gates and walked to the exit, I noticed that finally the new security entrance was almost done. They were testing it right then. 

The construction had been background noise for so long I had stopped perceiving that, slowly, progress was also happening. And that progress, eventually, inevitably, leads to a completion. 

Having kids is like this too. You are so in the thick of it that you can be blind to the passing of time. Every haircut and nail trim means they’re getting a little older. Same too for every shirt they grow out of. There are obvious benchmarks like walking and potty training and first words but a lot of the other moments are more subtle. You don’t notice the moment you stop lugging a stroller everywhere. There is no one moment when an infant becomes a toddler or a toddler a teenager. These transitions don’t announce themselves.

And you’re also so in the thick of it, dealing with so many problems, that you don’t always notice the ways they’re getting better, like as humans. You don’t notice the night that was the last night they woke you up at 3 a.m. You take for granted the day they started getting into the car themselves and buckling their own seatbelt. You don’t see the way they’re becoming more independent, more competent. It’s not obvious how the things you’re teaching are becoming values and habits, but if you’re doing it right, they are. And it’s easy to miss that everyday this person is becoming a better person, that you are succeeding at this really hard thing. 

I guess what I am saying is that it’s important that we stop and see this. How often do we update our world view to account for what has been fixed, for what’s gotten better, for sources of annoyance that have been eliminated? Or are we carrying around zombie frustrations and anxieties and grievances that we can’t seem to shake?  

Marcus Aurelius—who had every reason to see the world as dark and broken—had this remarkable capacity to notice beauty and progress everywhere. As he was dealing with wars and plagues and betrayals and the loss of loved ones, as his health was failing, he was also writing about the ordinary way that “baking bread splits in places and those cracks, while not intended in the baker’s art, catch our eye and serve to stir our appetite,” or the “charm and allure” of nature’s process, the “stalks of ripe grain bending low, the frowning brow of the lion, the foam dripping from the boar’s mouth.” 

This is someone who cultivated what you might call a poet’s eye—the discipline to notice the beauty in the banal, the mundane, the everyday. He was able to see beauty anywhere…which is really important when you live in ugly times. 

There’s a tendency, especially right now, to look at everything and see only what’s broken. And yes—there’s plenty that’s broken. But it’s worth remembering, stuff has always been broken. Ancient Greece had earthquakes and horrible storms and natural disasters. People suffered. People were killed. People stole the money intended to help those people. Ancient Rome had tyrants and bullies. It had pointless cruelty and systemic injustices. 

It’s always been this way. For centuries, people have fought over minuscule differences. Their governments have been dysfunctional. Their traditions seemed like they were falling apart. Stuff was changing. Stuff was stressful. Stuff sucked. 

It’s not only always been like this…but it’s almost always been worse. You can look out at the news and despair about things. Or you can zoom out and see progress. You can focus on the bad people and miss that the bad people today are almost certainly better than the bad people back then. Even the people you disagree with and dislike politically are not selling their enemies into slavery, sending children to work in the mines and doing science experiments on minorities–things that were not only common in Zeno and Marcus Aurelius’s time, but common enough where you live not that long ago! 

For all the things it is easy to lament about the world, it’s disputable that we live in a time of abundance, medicine, knowledge, and opportunity—things our ancestors could not have imagined in their wildest dreams. If you woke up in a bed this morning, brushed your teeth, flushed your toilet, and had a hot shower, you’re living better than the emperors, kings, and queens of the past. Before indoor plumbing and on-demand heated water, Genghis Khan conquered half the known world but never once felt clean and comfortable the way I do when I dress in sweats after a shower. Before toothpaste, Queen Elizabeth I, one of the most powerful women in history, had teeth blackened by decay. Before refrigeration, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, Queen Victoria, Cleopatra, Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington—none of them ever opened a fridge and cracked open a cold drink on a hot day.

Almost certainly you are living better than you were not that long ago. Think back to your first apartment. Think back that beater of a car you were once perfectly happy with. Think back to what you used to think was a lot of money, what you used to think was ‘fast’ internet. Think back to things you used to hear people saying growing up, think about what things were like for people less privileged than you back then. 

So yes, see what’s broken. Note what needs to be improved. Yes, work to make it happen. But try to notice all that’s been fixed too. Try to see what’s different in your own life. What used to bother you that doesn’t anymore? What was broken that got fixed? What problem solved itself while you weren’t looking?

The world is and always will be messy. But somewhere in the mess, progress is always being made—quietly, steadily, nearly imperceptibly. 

You just have to slow down and notice it.

