We can imagine he was a busy man, perhaps the busiest man in the world. 

He had 14 children.

There was a pandemic. 

He had a nagging stomach ailment. 

He was taking philosophy classes.

Oh, and he was the emperor of Rome. His domain stretched some 2.2 million square miles and included some 120 million people for whom he was both responsible for and in charge of. 

How did he manage it all? How did he get it all done? Without losing his mind? Without falling behind? 

We know that one question played a huge role. 

“Most of what we say and do is not essential,” Marcus Aurelius writes in his Meditations. “If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time, and more tranquility. Ask yourself at every moment, ‘Is this necessary?’”

How much or how little you work. Where you live. What your marriage or your relationships look like. The political policies you support. What you spend money on. What your goals are. The way your schedule is arranged. The things taking up room in your junk drawer…or the thoughts running through your head. 

Ask yourself about everything you do and say and think, “Is this necessary?” “Is this essential?” “Does it have to be this way?” “Why am I doing this?” “What would happen if I changed?”

We wonder why we’re not doing our best. We wonder why we’re not happy. We wonder why things are hard. 

It’s because we’re doing too much. Or we’re doing the wrong stuff. Or doing it in the wrong way. 

Greg McKeown has a great book called Essentialism. I love that word. You want to get to a place where your life is defined by it—where you’re doing only what needs to be done, in the way it ought to be done. 

That’s going to mean getting comfortable with saying “No.” It’s going to be mean cutting fat from your life, maybe even hurting some feelings. But that’s OK. You’ll soon realize: When you say no to something, you’re saying yes to something else. And conversely, when you think you’re saying yes to one thing, you have to understand all the things you’re saying no to in the same breath. So you might make some people upset by saying no, but you’ll make other people a lot happier too. 

A little while back, I was on Greg’s “What’s Essential” podcast. He called this the “non-essentialist trap.” When you haven’t distinguished between what is and isn’t essential, how do you decide what to yes to and what to say no to? Usually, we default to filtering opportunities by what’s most lucrative or what’s most impressive. Greg quoted Seneca to me, and that passage is worth putting here in full,

“We are told that life is short and the art is long…It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough and a sufficiently generous amount of it has been given to us for the highest achievement if it were all well invested. When it is wasted in the heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life, but we make it short. We are not ill supplied but wasteful of it. Just as when ample and princely wealth falls to a bad owner it is squandered in a moment, but wealth however modest, if entrusted to a good custodian, increases with use, so our lifetime extends amply if you manage it properly.”

One thing the pandemic has helped me with is it has shown me—in most cases without my consent—just what doing less looks like. 

Less flights.

Less dinners out.

Less meetings. 

Less income. 

Less errands.

You could argue that COVID-19 was the largest forced lifestyle experiment in history. It shattered so many of our assumptions about what is and isn’t essential. Oh, this can’t be done remotely? Just watch. Oh, I couldn’t live without childcare. Well, now you have to. Oh, I’ll never have time to do ____. OK, here it is. 

We’ve had to make due with less. We’ve had to reinvent how stuff was done. We had to reorganize everything. 

Some parts of this have been hard to bear. Some have made us sad and lonely. But other parts have been downright liberating. That’s the thing about less—why we ask Marcus Aurelius’ version of the question: Is this necessary?—is that it also reveals what more looks like. Because as tough as the last few months have been, it’s also meant:

More sunsets from the back porch.

More dinners at home.

More focused writing, about weightier topics. 

More appreciation for the people and things that matter.

More understanding of the urgency of memento mori.

“Doing what’s essential,” Marcus said, “brings a double satisfaction: to do less, better.”

So take a minute today and ask yourself Marcus’ question. Is this necessary? Is it essential? Do I really need to do this? What if I said no? What if I opted out?

What would happen?

You will find the answer, in many cases, is that no, it is not essential. It’s not important nor necessary. And by saying no, you’re not “shirking” your responsibilities. On the contrary, you are better fit, better able to actually fulfill your important duties—to your family, to your work, to yourself. 

