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RyanHoliday.net - Meditations on strategy and life
Blog

Now Is the Time to Have a Civic Backbone

Things are bad. 

Or at least, things are strange.

A pandemic, impeachments, riots, murder hornets, earthquakes, fires, record-setting unemployment, a contested election, whales swallowing kayakers. And that’s just what’s happened in the news.

In your own life, your parents are acting weird. Your neighbor believes in conspiracy theories, and your boss is blowing it.

You’ve probably found yourself asking: What does it all mean?

That’s the wrong question.

The right question—per the Stoics, per Viktor Frankl, per common sense—is What am I going to make it all mean?

It was a decade or so ago now, in the depths of the global financial crisis, that the great Henry Rollins offered a prescription that once again feels relevant. Indeed, it feels relevant because his timely advice was timeless in its character, applicable in ordinary and extraordinary times alike.

As unemployment spiked and markets crashed, Rollins wrote:

People are getting a little desperate. People might not show their best elements to you. You must never lower yourself to being a person you don’t like. There is no better time than now to have a moral and civic backbone. To have a moral and civic true north. This is a tremendous opportunity for you, a young person, to be heroic.

Well, here we are in rough and uncertain times again (though one could argue that we never left them). And once again people are not showing their best selves. You’ve seen some things you don’t like, to put it mildly. You saw armed insurrectionists storm the United States Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of a legitimate democratic election. Someone did it in a Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt, standing shoulder to shoulder with another man in a “6MWE” shirt (6 Million Wasn’t Enough). You saw someone walking through the halls of the Senate with a Confederate flag flying over their shoulder. You saw Congressional members and staffers evacuating, running for cover, putting their hands over their heads. And then, you saw a number of Capitol police officers politely escort these traitors out of the building and the president call them “very special people.”

You saw all of this. Sure, you could deny its importance. You could delude yourself with the succor of “whataboutism.” But whatever your party, whatever your beliefs, whatever your frustrations, there is no way around the reality that these events occurred. No way to make them unhappen.

So what are you going to make it all mean? 

You could decide not to care. But even in this, you are choosing a certain meaning. You are choosing to consent to what happened, to at least tacitly agree that what happened is OK.

I urge you to consider the statesman Pericles’ warning: “One person’s disengagement is untenable unless bolstered by someone else’s commitment.” If you decide to ignore your human obligation, to ignore what’s happening in the world because it doesn’t seem to affect you directly, it might make your life a little more peaceful, but the result is an incremental increase in the suffering of others—whether that is the additional burden placed on others to carry your part of the load or an elongation of the injustice they are trying to ameliorate.

Every riot, every plague, every genocide, every repressive regime that has terrorized a part of the globe since the end of World War II and the reorganization of the world order, one could argue, owes the length of its reign to just the kind of disengagement Pericles was talking about. At the core of each one, whether it was the collapse of the Roman Republic or the rise of fascism or Jim Crow, was a citizenry who had lost their sense of a moral and civic true north.

Yes, there is a lot going on in the world. Yes, things are complicated.

But also, things are simple.

We are all in this together. Character counts. State violence against innocent citizens is unacceptable. Racial hatred is a plague. Selfishness—be it refusal to wear a mask or failure to follow protocols in a pandemic—is pestilence. Political violence based on a lie must be condemned and the guilty parties driven from public life.

Ulysses S. Grant wrote to his father in 1861 that there are only two sides: traitors and non-traitors. Good and evil exist. “Are we the baddies?” is a question we must constantly ask ourselves.

This is a moment to decide what side you are on. A moment to be heroic. To think about others. To serve. To prepare. To keep calm. To reassure. To protect. This is a time to reevaluate our priorities. To ask ourselves what’s important, what are we working toward, how can we turn all of this into an opportunity?

Courage is calling you. Self-discipline is essential. We need your moral and civic backbone. We need wisdom. And man, do we need you to embody those things right now, more than ever.

