As part of the launch of Courage is Calling, I wrote this piece for Inc. 

All of my biggest mistakes in business have been things my wife warned against.

So you might be surprised to learn that the idea to drop our life savings into a small-town book store shortly after our second child was born actually came from her — not from the writer in the family. As we sat at a café in Bastrop, Texas, looking across Main Street at an empty historic storefront, I was skeptical. But she was right. Even the pandemic, which forced us to sit unopened for nearly 12 months at great expense, hasn’t proved her wrong.

For most of my life as an author and entre­preneur, my work has been digital. Close to half of the sales of my books are audiobooks and e-books — and the vast majority of all sales come through a certain trillion-dollar e-commerce behemoth. Most of the advertising campaigns I’ve designed appeared online. The startups I’ve invested in, the businesses I’ve created — all primarily digital.

With digital comes the opportunity, and seemingly the obligation, to pursue scale. A live event with 500 people is a huge success. An online video with 500 views is an embarrassing failure. Back in 2009, I started an email list to recommend books to people. This month, it will go out to more than 200,000 subscribers — and that’s relatively small compared with email lists such as Morning Brew or theSkimm, which hit millions of inboxes daily. Each morning I put out a podcast episode for my site Daily Stoic, which has now reached 50 million downloads and will do revenues in the mid-six figures this year…without having to leave my house.

The decision to open an actual bookstore in a town of 9,000 people, then, resulted in culture shock, as well as sticker shock and every other kind of shock. Running an email list is close to free. The expense of a podcast measures, after the purchase of a decent microphone, in the tens of dollars in monthly hosting fees. But a brick-and-mortar business is precisely the opposite. The total cost of opening The Painted Porch, from the building to the shelves to the inventory to the trademark work, will easily surpass $1 million. And, as any small-business owner can tell you — especially a small-business owner who survived Texas’s calamitous winter storm in February 2021 — costs are never frozen in place.

So you might think I am going to warn against the folly of brick and mortar. On the contrary. I have learned a lot of lessons worth sharing by doing this. It has been a chance to apply business and marketing thinking to a different scale of problems.

For one thing, as satisfying as it is to reach large numbers of people through the enormous scale of the internet, there is even more satisfaction in doing something in real life, for real people.

Online, your customers are little blips on a screen (if they are even your customers and not just “traffic” that gets sold to advertisers). In a shop, you’re dealing with people. People who get upset if asked to wear a mask during a pandemic. People who accuse you of being a liberal if you display Michelle Obama’s book. But also people who just need a place to sit down for a minute. A kid sprinting into the store and making a beeline for one of the books you grew up loving as a child. A customer who recommends a book to another customer, and you watch a friendship emerge as they check out and go have lunch together. A few weeks ago, a father came in to buy a few books he wanted to leave to his children, as he was dying of cancer.

When we first decided to do this, I bought a course from a bookstore consultant. One of the first things that surprised me was being told that the average indie bookstore carries more than 10,000 titles. Ten thousand! As far as I could tell, it’s basically an unques­tioned assumption in the business. Not only did this strike me as expensive, but it also struck me as related to the biggest problems bookstores have, according to the con­sultant: hiring and managing employees. With 10,000 titles, you need an inventory manager. You need cashiers and sales associates. You need a place to store all those books. You need to constantly order and reorder books. You have to stay on top of every­thing new and popular coming out.

The first decision we made was to go in the exact opposite direction. At the Painted Porch, we carry roughly 600 titles. The vast majority of them are not new, but rather the so-called perennial sellers of the backlist. I have personally read nearly all of them. I also have room to put them all face out on the shelf. Do people sometimes come in and ask about titles we don’t have? Yes, and we can special order those books for them. But, more important, we can personally vouch for the volumes we do carry.

My thinking is simple: If people want a specific book, they’ll buy it on Amazon. They come to a bookstore to discover new books, to experience being in a bookstore. Amazon carries some 48 million titles. Barnes & Noble’s New York City flagship has four miles of shelving. Those com­panies get price breaks from publishers and can pass some of those savings on to customers. I can’t compete with any of that. But I can beat those companies at curation.

Having a physical space, I have found, is also a key efficiency. Having an office upstairs saves me the cost of my old office in Austin — and saves me time, the most valuable resource, on my commute. Having a beautiful space where I can host events, or make videos for the Daily Stoic YouTube channel, or shoot photos for the Daily Dad Instagram channel, is hugely beneficial. That I’m also selling books in the same space is extra.

Before we opened the store, I was in Bucharest, Romania, for a talk. My host took me into a local bookstore that had an enormous globe hanging from the ceiling. I watched as customer after customer came in to take pictures beneath it, before checking out with books. I recalled a particularly cool floor-to-ceiling tower of books about Abraham Lincoln in the museum attached to Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. Back home, I decided to surround an old, broken fireplace in our building with a tower of books. It took more than 2,000 volumes, 4,000 nails, and many gallons of glue to build this 20-foot spectacle. And now, almost every customer who comes in takes a picture of it. Some come in specifically because they heard about it.

The irony is not lost on me that the attraction of a physical space is the ability to take a picture that you can share on social media. But it’s also a focusing device for me. The Painted Porch can succeed not despite its having a physical store­front, but because of it. If all people cared about was price, they’d buy online. If they want to do something cool on a weekend, they come by.

From the moment my wife suggested we open a small-town bookstore, everything has taken longer and been harder than we expected. Besides the ongoing pandemic, we’ve had to deal with that freak winter storm and a $40,000 air conditioner replacement. But we grow from committing to crazy things and then adapting before they over­whelm us. I won’t say that the challenges helped our marriage — but we’re still standing, and that says something.

