I remember driving home from my high school graduation, excited. I was excited not because I was done with school but because of what I was about to start. I’d been working with a friend to put up my first website.

I was going to be a writer.

I’m sure whatever I wrote that day was terrible but that’s sort of the point. It was the first of many, many days. Two decades of days, in fact. I have been writing almost every day for twenty years. How many millions of words is that? I don’t know.

The published output is pretty decent: sixteen books under my own name. Another half dozen or so ghostwritten. One of them was optioned to be a movie starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, directed by Gus Van Sant (if it ever happens…) Ten million copies sold. Articles in the New York Times, Forbes, USA Today, and Thought Catalogue.

But mostly, I can feel it. I feel like I am just starting to hit my stride, just starting to get the hang of it. If you told me twenty years ago that that’s how long real confidence would take, I don’t know if I could have handled it. Still, I stayed at it and here we are…and I’ve learned a few things along the way, both about craft and about life (the two are more related than you think).

So that’s what I wanted to share today…

– I am very ambitious as a writer. I no longer have any ambitions as an author. ​​I’m not aiming at lists. I don’t think about deals. I rarely even look at sales numbers​​. I have stopped tracking how other people’s books are doing. What I’m saying is that I have locked into process and tuned out publishing. The funny thing is that my results have gotten better the more I have flipped this ratio. I have also gotten much more content.

– Related…I once read a letter where Cheryl Strayed kindly pointed out to a young writer the distinction between writing and publishing. Her implication was that we focus too much on the latter and not enough on the former. It’s true for most things. Amateurs focus on outcomes more than process. The more professional you get, the less you care about results. It seems paradoxical but it’s true. You still get results, but that’s because you know that the systems and processes are reliable. You trust them with your life.

– And if you’re doing what you’re doing for external rewards, god help you. ​A Confederacy of Dunces​ was rejected by publishers. After the author’s suicide, it won the Pulitzer. People don’t know shit. YOU know. So love it while you’re doing it. Success can only be extra.

– Speaking of which, that distinction between amateur and professional is an essential piece of advice I have gotten, first from Steven Pressfield’s writings and then by getting to know him over the years. ​There are professional habits and amateur ones​. Which are you practicing? Is this a pro or an amateur move? Ask yourself that. Constantly.

– Professionals work. Amateurs talk a lot about tools. Software does not make you a better writer. If classics were created with quill and ink, you’ll probably be fine with a Word Document. Or a blank piece of paper. Don’t let technology distract you. Helen Simpson has “Faire et se taire” from Flaubert on a Post-it near her desk, which she translates as “Shut up and get on with it.”

– Don’t get caught up trying to please everyone all the time. No one who has ever created anything has escaped criticism. It’s inevitable that some percentage of people will not like what you do. You’ll drive yourself crazy if you think you’re somehow the exception to this. Just stay true to your work and who you are and don’t be too attached to your reputation.

– I’m not sure where I stole the idea from, but I am a big proponent of printing out and putting up good advice and quotes. What goes up on the wall next to where I work can change project to project, but right now, I have a quote from Martha Graham: “Never be afraid of the material. The material knows when you are frightened and will not help.” One from Boccaccio: “Who in our day can penetrate the hearts of the Ancients? Who can bring light and life again minds long since removed in death? Who can elicit their meaning? A divine task that–not human! It is, therefore, my plan of interpretation first to write what I learn from the Ancients, and when they fail me, or I find them inexplicit, to set down my own opinion.” And one from Bob Johnson to Johnny Cash: “You need to build a mausoleum in your head with big iron doors so that nobody can get in there except you. You don’t let me in there, you don’t let June in there, you don’t let your manager in there, you don’t let the record company people in there. You have to decide for yourself what you want to do with your music and not let anyone else tell you.”

– The novelist Philipp Meyer (whose book ​​The Son​​ is an incredible read) ​​told me on the podcast​​, “You have to be very careful about to what (and to whom) you’re giving the best part of your day.” 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.

– Writing ​Trust Me, I’m Lying​, I was 90% conscious about what other people might think and 10% following what was in my heart as an artist. The book I am most proud of is my book ​Conspiracy​. The only parts of it I wish I could do differently are the few instances that, in retrospect, I was too conscious of what other people might think (particularly journalists). I’ve flipped the ratio by this point, but I wish I had gotten to that happier place sooner.

– When ​The Obstacle Is the Way​ came out, it did okay, but I was already deep into working on what would become ​Ego Is the Enemy​. About a year later, Obstacle really took off—teams like the New England Patriots were reading it, and there was a big article that fueled sales. But by then, I didn’t care as much because I was focused on the next book. I accidentally stumbled into a process that protected me from both disappointment and ego—I was too focused on the next thing to get caught up in good or bad news. Now I always try to start the next project before the last one launches, even arranging my schedule so I’m working the day sales numbers come in, to avoid getting caught up in those ups and downs.

