In 1950, a man grieving his young son who had just died of polio got a letter from Albert Einstein. Now, one might think that as a man of science, Einstein would have had a rather resigned view of the tragic nature of the human condition.

We’re born. We’re buffeted by forces beyond our control, beyond our comprehension, and then we die. Often for no reason, leaving profound suffering in its wake.

Given the immensity of the events of the middle of the twentieth century—the Holocaust and the violence of the atomic age—it was quite reasonable that Einstein might be inured to the loss of a single child to whom he had no relation.

Instead, Einstein’s letter was one of profound and philosophic condolence.

“A human being,” he wrote, “is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.”

Einstein was expressing one of the few things that physics and philosophers and priests seem to agree on: That everything and everyone is far more connected than we are prone to think. We shared an animating force, an energy, a unity that no matter what happens or how different things seem is always there. Even in our suffering, in our grief, we are tapping into something eternal and vast, something that makes us realize we are very much not alone.

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” James Baldwin wrote, “and then you read.” It was books, history, philosophy, Baldwin said, that taught him that “the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”

We are all one. It’s so easy to forget it, but it’s true.

The virtue of justice–what my new book Right Thing, Right Now is all about–is this idea that because of interconnectedness and interrelatedness, we have an obligation. Stoicism is not lone-wolfness. It’s the understanding that we are one single organism and that the fate of one is the fate of all.

As I wrote in Stillness is the Key, no one has felt this more profoundly than the astronauts who had the unique experience of seeing the Earth from space. Whether they were American or Russian or Chinese, they were all overwhelmed by what has been called the “overview effect,” an instantaneous global consciousness, an inescapable sense that everyone is in the same boat, no matter where they live or what they believe.

What they experienced looking at the “Blue Marble” that is our planet was the exact thing that Hierocles, the 2nd century Stoic, was trying to teach people about two thousand years ago. Yes, we naturally think of ourselves and the people we love first, but with work, we can expand that circle of concern larger and larger until we see everything that is alive as one enormous organism. Astronauts experience the exact same thing that Gandhi, who never even flew in a plane, never saw humanity from above more than a few stories up in a building, called the great oneness.

Realizing this, letting it wash over us, sitting in awe of it—it’s more than just humbling. It also makes us more generous, more courageous, more committed to what’s right. It makes us less concerned with petty nonsense, with meaningless distinctions, with grudges or our own pain.

It’s euphoric. It can also be existentially devastating.

The actor William Shatner, after a lifetime of exploring space on film, finally visited the cosmos at age ninety. He thought he’d marvel at the beauty of all that he beheld. Instead, looking at the Earth from afar, all he felt was sadness.

Because, he realized, everything that mattered was down there on Earth and everyone was taking it for granted. They were destroying this thing of beauty, abusing it, stealing it from generations unborn.

The garment of interdependence, the great bundle of humanity that Frances Ellen Watkins Harper spoke of, it’s real. But what kind of shape is it in these days? The environment is reeling. Billions live in poverty. Millions perish of totally preventable causes. Injustice tears at the fabric that binds us together.

How long can it go unchecked before everything comes apart?

I am convinced that people are much better off when their whole city is flourishing than when certain citizens prosper but the community has gone off course. When a man is doing well for himself but his country is falling to pieces, he goes to pieces along with it, but a struggling individual has much better hopes if his country is thriving.

Is that the lament of a modern politician? The manifesto of some early-twentieth-century socialist revolutionary?

No, it’s Pericles in 431 BC.

The whole point of government and the social contract is built around this idea. All government, it was said by one of the Founders, have as its sole goal the common welfare.

What good is our success if it comes at the expense of others? How safe are we if our safety leaves others vulnerable? What good are we if we can’t help others? We are all bound up in this thing called life together. We share this planet together. When we forget that, or lose track of how our own actions affect others, that’s when injustice flourishes.

Marcus Aurelius’s line that “what’s bad for the hive is bad for the bee” could just as easily be a quip in an upcoming political debate as it could be a New York Times op ed. It’s something that he needed constant reminders of, just as we do. He strove to see the world “as a living being—one nature and soul . . . [where] everything feeds into that single experience, moves with a single motion. And how everything helps produce everything else. Spun and woven together.” Did his policies and decisions always reflect that? No. And his biggest failings—the persecution of the Christians by the Romans at that time—are a reflection of what happens when we lose track of that ultimate north star.