A couple of years ago, I asked Robert Greene what ​he thought about AI. “I think back to when I was 19-years-old and in college,” Robert said. It was a class where they were  to read and translate classical Greek texts “They gave us a passage of Thucydides, the hardest writer of all to read in ancient Greek,” he explained. “I had this one paragraph I must have spent ten hours trying to translate…That had an incredible impact on me. It developed character, patience, and discipline that helps me even to this day. What if I had ChatGPT, and I put the passage in there, and it gave me the translation right away? The whole thinking process would have been annihilated right there.”

What does he mean by “thinking process”? He means the slow, tedious, difficult work of figuring something out for yourself. The discipline. The patience. The hours and hours of sitting with frustration and confusion on your way to knowledge and understanding.

This is why I do all my research on physical notecards. It is not fast, easy, or efficient. And that is the point. Writing things down by hand forces me to engage and struggle with the material for an extended period of time. It forces me to take my time. To go over things again and again. To be immersed. To be focused, patient, and disciplined. To come to understand things deeply. 

People are talking about what AI is going to replace, that it’s the sum total of all human knowledge, that it’s going to make expertise obsolete. And it’s true it will do a lot and it is unbelievably powerful, but in many ways it makes thinking even more important. You have to be able to interpret what it spits out. You need to know when something’s off. Without domain expertise, without the ability to think critically, to question, to push back, you’ll be fooled. Again and again.

The irony of AI, this cutting-edge technology, is that it makes the humanities more valuable than ever. It makes brainpower even more important. Reading. Knowing things. Having taste. Understanding context. Detecting lies or nonsense. In short: being a discerning, critical, clear thinker.

The tools are only getting more powerful. The noise is only getting louder. We’re being bombarded with more information than any generation in history, and I worry—from some of the emails I get, from the comments I see—that too many people just don’t have the ability to wrap their heads around what’s being thrown at them. Which makes clear thinking one of the most essential skills of our time.

What follows is my advice for what you’re going to need more than ever in this brave new world—26 rules for becoming a better thinker. 

– Take another think. The problem with our thoughts is that they’re often wrong—sometimes preposterously so. Nothing illustrates this quite like what’s called an “eggcorn,” words or expressions we confidently mishear and then contort to match our misperception. “All for not” instead of all for naught. “All intensive purposes” instead of all intents and purposes. But the greatest eggcorn is doubly ironic: people who say “you’ve got another thing coming” are, in fact, proving the point of the actual expression, “you’ve got another think coming.” We need to be able to slow down and use a second think. Especially when we’re sure what we think is right. (And by the way, at least 50% of the time I have to ask ChatGPT to think again because it’s answers are obviously wrong). 

– Take walks. For centuries, thinkers have walked many miles a day—because they had to, because they were bored, because they wanted to escape the putrid cities they lived in, because they wanted to get their blood flowing. In the process, they discovered an important side-effect: it cleared their minds and made them better thinkers. Tesla discovered the rotating magnetic field—one of the most important scientific discoveries in modern history—on a walk through a Budapest park in 1882. Hemingway took long walks along the quais in Paris whenever he was stuck and needed to think. Nietzsche—who conceived of Thus Spoke Zarathustra on a long walk—said: “It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.” I have never taken a walk without thinking, after, “I am so glad I did that.”

– Embrace contradiction. F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” The world is complicated, ambiguous, paradoxical. To make sense of it, you must be able to balance conflicting truths.. F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” The world is complicated, ambiguous, paradoxical. To make sense of it, you must be able to balance conflicting truths.

– But don’t confuse complexity with nonsense. Stupid people are especially good at having a bunch of contradictory thoughts in their head at once. So the first-rate mind Fitzgerald described isn’t just about tolerating contradiction—it’s really about the ability to examine and interrogate it. It’s asking, Does this actually make sense? 

– Go to first principles. Aristotle taught that one must go to the origins of things, go all the way to the primary truth of the matter, instead of just accepting common observation or belief. Don’t just blindly accept what everyone else seems to say or believe. Go to first principles. Instead of engaging with an issue from a headline, a tweet, or a take, go to the beginning. Break things down and build them back up. Put every idea to the test, the Stoics said. The good thinker approaches things with a fresh set of eyes and an open mind. 

– Think for yourself. Generally, people just do what other people are doing and want what other people want and think what other people think. This was the insight of the philosopher René Girard, who coined the theory of mimetic desire. He believed that since we don’t know what we want, we end up being drawn—subconsciously or overtly—to what others want. We don’t think for ourselves, we follow tradition or the crowd.

