A few weeks back, I was down near Phoenix and swung out to talk to the Chicago Cubs and the Arizona Diamondbacks who were in the middle of Spring Training.

These are elite athletes. Preparing for the talk, I was thinking about just how hard it is to do what these professional baseball players do. Hitting a baseball almost defies physics. The amount of time you have between when you decide to swing and when the ball crosses the plate is almost nothing. It is nearly physically impossible. That’s why so few people can actually do it. And even the people who can do it can only do it maybe three or four out of ten times. It is one of the hardest things in sports.

But it struck me, as I was sitting in the cafeteria after, helping myself to a prepared, perfectly portioned, macro-balanced plate of eggs with turkey bacon and fresh fruit, and chatting with some of the players, that while they spend enormous amounts of time thinking about their diet and nutrition and they have some of the best people in the world helping them optimize what they put in their bodies, they think a lot less about what goes into their brains. 

In fact, many of them—like the rest of us—are injecting straight garbage on a daily basis.

We are, after all, flooded with more information than entire civilizations could have produced, let alone imagined. 

The key practice in the modern world is not how to consume all of it, but how do we decide what not to consume? How do we stay informed about what’s happening without overwhelming ourselves with distractions? How do we manage our information diet with the same discipline that we would put towards our actual diet? Because just as what we put in our bodies matters, what we put—or fail to put—in our minds matters too. 

Presidents of the United States face this problem most acutely. The president famously gets what is known as the Presidential Daily Briefing, typically three pages of top-secret information about international developments and concerns, delivered, as the name implies, daily, with in-person explanations and summaries. The best presidents listen intently, ask questions, and then apply what they’ve learned to their day-to-day decisions.

But we live in a world where the President doesn’t read this carefully curated document assembled by intelligence agencies and experts, and instead prefers to get his news from social media…and not just any social media network but one made up of his biggest, more ideologically zealous fans. If this bubble were not enough, there are also reports that he employs a special assistant whose job it is every day to bring him printed-out positive articles about himself to keep his spirits up.

Elon Musk is another example of how what you consume can warp you. He went from reading rocket manuals and reasoning from first principles to obsessively refreshing his Twitter feed. A man who could pay for a daily briefing rivaling even the most powerful heads of state instead mainlines information from trolls and pundits and conspiracy theorists.

This mirrors the problem we all face. We have access to the kind of information that emperors could have only dreamed of. This is real power, but as always, power corrupts and disorients and distracts. We have more information than emperors could have dreamed of. We are also subjected to more misinformation than they could have conceived of in their worst nightmare. 

Audio. Video. Text. It comes at us at incomprehensible speeds. 

It takes discipline and wisdom to manage your information diet properly, to be a discerning and selective conduit for everything that’s coming at you. 

Almost certainly, your information diet has too much real-time information in it. The news. The feeds. The notifications. Almost certainly, you would be better off if you read more books. If you focused on information with a longer half-life.

Personally, I prefer a steady diet of books about history and human nature (here’s a list of timely books I put together for 2026). They’re not all fun and sunshine—there’s plenty of darkness, too—but I learn far more from that than from endless scrolling. I’m deliberate about which chats and texts I participate in and who I spend time with. In programming, there’s a saying: “garbage in, garbage out.” I try to let in the opposite of garbage, because that leads to the opposite of garbage out.

“The art of not reading is a very important one,” Schopenhauer said of avoiding popular rubbish. It’s not how much you know, but that you know the right things. It’s not that you read, it’s what and how you read. “Do not be eager to know everything,” Democritus reminded himself in the fifth century BC, “lest you become ignorant of everything.” 

Go straight to the source when you can. Check sources always. 

Choose quality over quantity. 

Find experts you can trust. Verify them first.

Favor information that has staying power over what is “developing” or “just in.” Try to get the big picture. Try to make connections between what’s happening now and what has happened before. 

Seek out things that challenge you. Hear what the other side has to say. 

