RyanHoliday.net - Meditations on strategy and life
  • Home
  • About
  • Newsletter
  • Reading List
  • Blog
  • Best Articles
    • Archive
  • Speaking
  • Books and Courses
  • Contact
Home
About
Newsletter
Reading List
Blog
Best Articles
    Archive
Speaking
Books and Courses
Contact
  • Home
  • About
  • Newsletter
  • Reading List
  • Blog
  • Best Articles
    • Archive
  • Speaking
  • Books and Courses
  • Contact
RyanHoliday.net - Meditations on strategy and life
Blog

One Day Of Thanks Is Not Enough: Gratitude is a Daily Practice

The modern practice of this Thanksgiving holiday here in America is that we are supposed to take the time to think about what we’re grateful for. And the candidates are usually pretty obvious: We should be grateful for our families, for our health (especially through a pandemic), that we live in a time of peace (the first Thanksgiving America has not been at war in 21 years), for the food laid out in front of us. All the usual suspects.

I agree, these are important things to recognize and appreciate. It’s also good to have a specific day dedicated to that occasion. So by all means, celebrate.

But over the last few years, I have come to practice a different form of gratitude. It’s one that is a little harder to do, that goes beyond the cliche and perfunctory acknowledgment of the good things in our lives, but as a result creates a deeper and more profound benefit.

I forget how I came up with it exactly, but I remember feeling particularly upset—rageful, if I am being perfectly honest—about someone in my life. This was someone who had betrayed me and wronged me, and shown themselves to be quite different from the person that I had once so respected and admired. Even though our relationship had soured a few years before and they had been punished by subsequent events, I was still angry, regularly so, and I was disappointed with how much space they took up in my head.

So one morning, as I sat down early with my journal as I do every morning, I started to write about it. Not about the anger that I felt—I had done that too many times—but instead about all the things I was grateful for about this person. I wrote about my gratitude for all sorts of things about them, big and small. It was just a sentence or two at first. Then a few days later, I did it again and then again and again whenever I thought about it, and watched as my anger partly gave way to appreciation. As I said, sometimes it was little things, sometimes big things: Opportunities they had given me. What I had learned. A gift they had given me. What weaknesses they had provided vivid warnings of with their behavior. I had to be creative to come up with stuff, but if I looked, it was there.

In his book, Comedy Sex God (as well as on his wonderful podcast and on his HBO show) the comedian Pete Holmes talks about the aftermath of the dissolution of his marriage. After his wife cheated on him and their subsequent divorce, he was hit with a long developing crisis of faith in the religion he had grown up with. He describes this period as many nights on the road. Lots of work. Lots of drinking. Lots of crying. Lots of Counting Crows songs on repeat. Then he came up with a mantra that lifted him above his pain, that shifted his world view, that restored his hope and happiness. All with just three simple words: “Yes, thank you.” 

Your crying baby wakes you up at 3am? Yes, thank you. I know she is alive and now I get to spend time with her, just she and I.

Flight gets delayed? Yes, thank you. Now I can sit and read.

Show gets cancelled? Yes, thank you. Now I can do something else instead. 

It struck me that there was something similar about Pete’s gratitude mantra and the small success I had. It’s easy to think negative thoughts and to get stuck into a pattern with them. But forcing myself to take the time not only to think about something good, but write that thought down longhand was a kind of rewiring of my own opinions. It became easier to see that while there certainly was plenty to be upset about, there was also plenty to be thankful for. Epictetus said that every situation has two handles; which was I going to decide to hold onto? The anger, or the appreciation?

Now in the mornings, when I journal, I try to do this as often as I can. I try to find ways to express gratitude not for the things that are easy to be grateful for, but for what is hard. That nagging pain in my leg—yes, thank you, it’s making me take things slow. That troublesome client—yes, thank you, it’s helping me develop better boundaries. The mistake I made–yes, thank you, for reminding me to be more careful, for teaching me a lesson. That damage from the storm—yes, thank you, the damage exposed a more serious problem that we’re now solving. And on and on.

This is part and parcel of living a life of amor fati. Where instead of fighting and resisting what happens to you, you accept it, you love it all. You’re grateful for it. No matter how tough it is. 

It’s easy to be thankful for family, for health, for life, even if we regularly take these things for granted. It’s easy to express gratitude for someone who has done something kind for you, or whose work you admire. We might not do it often enough, but in a sense, we are obligated to be grateful for such things. 

It is far harder to say thank you to the things we didn’t want to happen. Or to people who have hurt us. Or to having our life disrupted by a pandemic. Or to be out of work. Or to lose money or people we love. Who would choose the events of the last two years? I certainly would not. But they have also not been without their benefits, as I have written. The time with family, the lifestyle changes they forced, the opportunities to do the right thing, to help others–these were things I have incredibly grateful for. 

Even if some situations unconscionably and irredeemably bad—as some events in recent days have been—there remains this advice from the writer Jorge Luis Borges:

A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

How can we not be grateful for these raw materials? Where would we be without them?

The Stoics saw gratitude as a kind of medicine, that saying “Thank you” for every experience was the key to mental health. “Convince yourself that everything is the gift of the gods,” Marcus Aurelius wrote, “that things are good and always will be.” 

I’m not saying it will be magic but it will help.

So as you gather around your family and friends this Thanksgiving or even an ordinary evening at home, of course, appreciate it and give thanks for all the obvious and bountiful gifts that the moment presents. Just make sure that when the moment passes, as you go back to your everyday, ordinary life that you make gratitude a regular part of it. Again—not simply for what is easy and immediately pleasing.

That comes naturally enough, and may even go without saying. What is in more desperate need of appreciation and perspective are the things you never asked for, the things you worked hard to prevent from happening in the first place. Because that’s where gratitude will make the biggest difference and where we need the most healing.

