-Self-reflection is the highest form of living. Epictetus said we differ from animals and plants in two ways: we can reason and reflect—two things animals and plants don’t need because they were made to obey, not command. Animals can look only outward and dream. Humans can look inward and, as Carl Jung said, awaken.
-I don’t journal to “be productive”. I journal to calm and prepare myself for the day (ironically making me more productive throughout).
-You can’t be your best on autopilot. None of us are perfect. And because we’re not perfect, we can always improve. And because we can always improve, we have an obligation to make a constant effort to improve. Journaling helps us make this effort by taking us off autopilot for a bit.
-Time rushes by like a raging river. The only way to slow it down and savor it is to slow ourselves down.
-Your subconscious knows you best. It’s wise. The problem is that it’s terribly quiet and shy. It often won’t respond to direct questioning. Journaling creates a patient, quiet, purpose-free space for your subconscious thoughts to roam freely. Only then, in familiar solitude with you, do they feel comfortable to speak up. (And when they do, they’re assertive.)
-If we don’t monitor our thoughts, we become vulnerable to their influence and control. We can end up living in the worst way: unconsciously. Lusting for money, worshiping material things, seeking power, thinking you’re the center of the universe…what’s insidious about these things “is not that they’re evil or sinful,” said David Foster Wallace, “it is that they are unconscious.” Journaling rewires our brains consciously.
-By dumping out our thoughts and feelings, by laying them before us, we’re able to sift through, untangle, and examine them. And discard the ones that no longer serve us.
–Epictetus said our predicament is that time and again, we lose sight of what’s important. The truth never changes. Wisdom is always the same. Our brains are just exceptionally good at forgetting. Journaling helps to keep the important stuff front and center.
-Problems don’t need to be completely resolved for you to gain some relief from them. Sometimes we can loosen the grip of a sadness or a fear simply by naming it, by tracing its outline and examining its contours. “What we call depression,” Alain de Botton said, “is in fact sadness and anger that have for too long not been paid the attention they deserve.”
-Great things are happening in slow, inconspicuous ways. The trajectory of your life is made up of subtle, nearly imperceptible actions. It may not feel like it at the time, but the small moments you spend each day writing in your journal, working on yourself, are adding up in unfathomable ways.
-In Lynda Barry’s What It Is there’s a short comic strip of a writer deep in thought, trying to figure out what she should write a book about. Ten years later, someone asks what her book is going to be about. “Shh! I’m still thinking,” she replies. We can’t think our way to good ideas. We have to roll up our sleeves. We have to do the work in front of us.
-Make time each day for your own work, and wear yourself out doing it.
-Don’t think about how long it’s going to take. Just focus on doing a little work on it each day.
-The best way to serve the world is to serve your work. And the best work is the work that connects the divine with the human.
–Haruki Murakami said the best way to express yourself as freely as possible is not to ask, “What am I seeking?” (which causes you to ponder heavy things and slows you up), but to instead ask, “Who would I be if I weren’t seeking anything?”
–The difference between genre and style. Genre is a category. Style is the life and humanity you give the art. As Jerry Saltz put it, “Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’ is a classic country song; the vulnerability of her performance is what makes you die inside when you hear it.”
-The better story wins.
-Relax. You can’t read every book.
-A great way to live: follow your interests and share them with the world.
Nature doesn’t ask questions. It just does what it does.
It’s one of my favorite things Marcus Aurelius talks about, how the birds and the ants and the bees and the plants go about their individual tasks, putting the world in order as best they can.
They’re not coerced or incentivized. They don’t rush. They’re not anxious about the future. They do their job, then they do it again the next day.
They do it willingly.
What good is it, Seneca rhetorically asked, to have accomplished something grand but against your will? If you dragged your feet and complained? If “the body went one way, the mind another…”?
The Stoics compared our free will to a dog attached to a wagon. We can run along with events, or we can be dragged by them.
We can approach each moment on our toes or our heels.
We can trot along with the day or fight against it.
We can do things willingly or unwillingly. Which one we choose is, in large part, the difference between enjoying life and just getting through it.
Oh Yeah, I Remember This Guy
Early in his career, Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston was auditioning all the time. After each audition, he would nervously wait by the phone to hear if he had gotten the part. “And then when I heard I didn’t get the part, I’d marinate in disappointment and introspection. Could I have done something differently?”
His wife set him up with a self-help guy who told Cranston he needed to focus on the process, not the outcome. That’s when everything changed. He had been attaching himself to the outcome—setting himself up to expect, and therefore fail. He realized auditions weren’t for competing with other guys; they were for giving something. “I wasn’t there to get a job. I was there to do a job. Simple as that. I was there to give a performance.”