– When I look back on my own writing, the stuff that makes me cringe isn’t necessarily even stuff I was wrong about. What disturbs me is the certainty. I thought I knew, but I didn’t really know. I wasn’t even close to knowing. Ego never ages well, even if it was correct in a narrow instance. My books have gotten longer as I’ve gone on. I don’t think I’m being self-indulgent, I think I am being more fair, more compassionate, more truthful.

– I’ve heard this many times from many different writers over the years (Neil Strauss being one), but as time passes the truth of it becomes more and more clear, and not just in writing: When someone tells you something is wrong, they’re almost always right. When someone tells you how to fix it, they’re almost always wrong.

– Along those lines…I wanted ​Trust Me, I’m Lying​ to be titled Confessions of a Media Manipulator. I also should have stuck to my guns about the prologue of ​Ego is the Enemy​ (I didn’t want to be in it, they wanted me in it). In creative disputes, the publisher/studio/investors/etc. are not always wrong, but often they are. And even when they’re not, you have to remember that whatever the decision, you have to live with it in a way they do not. I’ve regretted every time I did not go with what was in my heart as an artist.

– Writing is a byproduct of hours and hours of reading, researching, thinking and making my notecards. When a day’s writing goes well, it’s got little to do with that day at all. It’s actually a lagging indicator of hours and hours spent researching and thinking. Every passage and page has a prologue titled Preparation.

– As I was writing ​The Daily Stoic​, I got into it and decided I would just keep going. That’s what started ​The Daily Stoic email​. I’ve written and sent out a meditation on Stoicism every day since—I’d estimate that’s 1,500,000 words? It might seem like a lot of work to write and put out an email every day for almost nine years…and it is! But it’s also one of my favorite things to do, and it has made me so much better. Committing to this has been a forcing function for my productivity. We all need reps. If I only published books, I wouldn’t get nearly as many reps as I have gotten from publishing these daily emails–each one making me a little better at my craft.

– When Winston Churchill was driven from power, he could have wallowed or retired. Instead, he became a one-man media company—publishing 11 books, 400 articles, and giving 350 speeches between 1931 and 1939. He became more famous in the U.S. than in Britain, delivering his message without intermediation. They tried to cancel him, but it didn’t work. That’s what I’ve built with The Daily Stoic. It’s not just an email list but also a ​YouTube Channel with 2M subscribers​, an ​Instagram account with 3.4M followers​, ​a Twitter account with 600K followers​, a ​TikTok page with 800K followers​, and ​a Facebook page with 1M followers​. It’s Stoicism directly to the people.

– I can’t tell you how many times ​I’ve thought of a great line or solved an intractable writing problem while running or swimming​. Exercise is also an easy win every day. Writing can go poorly, but going on a run always goes well.

– James Altucher has a great rule that I have stolen: write what you’re afraid to say. If your stuff isn’t scaring you, you’re not pushing yourself enough.

– The guy that spoke before Lincoln at Gettysburg went on for about two hours—his speech was 13,607 words long. Lincoln got up and spoke just 271 words. Think about how short ​Meditations​ is. Think about Seneca’s best quotes, how boiled-down and blunt they are. Real insight does not take many words to express. (More on this idea in Gary Willis’ incredible book ​Lincoln at Gettysburg​).

– Near the end of his presidency, Eisenhower asked speechwriter James C. Humes to draft an address. After submitting a draft, Humes was called to Eisenhower’s office to discuss. “What’s the QED of this speech?” Eisenhower asked. Humes was confused. “QED,” he said, “what’s that?” “Quod Erat Demonstrandum,” Eisenhower barked. “Don’t you remember your geometry? What’s the bottom line? In one sentence!” Eisenhower was a brilliant man, but a simple and straightforward one after years in the Army. He had no patience for rambling. This is a good lesson for anyone and everyone when it comes to communication. Don’t dress things up more than they need to be. Don’t hedge. Don’t distract. Speak plainly. Make your point.

– Precisely zero of my sixteen books were immediately accepted by my publisher—and they were right to kick them back at me. In being forced to go back to the manuscript, I got the books to where they needed to be. Hemingway once said that “the first draft of anything is shit,” and he’s right (​I actually have that on my wall as a reminder​).

– Don’t talk about projects until you’re finished. Save that carrot for the end. Talking and doing fight for the same resources.

– My editor Niki Papadopoulos once told me, “It’s not what a book is. It’s what a book does.” This is why musicians follow the “car test” (how does the song sound in a car driving down the highway). It’s not about whether you like it…but about what it does for the people buying it.

– Vivian Gornick said, “What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.” As Robert Greene once told me, it’s all material. If you start asking more often, “How can I use this to my advantage?”—your creative output will not only get better, your life will too.

