In the middle of Rome, there stands one of the great trophies of history, the Column of Marcus Aurelius.

The nearly 100-foot monument was put up to commemorate Marcus’ victories during the Marcomannic Wars. It is covered in carvings depicting scenes of his armies marching, crossing rivers, laying siege to cities, fighting battles.

It’s a towering celebration of Marcus’ achievements, literally carved in stone.

But you know what? Marcus didn’t get to bask in all this glory. He died before the column was finished.

And then, in the sixteenth century, Pope Sixtus V had the monument restored and put Saint Paul on top instead. They even added a new inscription at the bottom, attributing all of the victories to the wrong emperor.

I was thinking about all of this a couple months ago, standing beneath the very monument. It was a little over 5 kilometers into what would be the furthest I’ve ever run in my life—50 kilometers (31 miles) through the streets of Rome, stopping at some of the most important Stoic sites in the world along the way.

Why did I run a 50K by myself through the streets of a foreign city during the hottest part of the year—literally the hottest it has ever been in Europe?

Because it’s hard.

And doing hard things is good for you. That was the whole point. Do we do hard things because we want to impress people? Because we want to beat other people? Because we want a medal or a trophy?

No. As Marcus’ victory column is a pretty good reminder, doing things for a trophy is a terrible reason to do things.

That’s why I like doing challenges like this, more than races or competitions. There was no starting gun for this run, no official course, no medal waiting for me at the end. I picked the start time. I picked whether it would start at all…and certainly whether I would finish. I like things where the victory is what I get out of it.

A few kilometers after the column, I got lost. I did a one-mile loop in completely the wrong direction. I was already trying to run farther than I had ever run before and now I’d added an extra mile. But I knew something like this was going to happen. When we do hard things, we have to be prepared for them to be harder than we’re anticipating. If you go into something thinking, This is all the gas I have in the tank. This is all I’m capable of doing. I need everything to go right, you’re in a really vulnerable position. Everything is not going to go right. As Seneca said, the unexpected blow lands heaviest. If I was lost and disoriented and mad at myself right then, this would have been harder than it was.

Instead, I figured out where I screwed up, turned around and kept going. What else are you going to do? From there, I ran up to the Campidoglio and the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, past the Colosseum, through Circus Maximus and eventually out toward the Appian Way.

Almost thirteen miles in, I stopped at what is supposedly Seneca’s tomb. We don’t know for certain. There are no inscriptions identifying it, and two thousand years is a long time and stuff starts to disappear. The last time I had been there was about thirteen years earlier. I had a picture of myself from that trip.

We see ourselves every day, so the passing of time can be invisible to us. Then you come back to a place you haven’t been in a long time. I looked at that old picture of myself. I feel the same. I feel great. I feel better than I did then. But you look at it and you go, Oh, I have more gray hairs now. I have more wrinkles. I can see the last ten years. Marcus Aurelius talks about time being this vicious, unrelenting, ceaseless, almost merciless flow of events, faster and faster and faster, taking us with it.

Standing there at Seneca’s tomb, I wondered if he knew that his plays would still be read two thousand years later. I wondered if he knew that his grave would get worn down by events and eventually forgotten.

By the time I got to the turnaround point, I was 15.64 miles in. I felt pretty good. I was hydrated (Rome is filled with little fountains of fresh drinking water). The shade had been nice. But it was getting hot and I was way behind schedule. It was already 8:40 in the morning, three hours and forty minutes after I’d started.

I hadn’t quite budgeted for how long all the stopping and filming was going to take. Whenever I’m preparing to do something challenging, I like to try to talk to and learn from someone who has done something similar before. Googling around before this run, I found a guy named Luke Tuttle who had run 53 kilometers into Rome and written about it on his blog. So I reached out. I had a million questions for him, and the conversation was so great that we turned it into an episode of the podcast.  He gave me some really good advice: Just let it take however long it takes. You’re not gonna be glad you rushed through it. Take your time. Stop. Admire the sights. Soak it in. If you have to walk, you have to walk.

The point isn’t to win at your hobbies. The point is to do it, to have fun doing it, to experience it, to be there for it. You don’t rush through other things that are pleasurable, and then for some reason, physical activity we try to get done as fast as possible.