January 19, 2021by Ryan Holiday
Blog

If You Only Read a Few Books in 2021, Read These

It was a rough year.

All of us were tested. Many of us failed.

Those failures were big and small. 2020 made some of us callous. It infected others with conspiracy theories. Others gave into apathy and chaos, losing all sense of routine and structure. Some of us spent hours watching Netflix. Others far too many hours glued to the news and twitter.

Now, with a new year in front of us—one that has already revealed that challenges don’t simply stop or reset when the calendar turns over—we have to get serious. We have to get serious about reading, the tried and tested way to wisdom, so that we might gain easily what others have gained by difficult experience.

“I’m not saying that you have to be a reader to save your soul in the modern world,” the great novelist Walter Mosley reminds us. “I’m saying it helps.”

Books are an investment in yourself—investments that come in many forms: novels, nonfiction, how-to, poetry, classics, biographies. They help you think more clearly, to be provoked less, to be kinder, to see the bigger picture, and to improve at the things that matter to you. Books are a tradition that stretches back thousands of years and stretches forward to today, where people are still publishing distillations of countless hours of hard thinking on hard topics. Why wouldn’t you avail yourself of this wisdom?

With that in mind, here are 18 books—some new, some old—that will help you meet the goals that matter for 2021, that will help you live better and be better.

Discipline Equals Freedom: Field Manual by Jocko Willink

Maybe right now you’re stuck at home, maybe you’re not working. Your kids might be home with you. Certainly the normal way of doing things has been significantly altered. Well, it’s when things are chaotic and crazy, when the world feels like it’s falling apart, that we need to create structure, better habits, limits and order. But you can’t create any of those things without discipline.

Why Don’t We Learn from History? by B. H. Liddell Hart

I’ve come to believe that one of the best ways to become an informed citizen in the present, to understand what’s happening in the world right now, is not to watch the news, but to read history. As Bismarck said, “Fools say they learn by experience. I prefer to profit by others’ experience.” This book is very short, but will help you understand the history more than thousands of pages on the same topic by countless other writers. In my view, Hart is unquestionably the best writer on history and strategy. Another important book to read re: history and this moment is The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, which if more people had read it, even as late as this spring, might have saved the US this horrific second wave of the virus we experienced (if you don’t learn your history, you’re doomed to repeat it).

Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything by Viktor E. Frankl and The Choice: Embrace the Possible by Dr. Edith Eva Eger

Nobody knows more about suffering and finding meaning in suffering than Viktor Frankl. From his experiences in the Holocaust, we got Man’s Search For Meaning. I was stunned to find that a new (lost) book from him was published this year, with a beautiful title worthy of a daily mantra: Say yes to life. Dr. Edith Eger was also sent to Auschwitz. She also not only endured unimaginable suffering, but found meaning in it. Dr. Eger went on to become a psychologist. She met and studied under Frankl, and survives to this day, still seeing patients and helping people overcome trauma. On the one hand, this is a book about the darkness of the human race… and on the other about the uncrushable spirit that allows us to survive and triumph over it. Incredibly, this book only came out in 2017. It’s sure to be a classic.

That One Should Disdain Hardships: The Teachings of a Roman Stoic by Musonius Rufus

Musonius was exiled at least three, possibly four times, so he knew about being locked down. He knew about losing your freedom. He knew that all a philosopher could do was respond well—bravely, boldly, patiently—to what life threw at them. That’s what we should be doing now. Musonius compared it to the way acrobats “face without concern their difficult tasks”—we don’t actually disdain hardships, we welcome hardship, even seek it out, “ready to endure hardship for the sake of complete happiness.”

The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life by David Brooks

Chasing personal success is the first mountain. But what happens when you find out, as many of us do, “Oh wait… this is not nearly as satisfying as I thought it would be. It did not magically solve all my problems and unhappiness”? That’s when we begin to look for what David Brooks calls the Second Mountain… and no, it’s not just a taller version of the first one. This is the one where we start thinking less about ourselves and more about other people. “True good fortune is,” as Marcus Aurelius reminded himself at the height of his power and fame, at the summit of his first mountain, “good character, good intentions and good actions.” True good fortune is you doing stuff for other people. For your community. For your country. For the world. This book won’t just make you think about your life, it will make you question everything in your life.