Whatever it is. However poorly it went. However difficult 2021 has been for you. 

Be grateful for it. Give thanks for it. Say yes, thank you for it. There was good within it.

Write it down. Over and over again. 

Until you believe it.

________

P.S. Daily Stoic is trying to provide 2 million meals for families facing hunger. Did you know that more than 950 million people are food insecure, more than 38 million people in America still face hunger, and some 1.5 million children lost their primary or secondary caregiver from COVID-19 and now, those children don’t know where their next meal is coming from?

Last year, the Daily Stoic community came together and raised over $100,000 together, providing some 1 million meals. This year we’re trying to go twice as big. We donated the first $20,000 and we’d like your help in getting to our goal of $200,000—which would provide over 2 million meals for families across the country! Head over to dailystoic.com/feeding and help us make a small dent in a big problem. Even $1 helps provide at least 10 meals!

November 25, 2021by Ryan Holiday
Blog

Work, Family, Scene: You Can Only Pick Two

When I first moved to Austin in 2013, I went out to lunch—fittingly—with a writer named Austin Kleon. I was a longtime fan of his book Steal Like an Artist (his book Keep Going is a new favorite). After we ate, he drove me around the city, showing me things and giving me advice. 

Austin was a little older than me and was already married with kids. 

I remember asking him how he made time for it all. “I don’t,” he told me. “The artist’s life is about tradeoffs.” And then he gave me a little rule that has stuck with me always:

Work, family, scene. Pick two.

Work—that is your creative output.

Family—that’s a spouse, kids, or any close personal relationships. 

Scene—that’s the fun stuff that comes along with success. Parties. Fancy dinners. Important friends. This is the stuff that looks good on Instagram, that you can brag about, that falls into your lap like a wonderful surprise. Offers, invitations, perks. 

It’d be wonderful if you could have it all…but you can’t. 

You can party it up and hang onto a relationship but you won’t have much time left for work. You can grind away at your craft, be the toast of the scene, but what will that leave for your family? Almost certainly it means they will be home, alone. If you’re as committed to the work as you are to a happy home, you can keep both but you will have no room for anything else—certainly late nights or hangovers or exotic trips. And if you try to have it all? Well, you won’t get any of it. 

I emailed Austin about this all recently and he pointed me to a poem by Kenneth Koch from the New Yorker that had inspired it for him. It had a great verse in it:

There isn’t time enough, my friends— 

Though dawn begins, yet midnight ends- 

To find the time to have love, work and friends. 

Pick two. 

I know you think you’re the exception, but you’re not. I wasn’t. I can tell you that from experience. I tried all the different variations. I’ve traveled too much…and family and work suffered. I’ve worked too much and family and connections have suffered. I’ve tried to cram it all in and ended up a burned out mess, as I wrote in the epilogue to Ego is the Enemy. Eventually, you come face to face with that hard choice of that epigram and choose your priorities. That’s just how it goes. 

In the years since that conversation with Austin, I’ve been very productive. I’ve written about a dozen books. I’ve sent out an email and a podcast episode every day for both Daily Stoic and Daily Dad. I’ve filmed over 250 videos for the Daily Stoic YouTube channel. I’ve read and recommended hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books to my Reading List Email and then opened a bookstore. I’ve also gotten married, had two kids, had wonderful moments with my family. 

I have not been to very many parties. 

I’ve said no to a lot of stuff. As I wrote recently, I’ve passed on everything from trips to the Super Bowl, a vacation on Necker Island, and more than a few different ghostwriting opportunities. A younger me would have thought these things crazy to pass up on. But that’s exactly what I did. 

I said no. 

I say no a lot. Not just to the big things but little things. Coffee, hangouts, a couple of us are going to dinner, group texts… People who know me, especially lately, find it hard to make plans with me. I’m not a jerk about it, but you can usually count on me to count myself out. 

A few years ago, Dr. Jonathan Fader, an elite sports psychologist who spent nearly a decade with the New York Mets, gave me a picture of Oliver Sacks in his office. Behind Sacks, who is speaking on the phone, is a large sign that just says, “NO!” 

I have that photo hanging on the wall in my office now. On either side of it, hang pictures of each of my sons. I can see them—all three photos—out of the corner of my eye even as I am writing this. It’s a sort of embodiment of the options Austin Kleon had laid out. 

I’m working. I have my two kids and my wife. I’m tapped out. 

Does that mean I miss out on stuff? Really cool stuff, in some cases? Sure, I guess. But the person who tries to have it all will always end up with very little. Certainly very little of anything lasting or meaningful. 

The memory of the warm sun from a long weekend on Necker Island won’t last nearly as long nor sink nearly as deep as the hugs I get from my boys each morning. There’s no one I could meet at a party who, in the end, I’d want to spend more time with than my wife. Moving amongst tens of thousands of people during the super exclusive festivities of Super Bowl Week comes with its own kind of invigorating energy, but it pales in comparison to the inspiration and motivation I get from the emails and messages (both positive and negative) sent by the readers of my books. Inspiration and motivation that help bring the next book into being, and the book after that. 

Life is about tradeoffs. 

When we know what to say no to, and we know why, we can say yes with comfort and confidence to the things that matter. To the things that last.

Work, family, scene. 

You can have two if you say no to one. If you can’t, you’ll have none.

P.S. Thank you to everyone who has supported my newest book, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave. If you haven’t yet picked up a copy or if there is someone in your life who would benefit from it, you can get signed copies in time for the Holidays over in the Daily Stoic store. Of course, you can also get the book anywhere else books are sold, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, and Audible.

November 10, 2021by Ryan Holiday

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

© 2018 copyright Ryan Holiday // All rights reserved // Privacy Policy
This site directs people to Amazon and is an Amazon Associate member.