And that’s the real double benefit.

One of the strangest things about business to me has always been how damn far everyone is from the products they create and the customers who use them. 

You have a problem with a product you bought and you call customer service, but you’re not actually talking to an employee of the company who made it—you’re talking to a customer service contractor, who is employed by an agency that runs third-party customer logistics, who in turn was hired by the company you purchased from (if in fact you bought direct, instead of through a retailer). 

Whenever companies are investigated by labor activists, the story always follows a similar path of intermediation: Shoe Company X outsourced to Manufacturer Y who outsourced to Factory Z who in turn used slave labor to make shoes not just for Shoe Company X but for all their competitors too. 

“We had no idea that the workers were being treated so poorly,” a spokesperson for the company explains, who is often a crisis PR flak, not an employee. What’s more, they are usually not totally lying. Neither the company, nor their spokesperson.

Even my profession—books—is illustrative of this phenomenon. You walk into an independent bookstore in your town and purchase a book because you like to “support authors’’ or “support local small business.” But what actually happened is this: you bought a book from a shop, who in turn bought their books from a large distributor like Ingram (est. annual revenue of $2.4 billion), who in turn bought their books from a publisher like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (market cap of nearly $1 billion), who in turn had acquired the book from the writer. In the business of books, the creator and the customer (i.e. the author and the reader) are several steps removed from each other. Even a multi-billion dollar behemoth like my publisher, Penguin Random House, sells the vast majority of their books to Amazon, who in turn uses a complicated algorithm to decide what to show to customers, and what to charge them.  

This has always struck me as weird, as well as ethically fraught. On top of that, it’s also felt like bad business to me. We say marketing is important, that knowing your customer is key, but then businesses hand responsibility for those areas off to a bunch of contractors? And then use their insights and choices to decide what to make next? Imagine a sports team who doesn’t do their own scouting, player development or coaching! Who doesn’t interact with their own fans!

How can you do a good job of making stuff for your customers if you don’t have a relationship with them? The short answer is, you can’t. Publishers are quick to tell authors about what audiences like and don’t like, but where are they getting this information? Not from the source, that’s for sure! 

When I was in marketing, I loved talking to people with the same job at other companies and in different industries. Or, not really the same job, because the “Director of Marketing” at most companies is often supplemented by an outside advertising agency, a creative agency and a PR agency. Like The Bobs in Office Space, I’d ask my own version of their question: What would you say you do here? 

As the flywheel of my own books has begun to spin faster and faster—nearing 4 million copies sold—I have become increasingly less satisfied with this intermediated status quo. I remember once talking to an author who had sold a million copies of a book that was published seven or eight years previous. Ok, I asked them, what kind of email list have you got? They started telling me about how many contacts were in their Outlook. Meaning: They didn’t have an email list at all. They’d sold a million books… but that relationship was Amazon’s to own (or in their case, Borders, which had existed when their book came out).

Since my first book was published in 2012, I’ve made sure the last page of the book asked readers to send me an email to sign up for my list. Hundreds of thousands of people have done that. I have entered many of their emails into my list personally. Their names have passed from my eyes through my fingertips into my customer database. I have heard what they liked and don’t like about the books. I have seen what’s worked and what hasn’t. I have gotten to know them.

Of course, I have social media, too (you can follow me on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube). But in the last several years, I’ve decided that those communication channels were not sufficient. I needed to be in the business of transacting directly to my readers, as well.

I had Tobias Lütke, the founder of Shopify, on my podcast recently and we talked about the power of a platform like his, one that allows people to become their own retailers. In 2017, with DailyStoic.com, we opened our own store. We started with a print, then moved on to challenge coins and then online products and a premium leatherbound edition of The Daily Stoic too. Since we launched, we’ve directly sold to north of 100,000 customers. Or rather, to a whole football stadium worth of “true fans” who we now have a relationship with. 

