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.

It’s a complicated issue. 

Maybe it doesn’t affect you directly. 

Maybe you’ve got a lot going on in your own life or your own community. 

Maybe you’d rather not think about it. 

Maybe you’d rather not hear from me about it. 

I get it. 

These are difficult, divisive times. 

There are plenty of reasons to turn off your brain or your heart. 

About six years ago, I wrote a piece about our obligation to care about what happens to other people. I wrote it in part because I was frustrated by the news that the sheriff in the rural county I live in was engaging in targeted traffic stops at night so they could detain and deport Latino immigrants (I was myself pulled over driving back from the airport one night but of course immediately let go as soon as the officer approached my car). I wrote it in part because of the videos I’d seen of the killings of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery.

I thought about it again the last few weeks as I watched the same horrifying videos that you may have watched.

One of the things I said in that piece was that I didn’t like the idea of “privilege” being the focus of the conversation in the discussions about the police or race. The fact that my publisher sends me early copies of books before they are released, I said, that’s a privilege. Something I didn’t earn, something that can disappear, something that I enjoy but am not entitled to.

But not being harassed on the street by the police or by vigilantes? Not being strangled to death on suspicion of some minor crime? Not being tear gassed or thrown to the ground for protesting government policies?

That’s not a privilege.

That’s a constitutional right. Actually, it’s more than a constitutional right. According to the Founding Fathers and many philosophers before and since, the rights to life and liberty and property are beyond constitutional: They are inalienable.

The right to not be murdered, to not be harassed by people with guns, to not be targeted, exploited or incarcerated unfairly, to speak your mind, to pursue your religion, for your home to be a safe haven, these are not things that governments give to their people. These are things that God—or generations of evolution and progress—endowed us with at birth, and that we in turn give governments the power to protect. 

All of us.

Black. White. Rich. Poor. Young. Old. Republican. Democrat. Socialist. Even annoying, obnoxious idiots. If these basic rights are threatened for one person, for one community, it’s threatened for all people.

Oh but these people came here illegally… But previous administrations deported a lot of people. But some of these people are criminals…Due process. Due process. Due process. That’s the answer to every one of those objections. It doesn’t matter if you’re a serial killer, everyone is entitled to their day in court.

Look, the punishment for filming I.C.E is not summary execution. The punishment for fleeing in your vehicle is not extrajudicial murder, even if a federal agent thinks you’re “a fucking bitch.” (Being shot in the face three times is not the punishment for hitting a federal officer with your car either, it’s worth saying!) The punishment for coming to the United States illegally—the punishment for overstaying your visa or indeed any kind of violation of immigration laws—is and never will be a trip to an El Salvadorian torture prison.

Immigration is a complicated issue. Crime is complicated. My dad was a cop for twenty years, I understand it’s a hard job. But this is not complicated.

Heavily armed masked agents should not be storming American streets demanding to see people’s papers. They should not be harassing citizens, making arrests and sorting things out later. They should not be harassing people because they don’t look or sound like citizens. They should not be entering schools or hospitals or courthouses or churches to try to take people away.

OK? 

It should not be controversial to say that. 

In fact, it is our job as human beings (and Stoics) to say it. 

Callous indifference to suffering by the authorities towards minorities or the poor or the voiceless is not just a lamentable fact of modern life, it’s an active crime. One we are complicit in, if we ignore it or rationalize it or tolerate it. 

Marcus Aurelius wrote two thousand years ago that “you can also commit an injustice by doing nothing.” The Stoics believed that harm to one was to harm all. Martin Luther King explained this idea of sympatheia beautifully. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” he said. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

I understand that this might not be what you want to hear from me. I write about self-improvement. I write about philosophy. I write about history. That’s true.

But what do you think the point of the study of those three things is? It’s not so you can make a little more money. It’s not so you can live in your own bubble or have interesting dinner conversations. It’s so you can be better. So you can do the right thing when it counts.

You have to realize that if the state can find ways to deprive someone of their rights, then they can find ways to deprive you of yours. If they can get away with brutalizing one group, eventually they’ll brutalize you. In fact, this is an inexorable law of power, whether it’s held by segregationists or Stalin, bureaucrats following orders or malevolent dictators. When you give power an inch, it takes another. When you allow evil to happen because you are not its victim, it will inevitably find its way to you—or if not you, to someone you love, or to your great-great-grandchildren.