“I am not conscious of a single experience throughout my three month stay in England and Europe,” Gandhi observed after one of his visits, “that made me feel that after all East is East and West is West. On the contrary, I have been convinced more than ever that human nature is much the same, no matter what clime it flourishes.”

This was why he couldn’t hate. Why he couldn’t turn his back. Why he dreamed of a better world with fewer divisions, where problems were never solved by violence or domination. “Life will not be a pyramid with an apex sustained by the bottom,” he explained, sounding like Hierocles. “But it will be an oceanic circle whose centre will be the individual always ready to perish for the village, the latter ready to perish for the circle of villages, till at last the whole becomes one life composed of individuals, never aggressive in their arrogance but ever humble, sharing the majesty of the oceanic circle of which they are integral units.”

This is what the last years of his life were dedicated to, why he was willing to die not just for independence but for equality for the untouchables and for Muslim and Hindu peace. “I am a Muslim,” he said, “a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Christian, a Jew, a Parsi.”

And so are you. We all are.

We are one and the same. All mortal. All flawed. All gifted with incredible potential. All deserving of justice and respect and dignity. All unique individuals and yet an inseparable part of humanity, of the past, present, and future.

Truman kept a line from a Milton poem in his wallet that read simply:

The parliament of Man, the federation of the world.

That’s what we belong to. That’s what we must protect.

This article is actually a chapter from the third book in my Stoic Virtues Series, Right Thing, Right Now: Good Values. Good Character. Good Deeds. which is officially available wherever books are sold! This is a book I’ve been thinking about for five years and writing for two. I’m really proud of it and hope you’ll check it out.

If you missed out on preordering, we’re still honoring bonuses (including signed and numbered pages from the original manuscript, bonus chapters, and even an invitation to a long book-themed dinner at The Painted Porch) at dailystoic.com/justice for a limited time.

Any fool can learn by experience, the saying goes. It’s vastly preferable to learn from the experiences of others.

This is what mentors are for.

They’ve been where you’ve been.

They’ve done what you’ve done.

They’ve made mistakes that you don’t have to make.

This is what books do also. They allow you to benefit from the experiences of others–successful and not-so-successful, happy and deeply broken people alike.

My whole life I’ve sought out that kind of advice, explicit and deduced. I’ve benefited from being pointed in the right direction and warned when I was heading in the wrong direction. I’ve picked up lessons in the books that I’ve read–I’ve highlighted and printed out passages of advice that I’ve tried to live by.

I’ve tried to do this in all aspects of life, but in today’s article, I wanted to talk specifically about the best career advice I’ve gotten.

1. Credit is Worthless

One of my first real jobs was as an assistant for a powerful movie producer. He was one of those guys in LA who had a lot of influence but you could hardly find out anything about him–his IMDB page was scant, he was never in the press, and he didn’t have some fancy title. I asked about this once and he told me that if ever offered the choice between credit and money, only an idiot takes the credit. He was talking specifically about the movie business which has a lot of inflated titles and credits on projects, which egotistical people gravitate towards as compensation. Why do you need to be recognized? he was telling me.

I took this in a couple of ways that shaped my career. First off, I understood quickly and early that my job as an assistant—and later in other positions—was to do work that others could take credit for. (This is a law in the ​48 Laws of Power​). My job was to be a source of ideas and problem-solving that I could surface to my boss so that they could surface to their boss or clients. This might seem thankless, but it’s actually a powerful place to be if you do it right. (Make others dependent on you is another ​law of power​). I would later come to call this “the canvas strategy”, which I write about in ​Ego is the Enemy​. You find canvases for them to paint on. You clear the path for them…and as a result, influence the direction they go.

At all my jobs, I focused on coming up with ideas for projects and on working on as many projects as possible. I wanted to learn. I wanted to see how things worked. I made sure no one saw me as a threat–on the contrary, that they saw me as someone who was a team player, who worked hard for others (and the business) to succeed. All the while, I was getting what really mattered to me.

