I’ve done some crazy things in my life, but as I’ve said, the absolute craziest was deciding to open a bookstore. Running a small business is always difficult, running a small business during a pandemic is damn near impossible but a small town book store in rural Texas? 

But here we are, a year later, not just still standing but doing great! 

We’ve learned a lot…about business, about books, and about ourselves. 

I made a YouTube video about the experience, but I wanted to expand it here into a fuller explanation of all the lessons that The Painted Porch has taught me. I share them here so you can get something too—and perhaps learn a little from my experiences and hopefully go create something cool of your own out of it. Here are 29 lessons from the first 12 months of owning The Painted Porch. 

– It always takes longer than you think it’s going to take. That’s Hofstadter’s law. From the moment my wife suggested we open a small-town bookstore, everything has taken longer and been harder than we expected. If you can’t pass the marshmallow test of delaying gratification and deferring things into the future, you’re just going to get crushed. 

– 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 ebooks. Every morning, I send out the Daily Stoic and Daily Dad emails to over 500,000 people. I put out a podcast that’s had 80 million downloads. 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, even at a much much smaller level. Every time I walk by or to the bookstore, I think, Wow, I made that. 

– I think one of the best decisions we made was making our book tower. It’s 20 feet tall and made of some 2000 books, 4000 nails, and 40 gallons of glue. It was not cheap to do. It was not easy to do. It took forever. We had to solve all sorts of logistical problems to make it work. But it’s also probably one of the single best marketing and business decisions we made in the whole store. Because it’s the number one thing that people come into the store to take pictures of. 

– You want to have a unique proposition. You want to have something that only you could do. Most bookstores have thousands and thousands of books. But what we decided here was that we’d have only a couple hundred books, only my absolute favorite books, only the books I put in my Reading List Email. It would only be those books. So not only did this make it cheaper and easier to run the bookstore, it makes us stand out. 

– There’s this great story of when Jeff Bezos had the idea for Amazon. He was working on Wall Street at the time. He and his boss go for a walk in Central Park and after he tells him his idea, his boss says, “that sounds like a great idea for someone who doesn’t have a job.” Meaning that somebody else should do it, not Bezos. If there’s something crazy that you’re thinking about doing, maybe you should get serious about actually doing it. On the other side of the risk and the crazy leap can be something that changes your life, that changes your community, that changes the world.

– Doing something cool means risk…but just because you take a big risk doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of little ways to take risk off the table. My office is above the bookstore. I rent part of the building out to another business, etc. 

– There are lots of easier ways to make money than a physical bookstore in 2022…so everyday I try to remind myself this project was not about making lots of money. Remembering why you did something and how you measure success helps you calibrate your decisions properly. I’m happy enough to be putting books out in the world, making this community better, having a physical space, challenging myself, etc…as long as I don’t lose lots of money, that’s a win. 

– Start small. The problem is when you have really high standards, when you expect a lot of yourself, it’s hard to be comfortable with something that’s kind of crappy or mediocre or not all the way there. But there’s a reason most tech start ups think in terms of a minimum viable product. 

– Related to that there’s a great Hemingway line—we actually have a shirt with it, and I have a print of it on my wall—it’s one of my all-time favorite quotes: the first draft of everything is shit. I love how The Painted Porch is now, but it took weeks and months to get it to where it is. It’s been a continual process of improvement and growth and making changes.

– Lengthen your timeline. I mentioned Hofsteader’s Law above—it was important to remind ourselves many times that the building we were in was nearly 150 years old. It can be very easy on a project to get caught up in the immediacy of what’s in front of you…but you miss the big picture and you miss the reality that most things that work are set up to work for a long time. We sell books in our store that were written 2,500 years ago! Who cares if the project took 13 months longer to open than we thought?

– As Zeno said, books are a way to have conversations with the dead. You can learn from people who came before you. They can also inspire and reassure you. Some books I leaned on often throughout this were The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and A Calendar of Wisdom by Leo Tolstoy.

– One of the things I did while I was kicking around the idea is I looked up how expensive it is to start a bookstore. Search results said it was hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars—way more expensive than I was interested in. But then I wanted to question whether that number was real. So then I went and looked up how expensive it was to start an ecommerce business—something like Daily Stoic. Search results said it was hundreds of thousands of dollars more than I’d spent to start Daily Stoic. That was really helpful—to learn, oh, these people don’t really know what they’re talking about. Or that there’s a cheaper way, a different way to do it. You don’t have to do it the way that everyone else does it.

