There aren’t too many of us who are satisfied with the person we currently are.

That is, we know we could be better. We know we should be better.

And by better, we don’t mean at our jobs, at lifting weights, or looking better, or having more money.

We know we could be better people–that is to say, kinder, more generous, more patient, more thoughtful, more reliable.

But how many of us actually do anything about this? How many of us are as focused on being good?

“A better wrestler?” Marcus Aurelius asked himself, rhetorically, referring to the time he spent improving at one of his hobbies. “But not a better citizen, a better person, a better resource in tight places, a better forgiver of faults?”

What is your most important job? he emphasizes. “To be a good person.”

When the Stoics talked about the virtue of justice, they weren’t talking about a legal system of rules and codes. They were talking about what Marcus was talking about—actively working to be a better citizen, a better person, a better resource, a better forgiver of faults.

That’s what I spent a lot of time thinking about as I wrote my newest book, ​Right Thing, Right Now​ (…which you can ​preorder…right now​). It’s about this key Stoic virtue, the virtue that challenges us to put in the work to be good, not just to be great. You know, values, character, deeds.

So here, riffing on some ideas from the ​new book​, are 10 habits that will make you better at your most important job—being a good person:

1. Tell the truth. “I’m going to be honest with you…”. How many times have you heard this phrase or said it yourself? It seems casual or like a way to establish trust. But beginning a remark by claiming we’re going to give it to you straight is of course implying that most of the time we’re not doing that. Honesty should not need a preface, Marcus Aurelius would say. An honest person should be like a smelly goat in the room—you know when they’re there. In matters big or small, public or private, convenient or inconvenient, tell the truth. Don’t be a jerk about it. Don’t give everyone your unsolicited opinion about how they should live or look or act. “Speak the truth as you see it,” Marcus reminded himself, “but with kindness. With humility. Without hypocrisy.” Be honest, not hurtful. Be a bastion of truth in a time of lies. This is more than just the right thing to do, it’s your job. As a friend. As a parent. As an employee. As a human being.
2. Respect others. Clementine Churchill once left a note for her husband. “My Darling Winston,” she wrote, “I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not so kind as you used to be.” Yes, he had power, she noted, but if you keep disrespecting people, “You won’t get the best results.” The way you treat others sets off a chain reaction that shapes your life in profound ways. Disrespect, rudeness, pettiness, jealousy—these things repel. But dignity, equanimity, politeness, calm—they attract. They draw people in. They bring the best out of others. Choose wisely.
3. Give, give, give. When Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote a book, he avoided procrastination and overthinking. His only ritual before starting was to make a small donation to a charity he and his wife supported. Like ancient sacrifices to gods before battle, the rabbi waged the war of art by first striking with an act of kindness. Generosity is admirable, and many of us wish we could be better at it. There’s only one way to improve, and it happens to be the same way one gets better at writing or any other craft: by doing it. Not later, once we’re better off or once somebody really needs it. But consistently, regularly, habitually. Money is not the only currency of generosity. You can give your time, your energy, your words of encouragement, your patience, your kindness. Seneca reminds us that every person we meet is an opportunity for kindness. For expressions of generosity. How are you doing? Do you need anything? Can I help you with that? These opportunities are everywhere, every day. Start to seize them. Make a habit of it.
4. Find the good. During one of his many stints in prison, Gandhi made a pair of sandals for General Jan Smuts, the prime minister of South Africa, who put Gandhi in jail. Somewhere in Smuts, despite his complicity in a racist and exploitative system, there was goodness, Gandhi believed. Smuts wore the sandals and thought of Gandhi’s grace and goodness as he did. Smuts eventually tried to return them, saying he felt unworthy to stand in the shoes of such a great man. To his credit, he made an effort to fill those shoes. He contributed to the founding of the League of Nations, drafted the UN Charter, and helped find a homeland for Jews after the Holocaust. He said Gandhi inspired him to redeem himself. Each of us, the Holocaust survivor Edith Eger would later write, has both a Hitler and a Corrie ten Boom (one of the Righteous Among the Nations honorees) inside us. Which one are you letting out? Which one are you seeing in others?