Later, it was thinking this way that made me a successful ghostwriter. Most of my fans don’t even know that I have written many books for other people, re-written and edited others. In fact, my first couple of appearances on the New York Times bestseller lists were for projects like this. The reason people don’t know about this is that not only do I not talk about it, but I never put my name on them. When it came to collaborating, it was always a breeze because the books were not about me–I saw my job as helping them make their book, not that we were making our book. It also gave me a leg up in negotiations with the agents and publishers because I didn’t use my leverage to discuss where my name would appear or how big it might be, I asked for my percentage instead.

I don’t do many projects like this anymore, but the books I worked on helped set me up financially. I also learned so much. I have way more ‘reps’ than the average author and many of the painful lessons I have learned about publishing happened when I was not the person on stage.

I’m so glad I learned this early. Forget credit. If you want to get ahead, think about somebody other than yourself.

2. Seize The Alive Time

I’ve talked many times about how when I was stuck at American Apparel and dreaming about leaving to become a writer, Robert Greene gave me his amazing advice about “​Alive Time vs Dead Time​.” Dead Time is when you’re sitting around waiting for things to happen to you, and Alive Time is when you’re in control, making every second count, improving, learning, and growing. But perhaps the reason this advice landed so much is that shortly after I had that conversation over lunch with him, I had dinner in Downtown Los Angeles (I remember it was at Wurstkuche in the Arts District) with Ben Smith, an early Google and YouTube executive. He had just left Google to start his own company and I asked him what he wished he’d done differently in the time before he left. I wished I’d used my Google email address more, he said. Meaning, he wished he’d taken full advantage of the unique status/reputation of Google at that time. He wished he’d taken more meetings, reached out to more people, agreed to speak at more events and attended more conferences. He wished he’d built his network more when he was in a position of demand.

Having dropped out of college myself a few years earlier, I immediately knew what he’d meant. While I was a student, I had all these opportunities to go to office hours with important professors and participate in subsidized activities. People were eager to help me out. But the moment I left, I became just another face in the crowd. Worse, I was their competition. People like to help students out. Now? Now I was on my own.

So, taking Robert’s advice about Alive Time and Ben’s advice about using my business card, I spent a good chunk of my last year at American Apparel inviting everyone I could to come tour the factory. I jumped at every chance to travel for work. I took on extra projects. I sponsored events. I developed relationships inside the company and with people who wanted stuff from the company. It seems crazy, but I am still benefiting from that work today. (That’s how I’d met Ben in the first place).

If it wasn’t for this advice, I might have spent my last days at American Apparel thinking, This is just a job, this is just a crappy couple of months, I just have to wait it out and get through it. I could have chosen Dead Time unknowingly, wishing for better circumstances and ignoring the opportunities right in front of me. I would’ve been much worse off.

In life and in your career, you have to be the driver of your own advancement. When conditions aren’t ideal, you can’t just sit around waiting for things to happen. If you do that, they never will. There is always something you can learn, always some opportunity to take advantage of.

We have to choose to make every moment a moment of Alive Time. We have to decide to be present, to make the most of whatever is in front of us.

Open your eyes. Open your ears. Open your mind. Find the advantage.

3. Build Your Own Platform

I’ve been fired. I’ve had projects and ideas not work. I’ve never been canceled, but I’ve been seriously criticized. I get that these things keep people up at night…but they don’t need to. Because there is a way to insulate yourself from it: Build a platform.

When I was working as a research assistant to Robert Greene for ​The 50th Law​, he had me read a bunch about Eleanor Roosevelt. I was struck by how she entered the White House as First Lady–it was with a magazine column that asked readers to write in to her. She didn’t want to become isolated by her husband’s success. She also didn’t want to be dependent on him. She built a massive audience as a writer and thinker and public figure–and this was an incredible form of power for her to have at that time.

