Life

This is what all great men and women have in common

Life, Philosophy, Reading / /

Seneca said that wisdom is always wanting the same things and always rejecting the same things.

You don’t even have to add the stipulation that they are the right things. If they are consistent, they are right.

Consistency. I’ve been thinking about this word a lot with the upcoming presidential election. Its polarity has made inconsistencies stand out like tolerance at a MAGA rally. To value your rights but not a transgender person’s…that’s inconsistent. To love your gay friend but look down on Pride celebrations…inconsistent. To claim to support African Americans by protecting “black jobs”…inconsistent.

Our steps will vary, but our path should remain the same. Laws and policies are debatable. Humanity isn’t.

The people who fight for civil rights and women’s rights are the same people who fight for gay rights and transgender rights. They’ll be the same people in the future, fighting for the next minority group that will be attacked once the mob inevitably loses interest in its current targets. And they will lose interest because passions of the day don’t last. Kindness does.

Take Euripides, the ancient Greek playwright. Wildly unpopular and dismissed in his day (what modern mind isn’t?), his plays made people uncomfortable by challenging their long-held prejudices. He wanted them to think. He wanted people to question conventions, as they were often masks for injustice. His love and compassion for people, especially those unlike him—women, the elderly, peasants, slaves—was so deep that the sadness it caused nearly incapacitated him.

What’s interesting, as Edith Hamilton writes in her phenomenalbook The Greek Way(see below!), is that not long after his death, his popularity swung completely in the opposite direction. People were told incredible stories of what a great man he was. (To this day, more of his plays survive than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles combined.)

“Dogmatisms of each age wear out,” Hamilton writes. “The heterodoxy of one generation is the orthodoxy of the next. The ultimate critique of pure reason is that its results do not endure.” Even Euripides’ biting indictments of the social structure were forgotten. What wasn’t forgotten, what people remembered and so loved him for, found solace in him for, was his sympathy for humanity’s pain, his “courage to tear down old wrongs and never give up seeking for new things that should be good.” It was his kindness that outlasted everything.

Kindness. That sturdy thread that runs through the long line of great men and women. Through the people who root for others and watch out for them. The people who are eager to understand, eager to…

Be a benevolent interpreter

In An Emotional Education, Alain de Botton notes how quickly society judges a person’s worth based on their status. If a person falls on hard times, they’re told to pick themselves up; failure means they didn’t try hard enough. People mostly get what they deserve. “Those who are condemned and broken did something wrong; those who succeeded worked hard and were good.” Their status is an indicator of their decency.

But the ancient Greeks saw it differently: You could do all the right things and still fail. This was the idea behind their tragic dramas. Playwrights like Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles wrote of honest, decent people who made an understandable mistake or were victims of chance and were left ruined or put to death. Audiences were thrilled and frightened. If it could happen to him, they realized, it could happen to any of us.

That’s why we must be generous in our interpretations of others, give them the benefit of the doubt. We’re all doing the best we can with what we have.

This thinking, Alan de Botton says, is an exercise in being kind, yes. But it’s also a way of getting to the truth. Two things which, “when you dive deep into psychology, might be the same thing.”

Lift them up

There was one theme running through Rosanne Cash’s eulogy for her stepmother, June: her kindness.

“In her eyes, there were two kinds of people in the world: those she knew and loved, and those she didn’t know and loved. She looked for the best in everyone; it was a way of life for her. If you pointed out that a particular person was perhaps not totally deserving of her love, and might in fact be somewhat of a lout, she would say, ‘Well, honey, we just have to lift him up.’ She was forever lifting people up. . . . She saw into all your dark corners and deep recesses, saw your potential and possible future, and the gifts you didn’t even know you possessed, and she ‘lifted it up’ for you to see. She did it for all of us, daily, continuously.” 