From then on, he focused solely on doing his best. He didn’t always get the job, but that wasn’t his concern. Instead of pacing by the phone after each audition, he would throw the script in a basket when he got home and forget about it. “I’d let go. You can’t fake letting go. You have to really genuinely detach from it. If I’d get a callback, I’d fish out the script and say, ‘Oh yeah, I remember this guy.’”
By being willing to keep showing up and giving his all, he freed himself from self-doubt, negativity, and supplication. Auditioning became enjoyable. How could it not? With the outcome irrelevant, with his concern only on what he did—not what anyone else said or did—he was the most powerful person in any room he walked into.
The Carrot Isn’t That Important
In Arbitrary Stupid Goal, Tamaya Shopsin tells the story of a family her father knew named Wolfawitz. They wanted to go on a vacation but didn’t know where to. They decided on a two-week road trip where they would go to as many places as possible that contained their last name: Wolfpoint, Wolfville, Wolf Lake, Wolf anything. On the way to the Wolf places, they looked up stuff to do and found lots of things that were unexpected and fun: “a hotel in a railroad car, an Alpine slide, a pretzel factory, etc.” Afterward, they felt great. They said it was easily the best vacation they’d been on, but they didn’t know why. “My Father says it was because they stopped trying to accomplish anything,” Shopsin writes. “They just put a carrot in front of them and decided the carrot wasn’t that important but chasing it was.”
Whistling Wilbur
On May 29, 1908, Wilbur Wright traveled to Paris to fly his and Orville’s biplane, the Flyer, publicly for the first time. The French reporters were skeptical of the Wright brothers and anxious to see them fly. Wilbur’s business partner, Hart Berg, assured the journalists that the secret trials were over and that Wilbur would fly before the people within two months. Still in the U.S., Orville shipped the parts for the Flyer, and Wilbur received them on June 16.
Eager to begin assembling the plane, he opened the packages—and was shocked by what he saw. The parts were in terrible condition. Large pieces were smashed, essential ones were missing, and everything was a knotted mess. After his initial burst of anger at what he assumed had been a poor packaging job by Orville (the damage had, he discovered later, occurred during shipment), he rolled up his sleeves. He got to work repairing parts and putting things in order. For parts damaged beyond repair, he would create his own, “making a needle if necessary.” Still, even with outside pressure mounting, he refused to overwork himself. He continued his lifelong observance of the Sabbath, using Sundays to sightsee and write letters. Though he had made significant progress, by August 6, the Flyer was still not in the condition he thought it should be.
Reporters on the scene were growing impatient, calling him stubborn and eccentric and accusing him of being “unnecessarily surly” towards them. Wilbur simply responded, “I did not ask you to come here. I shall [fly] when I’m ready.” Witnesses around that time noted his consistently calm demeanor and the buoyant ease with which he walked to his shed early each day for work, whistling. “The impatience of a hundred thousand persons would not accelerate the rhythm of his stride.”
Then, on August 8, the weather was right, and Wilbur was ready. People from Le Mans filled the wooden grandstand at the Hunaudieres race course, chatting happily while they waited. Two notable Russian officers were also there: Ernest Archdeacon, a known critic of the Wright brothers, and celebrated French aviator hero Louis Blériot. Still, Wilbur did not appear nervous or excited. He went about inspecting the Flyer from end to end at his own pace. An observer from the press noted, “Neither the impatience of waiting crowds, nor the sneers of rivals, nor the pressure of financial conditions . . . could induce him to hurry. . . .” Then, three hours into the afternoon, Wilbur opened the shed and rolled the Flyer out, “never hurrying in the least.” At 6:30 pm, he took flight.
The crowd cheered, shouting, “This man has conquered the air!” French Pilot Paul Zens, who had been waiting since morning, told a reporter, “I would have waited ten times as long to have seen what I have seen today.” The enthusiasm was “indescribable”. When he finished his flight, everyone rushed toward him, wanting to shake his hand. Hart Berg “did all he could to keep the men from kissing Wilbur on both cheeks.” Even the typically controlled Wilbur lost his composure around his friend’s ardor. Then, still beaming, “he put his hands in his pockets and walked off whistling,” McCullough writes. “That night, while the normally sleepy town of Le Mans celebrated, the hero retired early to his shed.” Neither criticism nor praise, failure nor success, could keep him from doing his work. Nor could it keep him from whistling while he did it.