How to Be a Leader by Plutarch

One of the best leadership books I’ve read in a very long time—and not surprisingly, it was written a very long time ago. There’s a reason Plutarch has been a favorite of thinkers and doers since the days of Ancient Rome. He’s insightful. He’s funny. He’s a great storyteller. He wasn’t just a writer either, but like the best historians and philosophers, a practitioner of what he talked about. Highly recommend. And it will help you relax, it will help you ratchet down the noise, and hopefully inspire you to make your own mark. Plutarch, I might also add, was the inspiration and a main source of my latest book: Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius.

Turning Pro: Tap Your Inner Power and Create Your Life’s Work by Steven Pressfield

This book is so good and so perfect for the moment, whether you’re an artist or an entrepreneur, a parent or a movie producer. Because 2020 was a year that separated the amateurs from the pros. When times are good, you can be soft and lazy. But when the going gets tough? I hope this book can be an investment in yourself this year. As Steven writes, “I wrote in The War of Art that I could divide my life neatly into two parts: before turning pro and after. After is better.”

Florence Nightingale by Cecil Woodham-Smith

Robert Greene told me a lot time ago to err on the side of age for biographies and it’s usually a pretty good rule. Biographers used to try to teach their readers things; they actually admired their subjects and didn’t get bogged down in endless amounts of facts. In any case, I got a lot out of this biography. When you think Florence Nightingale, you don’t think “hero’s journey,” but her life maps pretty perfectly on it. Also re: history providing perspective, the intense bureaucracy and institutional stupidity she fought against maps well to what we’re seeing today with the fight against COVID-19.

Everything Is Figureoutable by Marie Forleo

There’s a story that occurs constantly in the biographies of brilliant people. As a kid they had a question—maybe about how car engines work, or what Antarctica is like. Their mom or dad had the same response, “I don’t know, but let’s go figure it out!” So they went to the library or the computer until they found the answer. And they learned an essential lesson—one that we should all teach our kids—well-expressed in the title of Marie Forleo’s book: Everything is Figureoutable. Problems can be solved. Answers can be tracked down. The unknown can be made familiar. This is figureoutable. Everything is.

A Poem for Every Night of the Year (edited by Esiri Allie)

We’ve been reading this together every night as a family. The poems are all well-chosen and just short enough to keep my kids interested. It also serves as a nightly reminder of something I wrote about in Lives. Cleanthes—the founder of Stoicism’s successor—believed we are like half-completed poems, and our job in life is to work to make a complete and beautiful poem. We may face terrible circumstances and obstacles along the way, Cleanthes wrote, but it’s no different than how the constraints and “fettering rules” of poetry give the art its beauty.

A Calendar of Wisdom by Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy believed his most essential work was not his novels but his daily read, A Calendar of Wisdom. As Tolstoy wrote in his diary, the continual study of one text, reading one page at the start of each day, was critical to personal growth. “Daily study,” Tolstoy wrote in 1884, is “necessary for all people.” So Tolstoy dreamed of creating a book composed of “a wise thought for every day of the year, from the greatest philosophers of all times and all people… Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Pascal.” As he wrote to his assistant, “I know that it gives one great inner force, calmness, and happiness to communicate with such great thinkers… They tell us about what is most important for humanity, about the meaning of life and about virtue.” As you can imagine, I am a big fan of daily devotionals. Check out DailyStoic.com and DailyDad.com for the free daily email versions I do.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

I joked in February that I was deliberately not going to read this book because of the pandemic. In truth, I got it down from my shelf and sat on my bedside table while I worked up the courage to read it again. My feelings were well-founded, because on the night I finished, all I could do was walk quietly into my son’s room and sob while he slept. The Road is just one of the most beautiful and profound depictions of struggle and sacrifice and love ever put down on the page. Worth reading again!