– Steal like an artist (also a great book we carry). We got the idea for the bookshelves in our store at someone’s house for a toddler’s birthday party. They had built them themselves, we took a picture and had our contractor do his own version. The book tower was roughly inspired by The Last Bookstore. Even the idea to carry fewer titles and put them face out was partly inspired by Amazon’s physical bookstores. Take from many influences and make them your own. 

– One of my favorite parts of the whole experience has been watching my wife work her magic. Not only was the original idea to do the store hers, but almost all the big design ideas were hers too. We have very different styles of working but collaborating on this challenged me to see the wisdom in her approach on a humblingly regular basis. 

– When you get criticism, when you get information, when you get facts—and of course you have to look for those things—you have to take them with a grain of salt. You have to put them up to the test, as the Stoics say. You have to question some of the assumptions out there. You might just find, as we did, that instead of something being way too expensive, it is actually doable for you to do it.

– Think of it as an experiment. When I was thinking about opening The Painted Porch, I asked Tim Ferriss for advice. “Think about it as an experiment,” he said. “How are you going to know if it’s something you want to do if you haven’t tried doing it?” The decision to see it as an experiment, not as a permanent life choice, was so freeing. It allowed me to go into it knowing that I was going to commit to it for the next two years, and then, I can reassess, I can change my mind.

– Confidence is earned. People talk about trusting their gut. But that’s something you have to earn. I talk about this in Ego is the Enemy—there’s a difference between confidence and ego. Ego thinks, whatever I want to do, of course I’m going to be successful. Confidence is something you earn, something you earn over time. It’s something you earn through having an idea and bringing it into reality. It’s learning what you’re capable of, learning what’s possible, learning why you do deserve to trust yourself. Confidence is on the other side of having done a scary thing, a thing that a lot of people said wasn’t a good idea.

– In Letters From A Stoic, Seneca says he pitied the person who’s never gone through adversity, who’s never done anything difficult. Because they don’t know what they’re capable of. Well…cue March 2020.

– Help yourself by helping others. When I first started my Reading List Email in 2008, the idea was that I wanted to celebrate other people’s works. To me, the bookstore is an extension of the idea of celebrating other people’s work. And when you do that, when you create value for people, when you’re generally a positive force in your industry, in your space, you develop a reputation. People want to support you. People want to help you.

– Robert Greene’s metaphor for mastery (if you haven’t read Mastery, you must) is being on the inside of something. When we start a new sport, when we get a new job, when we approach a field we haven’t yet studied, we are on the outside of. But as we put in the work, as we familiarize ourselves with every component, as we develop our intuitive field, we eventually make our way to this inside. This is a metaphor I think about constantly with the bookstore.

– Permission assets are everything. All my success as a writer, right down to this bookstore, has been rooted in the email lists and social media accounts I have built. When you have direct access to people who like what you do, everything is more affordable and more scalable. When you don’t? Everything is harder and requires so much more luck. 

– Just do the right thing…the rest doesn’t matter. That’s what Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations. We delayed opening during the worst days of COVID—we didn’t need to, so why contribute to the problem? We paid people to work remotely instead. We kept up safety protocols even after the state of Texas washed its hands of its responsibilities last year. We did it even though people got mad at us for it, even though it probably cost us business. My conscience is clean and that’s what counts. Keeping your community and your staff safe is good for business in the long run anyway. 

– If it makes you a worse person (parent, neighbor, writer, whatever), it’s not success. On a note to myself when we were opening the bookstore in the middle of the pandemic, I wrote, “2020 is a test: will it make you a better person or a worse person?” That was the test that I reminded myself of over and over again: will this make you a better person or a worse person? If starting a business makes you a worse person—if it stresses you out, if it tears your relationships apart, if it makes you bitter or frustrated with people—then it doesn’t matter how much money it makes or external praise it receives. It’s not successful.

– As we were going through it, my wife and I asked ourselves, what does success look like? And we decided that success was going to be: becoming more community minded, becoming more responsible, becoming better organized, having more fun, making a positive contribution.

– Physical experiences matter more in a digital world. If people wanted a book cheaply, they’d buy it online. There has to be a reason people would drive out and come to your business.  We made a lot of our design and marketing decisions around that idea.  

– It would be wonderful of course if marketing didn’t have to exist. If things could be bare-boned. If presentation and packaging didn’t matter. That’s just not how life works—never has and it never will. You have to do interesting stuff. You have to make remarkable things, as Seth Godin writes in Purple Cow, you have to do remarkable marketing. Do stuff that commands attention. Draw attention like a magnet. These things cannot be underestimated.