On the window of our shop, we have written in large letters: “Good things happen in bookstores.” I have repeatedly been reminded of this fact since we opened. I might even expand it: Good things happen in small businesses.

P.S. I would love it if you came and visited us at The Painted Porch. You can also support the store by picking up some books online. We have signed copies of all of my books, including Courage is Calling, The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy, and Stillness is the Key. If you buy from those links, your books will be shipped from us here in Bastrop, Texas!

Quick exciting news: I just found out that my new book, Courage is Calling, debuted on the New York Times bestseller. Thank you to everyone who supported it. If you haven’t already picked up your copy, you can still get signed copies and a bunch of cool bonuses over in the Daily Stoic store. 

This piece was originally published in USA TODAY.

In September, as I traveled for the first time in almost exactly 18 months to spend the first night away from what had been 535 consecutive bedtimes with my boys, it struck me how much I had changed as a parent.

I entered the pandemic as a driven young writer and entrepreneur, who happened to be the parent of two kids under 4. If you had asked if it was possible, in March of 2020, to go even a few months with no travel, no ability to speak to groups, to consult with clients or organizations? I would have told you absolutely not, financially or professionally. And if we’re being honest, I suspect my wife would have said it wasn’t possible maritally either.

Like so many people, but especially parents, I have been profoundly changed by the events of the last year and half. The biggest reason was precisely the passage of all that time … together.

There is no such thing as parental leave in my line of work. And, like a lot of driven people who work for themselves, I’m not sure if I could have taken time off, that I would have let myself. Instead, I worked constantly for the first years and months of my young children’s lives, accepting and chasing opportunities – even though that meant many nights in hotel rooms and on airport benches. This, in addition to those ordinary work from home days that all writers know, where you are technically home but are, in fact, very far away.

Suddenly, every single day, rain or shine, I was able to take my boys for a long walk in the morning. Most days, we also did their nap in the running stroller or a bike trailer. In the evening we walked again – picking wild blackberries in the spring, splashing in puddles in the winter and summer showers. As I do the math, I’d estimate we covered somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 miles together.

Never before and perhaps never again will we get to spend that amount of uninterrupted time together. Certainly, never at this age.

It was on those many walks that something slowly began to seep in. Namely, that this was what I wanted my life to look like. Not just being outside, but not being rushed, not having so many things in the calendar, no meetings, no waking up in hotel rooms or eating food from airport kiosks.

From my many conversations with other parents and the daily email I send out each morning, amid the complaints and frustrations about COVID policy and failures, I have heard many similar awakenings.

I suspect this is why many people have decided to move during the pandemic or change careers. Forced to actually slow down for a minute, they got a better sense of what they actually wanted their lives to look like.

Because we almost always have a career and a life before we have children, we usually try to find a way to make the latter fit in with the former. I have come to see the pandemic as the largest lifestyle experiment in human history. It stripped everything down, broke it all apart and left so many of us, especially in the early months of the first and second surges, clinging tightly to our children and thinking about how we would restructure our lives around them.

Surely, there is some privilege in being able to do this. But this luxury is also insidious, because you know what choosing family over work will cost you, in real dollars.

In one of his Father’s Day messages as president, Barack Obama pointed out that the ability to have a kid isn’t what makes you a parent. It’s actually raising a child that makes someone a father – or a mother. This was something that came back to me at countless vexing decisions we had to make as parents during the pandemic. 

Can we see people? Are we comfortable sending the kids to school? What activities are essential? Should we find child care or a nanny-share? Should we lift the mask mandate in the bookstore my family runs now that all the other businesses on the street have?

An ordinary person has to think only of themselves; a parent has to put somebody else first.

I still find myself shuddering every time I hear someone point out that the chances of a child dying of COVID are very low. What kind of standard is that? And yet it is shocking and painful to me in retrospect to consider how often I must have brought home bugs and viruses from the road – including mono in 2018 – without much of a thought.

At the top of my list of changes in my parenting style is a clearer understanding of both risk as well as responsibility. No longer can I be “too busy” to think about this or that. Certainly, I can never go back to trusting that someone else – politicians or school boards or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – is on top of it for us.

It was the highly transmissible delta variant that obliterated the one of the only silver linings for parents – that there seemed to be few cases in children. Now as hospitals and ICU beds nearly fill up in Texas, I find myself thinking not just of that wonderful streak of consecutive bedtimes but its relation to an exercise practiced by Stoic parents in the ancient world, which involved privately meditating on your child’s mortality as you tucked them into bed at night.

While this was something I understood intellectually, it was not until there was a deadly virus that the weight and power of this practice truly hit me. The purpose of this memento mori is not detachment but the exact opposite. It’s about connection. It’s about presence. It’s about gratitude.

There’s no reason to rush through bedtime. There’s no reason to rush through anything or to anywhere. Because what we’re rushing from is our children and the limited time we get with them – the amount of which is never guaranteed.

It was another reminder to slow down, to take a few more minutes with them, another book with them, another night where they fell asleep on my chest or next to me, unknowingly turning this difficult, painful pandemic into what a POW survivor, Admiral James Stockdale, would describe as a “defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”

I know my kids wouldn’t either.

One of my favorite things to do each day is to sit down and write the Daily Dad email. It’s one piece of wisdom from history, science, literature and other ordinary parents. You can join over 60,000 parents and get it delivered to your inbox every morning by subscribing at email.dailydad.com.