I’d put in my hours.
482 weeks.
3,379 days.
That’s how long I’d been studying the Stoics when I sat down to write the Daily Stoic. I was 29 years old and I knew enough to write a couple-hundred-page book, one Stoic entry for every day of the year.
But there’s a difference between knowing something and really understanding it. That’s an important Stoic idea: you don’t read the Stoics once or study them at some point in your life. You are always studying them. You are always learning from them. You’re always understanding them in a new way.
That was ten years ago.
1,042 weeks.
7,294 days.
175,056 hours.
I can hardly believe it’s the ten-year anniversary of *The Daily Stoic.* What have the last ten years of Stoicism taught me? In those ten years, I’ve become a parent. We lived through a pandemic. We lived through political unrest. I’ve learned new things. I’ve met new people. I’ve lost people. I’ve been through some stuff, as I’m sure you have too.
I was lucky enough that the publisher let me go back and update the book based on those lessons for the 10th Anniversary Edition. The words from the Stoics haven’t changed—although we did put a bunch of new quotes and entries in the new book—but I have changed. My understanding of them has gotten deeper and better. And that’s what I’d like to talk about: the Stoic ideas I understand very differently now than I did when I wrote The Daily Stoic ten years ago.
Stoicism asks something of you
When I first came to Stoicism—at 19—I came to it like a lot of young people, especially young men, come to it. I was ambitious. I wanted to know what Stoicism could do for me: how it could make me more productive, more resilient, tougher, wiser.
I was drawn to how the Stoics could help me control my emotions, handle adversity, and stay focused. If Stoicism helps you with that, awesome. But you can’t leave it there, because the point of Stoicism isn’t to make you more productive. It’s not to make you richer. The Stoics believed that the purpose of the philosophy was to make you a better person.
Stoicism isn’t just about what it can do for you. It also asks a lot of you.
Looking at the completed first draft of The Daily Stoic, it hit me: Marcus Aurelius talks about the common good something like eighty times in Meditations. That is more than he addresses almost any other topic, including so many of the ones he has become famous for.
So Stoicism has to be about making you more courageous, making you more just. It has to help you become a better parent, a better neighbor, a better citizen—as we quote Marcus saying in the book, a better forgiver of faults, a better friend in tight places.
When I was younger, I was more interested, selfishly, in what Stoicism could do for me. As I’ve gotten older and seen what the book has done for people, I’m more interested in how I can be of service, what Stoicism is asking of me.
With the success of the book, which is about ideas that are not my own, I’ve had to wrestle with this. I even have a card on my wall next to my desk that says, “Are you being a good steward of Stoicism?” Am I living up to my obligations and responsibilities? Am I doing what Stoicism asks of me?
Every obstacle is an opportunity—but to do what?
When I wrote The Obstacle is the Way in my twenties, I took that Stoic idea to mean there’s always some way to turn adversity into advantage. The simplest idea at the center of the book is that there are hidden advantages in every problem, that businesses and teams and people can take seemingly impossible situations and triumph over them.
But what I’ve come to understand in the intervening years is that the Stoics were getting at something more profound than the fact that every downside can be flipped into some kind of advantage or transformed into a success story. The “opportunity” the Stoics saw inside adversity, big and small, was the opportunity to practice virtue.
In the new edition’s October 1st entry, we added a quote from the lesser-known Stoic Arius Didymus, laying out those four Stoic virtues: “There are four primary virtues: practical wisdom, self-discipline, courage and justice.” Marcus called them the “touchstones of goodness”—guiding principles for how to act, who to be, and how to respond in any situation.
And there really is no situation that we can’t use as a way to practice these virtues. Even the hardest, most tragic, most heartbreaking moments of life—a terminal diagnosis, a crippling injury, losing your livelihood, burying a loved one—can be transformed by endurance, by selflessness, by courage, by kindness, by decency.
Have the discipline to say no
When The Daily Stoic came out, I was at an inflection point in my career. Some of my books had done well. Some had done not so well. But they certainly hadn’t blown the doors off.
I was working really hard, taking every opportunity, saying yes to everything. But then the book came out and started to do well, then really well—better than anyone could have imagined. It’s a pretty timeless trajectory: at the beginning of your career, you’ve got to say yes to everything so you can get to a point where you start having to say no to almost everything.
Marcus Aurelius says in Meditations to ask yourself, is this thing essential? Because so much of what we do and say is not essential. That was challenging for me. It wasn’t until the pandemic forced me to say no to everything that I realized the cost of all the things I was saying yes to.
I ended up closing down my marketing company. I said no to a lot of the speaking, traveling, and consulting I was doing. I had to say, Hey, what’s really meaningful to me? What are the things that only I can do? What are the things that, if I didn’t do them, wouldn’t get done?
I have pictures of my kids on my wall—my oldest on the top, my youngest on the bottom—and in between is a sign that just says “No.” It’s a reminder that when I say no, I am saying YES to them.
