Before we get into today’s piece…our Read to Lead course over at Daily Stoic has been updated for 2026! If you want to become a better reader and get more out of your reading, check it out here. Sign up by September 22nd and you’ll also get to join me for a live Q&A—I’d love to see you there! 

It’s been said that books are “uniquely portable magic.” 

But, believe it or not, I think that understates it.

If you love to read, you know what I mean. 

A few weeks ago, I was in Minneapolis and walked by an Indigenous restaurant called Indígena at the Guthrie Theater right next to my hotel. It sounded interesting, so I walked in, ordered, sat down, and pulled out the book I had started on the plane: Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather.

I’ve found that when you read old famous novels you find one of two things: they are either totally unreadable, or they are so readable you can’t stand it. This book is the latter. It is incredible and sitting there reading it while I ate bison bone marrow was a nearly transcendent experience.

It was like traveling through time and around the world. It starts in Rome with a bunch of cardinals deciding who they are going to assign to the American Southwest to oversee an enormous diocese of tens of thousands of square miles after the Mexican-American War. What follows is a strange book unlike any I’ve read before. It has no huge action scenes, but every page is somehow riveting and beautiful.

It’s got buffalo and corrupt priests. It’s got cathedrals and canyons. It’s got primordial underground rivers and Kit Carson. And the huge sweep of history and territory is breathtaking. Sitting there in Minneapolis in 2026, I was somehow also there inside Cather’s nineteenth-century New Mexico too. 

And when I eventually looked up from the page, the bison bone marrow in front of me, the red neon “YOU ARE ON NATIVE LAND” sign above Indígena’s kitchen, the Mississippi River flowing there across the street, the three-hour flight I had just taken—it all felt a little richer, stranger, more interesting, more meaningful.

It was just one of those fleeting feelings that reminded me of all the reasons I love to read and how reading enriches life in almost unimaginable and inexpressible ways.

In Greece last year, I wandered into a little bookstore in Ithaca that felt more like a small office supply store. There was a book called The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller. I had never heard of it and was momentarily deterred by the horrendously inaccessible title, but I grabbed it anyway. It’s an account of his travels in Greece in 1939. At one point, sailing toward Corfu, he watches the islands come into view.

“Out of the sea,” Miller writes, “as if Homer himself had arranged it for me, the islands bobbed up, lonely, deserted, mysterious in the fading light. I couldn’t ask for more, nor did I want anything more. I had everything a man could desire, and I knew it. I knew too that I might never have it again.”

I got goosebumps. This book I had picked up on a whim, written more than eighty years earlier, perfectly put into words something I was experiencing, there, with my family, walking in the footsteps of all the influences that had shaped my life. I could never have articulated it that way myself but I thought about that passage many times during our trip.

That’s magic. That’s art. That’s humanity. That’s the meaning of life right there. 

That’s what I love about Stefan Zweig’s little biography of Montaigne. I first read it in 2016, then returned to it during the pandemic. Montaigne had lived through plague and religious wars. Zweig was writing about him centuries later, in exile from the Nazis. I was reading them both as my own world was being turned upside down. It’s a very surreal experience to read a book about a man turning inward amidst the cruelty and close-mindedness of his time, written by a man fleeing the brutality and persecutions of his time, and find that both are helping you make sense of yours. 

Three very different lives, separated by centuries, yet here were two men helping me think through questions I was facing myself. How do you think clearly when everyone seems to be losing their minds? How do you remain human in an inhuman time?

And of course, books also let you enter experiences you’ve never had. I heard someone say that a book should be a window and not a mirror—that it should help you look in on someone else, or out into another world rather than back at yourself. That’s why I love memoirs. They help you get inside someone else’s life.

What’s it like to be the most powerful man in the world? Meditations gives us a glimpse. What’s it like to die of terminal cancer? When Breath Becomes Air documents it. What’s it like to be a queer teenage girl with a twin? Tegan and Sara Quin’s book High School is a fascinating picture of it. What’s it like to be an alcoholic in an insane asylum in the 1930s? William Seabrook’s Asylum captures it through the lens of a travel writer who committed himself to one. What was it like to undergo a gender transition in the 1970s? Jan Morris’s Conundrum is an incredible and eye-opening account of it. 

Sometimes you’re not ready for the power of a book, even though it’s there. I thought Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was good when I first read it. It was devastating when I read it after having kids. On the night I finished, all I could do was walk quietly into my son’s room and sob while he slept. The book is one of the most beautiful and profound depictions of struggle and sacrifice and love ever put down on the page. McCarthy had taken me inside another father’s experience, and when I put the book down, I carried it into my own. My son was asleep in his bed. Nothing about that had changed. But standing there looking at him, I felt it differently.

The same book can do that to you more than once. The words stay the same, but your life keeps giving you new ways to understand them.

As part of our Quarterly Classics Book Club, I just reread History of the Peloponnesian War. It was a form of time travel for me. Not just because Thucydides is a great writer who transports you to the three-decade-long war between Athens and Sparta but because I first read this book roughly 20 years ago and I still have my copy. It is crazy to look at notes I wrote at that age…We never step in the same river twice (although I am amazed at how consistently the same passages still strike me). 

But of course, the craziest thing about Thucydides is this sentence from the introduction: “My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last forever.” And here we are, talking about his book 2500 years later. 

You did it dude! 

Of course, these are the big and famous books, the ones I remember where I was when I read them. But just as we quickly forget even some of our most powerful dreams right after we wake up, there have been hundreds and hundreds of other such moments for me in the course of my reading life. Novels that matched up perfectly with a song I was listening to. Nonfiction that taught me the exact lesson I needed at a certain juncture of life. Single sentences that I went back and read five or six times just to savor them. Books that helped me make sense of world events. Writing that was so good I got jealous. An argument I disagreed with so much it prompted me to go write something of my own. 

It’s the best. 

We take it mostly for granted. Think about how many people have lived before you; think of the immensity of their lives, what they said, what they heard, what they did. Think of them sitting at their desk, struggling to articulate this experience for others. Think of the historians and philosophers and wise people who dedicated their whole careers to figuring out how and why certain events unfolded, why and how individuals made fateful decisions. Think of all the books they had read just to create a single, distilled volume they published.

They are all long dead and buried, yet they continue to reach out, collapsing centuries and shattering barriers, traveling across time and space and the vast range of perspectives. They are offering you their hand along your own life path.

It’s magic. It’s so cheap it’s basically free. 

And most people choose not to do it! In any case, most of us don’t do it nearly enough. 

P.S. If you want to experience all the magic of books, it’s not enough just that you read—it’s about HOW you read. It’s about learning how to read more critically, how to digest challenging books, how to find books with the potential of changing your life, how to take what you learn off the page and into your actual life. 

In our all-new 2026 Read to Lead: A Daily Stoic Reading Challenge, you’ll learn how to do that—and much more! Since it first launched in 2019, Read to Lead has been our most popular challenge, taken on by tens of thousands of participants. 

The 2026 course takes place across 6 weeks at a pace of one challenge every three days (15 challenges and more than 30,000 words of exclusive content). You also receive an instant 20% discount to use at The Painted Porch, access to a private community where you can connect with fellow participants, and, of course, lots and lots of book recommendations.

Additionally, there will be a live video session with me! It’s one of my favorite things to get the chance to interact with everyone in the course—I would love to have you join us!

In March 2025, we found two ten-week old puppies dumped on the road near where we live out in the country.

One was white with spots. The other was mostly black with some white on her chest and paws.

Both were emaciated, covered in flea bites, and scared of the thunderstorm that was just starting. 

We took them home and as you can imagine our kids begged for us to keep them. I remembered many years ago reading about “the black dog bias”—that for some reason darker dogs are considered scarier and less likely to be adopted—so we decided to keep that one and found a home, almost immediately for the other. 