That’s what Martin Niemöller’s famous poem “First they came…” is about. You know it:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
    Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
    Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
    Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Niemöller’s words were not theoretical. He tolerated, even complied with, policies he didn’t agree with. He rationalized them, assuming his Christian church would be protected. For a while, it was. But in the end, Niemöller found himself in Dachau, where he nearly died. Someone later asked how he could have been so self-absorbed, so silent when it mattered. “I am paying for that mistake now,” he said, “and not me alone, but thousands of other persons like me.”

It is essential that you see it this way. Because when you do, you realize that this affects you, it affects everyone. 

Directly. 

Urgently.

There is no such thing as an issue that doesn’t affect you. We are all bees of the same hive, Marcus writes in Meditations. There is no injustice far enough away, no victim different enough, no rationalization clever enough to make you exempt from the single hive we all share.

It may be complicated.

But your obligation isn’t.

You have to care.

It’s weird how much you don’t remember, even of your own life. 

Even things that happened not that long ago can come back to you as total surprises. 

I opened an old worn copy of my One Line a Day journal this morning and was flipping through dates. 

On June 14th, 2017, I had lunch in Oklahoma City with a guy named Mark Daigneault, an up and coming coach in the G-League of the NBA…and now he’s the head coach and defending NBA champion of the Oklahoma City Thunder. On Dec 7th, 2017, we woke up to four inches of snow on our ranch. On October 19th, 2019 I had to kill a rattlesnake near the garage. A couple months later, I was walking my boys down our road when two loose pit bulls attacked us. I frantically searched around for anything to fight them off with before miraculously, mysteriously they ran back in the direction they had come from. 

July 2nd, 2018 was the day I wrote the first words of Stillness is the Key. July 2nd, 2017 is the day my oldest son crawled for the first time. In the fall of 2019, I kept popping in to “look at that building” which would become The Painted Porch over a year later. 

On a very disappointing day in February 2023, I discovered that an employee I had just promoted was actually stealing from us—and the next day, had a very emotionally difficult confrontation with them about it.

March 30th, 2025: I took my son to see Hamilton, and then we got sushi after. March 17th, 2022: We drove six hours to Balmorhea to swim in one of the most amazing spring-fed pools in the world. March 12th, 2020: My wife and I called and woke up her parents who were in Europe and told them we really, really thought they needed to come home because this pandemic thing was real. The next day, my son was home and the lockdowns began. 

In late April 2019, I had a call with an accountant we were using and I lost my temper and yelled and fired him in a way I regretted even in the moment. On Christmas evening in both 2024 and 2025, we went to the same Waffle House in Florida near the airport.

To catch a tight morning flight out of JFK in June of 2024, I got to fly in a helicopter to the airport…and then the next day I woke up with COVID. Over a four-day stretch in September 2023, my kids and I got our ATV stuck in the mud on our ranch, then I flew to LA to interview Arnold Schwarzenegger… before driving to Ojai for a talk the next morning…before flying so I could be home with the kids for twenty hours before flying back to LA to do a talk with Robert Greene to a sold out crowd at the historic Wilshire Ebell Theatre. 

I remember some of these things better than others. I know what happened because I wrote it all down. 

I’m sure there’s “better” stuff tucked away in the some 3,300 days I’ve filled out so far, and if I was writing a memoir or something, maybe I would take the time to find those keystone days. That’s not really the point. What strikes me most about what I see when I flip through it is the ordinary wonderful days, the little moments and memories, the rhythms of life on a ranch, as a writer, as a parent. 

I see the person I was. I see the person I am becoming. I see the person I want to be again. I see mistakes I don’t want to make anymore. 

I don’t remember exactly how, when, or where I first heard about the One Line a Day journal, but it’s changed my life. Although I’ve been journaling off and on for longer, I’ve been using one of these One Line a Day Journals for nine years now, going on ten. It’s something I’ve done every single day. Sometimes in the morning, but usually at night before bed. I take a few minutes and I write down something that feels like it defines the day I just had—something I wanted to remember about the day.

I’ve taken it pretty much everywhere in the U.S., and all over the world (Europe, Australia, South America at least). The pages are structured so you write just one line for each day, and the years stack on top of each other. January 14th, 2017 sits above January 14th, 2018, which sits above 2019, 2020, 2021, and so on. So you can see what you wrote on the same date one, two, five years ago. 