Fight hate with love

On her way home from school each day, Totto-Chan (whose full name is Tetsuko Kuroyanagi and is one of the most famous talk-show personalities in Japan) would walk by the tenements where Koreans lived. She didn’t know they were Korean, of course, as she was in the first grade. One day, a boy from another school named Masao-chan, who was maybe a year older than her, was standing on top of an embankment. With his hands on his hips and feet apart in an arrogant stance, he shouted at Totto-chan, “Korean!” His voice was full of hatred.

When she got home, she told her mother about it. “Masao-chan called me a Korean,” she said. Her mother put her hand over her mouth. Tears spilled down her cheeks, and her nose reddened. “Poor child,” she said. “People must call him ‘Korean! Korean!’ so often that he thinks it’s a nasty word.” He’s too young to understand, she continued. He probably thinks they are calling him a fool. And because it is said to him so often, he wanted to say something nasty to someone else. “How can people be so cruel?”

Wiping her tears, her mother calmly said to Totto-chan, “You’re Japanese and Masao-chan comes from a country called Korea. But he’s a child, just like you. So, Totto-chan, dear, don’t ever think of people as different. Don’t think, ‘That person’s a Japanese, or this person’s a Korean.’ Be nice to Masao-chan. It’s so sad that some people think other people aren’t nice just because they’re Korean.”

Totto-chan didn’t fully understand, but she did understand that people were mean to Masao-chan for no reason. She decided that if he called her ‘Korean’ again, she would reply, “We’re all children! We’re all the same.” Then, she would try to make him her friend.

Be fair

In his beautiful book Right Thing, Right Now, Ryan Holiday tells the story of famed lawyer Clarence Darrow. Late in his life, needing money, he agreed to do a speaking tour around the country debating other speakers onstage. His contract was $500 per event and $50 for expenses. After the first event, Darrow learned that the promoter made only $150 after costs and fees. Darrow was aghast at the unfairness of it. He gave his $50 expense money to the promoter and another $100 from his own check. Even later, when the profits had risen, Darrow kept his speaking fee to the original agreed on price. His partner explained, in admiration, “Mr. Darrow always leaned over backward to give men the best part of the deal.”

“At the end of our lives,” Ryan writes in the afterword, “we won’t care that much if people think we were hardworking or that the risks we’ve taken in our careers have paid off. We’ll want someone to say, ‘That was a good person. They were honest and decent and generous and loyal and kind. They made the world a better place.’”

Books Read This Month:

–Left of Bang by Patrick Van Horne and Jason A. Riley is a good supplement to The Gift of Fear, which, as I’ve said, reads in part like a thriller and is one of my favorite books. I think everyone, women especially, should read it. A favorite takeaway: be wary of unsolicited promises. Anyway, Left of Bang is also about spotting signs of potential danger. I mostly skimmed the more military-oriented chapters, but the stuff about people and how surprisingly predictable they are is fascinating and potentially life-saving.

–The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton is SO good. Oh my goodness, it’s phenomenal. (The pile of notes I’ve taken is almost an inch thick.) The ancient Greeks were the pinnacle of human excellence. The way they thought and the art they produced “has never been surpassed and very rarely equaled, and the stamp of it is upon all the art and all the thought of the Western world.” The Greeks LOVED life. They loved work, and they loved play. They loved leisure, which they used for intellectual pursuits. They were sociable. They thought for themselves. They found truth in both the rational and the spiritual, science and poetry. (A radical notion even today.) The mind and spirit were one. They were wise but not reclusive, lovers of wisdom with the charisma and vigor of a high school football captain. Seriously, this book is a masterpiece.

-I randomly came across The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr while browsing at Changing Hands Bookstore this month and was surprised I’d never heard of it. I blazed through it and got loads of good stuff on what makes a story—specifically a memoir, one of my favorite genres—work. 

-I loved This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff. He shares his experience growing up with his free-spirited mother and his unpredictable, emotionally abusive stepfather. From reading Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir, I noticed specific reasons why this memoir works so well: One, Wolff’s adolescent voice is so distinct we don’t question it’s him talking to us. (Similar to Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird). Two, he doesn’t tell us only the bad things his stepfather did. That would put us to sleep. What drives the story are the moments of hope mixed in, the times his stepfather was nice to him. And three, he endears himself to us with his candid telling of his shameful and embarrassing moments. Such a good read and one of my favorite memoirs.

