Here we are…at the halfway point of the 2020s. The first half seems like it was both yesterday and forever ago, doesn’t it?

Tempus fugit. 

That’s what the ancients said. Time flies. 

But as time passes, as the world changes, how many of us just stay the same? Incredible, unbelievable events have transpired, but I would not say I have transformed myself in any incredible or unbelievable way. 

We go on being the way we always were, not unlike, as Marcus Aurelius noted, those gladiators at the game “torn half to pieces, covered in blood and gore, and still pleading to be held over till tomorrow…to be bitten and clawed again.”

While there is nothing magical about the new year or nothing special about being halfway through a decade, there can be something powerful in these artificial constructs, in deciding to mark a turning point. There’s power in rituals, in moments that encourage us to pause, reflect, and reset. Even the Stoics embraced this. Seneca is said to have begun each year with a plunge into the icy Tiber River, a bracing ritual to wash away the old and prepare for the new.

Here are some habits, some best practices, some things I am going to ask of myself in 2025 (many of which were inspired by The Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge, which starts on January 1st). It’s a big part of my year each year—kicking things off with something that challenges me—and I hope you’ll join us on January 1st. Sign up here and learn more about the challenge in the P.S.

Do The Essential Things First

This is where it all starts: with how you spend the best part of your day. The novelist Philipp Meyer​ (whose book ​​The Son​​ is an incredible read) told me on the Daily Stoic podcast, “You have to be very careful about to what (and to whom) you’re giving the best part of your day.” This wisdom echoes across the habits of many productive people.

Well-intentioned plans fall apart as the day progresses. Our willpower evaporates. The world makes its demands. So it’s key that we prioritize the important things and that we habitualize doing them early. It doesn’t have to be perfect or grand. It just has to come first.

Personally, I fiercely protect my mornings—family first, then writing. My assistant knows not to schedule anything before mid-morning because early calls and meetings don’t just take time—they sap the energy needed for the essential work. I want to give my best self to my most important things. Everything else can come after.

Think Small

The writer James Clear talks about the idea of “atomic habits” (and has a really good book with the same title–it was actually the first book someone bought from The Painted Porch). An atomic habit is a small habit that makes an enormous difference in your life. He tells the story of how the British cycling team transformed themselves by focusing on 1% improvements in every area—tiny adjustments that, over time, added up to extraordinary results. It’s a simple but powerful concept: repetitive actions accumulate.

“Well-being is realized by small steps,” Zeno would say looking back on his life, “but is truly no small thing.” The key is to start small. Thinking big might feel inspiring, but it’s also overwhelming. Thinking small, on the other hand, is easier—and easier is what gets you started.

If you want to read more this year, don’t aim to finish 50 books. Commit to reading one page per day. Struggling with fitness? Don’t promise yourself a marathon—start with a walk around the block. If your eating habits need work, don’t overhaul your diet overnight—just choose one healthier option today.

The point isn’t about how small the change is; it’s about the momentum it creates. Once you start, you can build. As George Washington’s favorite proverb goes, “Many mickles make a muckle.” Small steps add up to something significant.

Focus On Process, Not Goals

Most people start the year with goals—lose 20 pounds, write a book, learn a language. But goals are just finish lines—they’re about achieving something specific, often external, and usually out of your control. A better approach is to focus on the process: the daily work and the practices that will move you forward, regardless of the outcome. As I wrote about recently, I don’t have goals. When I write, I don’t focus on finishing books—that would be overwhelming. Instead, I focus on my notecard system and writing for a couple hours every day. The books emerge from that process naturally, over time. This year, instead of fixating on specific outcomes, focus on the process that will guide you. The results will take care of themselves.

Create or Remove Friction 

Make bad habits more difficult to do. Want to spend less time on social media? Log out after each use, delete the apps, or set screen time limits. I don’t keep social media apps on my phone—they’re on my wife’s phone instead. If I really want to check Instagram or TikTok, I have to ask her first. That extra step is just enough to make me think twice, and because of it, I spend way less time scrolling.