Imagine standing on the 50-yard line of the Big House at the University of Michigan, packed with people to the very rim of the stadium, and knowing you’ve sold something to every single face staring back at you. It’s an immensely powerful feeling. 

Mostly though, it’s a liberating one. I’ve said before that I spell “success as a-u-t-o-n-o-m-y,” and this fits with that philosophy. I don’t want other people telling me what to do. I don’t want to be dependent on other people either. Yes, I work with a traditional publisher on my bigger books, but by choice.

Early in the pandemic, I started working on a fable about Stoicism that came out of stories I was telling my then 3-year old son. After I had finished the outline of the idea, I went to my publisher—who had done 10 books with me at that point—to see if they wanted to work on this one. They came back with terms that just made zero financial or creative sense for me. Part of me was frustrated, but I also believed that they had given me a great gift. Now I could do The Boy Who Would Be King myself. 

I did it faster. I did it cheaper. I did it with complete creative control. I even got to print it in the United States. In its first week, it sold more than 5,000 copies without a peep of external marketing or PR, just an email and a social post to my own fans, sold through my own store. It would have been enough to debut on any of the major bestseller lists—but of course, it didn’t appear on any because those lists had no way of tracking it. 

But what do I care? Well, let me tell you. I care about the fact that something I care about got into the hands of people who care about it. 

Isn’t that the whole point of art? Isn’t that the true basis of sustained (and sustainable) success in business?

Fewer middlemen. Fewer impediments. No delays in getting to market.

I did a talk for a fashion company a few weeks ago. When they started, they did 90% of their sales through retailers and 10% direct-to-consumer. That ratio has flipped as they have grown, based on the CEO’s strategic plan. Imagine if that hadn’t been the plan? They would have been destroyed during the pandemic, when physical retail was largely shut down or severely sidelined. And even without something like a pandemic, by going direct-to-consumer, they improved their margins, as well as the quality of their product… because, you know, they actually knew who their customers were and what those people liked. And by cutting out all those middlemen they could take the savings and apply it to the substance of the product itself.

Nobody knows what the future holds, that’s true. I will continue to traditionally publish many of my projects. My publisher helps me do things I can’t do and I help them do things other authors can’t do—which is why we choose to work together. Even right now, I am working on a distribution deal to get The Boy Who Would Be King sold through other stores. 

Still, I’m not sure how anybody goes broke working directly—as much as possible—with the audience and market they serve. Are there efficiencies that come from outside contractors and manufacturers? Of course. Are there great opportunities selling through other people’s platforms or stores or audiences? Obviously.

But if you’re not also cultivating a direct line to your people, what are you doing? Being arrogant and reckless is the answer, in my opinion. You’re gambling that the middleman will always need you, you’re gambling that your intuition will always land with the audience. You’re also giving up autonomy and creative freedom, too.

I’ll conclude with a great passage from The 50th Law by Robert Greene, as it defines the imperative for all creators perfectly:

Your goal must be to break down the distance between you and your audience, the base of your support in life. Some of this distance is mental—it comes from your ego and the need to feel superior. Some of it is physical—the nature of your business tends to shut you off from the public with lawyers of bureaucracy. In any event, what you are seeking is maximum interaction, allowing you to get a feel for people on this inside. You come to thrive off their feedback and criticism. Operating this way, what you will produce will not fail to resonate because it will come from the inside. This deep level of interaction is the source of the most powerful and popular works in culture and business, and a political style that truly connects.

You must know by now: I don’t believe that philosophy is something for the classroom. It’s something that helps you with life. It shouldn’t be complicated. It shouldn’t be confusing. It should be clear, and it should be usable. As Epicurus put it, “Vain is the word of the philosopher which does not heal the suffering of man.”