Pay attention to where misery, negativity, dysfunction, and chaos sneak into your life. Ask yourself, when was the last time X or Instagram left you feeling informed. Reddit? Cable news in an airport? If it isn’t leaving you calmer or wiser, maybe it’s time to cut it off at the source. 

You don’t have to be uninformed—just be intentional about what you consume and who you engage with. 

The best hitters in baseball will tell you that what separates the good from the great, at the highest level, is plate discipline. It’s the ability to lay off pitches. To not swing the bat. To be discerning.

That skill applies here too. The feeds. All the hot takes. The notifications. The group chats. The breaking news. Most of it is designed to get a reaction out of you, not to make you wiser or better informed. You need to cultivate the discipline to lay off the junk. To not take in everything thrown on your plate. To discern what’s worth your time and what’s designed to get a rise out of you. To swing only at the right pitches. 

Because you are what you eat. And what you read, what you watch, what you let into your information diet.

So choose wisely.

It was a long winter. 

You got sick. You lapsed on a resolution. You slipped up. You’re tired, distracted, out of sorts. 

So you’re going to write off the rest of 2026?

That’s crazy.

In one of my favorite passages in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius writes, “When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstances, revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help.”

I think that word “unavoidably” is key. Slipping up, getting knocked off course, falling off the wagon—it happens. 

And that’s what I want to talk about in today’s email: some rules for a reset. Here—already a couple of months into 2026—is the perfect time. For getting back to first principles, to the things that you said you were going to do, to the person that you know you want to be.

(And by the way, I’m getting together with thousands of Stoics from around the world to do a reset as part of ​The Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge​ on March 20. It’s a set of 10 daily, actionable challenges designed to help you clean up your life and spring forward without the weight of bad habits and vices. ​You can learn more and sign up here​. I hope to see you there!)

Focus on what you can control. You’re rattled by what’s going on in the world. The economy. The news. The possibility of AI taking your job. Whatever outrage is dominating the social media feeds this week. In short, you’re spending enormous amounts of time and energy on things you cannot control. Revert to what Epictetus described as our “chief task in life”—getting real clear about what’s up to us and what isn’t. Our actions, our thoughts, our feelings—these are up to us. Other people, the weather, external events, these are not. But here’s the thing: our responses to other people, the weather, external events are in our control. To reset your life, the best place to start is with making this distinction and then choosing to focus on the things that are in your control. If only because it concentrates your resources in the places where they matter.

Wake up early. No one likes getting up early in the winter. Because it’s cold. It’s dark. That’s the famous passage from Meditations: he knows he has to get out of bed, but so desperately wants to remain under the warm covers. “Is this what I was created for?” he asks himself. “To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?” No, it’s not what we were created for. We were made to be up and “doing things and experiencing them.” So we must reclaim the morning hours, the most productive hours in the day. Hemingway would talk about how he’d get up early because early, there was, “no one to disturb you.” Toni 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. If you want to get back on track, if you want to start executing at a higher level, then you have to get in the habit of waking up early.

Protect the best part of your day. Waking up early is critical, but even more so is what we do in those early hours. Waking up early just to get straight into scrolling social media, checking email, watching the news—this is not a reset. You’ve handed the best part of your day to other people’s emergencies, other people’s opinions, other people’s agendas. 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.” 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. 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.

Do less, better. Your calendar is filled up. Your inbox is flooded. Your to-do list is overflowing. You’re doing too much. When I talked to the great Matthew McConaughey on the Daily Stoic podcast, he told me the story about a moment a few years ago when he realized he was doing too much. “I had five proverbial campfires on my desk,” he said. He had a production company, a music label, a foundation, his acting career, and his family. “What I did was I got rid of two of the campfires.” He called his lawyer and shut down the production company and the music label. “I was left with the three things that were most important to me. And those three campfires turned into bonfires…I had been making C’s in five things, but when I concentrated on three things, I started making A’s.” A reset requires concentration. It requires elimination, Seneca said: “He who is everywhere is nowhere.” Remember: Everything you say yes to means saying no to something else. And conversely, everything you say no to means saying yes to something else. When you say no, when you cut out the inessential, the Stoics say, it allows you to double down on what is truly essential.