For good habits, make them as easy as possible. In our home, mornings go smoother when the kids’ clothes are picked out the night before, sometimes for the whole week. Packing lunches the night before means we can get out the door with less stress. When I get to my desk in the morning, the three journals I write in are sitting right there. If I want to skip the habit, I have to pick them up and move them aside. So most mornings I don’t move them, and I write in them. 

You can apply this to anything. Want to eat healthier? Don’t keep junk food in the house. Trying to shop online less? Remove saved credit card information from your browser—it adds just enough hassle to curb impulsive purchases. Want to drink more water? Keep a reusable water bottle with you at all times.

Make bad habits harder and good habits easier.

Do Something Good 

With so much happening in the world—so much chaos, so much uncertainty—I’ve found myself trying to focus on one simple thing: doing good for others. It’s the old Boy Scout motto: “Do a Good Turn Daily.” Some good turns are big—saving a life, protecting the environment, helping someone in crisis. But good turns can also be small: a kind word, holding a door open, mowing a neighbor’s lawn, or calling 911 when something seems off. Scouts are taught that it’s these little acts, done bravely and consistently, that make the world worth living in. Marcus Aurelius spoke of moving from one unselfish action to another—“only there,” he said, can we find “delight and stillness.” At Daily Stoic, we try to live this out every year by teaming up with Feeding America. This year, we raised over $230,000 (donate here—we could use your help in getting to our goal of $300,000). The truth is, it doesn’t take much to make a difference. A small act, done consistently, compounds—just like a good habit. Whether it’s holding open a door or holding up a family, the impact is real. As you head into this year, get in the habit of asking yourself: What good turn can I do today?

Do Less, Better

Matthew McConaughey told me he shut down his production company and his music label because “I was making B’s in five things. I want to make A’s in three things.” Those three things: his family, his foundation, his acting career (you can listen to our conversation here). Along the same lines, Maya Smart told me she had to start saying “No” so she could say “Yes” to writing her first book (which you can pick up at the Painted Porch Bookshop). “I had to start setting boundaries,” she said “Steven Pressfield writes about this idea that you do this shadow work. For me, it was volunteering…So I started resigning from boards and telling people, ‘I’m no longer able to do this thing that I used to do because I’m focused on this book.’” Marcus Aurelius would say that doing less “brings a double satisfaction.” You get to do less and you get to do those things better. As we enter 2025, consider what you might need to say “no” to in order to say “yes” to what matters most.

Set Boundaries

In a world of social media, instant gratification, and oversharing, setting boundaries is a lost art. You know, minding your own business, keeping your private life private, not letting people drag you down into the muck, not getting entangled in other people’s dysfunctions (or entangling them in yours), being strong enough to communicate what you like and dislike. Boundaries are about drawing some lines around yourself–healthy borders between what you’ll accept and what you won’t, what you’ll do and what you won’t. Without them, we leave ourselves open to being drained by the demands, chaos, and drama of others. There’s a term for people who not only lack boundaries, but suck others dry with their neediness, their selfishness, their dysfunction, and their drama: energy vampires. This year, don’t be an energy vampire and don’t put up with energy vampires. Be strong enough to keep them at arm’s distance even if they’re beautiful, even if they’re talented, even if they’re family or old friends, even if their helplessness calls to the most empathetic part of yourself. Set boundaries this year. And stick to them.

Don’t Do It All Yourself

Whenever I speak to military groups, I like to share one of my favorite lines from Meditations:

“Don’t be ashamed to need help. Like a soldier storming a wall, you have a mission to accomplish. And if you’ve been wounded and you need a comrade to pull you up? So what?”

I love how Marcus Aurelius delivers that line—with a shrug. So what? There’s no shame in needing help. Whether it’s therapy, asking for advice, or hiring someone to support you, seeking help is often the key to breakthroughs, growth, and success.

Tim Ferriss has a great question that ties into this: What would this look like if it were easy? Often, the answer involves creating support systems or finding the right kind of help. Building habits, achieving goals, or even just making progress isn’t something you have to do alone.