-I usually plan which books I’ll read next, but I pulled Creativity Sucks by Phil Hansen off my shelf randomly during a break from writing. Thirty minutes later, I was still standing there reading. It’s an easy read about balancing the demands of daily life with creativity. What’s interesting is that I almost quit reading it a few times. Not because I wasn’t enjoying it, but because I thought I should be reading something…denser? But then I remembered (because the day before, I had read some of my journals from 2013) that a relatively light book played a part in where I am today. Had it not been for Jeffrey Gitomer’s The Little Black Book of Connections that I bought (with my mom’s credit card because I had no money) on a whim at the O’Hare airport, there’s a good chance I might never have started talking with Courtney. It’s a long story but my point is that if you’re getting something from a book, keep reading it. Anyway, one of my biggest takeaways was Hansen’s method for creating on demand, systematically. How else can we create consistently? I also loved his idea of separating the mental work from the physical. The mental work can be done during your commute, washing dishes, etc. That way, when you get to your desk, you can spend your time physically creating. Highly recommend!

Willingness is the Difference

Life, Philosophy / /

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.

Why Meeting Ryan Holiday Was an Experience I Will Never Forget

Life, Philosophy / /

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 of absolute 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 bought Composed by 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. (Endurance is 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 War by 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 loved Courage is Calling and Discipline 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.

22 takeaways so far this year

Life, Philosophy, Reading / /

Last week, my wife Courtney and I flew to Austin, TX. We then drove 30 miles southeast to the small town of Bastrop to visit The Painted Porch bookstore, where we met my favorite author and mentor, Ryan Holiday. (More on that next month!)

Back in Austin, we visited the LBJ Library, the Neill-Cochran House Museum, and the State Capital. We took walks around Lady Bird Lake. Everywhere we went, I found a sticker or pamphlet or business card to tape into my journal (which has started to double as a scrapbook.) As I added entries, I looked at earlier ones from this year—the ideas and insights and things learned and magazine clippings and doodles. I found some good stuff to share, things that have changed me and made me better. Things that I think you can use too.

1. Henry David Thoreau said if you think too many trivial thoughts, your brain becomes a mess of trivialities. I couldn’t stop thinking about that. A mess of trivialities. 

This led me to think about the people I most admire, and what their thoughts probably look like. They probably don’t think much about personal irritations, or superstitions, or desires, or things that don’t matter. (If they did, they wouldn’t be able to accomplish what they do.) Their thoughts are likely big-picture and worldly. So I made an image in my journal as a reminder to keep my attention on better and higher things.

Whenever I have a trivial or obsessive thought—I wonder what he meant by that. Should I redo my hair?—I remember this image of the girl smiling as she focuses on bigger things, and I immediately forget whatever unimportant thing I was thinking about.

The point isn’t necessarily to elevate my thoughts, but to take my mind off the insignificant ones. Which, with time, might become the same thing.

2. In Lynda Barry’s What It Is (one of my favorite books about writing!) 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 will 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.

3. When you look back on your life, what you accomplished will mean far less to you than what you contributed. 

4. Make time each day for your own work, and wear yourself out doing it.

Marcus Aurelius asks, “Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?” Why aren’t you running to do your work? Not to a 9 to 5, but to the work you’re naturally inclined to do?

Seneca said that only fools begin to live life just as it’s coming to an end. You can’t wait until you’re retired. You can’t wait until you feel like you’ve saved enough money or have fewer obligations. That’s never going to happen.

And isn’t that great news? We don’t have to wait to start living because there’s nothing to wait for!

We will never have the time, so we have to make it. I don’t have the luxury to read and write all day—I’m not sure anyone does—so I wake up a few hours early and do it in the morning. Then I do more during lunch. I look for opportunities throughout the day, too. When coworkers take a smoke break, I take a note break.