In fact, the only person comparable really was Winston Churchill. Most people are unaware that Churchill made his living as a writer. He published more than ten million words in his lifetime across hundreds of publications and published works. Between 1931 and 1939–when he was stuck in the so-called political wilderness–Winston Churchill published 11 books, 400+ articles, and delivered more than 350 speeches. The result of this was an enormous worldwide platform that allowed Churchill not only to survive financially but wield influence that kept him relevant and guided policy and opinion across the globe. Under ordinary circumstances, a politician would have been powerless when pushed out of office or driven to the fringes by political enemies. But Churchill’s extensive platform—based on his editorial contacts, extraordinary gift with words, and relentless energy—saved his career…and as a result, the free world.

My first editor gave me similar advice. You don’t want to be dependent on PR and publicity to sell your books, she said. You need to have a direct connection to your audience. I’d already been doing that with my ​Reading List Email​, but ​The Daily Stoic​, which I launched in 2016, had meant that every day I talk to my readers–who now number more than one million. I talk to them on ​Facebook​ and ​Instagram​ and ​Twitter​ and ​TikTok​ and ​YouTube​ and on our ​podcast​. If any one of these channels were to ban me or go under, that would suck, but I’d be fine. Another example, if Amazon or Barnes and Noble closed, I’d be fine. I own my own ​bookstore​! My editor was telling me to be like Eleanor Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. To have power outside the system as an insurance policy.

We talk today about ‘cancel culture’, but this is mostly a problem for people who have things that can be taken from them, who rely on ‘permission’ and ‘greenlights’ to make their work. If you have developed an independent platform, you have an insurance policy. You have security. Not just against what other people might do to you, but also against changes in the trends or the marketplace.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur or an author or a filmmaker or journalist, it doesn’t matter. You should build a platform.

To do work without it is to be at the mercy of too much that’s outside of your control. To a creative person, to a free thinker, that is death. Having a megaphone that we own? That we can use when we need it? I’ll tell you having a platform–​my reading list newsletter​ for instance–helped me in negotiations on the ghostwriting projects, for sure. Would ​my bookstore​ have succeeded if I was wholly dependent on walk-up traffic in the small town where it’s located? I don’t think so!

At some point, you’re going to have something you need to communicate to the world, you’re going to need distribution…and when you need it, it will be too late to start building.

So don’t wait. Build your platform now.

A few years ago, Tim Ferriss asked if I would come over for dinner. It was clear he wanted to ask me something, although he wouldn’t say what. I really could not have guessed that he was asking permission to hire away my research assistant Hristo Vassilev to run his podcast, which Hristo has done ever since.

A couple years later, Tim would poach my actual assistant, Loni, too.

The reason for the dinner is that Tim is a good guy and more, Hristo had told Tim he would only accept the job if I was OK with it–but neither of them needed to worry. You should absolutely take the job, I said to Hristo. This is the kind of thing I was training you for.

I’m of course very proud of the books I have written and the things I’ve been able to do. I like accomplishing things. I like my success. But anyone who has seen someone they’ve discovered or mentored or opened doors for knows that there is something truly amazing about watching them succeed, when they go on to bigger and better things.

I just had this experience last month. Brent Underwood started as my intern more than a decade ago at the marketing company I was building. Actually, I hired several interns but he was the one that stuck.

Last month, I interviewed him on a very special day: He had just released his first book with Penguin Random House. That would have felt surreal enough if it weren’t for the fact that the book was about a town he owned and had turned into a hugely popular YouTube channel called Ghost Town Living. I have a bunch of plaques on my wall for my appearances on the bestseller list…but I took an incredible amount of pleasure and pride in designing one for his book (which debuted on the New York Times, USA Today and Publisher’s Weekly lists). It won’t hang on my wall, but it will look great on his.

To be clear, I’ve had some assistants and employees that didn’t work out. I’ve had some who I wouldn’t recommend to anyone and others who have just gone on to live normal lives. I’m by no means a perfect picker of talent or potential. But I think I’m pretty good. My last assistant currently runs a large nonprofit.  My current researcher, Billy Oppenheimer, now also works for Rick Rubin and sold his first book last year (he has a great newsletter I read every Sunday).

“Let the honor of your students be as dear to you as your own,” Rabbi Elazar famously said. It’s a wonderful little line, a thought I return to often.

