I’m not saying everyone should start a podcast. In fact, I have said the opposite many times. There are way too many of them out there…and most are not good.

I’m just saying that having a podcast is pretty magical because you get (for free) something that no amount of money in the world could buy: Access to some of the smartest and most interesting people in the world. ‘Picking someone’s brain’ is really a form of picking their pocket and yet with a podcast, you get to do that and usually the person says “Thank you so much for the opportunity” at the end.

It’s pretty magical!

Over the last several years, I’ve had the chance to spend more than a few hundred hours interviewing people for the Daily Stoic podcast (which you can subscribe to here and here). And with over 100 million downloads of Daily Stoic’s episodes so far, the people I’ve gotten access to have been beyond my dreams. I am certainly better, smarter and wiser for the privilege.

In today’s email, I wanted to share some of the absolute best things that I’ve learned in that time.

— Les Snead, the general manager of the Los Angeles Rams, told me that inside the Rams organization they talk about having “panic rules.” What do you do when everything gets mixed up, when the coverage is confusing, when the play breaks down and there’s havoc on the field? How do you respond when the play clock is running down and the play call hasn’t come in yet because the headsets aren’t working? “When there’s chaos and your brain is panicking,” Snead said, “go to your panic rules. Slow down and go to your panic rules.” This isn’t just an on-field thing. For the chaos of life, we all need panic rules. Otherwise, you’re liable to make panicked decisions. You’re liable to do something emotional, something short term, something that violates your principles and hurts your cause.

— The Olympic mountain biker Kate Courtney told me a piece of advice she received from her coach when she was pushing herself too hard in practice. “Do you want to be fast now,” her coach asked, “or later?” Meaning, do you want to win this workout or win the race? In Discipline is Destiny, when I say that self-discipline saves us, part of what it saves us from is ourselves. When we are committed, when we are driven, self-discipline isn’t always about getting up and getting to work. It’s easier to workout than to skip a workout, easier to write than relax. The problem with that is that if you want to last, you have to be able to rest.

— Here’s another from Les Snead where he told me his strategy for ignoring the constant criticism from Monday morning quarterbacks and living room GMs. “I intentionally practice Stoicism enough to know, ‘Okay, this comment or this tweet or this simple take shouldn’t disrupt or even ruffle my emotions.’” Les said. When you know what you’re doing, he explained, you have to let your competence double as armor against criticism and complaints. It’s not that he’s egotistical—it’s that he knows his decisions were well thought out by him and his team.

— 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. Marcus Aurelius would say that doing less “brings a double satisfaction.” You figure out what’s really essential and you do those things better.

— Along the same lines, Maya Smart told me about how 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.’”

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

— Somewhat related, the NASCAR driver and student of Stoicism, Brad Keselowski, talked about what distinguishes a professional in his field (and it applies to most fields). “If the conditions were always perfect, the average 12-year-old could do my job,” Brad said. “The problem is that those days are very seldom.” Can you still show up and perform when the conditions aren’t perfect? That’s the question.

— I talked to one of my favorite writers, Rich Cohen, about the many lessons he learned from his father (who is the subject of Rich’s latest, The Adventures of Herbie Cohen: World’s Greatest Negotiator), including: “One of my father’s big things is that the key to success is to care, but not that much. To remain detached. To look at this situation you’re so worried about and say, ‘it’s merely a blip on the radar screen of eternity.’”

— After a billionaire-backed lawsuit put him $200 million in debt (which you can read about in my book Conspiracy), AJ Daulerio was finally driven into drug and alcohol recovery. He told me about how critical it’s been for him to have “emergency routines” that he can rely on when, to borrow Marcus Aurelius’s phrase, he is “jarred, unavoidably, by circumstances.” Whether it’s waking up to bad news, getting hit with a sudden craving, or being sent into a downward spiral by some painful memory flooding back—he has routines that bring him back to center and keep him from giving back all the progress he has made. He gets to a recovery meeting. He picks up his journal. He spends a few minutes meditating. He calls someone else and helps them. As with Les Snead’s panic rules, what you choose doesn’t matter as much as that you choose.

— Another from McConaughey. He told me he’s known in Hollywood as “a quick no and a long yes.” What a great expression! Before he says yes to doing a movie, he sleeps on it for ten days to two weeks in the frame of mind that he’s not going to do it. If he sleeps well, he doesn’t do it. If the thought that he has to do it wakes him up at night, he does it.

— I told Dr. Edith Eger I felt guilty about someone I had lost touch with and only recently reconnected with. 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.”

