In the summer of 2019, my wife and I took our two sons for a hike in the Lost Pines Forest in Bastrop, Texas. It was a Saturday or a Sunday. I had a bunch of articles to write, but I put it aside and decided to spend some time outside with the kids in the shade of the prehistoric loblolly forest about thirty minutes from our house. 

It was a lovely afternoon, despite the heat. I always love Lost Pines because it’s a freak of nature. The trees appear here in the middle of Texas, hundreds of miles further east than most of their counterparts. Two horrible fires in the last ten years have only added to the mystique, making parts feel like a haunted elephant graveyard. 

As we wrapped up the hike and took the kids to the playground, suddenly, it hit me. It was a feeling that most creative people experience from time to time. You’re in the middle of not working and boom, you get hit with an idea. I have run many hundreds of miles in Lost Pines so it was a familiar feeling—I’ve sold business problems and writing problems and personal problems on the trails there. 

As I was carrying my son in the backpack, my mind had drifted briefly to the fact that my book Stillness is the Key would soon be released and it would mark the end of what had become a three-book trilogy. What would I tackle next, I thought. A book about courage would be cool. 

A few days later, we were on vacation in the panhandle in Florida. I was building a sandcastle with my son. Then the second lightning strike. Not just a book about courage, a series on the four virtues, starting with courage! And like that, the next four years of my life, my next creative mountain had been laid out in front of me. 

I tell this story in part because that first book, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave is now available for preorder (to be released almost two years exactly to the day the idea appeared to me). But also because it illustrates something that I learned when I was writing Stillness is the Key: our biggest breakthroughs often come when we are working on them the least, that stillness really is an important part of moving forward. 

John Cage, the composer, liked to hunt for mushrooms in the woods. Musashi, the samurai, was also an avid painter and poet. Socrates liked to relax by playing games in the street with children from his neighborhood in Athens. Nietzche said that it’s only ideas that come from walking that have any worth. Dorothy Day was a lifelong walker, and it was on her strolls along the beach on Staten Island in the 1920s that she first began to feel a strong sense of God in her life and the first flickerings of the awakening that would put her on a path toward sainthood. The choreographer Twyla Tharp talks about going for “mindless mental wanderings” each day. 

In my life, I’ve been repeatedly gifted with ideas—from the muses, from my own subconscious, I don’t know—when I least expected it. Running. Swimming. Playing with my kids. My wife can recognize it in my eyes and knows not to say anything when I rush into the house and head to the pile of notecards I have on the counter at all times. He’s probably come up with something…don’t interrupt or he’ll lose it and be a mess after. 

This is also an important lesson, at least for me, about work-life balance. We think that to be great at what you do, it requires complete and total dedication. That there’s no time for anything else. Nonsense. I owe this four-book deal I’m now mid-way through writing—a career securing project—to the fact that I went on vacation! Don’t have time for family? I wouldn’t have the book I’m releasing next month if I had stayed home and worked. I owe it to our wonderful hike. 

As excited as I am to tell you about this new book (pre-order bonuses and details here) mostly I wanted to share those insights—because they were life-changing for me. In Zen, they talk about the problem of “too much willful will,” basically, trying too hard, being too intentional. Real breakthroughs come when you’re not so controlling, when you let go. By not putting my work first, by not taking it all so seriously, I’ve found I’ve been able to reach for and hold on to more than I was with a very tight grasp. 

I hope this can give you something to think about as well. Of course, executing the project required incredible amounts of work and focus. It required being at the office. It required trying very hard to get it right. But none of that would have been possible without first letting go a little, without deciding to take a hike or go to the beach. 

You never know when an idea can change the course of your life or your career. You never know when that thing is going to come to you. So it’s really a matter of putting yourself in a position for that to happen. 

I just want you to realize—or to remember—that may well just mean being present. It may mean rolling around in the grass with your kids or taking the dog out for a walk. It could be a long dinner with friends. It could be any number of things we’re so often too busy to do or can’t be bothered to do. 

If only we had the courage to let go…what we might be able to find. 

P.S. If you haven’t already, I’d love for you to pre-order Courage is Calling. Pre-orders make a huge difference for authors as they try to get a book off the ground. And to make it worth your while, I’ve put together a bunch of cool pre-order bonuses, including signed pages from the drafts of the book as I wrote them. Click here to learn more about all the bonuses and how to receive them!

This piece is excerpted from my forthcoming book, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave. Part 1 of the book is about the forces that stand between you and doing what you want, can, and should. It’s about the battle we all fight—the battle against fear. Because real greatness is impossible if we don’t win that battle, if we don’t learn how to conquer fear. 

Jerry Weintraub wanted to be an actor.