– Don’t be contrarian for contrarian’s sake. Peter Thiel, widely considered a “contrarian,” (and a big fan of Girard) once told me that being a contrarian is actually a bad way to go. You can’t just take what everyone else thinks and put a minus sign in front of it. That’s not thinking for yourself. So in fact, if you find yourself constantly in opposition to everyone and everything (or most consensuses) that’s probably a sign you’re not doing much thinking. You’re just being reactionary. 

– Ask good questions. When Isidor Rabi came home from school each day, his mother didn’t ask about grades or tests. “Izzy,” she would say, “did you ask a good question today?” This doesn’t seem like much, and yet it is everything. After all, questions drive discovery. The habit of asking questions turned Rabi into one of the greatest physicists of his time—a Nobel Prize winner whose work led to the invention of the MRI. Questions are the key not just to knowledge but to success, discovery, and mastery. They’re how we learn and how we get better. And they don’t have to be brilliant, probing, or incisive. They can be simple: “What do you mean?” They can be inquisitive: “How does that work?” They can aim for clarity: “Sorry, I didn’t understand, can you explain it another way?” The point is to stay curious. To never stop asking questions.

– Watch your information diet. When I’m not feeling great physically — tired, irritable, sluggish — usually it’s because I’m eating poorly. In the same way, when I feel mentally scattered and distracted — I know it’s time to focus on cleaning up my information diet. In programming, there’s a saying: “garbage in, garbage out.” Aim to let in the opposite of garbage. Because that leads to the opposite of garbage coming out.

– Go deep. I thought I knew a lot about Lincoln. I’d read biographies, watched documentaries, interviewed scholars, visited the sites. I’d even written about him in my books. So when I sat down to write about him in Part III of Wisdom Takes Work, I thought I was set. I wasn’t even close. So I went deeper. I read Hay and Nicolay. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 944-page Team of Rivals. Michael Gerhardt’s 496-page book on Lincoln’s mentors. David S. Reynolds’s 1088-page Abe. David Herbert Donald’s 720-page Lincoln. Garry Wills’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the Gettysburg Address. I spoke with the documentarian Ken Burns about him, and Doris too. I read Lincoln’s letters and speeches. I went, multiple times while writing the book, to the Lincoln Memorial. In the end, I spent hundreds of hours reading thousands and thousands of pages on the man. Basically, I “dug deeply,” as Lincoln’s law partner once said of Lincoln’s own approach to learning, in order to get to the “nub” of a subject. This is a skill you need. Whether you’re an author, politician, lawyer, entrepreneur, scientist, educator, parent—you have to be able to pursue an idea, a question, a thread of curiosity until you’ve gotten to the nub and wrapped your head completely around it.

– Don’t just read, re-read. A lot of people read, not enough people re-read. 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.

– Seek out people who disagree with you. In 1961, the Navy sent Commander James Stockdale to Stanford to study Marxist theory. Not criticisms of Marxism—primary sources. Marx. Lenin. The works. His parents had taught him: you can’t compete against something you don’t understand. A few years later, Stockdale was shot down over North Vietnam and spent seven years being tortured in the Hanoi Hilton. His knowledge of Marxism proved essential—he understood the ideology better than his interrogators did. Seneca said we should read dangerous ideas “like a spy in the enemy’s camp.”

– Ego is the enemy. Epictetus reminds us that “it’s impossible to learn that which you think you already know.” The physicist John Wheeler said that “as our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.” Conceitedness is the primary impediment to wisdom. That’s something I often find with AI, its quickness and confidence in its answers…which are laughably wrong. If you want to stay humble, focus on all that you still don’t know. After all, isn’t that the Socratic method? 

– Beware the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. Named after the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann, the Gell-Mann amnesia effect is the term for a familiar experience: You read an article about something you know well, and you recognize that it’s full of errors, it’s missing context, it’s grossly oversimplifying things. You can’t believe something so bad got published. Then you turn to an article on something you know little about—foreign policy, international affairs, the economy, pop culture—and believe every word. It’s not just that the media exaggerates and sensationalizes. It’s actually worse: Most of the time they don’t even know what they’re talking about. The same goes for AI, which is trained on many of those error-filled sources. I’ve had ChatGPT confidently butcher things I know well. Why would I unquestioningly trust it on things I don’t? The problem is we don’t know what we don’t know. Which means we don’t know when we’re being fooled.

– Be flexible. A colleague of Churchill once observed that Churchill “venerated tradition but ridiculed convention.” The past was important, but it was not a prison. The old ways—what the Romans called the mos maiorum—were important but not to be mistaken as perfect. Plenty of people have been buried in coffins of their own making. Before their time too. Because they couldn’t understand that “the way they’d always done things” wasn’t working anymore. Or that “the way they were raised” wasn’t acceptable anymore. We must cultivate the capacity for change, for flexibility and adaptability. Continuously, constantly.