In these pages, I can see multiple drives across the country. I can see the patterns of catching colds and overworking. I can see the rhythms of the retail and the speaking businesses. I can see the ups and downs of nearly half my marriage. I can see the entirety of COVID. I can see political trends. I can chart books I conceived, wrote, published and promoted. I can see my kids growing up.

Some of it I vaguely remember. Most of it I had completely forgotten (On August 28th 2019, I apparently had dinner at a table with Condoleezza Rice and Paul Ryan. What?! What did we talk about? I don’t remember.) And without these pages, it would all be gone. 

From these jottings, I can piece things back together. I can travel back in time. I can marvel at the absurdities. I can be grateful. I can try to remember how easy it is to get lost in the day-to-dayness of your own existence while you’re in it. 

One line. One sentence. What did I think about today? Where did I go? What happened? How am I doing?

That’s it.

It sounds like nothing. And in a way, it is nothing—but those words accumulate. And after years of entries, you have something priceless: a record of who you’ve been, what you’ve done, how you’ve gotten to where you are.

When Joan Didion was five years old, her mother gave her a small notebook, to keep her busy, and it did—for the rest of her life. Of course, she used those notebooks as a writer and screenwriter, but Didion was reluctant to reduce her notebooks to just a professional tool. In a famous essay called “On Keeping a Notebook,” she flips through scraps of dialogue she had put down at a train station in Delaware, or recollections of childhood experiences, or facts about pollution in New York City. She wonders why she had bothered to write it all down. Who was this person who had felt the need to record so many seemingly banal things?

Then she realized, that was the point. “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be,” she writes. “We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.” Capturing little thoughts and moments—however seemingly mundane or insignificant—in the pages of her notebook was, she wrote, a way of keeping in touch with herself, a way of remembering “what it was to be me.”

A journal is a means of taking a picture, both of what you see in a moment…and the person seeing it.

Perhaps there is no area of life where such a practice is more helpful and important than parenting. Because you’re so busy and so much is happening and you can so easily forget to remember who you and they were day to day. (That’s what I built The Daily Dad Journal around. One question every day for five years.)

When I flip back through my journals, the person who wrote those entries a year ago, five years ago, nine years ago feels like a stranger in some ways. His concerns were different. His kids were smaller. His life was calmer. It was also crazier. But he’s also recognizably me. I can see the threads that connect us, the patterns that persist, the things that mattered then and still matter now. All the selves I have been on the way to becoming who I am today.

The biggest regret that comes through? Besides wishing that I slowed down a little and was present more…is that I wish I had started the journal earlier and could go back even further. 

It’s a gift to be able to check in with all those past versions of me. To stay on nodding terms with them. To remember what it was to be them.

A gift that costs almost nothing.

Just one line a day.

Today is the LAST day to sign up to join me in The 2026 Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge​. It’s one of my favorite things I do each year, and I really enjoy interacting with everyone in the challenge. Learn more below—would love to have you join us!

A lot happened in 2025. I don’t just mean in the world, although obviously it did. I mean in my life. 

But I think that, years from now, I probably won’t remember most of it. 

The news stories will recede into the background. I’ll forget exactly if this was the year that I put a book out or where it landed on the bestseller list. 

All those things—the concerns, the anxieties, the thrills, the benchmarks—will blur together the way they do every other year. What do I really remember about 2015 or 2022? 

On the Daily Stoic podcast, Jesse Itzler told me about this concept of the Misogi. Borrowed from an ancient Japanese purification ritual, the modern Misogi is about committing to one epic, year-defining challenge—something so significant, so hard, so memorable, that decades later, when you think back, you’ll instantly remember: that was the year I ___________________.

When I look back on 2025, I’m going to think, that was the year I ran the original marathon in Greece. By myself. In the middle of July. 

I’ll remember the training, running in as many different environments and conditions as possible to prepare for the heat, hills, and distance I’d face in Greece. The long runs up switchbacks in Palm Springs, along California’s Santa Ana River, on mountain trails in Utah (where I was warned to look out for a very protective mother moose and her two calves), around Lady Bird Lake in Austin, and through the eerie elephant graveyard of the burned-out forest of Bastrop State Park. I’ll remember running in 105-degree heat. Running on steep inclines. Running before dawn, at altitude, on cement, gravel, and sand. I’ll remember training at the Acropolis, in Ithaca, and up Mount Olympus.