It was a good thing because my kids had fallen in love with “Oreo.” 

Like every parent of all time, I was assured that they would take care of her and walk her. And like every kid who has ever made that promise, mine have not exactly followed through.

But I’m not mad, because it means I have to take her for two walks a day (on occasion I succeed in bribing or threatening the boys to come too). Of all the ways Oreo has changed our lives, that’s been the best part. She’s “forced” me to do more of something I love to do. Something I know is really good for me, for anyone.

Walking is good exercise, of course. It burns calories. You get vitamin D from the sun. If the research is correct, apparently getting several thousand steps a day comes with all sorts of benefits for your health and longevity. But I don’t care about any of that. I don’t mind those things, but I walk for the philosophical and psychological benefits.

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 helped them make better work. Literally, the name for the students of Aristotle was the Peripatetics—from the Greek peripatein, “to walk about”—because he did most of his teaching on walks.

Nietzsche’s, Thus Spoke Zarathustra came to him on a long walk. As he would later say: “It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.” The choreographer Twyla Tharp talks about going for “mindless mental wanderings” each day. Ernest Hemingway would walk along the Paris quais whenever his writing stalled. Charles Darwin built several walks into his daily schedule. The poet William Wordsworth walked as many as 180,000 miles in his lifetime—an average of six and a half miles a day since he was five years old! 

Even spiritual revelations seem to come on foot. Dorothy Day was a lifelong walker, and it was on her strolls along the beach on Staten Island in the 1920s that she first began to feel a strong sense of God in her life and the first flickerings of the awakening that would put her on a path toward sainthood. It’s probably not a coincidence that Jesus himself was a walker—a traveler—who knew the pleasures and the divineness of putting one foot in front of the other. Indeed, it’s no coincidence that many of the greatest expressions of faith and devotion involve long walks (i.e. pilgrimages) to holy sites around the globe.

The Buddhists speak of “walking meditation,” or kinhin, where movement after long periods of sitting, particularly through beautiful settings, can unlock a different kind of stillness than traditional meditation. In a beautiful letter to his bedridden and depressed sister-in-law, Søren Kierkegaard wrote: “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.”

In my life, I’ve been repeatedly gifted with ideas—from the muses, from my own subconscious, I don’t know—on walks. It was on a walk in Bastrop State Park with the kids when I got the idea for The Stoic Virtue Series. I’ve solved business problems and personal problems on walks. My wife can recognize it in my eyes and knows not to say anything when I return from a walk, rushing into the house and heading to the pile of notecards I have on the counter at all times. He’s probably come up with something…don’t interrupt or he’ll lose it and be a mess after. 

I’ll tell you what I’ve almost never thought—except a couple of times in the Texas summer—I have never returned from a walk and regretted it. Walks haven’t solved all my problems, but they rarely make them worse. And even when they haven’t changed anything, they’ve changed my mood—which is usually most of the problem anyway. 

Sitting at our computers, we are overwhelmed with information, with emails, with one thing after another. On a walk, the mind, relieved of all those inputs, can wander, drift, reflect, process, imagine, make connections, have ideas, or simply get a little peace and quiet.

Kierkegaard tells the story of a morning when he was driven from his house in a state of despair and frustration—illness, in his words. After an hour and a half, he was finally at peace and nearly back home when he bumped into a friendly gentleman who chattered on about a number of his problems. Isn’t that how it always seems to go?

No matter. “There was only one thing left for me to do,” Kierkegaard wrote, “instead of going home, to go walking again.”

And so must we.

Walk.

Then walk some more.

Anyway, I’ve got to go now. Oreo is scratching at the door. 

I’ll see if the kids want to come, but either way, I’m walking.

You know, not everything has to be big. 

I realize that the impulse, especially when it comes to business, is to try to grow everything to the absolute biggest it can be.

This is not a new, but it’s certainly a defining trend of our age. After all, all this drama about data centers is being driven by hyperscalers—companies built around taking things that work and scaling them as far as they can possibly go.

But I hate that philosophy…or at least, it’s not what I practice in my life. 

In 2019, I could have started just about any kind of business. A bunch of my friends were starting tech companies. Others had been making a fortune investing, flipping real estate, trading crypto. 

I was the crazy one who decided to open a small bookstore in rural Texas. 

What’s crazier though is that the bookstore worked. And yet do you know what I get asked, probably once a week? “When are you going to open another location?” At least three struggling bookstores have reached out about us acquiring them. 

What strikes me isn’t that people ask—it’s how instinctively they ask. As if expansion were the only logical next step. As if the point of having one successful thing is to have two. Then four. Then forty.

On an episode of The Daily Stoic podcast a little while back, Nate Silver called it “the obsession with scale.” We were talking about how the venture capitalist mindset—where success is defined by scaling 1000x—has seeped into how ordinary people think about their work. About what it means to have a successful podcast. A successful newsletter. A successful creative career. A successful anything.

“In the content space,” Silver said, “VCs tend to analogize content creators or media startups to tech companies. When it’s actually more like running a restaurant. You can run one really nice restaurant. If you’re very lucky, you can even franchise that to a couple of locations and you can write a cookbook and you can get on Iron Chef or whatever. But it doesn’t have to scale beyond that. Unless you want to be a Chipotle or something, which is fine.”

It is fine if you want to be a Chipotle. There’s nothing wrong with building something large if that’s genuinely what you set out to do. But in my experience, most people actually don’t really think at all about what they’re setting out to do. They don’t sit down and consider what success would look like for them, what “enough” would feel like, what winning their particular game would mean. And because they’re not clear on what they actually want, they end up chasing growth indiscriminately. More followers. More subscribers. More platforms. More revenue. More locations. More, more, more—until eventually their thing collapses under its own weight. Or it succeeds and doesn’t fail…but it is an enormous, life-consuming burden. 

“Do Not Go Past The Mark You Aimed For” is one of the most important laws in ​The 48 Laws of Power​. It’s about knowing where you’re trying to go and when you’ve gotten there. It’s about knowing what game you’re playing and when you’ve won. It’s about having the discipline to choose the target and not blow past it. 

I think about this with myself. ​I write books about Stoicism​. If I wrote about something with more mass appeal or if I wrote romance novels or if I ghostwrote celebrity memoirs, maybe I would sell more books, make more money, or be known by more people.

But that wasn’t the mark I was aiming for. If it were, I certainly wouldn’t have chosen an obscure school of ancient philosophy as the means to try to get there.

Or, could The Daily Stoic make more money if we got into t-shirts and hats and supplements and energy drinks and cheap merch? Probably. Could we license the brand to some conglomerate and cash out? I bet we could find a buyer. But if the point of all this was to endlessly raise the ceiling on the amount of money coming in, I would have selected a different line of work a long time ago.

So many people think they have to live a life they don’t want for a long time so that eventually, off in the distant future, they can live a life they do want. They need to make millions or get famous or earn their big break. Then and only then can they…

I’ve always found it’s better to think about what my ideal ordinary day looks like. That, at least, is the mark I am aiming for: for that ideal ordinary day to be most of my days. When an opportunity comes along or I’m faced with a decision, I ask myself: Will this get me closer to that ideal or further away? Will it give me more of the days I actually want to have, or fewer of them?

A really cool job opportunity? I’ll consider it. But wait, it means moving my family to D.C., wearing a suit most days, being on someone else’s schedule—and I won’t be able to write much? Never mind. I could make a lot of money investing in startups? Sounds great. But I’d have to read pitch decks and go to meetings all day? You know what, I’ll pass.

You might ask: “But isn’t this a privileged way to live?” Yes, I do feel very privileged that for me happiness is relatively cheap. My ideal day doesn’t require me to be rich or powerful or important. It just requires that I be good enough at something to sell my services on the open market and strong enough to say no to things that are beyond my needs. That is a privilege, and it’s more accessible than we think. There are plenty of billionaires who don’t have it, plenty of ordinary people who have never lost it.