Because we can’t wait 10 years. We can’t wait 10 days. Our work must be done now, wherever we are. Because if we wait, we may never get the chance to do it at all. Besides, if you have excuses today, you’ll have excuses tomorrow, too.

5. Don’t think about how long it’s going to take. Just focus on doing a little work on it each day.

6. 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.

7. In An Emotional Education, Alain de Botton says we’re unhappy because we think perfection is possible. But it’s not. The human condition is struggle and pain and weakness. There’s no cure, only consolation. He puts this idea beautifully:

“What we can aim for, at best, is consolation—a word tellingly lacking in glamor. To believe in consolation means giving up on cures; it means accepting that life is a hospice rather than a hospital, but one we’d like to render as comfortable, as interesting, and as kind as possible.”

8. A common reason for failed relationships is that one person, consciously or not, wants their partner to have only strengths. But, of course, no one has only strengths. Said differently, weakness-free people don’t exist. We’re all flawed. In fact, Alain de Botton pointed out, our “weaknesses” exist because of our strengths. The creative energy that makes her artistic may also lend to her messiness. The guy who can be frustratingly stubborn is also honest and loyal.

9. Despite what Shark Tank would have you believe, you don’t have to have millions of dollars worth of sales or be super well-known. You can sustain yourself and your work with 1,000 true fans.

10. Nature doesn’t ask questions. It just does what it does.

11. In Novelist as a Vocation(another one of my favorite books about writing!) 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?”

12. Start the clock. Ryan Holiday recently wrote about having a sense of urgency. About the importance of starting the clock on a project, getting the ball rolling as soon as possible. And about spotting bottlenecks quickly and fixing them quickly.

13. I found this gem in a poem of Ray Bradbury’s: “There’s no rest, there is only journeying to be yourself.”

14. We can’t always be calm. But we can make an effort to be more calm than we were last year.

15. 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.”

16. The better story wins.

17. When the problem is abstract, ask how. When the problem is concrete, ask why.

18. Relax. You can’t read every book.

19. Don’t be satisfied with doing work that gets you by. Find work to be invested in.

20. Don’t live a boring life.

21. Burn with the ambition to be useful.

22. A great way to live: follow your interests and share them with the world.

Books Read This Month:

I added all 4 of the books I read this month to my favorites list. If you’re wondering why so many of the books I read I end up loving, it’s because I quit a lot of books I’m not loving. This section could also be called Books I Didn’t Quit This Month:

-I got so, so much from A Life in Parts by Bryan Cranston (and not just because he’s my favorite actor). His career is the epitome of serving the work. Of doing his job. Of changing things up. I’ve heard of golden handcuffs (staying at a job that pays well but makes you miserable), but never velvet handcuffs (staying at a job because it’s comfortable and you’re “learning a lot”.) In a way, velvet handcuffs are more insidious than golden ones. The velvet is comforting, easily missed. In his mid-twenties, Bryan Cranston’s dreams came true when he landed a recurring role on the soap opera Loving. He we finally a working actor. He no longer needed a day job. He was making enough to live on and enjoying the work. About a year and a half into his role on Loving, his contract renewal was coming up. His manager Leonard Grant called him and asked what he wanted to do. “I like having a job,” Cranston answered. “I’m enjoying myself. Learning a lot.” His manager replied, “It’s velvet handcuffs. You’ve got to get out of daytime, or else you’ll wake up and it’s twenty years later and it’s all you’ve ever done.” Cranston realized Grant was right and immediately put in his two weeks.

–Tunnel 29 by Helena Merriman. Wow…this is easily one of the best books I’ve read. It’s the incredible true story of how 29 people escaped through an underground tunnel beneath the Berlin Wall. There are tons of holy shit moments. I learned a ton of history and was never bored—two things I rarely put in the same sentence. Seriously, this book was so much fun to read.

–Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper. I LOVED this book. He talks about the importance of leisure, and how nothing of genius is accomplished without it. He says leisure is a form of silence where “the soul’s power to ‘answer’ to the reality of the world is left undisturbed. For leisure is a receptive attitude of mind, a contemplative attitude, and . . . the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation.” Leisure isn’t about turning our brains off; leisure is about being fully alert and receptive! True leisure is impossible if we’re overworked. Further, overwork creates the dangerous illusion that we’re living a fulfilled life.

–Furious Hours by Casey Cep is another incredible true story. The first half of the book is about a reverend who murdered family members for insurance money…only to be shot dead at one of his victim’s funerals by a grieving relative. The second half is about one of the most famous authors of the time, Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird), and her attempt to tell the story of the reverend. (She hoped it would be another In Cold Blood, the true-crime classic she helped Truman Capote write.) She spent about 10 years—the first few researching, the remaining trying to figure out how to tell the story—before abandoning the project entirely. There’s much speculation about why she never wrote another book after her wildly successful Mockingbird (not counting Go Set a Watchman, which was really just the first draft of Mockingbird). Maybe she thought she would never top her first book. Maybe perfectionism got the best of her. Whatever the case, she might have saved herself years had she decided how to tell the story—or move on to something else entirely—before researching. Perhaps she would have benefitted from Steven Pressfield’s advice in The Daily Pressfield, given to him by Randall Wallace, the writer of Braveheart: “The most important thing is the story. Get that first. What’s the drama about? Who’s the hero? Who’s the villain? How does it end? Once you get those, you can go back and fill in the research.”

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You flee along with yourself

Life, Philosophy / /

In 2006, Jackass star Steve-O was at the height of his career. At the red-carpet movie premiere for the second Jackass movie, he felt on top of the world. Or so one would have thought. But, as he recently shared, he felt like he was at his own funeral. He worried he and his team would never again produce something as good, that it would be downhill from there. On top of that, he was terrified his fame would disappear any moment. These worries spiraled into addictions, arrests, an intervention, and a 72-hour involuntary psychiatric hold after he emailed friends saying that he was, “ready to die.” Destructive behavior would consume him for the next 8 years.

It’s shocking, isn’t it? Here’s a guy who got everything he wanted, only to feel like he was at his own funeral. 

But it’s also not shocking. It’s natural to think that money or fame or status will fix us. But, of course, it never does. External things can’t penetrate the mind; a mind prone to worry will worry regardless of circumstances.

Quoting Socrates, Seneca wrote, “All your bustle is useless . . . You must lay aside the burdens of the mind; until you do this, no place will satisfy you. . . .because you flee along with yourself.” If you want to escape anxiety, he continued, “what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person . . . . You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate.”

This isn’t just Western philosophy. The Buddha also recognized our inclination to search for happiness outside of ourselves. As Karen Armstrong writes, the Buddha believed humans were unhappy because they were “ceaselessly yearning to become something else, go somewhere else, and acquire something they do not have. . . .”

The problem is that if we don’t maintain our perspective, the goalposts move. No matter where we go or how much we acquire, it eventually becomes normal. We end up in an endless cycle of needing more.

Soon after Henry Ford created his assembly line in 1913, a huge problem arose: employees kept quitting. They would simply walk out midshift. The work provided no cognitive stimulation or personal satisfaction or agency. In other words, it sucked. The attrition rate was so bad that when Ford needed to hire 100 employees, he had to hire 963. It was costing a fortune. He needed a way to cut costs and increase production. His solution: he would increase wages.

The results were incredible. Employee attrition plummeted; the pay was too good to leave. Ford called the wage increase, “one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made.” Then he sped up the conveyor belt. Production tripled. Employees were working harder and faster, anxious to keep their well-paying jobs and maintain their new lifestyles—lifestyles that had grown with their income, “keeping them,” as Jackson Lears said, “at routinized jobs in factories and offices, graying but in harness, meeting payments regularly.”