He made it into the Neighborhood Playhouse. He studied under Sandy Meisner. One of his classmates was James Caan. There’s a reason you’ve seen movies with James Caan and none with Jerry Weintraub, and that reason is fear.

Or rather, fear by its other identity: Shame.

Sent to get clothes for a dance class—taught by Martha Graham, no less—Jerry and Hames went to a store on Broadway. As he tried on tights, Jerry, a tough kid from the Bronx, took one look in the mirror and knew there was no way he’d ever let himself be seen this way in public. James Caan, who came from the same neighborhood, whose father had been a butcher, who had the same view of himself as a tough guy, looked in the same mirror. He did not let self-consciousness win.

As the author Rich Cohen writes, “This was the dividing line, the moment of truth. Jimmy Caan put on the slippers and tights, so his name appears in the credits as, say, Sonny Corleone in The Godfather. Jerry Weintraub, because he was filled with normal, decent human shame, did not put on the slippers and tights, so his name appears in movie credits as producer.”

One would be nominated for Academy Awards, the other would package The Karate Kid. Both would be successful, but only one realized that shared early dream—only one was able to stand boldly, bravely in front of the camera, and own it.

While most of us will not make our living on the screen, we all have to face this reluctance to be seen. Our fear of what other people think, of embarrassment or awkwardness, is not the same fear that holds a man back from running into battle, but it is a limitation, a deficiency of courage that deprives us of our destiny all the same.

There is no change, no attempt, no reach that does not look strange to someone. There’s almost no accomplishment that is possible without calling some attention on yourself. To gamble on yourself is to risk failure. To do it in public is to risk humiliation.

Anyone who tries to leave their comfort zone has to know that.

Yet we’d almost rather die than be uncomfortable.

The comedian Jerry Seinfeld once noted that people rank public speaking as worse than the fear of death, which means, quite insanely, that at a funeral the average person would rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy.

In ancient Rome, there was perhaps no better orator than Crassus, famed for his brilliant speeches and prosecutions of the corrupt and the evil. At least that’s how he appeared to his audiences. You would not have known, as he later admitted, that at the outset of every speech he would “Feel a tremor through my whole thoughts, as it were, and limbs.” Even as a master, he still experienced doubt—still felt waves of overwhelming anxiety and fear crash over him before he went onstage.

At the beginning of his career, it was even worse. He recounts his eternal debt and gratitude to a judge who, at one of Crassus’s first public appearances, could tell how “absolutely disheartened and incapacitated with fear” the boy was, and adjourned the hearing until a later date. We can imagine those merciful words from the judge, sparing Crassus as he no doubt prayed he would be spared, as we have prayed a thousand times, second only to his hope that he might be struck down and killed rather than have to go on.

Yet we would not be talking about Crassus had he not pushed through that fear.

Would he have rather practiced law from the privacy of his study? Sure, just as Serpico probably wished he could’ve dressed as he liked without comment. Such is life. It doesn’t care about our rathers. You will have to stand alone from time to time. If you can’t even do that to deliver a talk, how will you possibly have the courage to do it when it counts?

You put on the tights. You push through the stage fright—the fright that persists even after you’ve mastered the art of public speaking. You enter the witness stand. You deliver the hard news to the assembled employees. You just learn to stop thinking about what they think. You’ll never do original work if you can’t. You have to be willing not only to step away from the herd but get up in front of them and say what you truly think or feel. It’s called “public life” for a reason.

We don’t get to succeed privately.

It’s ironic, the Stoics would say, that for all our selfish cares about ourselves, we seem to value other people’s opinions about us more than our own. The freed slave Epictetus says, “If you wish to improve, be content to appear clueless or stupid.” Can you do that? You’ll have to.

When we flee in the direction of comfort, of raising no eyebrows, of standing in the back of the room instead of the front, what we are fleeing is opportunity. When we defer to fear, when we let it decide what we will and won’t do, we miss so much. Not just success, but actualization.

Who might we be if we didn’t care about blushing? What could we accomplish if we didn’t mind the spotlight? If we were tough enough to put on the tights? If we were willing not only to fail but to do so in front of others?

P.S. If you have gotten anything out of my writing, I’d love for you to consider pre-ordering  Courage is Calling. Pre-orders make a huge difference for authors as they try to get a book off the ground. And to make it worth your while, I’ve put together a bunch of cool pre-order bonuses, including signed pages from the drafts of the book as I wrote them. Click here to learn more about all the bonuses and how to receive them!

All the talk about morning routines makes it easy to overlook that a good morning is impossible without a good evening. 

I am reminded just how essential a good evening routine is as I write this from an RV in Balmorhea, Texas—as I drive across the country to do some media for my new book, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave (awesome pre-order bonuses here).