Leadership: In Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin

This is an absolutely incredible book—a study of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR and Lyndon Johnson. It is so clearly the culmination of a lifetime of research… yet somehow not overwhelming or boring. Distillation at its best! Even stuff I already knew about those figures, I benefited from Goodwin’s perspective. This is the perfect book to read right now—a timely reminder that leadership matters. Or as the Stoics say: character is fate. Or as I wrote about in this piece about leadership during the plague in ancient Rome: when things break down, good leaders have to stand up.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport

The future belongs to those with the ability to focus, be creative, and think at a high level. This is a book that explains how to cultivate and protect that skill—the ability to do deep work. The type of intense concentration and cognitive focus where real progress is made — on whatever it is that we happen to do, be it writing or thinking or designing or creating. Elite work takes deep work.

The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene

“If I had to say what the primary law of human nature is,” Greene has said, “the primary law of human nature is to deny that we have human nature, to deny that we are subject to these forces.” The reality is, humans do have aggressive, violent, contradictory, emotional, irrational impulses. And we have to understand them if we want to rise about them. Greene’s pieces on internet trolls, on passive aggressive arguers, on identity politics, and this monologue on irrationality are good previews of lessons that we’d all be better for understanding this year.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Reading this book, first published in 1952, in light of the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd was terribly sad. How little has changed. How callous and awful people are to each other. How crushing it must be to live in a world that strips you of your dignity, that uses you, that subjects you to violence and unfairness. There are many “anti-racist” reading lists floating around, but how many of the books on those lists will still be readable in 70 years? Do yourself a favor and read this. It’s not going anywhere because it is timeless and sadly, very timely.

Montaigne by Stefan Zweig

There are two kinds of biographies: Long ones which tell you every fact about the person’s life, and short ones which capture the person’s essence and the lessons of their life. This biography by Stefan Zweig is a brilliant, urgent and important example of the latter. It is what I would call a moral biography—that is, a book that teaches you how to live through the story of another person. If you’ve been struggling with the onslaught of negative news and political turmoil, read this book. It’s the biography of a man who retreated from the chaos of 16th century France to study himself, written by a man fleeing the chaos of 20th century Europe. When I say it’s timely, I mean that it’s hard to be a thinking person and not see alarming warning signs about today’s world while reading this book. Yet it also gives us a solution: Turn inward. Master yourself. Montaigne is one of humanity’s greatest treasures—a wise and insightful thinker who never takes himself too seriously. This book helped me get through 2020, no question.

**

As I have published different versions of this piece over the last couple of years (2018, 2019, 2020), I made one final recommendation worth repeating: Pick 3-4 titles that have had a big impact on you in the past and commit to reading them again. Seneca talked about how you need to “linger among a limited number of master thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind.”

We never read the same book twice. Because we’ve changed. The perceptions about the book have changed. What we’re going through in this very moment is new and different. So this year, go reread The Great Gatsby. Give The Odyssey another chance. Sit with a few chapters from the 48 Laws of Power. See how these books have stood the test of time and see how you’ve changed since you’ve read them last.

It can be some of the best time you spend with a book this year. Happy reading!

January 12, 2021by Ryan Holiday
Blog

From America’s Oldest Veteran, Here Are 9 Lessons On Living

This article was originally published in February 2017. Richard Overton passed away on December 27th, 2018 at age 112. R.I.P.

Richard Overton is the oldest living veteran in the United States. 110 years old. He was drafted at age 36 in 1942 at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. He fought in the Pacific—Hawaii, Guam, Palau and Iwo Jima—in World War II. He also happens to live down the street from me. Still.

When I saw online that he was having trouble affording the cost of an in-house nurse and care that would allow him to continue living at home (in the house he partly built with his own hands after returning from the war), I of course, donated and then I reached out to his third cousin to see if I might be able to come by and meet this great man.