That image—graying in harness—reminds me of a short comic strip I saw years ago: a young guy sprinting after a flurry of money, eventually collecting a sizable amount, only to look up and see he’s now an old man.

It’s not that we lose sight of what’s important on purpose. It’s just that it’s so natural and easy to think we’re lacking something when we’re not. That’s why one of my favorite parts in Epicurus’s The Art of Happinessis when he talks about how little our nature requires. Nature doesn’t care if your house “does not gleam with silver and flash with gold and if there are no paneled and gilded ceilings re-echoing to the lute,” he said. Nature has everything it needs, content to “recline on the soft grass beneath the branches of a tall tree near a stream of water and joyously care for their bodily wants at no great expense.”

This, Epicurus says, proves that power and riches “in no way profit the body of a man.” He adds that they don’t profit the mind, either. It’s our imagination that makes us feel something is lacking when it isn’t. (Our imagination is what marketers—dubbed “consumption engineers” in the early twentieth century—play on.)

The Roman poet, Horace, who wrote much about contentment, said that the good life is found in having what is sufficient, and a steady mind. Reason and good sense banish anxiety, not vacations and luxury.

Besides, he continues:

“If neither Phrygian marble or the wearing of purple that surpasses the brightness of stars, cannot relieve the sick man … Why should I labor to build a hall with doorposts to attract envy? … Why should I exchange my [modest home] for riches that bring bigger burdens?”

His psychological message, Stephen Harrison writes, “is that great riches bring anxiety rather than escape from it.”

This is true for us just as it was true for Steve-O. It wasn’t until he went to work on himself that he turned his life around. It wasn’t until he stopped counting his bedpost notches, and started counting his days of celibacy, that he found happiness.

Rich is the person who adds bricks not to what can be blown down or taken away, but to their inner citadel—that reliable place of resilience, calm, virtue, and wisdom inside us all. The place we can flee to whenever we’d like, and come back better for it. The place that fortifies us as we fortify it.

Bolster that place and rest easy knowing that wherever you go, whatever you do, it will be right there with you.

Books read this month:

–The Wright Brothers by David McCullough was so good I added it to my list of favorite books. I loved how stoic the brothers were, how they went about their work diligently and without frenzy. How Wilbur whistled while he worked, refusing to rush preparations on his plane even as a large crowd and impatient reporters waited for him to fly. What I found especially beautiful was how loving and supportive their family was. Just a great book and McCullough’s smooth writing made the pages (I really didn’t mean to add a pun here) fly by.

–His Majesty’s Airship by S. C. Gwynne is another book I’d been wanting to read, and I thought it would be a good follow-up to The Wright Brothers. Imagine: a giant airship, about 6 acres in surface area, with a cloth-like exterior, full of people and helium, nearly impossible to steer, reactive to the tiniest shifts in weather, ready to explode at the slightest bump, moving slowly and at low altitude over the city. Why anyone thought these balloons would be the future of travel is beyond most historians, though the answers lie somewhere in ego, ignorance, good intentions, and a tragically flawed sense of competition.

-I loved David McCullough’s The Wright Brothers so much that I read another of his, John Adams, which I also quickly added to my list of favorite books. Wow, I didn’t know what a great guy Adams was, how strongly he opposed slavery and supported women’s rights. And unlike his peers, he actually practiced what he preached. He had an unflinching sense of duty, acted urgently, and was committed to his family. And through all of his professional and personal hardships, he did his best to move forward in good spirits.

-After reading and loving The Daily Thoreau last month, I decided to read Henry David Thoreau’s Where I Lived, and What I Lived For, and I LOVED it. It’s one of the best books I’ve read. Thoreau spent years living in a self-sufficient home in the New England woods and wrote about his experience. His goal was to live simply, and he encouraged his readers to do the same. One of my favorite stories is how he decorated his desk with 3 pieces of limestone, only to be horrified when he realized they required daily dusting. Throwing them out of his window in disgust, he wondered why he would dust his furniture “when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still. . . . I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken ground.”

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