— When I talked to Dr. Sue Johnson, she talked about how when couples or people fight, they’re not really fighting, they’re just doing a dance, usually a dance about attachment. The dance is the problem—you go this way, I go that way, you reach out, I pull away, I reach out, you pull away—not the couple, not either one of the people. This externalization has been very helpful.

— George Raveling told me that he sees reading as a moral imperative. “People died,” he said, speaking of slaves, soldiers and civil rights activists, “so I could have the ability to read.” He also pointed out that there’s a reason people have fought so hard over the centuries to keep books from certain groups of people. I’ve always thought reading was important, but I never thought about it like that. If you’re not reading, if books aren’t playing a major role in your life, you are betraying that legacy.

— Tim Ferriss advised stripping these three words out of your vocabulary: it’s not fair. Because they are impotent and meaningless. Because they don’t do anything but make you upset.

— “Sometimes,” the professional baseball player Ryan Lavarnway told me, “you just have to say, ‘good swing, bad aim.’” Sometimes you put a great swing on a pitch but hit the ball right to a fielder. Great effort, bad result. So it goes in life. Try to think less about results. Just try to make contact with the ball, just try to give your best. If you do, that’s a win, regardless of whether it’s a home run or an out.

— I asked Matt Quinn, the frontman of indie rock band Mt. Joy, about Mt. Joy’s rise and how the band has navigated success. “It’s helpful to tether to controlling what you can control,” he said. “That’s the thing we think about all the time. We’ve put in a lot of hard work. And if we just keep doing that—if we just keep getting better and practicing our instruments and doing the controllable things—then the outcome will at least not be a failure. I believe that for us. That’s really kind of been our motto.”

— When I interviewed Dr. Lisa Barrett for the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge, she had a great question to ask whenever you have an emotional reaction to something that happens, “Is this the only story?” Is this the only interpretation that fits here? No? What are my other options? What are some other stories I could make up about what happened here?

— James Clear, author of the wonderful bestseller Atomic Habits, told me he carves out “two sacred hours” in the morning to do his writing. “I fit it in,” he said, “before everybody else’s agenda creeps into my agenda.”

— Ron Lieber—the longtime “Your Money” columnist for The New York Times and author of The Opposite of Spoiled: Raising Kids Who Are Grounded, Generous, and Smart About Money (one of my all-time favorite titles)—told me a story about a time his three-year-old daughter asked, “Daddy, why don’t we have a summer house?” He said that she clearly had been pondering the question for some time, that she clearly had an interest in where her family stood in relation to other families, and that she clearly had a hunch that her family could have a summer house but made a decision to not have a summer house. It struck Lieber in that moment: how you spend money is a signal of what you value. “Our choices, not just our words, but our choices have meaning. They are modeling something. They model a certain form of trade-off.”

— Randall Stutman, leadership coach to some of Wall Street’s biggest CEOs, told me his teenage kids taught him an important lesson about power. You gotta figure out how to get people to think it’s their idea to do what you want them to do. “You gotta give up power to keep power,” he said. “You gotta give up power to maintain power.” One of the interesting things about power is that the harder you try to hold on to power, the less of it you actually have.

Thanks for reading these 20 lessons from the hundreds I’ve learned on the Daily Stoic podcast. Remember you can find the full archive at DailyStoic.com/podcast and subscribe to upcoming episodes here and here.

One morning in the middle of the second century AD, the most powerful man in the world was awakened by his orderly.

It could have been in his tent on the front lines of the war in Germania.

It could have been somewhere along his frequent and arduous travels across the empire—in Asia Minor or Syria, Egypt, Greece, or Austria.

But chances are it was at the palace in Rome.

It was early. So early.

The sun still hid. It was cool and dark and quiet.

Like any normal person, a deep part of Marcus did not want to wake up, instead wanting to “huddle under the blankets and stay warm,” he would say. It was nicer there. Easier there.

But then he caught himself. “Is this what I was created for?” he said to himself. To feel nice? To have it easy?

“I have to go to work—as a human being,” he said, hauling his feet up and onto the floor. “Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants, and the spiders and the bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can?” he said to himself but also to us. “And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?”

I first read a passage from Marcus Aurelius about this in his Meditations when I was 19 years old. It was before I dropped out of college, and I was having a similar back-and-forth with myself most mornings. Stuck in an early class I could never seem to get motivated for, my lower self desperately wanted to blow it off. So it was amazing to read the most powerful man in the world chiding himself for wanting to stay in bed. A guy reluctant to get out from under the blankets and put his feet on the cold floor—just like the rest of us. I printed out the full passage and put it on the wall next to my desk.

At the time, that advice was a helpful reminder to myself to get off my ass, to stop being lazy, and to work hard. It was an important early lesson in discipline. As I said in Discipline is Destiny, this decision we make in the morning, it not only determines how our day will go but it determines who we are.