It was one of Seneca’s observations—that nearly everything in life is circular: there’s an opening and a close, a start and a finish. Life, he says, is a collection of large circles enclosing smaller ones. Birth to death. Childhood. A year. A month. “And the smallest circle of all,” he writes, “is the day; even a day has its beginning and its ending, its sunrise and its sunset.”

To the Stoics, every day was to be lived as if it closed the story, every night ended as if it was the last night we had. They’re right. How we close out the day matters. The decisions we make. The reflection we encourage. The time we drift off to sleep. All of it is about finishing well…because then and only then can we start tomorrow better too. 

So what does a good evening routine look like? Whether I’m home or on the road, these are the 9 things I try to do every evening. Each is rooted in the wisdom of the ancient Stoics and when applied, as Seneca said, “let us go to our sleep with joy and gladness.” 

Make Time For Leisure

The opposite of work is not laziness or lounging around, it’s leisure. 

In the ancient world, leisure meant scholé. School. But not the get good grades and get ahead kind of school. No, in the ancient world, it meant learning and studying and pursuing higher things to enrich one’s soul and spirit.

Seneca wrote thoughtful letters to friends. Zeno gathered at the Stoa Poikile to discuss ideas. Marcus Aurelius attended philosophical lectures. My family reads together. 

Marcus said it was a requirement to “Give yourself time to learn something new and good, and cease to be whirled around.” And as Seneca wrote in his essay On the Tranquility of the Mind, “We must be indulgent to the mind, and regularly grant it the leisure that serves as its food and strength.” 

After indulging the mind, you’ll have worked up the appetite to… 

Enjoy A Philosophical Dinner

Some people watch TV at dinner. Some people eat at their desk and answer emails between bites. Some people eat as fast as they can so they can get back to work.

In The Learned Banqueters, written just after the time of Marcus Aurelius, we learn that the sixth Stoic scholarch Antipater routinely invited friends over for dinner and long discussions about philosophy. 

A few decades after Antipater, Cato would become famous for his philosophical dinners. Even his last meal—before his famous suicide—he was debating the very implications of life and death, good and bad, at such a dinner.

More recently, the philosopher Agnes Callard told me on the Daily Stoic podcast that she, her husband, and her children have philosophical debates over dinner. The topics range from serious to silly, but it’s the activity itself that really matters. It’s that for an hour or two every night, she is not doing anything but connecting with the people she loves. 

My kids are younger, so our dinner discussions range from silly to sillier. But again, it’s the time together that really matters. 

(Speaking of which we are hosting a philosophical dinner at The Painted Porch as part of a pre-order bonus for Courage is Calling. Learn about how to attend that here.)

After filling up our stomachs, it’s time to…

Go For A Walk

After a meal, but before it’s dark, it is a wonderful time to get active.

Seneca wrote about taking a walk outdoors as a kind of medicine. In a notoriously loud city like Rome, peace and quiet would have been hard to come by. The noises of wagons, the shouting of vendors, the hammering of blacksmiths—all filled the streets with piercing violence. So Seneca said, “We should take wandering outdoor walks, so that the mind might be nourished and refreshed by the open air and deep breathing.” 

Marcus Aurelius too talked about the cleansing effects of a walk in nature. On his evening walks, he liked to take a moment to look up at the stars to “wash off the mud of life below.” Freud was known for his walks around Vienna’s Ringstrasse after his evening meal. David Sedaris likes to take nighttime strolls on the back roads of his neighborhood in the English countryside and pick up garbage. Dan Rather talked about how “One of my favorite things long has been taking a leisurely stroll with wife Jean at twilight time.”

When we’re home, we get the kids in the stroller and do as much as three miles on the dirt road around our house, or in the backwoods and pastures on our farm. We see rabbits and deer and cows and armadillos. We stop and pet the donkeys. Like Sedaris, we pick up garbage. These are some of the very best moments in life. When it’s quiet. When we’re fully present and there. When we’re around people we love. As Rather said, “I gently recommend it. Just walk slowly in the time after the sun sets and before night descends.” 

Once back from a walk, we…

Tuck The Kids In 

Not everyone has kids, but everyone can learn from this exercise. Marcus Aurelius, borrowing from Epictetus, tells us that…

As you kiss your son good night, whisper to yourself, “He may be dead in the morning.” Don’t tempt fate, you say. By talking about a natural event? Is fate tempted when we speak of grain being reaped?

What is the point of this morbid exercise? It’s not about trying to reduce the affection you feel for the people you love. It’s not about preparing for the pain of losing a child (nothing can prepare you for that). It’s about not wasting a single second of the time you do get with the people you love. 

A person who faces the fact that they can lose someone they love at any moment is a person who is present. Who loves. Who isn’t rushing through moments. Who doesn’t hold onto stupid things. 