It was funny: I wasn’t racing anyone. There wasn’t even a race. Other than trying to beat the full heat of the sun it was impossible to be “behind schedule.” So I took a break, turned around and started running back.

Eventually I got to the point where there were seven miles left. You know you’re doing something hard when you think, only seven miles left. That’s one of the great things about doing hard things. You push yourself, you raise your threshold higher and higher until what used to seem like a lot now only seems like a little.

A few miles later, I’d officially done a marathon. I still had five-ish miles to go. At that point I was thinking about something Epictetus said: Whatever difficulties you face, understand what resources you have inside you. How was I going to get through the last five miles? With the same willpower and strength and training that got me through the first twenty-six.

Honestly, this is my favorite part. They say you’re not really pushing yourself until you get to your limits. It’s after you get tired and keep going that the muscle and strength and fortitude are earned.

It’s a little like working on a book. The first two-thirds, sometimes even the first 80 percent, is the really hard part. You don’t know if you’re going to make it. You don’t know if the thing is going to work. Then you reach a point where you know you’re going to make it as long as you don’t quit. You’ve crossed most of the difficulties off. You have some momentum. You’re in a rhythm.

You have this sense of what you’re capable of because of what you’ve just done. You just gotta see it through.

Somewhere around mile 29.5, I lost it. That was apparently my limit. I was fucking dying at the end. Whatever graceful ideas I had about finishing strong disappeared. I staggered into this little restaurant stand alongside the Tiber and asked if they had water and took Apple Pay. They were incredibly confused about this person stumbling about and slurring his words. I drank two water bottles and then basically  limped the rest of the way.

The whole thing took much longer than I thought. It was much harder than I thought. I got lost. I stopped more than expected. The last couple miles took everything I had.

And then my son popped out from an alleyway and spontaneously joined me, which was just the best. Some thirteen years earlier, somewhere along the Appian Way, I had asked my wife to marry me. And now I was back, finishing this run on that same ancient road with my nine year old son jogging along for the last couple hundred yards.

That’s why we do hard things.

I started the morning knowing I was going to try to run further than I ever had in my life.

Six and a half hours later, I knew a little bit more about myself.

About where my limits are.

About what I’m capable of.

About what I’ve got in the tank.

That was the trophy.

And that one I get to keep.

Before we get into today’s piece…tomorrow I’m hosting a live Q&A session with everyone in the Read to Lead course over at Daily Stoic. Today is the last day to sign up and get your invitation—I hope to see you there! 

Reading is a good thing. 

Every book teaches us something, makes us a little smarter and wiser, right?

And not enough people read enough…

So learning how to read faster is the answer?

No, it’s not. 

Speed reading is not only a scam. It’s missing the point. 

I get this a lot. Because I talk about reading quite a bit, people assume I am a speed reader. I’m not. Across all the other great readers I’ve gotten to know and all the great readers throughout history I’ve studied, I can’t think of anyone who attributed how much they read to how fast they read. I can’t think of a single example of a “speed reader.” 

I just spend a lot of time reading.

Because it’s important. Because I enjoy it. 

I like food. I like music. I don’t rush through those either. Nobody tries to have sex faster, do they? Don’t most people try the opposite?

But here we are with people listening to audiobooks at 2x or 3x speed. Here we are with speed-reading courses that will teach you special techniques to blaze through books. Here we are with rapid-reading apps that flash words at you faster and faster to up your words-per-minute rate. Here we are with people hung up on how many books they read instead of how much they get out of the books they read.

Great readers take their time. Great readers read deliberately. Great readers read actively. I think of people like Joan Didion and Emerson, who filled hundreds of commonplace books with handwritten passages and quotes and ideas from the books they read. People like Montaigne and John Adams, who were lifelong producers of “marginalia,” covering the margins of their books with notes, comments, questions, disagreements, free-form musings, curiosities they wanted to investigate further. People like Major George Patton and Octavia Butler, who were dyslexic and had to struggle just to make sense of the words on the page and still were voracious readers.

People who read a lot of books spend a lot of time reading. There’s no way around this. “The best way to read quickly,” as Tyler Cowen has said, “is to read lots. And lots…Reading quickly is often, in a margin-relevant way, close to not reading much at all.” 