Just make a little progress every day. 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. “Well-being is realized by small steps,” Zeno would say looking back on his life, “but is truly no small thing.” Focus on that—just making a little progress each day. 

Focus on process, not goals. When most people think about resetting their life, they think about setting a goal—lose 20 pounds, read 30 books, write a book. 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. Any time you want to reset things in your life, instead of fixating on specific outcomes, focus on the process that will guide you. The results will take care of themselves.

Make amends. This is actually one of the challenges in the upcoming ​Spring Forward​: to apologize or make amends with someone. Years ago, there was someone I got into a big fight with over one of my books. I eventually emailed them, saying, “Hey, here’s what I’ve been carrying, and I wish I’d done it differently. I feel bad about the consequences for you. I’m sorry.” I’d love to say we became friends afterward, but they didn’t accept my apology—instead, they hurled more anger at me. It was obvious they still carried a lot of resentment, but making amends is also a gift you give yourself. I said what I needed to say, so I’m no longer ruminating or carrying it around. I owned my role in it. I tried to be who I want to be. If they aren’t there yet, that’s okay—I did what I could. As Marcus Aurelius said, the best revenge is not being like the person who wronged you. Maybe they’ll never see your side, but at least you won’t turn into them. We can’t change the past, but we can take responsibility: acknowledge our mistakes, own the pain we caused, learn from it, practice empathy, and try to repair it. This is a kind of deep clean for your life, allowing you to start fresh and move forward without the weight of that emotional clutter.

Discard anxiety. You’re anxious about politics. About flying. About the state of the world. About your kids. The one thing all causes of anxiety have in common? US! The airport is not making you anxious. You are making yourself anxious in the airport! Marcus Aurelius talks about this in ​Meditations​. “Today I escaped from anxiety,” he says. “Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions—not outside.” It’s a little frustrating, but it’s also freeing. Because it means you can stop it! You can choose to discard it.

Find a scene. You’re hanging out with the same people you’ve always hung out with. The same circle, the same conversations, the same comfortable group that never quite challenges you or pushes you or expects anything different from you. And then you wonder why you keep ending up in the same place. “Tell me who you consort with,” Goethe said, “and I will tell you who you are.” You need to find a scene that challenges you, inspires you, exposes you to new ideas, holds you accountable, and pushes you beyond your limits. The Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus introduced the common mess hall and required that all citizens eat together. It was harder to eat more than your fair share, more than your healthy share, when you were surrounded by your comrades in battle.

Quit your vices. There’s a story I tell in ​Discipline is Destiny​ about the physicist Richard Feynman feeling a sudden midday pull to have a drink. On the spot, Feynman gave up drinking right then and there. Nothing, he felt, should have that kind of power over him. Ask yourself: What has control over me? Is it caffeine, social media, Netflix, junk food—something more serious? I once heard addiction described as losing the freedom to abstain. Where have you lost the freedom to say no to? And how can you reclaim your power by refusing to feed that habit? If you want a happier, more fulfilling life, decide which vices you’re no longer willing to let rule you.

Do hard things. Making a life change, adopting new habits, doing anything challenging requires courage. As I write about in Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave, we can’t just hope to be brave when it counts. Courage has to be cultivated. To do the big things that scare you, start with smaller things—start with developing the ability to push yourself to do stuff you’re reluctant to do. To be able to endure the cold reception of a bold idea, start with enduring a cold shower. To be able to step forward when the stakes are high, regularly do that when the stakes are low. To be able to embrace the discomfort of a major life change, accustom yourself to minor discomforts. We treat the body rigorously, Seneca said, so that it may not be disobedient to the mind. We push ourselves in little ways so the big ways stop seeming quite so big, quite so out of character.

Don’t be ashamed to ask for help. 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. Resetting your life isn’t something you have to do alone.