– COVID has been tough. Even as I was working on this piece, we had to close because people got sick, even after all our precautions and we couldn’t stay open. That was expensive and it was scary for everyone. But we took it one day at a time, we adapted, we adjusted, we figured it out. Which is all you can do. .

– In The Obstacle is the Way, I quote this Haitian proverb that I like: behind mountains are more mountains. That’s just how life is. You don’t overcome one obstacle, you don’t get through the first year of your business, and then suddenly, you’re magically done with obstacles. No, that’s not how life works. Life is one obstacle after another. You just have to keep going. 

– I mentioned Austin Kleon’s book Steal Like An Artist earlier but his book Keep Going was even more relevant to this journey. 

I happened to be writing Courage is Calling during most of the crazy period of putting this book store together. Obviously, starting a small business is not the same as running into a burning building or onto a battlefield, but one thing you can’t escape noticing when you read history or biography is just how badly we need people to step up, to put themselves out there, to pursue their crazy ideas. All of human progress—big and small—depends on that. 

If you’re thinking of doing something, if you feel called to do something…well, maybe you should do it. Just remember to…

• • Start small.
  • Be patient.
  • Think of it as an experiment.
  • Do it the way only you could do it. 
  • Find ways to take risk off the table.
  • Define what success means to you.
  • Question some of the assumptions out there.
  • See adversity as an opportunity to find out what you are capable of.
  • Keep going—behind mountains are more mountains.

Anyway, come visit us on Main St. in Bastrop sometime…or support the store online at thepaintedporch.com! Some of the most popular books in the store are Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne, The Library Book by Susan Orlean, and The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant. We’ve also had many of my favorite authors stop by and sign copiesof their books, such as: The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson, From Strength to Strength by Arthur Brooks, and Finding Ultra by Rich Roll. If you buy from those links, your books will be shipped from us here in Bastrop, Texas!

All the data about taking cold showers is bullshit to me. 

Sure, some research says that they can reduce anxiety, improve your immune system, increase metabolism to assist in weight loss, reduce the number of days you call out sick from work, and potentially even improve cancer survival.

But I don’t care about any of that. 

The reason I interrupt my warm showers by cranking the knob to the side is far more simple, in fact it’s nearly tautological. I do it to do it.

It’s making a statement about who is in charge. 

In one of his letters, Seneca describes himself as a “cold-water enthusiast.” He would “celebrate the new year by taking a plunge into the canal, who, just as naturally as I would set out to do some reading or writing, or to compose a speech, used to inaugurate the first of the year with a plunge into the Virgo aqueduct [present day Trevi Fountain].” But then he gives the real reason: “The body should be treated more rigorously that it may not be disobedient to the mind.”

I think about that every morning just before I crank the knob. Who is in charge? The courageous side of me or the cowardly side? The side that doesn’t flinch at discomfort or the side that desires to always be comfortable? The side that does the hard thing or the side that takes the easy way? 

In a Sports Illustrated story by Greg Bishop about the Los Angeles Rams’ difficult path to becoming Super Bowl champions, we learn that Rams General Manager Les Snead is a cold-water enthusiast. “As Les Snead watched his grand football experiment unfold over the course of the 2021 season,” Bishop writes, “he decided that, starting on Jan. 1, he would borrow from the Roman philosopher Seneca and plunge into the Pacific Ocean. And he did that, every morning, every week, all the way until Super Bowl Sunday.”

It wasn’t so he could improve his immune system to make it through the long season. It wasn’t to increase his metabolism. It wasn’t to reduce anxiety. Those things might have been nice ancillary benefits but they were not the point. The purpose was to become the kind of person that could do it—that could crank the handle or dive into the surf even though that’s almost certainly not going to be pleasant. 

Because that guy is also the guy who can trade a quarterback he just signed to an enormous contract. That guy is also the guy who can say ‘Fuck those draft picks’ even though everybody else in the NFL thinks that insane. 

As I write about in Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave, we can’t just hope to be brave when it counts. Courage has to be cultivated. No athlete just hopes to hit the game-winning shot—they practice it thousands of times. They take that shot in scrimmages, in pickup games, alone in the gym as they count down the clock in their head.

You know there’s that cliché: Do one thing each day that scares you. 