5. Choose a north star. I watched Dov Charney go from a hero in the fashion business to one of its villains. In the early days, he was focused on challenging the broken assumptions of the business. He cared about his workers. He cared about the environment. Later, it became all about him, all about his urges, all about his power. This is the power of a north star. It can take you on an amazing journey or get you hopelessly lost. Your values, your aspirations, the things pushing and pulling you—whatever they are, they foretell a prophecy. They determine where you’ll end up…and who you’ll be when you get there. Cash is a bad but easy north star to default to. Same with ego, fame, power, a desire for revenge or dominance—they will lead you astray. Loyalty, mastery, a love of the game, a desire to keep your hands clean, to be an open book, have a clear conscience. These things take you north. They lead you forward. They cut through the noise. Of the cardinal directions, justice is the clearest, the Stoics said—it points you north, shows you where to go. Follow it, and you’ll end up in a good place…and you’ll be a good person when you get there.
6. Hold the line. Your north star will illuminate a line in your life. That is, the line between good and evil, right and wrong, ethical and unethical, fair and unfair. Courage requires you to put your ass on that line. Self-discipline tells you to get your ass in line. Justice is holding that line. It’s what you will do and what you won’t. What you will stand for and what you won’t stand for. It’s the decisions you make, the actions you take. Indeed, all the philosophical and religious traditions–from Confucius to Christianity, Plato to Hobbes and Kant—are best preached not with words but with actions. Each action is like a lantern that hollows darkness and uncertainty. Each decision to do the right thing is a statement that our peers, children, and future generations will hear. So draw the line and hold it.
7. Develop competence. Keeping your word, taking responsibility, having compassion, good intentions, and good values are great. So is wanting to change things, to take on evil or injustice. But these feelings are worthless without competence. Florence Nightingale is often portrayed as an angelic nurse gliding through the halls of hospitals. The reality is much more impressive. She was a tireless seeker of knowledge, a stern teacher and trainer of a generation of talented nurses, a fierce advocate for resources, a diligent fundraiser, and a skilled steward of that money. If a problem is to be solved, it must be studied. If progress is to be made, if positive change is to happen, it will be paved not with good intentions but rock-hard competence. It will require courage, discipline, and wisdom. Of course it will. If change, if being of service, if developing smarts, capability, and competence were easy, everyone would do it and no one would be impressive.
8. Love. In the struggle against injustice, it’s easy to let bitterness and hatred harden your heart. As Marcus Aurelius wrote: “What doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness.” When we close ourselves off to love and hope, we naturally experience less love and hope. The Bible reminds us that “whoever hardens their heart falls into trouble.” And James Baldwin, that “hatred…has never failed to destroy the men who hated.” Hatred corrodes. It takes you south, backward, down, down to depths. Love, on the other hand, protects, trusts, hopes, preserves. Love does not fail. It takes you north, it leads you forward. It always wins. Which way are you going? Is your heart growing or shrinking? Is your love and compassion and connection for other people, your hope for a better future, growing or shrinking?
9. Just be kind. How did Hadrian know that Antoninus would be a worthy mentor to Marcus Aurelius? That he could give his absolute power to another man with only a promise that Antoninus would protect and guide Marcus to one day rule in his place? Because he felt he had glimpsed into Antoninus’ true character when he had once watched Antoninus help his elderly stepfather up a flight of stairs. He didn’t know anyone could see. It wasn’t a performance. It wasn’t ‘virtue signaling’ as we call it today. It was actual virtue—what Antonius brought to his twenty years as Marcus’ guardian and to the Roman people as their leader. Character is fate, the Stoics said. Small acts are no small thing, they said. A helping hand, a smile, a door held open, a favor rendered—you never know who might be watching. You never know what low moment you might be rescuing a person from. You never know the ripple effect your small gesture can have. But that’s not why we do it. We do it because it’s right—because people deserve kindness and because kindness makes us better. We do it because it’s the discipline we practice.
10. Leave this place better than you found it. There’s a sign at the track I used to run at in Austin that reads: “Leave This Place Better Than You Found It.” It was put up by the Hollywood Henderson, who paid for the track (and made the neighborhood better). You don’t have to save the planet. You don’t have to save someone’s life. Can you make sure you pick up a piece of trash when you see it? Can you do something nice for a stranger? Can you just make things a little bit better every day?