You want to get to what Seneca defines as euthymia, or tranquility, where you have a sense of your path and you’re not distracted by the paths that crisscross yours. Keeping up with the Joneses—or, in his case, the people who are lost, who are wandering this way or that way.
You want to make sure your discipline is not compulsion. That you have the strength to do the things that actually need to be done, and the discipline to say no to the things you shouldn’t do anymore.
Know what enough is
If you’re ambitious, if you’re driven, you always want more. You always want to sell more books. You always want to do more.
Seneca defines this as a form of poverty. He says poverty is not just having too little. It’s also wanting more.
With the success of my books, I had to remind myself: Hey, what was the goal here originally? To write one book. And then the next goal was, what if I could write about this philosophy that I love? So I wrote one book about Stoic philosophy, and I thought that would be it.
Now I’ve written several. The Daily Stoic became a bestseller that put me in a different tax bracket, that gave me security. It gave me purpose. It gave me a mission. It gave me an audience.
But how quickly we move the goalposts. And how quickly we make our happiness dependent on those moved goalposts. Marcus Aurelius talks about the problem with ambition: it’s so often tied to things outside our control.
It’s funny: the same year that The Daily Stoic came out—and it did sell well—a friend of mine, Mark Manson, put out a book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck,* that sold probably more in that year than The Daily Stoic has sold in its lifetime.
There will always be people who have sold more, done better, who make your accomplishments seem small in comparison. But if you let that make you feel small, you’re stealing from yourself the reality of the success you’ve had.
Knowing what enough is, what you were actually after, what’s in your control, is important. Because you could succeed beyond your wildest dreams and still be miserable, still feel insecure, still feel inferior. And that’s terribly, terribly sad.
Sometimes success can teach us, if we’re willing to listen, what actually matters, what’s actually up to us, and whether we’ve actually succeeded in what we set out to do.
Wish for things to go the way they have gone
In 2016, if you had asked me how I thought the next ten years would go, or how I wanted them to go, I wouldn’t have guessed any of this. I certainly wouldn’t have asked for a pandemic. I wouldn’t have asked for the market to behave the way it did. I wouldn’t have asked for the political disturbances. I wouldn’t have asked for some of the things that happened to me personally and professionally.
Which is the point. You don’t get a choice. Nobody asked. The world is going to do what it’s going to do. We have to figure out how we respond to it. That is the basis of Stoic philosophy.
Epictetus talks about this most movingly, given the adversity he experienced: the key is to wish for things to go the way they have gone. To see them as uniquely fated and designed for you, because they have set you up to be who you are.
If you asked Marcus Aurelius, did he want his reign to be defined by a plague and famine and flood and war? He would have said, “Of course not.” And yet, this is why we admire Marcus. This is what made Marcus great.
If someone else had been in his place in that moment, the world might have turned out very differently. And perhaps if things had gone the way he wanted, he would have failed that test and been an underwhelming or a disappointing figure.
Seneca says fortune is going to behave exactly as she pleases. We can’t be surprised by this. All we can do is prepare. All we can do is respond well. All we can do is use this as an opportunity to be what we could only be in these circumstances.
We are made to be of service
We quote the Stoics over and over again in The Daily Stoic: we are made for each other. The phrase “common good” appears more than 80 times in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. He said that a good life is simply about moving from one unselfish action to another, that our only job is to do good for other people.
As I’ve gotten older, as I’ve had kids, as I’ve built businesses, as I’ve interacted with the millions of people who are into Stoicism, I’ve become much more rooted in that idea. Next to my desk, I have a notecard taped to the wall that says, “Am I being a good steward of Stoicism?”
Am I living up to my obligations and responsibilities? Am I using the success that this philosophy has brought me to introduce more people to the philosophy? Am I making positive contributions to the common good?
That question guides everything I do. How we spend our time and money. The content we make. The decision to stop spending money on advertising. The causes we support. The injustices we speak out about. Not all of these decisions are good for business. Some are not popular. Some make people mad. Some have probably cost us business.
But the filter isn’t if I am making good business decisions. It’s if I am being a good steward of this philosophy that’s given so much to me. If I am being of service. If I am doing good for others.
Find one thing every day
The Daily Stoic, as a page-a-day book, mirrors what Stoicism is supposed to be: a daily practice.
Seneca, in one of his letters to Lucilius, said his goal was to find one thing every day. Just a little thing that makes him better, that makes him smarter, that fortifies him against poverty, that helps him prepare for his ultimate death. The path to wisdom is these little things, little by little.
Zeno said something similar: well-being is realized by small steps, but it’s no small thing.
The Daily Stoic could have been just a collection of the greatest hits of the Stoics. It could have been our favorite selections. It could have been some of the best essays, exploring them at length.
But by being a page a day, one thing every day that you review in the morning or at night—and, of course, people with The Daily Stoic Journal sitting down and writing about these passages, reflecting on them—it mirrors what Stoicism is.
