The week after my first book came out in 2012 was rough. 

I mean, it wasn’t actually rough. I was twenty five. My rent was $900 a month for a beautiful two room apartment in the Garden District in New Orleans. I was with the girl I would eventually marry and I’d just put out my first book.

I should have felt like everything was amazing. 

Instead I was in almost debilitating physical and emotional pain…and it was all self-inflicted. 

Traditionally books come out on Tuesdays and first week sales account for all pre-orders plus whatever comes in between launch and that coming Sunday. And then, you don’t find out whether you landed on the New York Times bestseller lists until late in the day on Wednesday. In those days, there was another equally important list—put out by the Wall Street Journal—that was made public sometime on Friday. 

I’d actually had a great sales week—and great media coverage too—but that middle period of the waiting, that was the reason I was in pain. I was torturing myself in anxiety and anticipation (and alternatively dread) about whether I would make it or not. I’ve said before, but with that first book, Trust Me I’m Lying, I was probably 10% proud of what I’d done and 90% waiting for this news to decide whether I had succeeded or failed. Years of my life had gone into it, I was already so blessed—I got to do my dream, publish a book!—and yet it all hung on how a group of faceless gatekeepers decided to evaluate the numbers that week (because, like so many things in life, even objective sales numbers are not actually objective).

In short, I was doing the exact opposite of what the Stoics teach. I had attached my identity, my happiness, my pride to something I did not control. 

So of course I was miserable!

And of course, I was crushed when I didn’t hit the Times list…and only moderately relieved when good news came about WSJ two days later. 

I’ll tell you, I’m not proud of how I acted in that interminable waiting period (according to my wife, I was awful to be around). But I am proud of how far I’ve come since then.

I don’t mean I’m proud that I’ve hit the lists a bunch since then (I have) but…that is no longer something I think much about.

I once read a letter where the great Cheryl Strayed kindly pointed out to a young writer the distinction between writing and publishing. Writing is all the things that are entirely in your control—the work, the hours at the desk, the ideas you wrestle onto the page. Publishing is all the things that are not entirely in your control—acceptance and rejection letters, the size of your advance, the sales numbers, the bestseller lists, the reviews, the invitations, awards, how it lands with readers, whether bookstores stock it, press bookings.

It’s not that the publishing stuff is not important, it’s just that in focusing on them, people often ignore the basic things that precede them—the stuff that it is impossible to succeed without. 

And this is true in all domains. 

Look, from the outside, it probably seems like people like Tom Brady are obsessed with winning. You see them breaking the tablet on the sidelines when the game is going poorly or you hear about how famously competitive they are and this makes sense. Obviously to win that much you have to really care about winning, right? 

What Tom Brady’s actually obsessed with, he has said, is trying “to get a little bit better each day.”

He wanted to improve the accuracy of his throws a little bit. He wanted to get the ball out a little bit faster. He wanted to make his reads a little bit better. He wanted to be a little bit better as a leader. He wanted to recover after games a little bit faster. Because it’s getting a little bit better every day, compounded over a long enough time, that leads to results.

It’s the same distinction as writing vs publishing. Brady’s obsessed with performance—his performance—and that translated into a lot of Super Bowl victories. 

As I’ve locked more into writing and tuned out publishing, more on the parts in my control than the parts outside my control, the funny thing is that my results have gotten better the more I have flipped this ratio.

It’s a strange paradox. That you could get results by not thinking about them? 

I think this is because the fixation on externals, on things outside your control—whether winning a championship, hitting a bestseller list, or making [$$$,$$$$$,$$$$]—carries a hidden cost. It consumes a significant amount of time and energy that would be better spent doing things that actually generate those results. A musician chasing a spot on the charts churns out derivative work, never finding their unique sound. A speaker fixated on the audience’s reaction loses their train of thought. A swimmer who glances over at the competition or up at the finish creates drag and slows down. Have you ever golfed? You know what happens when you pull your head up to follow the ball. 

I’m not saying you shouldn’t strive to accomplish great things or to do and be all that you’re capable of—you definitely should. Obviously external results do matter to a degree. If my books stopped selling, my publisher would stop publishing them. 

I’m just saying you need to make sure you’re running the right race. 