– Speaking of Robert…I’ve talked before about ​my notecard system​—the process I use to research and write my books, which I learned from Robert. As he says, “A lot of books fail because the writer loses control of the research. You are either a master of the material or it’s the master of you.” That’s true beyond books: You either master your to-do list or the day masters you. You either set clear priorities or get lost in trivial tasks. You either build systems or get overwhelmed by chaos.

– A formative lesson for me when I was Robert’s research assistant came when he sent me off to find stories for his writing. I’d spend weeks gathering material and bring back options I thought might work. At one point, looking over what I’d found, he said something like, “Ryan, all your stories are from nineteenth-century white guys. That’s not going to work.” He wanted diversity in his examples—not just so every reader would feel included, but because a book on the laws of power or mastery or human nature would be incomplete if it only drew on white men from the nineteenth-century.

– One more from Robert. He once told me a book needs to be either extremely entertaining or extremely practical—most fail because they fall somewhere in between. He taught me to ask: What role does this book play in someone’s life? Does it justify its cost to the reader? Readers are customers, and many authors forget that, thinking readers are just lucky for whatever the artist creates. Robert helped me see that a book has to do a job.

– My research assistant ​Billy Oppenheimer​ recently reminded me of a time I once called him about some piece he was working on, and said, “You know the ‘go for the throat’ story in ​Courage Is Calling​?” (Early in the Korean War, with U.S. forces trapped and the enemy advancing, General MacArthur strode to the blackboard, circled the point of attack, and said, “That’s where we should land…go for the throat.”) “That should be your motto,” I said, “write it down. Don’t spin your wheels or backstory your way into the story—grab the reader by the collar and rip them immediately into the story.

– For a long time, my writing habit was all-or-nothing—either I wrote a lot of words or I didn’t. Over time, I’ve lowered the stakes: now the question is simple: “Did I make a positive contribution to my writing today?” Sometimes that means writing, sometimes editing, adding, deleting. Sometimes I’m home and it’s in my office, sometimes I’m on the road and it’s on a plane or in a hotel room. Sometimes it’s a big contribution, sometimes it’s a little contribution. The line from Zeno was that big things are realized by small steps. That’s what I try to remind myself: every day, just make a positive contribution.

– Related…​I once asked one of my favorite writers, Rich Cohen,​ about how he’s able to be so consistently productive at such a high level. He said he approaches a big project like he approaches a cross-country road trip. “The way you deal with long road trips is you set yourself a minimum number of hours a day, no matter how you feel.” The point is that “not much” adds up if you do it a lot.

– Counterprogramming is key. Writing ​The Obstacle Is the Way​ and later launching ​The Daily Stoic​ might have seemed crazy. Not just to me—everyone said so. Who was going to care about some obscure ancient philosophy? The world wasn’t exactly clamoring for books or daily content about Stoicism. But that’s exactly why it worked. It was crazy because no one else was doing it. It was different. It stood out.

– The best way to market your writing is to write the marketing into the writing. My explicit mission with ​Trust Me, I’m Lying​ was to write an exposé of the media system that would shock and appall anyone who followed the news or worked in marketing world. The book was written to provoke, to challenge, to make people uncomfortable enough that they would talk about it. As Elizabeth Wurtzel put it, “Either you’re controversial, or nothing at all is happening.”

– Nothing is so good that it just finds its audience. You have to bring it to them. As literary agent Byrd Leavell puts it to his clients: “You know what happens if your book gets published and you don’t have any way of getting attention for it? No one buys it.” Plenty of artists can make great work. Not everyone has the dedication to make great work and market it. Marketing is where you distinguish yourself and beat out the talent whose entitlement or laziness holds them back.

– Most of all, I’ve learned to enjoy the work. A few years ago, I was talking to a retired pro athlete and they were telling me how they regretted not enjoying the game as much when they played, that they hadn’t had more fun while they played. It wasn’t a particularly unique insight. I’ve heard it in a million speeches and interviews, but I was in the middle of a particularly hard writing project at the time and not having much fun. I remember thinking: I’ve made it. I’m a pro at this really cool job…why am I not enjoying myself? I’ve made a conscious effort since to appreciate that I get to do this, to not let it turn into a grind or a slog.

There is something melancholic about birthdays. I’m not the first to notice this. Another year has gone by, a wise man once said, and we can’t help but note how little we’ve grown. “No matter how desperate we are that someday a better self will emerge,” he said, “with each flicker of the candles on the cake, we know it’s not to be, that for the rest of our sad, wretched pathetic lives…this is who we are to the bitter end…..inevitably, irrevocably. Happy birthday? No such thing.”

Marcus Aurelius?

Not quite, although ​Jerry Seinfeld is now a Marcus Aurelius fan​, I am happy to report.