So it doesn’t take some enormous amount of money. Nor do you have to be famous or well-connected or wildly successful.

It takes discipline. 

The discipline to figure out what you actually want your life to look like.

The discipline to turn down cool, lucrative opportunities. =

The discipline to say no to the investors, the acquirers, the well-meaning people who have ideas for how you can really blow this thing up.

The discipline to not go past the mark you aimed for.

The discipline to not scale.

The right book at the right time is a powerful thing.

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

Some time around the year 141 CE, the philosopher Junius Rusticus gave a young Marcus Aurelius a book from his own library: the lectures of a former slave named Epictetus. Marcus would remember the gift gratefully decades later, thanking Rusticus in Meditations “for introducing me to Epictetus’s lectures—and loaning me his own copy.”

Nearly two thousand years later, before the Vietnam War, James Stockdale had almost that exact experience as Marcus when he was given a copy of Epictetus by one of his professors at Stanford, Philip Rhinelander.

Neither Rusticus nor Rhinelander could have known just how consequential those recommendations would become. Marcus would rely on Epictetus as he became the most powerful man in the world. Stockdale would rely on him after his plane was shot down over North Vietnam and he spent seven and a half years as a prisoner of war.

There’s another impressionable young person whose life was changed by someone recommending Epictetus.

Who?

Me!

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

I did. And nearly twenty years later, I’m still reading him, quoting him, writing about him, and coming back to his ideas.

What I love about Discourses is that it is not some dense academic philosophy book filled with abstract arguments that have very little to do with real life. It’s the opposite. Epictetus never wrote anything down. Discourses comes to us from one of his students, who tells us that “whatever I used to hear him say I wrote down, word for word, as best I could, as a record for later use of his thought and frank expression.” So what we have is essentially a collection of conversations—Epictetus going back and forth in real time with his students.

It’s an unusual book, to be sure. And as powerful as Epictetus is, he’s not the easiest to get through. He did not suffer fools easily. He wasn’t afraid to call his students foolish for not understanding him or for missing the point. I think that’s one of the reasons I didn’t immediately take to Epictetus, and I know it’s why many people over the years have been turned off by him. He’s blunt, meanders a bit at times, and can be a bit of a struggle to understand at first. (FYI: That’s why we made the Daily Stoic How To Read Epictetus Guide—a digital companion to Discourses that gives you the context and guidance to better understand—and learn from—this incredible teacher).

But the pursuit of wisdom isn’t supposed to be painless. “The philosopher’s lecture hall is a hospital. You shouldn’t walk out of it feeling pleasure, but pain, for you weren’t well when you entered.” This from a guy uniquely equipped to speak about how to handle hardship. Unlike so many philosophers who spoke about hardship and struggle from positions of wealth and privilege, Epictetus experienced difficulties few of us can even imagine.

He was born into slavery in a Greek province of the Roman Empire in what is now modern-day Turkey. His name—Epiktetos—means “acquired one.” And even by Roman standards, his master was cruel and violent, at one point twisting Epictetus’s leg with all his might. As a punishment? As a sick pleasure? Trying to get a disobedient young kid to follow instructions? We don’t know. All we know is that Epictetus calmly warned him about taking it too far. When the leg snapped, Epictetus made no sound, he uttered no tears. He smiled and looked at his master and said, “Didn’t I warn you?”

For the rest of his life, Epictetus walked with a limp. But he remained unbroken by the incident. “Lameness is an impediment to the leg,” he would later say, “but not to the will.” He would choose to see his disability as only a physical impairment, and in fact it was that idea of choice that defined the core of his philosophical beliefs. He called it our “first job” in life. It was simply this:“to divide and distinguish things into two categories: externals I cannot control, but the choices I make with regard to them I do control.”

Our judgments. Our attitudes. Our wants. Our desires. Our opinions about what has happened to us. Our choices about how we respond to what has happened to us. Those are up to us.

Life was like a play, he liked to say, and if it was the playwright’s “pleasure you should act a poor man, a cripple, a governor, or a private person, see that you act it naturally. For this is your business, to act well the character assigned you; to choose it is another’s.”

One of my personal favorites is Epictetus’s idea that every situation has two handles—“one by which it can be carried, and one by which it can’t.” When bad news comes, do I grab the handle of despair or the handle of action? When I’m slighted, grievance or grace? When things feel uncertain, fear or preparation?

There is another wonderful line from Epictetus that I think of every time I see someone get terribly offended or outraged about something—and that I try to think about when I get upset myself. “If someone succeeds in provoking you,” he said, “realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation.” Whatever the other person did is on them. Whatever your reaction is, that’s on you.

The Discourses are full of passages like this, little arguments and anecdotes that force a shift in perspective. Epictetus never actually wrote any of them down. They come from one of his students, Arrian, who tells us that “whatever I used to hear him say I wrote down, word for word, as best I could, as a record for later use of his thought and frank expression.”

Stoicism as a philosophy was made to be kept in hand, always at the ready. And it is the title of Epictetus’s Enchiridion (a kind of “greatest hits” of his teachings collected at the back of many editions of Discourses) that best shows this. It comes from a Greek word meaning “held in hand” or “have at hand,” and at the time, it often referred to a hand-knife or dagger. Arrian’s idea in choosing the title was that Epictetus’s teaching worked the same way. They were something you could keep at hand and reach for in difficult moments.

“If you didn’t learn these things to demonstrate them in practice, what did you learn them for?” Epictetus pointedly asked.

Stockdale had spent those years before the war with his Epictetus books on his bedside table, several hours each week buried in them. Then on September 9, 1965, his A-4 Skyhawk was shot down over North Vietnam. “Five years down there, at least,” Stockdale said after ejecting from his plane. “I’m leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.”

It turned out to be seven and a half years in a brutal Vietnamese prison, where Stockdale was repeatedly tortured and spent long stretches in isolation. He would later credit Epictetus—and all those hours spent buried in his books—with helping him survive it.

Stockdale wasn’t alone to test Epictetus’s ideas in “the laboratory of human behavior,” as he liked to put it.

Frederick the Great carried Epictetus with him into battle. Thomas Wentworth Higginson was reading him as he raised and led one of the first black regiments for the Union in the Civil War. Toussaint Louverture, the leader of the Haitian Revolution, studied him too as he rose up against Napoleon. And Theodore Roosevelt took a copy of Epictetus with him on his brutal “River of Doubt” expedition in the Amazon.

“Lent to me by my friend Major James A. Shipton and carried by me through my South American journey, including the exploration of the River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt, Feb 8th 1915”

I like to say that Epictetus is your favorite philosopher’s favorite philosopher. Like the way we sometimes talk about “your favorite rapper’s favorite rapper” or “your favorite comedian’s favorite comedian”—someone who isn’t necessarily the biggest name, but who is revered by those in the know.

Epictetus is like that. Someone who should be much more widely known and read—because when he is, he changes lives.

He changed Marcus’s.

He changed Stockdale’s.

He changed mine.

And he can change yours.

P.S. As I mentioned briefly above, if you do decide to read Discourses (you can pick up my favorite translation here), we put together the Daily Stoic How To Read Epictetus Guide to help you best navigate it, and it will be 30% off with your purchase of the book this month. It’s 14 in-depth modules that distill all of my reading, rereading, and rabbit-holing of Epictetus into a kind of roadmap designed to help you get out of the book in a few weeks what took me nearly twenty years.

August has been Epictetus Month over at Daily Stoic, where thousands of us have been reading and discussing Epictetus together. And on August 27th, I’m hosting a live Epictetus Q&A, where I’ll take your questions.

Just get the guide before August 26th to receive your invite to the Q&A.

I hope to see you there!

One of my kids’ favorite books is I Need a New Butt. 