Life is short.

Be good. Do good. Find the good.

Draw the line and hold it. Be respectful, kind, competent. Love and be loved.

Do the right thing.

Right now.

If you enjoyed this article, then I promise you’ll like my new book: ​Right Thing, Right Now​. This book comes out June 11th, but it would mean the world to me if you could preorder the book from ​dailystoic.com/justice​. Preordering a book is the number one thing you can do to support an author as they get a book off the ground. It’s how publishers determine how many copies to print, whether they’ll give an author a book tour, and where the book will land on the bestseller list.

To make ordering it early worth your while, I put together a bunch of bonuses like signed and numbered first editions, a signed page from the original manuscript, bonus chapters, and a bunch of other stuff. Just head to ​dailystoic.com/justice​ before June 11th to claim your bonuses.

And one last thing before I go… I’m celebrating the launch of ​Right Thing, Right Now​ in New York City at the ​Barnes & Noble Union Square​ on June 11th. I’d love for you to join me. There will be a live Q&A, book signings, and more. Learn more and register ​here​.

Any fool can learn by experience, the saying goes. It’s vastly preferable to learn from the experiences of others.

This is what mentors are for.

They’ve been where you’ve been.

They’ve done what you’ve done.

They’ve made mistakes that you don’t have to make.

This is what books do also. They allow you to benefit from the experiences of others–successful and not-so-successful, happy and deeply broken people alike.

My whole life I’ve sought out that kind of advice, explicit and deduced. I’ve benefited from being pointed in the right direction and warned when I was heading in the wrong direction. I’ve picked up lessons in the books that I’ve read–I’ve highlighted and printed out passages of advice that I’ve tried to live by.

I’ve tried to do this in all aspects of life, but in today’s article, I wanted to talk specifically about the best career advice I’ve gotten.

1. Credit is Worthless

One of my first real jobs was as an assistant for a powerful movie producer. He was one of those guys in LA who had a lot of influence but you could hardly find out anything about him–his IMDB page was scant, he was never in the press, and he didn’t have some fancy title. I asked about this once and he told me that if ever offered the choice between credit and money, only an idiot takes the credit. He was talking specifically about the movie business which has a lot of inflated titles and credits on projects, which egotistical people gravitate towards as compensation. Why do you need to be recognized? he was telling me.

I took this in a couple of ways that shaped my career. First off, I understood quickly and early that my job as an assistant—and later in other positions—was to do work that others could take credit for. (This is a law in the ​48 Laws of Power​). My job was to be a source of ideas and problem-solving that I could surface to my boss so that they could surface to their boss or clients. This might seem thankless, but it’s actually a powerful place to be if you do it right. (Make others dependent on you is another ​law of power​). I would later come to call this “the canvas strategy”, which I write about in ​Ego is the Enemy​. You find canvases for them to paint on. You clear the path for them…and as a result, influence the direction they go.

At all my jobs, I focused on coming up with ideas for projects and on working on as many projects as possible. I wanted to learn. I wanted to see how things worked. I made sure no one saw me as a threat–on the contrary, that they saw me as someone who was a team player, who worked hard for others (and the business) to succeed. All the while, I was getting what really mattered to me.

Later, it was thinking this way that made me a successful ghostwriter. Most of my fans don’t even know that I have written many books for other people, re-written and edited others. In fact, my first couple of appearances on the New York Times bestseller lists were for projects like this. The reason people don’t know about this is that not only do I not talk about it, but I never put my name on them. When it came to collaborating, it was always a breeze because the books were not about me–I saw my job as helping them make their book, not that we were making our book. It also gave me a leg up in negotiations with the agents and publishers because I didn’t use my leverage to discuss where my name would appear or how big it might be, I asked for my percentage instead.