I’ve always loved that scene from Seinfeld (which happens when George tells Jerry to stop being his funny self). I’ve related to it on some birthdays but on others, like today, I don’t. I find I have grown quite a bit during most of my trips around the sun, to the point where I hardly recognize the person who first started these posts a decade ago (you can see my birthday posts for ​26​, ​27​, ​28​, ​29​, ​30​, ​31​, ​32, ​​33​, ​34​, ​35​, ​36​, and ​37​ here). I feel like I have changed a lot in the last year and that a better self has and is emerging.

Anyway, as always, here are 38 things I’ve learned in 38 years.

– I put up my first website a few days after I graduated from high school and I’ve been writing more or less every day since. It hit me recently that that means I’ve been doing this for two decades. And you know what? I’m just starting to feel like I’m getting the hang of it. If you told me twenty years ago that that’s how long real confidence would take, I don’t know if I could have handled it.

– This reminds me of an old Zen story. A student approaches a master: How long will it take? Ten years, he says. What if I work really hard? the student asks. Fifteen years, the teacher says. No, you don’t understand, the student says, I am in a hurry. Ok, then, the teacher replies, twenty years. Mastery is not something you can rush. Nor can you rush the opportunities you think you need. When I look back, that’s one thing I am struck by, how lucky I am that most of my biggest opportunities came later. If I had gotten them when I thought I wanted them, you know what would have happened? I would have blown them because I wasn’t ready.

– I’ve been a runner a long time and as I’ve talked about before, the one thing you get asked all the time as a runner is “Are you training for a marathon?” My answer has always been, “No, this is the marathon.” That is, the day-to-dayness, the doing it for no reason other than because, is the real challenge I’m tackling.

– Along those lines…I love the phrase from the college basketball coach Buzz Williams, ​be an every day guy​. “You have to be Every Day,” he says. “There’s no, ‘We’ll do it tomorrow.’ No. We’re doing it today…You gotta do it every day. And if you can’t do it every day, then you’re going to struggle because it is every day.” I try to be an every day writer. An every day runner. ​An every day father​. An every day spouse.

– Anyway, the last couple of months I have been training a little—I want to do the 26 miles from Marathon to Athens this summer. I haven’t done it yet, so I can’t be certain about anything, but I will say after looking at a lot of the training regimes, I haven’t had to change much. Which was my point all along: ​If you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready​.

– A couple of years ago, my wife suggested I read this book called ​Fair Play​ by Eve Rodsky. It’s a great book and will definitely improve your marriage. The funny thing is I think the concept of mental load is equally essential in the workplace. If I give someone a task, I should be able to give them effectively all of it—meaning I shouldn’t have to worry about it or them, they should be updating and keeping me informed, if they run into problems they should come to me with the solutions etc. People who can manage themselves go far in life. People who can’t go nowhere.

– Again, it’s always shocking (and humbling) to discover just how hard it is to get good at something. I’ve been doing ​The Daily Stoic Podcast​ since 2018 and ​the long-form interviews since 2020​. We’ve done hundreds of millions of downloads and it did well from the jump—so I think I can say people have always liked it—and yet I had a feeling doing an interview last week (approximately my 550th) that I was just getting the hang of it. But you know what? That sensation—that feeling of really being on the inside of something, finally, the clicking that happens after all that work? There is really nothing like it.

– Why am I rushing my kids? I’m rushing them (and me) where exactly? To the end of their childhood…precisely the thing I will soon enough miss desperately. What will I do with this time I am trying to save, what will I do with this time I get to myself after they go to bed? Watch Netflix?

– ‘​​Rich’​​ is how much you see your kids, I’ve been saying at Daily Dad. ‘​​Power’​​ is how much say you have over your own schedule.

-When I lived in New York, someone told me, “The thing you have to understand about New York is that things just cost what they cost.” This reminds me of Seneca’s famous line about “​paying the taxes of life, gladly​.” Things cost what they cost–travel costs delays, fame costs critics, kids cost noise, etc etc–and the sooner you learn to pay these taxes gladly, the happier you will be.

– ​You are what you won’t do for money​. Your priorities and principles are demonstrated by what you say no to.

– I had the excruciating experience last year of updating ​The Obstacle is the Way for the 10th anniversary edition​. Honestly, I would not wish re-reading (​especially into a microphone for an audiobook​) a book you wrote in your twenties on anyone. And again, that’s a book that has been loved by millions of people! ​There was so much I had to fix​. So much I have gotten better at.

-That being said, if I envy anything about that younger version of myself, it’s that I didn’t have much of the self-consciousness I have now. I was freer. Things were simpler. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I didn’t have the taste to properly judge or understand what I was doing. There is something to be said for that.