Some of the best philosophers never wrote anything down; they just lived exemplary lives and provided an example which we can now learn from. That was philosophy. It was practical and it was applicable and it made life better. But thankfully some philosophers were doers and writers, and the books below will help you understand the words that they lived by—and hopefully apply them to your own opportunities, obstacles, and experiences.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

It still strikes me now, some 17 years into reading this book, how lucky we are to even have it. Meditations is perhaps the only document of its kind ever made: the private thoughts of the world’s most powerful man about how to make good on the responsibilities and obligations of his positions. Marcus stopped almost every night to practice a series of spiritual exercises—reminders designed to make him humble, patient, empathetic, generous, and strong in the face of whatever he was dealing with. You cannot read this book and not come away with a phrase or a line that will be helpful to you next time you are in trouble. Read it, and then read it again as often as you can. (Note: I strongly recommend Hays’s translation above all others. I loved it so much we created a leatherbound version to withstand the test of time for The Daily Stoic.) And if you end up loving Marcus, try The Inner Citadel and Philosophy as a Way of Life by Pierre Hadot. Hadot is maybe one of the smartest people I’ve ever read. The Inner Citadel is mostly about Marcus Aurelius and the Stoic concept of the self as a fortress. Philosophy as a Way of Life is essentially a book about the wisdom of ancient philosophers cumulatively acquired and how we can use the same exercises in our struggles. Also Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar. There are not many great works of fiction about Stoicism, but this is one. Written from the perspective of Hadrian, the book takes the form of a long letter of advice to a young Marcus Aurelius, who would eventually succeed him as emperor. It’s somber but practical, filled with beautiful and moving passages from a man near death, looking to prepare someone for one of the most difficult jobs in the world.

Letters from a Stoic by Seneca 

Seneca, like Marcus, was a powerful man in Rome. He was also a great writer and from the looks of it, a wise man who dispensed great advice to his friends. Much of that advice survives in the form of letters, guiding them and now us through problems with grief, wealth, poverty, success, failure, education and so many other things. Seneca was a Stoic as well, but like Marcus, he was practical and borrowed liberally from other schools. As he quipped to a friend, “I don’t care about the author if the line is good.” That is the ethos of practical philosophy—it doesn’t matter from whom or when it came from, what matters is if it helps you in your life, if only for a second. Reading Seneca will do that. (Other collections of his thoughts are great too. Penguin’s On the Shortness of Life is excellent, and if you’re looking for an audiobook of Seneca, try Tim Ferriss’ edition of The Tao of Seneca: Letters from a Stoic Master.) I also recommend The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca by Emily Wilson. Wilson’s translations of Seneca are excellent and her insights are provocative. Must read for any student of history or philosophy.

Enchiridion by Epictetus 

Unlike those two powerful Stoics, Epictetus overcame incredible adversity. A slave who was banished from Rome, he eventually became a philosopher and opened a small school. Notes from his classes survive to us in what is now called the Enchiridion, which translates as a “small manual or a handbook,” and it is exactly that. It is the perfect introduction to Epictetus as it is packed with short Stoic maxims and principles. Unlike both Seneca and Marcus, Epictetus is somewhat more difficult to read, and I recommend beginning with those two if you haven’t yet read them. The next step would be Epictetus’ Discourses, which are much longer and deserve a bigger commitment. And for more related to Epictetus, you can look into the short autobiography Courage Under Fire by James Stockdale. We interviewed James Stockdale’s son, Sid Stockdale, on the legacy of his father. You can listen to that episode here.

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

Unfortunately, most of the works of the Stoics not named Epictetus, Seneca or Marcus Aurelius have been lost to history. Others are poorly translated or organized. Musonius Rufus has been neglected for both these reasons, but this new book is a great step forward into making him accessible to modern readers. He’s very quotable and very direct—tellingly, the opening essay is That There Is No Need of Giving Many Proofs for One Problem. His most provocative belief in first-century Rome? That women deserved an education as much as men. Two of Musonius’s 21 surviving lectures (That Women Too Should Study Philosophy and Should Daughters Receive the Same Education as Sons?) come down strongly in favor of treating women well and of their capabilities as philosophers. He wrote movingly on companionship, love, and marriage (What Is the Chief End of Marriage and Is Marriage a Handicap for the Pursuit of Philosophy?). Musonius was exiled at least three, possibly four times. 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 us.