I don’t do many projects like this anymore, but the books I worked on helped set me up financially. I also learned so much. I have way more ‘reps’ than the average author and many of the painful lessons I have learned about publishing happened when I was not the person on stage.

I’m so glad I learned this early. Forget credit. If you want to get ahead, think about somebody other than yourself.

2. Seize The Alive Time

I’ve talked many times about how when I was stuck at American Apparel and dreaming about leaving to become a writer, Robert Greene gave me his amazing advice about “​Alive Time vs Dead Time​.” Dead Time is when you’re sitting around waiting for things to happen to you, and Alive Time is when you’re in control, making every second count, improving, learning, and growing. But perhaps the reason this advice landed so much is that shortly after I had that conversation over lunch with him, I had dinner in Downtown Los Angeles (I remember it was at Wurstkuche in the Arts District) with Ben Smith, an early Google and YouTube executive. He had just left Google to start his own company and I asked him what he wished he’d done differently in the time before he left. I wished I’d used my Google email address more, he said. Meaning, he wished he’d taken full advantage of the unique status/reputation of Google at that time. He wished he’d taken more meetings, reached out to more people, agreed to speak at more events and attended more conferences. He wished he’d built his network more when he was in a position of demand.

Having dropped out of college myself a few years earlier, I immediately knew what he’d meant. While I was a student, I had all these opportunities to go to office hours with important professors and participate in subsidized activities. People were eager to help me out. But the moment I left, I became just another face in the crowd. Worse, I was their competition. People like to help students out. Now? Now I was on my own.

So, taking Robert’s advice about Alive Time and Ben’s advice about using my business card, I spent a good chunk of my last year at American Apparel inviting everyone I could to come tour the factory. I jumped at every chance to travel for work. I took on extra projects. I sponsored events. I developed relationships inside the company and with people who wanted stuff from the company. It seems crazy, but I am still benefiting from that work today. (That’s how I’d met Ben in the first place).

If it wasn’t for this advice, I might have spent my last days at American Apparel thinking, This is just a job, this is just a crappy couple of months, I just have to wait it out and get through it. I could have chosen Dead Time unknowingly, wishing for better circumstances and ignoring the opportunities right in front of me. I would’ve been much worse off.

In life and in your career, you have to be the driver of your own advancement. When conditions aren’t ideal, you can’t just sit around waiting for things to happen. If you do that, they never will. There is always something you can learn, always some opportunity to take advantage of.

We have to choose to make every moment a moment of Alive Time. We have to decide to be present, to make the most of whatever is in front of us.

Open your eyes. Open your ears. Open your mind. Find the advantage.

3. Build Your Own Platform

I’ve been fired. I’ve had projects and ideas not work. I’ve never been canceled, but I’ve been seriously criticized. I get that these things keep people up at night…but they don’t need to. Because there is a way to insulate yourself from it: Build a platform.

When I was working as a research assistant to Robert Greene for ​The 50th Law​, he had me read a bunch about Eleanor Roosevelt. I was struck by how she entered the White House as First Lady–it was with a magazine column that asked readers to write in to her. She didn’t want to become isolated by her husband’s success. She also didn’t want to be dependent on him. She built a massive audience as a writer and thinker and public figure–and this was an incredible form of power for her to have at that time.

In fact, the only person comparable really was Winston Churchill. Most people are unaware that Churchill made his living as a writer. He published more than ten million words in his lifetime across hundreds of publications and published works. Between 1931 and 1939–when he was stuck in the so-called political wilderness–Winston Churchill published 11 books, 400+ articles, and delivered more than 350 speeches. The result of this was an enormous worldwide platform that allowed Churchill not only to survive financially but wield influence that kept him relevant and guided policy and opinion across the globe. Under ordinary circumstances, a politician would have been powerless when pushed out of office or driven to the fringes by political enemies. But Churchill’s extensive platform—based on his editorial contacts, extraordinary gift with words, and relentless energy—saved his career…and as a result, the free world.