– There’s a line in ​The Great Gatsby​ where Jay asks Nick Carraway if he’d like to do a little job for him, a way to make some money on the side. Nick declines and says later, that had he answered differently, perhaps the whole course of his life might have been different. When I look at some of the people I used to work for or knew and I see where they ended up, I often think of how had I made even a few different decisions, I could have ended up on a very different trajectory.

– By very different, I mean very different. For instance, it occurs to me now that I was probably being vetted for something by Peter Thiel (I too had written a memoir he’d liked…). ​I could have gone to Washington in 2017​. I’d like to think I was always just a little too independent to get fully sucked into anyone’s orbit. But maybe I just got lucky. The point is: Each of our choices adds up to who we are going to turn out to be.

– I am very ambitious as a writer. I no longer have any ambitions as an author. ​I’m not aiming at lists. I don’t think about deals. I rarely even look at sales numbers​. I have stopped tracking how other people’s books are doing. What I’m saying is that I have locked into process and tuned out publishing. The funny thing is that my results have gotten better the more I have flipped this ratio. I have also gotten much more content.

– ​The people who are most successful in life, who accomplish the most, who dominate their professions—they don’t care that much about winning​. They are obsessed, instead, with improving at the thing they love doing.

– Most labels are unhelpful, too—filmmaker, writer, investor, entrepreneur, executive. These are nouns. But what gets someone to that position? Verbs. Forget the nouns. Focus on the verbs.

– I don’t know what AI will mean or do over the long term. What I can say is that I have gotten a lot out of it. I mean that practically (for instance, it’s helped me fill out graphics and illustrations ​in my talks​ and ​in the Daily Stoic videos​), but I also mean personally. As in, in figuring out how to use a new technology, I feel invigorated and improved. ​I’ve read books about it​. ​Listened to podcasts about it​. We talk about it in our weekly staff meetings. I’ve taught my kids about it. It is good to figure new things out. It is good to be a beginner at something again.

– You know what AI isn’t going to replace? Actually, what it will necessitate even more? A good bullshit detector. It may well turn out that the most valuable thing a person can have in this new era is a broad liberal arts education and a strong dose of common sense.

– As I waited at my gate at the airport for an extra hour or so the other day, it occurred to me: This is what anxiety steals from you. Or rather, this is what we steal from ourselves when we are anxious. I could have been at home with my kids, but I had let the remote possibility of traffic override my ability to do that. It occurs to me this is true not just for time, but for the present moments it takes from me and for the conflict it sucks me into. ​Anxiety is expensive​.

– Related…​I had an incredible conversation with Dr. Becky Kennedy​ that every parent—or really just any human—needs to listen to​. (If you haven’t read her book, ​​Good Inside​​, yet…what are you doing?!). ​In the episode​, she defined anxiety as “some amount of uncertainty coupled with our underestimation of our ability to cope.” It reminded me of what Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations: “Consider all that you’ve gone through, all that you’ve survived.” If these last five years haven’t given you a sense of your ability to cope…I don’t know what will.

– The less news I consume, the more informed I seem to get. “Read not the Times,” Thoreau wrote. “Read the Eternities.” Read old books. Read philosophy. Read history. Read biographies. Study psychology. Study the patterns of history. Read ​​The Great Influenza​​ to be informed about pandemics. Read ​​All The King’s Men​​ and ​​It Can’t Happen Here ​to be informed about the demagogues of this moment. Read ​The Moviegoer​ to understand your listless teenager. Read ​The Years of Lyndon Johnson​ to study power and ambition. ​Read the Stoics​. And definitely, definitely, definitely, read ​Zweig’s biography of Montaigne​ (​which I talk about here​).

– I’m not sure I’ve ever opened a social media app and then after logging off thought, “Wow, I’m so glad I did that.”

– Conversely, I have never taken a walk without thinking, after, “I am so glad I did that.”

– I am always glad I jumped in the water. Even when—perhaps especially when—it’s really, really cold.

– It’s also rare that I have regretted asking for help. Sure, sometimes it can be more trouble than it’s worth, but at least I got some practice doing a thing that’s hard–being vulnerable, putting myself out there, connecting with someone.

– At least once a week, someone asks us if we’re going to open a second location of ​the bookstore​. And at least three struggling bookstores have reached out about us acquiring them. The answer is usually a polite “no.” Sometimes it’s “Are you insane?” “Do Not Go Past The Mark You Aimed For” is one of the most important laws in ​The 48 Laws of Power​. Know when you’ve won. Know what enough is. Know your limits.

– A couple of months ago I was working on something in a car from JFK to Manhattan. The car bounced and the Sharpie I was using made a little mark on the door. It was stupid for me to have been using a permanent marker in a moving car, but obviously, the driver didn’t see and I could have just gotten away with it. It was weird how much I had to work myself up in my head to tell the driver when I got out. “If you have to charge me for it, I understand,” I said. It was an uncomfortable little conversation, but I’m glad I had it. I honestly don’t even know if they ended up charging my card for anything, but if they did it was worth it. Calling fouls on yourself is not fun, but it’s a habit you need to build.