Marcus lost 5 children. 5! It should never happen, but it does. There’s nothing we can do about that. We can, however, drink in the present before we…

Review The Day

Winston Churchill was famously afraid of going to bed at the end of the day having not created, written or done anything that moved his life forward. “Every night,” he wrote, “I try myself by Court Martial to see if I have done anything effective during the day. I don’t mean just pawing the ground, anyone can go through the motions, but something really effective.”

In a letter to his older brother Novatus, Seneca describes the exercise he borrowed from another prominent philosopher. 

“When the light has been removed and my wife has fallen silent,” Seneca wrote, “I examine my entire day and go back over what I’ve done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by.”

Every night, Seneca sat down and forced himself to questions like these:

What bad habits did I cure?

What temptations did I resist?

In what specific way am I now better than I was yesterday?

Success and happiness require self-awareness. Self-reflection. Be unflinching in your assessments. Notice what contributed to your happiness and what detracted from it. Write down what you’d like to work on or quotes that you like. 

Writing, analyzing, reflecting, interrogating, taking inventory of how you spent the day—this is how you continue improving. Asking yourself questions. Questioning every experience, every day. 

Did I follow my plans for the day? Was I prepared enough? What could I do better? What have I learned that will help me tomorrow? These simple questions make an enormous impact. So I spend some time every night answering them.

After this reflection, my evening routine is drawing to a close. It’s time to…

Count Your Blessings

This is another exercise from Seneca. He said we should wrap up each day as if it were our last. The person who does this, who meditates on their mortality in the evening, Seneca believed, has a super power when they wake up. 

“When a man has said, ‘I have lived!’” Seneca wrote, then “every morning he arises is a bonus.” 

Think back: to that one time you were playing with house money, if not literally then metaphorically. Or when your vacation got extended. Or that appointment you were dreading canceled at the last moment. 

Do you remember how you felt? Probably, in a word—better. You feel lighter. Nicer. You appreciate everything. You are present. All the trivial concerns and short term anxieties go away—because for a second, you realize how little they matter. 

Well, that’s how one ought to live. Go to bed, having lived a full day, appreciating that you may not get the privilege of waking up tomorrow. And if you do wake up, it will be impossible not to see every second of the next twenty-four hours as a bonus. As a vacation extended. An appointment with death put off one more day. As playing with house money. 

And now, as the day comes to a close, it is time for the most important part, to…

Go To Bed At A Set Time

All the other habits and practices listed here become irrelevant if you don’t have the energy and clarity to do them. What time you wake up tomorrow is irrelevant…if you didn’t get enough sleep tonight. 

One thing every parent knows is that kids are a mess when they don’t sleep. But for some reason, we think we’re different. We think we can get away with pulling an all-nighter here and there. We think we can substitute stimulants for sleep. 

Nonsense. 

We only have so much energy for our work, for our relationships, for ourselves. A smart person understands this and guards their sleep carefully. The greats—they protect their sleep because their best work depends on it. The clearer they can think and the better their mental and physical state—the better they perform. In other words, the more sleep, the better. 

The philosopher and writer Arthur Schopenhauer used to say that “sleep is the source of all health and energy.” He said it better still on a separate occasion: “Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death. The higher the interest rate and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.”

Me? I get my 7-8 hours every night. Sleep is one of the most important parts of my work routine, period. All-nighters are for people who don’t know how to plan, who put things off to the last minute. 

If you want to be great at what you do, start going to bed earlier. Give yourself a bedtime that you honor and respect and enforce. Value sleep. Take care of yourself. Put yourself in a good spot to…

Start Again

As I say in the title of this piece, the perfect day begins with a good evening. A good evening routine is just priming us to have a great day—there is still work to be done when we wake up. It’s for a reason that one of our fifty rules for life from the Stoics is “own the morning.” Well-begun is half done, as they say. Fortunately, the Stoics—in their writing and in their example—left us even more wisdom on what a good start to the day looks like. I’ve written about that here and then adapted it into a video that now has over a million views. 

P.S. If you have gotten anything out of my writing over the years, I’d love for you to consider pre-ordering my new book, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave. It’s being released in less than a month on 9/28. I’m confident it’s one of my best and I think the blurbs and early reviews already hint that it is. Academy Award Winning Actor Matthew McConaghey called the book an “urgent call to arms for each and all of us.” General Jim Mattis called it “a superb handbook for crafting a purposeful life.” And Classics Professor Shadi Bartsch was nice enough to say it’s “a heartfelt and passionate book.”

Pre-orders make a huge difference for authors as they try to get a book off the ground. So it’d really mean a lot to me if you pre-ordered…and to make it worth your while, I put together a bunch of cool preorder bonuses, including signed and numbered pages from the original manuscript of the book as I worked on it. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at dailystoic.com/preorder