– Empty the cup. There is an old Zen story about a master who receives a student for tea. As the visitor extends their cup, the master pours…and pours, and pours. The cup begins to overflow. Finally, the student says something: “Stop! The cup is full. It can hold no more.” “Yes,” the master replies. “And your mind is like this cup, full of opinions and speculations. How am I to show you Zen unless you empty your cup?” This is a message about the perils of ego, obviously. It’s a message about keeping an open mind. Because the cup also does not have to be full to cause problems. “If this vessel is not clean,” the Roman poet Horace said in the first century BC, “then whatever you pour in goes sour.”

– Seek understanding, not trivia. Whenever you’re consuming anything, don’t just try to find random pieces of information. What’s the point of that? The point is to understand, to build a foundation of real, true wisdom — that you can turn to and apply in your actual life. 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), Seneca said, “Far too many good brains have been afflicted by the pointless enthusiasm for useless knowledge.”

– Write to think right. Peter Burke, one of Montaigne’s biographers, believed that Montaigne’s essays were precisely that, a man’s “attempt to catch himself in the act of thinking.” Montaigne said that he wrote as though he was speaking to another person. But that doesn’t mean his essays were casual or off the cuff. Montaigne had to sit and really think—the act of his thoughts flowing from his brain, down his arm, through his pen, and onto the page was a process by which much reflection was transcribed, and, since he continued to edit his writing until the day he died, refined. Only a fool goes with their first thought. A wise person takes time to contemplate.

– Create a second brain—a collection of ideas, quotes, observations, and information gathered over time. 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 method).

– Cultivate empathy. Empathy is as much a practical skill as it is a moral one. If you don’t have the ability to think about what other people think about this or that situation, to imagine how something looks from someone else’s perspective, then you have a very limited view of reality.

– Look at the fish. When Samuel Scudder interviewed for a job with the great Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz in 1864, Agassiz placed a dead fish on a tray in front of him. “Look at the fish,” said, and then he left the room. Scudder picked it up, turned it over, counted the scales, and drew it. When Agassiz returned, he was unimpressed. “You have not looked very carefully,” he said. “You haven’t even seen one of the most conspicuous features of the animal, which is as plainly before your eyes as the fish itself; look again, look again!” This went on for three days. “Look, look, look,” Agassiz would say. What did Scudder ultimately discover about the fish? Nothing. It wasn’t about the fish. It was about focus—looking long enough and hard enough to truly see what’s in front of you. This is the skill that good, clear, deep thinking depends on.

– Find your scene. “Tell me who you consort with,” Goethe said, “and I will tell you who you are.” You need to find a scene that challenges you, inspires you, exposes you to new ideas, holds you accountable, and pushes you beyond your limits. Put yourself in rooms where you’re the least knowledgeable person. Observe. Ask questions. That uncomfortable feeling when your assumptions are challenged? Seek it out. Let it humble you.

– Assemble a board of directors. It’s important to have a mentor. It’s important to have a scene. But at the highest levels, we must develop a board of directors—people who advise and consult, who check and even correct you. This isn’t a formality but an essential practice to always be learning and improving. Whose collective experiences are you drawing on? Who in your life can tell you that you’re wrong? That you’re being an idiot? We need other voices around us. We need help. We need to be able to yield. Only a fool declines this priceless resource.

– Beware your inner child. Where do your own emotional patterns get in the way of clear thinking? When you’re hurt or betrayed or unexpectedly challenged, pay attention to how you react. Notice the “age” of that reaction. Is it mature, measured, proportional? Or does it feel more like a wounded eight-year-old lashing out? That’s your inner child—the pain you still carry from early experiences, hijacking your adult mind. Good thinking requires the ability to recognize when your inner child has taken the wheel. This is another benefit of having a board of directors—they can serve as parents to our inner child.

– Keep your identity small. This is a rule from the great Paul Graham. His point was that the more you identify with things—being a member of a certain political party, being seen as smart, being seen as someone who drives a fancy car or someone who belongs to this club or that ideology—the harder it is for you to change your mind or entertain new points of view. Stay a free agent!

– Do the work. In Wisdom Takes Work, I quote Seneca, “No man was ever wise by chance.” We must get it ourselves. We cannot delegate it to someone or something else. There is no technology that can do it for you. There is no app. There is no prompt, no shortcut or summary or step-by-step formula. There is no LLM that can spit it out in thirty seconds.