And, of course, I’ll remember everything about July 13, 2025. Standing at the starting point of the original Marathon route at 6:51 a.m. Being the only one out there running the course. Running on sidewalks, shoulders of busy roads, past shopping centers and autobody shops, alongside freeways, and through underpasses. 

I’ll remember, three and a half miles in, passing a giant mound surrounded by trees—the burial mound of the 192 Athenians who died at Marathon, to whom we owe basically all of Western civilization. 

Mostly what I’ll remember though is that I set out to do a hard thing and then I did it. I’ll forever remember that when I ran into a complete wall—both my mind and body begging to quit—I held on, I didn’t quit, I gutted it out, I finished. (Videos here and here about the full experience of training for and running the original marathon and what it taught me).

As we’ve said before, doing hard things is good for you. Challenging yourself is good for you. Because life is hard and life is challenging. 

Among other Misogi challenges, Jesse has run 100-mile races, completed Ultramans, biked across America, and hiked 44 miles rim-to-rim-to-rim across the Grand Canyon. I actually don’t think the challenge needs to be physical. Quitting drinking might be what you remember about 2012. Or reading the Robert Caro series on Lyndon Johnson is a pretty good Misogi. Learning a language or repairing a relationship could be a hard thing that defines your year. 

I’ll give a minor one that already stands out to me from 2025: One of the early challenges of the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge was to quit a bad habit. I found that I was checking/using Reddit too much. It wasn’t good for my productivity. It wasn’t good for my mental health. So I decided I would quit for the New Year. It took some habit reformation, but I did it. And it sort of snuck up on me yesterday that I hadn’t used the site in a year! 

Considering that I remember vividly that December 2011 was the year I quit drinking soda, I’m guessing this will be another date that sticks with me. In fact, I was just proudly telling my kids about this the other day, that I had made a decision fifteen years ago to stop something and I had held to it ever since. I was telling them that it taught me that I was in charge of my habits and not the other way around and that even if there weren’t any health benefits to cutting that out of my diet, just learning how to do it would have been valuable enough. 

I love this idea of the Misogi because it’s about taking control of your life and the experiences that will, in the end, define it. It’s about being able to one day look back and remember all that you did, rather than all that was done to you.

This is really the idea with the New Year, New You Challenge. Some of the challenges are physical. Some are mental. Some spur you to investigate and overcome internal adversities, others have you take on external ones. Some of the challenges are completed in a single day and others over the course of the year. But in each and every case, the challenges present an opportunity to prove who is in charge. To do the harder thing. To take on the challenge. To not follow the drift of least resistance. To get in the habit of choosing the more difficult option.

Seneca talked about how the only people he pitied were those who hadn’t been through adversity or experienced difficulty. “You have passed through life without an opponent,” he said. “No one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.”

It’s important that you do hard things. That you seek out challenges and opponents. That every year—starting with 2026—you do something really, really hard.

Something year-defining.

Something you’ll be proud of.

Something you’ll remember.

Something that will make your life better.

Something that will make YOU better.

That’s what Stoicism is—physical and mental challenges we subject ourselves to so that when life tests us, we can say as Epictetus said we need to be able to say: “This is what I trained for.” 

This is why every year since 2018, I’ve started the year with The Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. It’s 21 days of Stoic-inspired challenges, weekly live calls with me, and a private community of people—CEOs, writers, artists, parents, professors, students, founders, athletes—from around the world, all doing hard things together.

Today is the LAST DAY to sign up to join us in the 2026 Challenge.

We create a new challenge every year and to meet the unique demands of 2026, this year’s challenge is 21 days of challenges built on the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. It’s over 20,000 words of exclusive content that I don’t post anywhere else. Get all the details here—would love to have you join us.

The 2026 Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge starts TOMORROW. Learn more and sign up NOW at dailystoic.com/challenge!

Today is quiet and calm.

It’s lovely and peaceful. 

But when we think about the year ahead, many of us are nervous. We are clinching, as if for a fight, tensing as if we know that a rollercoaster is about to start. 

There is of course the political dysfunction and division that could spiral out of control at any moment. There is the looming, incredible potentially disruptive power of AI sitting before us…as well as the vertigo of a market just a few companies have driven higher and higher. 

There are warning signs. There are unknowns. 

We could keep walking through raindrops…or the music could stop. 

We don’t know what is going to happen in 2026, but we can be pretty sure that something is. 