In Wisdom Takes Work, I tell a story about a samurai warrior named Banzo, who sought an education so that he could impress his father. Told by a great teacher that mastery would take ten years, he was aghast.

“I can’t wait that long. What if I work extra hard?”

“OK,” the master said. “Thirty years.”

“But I will do whatever it takes to make it go faster,” Banzo pleaded.

“In that case,” the master said, “it shall take seventy years. A student in a hurry learns the slowest.”

The whole point of reading is that it’s hard, but that the hard is worth it. The whole point of a book is that there is a lot in there and it will take time to get it out. There is a payoff and that payoff is priceless wisdom. In one of the first passages in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius wrote that one of the most important lessons he learned in life was to invest in his education and to always regard “the resulting costs as money well-spent.” 

That seems to be another thing great readers have in common: they regard all the time (and money) spent reading as well-spent. A big part of how I manage to read as much as I do has come down to identifying as a professional reader, and by that I don’t just mean I read as part of my job as a writer or a bookstore owner, but that I see reading as my job.

It makes me a better person. It makes me a better parent. It makes me a better husband. It makes me a better boss. It makes me better at everything I do. So I take it seriously. I invest in it.

That’s the idea behind Read to Lead: A Daily Stoic Reading Challenge—which we are re-launching right now. It was designed for people who want to take their reading more seriously. Not to read faster. Not to sound smarter. Not to impress people with how many books they’ve finished. But to actually get better. To accumulate a mass of true wisdom—that you can turn to and apply in your actual day-to-day life.

There are no shortcuts, no hacks, no way around it. 

To be a great reader, you spend a lot of time doing it—slowly, patiently, attentively, without trying to make it go faster, without being in any hurry.

P.S. If you want to learn to get more out of every book you read, Read to Lead is for you!

It was painstakingly designed to distill everything I’ve learned about being a great reader to help you learn in a few weeks what took me nearly two decades to figure out.

Across 15 challenges (at a pace of one every three days), I’ll walk you through the best of what I’ve learned about reading: how I read, how I choose what to read, how I retain more of what I read, how I work my way through difficult books, and—most importantly—how I take what I read and put it to use in my actual life.

Along with the 15 challenges, you also get access to a private community where you can connect with fellow readers, an instant 20% discount at The Painted Porch Bookshop, and, of course, lots and lots of book recommendations.

Check it out here!

It’s clearly a timeless tendency because Seneca tells us a story about it from two thousand years ago. 

People have always wanted to get something for nothing. They’ve always wanted to get the results without doing the work. 

Especially when it comes to knowledge. 

“Wanting to appear a well-read man,” Seneca writes about a rich but lazy Roman named Calvisius Sabinus, “he thought up the following short cut: he spent an enormous amount of money on slaves,” each one tasked with mastering a different body of work. 

One had to know Homer by heart. Another had to master Hesiod. He had a slave for Sappho, another for Pindar, and one for Simonides—one for each of the ancient Greek poets that an upper-class Roman was supposed to know inside and out.

At dinner parties, Sabinus kept these learned but enslaved Romans at his elbow, ready to feed him quotes, references, and facts to impress his educated friends. And he would insist, Seneca tells us, that summoning knowledge on demand from one’s staff was no different from summoning it from one’s mind. Indulging this notion that any readily available capability was effectively one of your own, a friend suggested Sabinus take up wrestling.

“But I am weak and frail,” Sabinus replied. 

“Don’t say that,” the friend teased. “Consider how many perfectly healthy slaves you have!”

I know it isn’t, but I like to think of this as a parable about AI. It would be nice if someone could do your learning for you, if something could do your thinking for you…but that’s just not how it works. 

Even now. Even as LLMs can do incredible things. 

Because as I’ve said before, the point isn’t to have the information, it is to be the person who has done the work to get the information. You can pay someone to lift something for you…but that won’t make you strong. 

I think about this with my own writing. I am in the middle of working on a biography of someone who wrote thousands of letters, gave hundreds of speeches, sat for oral histories, published his own books and was the subject of countless newspaper reports, classified documents and contemporaneous accounts…and so did the people he was closest to or worked for and with. It would be wonderful if I could just download this into my brain—or I guess my research assistants’ brain—but there is really no way to escape the great Robert Caro’s dictum that you have to “turn every page.”