I don’t want to spoil the plot, but he needs a new butt not for any culture-war reason but because his has a crack in it. That’s funny, especially if you’re four or five or six or seven.

My boys love the sequels too, I Broke My Butt! and My Butt Is So Noisy!, which I’ve read to them many, many times. They’re funny and silly and ridiculous and creative. And they do what good children’s books are supposed to do: they help kids develop a love of books. 

Back in 2022, an assistant principal in Mississippi named Toby Price read I Need a New Butt! to a group of second graders. Then—gasp—some of the kids started saying the word “butt” a lot. So Price was fired. Seriously. He sued for wrongful termination. He spent a fortune on legal fees. The school district spent a fortune on legal fees. Eventually, he won and was reinstated. Everyone lost, including the taxpayers and the kids. As Price put it, “If you limit the books kids have, you limit the person they become.”

And this wasn’t some isolated bit of insanity. A little more than an hour from where we live in Texas, some crazy people in Llano County became fixated on getting the Butt books removed from the public library, calling them “grooming stuff.” The campaign spread, more books disappeared, and a librarian who resisted what was happening was eventually fired. 

Hitting even closer to home, the high school my sons are likely to go to here in Bastrop was in the news not long ago for challenging a book called Out of Darkness, about segregation in a Texas oil town in the 1930s. More comically, another parent angrily protested an example of gay sex from a book called Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison at one of our school board meetings in September…but as the school librarian later pointed out, the school doesn’t even carry that book. The mother had confused it with another book literally about a boy who mows lawns. 

So I get a little frustrated when I see people say that book banning isn’t a real thing. The whole point of school—and libraries—should be introducing kids to books that make them laugh, make them think, and show them that books can be provocative and transgressive and interesting and creative.

This is exactly what I was going to say when I was supposed to speak at the U.S. Naval Academy last year. If you remember, my talk was cancelled moments before I went on stage because I was going to address the fact that the Academy—at the direction of the president and Secretary of Defense—had removed hundreds of books from its library for being “too woke.” (I wrote a whole NYT article about it). These are our warriors and they’re being told what books they can and can’t check out from a library?

Again, this is why I get upset when people say book banning isn’t real. 

The degree to which people will do mental gymnastics not to face this is crazy. Oh, it’s not a ban if they are just restricting access. Oh, it’s not censorship, they are just making sure it doesn’t get in the wrong hands (Sir, you’ve just described censorship). Apparently, if a book is available anywhere, it’s not actually banned? Tell that to the librarian who got fired. Tell that to all the educators being threatened with fines or even prison time for giving students access to certain books. In the antebellum South, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was banned and criminalized. The fact that you could still buy it in Boston doesn’t cancel that out. When the Catholic Church banned—and burned—books, was it not a big deal because there were still Protestant countries? 

With this deranged campaign spreading through schools and libraries around us, I started thinking about what I might be able to do about it. We’ve had this extra space in the building next door to The Painted Porch that we’d been trying to figure out what to do with for a while. Well, we figured it out. 

We turned it into a free lending library for banned books. After months of planning, designing, collecting books, and building the space out, the Banned Books Library opened a few weeks ago. My hope is that it can serve as one small counterblow against this deranged book-banning impulse spreading across the country.

Every book in the library has been banned or challenged somewhere. Some were removed by school boards. Some were outlawed by governments, burned by mobs, denounced by churches, dropped by publishers, or struck from the shelves of libraries, universities, and military academies. Some are great books. Some are strange books. Some contain ideas I agree with. Some contain ideas I don’t. That’s the point. A library is not an endorsement of every book inside it. Reading something is not the same as agreeing with it.

Like many public school kids, I was assigned Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in high school. I remembered the book as a warning against totalitarian censorship by the government. It was only later, rereading it as an adult, that I realized Bradbury was depicting something much more insidious. As Captain Beatty explains to Montag, censorship was what the people wanted. This horrendous burning of books hadn’t been forced on them by a tyrant. They had chosen it. One group didn’t like one book. Another group didn’t feel good about another. So burn it. Make everyone comfortable.

Bradbury’s message is a much more salient warning to modern Americans than many of us are ready for upon first reading. America is, and always has been, in less danger of top-down Chinese- or Soviet-style suppression and much more vulnerable to short-sighted or even well-intentioned democratic censorship. People are willing to ban a book because of what they think might be in it, or because of what someone else said was in it.

It’s almost beyond irony that that book itself has been challenged or banned in some schools. But that’s no more ironic than the fact that in 2024, the ACLU had to file a lawsuit to restore access to 1984 in a Colorado school district. 

Look, reading something is not the same thing as endorsing it. You can wrestle with a book. Challenge it. Disagree with it. Learn from it. In the fall of 1961, Commander James Stockdale began a course at Stanford on Marxist theory. “We read no criticisms of Marxism,” he later recalled, “only primary sources. All year we read the works of Marx and Lenin.” 

A few years later, Stockdale was shot down over North Vietnam and spent the next seven years as a prisoner of war. “In Hanoi, I understood more about Marxist theory than my interrogator did,” he explained. “I was able to say to that interrogator, ‘That’s not what Lenin said; you’re a deviationist.’”

Reading Marx and Lenin didn’t make Stockdale a Marxist. It helped him understand and resist his captors. Interacting with stuff that challenges you or that provokes you either opens your mind or it serves as an inoculation…Both those things are good. That was going to be my message to the Naval Academy, but it’s one everyone needs to remember. 

America has many problems. Reading too many books is not one of them. In fact, I would argue that our problems stem from the exact opposite. We spend too much time online. We watch too much real-time partisan news. We have a poor understanding of history and our founding principles. We read only things that confirm what we already believe.

If you’d like to be part of the solution, you can donate a book by sending one to the Banned Books Library (912 Main St., Bastrop, TX) or through thepaintedporch.com/banned. And if you happen to be in the area, come by, take one home, and read it. Wherever you are, find out what books people are trying to remove and read them. As Stephen King has said, “Don’t spend time waving signs or carrying petitions around the neighborhood. Instead, run, don’t walk, to the nearest nonschool library or to the local bookstore and get whatever it was that they banned. Read whatever they’re trying to keep out of your eyes and your brain, because that’s exactly what you need to know.”

In a time of misinformation and disinformation, that quote might not always be right, but directionally the argument is good. Read whatever they’re trying to keep out of your eyes and your brain. Read dangerously. Read what they’d rather you not see, not know, not think. Wrestle with it. Challenge and disagree with it.

And, above all, learn from it.

For 2,130 consecutive games, Lou Gehrig played first base for the New York Yankees—a streak that would stand for five and a half decades. He put up a career .340 batting average. He was a two-time MVP, seven-time All-Star, six-time World Series Champion, Hall of Famer, and the first player ever to have his number retired.

All from a man who wasn’t born an athlete. As a boy, Lou Gehrig was so uncoordinated that a friend joked his body “behaved as if it were drunk.” He made himself into the Iron Horse—day by day, action by action—not with some special gift, but with a handful of perfectly reachable habits. He went to bed early every night. He didn’t drink or smoke. He showed up even when he didn’t feel like it. He never made excuses. He trained on his own. He saved his money. The only thing he ever asked of the staff was a stick of gum on his locker before a game. Two if it was a doubleheader.

Nothing particularly groundbreaking or dramatic. But strung together, day after day, year after year, those small things added up to one of the greatest careers in the history of the sport. And that’s what the path to greatness almost always looks like: small, ordinary actions, repeated for a very long time.

That’s how I’ve tried to build my own life. (It’s also what we built the Habits for Success, Habits for Happiness course around at Daily Stoic. It’s an awesome six-week experience—inspired by the best habits of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus, as well as my own—that thousands of people have now gone through). 

And so that’s what I wanted to share today—the handful of ordinary habits and practices that, repeated again and again, have had an enormous impact. On my work. On my health. On my happiness. And most of all, on who I am.