Epictetus quipped that, “You can always win if you only enter competitions where winning is up to you.” The bestseller list? That’s up to the New York Times. Winning a Grammy? That’s up for the Recording Academy. A Nobel Prize? That’s up to the folks in Stockholm. Even competitive goals like being the fastest person in a race or the richest person in the world—these depend on what your competitors do.

What is in your control is showing up, giving maximum effort, following your training, sticking to your principles, pursuing your calling. If that translates to on the field success, great—in fact, it almost always does. If that translates into career recognition, awesome—and again, it usually does.

Many great artists have talked about this—this paradoxical way results tend to be an accidental byproduct, coming to those who don’t directly pursue them. The comedian Mike Myers once said this was his advice for young creators: “Don’t want to be famous…fame is the industrial disease of creativity. It’s a sludgy byproduct of making things.” Bruce Dickinson from Iron Maiden would say in an interview, “I’m not interested in being famous. Fame is the excrement of creativity, it’s the shit that comes out the back end, it’s a by-product of it.” And Viktor Frankl would talk about how “strange and remarkable” it was that Man’s Search For Meaning became such a success because he wrote it not to “build up any reputation on the part of the author.” After the book sold millions of copies, Frankl shared what that taught him: “Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication.”

Perhaps this is what Eugen Herrigel is talking about in Zen in the Art of Archery. The more you’re aiming, the less you’re focused on your form, the more distracted you are, the more tense you are. Your willful will causes you to miss. 

One night just last week, the week after Wisdom Takes Work came out, I was hanging out with my kids when I glanced at the home screen of my phone and could see there was a text from my agent, Steve. I knew what that text was probably about…so I ignored it. 

The next morning, after I got my boys to school and went for a run, I was sitting in the anteroom, going over some letters I am reading for my next book. Remembering that Steve was catching a flight out of the country later that day, I called him back. He told me the good news: Wisdom Takes Work debuted at #2 on the New York Times Bestseller list, and is on pace to be the best selling book in the Four Virtues Series.

“That’s incredible,” I said. “Now, I’m going to get back to work.”

Don’t get me wrong—I’m deeply grateful to the readers who got the book on the bestseller list. It’s crazy and humbling. In fact, to the extent I do think about a book’s success anymore, it’s the readers I think about. They not only give me the satisfaction of knowing the work is having an impact, but they give me the great fortune of being indifferent to things like bestseller lists—their trust and support matters more.

In Perennial Seller, I quote Stefan Zweig, “I had acquired what, to my mind, is the most valuable success a writer can have—a faithful following, a reliable group of readers who looked forward to every new book and bought it, who trusted me, and whose trust I must not disappoint.” 

In that sense, I was pleased to hear the news that Wisdom hit the bestseller list. I took it to mean that I built that following. It also meant, though, that they trusted me and I had to do my best as a writer to live up to that. I didn’t owe anyone or anything to anyone else. There wasn’t anything else to focus on but that work, which is what I meant when I told Steve I was getting back to the pages in front of me. 

Compared to that nervous, anxious, desperate twenty-five year old waiting for good news almost fifteen years ago, I had come a long way. The news hardly changed my opinion about the work I had done…and it didn’t change what I knew about the work I still had to do. 

The idea is that you enjoy the process, the part that’s up to you. 

This sets you up for good results and it also means that when you’re fortunate enough to get them, they are extra as opposed to validation.

As they should be.  

My latest book, Wisdom Takes Work, is officially out and you can get a copy wherever you buy books! Thank you to everyone who has picked up a copy. The support has been incredible—and honestly, a little overwhelming. Our small team here at The Painted Porch is working hard to get every order out the door as fast as we can. If you’re still waiting on yours, we really appreciate your patience. Believe me… I have been working on this series for 6 years—I can’t wait for you to read the new book!

In the summer of 2019, my wife and I took our two sons for a hike in the Lost Pines Forest in Bastrop, Texas. 

It was a Saturday or a Sunday. 

I had a bunch of articles to write, but I put it aside and decided to spend some time outside with the kids in the shade of the prehistoric loblolly forest about thirty minutes from our house. 

It was a lovely afternoon, despite the heat. I always love Lost Pines because it’s a freak of nature. The tall prehistoric loblolly pine trees appear here in the middle of Texas, hundreds of miles further east than most of their counterparts. Much of the forest still shows scars from two 2011 wildfires that burned tens of thousands of acres—one of them the worst in Texas history—only adding to the mystique and making parts feel like a haunted elephant graveyard. 