Books Read This Month:
–Letters From a Self-Made Merchant To His Son by George Horace is excellent. It’s short but packed with tons of wisdom about business and life. Seriously, there’s so much good stuff in here. I highlighted something on almost every other page.
-My dad gave me his copy of The Gospel in Brief by Leo Tolstoy and it’s up there with some of the best books I’ve ever read. Basically, Tolstoy rewrote the Gospel based on what he believed, after years of intense Bible study, were the essential messages of Jesus—the most important being to love all people as you love yourself and to do good for them. Tolstoy said Jesus didn’t care if we went to church. In fact, he discouraged it; rituals and liturgy tend to take our focus away from what’s important. Better to use that time to do good for someone. Tolstoy is refreshingly honest and outspoken about what he saw as evil: the calculated misrepresentation of Jesus’s message. (Also, if you haven’t read A Calendar of Wisdom, you’re in for a treat.)
–High School by Tegan and Sara Quin. I LOVED this book. Literally loved it. It’s one of those books I’m positive will stick with me for the rest of my life. I’m not much younger than Tegan and Sara, so their experiences of life as gay teenagers in the 90s hit close to home. My heart ached for them. I just wanted to hug their teenage selves. I could relate to the sadness and confusion and shame they felt. The dreaded possibility of being a *whisper* lesbian…and the terror of being found out. Their openness and honesty helped me to understand things in myself that I never had before, as if something in me shifted and I’m a little more myself than I was before reading it. If that makes sense. What I found so inspiring about their stories is not that they became world-famous rock stars, which they did, but that they became themselves. I wish more people would read this book. On a side note, I started listening to their music this month for the first time (20 years late to the party, I know), and I currently have their songs on repeat when I run each day.
-I bought The Art of Clear Thinking by Hasard Lee at Changing Hands a few months ago and finally got around to reading it. It’s phenomenal. Lee, a U.S. Air Force stealth fighter pilot who’s flown over eighty combat missions, breaks down how he makes, and how he teaches others to make, split-second life-and-death decisions. (I white-knuckled the first chapter about the 2009 Air France Flight 447 and the human errors that sealed its fate.) This book is super entertaining and teaches how to best make decisions in our own life, however high the stakes.
In May 2014, I flew the nest. Courtney and I found a one-bedroom apartment in the college town of Tempe, Arizona. Rent was $758 per month. Before signing the lease, I called my mom and asked her if she thought I could afford the $379 per month, my half of the rent.
“Well, honey, you have to calculate your monthly expenses. Can you afford it?”
I thought about it. “I don’t know? I think so?”
The day after we moved in, I figured I should get a job. Courtney would appreciate that. The store where I’d been slinging wine and liquor was now an hour’s drive away, so I needed a closer gig.
Around that time, Courtney’s friend from grad school visited. I took it upon myself to show him around his first day here, as Courtney had to work. “Don’t forget, you have to get a job today,” she said as I got in my car. “Oh yeah, thanks for the reminder!”
I wasn’t being sarcastic.
As her friend and I drove around, I looked for jobs. I had experience waitressing, so I stopped in the first sports bar I saw and asked if they were hiring. They were. I could start tomorrow. Sweet. Done with my to-do list for the day!
We drove around some more, and Courtney called. “You won’t believe it,” I told her. “We’re driving by this playground and there’s a rope structure thing that’s, like, three stories high. And kids are climbing to the top. You’d think their parents would be around…”
“I thought you were getting a job today.”
“Oh! I already got one!”
I was proud of myself. Getting a job could have taken an entire week. And I did it in one day. Before noon!
Fast-forward a few months.
I had become more serious. Responsibility will do that to you. I had a 9 to 5 now. Office job. Sales. The work was stressful and the hours long. But the money was good. If I kept my foot on the gas and kept working harder and faster, I could make more money and buy lots of nice things.
Throughout the next few years, making more money was my only goal. But no matter how much I made or how much I “accomplished,” I was still empty. Was life really just a continuous sprint to acquire bigger commission checks and bigger houses? To go on fancier vacations? That is what I’m spending the majority of my waking hours pursuing? It didn’t make sense to me, but what else was there to aim for? Life started to feel like a sick joke.
One day in 2016, on my way home from work, drained from another day of trying to decipher the meaning of life between an onslaught of phone calls, I was listening to an interview Tim Ferris had with Ryan Holiday, and he said something that shook me.