Get back up when you fall. It’s wonderfully fitting that in both the Zen tradition and the Bible, we have a version of the proverb about falling down seven times and getting up eight. Marcus Aurelius said it was inevitable to be jarred by circumstances, but the key was to get back the rhythm as quickly as possible, to come back to yourself, rather than giving in.

Be kind to yourself. The Stoic philosopher Cleanthes was once walking through the streets of Athens when he came across a man berating himself for some failure. Seeing how upset he was, Cleanthes—normally one to mind his own business—could not help himself but to stop and say kindly, “Remember, you’re not talking to a bad man.” Often, the desire for a reset comes packaged with self-contempt, with some judgment of the version of us who got off track. But this isn’t about beating yourself up. After a lifetime of study of Stoicism, this is how Seneca came to judge his own growth: “What progress have I made?” he wrote. “I have begun to be a friend to myself.” Be kind to yourself. Celebrate your decision to make a change, to get back on track, to make yourself better. That’s what friends do. 

Go the f*ck to sleep. All the other habits and practices listed here become irrelevant if you don’t have the energy and clarity to do them. We have to follow the advice of a book I love to read to my kids: Go the F*ck to Sleep! In the military, they speak of sleep discipline—meaning it’s something you have to be good at, you have to be conscious of, something you can’t let slip. We only have so much energy for our work, for our relationships, for ourselves. A smart person knows this and guards it carefully. A smart 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.

Remember you are going to die. Shakespeare said that every third thought should be of our grave. Perhaps that’s too much. One thought per day is plenty. The point isn’t to be morbid, but to remember that you are mortal. How much time do we waste on things that don’t matter? And why? Because we think we can afford it! Memento Mori. You will die. Live while you can. Live your life as if you have died and come back and all of this is extra. I keep a coin in my pocket to remind me of this and touch it at least once a day. Death doesn’t make life pointless but rather purposeful. And fortunately, we don’t have to nearly die to tap into this.

***

Those are some things I come back to whenever I need a reset.

If you’re ready to take your own efforts to the next level, I’d love for you to join me in the ​Spring Forward Challenge​ from Daily Stoic.

It’s packed with powerful exercises rooted in the best Stoic insights and strategies, and thousands of people around the world will be participating.

Sign up at ​dailystoic.com/spring​—we start on March 20th. I hope to see you there, ready to clear out the clutter and make room for what truly matters.

Honestly, it’s been so bad for so long, I didn’t even notice. 

When we moved out to rural Texas in 2015, there was basically no cell phone service at our house or on our dirt road. We tried to fix it at first—I even put a booster on the roof—but it didn’t work. I suppose we could have switched providers…but that seemed like a pain.

We had a landline and wifi-calling, though both were unreliable, especially in storms or when one of our neighbors would cut the AT&T line while grading the road. So we got used to it. We accepted that when we were out and about at home, our phones couldn’t make calls or send texts…for over ten years. It was almost predictable, I’d be back somewhere on my property and some incredibly important call would come through…with just enough service for me to answer and not be able to talk.

That’s why it sort of snuck up on me the last couple months that my phone had full reception when I was out checking on the cows. Or when I was walking the dog. Or even out in the garage. 

An inconvenience that had been part of our lives for so long just suddenly went away. 

And it took me some time to notice it.

Which is something life does, by the way, it gets better and we don’t notice. 

Because we’re so focused on what’s going wrong. Because we’re not paying attention. Because the algorithm and the news cycle is biased. 

I thought the same thing as I was passing through the Austin airport this morning. For the last two years or so, security had been a mess because of a major construction project. As I landed at the American gates and walked to the exit, I noticed that finally the new security entrance was almost done. They were testing it right then. 

The construction had been background noise for so long I had stopped perceiving that, slowly, progress was also happening. And that progress, eventually, inevitably, leads to a completion. 

Having kids is like this too. You are so in the thick of it that you can be blind to the passing of time. Every haircut and nail trim means they’re getting a little older. Same too for every shirt they grow out of. There are obvious benchmarks like walking and potty training and first words but a lot of the other moments are more subtle. You don’t notice the moment you stop lugging a stroller everywhere. There is no one moment when an infant becomes a toddler or a toddler a teenager. These transitions don’t announce themselves.