Will 2026 be like Seneca’s year 26, a turbulent year of exile, illness, financial setbacks, and all sorts of other brutal reminders of, as he wrote, “fortune’s habit of behaving just as she pleases”? Will it be like Marcus Aurelius’s year 126, filled with chaos, upheaval, and uncertainty? 

Again, we don’t know. 

So what should we be thinking about? What should we do? 

The Stoics say that we should think about our “chief task” in life: to identify and separate matters into what’s under our control and what isn’t. Making this distinction—then choosing to focus on what’s in your control—will make you happier, stronger, and more successful. If only because it concentrates your resources in the places where they matter.

While many people this time of year think about making resolutions about things that are only partially in their control—getting promoted, reducing stress, making more money, finding a partner—I’m focusing on these 13 things that are fully up to me…

Watching my 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. “Read not the Times,” Thoreau wrote. “Read the Eternities.” Read old books. Read philosophy. Read history. Read biographies. Study psychology. Study the patterns of history. Read ​​The Great Influenza​​ to be informed about pandemics. Read ​​All The King’s Men​​ and ​​It Can’t Happen Here ​to be informed about the demagogues of this moment. Read ​The Moviegoer​ to understand your listless teenager. Read ​The Years of Lyndon Johnson​ to study power and ambition. ​Read the Stoics​. Read Andrew Ross Sorkin’s new book on the market crash of 1929. Read Morgan Housel’s great book of anecdotes and musings on the constants of human nature and history. Read Holocaust survivor Dr. Edith Eger’s wonderful book about not only enduring unimaginable suffering but finding meaning in it. And definitely, definitely, definitely, read ​Zweig’s biography of Montaigne​ (​which I talk about here​).

Challenging myself. “We treat the body rigorously,” Seneca said, “so that it will not be disobedient to the mind.” We toughen ourselves up because life is tough. That’s what Stoicism is—physical and mental challenges we subject ourselves to so that, no matter what life has in store for us, we’ll be able to say as Epictetus said we need to be able to say: “This is what I trained for.” This is why I’m a big believer in having a physical practice. It’s why I take cold showers even though I hate them. And it’s why every year since 2018, I’ve started the year with The Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. It’s 21 days of Stoic-inspired challenges, weekly live calls with me, a private challenge community, and the chance to do hard things alongside people—CEOs, writers, artists, parents, professors, students, founders, athletes—from around the world. (Only a week left to sign up to join us in the 2026 Challenge—get all the details here). In any case, we must challenge ourselves, we must treat ourselves rigorously, so that whatever happens in 2026 and beyond, we can say, “this is what I trained for.”

Making a positive contribution 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. 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 every day. 

Doing what only I 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? What can only we write? What can only we create? With the bookstore, for example, 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. This has always been good advice, but with these 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. There’s a lot a lot of people can do, but there’s some stuff—particularly where you live, with your family, with your skills etc–that only you can do. Do that. 

Competing only with myself. Epictetus quipped that, “You can always win if you only enter competitions where winning is up to you.” The bestseller list? That’s up to the New York Times. Winning a Grammy? That’s up for the Recording Academy. A Nobel Prize? That’s up to the folks in Stockholm. Even competitive goals like being the fastest person in a race or the richest person in the world—these depend on what your competitors do. What is in my control is showing up, giving maximum effort, following my process, sticking to my principles, pursuing what lights me up. Could I write about something with more mass than an obscure school of ancient philosophy and sell more books? Could I get into crypto and make more money? Could I do what other podcasters do—platform anyone, no matter how ridiculous or toxic, just because controversy drives downloads—and get more attention? Maybe. But philosophy is what I find endlessly fascinating, crypto is something I know nothing about, and getting attention is not my goal. So I’m tuning those things out and focusing on what I can do, what I know, what gets me excited, and what I value. If that translates to on the field success, great—in fact, it almost always does. If that translates into career recognition, awesome—and again, it usually does.

Discarding anxiety. Some people are anxious about politics. Others about flying. Others about their 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.

Raising my kids well. One of my favorite things to do each day is sit down and write the ​Daily Dad email​. It’s one piece of wisdom—drawn from history, science, literature, and other ordinary parents—that goes out to about 100,000 parents around the world (sign up here). But really, I’m writing it for myself. I’m reading, researching, and collecting the best ideas because I want to be a better parent. I want to be more patient. I want to set a good example. I want to give my kids the wisdom and resilience they’ll need to navigate the world. Raising kids is the most important thing I’ll ever do. So I study it the way I study philosophy, history, or business—because I want to do it well. If you want to have a multi-generational impact, if you want to make the future better—raise your kids right.