In 2018, we ran the first Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. It was packed with activities and exercises inspired by Stoic philosophy. Even I, the person who designed the challenge, found it transformative. Why? Because being part of a group, all working together, created a sense of accountability and momentum. Knowing others were pushing themselves alongside me made it easier to show up, stay committed, and go further than I might have on my own.

As we kick off 2025, we’re doing another Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge—a 21-day program to build momentum for the rest of the year. If you’re looking to improve your habits, consider finding a similar challenge. It doesn’t matter what it’s about or who’s doing it with you; what matters is having a structure and a community to support you.

If you need help, so what? Hire a coach or trainer. Lean on your team. Join a group. Ask someone who knows more than you. It’s not a weakness to seek help—it’s a strength. Marcus Aurelius reminded himself that we’re all comrades on this mission. Don’t let pride hold you back from getting the support you need to succeed.

Escape The Most Expensive Habit

I don’t gamble. I don’t spend recklessly. But I do have an expensive habit: anxiety. It’s cost me hours of sleep, moments with my family, and opportunities I let pass because I was too caught up in my fears. It’s the vacation I didn’t enjoy, the dinner I spoiled, the car ride I spent stressing instead of being present. Seneca said, “We suffer more in imagination than in reality.” Anxiety drags us into a future that doesn’t exist, forcing us to live out worst-case scenarios that rarely happen. And yet, the time and energy anxiety steals are gone forever. The good news? If anxiety comes from within us, we can choose to let it go. Marcus Aurelius put it simply: “Today I escaped from anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me.” ​I carry a small reminder with me​—a medallion engraved with Epictetus’ phrase, ta eph’hemin, ta ouk eph’hemin (“What is up to us, what is not up to us”). On the back is a quote from Seneca: “He who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary.” These phrases are anchors. They remind me that anxiety doesn’t change the outcome—it only punishes me before anything has even happened. It’s not easy to break free, but we can practice—by staying in the present moment, letting go of what we can’t control, and reminding ourselves that anxiety is an expensive habit. Don’t let it cost you anymore of your life.

Say No To Say Yes

It’s a pretty weird thing to collect. But they help me every single day. 

It started a few years ago when Dr. Jonathan Fader, an elite sports psychologist, gave me a picture of Oliver Sacks, who is in his office speaking on the phone, and behind him is a large sign that just says, “NO!” I added to this motif with a small memo signed by Harry S. Truman, shortly after he became president. His secretary wrote an inner-office memo to ask if they should start saying no to these sorts of requests with all the demands he had on his schedule. “The proper answer underlined, HST”, he wrote back. Surrounded by physical reminders makes it impossible to avoid considering each opportunity and each ask carefully. 

In tech, there’s a term called “feature creep”—when too many ideas or requests dilute the core of a product, leaving it ineffective and unremarkable. The same thing happens in life. Trying to please everyone makes sure you’ll achieve nothing. Borrow E. B. White’s elegant response when asked to join a prestigious commission: “I must decline, for secret reasons.” Or take inspiration from Sandra Day O’Connor—one of her clerks once said with reverence, “Sandra is the only woman I know who doesn’t say sorry. Women would say, ‘Sorry. I can’t do that.’ She would just say, ‘No.’” No, Sandra liked to point out, is a complete sentence. Say no. Own it. Be polite when you can, but own it. Don’t say maybe. Don’t give a bunch of reasons (which invite an argument). Don’t push it until later. Say NO. Understand: Everything you say “YES” to in this life means saying “NO” to something else. 

Go The F*ck To Sleep

Earlier we talked about things sapping our energy and making it increasingly more difficult to make good choices throughout the day. Related to that: All the other habits and practices listed here become irrelevant if you don’t have the energy and clarity to do them. What you plan to do tomorrow is irrelevant…if you didn’t get enough sleep tonight. If you’re burned out, if you’re exhausted, if all you want to do is veg out on the couch. 