As we wrapped up the hike and took the kids to the playground, suddenly, it hit me. It was a feeling that creative people experience from time to time. You’re in the middle of not working–you’re in the shower or your drifting off to sleep or you’re in the middle of sweeping the floor–and boom, you get hit with an idea. I have run many hundreds of miles in Lost Pines so it was a familiar feeling—I’ve sold business problems and writing problems and personal problems on the trails there. 

As I was carrying my son in the backpack, my mind had drifted briefly to the fact that my book Stillness is the Key would soon be released and it would mark the end of what had become a three-book trilogy. What would I tackle next?, I thought. This was 2019. The political situation was a mess. There were wildfires, earthquakes, wars dragging on, terrorist attacks. There was chaos, upheaval, and uncertainty. “A book about courage would be cool,” popped into my head. I shared the idea with my wife. We talked it over along the trail, and by the time we were loading the kids in the car, an idea for one book had become an idea for a series on the four virtues, starting with courage!

And like that, my next creative mountain had been laid out in front of me. 

I’ve been thinking about this story lately because here I am, six years later, coming to the end of that series, as the fourth and final book, Wisdom Takes Work, came out last week.

There was a period a couple of years ago where I didn’t think I would be here having completed the series. It was around the halfway mark, working on the second book in the series, Discipline is Destiny, and I hit a wall. 

Coming up with the idea for a book—or in this case, a series—is a fun, creative act. Actually creating those books is a work of excruciating manual labor, sitting in a chair, grinding out each consecutive sentence—a process not measured in hours or days, but months and years. It’s a marathon of endurance, cognitive and physical.

For me, in the last decade, I have run not just a couple of these marathons but twelve of them, back to back to back. That’s roughly 2.5 million words across titles I’ve published, articles I’ve written, and the daily emails that I produced in the same period. 

During that time, there was a destabilizing, devastating global pandemic. There were fires, floods, and freezes. Demagogues and wars. Market crashes and inflation. Technological disruption. My kids growing up. My wife and I opening and running a small town bookstore.

So I was tired. Just really tired. 

I’m not someone inclined to believe in divine intervention. But I needed help . . .

On a sweltering-hot day in Texas, I was sitting at my workroom table in my office above the bookstore. The air conditioner wasn’t working and I wasn’t sure if we could afford another one for the building. It was my 34th birthday. Sweating, exhausted, and on the verge of a crisis of confidence—that I had the wrong topic, I didn’t have the material, and contemplating whether to call my publisher and ask for a delay—I went through boxes that contained thousands of note cards of research. As a whole, they overwhelmed me—what they contained, the way they might fit together to produce a book, seemed impossible to comprehend. I reached out and grabbed one.

It had just two dozen words scrawled in red Sharpie. When was it written? Why had I written it? What had prompted me? All I know is what it said.

Trust the process. Keep doing my cards. When I check them in June—if I have done my work—there will be a book there.

It wasn’t exactly a miracle . . . but defying space and time, I had traveled from the past into the future to deliver a reminder of self-discipline.

And guess what? It was exactly what I needed.

It didn’t save me from the work, of course, but from myself. From giving up. From abandoning the system and process that had served me so well on all those books and articles and emails. In one of the best passages in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius, almost certainly in the depths of some personal crisis of faith, reminds himself to “Love the discipline you know, and let it support you.”

That’s what my note said to do.

I listened.

I began showing up at the office earlier each day to work with my material. Card after card, I sorted them into tiny little piles. Looking for connections, for threads I could follow, for the key that would unlock the book.

Instead of worrying, I used the calm and mild light of the philosophy I have written about in my books. I went for long walks when I got stuck. I tried to follow my routine. I tuned out distraction. I focused. I also sat—just sat—and thought.

I’d love to be able to tell you that shortly after this the book just clicked. But that’s not how writing, or life, works. What actually happened was slower, more iterative, but also in the end, just as transformative. 

As I walked that long hallway of doubt and despair, as I kept doing my cards, light began to creep in. Lou Gehrig and Angela Merkel stepped forward from the shadows. After nearly four thousand pages of biographies, Queen Elizabeth entered as a portrait of temperament. Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and King George IV jumped out as cautionary tales, stunning examples of self-inflicted destruction. One character after another slowly, painstakingly, chapter by chapter, became discernable. 