– Wake up early. I get up early, between 5:30 or 6am.The mornings are the most productive hours of the day—before the interruptions, before the distractions, before the rest of the world gets up and going too. 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. As I said in Discipline is Destiny, this decision we make in the morning, it not only determines how our day will go but it determines who we are.

– Protect the best part of the day. The novelist Philipp Meyer (whose book ​​The Son​​ is an incredible read) ​​told me on the podcast​​, “You have to be very careful about to what (and to whom) you’re giving the best part of your day.” 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. 

– No phone for the first hour. My rule is no phone for at least the first hour of the day. Some days, I don’t touch it until lunch, and on those days I’m happier and more productive.

– Journal. I’ve been keeping a One Line a Day journal for nine years now (you should keep one, they’re amazing). One line. One sentence. What did I think about today? Where did I go? What happened? That’s it. It sounds like nothing—and in a way it is—but the words accumulate. It’s weird how much you don’t remember, even of your own life. Most of what’s in there I’d completely forgotten. Without those pages, it would all be gone. With them, I can flip back and I see the person I was. I can see the person I am becoming. I can see the person I want to be again. I can see mistakes I don’t want to make anymore. I can see all the small things that have added up to who I am. 

– Just a little progress every day. As I wrote about recently, my writing habit was all-or-nothing for a long time—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. 

– Carry a book everywhere. People often assume 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, some trick for reading so fast. The truth is, even though I read hundreds of books each year, I read at a pretty slow pace. In fact, I deliberately read slowly. But I also read all the time. I always carry a book with me. Phone, wallet, keys—and a book. I’ve brought one to the Grammys, NFL games, kids’ practices, restaurants, the DMV, Disneyland, the White House, backstage before talks, and into the waiting room before surgery. Every time I get a second, I crack it open.

– Take a walk. I take a walk twice a day. I don’t think I have ever taken a walk without thinking, after, “I am so glad I did that.” We rescued a dog last year and that’s been the best part. It’s “forced” me to do something I love to do. It’s not about burning calories, but for the philosophical and psychological benefits. As Nietzsche would later say: “It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.” 

– Strenuous exercise. I also go for a run or swim just about every day. “We treat the body rigorously,” Seneca said, “so that it’s not disobedient to the mind.” That sounds a little aggressive, because in my experience, the physical practice is actually quite kind to the mind. Some days, it turns it off in a very restorative way. Other days, it lets it wander and work on things. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought of a great line or solved an intractable writing problem while running or swimming. Exercise is also an easy win every day. Writing can go poorly, but going on a run or swim always goes well. 

– A simple to-do list. When we were working on ​​​What You’re Made For​​​, the late George Raveling told me that when he became Nike’s Director of International Basketball at 63, having no prior corporate experience, he was overwhelmed by self-doubt. Until a mentor gave him a simple system: “When you leave the office every day, leave a yellow pad in the middle of the desk, and when you come in the morning, write down the three most important things you gotta get done that day in that order. That day, do not do anything else but the first thing on the pad. And if you get the first one, then you go to the second one.” As for me—every day, on a notecard, I write down 5-6 things I want to get done that day. Every day, I cross these off and tear up the card. That’s it. That’s the system. 

– Don’t drink. “Why don’t you drink?” is a question I’ve been asked probably eight thousand times in my life. The real answer is boring: I don’t like the taste. But even if I did, I still wouldn’t. Heraclitus’s line was that “a dry soul is wisest and best.” He’s right. Have you ever done anything you’re really proud of while drinking? Is anyone their best selves while drunk? Of course not.

– Don’t drink calories. This is one I got from Tim Ferriss. Along with not drinking alcohol, I don’t drink soda, smoothies, juice, milk, anything. It’s just a simple way to help keep your diet on track.

– Focus on process, not goals. 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.

– Think about death. Shakespeare said that every third thought should be of our grave. Perhaps that’s too much. One thought per day is plenty. 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.

– Review the day. “When the light has been removed and my wife has fallen silent,” Seneca wrote, “I examine my entire day and go back over what I’ve done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by.” He’d ask himself: What bad habits did I cure? What temptations did I resist? In what specific way am I now better than I was yesterday? I spend some time every night on my own version. Did I follow my plans for the day? Was I prepared enough? What could I do better? What have I learned that will help me tomorrow? These simple questions make an enormous impact. So I spend some time every night answering them.

– Sleep with the phone in another room. Ben Sasse used to give his young staffers old-school alarm clocks—not because he wanted to make sure they were on time for work, but so they wouldn’t have an excuse to sleep with their phone on the nightstand. If your alarm isn’t your phone, your phone can go in the other room. And if your phone is in the other room, you can’t check it at night. Which means I won’t know if a text or an email comes in. I won’t be tempted to scroll. I’ll have to lie there with my own thoughts, read a book, or maybe even go to sleep at a reasonable time.

– Go the F*ck to Sleep! I follow the advice of a book I love to read to my kids: Go the F*ck to Sleep! All the other habits and practices listed here become irrelevant if I don’t have the energy and clarity to do them. 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. Knowing this, I guard my sleep carefully. I try to get my 7-8 hours of sleep every night.

There are a million good reasons not to travel.

I woke up with a bunch of them this morning. 

I was exhausted. My kids were fighting. My wife has been sick. It was ungodly hot—literally the hottest Europe has ever been. My routine is out the window. So is any sense of a budget. Our suitcases are already full of knick-nacks and crap we don’t need and there’s quite a bit of trip left. The car that was supposed to pick us up for our tour is late. 

But we’re in Rome. 

It’s all worth it…or so I tell myself.

Even though travel can be expensive, stressful, and frustrating. Even though it tests your patience. Even though things go wrong. Even though you know that when you get home, you’ll be behind on everything.

Still, it’s worth it. 

It has always been worth it.  

For all their warnings against escapism, the Stoics traveled widely—in an age when travel was far slower, harder, and more dangerous. 

Unlike his stepfather Antoninus, who never left Italy, Marcus Aurelius was on the road a lot as emperor. It wasn’t always pleasant. But it undoubtedly influenced his philosophy and his view of the world. He could have sent someone else to inspect the troops on his behalf, but he chose to go. When the calls of duty and the road converged, he went. Seneca was born in Corduba, Spain (modern Córdoba), moved to Rome, and in addition to his exile in Corsica, lived for nearly a decade in Egypt. Posidonius (a key figure in Middle Stoicism) worked and lived in many places throughout his long life—Syria, Athens, Rome, and Rhodes—and traveled almost the entirety of the known world. After completing his studies under Posidonius, Athenodorus traveled widely as a lecturer, reaching Petra, Egypt, and other major Mediterranean cities before becoming young Octavian’s teacher in Apollonia, on the coast of modern Albania.

These were critical experiences for them. Then, and now, hitting the road was a source of wisdom. It shaped their philosophy. It enlarged their view of the world. It opened their eyes to new lands, new customs, new perspectives.

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness,” Mark Twain famously wrote, “and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” 

This was true of America in the 19th and 20th centuries, and it was true in Rome in the first century. Marcus Aurelius’ passages in Meditations which reference being a citizen of the world were almost certainly shaped by the people he met in Athens and Tarsus and Alexandria (and of course the people he met in Rome who had traveled there from far away). 

Every culture thinks its norms are, well, normal. One of my favorite examples of this is the criticism I get that by talking about politics I am “upsetting half my audience.” It’s the most American thing in the world to assume that the world is as evenly divided as America is. (Shocker, it’s not!) 

Only travel can shake us from this ethnocentrism, awakening us to the plain fact that our way of life is but one of many. In our travels, we meet people who care about different things, wear different clothes, tell different stories, eat different foods, speak different languages. 