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 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. Follow the advice of a book I love to read to my kids: Go the F*ck to Sleep! Morning routines are great, but a bedtime routine is important, too. Being disciplined about wrapping up and winding down is essential. 

Don’t Lose The Rhythm More Than You Can Help

The path to self-improvement is slippery, and falling is inevitable. You’ll sleep in and not be able to read that page, you’ll cheat on your diet, you’ll say “yes” and take on too much, or you’ll get sucked into the rabbit hole of social media. That’s okay. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. You’re only a bad person if you give up. 

​I told Dr. Edith Eger I felt guilty about how I had lost touch with someone and only recently reconnected with them. She cut me off and told me she could give me a gift that would solve that guilt right now. “I give you a sentence,” she said, “One sentence—if I knew then what I know now, I would have done things differently.” That’s the end of that, she said. “Guilt is in the past, and the one thing you cannot change is the past.”

No one is perfect. We all have bad days. We can’t change that. When we mess up, we can’t go back and fix it. But we can move forward. We can be better here and now. We have to. “Disgraceful,” Marcus Aurelius would say, “for the soul to give up when the body is still going strong.”

All of us have fallen short in the last year…and the years before that. We broke our resolutions. We lost touch with people we care about. We made the same mistakes again and again. We were “jarred, unavoidably, by circumstances,” as Marcus said. But now it’s time to pick ourselves up and try again. It’s time, Marcus continues, to “revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help. You’ll have a better group of harmony if you keep on going back to it.”

In other words, when you mess up, come back to the habits you’ve been working on. Come back to the ideas here in this post. Don’t quit just because you’re not perfect. No one is saying you have to magically transform yourself in 2025, but if you’re not making progress toward the person you want to be, what are you doing? And, more importantly, when are you planning to do it?

I’ll leave you with Epictetus, who spoke so eloquently about feeding the right habit bonfire. It’s the perfect passage to recite as we set out to begin a new year, hopefully, as better people.

“From now on, then, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable, or highly or lowly regarded, remember…The true man is revealed in difficult times. So when trouble comes, think of yourself as a wrestler whom God, like a trainer, has paired with a tough young buck. For what purpose? To turn you into Olympic-class material.”

For more life-changing habits to implement in 2025, check out this video on The Daily Stoic Youtube channel: How To Reinvent Your Life In 2025 (8 Stoic Practices You’ll Actually Use).

As I said above, I’m starting 2025 with The Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. It’s 21 days of challenges—presented one per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy—designed to turn you into Olympic-class material. Sign up here before it starts on January 1st.

Each day you’ll get an email from us with instructions for the day’s challenge. These will all be exercises and routines you can begin right away to spark personal reinvention. We’ll tell you what to do, how to do it, and why it works. We’ll give you strategies for maintaining this way of living, not just for this challenge or for this coming year, but for your whole life.

This challenge is my favorite way to start the New Year. Head over to dailystoic.com/challenge and sign up NOW!

I manage my finances pretty well. I don’t gamble, I don’t spend recklessly, and I don’t indulge in luxuries I can’t afford.

But I do have an expensive habit. And you probably have it, too.

Anxiety.

It’s cost me so much.

A lot of misery, a lot of frustration, countless hours of sleep. It’s caused me to miss out on a lot of things that are important to me.

It’s not flashy, it’s not thrilling, and it doesn’t even provide the fleeting pleasures that other vices might. And yet, anxiety is a vice. A habit. A relentless one that eats away at your time, your relationships, and your moments of joy.

How many family dinners have I ruined by letting my mind wander to what could go wrong? How many minutes of vacations have I missed out on because I was preoccupied, lost in spirals about things that hadn’t happened? How many opportunities have I passed up because I was too caught up in my own fears? How much sleep did I waste, lying awake at night, worrying about what might or might not happen?

It doesn’t just steal moments. It adds costs. You leave hours earlier for the airport than you need to, only to sit at the gate. You ruminate on the past or the future at the expense of the project you could be working on. You spend weeks dreading news that you know you could have actually been preparing for, instead of just thinking about.