And you’re also so in the thick of it, dealing with so many problems, that you don’t always notice the ways they’re getting better, like as humans. You don’t notice the night that was the last night they woke you up at 3 a.m. You take for granted the day they started getting into the car themselves and buckling their own seatbelt. You don’t see the way they’re becoming more independent, more competent. It’s not obvious how the things you’re teaching are becoming values and habits, but if you’re doing it right, they are. And it’s easy to miss that everyday this person is becoming a better person, that you are succeeding at this really hard thing. 

I guess what I am saying is that it’s important that we stop and see this. How often do we update our world view to account for what has been fixed, for what’s gotten better, for sources of annoyance that have been eliminated? Or are we carrying around zombie frustrations and anxieties and grievances that we can’t seem to shake?  

Marcus Aurelius—who had every reason to see the world as dark and broken—had this remarkable capacity to notice beauty and progress everywhere. As he was dealing with wars and plagues and betrayals and the loss of loved ones, as his health was failing, he was also writing about the ordinary way that “baking bread splits in places and those cracks, while not intended in the baker’s art, catch our eye and serve to stir our appetite,” or the “charm and allure” of nature’s process, the “stalks of ripe grain bending low, the frowning brow of the lion, the foam dripping from the boar’s mouth.” 

This is someone who cultivated what you might call a poet’s eye—the discipline to notice the beauty in the banal, the mundane, the everyday. He was able to see beauty anywhere…which is really important when you live in ugly times. 

There’s a tendency, especially right now, to look at everything and see only what’s broken. And yes—there’s plenty that’s broken. But it’s worth remembering, stuff has always been broken. Ancient Greece had earthquakes and horrible storms and natural disasters. People suffered. People were killed. People stole the money intended to help those people. Ancient Rome had tyrants and bullies. It had pointless cruelty and systemic injustices. 

It’s always been this way. For centuries, people have fought over minuscule differences. Their governments have been dysfunctional. Their traditions seemed like they were falling apart. Stuff was changing. Stuff was stressful. Stuff sucked. 

It’s not only always been like this…but it’s almost always been worse. You can look out at the news and despair about things. Or you can zoom out and see progress. You can focus on the bad people and miss that the bad people today are almost certainly better than the bad people back then. Even the people you disagree with and dislike politically are not selling their enemies into slavery, sending children to work in the mines and doing science experiments on minorities–things that were not only common in Zeno and Marcus Aurelius’s time, but common enough where you live not that long ago! 

For all the things it is easy to lament about the world, it’s disputable that we live in a time of abundance, medicine, knowledge, and opportunity—things our ancestors could not have imagined in their wildest dreams. If you woke up in a bed this morning, brushed your teeth, flushed your toilet, and had a hot shower, you’re living better than the emperors, kings, and queens of the past. Before indoor plumbing and on-demand heated water, Genghis Khan conquered half the known world but never once felt clean and comfortable the way I do when I dress in sweats after a shower. Before toothpaste, Queen Elizabeth I, one of the most powerful women in history, had teeth blackened by decay. Before refrigeration, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, Queen Victoria, Cleopatra, Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington—none of them ever opened a fridge and cracked open a cold drink on a hot day.

Almost certainly you are living better than you were not that long ago. Think back to your first apartment. Think back that beater of a car you were once perfectly happy with. Think back to what you used to think was a lot of money, what you used to think was ‘fast’ internet. Think back to things you used to hear people saying growing up, think about what things were like for people less privileged than you back then. 

So yes, see what’s broken. Note what needs to be improved. Yes, work to make it happen. But try to notice all that’s been fixed too. Try to see what’s different in your own life. What used to bother you that doesn’t anymore? What was broken that got fixed? What problem solved itself while you weren’t looking?

The world is and always will be messy. But somewhere in the mess, progress is always being made—quietly, steadily, nearly imperceptibly. 

You just have to slow down and notice it.