It was early, always early, when Toni Morrison awoke to write. In the dark, she would move quietly, making that first cup of coffee. She’d sit at her desk in her small apartment, and as her mind cleared and the sun rose and the light filled the room, she would write. She did this for years, practicing this secular ritual used not just by writers, but by countless busy and driven people for all time.

“Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact,” she’d later reflect, “where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transition. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense.”

But of course, it was as practical as it was spiritual. Because at the beginning of her career, Morrison was also a single working mother of two young boys. Her job as an editor for Random House occupied her days, her children every other minute, and by the late evening she was burned out, too tired to think. It was the precious early morning hours between the parting dark and the rising dawn, before her boys uttered the word Mama, before the pile of manuscripts from work demanded her attention, before the commute, before the phone calls, before the bills beckoned, before the dishes needed to be done, it was then she could be a writer.

Early, she was free. Early, she was confident and clearheaded and full of energy. Early, the obligations of life existed only in theory and not in fact. All that mattered, all that was there, was the story—the inspiration and the art.

There she was, starting her first novel in 1965, freshly divorced, thirty-four years old and struggling as one of the few Black women in an incredibly white, male industry. Yet in her mind, this was “the height of life.” She was no longer a child, and yet for all her responsibilities, everything was quite simple: Her kids needed her to be an adult. So did her unfinished novel.

Wake up.

Show up.

Be present.

Give it everything you’ve got.

Which she did. Even after The Bluest Eye was published to rave reviews in 1970. She followed it with ten more novels, nine nonfiction works, five children’s books, two plays, and numerous short stories. And she earned herself a National Book Award, a Nobel Prize, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Yet for all the plaudits, she must have been most proud of having done it while being a great mother–a great working mother.

Of course, it’s not exactly fun to wake up early. Even the people who have reaped a lifetime of benefits from it, still struggle with it. You think you’re not a morning person? Nobody is a morning person. In the military they speak of sleep discipline–meaning it’s something you have to practice. We only have so much energy for our work, for our relationships, for ourselves. A disciplined person knows this and guards it carefully. A disciplined person knows that getting their 7-8 hours of sleep every night does not negatively affect their output, it contributes crucially to their best work. It allows them to wake up and take advantage of the most productive hours of the day—before the interruptions, before the distractions, before the rest of the world gets up and going too.

Hemingway would talk about how he’d get up early because there was “no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write.” But we can imagine the mornings when he was hungover or exhausted from partying…those were not as fruitful. Morrison found she was just more confident in the morning, before the day had exacted its toll and the mind was fresh. Like most of us, she realized she was just “not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.” Who can be? After a day of banal conversations, frustrations, mistakes, and exhaustion.

Not that it’s all about being clever. There’s a reason CEOs hit the gym early—they still have willpower then. There’s a reason people read and think in the morning—they know they might not get time later. There’s a reason coaches get to the facility before everyone else—they can get a jump on the competition that way.

Be up and doing.

While you’re fresh. While you can. Grab that hour before daylight. Grab that hour before traffic. Grab it while no one is looking, while everyone else is still asleep.

Today, my routine is a little different than it was when I was in college, but I’m still up early. Now I’m not alone in a dorm but in a house with young children. Instead of an alarm clock, the kids wake me up before 6 a.m. My rule is no phone for at least the first hour of the day. I get the kids in the stroller and go for a three-mile walk. Then I journal for fifteen minutes before tackling the hardest task on the to-do list— it’s always something writing related. I write for about three hours then break the intermittent fast I started at around 6 the night before and do some reading over an early lunch. The pandemic was rough for me like it was for many people but one good thing about it was that I really dialed in my routine (I talk about this at length in the afterword of Discipline is Destiny if you want more detail). I think back now to those endless days of being in the zone, of having few interruptions, and as crazy and weird as they are, I have a nostalgia for them.

“I think Christ has recommended rising early in the morning, by rising from his grave very early,” observed the theologian Jonathan Edwards in the 1720s. Is that why quiet mornings seem so holy? Perhaps it’s that we’re tapping into the traditions of our ancestors, who also rose early to pray, to farm, to fetch water from the river or the well, to travel across the desert before the sun got too hot.

When you have trouble waking up, when you find it hard, remind yourself of who you come from, remind yourself of the tradition, remind yourself of what is at stake. Think, as Morrison did, of her grandmother, who had more children and an even harder life. Think of Morrison herself, who certainly did not have it easy, and still got up early.

Think of how lucky you are. Be glad to be awake (because it’s better than the alternative, which we’ll all greet one day). Feel the joy of being able to do what you love.

Cherish the time. But most of all, use it.

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