What does anxiety really give us in return? Nothing but exhaustion and the tiniest sliver of relief when the thing you feared doesn’t happen. And even that relief is fleeting because another worry is always waiting to take its place.

Seneca tells us we suffer more in imagination than in reality. Anxiety turns the hypothetical into the actual. It drags us into a future that doesn’t yet exist and forces us to live out every worst-case scenario in vivid detail. The cost isn’t just mental. It’s physical. It’s emotional. It’s relational.

Take a moment to think about what anxiety has stolen from you.

The car ride that could have been fun, but you spent stressed because you thought you’d be late. The arguments it got you into, the relationships it strained. The way it hijacks your thoughts, like a runaway train, speeding further and further away from the present moment.

And for what?

How often does the thing you were worried about actually happen? Sure, occasionally there are issues that come up. Occasionally, you miss the connection or the package arrives late. But far more often, the imagined disaster dissolves into nothing. Meanwhile, the moments anxiety robbed you of are gone forever.

The Stoics understood this all too well. Anxiety feeds on itself. It’s like the ouroboros—a snake devouring its own tail.

Worry leads to more worry, until the cycle becomes self-sustaining. Marcus Aurelius, in ​Meditations​, put it succinctly: “Today I escaped from anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions—not outside.”

Work. Your kids. Politics. Flying. These things aren’t the source of your anxiety. You are. They’re just places. Just people. Just things happening in the world. We’re the ones getting upset about them. Certainly, the airport isn’t thinking about us!

The good news? If we’re the problem then we can also be the solution.

​I carry a small reminder with me​—a medallion engraved with Epictetus’ phrase, ta eph’hemin, ta ouk eph’hemin (“What is up to us, what is not up to us”). On the back is a quote from Seneca: “He who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary.” These phrases are anchors. They remind me that anxiety doesn’t change the outcome—it only punishes me before anything has even happened.

But even with reminders, breaking free from anxiety is not easy. It traps you in a tunnel where emotions blur your thinking, and every exit seems further away than it really is. You start to feel like a prisoner of your own mind, held hostage by thoughts you can’t control.

Yet, there are tools to escape.

The Stoics offered timeless strategies: stay in the present moment, detach from the illusion of control, and gain perspective. Epictetus reminds us, “It’s not events that upset us but our opinions about them.” Anxiety thrives on those opinions. Letting go of them can be transformative.

Anxiety is expensive—not just in terms of the mental toll, but in the way it costs us our lives. Every minute spent consumed by worry is a minute lost.

Maybe we can’t get rid of it entirely, but like our finances, we can be more efficient. We can budget. We can eliminate unnecessary expenses and get rid of obvious waste.

Anxiety may never disappear entirely. But with practice, you can begin to discard it, as Marcus did. You can remind yourself that it’s within you, not outside. And slowly, you can reclaim the moments it’s stolen.

It’s not easy, but I’m working on it. Every day, I try to get a little better. And I hope you will, too.

Another year and what do I have to show for it? A big stack of books read and ruminated on is not a bad answer. I know some people assiduously track how many books they read, but I do not (Do you count books you made halfway through? Re-reads? Books you read to your kids? Favorites you took off the shelf to find a favorite passage?) because I don’t think it’s a contest. Epictetus was right when he said it’s not that you read but what you read. So I do track my favorites. And boy, there were some books I loved this year. Books that I got a ton out of. Books that in some cases, have already changed my life.

Here, at the end of the year, I try to narrow down all the books I read and recommended ​in this email list​ to just a handful of the best. The kind of books where if they were the only books I’d read that year, I’d still feel like it was an awesome year of reading. You can check out the best of lists from ​2023​, ​2022​, ​2021​, ​2020​, ​2019​, ​2018​, ​2017​, ​2016​, ​2015​, ​2014​, ​2013​, ​2012​ and ​2011​… I can’t believe it’s been 14 years of these roundups!

My reading list is now ~315,000 people and between that and meeting folks who come into my bookstore every day, I hear pretty quickly when a recommendation has landed well. I promise you—you can’t go wrong with any of these.