There was a generation of Americans who used to sit on their porch and enjoy life as it happened. Richard is one of the last living members of that generation. Sitting on that porch with him, shooting the shit, I picked up a few things I wanted to share with you. He ate ice cream out of a coffee cup, I asked questions.

He humored me, I tried to be as little of a bother as possible. I won’t pretend we had a particularly deep conversation, though I think anything that comes out of the mouth of a person older than a century has a certain intrinsic wisdom to it.

I walked away that afternoon with a feeling of having experienced something very special. It made me hopeful, to be around a man who had seen and lived through so much and was still sitting there on his porch. It made me sad too (what would it have been like to have another 20 years with my own grandfather?). Mostly, I just wanted to share what I learned with you.

The man’s a treasure. I hope you’ll help keep him on that porch for as long as he wants to sit there.

Take It Day By Night

I asked Richard, other than God—he’s a faithful man—if he had a secret for living this long. “A secret? No, no secret,” he said. “Just live it.” Day by day?, I asked. He shook his head. At 110, day by day is too long. “Take it day by night,” he said.

Forget What The Doctors Say

Everyone I know that aspires to live for a very long time is obsessive about their health. Everyone I know that’s actually lived for a very long time doesn’t seem to think about it at all.

I realize that’s purely anecdotal but it’s hard to sit next to a man who has been alive 110 years old and still smokes 10 to 12 cigars a day and not think maybe it’s all a bit of a crapshoot. The man drinks his whiskey, smokes his cigars, eats his ice cream. He does what he wants. And he’s still here. Good for him.

It’s All Very Simple

How does it feel to be the oldest veteran? “Never think about it.” You seem very calm and relaxed. Have you always been that way? “Yes.” Do you think about dying? “Nothing I could do about it.”

Like I said, there is a certain sagacity to anything uttered by someone who has been alive that long. There is also a simplicity and a finality to the answers. A younger person would pontificate, would chatter, would argue this way or that way. Richard gives you his one-word answer.

Maybe it’s because he’s old and tired, but it just as easily might be the fact that after all those years complicated things become very simple. No reason to think about dying.

Of course you learn how to forgive people. Sure, he’s calm and relaxed, it’s the only way to be. A couple words is all you need when you’ve seen it all.

Just Sit There

I’ve mentioned Richard’s porch a couple times. It’s a wonderful thing. In East Austin, they’re tearing down most of the old houses and building cool looking new ones.

You know what they’re not putting back on them? Porches.

You can’t even see the street from my house; the builder put a 10 foot fence around the whole thing. But Richard spends four or five hours a day out on his, on a chair he refers to as his throne.

He showed me the railing that rings the porch and the waist-high plants which go around it. Want to know why they’re there, he asked? It was because women used to wear skirts and he wanted them to be able to sit comfortably and privately.

The man just enjoys life on that porch, enjoys the present moment, maybe remembers the past a little. I asked him what he thinks about up there. “Different things,” he said. “I look at the trees.” I did too. It was nice.

History Is Very Short

It’s fascinating to think that when Richard was born, Theodore Roosevelt was president. Overton is the oldest living American veteran now, but when he was born, Henry L. Riggs was still alive.

Riggs was a veteran of the Black Hawk War (1832) and he was born in 1812… and Conrad Heyer, the Revolutionary War veteran and the oldest and earliest person to be photographed (born in 1749) was still alive when Riggs was born. Three overlapping lives: that’s all it took to get back to before even the idea of founding the United States.

Richard’s brother fought in the first World War. He told me he remembered seeing Civil War veterans around when he was a kid. Not many, but they were there. It was Texas—those men fought to keep his mother in slavery. How long ago all that horribleness seems.