When he traveled, Montaigne sucked up everything he saw like a vacuum, avoiding much in the way of plans, leaving himself open to chance encounters and experiences. Like the time he came across men leading two ostriches on leashes as a present for a duke. He stopped in at every church he could find, taking in their various practices like an anthropologist.

When the New World was discovered—basically in his lifetime—Montaigne did not think the people who lived there were savages. From his travels, he understood that every distant land has its own culture and beliefs—and that our customs would seem just as barbaric to them. Not that he defended the “horrible barbarity” of cannibalism. What struck him was that “while judging correctly of their wrong-doings we should be so blind to our own.” Did the cannibals draw and quarter each other? Commit atrocities? Accuse each other of black magic? Who was actually the barbarian?

Perhaps it was a lesson he first absorbed from his extensive reading of Herodotus, our first great historian and travel writer, who traveled thousands over the course of his life—from Persia to Athens to Italy, Libya, Babylonia, Byzantium, and the Black Sea. Above all, he delighted in getting inside the nomos of each place—the people’s customs, and the ways they differed from his own. He loved to tell the story about a small sect in India that ate a small piece of their dead as part of a religious ritual. Obscene! Disgusting! But how did these people react when told that Greeks burned their dead at the funeral pyre? An outrage! A sacrilege!

Me and Herodotus in the Palazzo Massimo

The world is very big. The place you call home is only one small corner of it. There is wisdom on the other side of the hill, wisdom in the experiences that only the road can give you, wisdom in learning how other people live and why they live that way.

It’s easy to be comfortable where you are. To tell yourself that travel isn’t worth all the hassle. To think of it as a luxury, an indulgence, a needless extravagance. But it isn’t. It’s essential. “I was never a fan of people who don’t leave home,” the well-traveled Joan Didion once wrote. “It just seems like part of your duty in life.”

But leaving home doesn’t have to mean going far. It doesn’t have to mean spending lots of money on some exotic trip to the other side of the world. I remember talking to a waitress in Natchez, Mississippi once who told me she had never been to Vicksburg (a little over an hour away!). Growing up in the suburbs of Sacramento, I was lucky my parents took us on trips to Europe and China and Canada and Mexico, but I BARELY ever went to downtown Sacramento. Or even San Francisco. I only discovered the fullness of those cities as an adult. 

Don’t tell yourself you’ll do it later. When you’re older. When the kids are older. When things settle down. When you have more money. When it’s more convenient. That misses the point. You don’t need the benefits of travel someday, when your life is perfectly arranged for it. You need them now.

So hit the road! Travel to the well-known places and the little seen. Travel by boat and by car and by train and by plane and by foot. Read the signs. Struggle with the language barrier. See things from the other side of the road. Eat the food. Go to the museums. Sit at sidewalk cafes. See the ancient hieroglyphs and notice graffiti on city streets. See the cemeteries. Visit the battlefields. Listen to people chatter. Learn. Explore. Be curious. Ask questions. Carry a notebook. Write down everything you see and feel and think.

See your own country as a tourist. Live abroad like a local. Every building, every person has a story. Think of what they witnessed. Think of who stood where you are standing. Think of what was here before any of this was here. Think of what people used to think here, what they were afraid of, what they hoped for, what they believed.

Let things go wrong (and they will!). These experiences teach as much as anything else. Last summer, I spent 27 days in Greece with my family, covering some 3,000 kilometers between Athens, Olympia, Ithaca, Delphi, Thermopylae, Mount Olympus, Marathon, and Cape Sounio. We were in a Chinese rental car that was far too big for tiny ancient streets. We got a flat tire at the top of Mount Olympus. I was stung by a jellyfish near Thermopylae. We bumped into friends I hadn’t seen since high school. We got ripped off. On the last day, a bee stung me in the back of the throat and I almost died. Oh, and somewhere in between there, I got myself a bad case of sunstroke. 

But that’s what travel is supposed to be. Travel is an adventure. Travel is pushing your limits. Travel is trying new things. Travel is learning that most problems can be solved, most setbacks can be survived, and most of what goes wrong can be figured out. 

You don’t have to be gone for long. You don’t have to spend a fortune. You don’t have to see the whole world to become a worldly person.

But you have to check out what’s on the other side of the hill a couple times.

You have to expose yourself to different places, different people, different perspectives.

You have to hit the road.

It will be disruptive. Your patience will be tested. Things will go wrong.

And it will all be worth it.

Well, I’m now almost 40. Like officially almost 40. I woke up yesterday in Cle Elum, Washington, ran 20 miles and then turned 39. I did a little talk for Amazon and then flew home, getting in very late and very tired. 

I have been doing some version of this post for basically twenty years. 

(You can see my birthday posts for ​26​, ​27​, ​28​, ​29​, ​30​, ​31​, ​32, ​​33​, ​34​, ​35​, ​36​, 37, and 38​). 

How much have I learned and changed? Quite a bit, I’m proud to say. Not enough, I’d have to add much more honestly. I still fall prey to the same patterns. I am still doing too many of the same things. And worse, I’m still too often not aware of it until it’s painfully obvious much later. Which brings me to my first lesson for this year’s list. 

– At my talk in Seattle last week (I’m on tour this summer and fall if you want to come see me in the US and Australia), someone asked how I would describe myself in one word. I thought about it and I just said: “Trying.” I’m trying. Could I try a little harder? Would I like to make a little more progress? Yes. But I am trying. 

– I’ve given hundreds of talks now, and I could give the same one every night, the same way, until I had it down cold. Instead, I try to change it each time—I add things, I cut things, I work out new material right there on stage. If I have the opportunity, because of the audience or whatever, to give a totally new one that I haven’t done before, I see that as a gift not an obligation. Because harder is what makes me better. It also keeps life interesting. 

– One of the things that sneaks up on you as you get older are the blocks of time you can start measuring things in. For a while, four years—the length of high school or college—is a measuring stick of something that takes a while. Then you get comfortable with things being a decade long—“We’ve been friends of a decade” and “That was like ten years ago?”—and then suddenly, it’s twenty years, like I did in the intro above. I had my twenty year high school reunion last year. This gives you perspective. You start to get a sense of how long things take and how much capacity you have to endure or live through.

– And yet even so, the passage of time can sneak up on you. I was looking at a baseball picture of my son the other day. It was him holding a bat, looking basically like the kid he is now, except it says 2025. How could he be old enough to at one point have been five years younger? I was trying to express to him how unbelievable that is to me. But it’s true. Tempus fugit the ancients said. Time flies. Be present. Be ready. 

– I don’t believe in time travel…but I do believe the work—learning, research, exercise, etc—is a gift we give our future selves. Basically, you can’t make withdrawals from accounts you haven’t made deposits in.  

– The purpose of any piece of writing at all is not the end product on the page. It’s the person YOU are on the other side of having done it. It’s the thinking long and hard about something. It’s the slow, tedious, difficult work of figuring out what you actually work. And the equally hard work of finding the words for what you think. AI can give you an essay, an article, a book, or a briefing. What it can’t give you is the person you can only become by doing the writing yourself.

– “It is surprising,” Roosevelt said, “how much reading a man can do in time usually wasted.” That’s exactly right. Bring a book with you everywhere. 

– I don’t think I have ever taken a walk without thinking, after, “I am so glad I did that.” We rescued a dog last year and that’s been the best part. It’s “forced” me to do something I love to do. 

– For fifteen years (again those chunks of time!) I’d had this idea sitting in the back of my head, and last July I finally did it: I ran the 26 miles from Marathon to Athens. 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. In a couple weeks, I’m going to try to do my Misogi in Rome. I’ll let you know how it goes. 

– We are flooded with more information than entire civilizations could have produced, let alone imagined. And yet, how much of this matters? Or even holds up? When I was talking at Amazon, I brought up one of their company values which is “focus on the things that don’t change.” But how much of our information diet adheres to that? How much of what we give our attention to day to day, supports us in our goal to be long term thinkers? 