Ryan was talking about Marcus Aurelius and how, as emperor of Rome 2,000 years ago, he had been the most powerful man in the world. He could have anything and do anything he wanted. And yet, unlike almost every example I’ve seen of someone with wealth and power, he wasn’t concerned with what he could buy or how many women he could sleep with or how popular he was or any of the other multitude of pleasure traps those with too much time and money ruin themselves in. You know what he was concerned with? How to be a better person. How to control his anxiety and desires. How to do more for people. How to do the right thing.
Whoa.
It’s one thing to strive to be a better person. It’s another to strive to be a better person while also in a position ofabsolute power.
Marcus Aurelius, Ryan said, sought something higher than greatness. He sought goodness. And to miss this next point would be to miss the point entirely: it was his goodness that made him great.
Of course, I couldn’t fully grasp the implications at the time. Still, the contours for a different model of success were forming in my mind. Maybe there was nothing inherently good in what I was pursuing. Perhaps that was the problem, the source of my frustration. A meaningful life has a purpose beyond itself. It has a north star, a destination we’ll never quite reach but should always be reaching for. We must pursue something higher, or we’ll walk in circles. Or worse, spiral down.
I immediately devoured everything on Stoicism, though I’m not sure it would have impacted my life as significantly had it not been for Ryan Holiday. He contextualized it. He made it accessible. He championed its validity—something no one was doing with an ancient philosophy—and showed how it’s just as relevant today.
His advice was pragmatic. He didn’t say, ‘Stay positive and you can do anything you put your mind to!’ He said, “Yeah, things might impede your path, but nothing can impede your will. You can turn any obstacle into an advantage.”
He was explicit. He didn’t say, ‘Humility is good.’ He said, unequivocally, Ego is the Enemy. It was pointed. You couldn’t ignore it. You had to either accept or reject it. (It took me a while to fully accept it, so entrenched was my belief that ego was a good thing.)
When I finally accepted that ego was leading me astray, everything changed. My idea of what was worth pursuing changed. Material things, awards, praise…without ego, what good were they?
When I removed ego from the equation, what I wanted from life became clear: as much time as possible with my wife and family, and a stable job that paid well but left me with enough energy to think and write. I went from trying to decide on a specific career I’d like to have, to thinking about the day-to-day life I wanted to live. I went from thinking about who I wanted to be as a professional to who I wanted to be as a person.
Once I clarified how I wanted to live, I realized my best bet would be to get my degree. It would take years—a fact that had always deterred me. But now I gladly embraced it. Because it was my way forward. It was in my control. Maybe nothing would change once I had my degree, but that wasn’t my concern. I knew I was doing the right thing for the right reasons. Everything else was background noise. My goal was to pass one class, then the next. Learn to write one line of code, then the next. There would be setbacks and obstacles, but I could adjust. I could be patient. And I could be happy all the while.
The Stoics called this euthymia—the tranquility that comes from knowing you’re on the right path. (I’ll never forget where I was when I read one of my favorite lines in The Daily Stoic: “Who cares if someone is bubbly when times are good? What kind of accomplishment is that?”) The Stoics had a sober, constant joy—joy they controlled by doing the right things each day. As Ryan put it, “Here’s how to guarantee you have a good day: do good things.”
Ryan showed me what was worth pursuing and how to build the life I envisioned in 2016: a life of love, service, wisdom, balance, and time. It’s the reason I’m able to write these newsletters.
And it’s the reason I had to go to Texas.
As I shared in May’s email, Courtney and I flew to Austin, Texas last month and then drove down to Bastrop to visit Ryan and Sam Holiday’s bookstore, The Painted Porch. (What’s especially cool about their bookstore is that they only sell books they’ve read and recommend. You can get great recommendations just by browsing their website.) It was surreal being there in person. We browsed for about an hour, bought ~15 books, then went across the street for lunch.
After we ate, we decided to drive back to Austin, having accomplished our mission of going to The Painted Porch. But as we made our way to the parking lot behind the strip of stores, I felt disappointed. I knew full well before we went to Bastrop that there was less than a 1% chance I’d be able to meet Ryan. But being there, being so close, made me forget about the near-zero odds thing. Knowing I might never be this close again, and knowing, according to his daily schedule posted all over his socials and therefore not creepy for me to know, he’s likely there right now, writing in his second-story office above the bookstore, the guy who almost single-handedly turned my life around…I at least wanted to meet and thank him!
On a whim, I decided to walk to the back of the bookstore. I climbed the ramp to the wooden deck with picnic tables and took a picture of the famous orange wall painted with ancient philosophers.