My first editor gave me similar advice. You don’t want to be dependent on PR and publicity to sell your books, she said. You need to have a direct connection to your audience. I’d already been doing that with my ​Reading List Email​, but ​The Daily Stoic​, which I launched in 2016, had meant that every day I talk to my readers–who now number more than one million. I talk to them on ​Facebook​ and ​Instagram​ and ​Twitter​ and ​TikTok​ and ​YouTube​ and on our ​podcast​. If any one of these channels were to ban me or go under, that would suck, but I’d be fine. Another example, if Amazon or Barnes and Noble closed, I’d be fine. I own my own ​bookstore​! My editor was telling me to be like Eleanor Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. To have power outside the system as an insurance policy.

We talk today about ‘cancel culture’, but this is mostly a problem for people who have things that can be taken from them, who rely on ‘permission’ and ‘greenlights’ to make their work. If you have developed an independent platform, you have an insurance policy. You have security. Not just against what other people might do to you, but also against changes in the trends or the marketplace.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur or an author or a filmmaker or journalist, it doesn’t matter. You should build a platform.

To do work without it is to be at the mercy of too much that’s outside of your control. To a creative person, to a free thinker, that is death. Having a megaphone that we own? That we can use when we need it? I’ll tell you having a platform–​my reading list newsletter​ for instance–helped me in negotiations on the ghostwriting projects, for sure. Would ​my bookstore​ have succeeded if I was wholly dependent on walk-up traffic in the small town where it’s located? I don’t think so!

At some point, you’re going to have something you need to communicate to the world, you’re going to need distribution…and when you need it, it will be too late to start building.

So don’t wait. Build your platform now.

A few years ago, Tim Ferriss asked if I would come over for dinner. It was clear he wanted to ask me something, although he wouldn’t say what. I really could not have guessed that he was asking permission to hire away my research assistant Hristo Vassilev to run his podcast, which Hristo has done ever since.

A couple years later, Tim would poach my actual assistant, Loni, too.

The reason for the dinner is that Tim is a good guy and more, Hristo had told Tim he would only accept the job if I was OK with it–but neither of them needed to worry. You should absolutely take the job, I said to Hristo. This is the kind of thing I was training you for.

I’m of course very proud of the books I have written and the things I’ve been able to do. I like accomplishing things. I like my success. But anyone who has seen someone they’ve discovered or mentored or opened doors for knows that there is something truly amazing about watching them succeed, when they go on to bigger and better things.

I just had this experience last month. Brent Underwood started as my intern more than a decade ago at the marketing company I was building. Actually, I hired several interns but he was the one that stuck.

Last month, I interviewed him on a very special day: He had just released his first book with Penguin Random House. That would have felt surreal enough if it weren’t for the fact that the book was about a town he owned and had turned into a hugely popular YouTube channel called Ghost Town Living. I have a bunch of plaques on my wall for my appearances on the bestseller list…but I took an incredible amount of pleasure and pride in designing one for his book (which debuted on the New York Times, USA Today and Publisher’s Weekly lists). It won’t hang on my wall, but it will look great on his.

To be clear, I’ve had some assistants and employees that didn’t work out. I’ve had some who I wouldn’t recommend to anyone and others who have just gone on to live normal lives. I’m by no means a perfect picker of talent or potential. But I think I’m pretty good. My last assistant currently runs a large nonprofit.  My current researcher, Billy Oppenheimer, now also works for Rick Rubin and sold his first book last year (he has a great newsletter I read every Sunday).

“Let the honor of your students be as dear to you as your own,” Rabbi Elazar famously said. It’s a wonderful little line, a thought I return to often.

In sports, a “coaching tree” is defined by the coaches and players and executives that a coach has discovered, hired, and mentored and what they go on to do in their careers. That’s a concept I’ve been thinking about a lot. I ended up doing a chapter on it in the new book, actually (BTW–you can preorder Right Thing, Right Now… right here if you want to take advantage of some of the awesome preorder bonuses we’re doing), because it deserves to be recognized outside of sports.