In sports, a “coaching tree” is defined by the coaches and players and executives that a coach has discovered, hired, and mentored and what they go on to do in their careers. That’s a concept I’ve been thinking about a lot. I ended up doing a chapter on it in the new book, actually (BTW–you can preorder Right Thing, Right Now… right here if you want to take advantage of some of the awesome preorder bonuses we’re doing), because it deserves to be recognized outside of sports.

It’s just a wonderful way to measure a life.

By all-time wins, someone like Gregg Popovich of the San Antonio Spurs is a great coach. Five NBA championships, twenty-two winning seasons, two Olympic medals (one gold, one bronze) and a winning percentage of .657 But his coaching tree is unreal. Players like Tim Duncan and Tony Parker and Manu Ginóbili and Patty Mills and Kawhi Leonard and now Wemby. At one point, nearly 30 percent of all the coaches in the NBA had worked for or played under Popovich, and his protégés have, independently, won eleven championships as head coaches (and one G League championship). Five times, someone from his tree has been named the NBA Coach of the Year. Of the current twenty-three black head coaches and GMs in the NBA, seven spent time under Popovich at the Spurs. Becky Hammon, the 2022 WNBA Head Coach of the Year, spent eight years with the Spurs, where she was the first female assistant coach in the NBA and the first to serve as an acting head coach after an ejected Popovich designated her his replacement (she won two-straight WNBA titles as a coach too).

Gregg Popovich’s coaching tree is so extensive, as one sportswriter put it, that it’s actually more like a coaching forest.

What a legacy! Because each one of the coaches and players he shaped has shaped and helped others, starting their own coaching trees that continue on.

Emerson wrote a lot of wonderful things, but one of his sentences is stuck permanently in my head for its sweetness and generosity and prescience. “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” Emerson gushed in a letter to a struggling Walt Whitman in 1855 (which Whitman promptly added as a blurb to the front of his then undiscovered, self-published masterpiece Leaves of Grass).

How lovely is that?

Without Emerson, the careers of Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Ellery Channing, Amos Bronson Alcott, and later William James (Emerson’s godson) and Alcott’s daughter Louisa May Alcott, would have gone very differently. And what of the people their work inspired? Who became poets because of Whitman or because they read Emerson’s essays 100+ years later?

Socrates had a coaching tree of about thirty-three students that we know of. We are all footnotes to Plato, it has been said, but Plato was himself a footnote to Socrates. There was a guy named Thomas Wentworth Higginson who translated Epictetus into English and led one of the first black regiments in the US Civil War. These are incredible accomplishments. But what a feather in his cap that he also helped discover and publish the poetry of Emily Dickinson.

That’s what I like about Popovich’s coaching tree. He didn’t just create a bunch of replicas of himself. Steve Kerr is a very different coach. Becky Hammon and Monty Williams look very different and come from very different places. Nor are all the coaches people he “discovered.” Some are people he gave second chances to. Or gave a safe landing in San Antonio. Maybe he gave them a job or recommended them for one somewhere else. Maybe he spoke up for them during a controversy. The point is, he used his clout, his resources, and his organization–a lot of time to mutual benefit, but sometimes out of pure kindness. That’s a powerful thing.

I can’t write about coaching trees without mentioning my mentor, Robert Greene, who taught me so much about not only writing, but life. It’s funny, Robert talked about “never outshining the master” and “let others do all the work but take all the credit” in the 48 Laws of Power, yet in reality, he’s generous, patient and supportive. No one has helped me more in my career.

How can I possibly repay him? I can’t…all we can do for a great mentor is to pay it forward.

I carry a debt now and I am only able to discharge it through Hristo or Brent or Billy or the random people who email me and ask for advice. I pay it forward through the work that I do. I pay it forward through writing this article if one person supports one person after reading it.  That’s the thing about coaching trees: they’ll die if you don’t tend to them, they survive through grafting and through reproduction.

At the end of your career and your life, you’re going to look back and be proud of your accomplishments. If these were achieved selfishly or solitarily though, it will seem empty and sad. At the end, you’ll be thinking about people. You’re going to think about what your kids have been able to do. You’ll be just as proud of what other people have done, what you’ve been a part of and connected to.

But only if you put the work into it now…working as hard to help others as you do yourself.