The book was there, as my note promised me. Now I had to write it.

While a book requires many, many hours of work, these hours come in rather small increments. If I get to the office at eight thirty, I could be done writing by eleven. Just a couple hours is all it takes. Just a couple crappy pages a day, as one old writing rule puts it. The discipline of writing is about showing up. No delays, no procrastination, no digital distractions. Just writing.

The seasons changed. World events raged and spun as they always do. Opportunities, distractions, temptations, they did what they do too—popping up, pinging, nagging, seducing. 

Day after day, I kept after it. I trusted the process. I loved the discipline I knew. I let it support me. 

As I finished the book, I was still tired. Every writer is tired when they get to the end of a book. Yet, I also felt wonderful. I thought it was to date some of my best writing, but what I was proudest of is who I was while I wrote it. A less disciplined me, a younger me, would have been wrecked by that period where it felt like the book might not come together. I would have acted out. I would have been consumed. But the work had been working on me—as I worked from home on the final pages of Discipline, my five-year-old looked up from his art project and said, “I’m sorry you lost your job writing books, Dad.” Apparently things had been so much less crazy and my boundaries had been so much better that he thought I wasn’t working anymore! 

But I was, of course. I was in the process. Doing my cards. Trusting the discipline I knew would lead to the next book, Right Thing Right Now, and the final one, Wisdom Takes Work. 

As a result, here I am—having read over 500 books of research, made 10,000 note cards, published 300,000 words (with tens of thousands of additional words cut) and 1,400 pages—drawing the series to a close. 

When Edward Gibbon finished ​The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire​, he noted his sadness at taking “everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion.”

I don’t feel that way, though, because of everything I learned during these past six years spent working on the series, the clearest lesson of all is that virtue isn’t something you take leave of. It’s not something you ever fully possess. It’s not something you commit to just for a little while, but for a lifetime.

There’s still a long way to go, but I’m proud of the progress I’ve made. I’m proud of what I have put to the page in each of the four books. And I’m proud of how I’ve improved both as a writer and a person through it all. I am calmer. I am quieter. I argue less. I get upset less. I admit I am wrong more often. I’m a little wiser, a little more disciplined, just, and courageous than I was on that hike in the summer of 2019.

I close the virtues series, but the ideas are still working on me. I am doing my best to live up to them. To be more community-minded. To be braver, stronger, kinder, wiser. 

Day by day. Page by page. Struggle by struggle. 

I hope you do the same.

…and now I go onto my next project. 

If you haven’t checked out Wisdom Takes Work, it would mean so much to me if you could. It came out last Tuesday. Here’s me talking about it on The Daily Show and on The Breakfast Club.

We still have some signed first-edition copies of Wisdom Takes Work left—and will be extending our preorder bonuses for folks who buy the book this week. Bonuses include cut chapters and the annotated bibliography with all purchases, or a signed manuscript and even dinner with me if you buy more copies.

If you’re interested, grab your copy now before it’s too late.

My new book, Wisdom Takes Work, comes out in 6 DAYS!  If you’ve gotten anything out of my writing over the years, it would mean the world if you preorder a copy. Preorders are the single best way to support an author and help a book get off the ground. To make it worth your while, I’ve put together a bunch of bonuses—a signed page from the original manuscript, bonus chapters, an annotated bibliography, and more. Just head to ​dailystoic.com/wisdom before October 21st to claim your bonuses.

There I was at 19 years old, sitting across from the great Robert Greene at The Alcove in Los Feliz.

He was talking about all the trouble he was having finding a good research assistant. 

I had to restrain myself from jumping over the table.

This was literally my dream job. 

Fortunately, before I leapt out of my chair, Robert asked if I might have any interest in giving it a shot. 

Thus started for me what Robert calls in Mastery, The Apprenticeship Phase.

It didn’t start with anything glamorous. In the days before AI or even decent software, I spent hours transcribing interviews he had done for his book The 50th Law. I read obscure books he didn’t want to waste time on. I found articles. I worked on his website. I went to libraries and scanned pages. I went through old archives. I tracked people down.

And in between, I asked questions. I listened. I watched. I absorbed his research and note card system, which I continue to use to this day.