Using my platform to support what I think is important. I have a platform, and I want to use it well. That means amplifying ideas, voices, and causes that matter—not just whatever gets the most clicks or makes the most money. Every year over at Daily Stoic, we skip the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales—huge revenue opportunities—and run a fundraiser for Feeding America instead. This year we surpassed our $300,000 goal, providing well over 3 million meals for families across the country! Epictetus talked about how every situation has two handles. I could pick up 2025 by the handle of everything that went wrong, everything I didn’t like, everything that disappointed me. Or I can pick it up by the handle of what we accomplished, the money we raised, the people we helped, the good we did. I’m choosing to focus on the second handle.

Thinking long term. One of the things you get when you “read the eternities” as Thoreau said, is a longer term perspective. Do you know how long the Antonine Plague lasted? 15 years. Ok, what about the “Decline and Fall of Rome” which some people think America is in the middle of right now? Some 300 years! We need to zoom out. We need, like that famous Zen story, to “wait and see.” And we need, as Jeff Bezos likes to say, to “focus on the things that don’t change.” A lot of people will spend 2026 fixated on trends, fads, and momentary crises. I’m focusing on what will still matter in five, ten, fifty years. Character. Discipline. Patience. Wisdom. Hard work. These are constants—no matter who’s in office, no matter what’s happening in the headlines. The world will always be chaotic. There will always be noise. The only way to stay grounded is to focus on what actually matters in the long run.

Treating people well. I don’t control the cruelty in the world. I don’t control how others act, how unfair or thoughtless or selfish they can be. But I do control how I run my team. How I show up for my family. How I treat strangers. The world will always have its share of rudeness, dishonesty, and indifference. That doesn’t mean I have to contribute to it. Kindness, patience, fairness—these are always within my control.

Having fewer opinions. It’s possible, Marcus Aurelius said, to not have an opinion. Do you need to have an opinion about the scandal of the moment—is it changing anything? Do you need to have an opinion about the way your kid does their hair? So what if that person is a vegetarian? “These things are not asking to be judged by you,” ​​Marcus writes​​. “Leave them alone.” Especially because these opinions often make us miserable! “It’s not things that upset us,” Epictetus says, “it’s our opinions about things.” The fewer opinions you have, especially about other people and things outside your control, the happier you will be.  Of course, this is not to say that we shouldn’t have any opinions at all, but that we should save our judgments for what matters—right and wrong, justice and injustice, what is moral and what is not. If we spend our energy forming opinions about every trivial annoyance, we’ll have none left for the things that actually matter.

Contributing to my community. America’s communities have been hollowed out. Big box stores replaced small businesses. Digital replaced physical. So much of modern success is subtractive—extracting, optimizing, squeezing more for less. I’m trying to do the opposite. In 2021, my wife and I bought ​Tracy’s Drive-In Grocery​, a little place that’s been in business in our small, rural town since 1940. We also opened ​The Painted Porch​, a small-town bookstore down the street. Neither of these are the most rational business decisions—it’s risky, expensive, and deeply local. But what’s the point of success if you only spend it trying to be more successful? We like these things because they matter. Because they are real.

Not letting the sonsofbitches turn me into a sonuvabitch. This might be the hardest task in the world right now—to not let assholes turn you into an asshole. To not let cruelty harden you, to not let stupidity make you bitter, to not let outrage pull you down to its level. “The best revenge,” Marcus Aurelius wrote in ​Meditations​, “is to not be like that.” I am disappointed by some of the things people I know are saying and doing; I am more focused on making sure I don’t follow suit.

As I said, I start each year by doing ​The Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge​. There’s only A WEEK LEFT to sign up to join me in the 2026 Challenge.

We create a new one every year and to meet the unique demands of 2026, this year’s challenge is 21 days of challenges—presented one per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy—designed to set up life-changing habits for 2026 and beyond. It’s over 20,000 words of exclusive content that I don’t post anywhere else, weekly live Q&A Zoom calls, a private challenge community for accountability, and a lot more. 

It’s one of my favorite things I do each year, and I really enjoy interacting with everyone in the challenge. Would love to have you join us—click here to learn more.

The 2026 Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge starts January 1, 2026. Learn more and sign up today at dailystoic.com/challenge!