It’s just a wonderful way to measure a life.

By all-time wins, someone like Gregg Popovich of the San Antonio Spurs is a great coach. Five NBA championships, twenty-two winning seasons, two Olympic medals (one gold, one bronze) and a winning percentage of .657 But his coaching tree is unreal. Players like Tim Duncan and Tony Parker and Manu Ginóbili and Patty Mills and Kawhi Leonard and now Wemby. At one point, nearly 30 percent of all the coaches in the NBA had worked for or played under Popovich, and his protégés have, independently, won eleven championships as head coaches (and one G League championship). Five times, someone from his tree has been named the NBA Coach of the Year. Of the current twenty-three black head coaches and GMs in the NBA, seven spent time under Popovich at the Spurs. Becky Hammon, the 2022 WNBA Head Coach of the Year, spent eight years with the Spurs, where she was the first female assistant coach in the NBA and the first to serve as an acting head coach after an ejected Popovich designated her his replacement (she won two-straight WNBA titles as a coach too).

Gregg Popovich’s coaching tree is so extensive, as one sportswriter put it, that it’s actually more like a coaching forest.

What a legacy! Because each one of the coaches and players he shaped has shaped and helped others, starting their own coaching trees that continue on.

Emerson wrote a lot of wonderful things, but one of his sentences is stuck permanently in my head for its sweetness and generosity and prescience. “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” Emerson gushed in a letter to a struggling Walt Whitman in 1855 (which Whitman promptly added as a blurb to the front of his then undiscovered, self-published masterpiece Leaves of Grass).

How lovely is that?

Without Emerson, the careers of Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Ellery Channing, Amos Bronson Alcott, and later William James (Emerson’s godson) and Alcott’s daughter Louisa May Alcott, would have gone very differently. And what of the people their work inspired? Who became poets because of Whitman or because they read Emerson’s essays 100+ years later?

Socrates had a coaching tree of about thirty-three students that we know of. We are all footnotes to Plato, it has been said, but Plato was himself a footnote to Socrates. There was a guy named Thomas Wentworth Higginson who translated Epictetus into English and led one of the first black regiments in the US Civil War. These are incredible accomplishments. But what a feather in his cap that he also helped discover and publish the poetry of Emily Dickinson.

That’s what I like about Popovich’s coaching tree. He didn’t just create a bunch of replicas of himself. Steve Kerr is a very different coach. Becky Hammon and Monty Williams look very different and come from very different places. Nor are all the coaches people he “discovered.” Some are people he gave second chances to. Or gave a safe landing in San Antonio. Maybe he gave them a job or recommended them for one somewhere else. Maybe he spoke up for them during a controversy. The point is, he used his clout, his resources, and his organization–a lot of time to mutual benefit, but sometimes out of pure kindness. That’s a powerful thing.

I can’t write about coaching trees without mentioning my mentor, Robert Greene, who taught me so much about not only writing, but life. It’s funny, Robert talked about “never outshining the master” and “let others do all the work but take all the credit” in the 48 Laws of Power, yet in reality, he’s generous, patient and supportive. No one has helped me more in my career.

How can I possibly repay him? I can’t…all we can do for a great mentor is to pay it forward.

I carry a debt now and I am only able to discharge it through Hristo or Brent or Billy or the random people who email me and ask for advice. I pay it forward through the work that I do. I pay it forward through writing this article if one person supports one person after reading it.  That’s the thing about coaching trees: they’ll die if you don’t tend to them, they survive through grafting and through reproduction.

At the end of your career and your life, you’re going to look back and be proud of your accomplishments. If these were achieved selfishly or solitarily though, it will seem empty and sad. At the end, you’ll be thinking about people. You’re going to think about what your kids have been able to do. You’ll be just as proud of what other people have done, what you’ve been a part of and connected to.

But only if you put the work into it now…working as hard to help others as you do yourself.