It’s hokey but it’s actually not bad advice! How do you expect to do the big things that scare you—that scare others—if you haven’t practiced them? Why do you think you can endure the cold reception of a bold idea if you can’t even endure cold water? How can you trust that you’ll step forward when the stakes are high when you regularly don’t do that when the stakes are low? What gives you any confidence you’ll do the hard thing when people are watching if you can’t do that even when no one is watching? 

The person who does something scary every day is less fearful than someone who can’t. The person who does something difficult every day is tougher than someone who doesn’t. And life? Well life is scary and it is tough. There is nothing worth doing that isn’t. You need those traits…unless you plan to cower and hide or get really lucky. 

We treat the body rigorously to remind it who is in charge. We push ourselves in little ways so the big ways stop seeming quite so big, quite so out of character. We minimize fear by making the act of overcoming it routine. We test ourselves to prepare for the tests of life.

Courage, self-control—all of the virtues are habits. They are superlatives paid for over the course of a life of virtuous decisions. They are not something you declare, like bankruptcy, they are something you earn, that become part of you. Just as a writer becomes one by writing—we build them by doing. By doing things like them.  

We can crank the knob in the shower to cold. We go for the run even though we’re tired. We pick up the phone and start the conversation we’ve been dreading. We agree to try what we have never tried before. 

We do something difficult, something scary, something good every day. 

We do it to do it. 

We do it because we’re in charge.

We do it so we can do it when it counts. 

P.S. Also I’m excited to announce we’re re-opening Stoicism 101: Ancient Philosophy For Your Actual Life. It’s a 14-day course designed to show people how to integrate philosophy into their everyday lives. Along with the 14 custom emails delivered daily (~20,000 words of exclusive content), there are 3 live video sessions—what we call office hours—with me where I’ll be taking all your questions about Stoicism. It’s one of my favorite things to get the chance to interact with everyone in the course—I would love to have you join us. You can learn more here! But it closes March 21 at Midnight so don’t wait.

Life is about choices.

How we choose to see things. What we choose to say. What we choose to think.

We choose what kind of person we are going to be. 

It all comes down to choices.

And Stoicism, it could be said, is a philosophy about how to make better choices. This is what we see in a book like Meditations. We see Marcus Aurelius journaling, working to get better at choosing. Choosing the right things to value, the right things to think, the right things to focus on, the right response to a difficult situation. 

In this article, I am going to give you the best insights from the Stoics on choosing well to live better. 

Start now by making the choice to…

Say Yes Only To What Matters

Being great at anything requires concentration. It requires elimination, Seneca says. “He who is everywhere is nowhere.”

If you want to be great at whatever it is you’re doing, you have to make some choices about what you say yes to and what you say no to. Everything you say yes to means saying no to something else. And conversely, everything you say no to means saying yes to something else. 

When you say no, when you cut out the inessential, the Stoics say, it allows you to double down on what is truly essential. So the question is: are you saying no to say yes only to what matters?

Control Your Emotions

Cato was once spat on by a rival politician. He was a physically tough man, a soldier, who could have, let’s say, taken matters into his own hands. Instead, he is reported to have laughed and said, “I will swear to anyone, Lentulus, that people are wrong to say that you cannot use your mouth.”

In another case, he was punched and responded to the man’s apology by saying, “I don’t even remember being hit.”

Cato chose not to be provoked. He chose not to be dragged down to their level. He didn’t lose his temper. He didn’t let them get to him. He abided by Marcus Aurelius’s wisdom, “You don’t have to turn this into something. It doesn’t have to upset you.”

Let Go of Anxiety

This was a breakthrough I had during the pandemic. Suddenly, I had a lot less to worry about. I wasn’t doing the things that, in the past, I told myself were the causes of my anxiety. I wasn’t having to get to this plane. I wasn’t battling traffic to get somewhere on time. I wasn’t having to prepare for this talk or that one.

So you’d think that my anxiety would have gone way down. But it didn’t. And what I realized is that anxiety has nothing to do with any of these things.

Marcus Aurelius actually talks about this in Meditations. “Today I escaped from anxiety,” he says. “Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions—not outside.” He writes this during a plague, no less.

We tell ourselves we are stressed and anxious and worried because of the pressure our boss puts on us or because of some looming deadline or because of all of the places we have to be and people we have to see. And then when all that gets paired down, you realize, ‘Oh, no, it was me. I’m the common variable.’ The anxiety is coming from the inside. And you can choose to discard it. 