That’s what Marcus Aurelius was doing in Meditations. Digesting one thought, one idea, one lesson every single day. Sometimes the same lesson over a period of time, trying to get better as he goes. That’s what Stoicism is as a practice.
Read and reread
It is a strange experience, now that I’m in my late thirties, to pick up something I wrote ten years ago, when I was in my twenties.
As I went back through The Daily Stoic, I found parts that were mortifying, parts that were cringe, parts that I understand and think about totally differently now.
It was the philosopher Heraclitus who said that we never step in the same river twice. Because we are always changing. It’s equally true that we never read the same book twice—because while the contents don’t change, we do. Our circumstances change. The world changes. That’s why it’s important that we read and reread. I couldn’t have anticipated how much my understanding of the Stoics would evolve as I went along. And I couldn’t have fully understood all that I was missing.
For this anniversary edition, Steve and I revisited every page, adding new translations, new stories, and revised meditations. My understanding of the Stoics has gotten deeper, and I wanted the book to reflect that.
It wasn’t until the middle of the pandemic that I was reading Marcus Aurelius and all these allusions—and, in some cases, direct references—to a plague that he was living through fully landed with me. It wasn’t until I had kids that I was able to understand just what a theme it was for the ancients, in this time of infant mortality: worrying about your kids, about something terrible happening to them, and how they would manage that.
That’s what I wanted to bring to the new anniversary edition: another ten years of reading these ideas, thinking about them, and trying to live by them. Along with Steve Hanselman—my coauthor who translated all of the book’s Stoic quotes—I went through it page by page, asking what could be clarified, improved, or added.
There are some things you can only understand at different points in your life. And so you have to read and reread, read and reread, go back to the ideas over and over and over again. You change and grow with the ideas.
Don’t rush through it
One of the most common themes in the Stoic writings is memento mori. Remember you are mortal. I carry a Memento Mori coin with me. It has a quote from Marcus Aurelius on the back: “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”
For the Stoics, meditating on mortality is supposed to be sobering, supposed to wake you up. I found that a little depressing at first. But I’ve come to understand, as I’ve gotten older, that meditating on your mortality doesn’t just give you urgency. It gives you the present moment.
In one of the most haunting passages from the Stoics, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius both talk about this: as you tuck your children in at night, tell yourself they may not make it until the morning.
Before I had kids, I took it to mean that attachments can be a source of vulnerability. This is like the Zen Buddhist idea: the cup is already broken. Is that what that practice is?
Now, having done hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of bedtimes with my kids, particularly in some scary moments like the early days of the pandemic, I’ve come to understand what they’re saying: Slow down, man. Why are you rushing through this? This could be your last bedtime. Be present for it. Enjoy it. Soak it in. You don’t have anywhere to be. You are where you’re supposed to be in this moment.
On the one hand, memento mori can help you speed things up, give you urgency. But on the other hand, it can help you slow things down. Savor this second. Savor this moment.
At 29, memento mori made me go faster. At 39, it reminds me: don’t rush this. Because what are you rushing towards? You are rushing towards death. You are rushing towards the end of this.
Even in the best-case scenario, your kid’s not going to be four forever, not going to be five forever, not going to live in your house forever. You only get to do this so many times. I only get to make so many videos. I only get to write so many books. I only get to do the dishes, do this drive in traffic, so many times. Don’t rush through it.
You don’t graduate from philosophy
The final lesson is embodied in the original and ten-year anniversary editions of The Daily Stoic. The original was itself the result of many, many drafts. Ten years later, there was still more to revise. Even recording the audiobook for the new edition, I was still making notes and changes.
Stoicism is an evolving thing. Your study and understanding of it is an evolving thing. It is not something you studied. It is something you are studying.
As I said earlier, when The Daily Stoic came out, I’d been studying Stoicism for a decade. Now I’m two decades in. But hopefully my understanding of it will be better three decades in and four decades in and five decades in. When I do a 25-year anniversary edition, I hope there are even more things to change, many new things I’ve learned.
There’s a story about Marcus Aurelius. He’s seen leaving his palace, and a friend asks him, “Where are you going?” And he says, “I’m off to see Sextus the philosopher to learn that which I do not yet know.”
He’s saying that we have to remain a student. Not just a student when we’re young. Even as an old man, even as a philosopher king, he is still learning.
I am still learning about Stoicism, still reading new things, still understanding these things in a new way. You cannot learn that which you think you already know, Epictetus said. If you think you understand it, if you think you’ve got it, if you think you’ve graduated, that is the second it stops for you.
Don’t be a know-it-all. Focus on what you don’t know. Focus on all the things you want to know. Keep learning. Keep growing. Keep coming back to the same ideas and getting new things out of them.
You don’t graduate from philosophy. You practice it. Even if you teach it, you remain a student. Seneca said: “We learn even as we teach.”
I have learned so much talking and writing about Stoicism, writing this new edition, writing the Daily Stoic email for the last ten years, making videos, doing the Daily Stoic podcast. And I still have so much left to learn.
I’m still struggling every single day to apply it all a little bit better to my life.