​Tunnel 29: The True Story of an Extraordinary Escape Beneath the Berlin Wall​ by Helena Merriman and ​Night of the Grizzlies​ by Jack Olsen It’s almost a problem how many amazing books my wife recommended to me this year. It’s not a problem that the books were good, it’s that I sat on them for too long. I’m pretty sure she didn’t even recommend ​Tunnel 29​ to me this year. What an idiot I am for taking my time getting around to reading this because it’s incredible. Like, so good that I sometimes had trouble reading more than a few pages at a time–I would have to get up and walk around or just snack on something to calm down. It’s the story of a German graduate student who escapes into West Berlin…and then despite having no family or loved ones on the other side, spends thousands of hours–at great risk to himself–digging a 442-foot tunnel back to East Berlin to help others escape. So much good Cold War history here, but more than that, just a riveting story. I love narrative nonfiction, as you know, but this one is written by a TV journalist so it has a very unique feel to it. I don’t think I’ve read anything like it before. Just LOVED it. I’m sorry, Samantha, you were right. I should have listened.

And yet…she’s guilty of it too. Because I have been raving about ​The Tiger​ for close to a decade and she read it…this year. Now is ​Night of the Grizzlies​ (one of my favorites this year) as good as ​The Tiger​? Of course not, because ​The Tiger​ is the greatest man vs animal (or animal vs man) book ever written. What I am saying is that ​this book is also great​. I found it mentioned in another book and tracked down a used copy. I’m glad I did because it’s a riveting story of how two grizzlies killed two women in two different areas of Glacier National Park after never having killed a person in the park’s 57-year existence. The book reminded me a lot of Erik Larson’s ​Dead Wake​, too (and I suppose Walter Lord’s ​A Night To Remember​) where your dread increases as the book goes on, as each warning is ignored, each chance to prevent the tragedy is missed, and each page brings you closer to what you know will be the gruesome, violent, and now unavoidable action. ​This book​ deserves to be much more well-known. It was a lot of work, but we tracked down the publisher and got a bunch of new copies for The Painted Porch…which we have repeatedly sold out this year. Very excited that this amazing book is getting a second life. It deserves it. Also if you want another great story, ​The Revenant​ is not just a good movie but an even better book.

​James: A Novel​ by Percival Everett My wife grabbed this for me at First Lights Books in Austin, TX for my birthday. What a wonderful idea for a novel–to tell ​the story of Huckleberry Finn​ and Jim from Jim’s perspective! That Everett is able to take this much darker and tragic perspective and still make it funny? That’s a task worthy of Mark Twain. It’s also deeply moving and I think an important look at how slavery actually was (​Twelve Years a Slave​ is one of the greatest memoirs ever written). I spent my birthday reading ​James​ and I consider that a great gift. Also, it reminded me of two other books I loved: ​Wicked River​ by Lee Sandlin (an absolutely incredible book about the history of the river) and another book I read and loved this year, ​Life on the Mississippi​ by Rinker Buck (about a guy who recently traveled the river on his own raft, not too dissimilar to the one Huck and Jim were on). And of course, the other book I thought of when I read ​James​ was Wright Thompson’s ​The Barn​ (which I took in on a flight to Brazil and back this year), because ​The Barn​ is about Emmett Till and Emmett Till and Huck Finn were the same age. Both books are the story of America–its hope and its evil, its land and its people, its potential and its horrific past. Wright is one of my favorite writers and thinkers (​here’s his episode on The Daily Stoic Podcast​ about the book) but ​this book​ is an essential contribution to American history. I think everyone needs to read ​James​ and ​The Barn​ this year.

​Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World​ by Irene Vallejo and ​The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper​ by Roland Allen I am in awe of artists who can make something you didn’t think would be interesting, just utterly fascinating. And oh my god, ​Papyrus​ is one of the most impressive examples of that I can recall (the invention and the impact of paper???). Last year, I swooned over Ann Wroe’s ​Pontius Pilate​ for similar reasons–it’s a beautiful and insightful study of ancient thought and how we’ve been shaped by it. I just love when you get to read an author who not only has complete mastery of their subject, but complete mastery of story and language, too. The only downside to this book was how many pages I folded for notes that I now need to transfer to my commonplace book…and that brings me to ​The Notebook​. My British publisher sent me this which I’m glad about because I haven’t heard anyone talking about Roland Allen’s lovely book about one of the most transformative pieces of technology ever invented. We don’t really think of notebooks and journals as a piece of technology, but of course, they are–there were dark days before such wonderful things existed. My life is built around my notebooks. I journal before bed (there’s ​even a Daily Stoic Journal​). I have kept a ​“One Line a Day”​ journal (my favorite) for the last 8 years. I have been keeping a “commonplace book” for even longer–none of my writing would be possible without it. (​I learned this from Robert Greene​). Have you heard the phrase “keeping a second brain”? That’s what my notebooks are. Anyway, one of the things that struck me in ​this book​ is how late the invention of the notebook was. Of course, people were taking notes in Greece and Rome (ahem, Marcus Aurelius’ ​Meditations​), but the more modern notebook as we understand it today dates to roughly the 1400s in Florence. And who was one of the first great minds to see them for all their potential? Da Vinci! ​Here’s my pod with Roly​, which you might enjoy.

And a few more… Of course, I couldn’t just pick those few titles. I was blown away by Gary Will’s ​Lincoln at Gettysburg​. I read 3,000 or so pages on Lincoln this year–and many more before that–and this is probably the best. I’ve given something like 30 copies of Brent Underwood’s ​Ghost Town Living​ out to friends at the bookstore this year. And I sent another friend a copy of Cal Newport’s ​Slow Productivity​ (something I’m working to get better at). My in-laws are big Sharon McMahon fans (one of the only ​podcast guests​ they wanted to meet), as a family we all really liked her new book ​The Small and the Mighty​. It’s a book that’s even more important after this election. ​You can listen to my interview with her here​. You can ​also listen to my interview with Julia Baird​, who has two other important books for where the world is right now, ​Phosphorescence​ (about resilience and adversity) and her new one ​Bright Shining​ (about grace, which we could all use more of). Another recommendation my wife raved about was Charles Duhigg’s ​Supercommunicators​ (​our chat here​). I got to work on lacrosse great Paul Rabil’s ​The Way of the Champion​, which I think you’ll like, too (​and here’s our chat​). And lastly, I’ve been hoping for a good biography of Marcus Aurelius for a long time and we finally got one–a great one actually–in Donald Robertson’s book, ​Marcus Aurelius: The Stoic Emperor​ (​here’s our chat about that one​). Definitely read.

Kid books: My oldest became madly obsessed with Greek myths this year, mostly ​The Odyssey​. We’ve been reading ​Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey​ together as well as ​this graphic novel​. My Spotify Wrapped tells me that we spent an almost alarming amount of hours listening to the ​Greeking Out podcast​, which I can’t recommend highly enough to parents with elementary school kids. There are also two great books, ​Greeking Out: Epic Retellings of Classic Greek Myths​ and ​Greeking Out Heroes and Olympians​. As a parent of two boys, I got a lot out of Richard Reeves’ ​Of Boys and Men​ (​here’s our chat​). We read Adam Rubin’s ​High Five​ book many times this year, so much so that our copy is starting to fall apart (the kids love reading it because they get to hit it as hard as they can). We had to put down our 16-year-old dachshund last year, so I loved reading Doug Salati’s ​Hot Dog​. It’s a very sweet book. My youngest is just learning to read and I’m proud to say that he read his first book by himself this year! It was ​Bob Books​. We’re very excited. We also loved Jon Klassen’s ​The Rock From The Sky​ and trolled each other around the house with lines from the book after reading it. ​Matthew McConaughey came out to the bookstore​ last week to do a live event and podcast (coming soon), and he signed a bunch of copies of his children’s book ​Just Because​.