– A day or two ​before my ill-fated talk at the Naval Academy in April​, as I was weighing whether I was going to speak up about the book bannings on campus in my remarks, I emailed someone who I really admire. They are a USNA graduate and someone who has served their country for many years with quiet, honorable leadership. I said, hey, I’m thinking about saying something but I don’t want to cause trouble for anyone and I definitely don’t want to get a good person fired (especially if they end up replaced by someone worse.) This is what they wrote back:

“I think you should just speak directly about what you truly believe. That is always a path.”

– I will say, in these deranged times we live in, one thing I have continually taken solace and inspiration from is when smart people or people whose work I respect, take a little time out of their day to say “Hey, I’m not OK with what’s happening,” or use their platform to reiterate basic values like decency, honesty, justice or kindness. Maybe this doesn’t feel like much to them or to you, but we are social creatures. We look around us, we look above and below us and we make our choices based on what we see other people doing. Deciding to stay silent breeds silence and complicity. ​Speaking up breeds courage and virtue​.

– After a flight into LAX and a long drive to Palm Springs, I finally got my family into our hotel room. Then I started changing to go for a run. Are you out of your mind, my wife said. It was 4pm and 104 degrees out. “That’s not self-discipline,” she said, “that’s self-harm.” She’s probably right. It’s a fine line…and sometimes my problem is too much discipline, not too little.

– Something I’ve started saying all the time to employees: “Let’s start the clock on this.” If the bindery says it’ll take six weeks to make another run of the ​leatherbound Daily Stoic​, I want to “start the clock” as soon as possible. I don’t want to add days or weeks by being indecisive, procrastinating, or slow to process an invoice. We don’t control how long others take, but we do control whether we waste time on our end. The project will take six months? Start the clock. You’re going to need a reply from someone else? Start the clock (send the email). Getting the two quotes from vendors will take a while? Start the clock (request it). It’s going to take 40 years for your retirement accounts to compound with enough interest to retire? Start the clock (by making the deposits). It’s going to take 10,000 hours to master something? Start the clock (by doing the work and the study).

– Whenever I go and do something with my kids (like a trip or an activity or an errand) I try to tell myself: Success is wanting to do this again. That is to say, it’s not about accomplishing anything or checking off certain boxes—did we see all the sights, did we get what we needed to get, did we arrive on time or whatever—it’s ultimately whether we got along well enough, enjoyed the experience enough, that at some point in the future they’ll say: “Hey, remember when we went to that concert? Can we do that again?” or “Oh, you’re driving across town to grab that thing? Can I come?”

– For a long time, my writing habit was all-or-nothing—either I wrote a lot of words or I didn’t. Over time, I’ve lowered the stakes: now the question is simply, “Did I make a positive contribution to my writing today?” Sometimes that means writing, sometimes editing, adding, deleting. Sometimes I’m home and it’s in my office, sometimes I’m on the road and it’s on a plane or in a hotel room. Sometimes it’s a big contribution, sometimes it’s a little contribution. The line from Zeno was that big things are realized by small steps. That’s what I try to remind myself: every day, just make a positive contribution.

– It’s important to realize that most of the time people are not playing three-dimensional chess. Most of the time they are slaves to their emotions and impulses. Most of the time they have no idea what they’re doing at all. I’ve been amazed at the degree to which smart people I know manage to convince themselves that what they’re seeing is part of some thought-out plan and thus rationalize what is obviously insane or explain away what would be otherwise deeply alarming. We forget ​Hanlon’s Razor​ at our peril.

– When we were working on ​​​What You’re Made For​​​, George Raveling—who I think is one of the most remarkable people of the 20th century—said that when he wakes up in the morning, as he puts his feet on the floor but before he stands up, he says to himself, “George, you’ve got two choices today. You can be happy or very happy. Which will it be?” (Voltaire put it another way I love: The most important decision you make is to be in a good mood.)

– The basic most essential of responsibilities: Do not let assholes turn you into an asshole. To not let the cruelty harden you, to not let stupidity make you bitter, to not let outrage pull you down to its level, to not let the sonsofbitches turn me into a sonuvabitch. It is a timeless struggle, as Zweig put it in 1942 about Montaigne in 1562, saying that we must “remain human in an inhuman time.”

– Remember, you don’t die once at the end of your life. You are dying every second that passes. We are going in one direction. Don’t rush through it. Don’t miss it. Have something to show for it.

—

I feel very lucky not just to be 38 but to be here at 38. I have been blessed in so many ways. I have been able to live so much. I’m good. If I get to do another one of these a year from now, I’ll be grateful, but it will be a bonus.