– Obviously I am biased as an author but I think most people should consume less news and read more books. Less news, more books. More history. More poetry. More literature. More philosophy. More myths. Because you know what those stories are about? They’re about what’s happening now!

– Almost every lesson you need to learn to deal with what’s happening in the world, almost every skill you need to develop to succeed in modern times is the topic of old art. I was bowled over last summer when I read Euripides’ The Children of Hercules. It’s a play from 430BC and I’d never even heard of it. In it, the young children of Hercules are driven to the Temple of Apollo in Marathon by a bounty hunter from an angry king, who demands they be handed over to be punished. “They are suppliants and strangers,” the Athenians reply, “Who look to our city for help. / To reject them is to defy the gods.” The people of Marathon have to decide. In theory they care about the plight of the refugee, they know what their values say to do. But how much are they willing to risk for strangers? Is their compassion a match for the animus and anger of the fearful and the angry? Anyway, as Truman famously said, “the only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.”

– Again, supreme irony: AI, this cutting-edge technology, actually makes the oldest skills more valuable than ever. Reading. Thinking. Knowing things. Empathy. Having taste. Understanding context. Detecting lies or nonsense.

– That last one is really important. The essential skill of our time is having a good bullshit detector. Can you spot an obvious agenda? Can you recognize legit craziness? Can steer clear of bad actors and grifters? I have been amazed at how bad people seem to be at this, especially people who host podcasts. C’mon guys. Do better. 

– 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. Again, the purpose of any piece of writing is the person you are on the other side of having done it. We write to figure out what we think and believe. Which is something you can’t have someone else do for you. The point is to do it.. 

– You’re going to look back on this period and wish you did more. I don’t mean work. I mean you’re going to wish you were more active and outspoken. That you went against the political current, that you lent a hand, that you participated. This fever will break (or rather, it will be broken) and we will all be judged. We will judge ourselves. 

– Related: I want to quote again some advice I got last year when I was weighing whether to say something I knew might cause me some problems. It came from a four star admiral: “I think you should just speak directly about what you truly believe. That is always a path.”

– And related even more: When you do this, you are doing the world a service. Courage is a team sport. Justice is a team sport. People are far more likely to stand up, to say “this is wrong,” when they’ve seen someone else do it first. So when you speak up, you’re not just taking a stand. When you are unapologetically yourself, you’re not just being yourself. You’re making it easier for the next person to. 

– Everyone could use a support group. A circle of people who’ve been there, who give you advice, who relate to what you’re going through. When my first son was born, I wanted that and couldn’t find it for dads, so I built one, Daily Dad Society. A little over a year in, the conversations in our monthly live calls have changed how I parent. (Dads, join us!)

– You might think you’re zooming out to see the big picture, but almost certainly you can open the aperture even more. I was talking to Senator and retired astronaut Mark Kelly on the Daily Stoic podcast about a line in Meditations where Marcus Aurelius is talking about looking at the city from above, trying to imagine what Earth looked like from the stars as a way to “wash off the mud of life below.” He responded by saying, “Now imagine if Marcus knew that we were one galaxy in a universe of two trillion galaxies.” So good. 

– 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—I even put a booster on the roof—but it didn’t work. We could have switched providers, but that seemed like a pain. So we got used to it. For over ten years, when we were out and about at home, our phones couldn’t make calls or send texts. 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 snuck up on me the last couple months that my phone had full reception when I was out checking on the cows. Or 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. I guess that’s my point: Life doesn’t always get worse. It often gets better…and we don’t even notice. 

– 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. I re-read The Road and The Great Gatsby (there’s an incredible new annotated 100th-anniversary edition that came out last year with tons of fascinating asides that provide a ton of new context) this year. Both hit me very hard, which of course, is what the best literature does. 

– How well do those first two sentences in Gatsby hold up by the way?

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

– And for The Road (which I did a long interview for The New York Times about)? The idea of ‘carrying the fire’ / being ‘one of the good guys’—that’s what life, what parenting, what making it through this crazy period of history is all about. As I quoted Stefan Zweig in last year’s birthday post: we must “remain human in an inhuman time.”

– The novelist Philipp Meyer (whose book ​​The Son​​ is an incredible read) told me on the podcast, “You have to be very careful about what—and to whom—you’re giving the best part of your day.” Wake up, scroll, check email, meetings, busy work, whatever—why do we hand the best part of our day to other people’s emergencies and agendas? I fiercely protect my mornings—family, exercise then writing. I want to give my best self to my most important things.

– 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.

– To go to Euripides’ point about the refugees and the weak: There is no such thing as an issue that doesn’t affect you. People thought the crack epidemic was an urban issue…if they’d responded with more kindness and support (and solutions instead of punishment and fear), perhaps the country would have been better equipped to deal with the opioid epidemic. We will come to think the same about many other things in the future…

– 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? Don’t be like everyone else. Be yourself! That’s where you have a monopoly. That’s something Iron Maiden’s manager once said—that he wasn’t in the “music business” as some people thought, he was in the “Iron fucking Maiden business.” 

– The reward for success should not be that you don’t get to practice your craft anymore. If power gives you less power over your schedule and your day, is it actually power?

– When we were working on ​​​What You’re Made For​​​, the late George Raveling—who I think is one of the most remarkable people of the second half of the 20th century—told me that when he became Nike’s Director of International Basketball at 63, having no prior corporate experience, he was overwhelmed by self-doubt. Until a mentor gave him a simple system: “When you leave the office every day, leave a yellow pad in the middle of the desk, and when you come in the morning, write down the three most important things you gotta get done that day in that order. That day, do not do anything else but the first thing on the pad. And if you get the first one, then you go to the second one.” If you just did that, how much better would you be? How much better would the world be if people could consistently do just that? 

– I’ve been keeping a One Line a Day journal for nine years now (you should keep one, they’re amazing). It’s weird how much you don’t remember, even of your own life. But my favorite part of the journal is when things line up. This day last year, I was working on my next book which starts in media res. Today, I sat down to work on the book and I have almost come back to the starting point. I love that. Half way left! 

– As I’ve made some money over the years, I’ve tried some expensive things. I’ve done the things that people use their money to do—whether it’s upgrading travel or living conditions or hiring help. Most of the time, it’s honestly not worth the money. Or it’s not as great as you think it’s going to be. 

– The one exception—in the last two years, my kids ended up at a very expensive school that’s specialized for their needs. I will say, that’s maybe the one thing where I really felt like I was getting what I paid for. Would I love it if their local public schools could do that (since via my taxes I am also paying for that)? Yes, of course. And maybe, hopefully that will change in the future. But right now it reminds me of the Marcus Aurelius quote about what he learned from his great-grandfather, “to hire good private teachers, and to accept the resulting costs as money well-spent.”

– The antidote to shame/guilt, I was told, is total accountability. 

– You think the rich and powerful have it all. But they’re some of the most jealous people alive—not just of each other, but of ordinary people with freedom, with time, with happiness. And you can have those things easily. In fact, you may well have them right now. You do not need to strike it rich…you were born rich. You do not need to climb to the top…you can simply step off the treadmill. Or at least some of them.  

– I said ‘No’ to a pretty big opportunity over the summer. There were a bunch of reasons I passed but the one I kept thinking of was “Was this exciting but ultimately selfish choice the thing that blew up my family?” I would like to stay married. I like to be able to pick my kids up from school—not be away from home many nights in a row. So in the end, the choice was clear. The point is: You have to know what you like about your life to be able to evaluate the opportunities that arise. 

– There’s a scene in Mad Men where a young copywriter who’s grown to hate Don Draper corners him in the elevator: “I feel bad for you.” Draper just looks at him and says, “I don’t think about you at all.” It’s a great line especially because Don Draper was horrible and did horrible things to people! The people who take up the most space in our heads usually aren’t thinking about us. They aren’t being awful to torture us. There’s nothing personal in it. And we are adding insult to injury when we let them consume our sanity and happiness. 