“I don’t think you’re allowed to be up there,” Courtney said.
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” I sighed, looking around.
Then, in an upper window, I saw a white guy with dark hair taking a swig from a water bottle.
“Holy shit. I think I just saw him.”
I asked Courtney what I should do. Run around to the front of the store and ask if it was okay to say hi to him? Or would I just embarrass myself when they told me no?
Courtney asked, “What will you regret more: trying and failing, or not trying at all?”
“That one.”
Ten seconds later, Ryan zoomed out of the back door, deep in conversation with possibly his assistant, walked past us, and rounded the corner. I looked at Courtney. This was it.
I walked quickly to catch up, and just as he was about to enter an obscure side door, I called out, “Ryan.”
He turned around, and I began to apologize.
“I’m so, so sorry. I know how busy you are.”
“No, no, no, you’re good,” he smiled, walking toward us.
I shook his hand and told him how long I’d been following him and his work, and he seemed genuinely surprised and flattered. He asked us where we were from and what we’d been up to and what books we picked up. Courtney said something that made him laugh, and then she took a picture of us.
I don’t say this lightly when I say he could not have been sweeter to us. Just the nicest guy. I don’t remember much of what I said, but Courtney assured me it was nothing weird. One thing I do remember was tearing up, looking him directly in the eyes, and thanking him for everything he’s taught me. It was an experience I will never, ever forget.
One last thing.
While writing this email, I realized that we met Ryan exactly ten years to the month after moving in together. I really am not trying to be sappy, but I feel something essential would be missing from this newsletter if I didn’t state the obvious: I would never have cared enough to learn philosophy if it wasn’t for Courtney. Not only that, she’s been teaching me Stoicism, unknowingly, this whole time. She’s the one who, after I failed the first test I took in my first week back in school and said I was going to drop the class and try it again next semester, put her foot down and said she wasn’t going to watch me quit every time it got hard. She’s the one who showed me what self-reliance looked like. The one who, after I told her my crazy idea to travel 1,000 miles for a bookstore, took her phone out and booked our flight without a question.
While Ryan’s teachings and Stoic philosophy got me on the right course and guided my sail, it’s been my wife, all along, lighting the way home.
Books Read This Month:
-I boughtComposedby Rosanne Cash while at The Painted Porch last month. It took a while to get into, but once I did, I thoroughly enjoyed it. One story in particular stuck with me as a beautiful example of kindness. Rosanne was sitting at home and talking with her stepmother, June, when the phone rang. June picked it up, and after a while, Rosanne wandered into a different room—it was obvious June was in a deep conversation. When Rosanne returned to the room 10 or 15 minutes later, June was still fully absorbed in conversation. Finally, about 20 minutes later, June hung up and, with the biggest smile, said what a wonderful conversation she just had. June went on and on about the woman she’d spoken with—how many kids she had, a personal loss she recently experienced, where she lived, etc. Rosanne asked, “Well, June, who was it?” June said, “Why, honey, it was a wrong number.”
–In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick…wow, this is one of the best real-life thriller/adventure stories I’ve read. An enraged sperm whale sank the Essex whaling ship in the early 1800s. Only 8 out of the 22 on board survived the three months of torture that followed. (Enduranceis another shipwreck story I read recently, which was good, but I liked this one more.) I won’t spoil it and give away details, but their ordeal was unimaginable. It reads like a thriller. It’s no surprise it won a National Book Award.
-My friend recommended When the Game Was Warby Rich Cohen, and it’s one of the best sports books I’ve read. Cohen brings together the journeys of the NBA’s four most prominent names in the 1980s—Isiah Thomas, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, and Michael Jordan. It’s an entertaining read, but there’s also great stuff on leadership, craft, and opening doors for others. On a side note, I think we’re living in another golden era of basketball with Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese.
-Though I lovedCourage is CallingandDiscipline is Destiny, Ryan Holiday’s newest book, Right Thing, Right Now, about justice, might be my favorite of his virtue series. It’s about kindness and doing good for others and ourselves. But it goes way beyond that. He shows how idealism and sentiment aren’t enough. If we want to make lasting changes in the world, we need to understand the force that drives it: power. We may not like it, but that’s the way it is. “Anyone who wants to do good in this world,” he writes, “must be a student of power. Anyone who wants to do something other than sit around and wait for change must read Machiavelli and Robert Greene.” It reads as an urgent wake-up call that the world desperately needs.
P.S. If you’re new to Stoicism, there’s no better place to start than with The Daily Stoic.