I spoke at a biohacking conference a few weeks ago where the stated purpose was all about living well into your hundreds. I teased them a little. Why? I said. So you can spend more time on your phone? So you can accumulate more stuff? So you can check more boxes off your to-do list? It’s not like these were researchers trying to cure cancer or engineers trying to bring clean water to communities that don’t have it, or scientists trying to solve the climate crisis—people whose services the world desperately needs…yet we all think we need to, deserve to, live forever.

I hope I get a lot more time with my kids and my spouse and my work, I do. But I also understand that I’ve gotten a lot of time on this already—and that too much of it I wasted or didn’t appreciate in the moment.

These 38 years have been good to me, better perhaps than could be reasonably expected. I think I’ve used them well. I hope you do, too.

—Today’s newsletter is sponsored by Shortform.

It was a sales pitch, so I take it with a grain of salt, but according to an email I got a few weeks ago, I have a seven-figure opportunity sitting in front of me.

And I’m apparently too stupid or closed-minded to see it. 

All I would have to do is partner with a supplement maker and produce a line of supplements connected to the Daily Stoic brand—marketing their ability to help with “calm, clarity, and resilience”—and I could very easily make several million dollars. They’d handle everything: procurement, production, design, fulfillment. I’d just have to lend my brand and my platform to do it. 

The only problem? I don’t want to. 

I’m not exactly opposed to supplements or vitamins. I actually take a few each morning. I even advertise some on the Daily Dad and Daily Stoic podcasts. Nor am I opposed to making money. I don’t think there is anything wrong with it, and neither did the Stoics (“No one has condemned wisdom to poverty,” Seneca writes in On The Happy Life. “The philosopher shall have considerable wealth, but it will not have been pried from any man’s hands, and it will not be stained with another man’s blood.”)

But I have always declined to do things like Daily Stoic T-shirts and hats and cheap merch: It doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t get me excited. It doesn’t seem like a responsible use of my platform. 

So as long as I’m in charge, it won’t be. 

I remain a proud capitalist. I have built companies and invested in many others over the years. I make and sell a lot of things for Daily Stoic. But I like the things we make. I believe in them. They were things I wanted to create for my own personal use or that I thought addressed a real need—that they worked commercially was extra. (Nor do I pressure anyone about them. If you don’t like it…don’t buy it! That’s the other part of capitalism when it works well: It is a voluntary exchange.)

I understand that there is a certain privilege in my attitude, which is why I do my best not to judge people in different financial circumstances. At the same time, I have come to believe that we are defined by the things we don’t do for money. 

Do you know who Audie Murphy is? He’s the most decorated soldier in American history. Before he turned 21, he fought in nine campaigns, was wounded three times, and received 33 medals for valor—including the Medal of Honor, three Purple Hearts, and every combat decoration the Army offers. Once, against an onslaught of 250 German soldiers and six tanks, Murphy ordered his men to fall back to safety—alone, he climbed into a burning tank destroyer and used its single machine gun to hold off the Nazis for over an hour, single-handedly killing 50 of them, refusing to give an inch of ground, holding the woods until reinforcements came. (Read his memoir, To Hell and Back…it’s incredible.)

After the war, he became an actor and a musician. In 1968, he did another courageous deed: he turned down enormous sums of money to appear in a series of cigarette and alcohol commercials. “How would it look: ‘War Hero Drinks Booze’?” he said. “I couldn’t do that to the kids.”

I was also struck by Harry Truman’s ability to rise up through the corrupt Kansas City political machine without being corrupted. “In all this long career, I had certain rules I followed, win, lose or draw,” Truman explained. “I refused to handle any political money in any way whatever. I engaged in no private interest whatever that could be helped by local, state or national governments. I refused presents, hotel accommodations or trips which were paid for by private parties…I made no speeches for money or expenses while I was in the Senate. I lived on the salary I was legally entitled to and considered that I was employed by the taxpayers, and the people of my country, state and nation.” I was even more struck by his post-presidency years because they stand in such contrast to the practice today: Truman was nearly broke after leaving office. In fact, the reason there is a presidential pension is because people were concerned about a destitute former president! Yet for Truman, this outcome was vastly preferred to compromising his principles. 

In Right Thing, Right Now, I tell the story of Martha Graham, who was approached in 1935 with the opportunity of a lifetime: an invitation to present her work at the upcoming Olympics. It was a chance to dance on the world stage, the kind of opportunity that no talented or ambitious person could afford to turn down.

​​Yet there she was, turning it down.

“Three-quarters of my group are Jewish,” she told the emissaries from Berlin. “Do you think that I would go to a country where they treat hundreds of thousands of their coreligionists with the brutality and cruelty that you have shown Jews?” Shocked that self-interest hadn’t worked—that she wouldn’t look the other way like so many others—the Nazis tried a different tactic. “If you don’t come,” they warned, “everyone will know about it and that will be bad for you.”