– How many times have I heard The Smashing Pumpkins’ Tonight Tonight? Hundreds easily. I don’t know why it wasn’t until a couple weeks ago, when it came on randomly in a playlist, that that lyric hit me. 

Time is never time at all 

You can never ever leave 

Without leaving a piece of youth

– Not just our youth, but our middle age and our golden years. Our children’s youth, the best years of a marriage, of a career, of anything. There is a cost to everything we do, everything we agree to, every commitment we make. We have to spend our time wisely because we are paying for it with our lives. 

That’s the message I always give a little extra consideration on my birthdays, but it’s a thought that shouldn’t ever be far from our minds. 

Memento Mori.

I’ll tell you, very few people become writers because they want to stand up in front of a room full of strangers and talk.

Often, in fact, it’s the opposite. What draws most people to writing in the first place is that they’re introverts. At least, that’s what drew me! We like to sit quietly, alone in a room, working through our thoughts on the page. That’s the whole appeal.

So one of the strange ironies of having any success as a writer is that you are then invited to do the opposite of that. To leave your quiet room. To get up on a stage. To talk in front of people. 

It was actually before my first book even came out that I got my first invitation to talk at an international marketing conference. And I remember thinking: this is precisely the thing I became a writer to avoid.

But over time, I started to feel differently about it. Partly because they weren’t just inviting but offering to pay, but also because I could see that it was a way of reaching people that really matters. People don’t just want to read the things you’ve written and shaped on the page. They want to hear you talk about them. They want it straight from the horse’s mouth. Think about the State of the Union Address. For over a century, the president didn’t deliver it as a speech—it was just a written report sent over to Congress, the “President’s Annual Message.” But eventually, people realized there are things you just can’t get from a letter. They wanted to hear the president say it. To watch him explain it. To hear which words he stressed and which he didn’t.

And then there’s the fact that public speaking is just part of life. There is no line of work where this is actually avoidable. An entrepreneur has to get up and pitch investors. A coach has to get up and address the team. A professor has to deliver lectures. A salesperson stands before a skeptical group of buyers. A freelancer has to sell themselves to a potential client. An athlete has to talk to the press. A friend has to get up and give a wedding toast. My nine year old and six year old just had their school’s annual showcase.

We will all have to leave our comfort zone from time to time. Yet many of us would almost rather die than do this. The comedian Jerry Seinfeld once noted that people rank public speaking as worse than the fear of death, which means, quite insanely, that at a funeral the average person would rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy.

In Courage Is Calling, I tell the story of Crassus. In ancient Rome, there was perhaps no better orator than Crassus, famed for his brilliant speeches and prosecutions of the corrupt and the evil. At least that’s how he appeared to his audiences. You would not have known, as he later admitted, that at the outset of every speech he would “feel a tremor through my whole thoughts, as it were, and limbs.” Even as a master, he still experienced doubt—still felt waves of overwhelming anxiety and fear crash over him before he went onstage.

At the beginning of his career, it was even worse. He recounts his eternal debt and gratitude to a judge who, at one of Crassus’s first public appearances, could tell how “absolutely disheartened and incapacitated with fear” the boy was, and adjourned the hearing until a later date. We can imagine those merciful words from the judge, sparing Crassus as he no doubt prayed he would be spared, as we have prayed a thousand times, second only to his hope that he might be struck down and killed rather than have to go on.

Yet we would not be talking about Crassus had he not cultivated the ability to push through that fear. There are unfortunately no tricks to cultivating this ability. You can’t read your way to it. You can’t think your way to it. You just gotta do it. You make the pitch. You get up on the stage. You deliver the pre-game speech. You give the toast. And then you do it again and again. 

That’s what I was telling my sons and one of their nervous classmates. I get stage fright too. It is scary to get up there. But it gets less scary the more you do it. Confidence is built by competence, there’s no way around it. 

Come see me take the stage to talk Stoicism on the Daily Stoic Live tour—grab tickets here!

There’s another irony in all this. The philosophy I’ve spent my life writing about isn’t really a written philosophy at all. Because so much of Stoicism comes down to us in books, it’s easy to think of the Stoics as writers.

Isn’t that how we got Meditations? Or Seneca’s Letters?

Yes. But that’s not how we got the philosophy itself.

Stoicism began on a porch in Athens—the Stoa Poikile, the “Painted Porch”—where Zeno would talk and trade ideas with whoever happened to be around. The playwright David Mamet had a good way of putting it: what he loves about the Stoics is that they were just “porch guys.” Regular people, hanging out, talking about how to become the best version of themselves.

Cato, the man widely admired as the greatest Stoic of them all—there isn’t even a secondhand record of his words. We know that he liked to do his philosophizing on foot. Plutarch tells us he would take meandering walks through Rome, talking with whoever he met “on his rounds.” And for all his austere habits, his other practice was hosting philosophical dinners, where he talked about ideas long into the night.

Epictetus never wrote anything down. His Discourses comes from a student, who tells us that “whatever I used to hear him say I wrote down, word for word, as best I could, as a record for later use of his thought and frank expression.” That’s how Epictetus taught—in person, going back and forth in real time.

So for most of its history, Stoicism was a spoken, conversational philosophy. It’s meant to be heard, meant to be talked about, meant for that back and forth. And this is a long, unbroken tradition that goes back thousands of years, one that continues to this day.

I’m thinking about all this because I happen to be right in the middle of it. As I write this, I’m preparing for the Daily Stoic Live tour. I’m going to be spending a good chunk of the rest of the year making the rounds, talking Stoicism all over the world: Portland (on Monday!), San Francisco (on June 11th), Chicago, Boston, and a bunch of other U.S. cities, before heading all the way to Australia and New Zealand in October. Night after night of overriding that introverted part of me that would rather just stay home and write.

Over the years, though, this is something I’ve really tried to get good at. I’ve done it hundreds of times now. In big venues and small venues. To American audiences and international audiences. With slides and without slides. With technology and with no technology. Long talks and short talks. 

And I’ve come to see it as a meaningful and exciting way to share these ideas with people, but also as this high-wire act that forces me to get better. That’s why I don’t make it easy on myself. I could give the same talk every night, the same way, until I had it down cold. Instead, I’m changing it each time. I add things. I cut things. I try one delivery one night and a different one the next. I prepare some stuff I know works, and some new stuff to work out right there on stage.

Because that makes it harder. And harder is what makes me better.

So now…I’ve got to get back to preparing to talk to rooms full of strangers. Hope to see you there!

When I first moved in, six years ago.

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

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

Why do they do this?

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

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

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

1. A “No” Sign

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

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

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

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

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

2. Books. Books. Books.

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

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

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

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

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

3. My “Why”

This notecard is tapped to the wall next to my desk

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

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

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

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

4. A Grammy?

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

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

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

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

That’s what matters. Everything else is garbage.

5. Joan Didion’s Chair

Speaking of estate sales…

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

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

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

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

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

6. Notecards and Notecards and Notecards

And speaking of the importance of keeping a commonplace book…

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

Two thousand years ago, Pliny the elder said, “Never read without taking extracts.” Seneca put it another way: “We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application—not far far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech—and learn them so well that words become works.”

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

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

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

7. The Four Virtues 

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

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

Courage. Temperance. Justice. Wisdom.

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

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

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

8. First Draft Print

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

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

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

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

9. A Very Special Pinecone

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

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

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

10. Me, But Younger

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

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

There’s another reason too.

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

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

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

11. “Sense of Urgency” Signs

Preparation is important.

Planning is important.

Reflection is important.

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

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

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

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

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

12. Chunk of an Old Tombstone

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

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

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

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

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

13. My Guiding Sentences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I have all these reminders because I need them.

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

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

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

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

It will make you better.