So my researcher can help me track stuff down, scan stuff, put it in little binders, but ultimately, I have to touch it all. Every damn page. I have to read it all. 

But I don’t mind. I don’t mind because 1) Reading is amazing. I love doing it. Why would I want to skip the best part of my job? 2) Because it is my job, I’m pretty good at it.  

I was lucky in that I had someone teach me how to read well. Marcus Aurelius talked about how “mastery of reading requires a master.” For Marcus, his teacher Rusticus was that master—the one who taught him “to read attentively—not to be satisfied with ‘just getting the gist of it.’” 

For me, Robert Greene was my master. I started as his research assistant, and his rigor as a reader and researcher was legendary. He taught me to go way beyond the “gist.” He taught me to hold what I read—and what I brought him—to a very high standard. Finding the perfect quote or story for whatever he was working on wasn’t enough. Where did it come from? What was the context? Was the source itself legitimate? Does it hold up across other sources? Was I settling for the first thing that seemed relevant or confirmed what I wanted? 

He sent me down rabbit holes. He asked me to go find papers and old works that were, in the days before Google Books, harder to locate. He had me transcribe interviews (something no one does anymore). He introduced me to writers and thinkers I had never heard of. He taught me how he used notecards and how he organized his library. Most of all, he modeled for me what a disciplined, curious and well-read person can be. 

To be a great reader, it’s not enough to read—you have to question, challenge, verify, and mark things up. You have to put books through the wringer and authors on trial. You have to go chase things down, follow footnotes, look up references, look up words you don’t know. You have to have a practice of capturing information and organizing it so it can be drawn on when you need it later.

Sadly, too many people are not taught how to be great readers—and never find the masters who can show them. That’s the idea behind Read to Lead: A Daily Stoic Reading Challenge—which we are re-launching right now. It was painstakingly designed to distill everything I’ve learned about being a great reader—from Robert, from trial and error, from the habits of other great readers I’ve gotten to know, from studying how history’s greatest readers read—to help you learn in a few weeks what took me nearly two decades to figure out.

Read to Lead 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), with each challenge built around a specific practice for becoming a better reader. And no, there are no hacks, tricks, or shortcuts. You will not learn how to be a speed reader—that’s a scam. We are not going to show you how to use AI to get out of having to pick up a book. We are not going to tell you to play your audiobooks at 3X speed. We are not going to show you how to shut off that little voice in your head so you can supposedly race through pages faster.

The whole point of reading is that it’s hard, but that the hard is worth it. There is a payoff and that payoff is priceless wisdom. Reading is not about impressing people or winning some game of mental gymnastics. It’s not about winning trophies for your shelf. It’s not about collecting random pieces of information. It’s about accumulating a mass of true wisdom—that you can turn to and apply in your actual day-to-day life.

Valuable things are usually hard-won. Wisdom, a sound and strong mind, is one of them. “The greatest educational fallacy,” James Stockdale would say (himself sent to Stanford as an adult, where he learned to think critically and philosophically), “is that you can get it without stress.” 

No, the road to wisdom is long and rocky.

It’s one beset by obstacles, dead ends, and pits of despair.

One with staggering peaks and terrifying wonders.

One where there is always more ground to cover.

One that, above all, you cannot have anyone—or anything—else travel for you.

P.S. If you’ve never had a Rusticus or a Robert Greene show you how to be a great reader, I tried to build Read to Lead to give you a way to learn from those kinds of masters.

Across 15 challenges (at a pace of one every three days), I’ll walk you through the best of what I’ve learned about reading: how I read, how I choose what to read, how I retain more of what I read, how I work my way through difficult books, and—most importantly—how I take what I read and put it to use in my actual life.

Along with the 15 challenges, you also get access to a private community where you can connect with fellow readers, an instant 20% discount at The Painted Porch Bookshop, and, of course, lots and lots of book recommendations.

And I’ll also be hosting a live Q&A session on September 23 (just sign up by September 22 to get your invitation). It’s one of my favorite things to get the chance to talk about all things books and reading with everyone in the course.

I’d love for you to join us!

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.