Obviously he was paying me, but I always considered having access to him—being able to ask these questions—my actual compensation. The feedback wasn’t always fun, but what would he have normally charged someone as a consultant? How many people would have killed to be able to call him or email him about anything?

When I say I was his apprentice, I don’t mean it like, “Oh, I was his intern for a few months.” I did this for close to 7 years, even after I became the director of marketing at American Apparel. I was even doing it even after I had gotten my own book deal and was working on my first books. 

Why? 

Because this is how it works. 

As the great Jack London writes in his novel Martin Eden, “no matter how peculiarly constituted a man may be for blacksmithing, I never  heard of one becoming a blacksmith without first serving his apprenticeship.”  

In Wisdom Takes Work—which there are just 6 days left to preorder!—there are multiple chapters on the art of cultivating these mentors and teachers because there is no one who is able to reach their potential totally alone. There is no one who can learn everything they need to learn by trial and error. Wisdom is not a solitary pursuit. It is often a collective effort.

For thousands of years, this is how trades—and life—were taught. Not in a classroom with hundreds of other students, but attached to a professional, who taught, largely by example, until the student was ready to head out on their own. There are some things, the tennis great Billie Jean King would say of her time  training under Alice Marble, an eighteen-​time Grand Slam Champion, “you can only learn from someone who’s been the best in the world.” Or at least, someone who is world class.

It was from Robert that I learned everything—literally everything—about being a writer. He taught me how to write a book, how to think about books, how to research them, how to market them, how to work with a publisher. He fundamentally taught me, from beginning to end, how the entire process works. In addition to telling me what to do, he showed me how a real pro does the job. 

We have to find the people who can teach us and open ourselves to learning from them. Whatever stage of life we’re in, there is someone who knows more than us, who has been through more than us, who can open doors for us.  

We are a product of our teachers and our mentors. 

There would be no Plato without Socrates. There would be no Aristotle without Plato. There would be no Alexander without Aristotle. There would be no Marcus Aurelius without Rusticus or Epictetus or Antoninus. There would be no Zeno without Crates, and thus there would be no Stoicism without Crates. 

Do you know what Crates’s nickname was in ancient Athens? He was known as “the door-opener.” Because that’s what great mentors and teachers do: They open doors to worlds we didn’t even know existed. They invite us into things we wouldn’t have discovered on our own. They help us see possibilities we’d otherwise stay blind to. 

How do you find these door-openers? How do you attract their attention? How do you make yourself worth their while?

You have to show yourself as somebody with the hunger to learn and excel. You have to show yourself as somebody who listens. Somebody who is curious. Somebody who is worth teaching. Somebody who is coachable.  

Mentors give us books to read. They give us problems to solve. They give us riddles to chew on. They provide an example that inspires or even shames…and sometimes cautions. 

The process is not always fun. It will often be painful. As Epictetus would tell his students, having modeled himself on his mentor Musonius, “The philosopher’s lecture hall is a hospital. You shouldn’t walk out of it feeling pleasure, but pain, for you weren’t well when you entered.” 

Valuable things are rarely free. An apprenticeship is one of them. 

But it’s also priceless. 

I wouldn’t be here without it. 

There’s no way I can repay Robert for his kindness and his patience and his generosity. But as I explain in the “Grow a Coaching Tree” chapter in Right Thing, Right Now (the third book in the Virtue Series), as well as in the “Be a Teacher” chapter in Wisdom Takes Work, the only thing we can do is pay that forward. The next step is to become a teacher, to help mentor someone else. 

Because we learn as we teach. 

Because we carry debts from those who helped us—debts that can only be discharged through helping others.

And because, at the end of your career and your life, you’ll be prouder of what you helped others accomplish than what you achieved yourself. 

But only if you put the work in now…working as hard to open doors for others as you work to open doors for yourself.  

***

For the past six years I’ve been lavishing all my working hours on the Stoic Virtues series and I can honestly say Wisdom Takes Work, the fourth and final book in the series, is the culmination of my life’s work.

There are just SIX DAYS left to pre-order Wisdom Takes Work! 

Each time I release a book, I like to do a run of preorder bonuses like signed and numbered first editions, early access to the introduction, bonus chapters, and even an invite to a philosophy dinner at my bookstore, The Painted Porch. 

Just head to ​dailystoic.com/wisdom before October 21st to claim your bonuses.