But Graham knew precisely the opposite was true. “If I don’t come,” she said, “everyone will know why I didn’t and that will be bad for you.” She may have been a starving artist well into her forties and could have used the money and exposure, but it wasn’t worth her integrity. It wasn’t worth her soul. By acting on her principles, she struck a public blow against an evil not enough people had yet condemned. 

Back in April, I told this story on stage at the global gathering of the Entrepreneur’s Organization. Everyone broke out in applause at Graham’s line, but as they say–and as Graham would have experienced–you can’t live on gratitude or respect. It must have been a hard choice. It must have been a scary choice. It was the right thing to do as a person…but it didn’t change the fact that she still had her financial obligations as a businesswoman with dancers to support.

Every entrepreneur knows that struggle. You have your views…and you also have payroll to meet. Or investors to satisfy. Or your ego to fill…

It’s the scene in The Great Gatsby where Gatsby approaches the young Nick Carraway, the cousin of Daisy Buchanan, the love of Gatsby’s life. Ultimately hoping to win back Daisy, Gatsby tries to first win over Carraway. “I carry on a little business on the side, a sort of sideline,” Gatsby tells him. “And I thought that if you don’t make very much…this would interest you. It wouldn’t take up much of your time and you might pick up a nice bit of money. It happens to be a rather confidential thing.”

It’s only later that Nick, understanding more clearly that Gatsby was a gangster and a bootlegger, comes to see that “under different circumstances that conversation might have been one of the crises of my life.” Gatsby was trying to draw him in, hoping to hook him on the money and the lifestyle. 

I have not always been good at this and I have gotten myself into some fixes that might have gone badly for me. I sometimes look back at clients and people I worked for in my twenties—and even later—and I feel the urge to take a shower. Growing up, I suspect I heard my parents talk more about financial success than about integrity or ethics. It took time for me to develop both the character and the confidence to be better able to say “NO” to things that gave me the ick or that seemed iffy. 

I wrestle with it still. I turned down a talk last year from an organization I thought was a scam. I weighed whether I should cancel another one recently with someone whose politics I find abhorrent.  

My reading has helped me get better at this. Perhaps because my inclination was to make money, I found it particularly impressive when people turned down an opportunity to make money. Especially when those people really needed it. Especially when it was a lot of money.  

Imagine if you had been offered one of those enormous greenwashing contracts from LIV, a Saudi-backed rival league. Ditching the PGA (and trying to bully their old league into letting them keep their privileges in the process) wasn’t technically illegal. But it was definitely pretty gross.

Rory McIlroy turned down hundreds of millions of easy dollars because he believed that the new league was bad for the game. That where his money comes from matters. That his choices don’t just reflect his own values and priorities, they shape those of the many young players, the future generation of golfers, who look up to him. And that a decision “you make in your life purely for money,” he explained, “doesn’t usually end up going the right way.”

(And by the way, what was his reward for this? His game took a major hit from the distraction and the PGA hung him out to dry!)

But that can be how it goes. 

Do you know what they called Truman when he was elected to the Senate? The colleagues who didn’t snub him as a hick referred to him as the “Senator from Pendergast”—implying that he was bought and purchased, in the pocket of Tom Pendergast, the all-powerful Kansas City boss. Truman, who had forgone millions in bribes and deals, still got stuck with a reputation for being corrupt! 

If you’re making the right decision because you want to be rewarded reputationally, you’re probably going to be disappointed. 

Even though I feel like I’ve made some expensive decisions about what I won’t do in my career—as well as some expensive decisions in how we do what we do (I talk about our manufacturing and import decisions here)—I still have to put up with people accusing me of “$toicism” or being a grifter or whatever. There are plenty of people who dislike the coins we make or the courses we have done—or even the fact that I write books! I turn down all sorts of lucrative ads—from gambling sites and alcohol companies and THC companies and crypto—and still, the comments sections on our videos and the podcast are filled with complaints about advertisers. I’m sure someone will respond to this very email with a disagreement about whoever sponsored it. 

That’s something Marcus Aurelius talks about in Meditations—the frustrating experience of “earning a bad reputation by good deeds.” It can even be more galling than that. Someone else will do some kind of Stoic supplement at some point! They’ll probably make a bunch of money from it. 

That person will just not be me. 

You can’t call it a principle, as the expression goes, unless it has cost you something—money, access, friends, followers, convenience, an opportunity to get ahead. 

You shouldn’t call yourself rich unless your hands are clean.

It’s not really your platform unless you decide what goes on it. 

You’re not free if you can’t say no.

And you don’t know who you are unless you know what you won’t do for money.