The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus by Publius Syrus

A Syrian slave in the first century BCE, Publius Syrus is a fountain of quick, helpful wisdom that you cannot help but recall and apply to your life. “Rivers are easiest to cross at their source.” “Want a great empire? Rule over yourself.” “Divide the fire and you will sooner put it out.” “Always shun that which makes you angry.” Those are a few I remember off the top of my head. But all of them are good and worthy of re-reading in times of difficulty (or boredom or in preparation of a big event).

Fragments by Heraclitus

The Stoics, especially Marcus, loved to draw from Heraclitus, a mystic, ephemeral philosopher whose beautiful fragments are eminently quotable. My favorite line from Heraclitus is his line about how no man steps in the same river twice—because it is not the same river and he is not the same man. Another favorite: “Applicants for wisdom / do what I have done: / inquire within.” And of course, his most direct and timeless remark: “Character is fate.” If you’re looking for philosophy that is poetic but also practical, give Heraclitus a chance.

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

A man is sent to a concentration camp and finds some way for good to come of it. He uses it to fashion a set of principles for life: we have little control over our circumstances, complete control over our attitude, and the ability to make meaning out of the things which happen to us. In Frankl’s case, we are lucky that he was a brilliant psychologist and writer and managed to turn all of this into one of the most important books of the 20th century. I think constantly of his line about the man who asks, “What is the meaning of life?” The answer is that you don’t get to ask the question; life is the one who asks and we must reply with our actions. I was stunned to find that a new (lost) book from him was published in 2020, with a beautiful title worthy of a daily mantra, “Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything.” 

Essays by Michel de Montaigne

Montaigne was deeply influenced by some of the books I mentioned above. He was the epitome of Heraclitus’s line about “inquiring within,” so much so that he spent basically the entire second part of his life asking himself (and other people) all sorts of interesting questions and then exploring the answers in the form of short, provocative essays. (A favorite: Whether he was playing with his cat, or whether he was the toy to his cat.) These essays are always good for a helpful thought or two—be it about death, “other” people, animals, sex, or anything. Also, read Stefan Zweig’s Montaigne. I think it is one of the most beautiful biographies ever written. It’s a book about a man who turned inward as the world was tearing itself to pieces… written by a man forced to do the very same thing some 350 years later. It is timely and important. 

Nature and Selected Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

While Montaigne’s essays are good for making us think, Emerson’s essays make us act. They remind us that we are ultimately responsible for our own life, for making ethical choices and for fulfilling our potential. Unlike most classic writers, Emerson embodies that uniquely American mix of drive and ambition (but in a healthy way). If you have not read Emerson, you should. If you have—and you remember fondly his reminders about recognizing our own genius in the work of others, or his reminders to experience the beauty of nature—that counts as philosophy. See how easy it is? Also, read Walden by Emerson’s friend and protégé Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau did what everyone who has ever lived a normal life has considered doing at least once: he ran into the woods. He retreated into solitude on Walden Pond where he built himself a tiny cabin, in which he lived alone for two years. Thoreau immortalized those two years and the lessons he learned in Walden, concluding with why you can put to bed any considerations of escaping to the woods.

The Art of Happiness by Epicurus

Epicurus was a rival to the Stoics… and today, both schools rival each other for the title of most misunderstood school of philosophy. Epicureanism is not hedonism. In fact, Epicurus preaches restraint and self-discipline. “The pleasant life is not the product” of drinking and sex, Epicurus said; “On the contrary, it is the result of sober thinking—namely investigation of the reasons for every act of choice and aversion and elimination of those false ideas about the gods and death which are the chief source of mental disturbances.” That being said, Epicurus was much more explicit about joy and happiness than Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius. The Epicureans were less concerned about duty and honor and other earthly obligations—they were more Eastern in that way. They were also pithier, in my opinion. Which is probably why Seneca joked, after quoting Epicurus, “I don’t mind quoting a bad author if the line is good.” Anyway, read this… and it’s probably OK to skip the stuff about atoms. 