How recent it is at the same time. I’m bringing my son over to meet Richard soon. He’s three months old. I want him to shake hands with a man who walked the earth when TR was in the Oval Office, who shook hands with Obama, who lived through the Spanish influenza, who stepped foot on more Japanese islands than he should have had to, who came home after fighting for this country and had to put up with segregation, who bought a house for $4,000 and lived in it for 70 years (it’s now worth more than 100x that), who worked for some of the most famous governors in Texas (Ann Richards was his favorite), who at 110 is still going strong.

A Wise Man Knows Nothing

Another observation about really old people: They’re never the ones that try to tell you what to do. A 40-year-old will stop a stranger on the street and tell them to pull up their pants or remind a young woman she needs to smile more.

An octogenarian and beyond just lets people do what they do. I asked Richard if he had any advice for young people: “I don’t know.” I asked him again later, “Never get in trouble.” They say that Socrates was wise because he knew how little he knew. I think that’s the real lesson in aging, a certain humility and indifference.

An acceptance of other people, that they’ll find their own way and they don’t need your moralizing. Besides, staying alive is a full time job.

Know What You Like (And Hold Onto It)

I mentioned it above, but Richard has been living in the same house in Austin since coming home at the end of World War II. He refuses to leave, either—he likes it there.

He’s got a couple of old cars in the driveway too. Knowing what you like is the first step to wisdom and old age, said Robert Louis Stevenson. There’s something comforting in the thought of Richard being happy and active in his community, enjoying life and sitting on the same porch for over seven decades.

In an age that promotes constant change, Richard’s message in a way is the opposite. Find what you like and stick with it.

Community Is the Key to Everything

Richard pointed across the street—the cactus, he planted that. The porch across the street? He helped build that. The electrical pole on the corner—it used to have an unsafe number of houses connected to it until he called and called and the power company finally fixed it.

He told me the story of a woman who fell into the cactus and how he helped her out and helped her pull out the thorns. A woman drove by while we sat there and waved. For over half a century, he’s been a watchdog in that neighborhood, helping people, making it better.

Now that he’s outlived nearly every relative on earth, the community is helping take care of Richard. His third cousin—do you even know your third cousin, would they help you?—comes by almost everyday to sit with him and talk.

His third cousin is the one who is keeping Richard in his home and looking out for him. That’s community. That’s family.

Enjoy the Absurdity of Life

The most animated Richard ever got was when he told me a story about the enormous pecan tree in his front yard. It seemed like an ordinary tree to me, until he told me his dog planted it seventy years ago. They had a pecan tree in the back, and the dog would grab the nuts and bury them in the front yard.

With glee, Richard told me how eventually the tree grew and now it’s so big it’s nearly pushing up the foundation of his house. He loved the absurdity of it—a dog planting a tree! He was laughing at it still, seven decades later. The philosopher Chrysippus supposedly died laughing at a donkey eating his figs.

It occurred to me that it wouldn’t be a bad way for Richard to go someday either, sitting on his porch, thinking about his dog, laughing at the tree that’s going to outlast all of them, and many of us.

It’s a shame on this nation to me that Richard Overton, at 110 years old and as our oldest living veteran, is having to ask for money on the internet to stay in his home and pay for medical care.

Who doesn’t agree that our oldest living hero deserves to be taken care of?

It’s been my belief that America has always been great and it’s great because of men like Richard. It’s great because when his third cousin created a GoFundMe campaign, thousands of people do show up to help. But they shouldn’t have to.

Richard and his family shouldn’t even have to ask. (I’ll ask for them though: Please keep helping!)

But I don’t want to end this on a negative note. Because political dysfunction aside, Richard is still here and he doesn’t look like he is going anywhere. I was lucky to meet him and learn from him. I hope I’ve been able to pass along a little of what that was.

I have no idea how long I will live for, or what old age will look like for me, but I feel more connected to the past after meeting Richard. I could feel his wisdom and his energy and am better for it. Meeting him was one of the treats of my life.

So I’ll end this piece by thanking him—for that—and for what he’s done for the rest of us the 110 years he has been on this planet.

January 5, 2021by Ryan Holiday

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” - Murakami

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