Stop Wasting Time

When I was 20 years old, I was thinking about becoming a writer. I had about a year left on my contract at the company I was working at. I was telling Robert Greene, one of the greatest writers of all time, about all of this, and he told me I had two options. With this next year, he said, you have the choice between alive time and dead time.

Dead time is when you waste time sitting around, waiting, hoping for things to happen to you.

Alive time is when you are in control, when you make every second count, when you are learning and improving and growing and experimenting.

Is this going to be Alive Time or Dead Time? I decided to print it out and put it on my wall. And it was one of the most productive years of my life. I read stacks and stacks of books. I filled up a box of notecards. I reached out to people and have relationships to this day that came out of that experience. 

Most of all, what I took was life is constantly asking us, Is this going to be alive time or dead time? A long commute—are you going to zone out or listen to an audiobook? A delayed flight—are you going to get a couple thousands steps around the terminal or shove a Cinnabon into our face? A contract we have to earn out—is this tying us down or freeing us up?

What you do with the time when you are not totally in control—that is the critical choice you have to constantly make. 

Focus On What’s In Your Control

99 percent of the things that you spend time on don’t matter. It’s not that they’re not important. It’s that we focus on things that are not up to us.

Epictetus said, “The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control…”

The chief choice is between things that are in our control and those that are not in our control. What other people do, what other people say, what the weather is doing, how the dice rolls—just about everything except our actions, our thoughts, our feelings—not in our control.

Our actions, our thoughts, our feelings—these are up to us. Other people, the weather, external events, these are not. But here’s the thing: our responses to other people, the weather, external events are in our control. 

Making this distinction and then choosing to focus on the things that are in your control will make you happier, stronger, and more successful. If only because it concentrates your resources in the places where they matter.

Do The More Difficult Thing

Whenever we come to a little crossroad—a decision about how to do things and what things to do—the Stoics said to default to the option that challenges you the most.

Marcus Aurelius wrote in Meditations about holding the reins in his non-dominant hand as both an exercise to practice and a metaphor for doing the difficult thing. Seneca talked about how a person who skates through life without being tested and challenged is actually depriving themselves of opportunities to grow and improve. 

It is both these ideas that informed one of the things I wanted to do with my book Courage is Calling. I wanted to alter people’s perception of courage. To get people to stop thinking our courage only as what happens on the battlefield or when destiny calls you onto the world’s stage. Courage is a kind of craft, something you pursue day in and day out just as one pursues the mastery of any profession or skill. It’s something you do, something you make a habit of.

Jump into the colder pool. Walk instead of drive. Pick up the book instead of your phone. Take responsibility instead of hoping it goes unnoticed. It matters big and small, courage is choosing the more difficult option. Make it a habit. Iron sharpens iron, after all. You’ll be better for it—not only for the improvement that comes from the challenge itself, but for the willpower you are developing by choosing that option on purpose. 

When you have two choices, choose the more difficult one. Choose the one, as Marcus would agree, that allows you to take the reins in any situation.

Grab The Smooth Handle

If you’ve ever been stuck in Los Angeles traffic at night, you know it’s miserable. But if you’ve ever seen a helicopter shot of Los Angeles at night, you’ve seen how this same miserable experience can suddenly be made to seem beautiful and serene. We call one a traffic jam, the other a light show.

Same thing, different perspective.

Life is like this. We can look at it one way and be scared or angry or worried. We can look at it another and find an exciting challenge. We can choose to look at something as an obstacle or an opportunity. We can see chaos if we look up close, or order if we look from afar. 

As Epictetus said, each situation has two handles—one that will bear weight and one that won’t. We get to choose how we look at things. We get to look for the best handle to grab. As Marcus would put it, we get to choose the thoughts we dye the world with.

Little Choices Make For a Big Change

These choices are all very minor, I get that. But that’s the point. These little choices we make–the choice to direct our attention, to grab the right handle, to not get upset–this adds up. 

To what?

To freedom, the Stoics would say. To be in control of your life…even when so much of what happens in life is outside your control. 

***

P.S. Happy Texas Independence Day! One of the best choices I ever made was moving to Texas back in 2013. I continue to fall deeper and deeper in love with the Lone Star State. At The Painted Porch, we have a section just for books about Texas. The one I most recommend is the wonderful and important book, Forget the Alamo. Bryan Burrough, one of my all time favorite authors, and his co-writer Jason Stanford came out to The Painted Porch and signed copies of Forget the Alamo. Bryan also signed my two favorite books of his: Public Enemies and The Big Rich. You can check any of those out here!