Plutarch’s Lives and Plutarch’s Moralia

Is there anyone better than Plutarch? No, there is not. I think he’s the best, most interesting, most accessible biographer to ever do it. There’s a reason he was the favorite of everyone from Napoleon to Alexander Hamilton right on down to people today. Funny enough, his grandson was one of Marcus Aurelius’s philosophy teachers. Anyways, he’s hard to beat. If you haven’t read Plutarch, do it! Try Penguin Classics; or the little translation How to Be a Leader from Princeton Press is also good. 

The Tao Te Ching by Laozi

It’s fascinating that both Epictetus and the Tao Te Ching at one point use the same analogy: The mind is like muddy water. To have clarity, we must be steady and let it settle down. Only then can we see. Only then do we have transparency. Whoever you are and whatever you’re doing, you would benefit from having more of this clarity. The Tao Te Ching is made up of 81 short chapters, a mixture of poetry and prose aimed at giving you that clarity. Also read Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy by Philip J. Ivanhoe. Don’t dismiss it over the boring title! The book is an amazing anthology of the best of Eastern Chinese philosophy (most of it pre-Zen Buddhism). I folded so many pages reading it that I dreaded having to transfer my notes to notecards. It took forever, but it was worth it. This is a great introduction to Confucius, the Tao Te Ching, and other important texts. I also like Buddha by Karen Armstrong. It’s scholarly without being pedantic, inspiring without being mystical. Armstrong is actually a former Catholic nun (who teaches at a college of Judaism), so I loved the diverse and unique perspective of the author. And Armstrong never misses the point of a good biography: to teach the reader how to live through the life of an interesting, complicated but important person. 

Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel 

I was sitting back taking notes after my reading of both these books when my wife yelled “HOGS!” I rushed downstairs, grabbed my rifle, and as I walked slowly through the trees towards the small pack of wild hogs, I practiced both the breathing exercises in the book and the art of letting the shot fall from the weapon (rather than being forced). It was a rather perfect moment—and so too was the delicious boar sausage I had made afterwards. Of course, Master Kenzo would say that whether the shots hit their mark (three of four did) is irrelevant. What mattered was the moment and the practice. Because this is ultimately not a book about archery, but about zen, and the mastery of the soul. Also read The Way of Baseball: Finding Stillness at 95 mph by Shawn Green. It’s a great, accessible book about peace and peak performance that doesn’t hit you over the head with Buddhism, yoga, meditation or any of that. It’s about how Shawn Green struggled as a major league baseball player and through repetitive simple practice turned himself into one of the best home run hitters in the game. And Sadaharu Oh: A Zen Way of Baseball by Sadaharu Oh. As a testament to my embarrassing American-ness, I hadn’t heard of Sadaharu Oh until a baseball coach I know mentioned him (and therefore didn’t know he was a better home run hitter than Babe Ruth or Hank Aaron or Barry Bonds). It turns out that in addition to being an incredible athlete, he’s also a beautiful writer and storyteller. I’ve recommended and written about Musashi before—well, Sadaharu actually designed his infamous swing around the teaching of Musashi (famously practicing swinging at pitches with a sword). This book was great. It’s a memoir more than it is a book about baseball, so even if you don’t like sports, I promise you will get a lot out of it.

—

And one final recommendation…

I’ve talked a bit about Marcus Aurelius here and why we should study the LIVES of the Stoics. Well, one more short read for you: The Boy Who Would Be King.

It’s one of the most incredible stories in all of history. A young boy, out of nowhere, is chosen to be the emperor of most of the known world. How did he do it? What did he need to learn? Who taught him? What do his experiences teach us? I answer those questions in my first illustrated fable, which I’m so excited to tell you is available for preorder: The Boy Who Would Be King. It’s an ageless story of Stoicism… for all ages… and it happens to be printed right here in the US. You can preorder it directly here, and there are signed copies as well.