The ancients were fond of an expression: Character is fate.

It means that character is deterministic, that who you are determines what you will do.

Self-discipline is one of those special things that is both predictive and deterministic. It both predicts that you will be great, AND it makes whatever you are doing great. It is not a means to an end. It is not just something we value until we get something we think we might really value—this job title, that amount of money, winning the biggest game, landing the best opportunity.

No. Discipline is the win. When you are disciplined about your craft…you win. When you know you put your best into something…you win. When your self-worth is tied to things you can control (effort, for example)…you win.

This is what I mean when I say, as I titled my latest book, Discipline is Destiny. Who we are, the standards we hold ourselves to, the things we do regularly—in the end, these are all better predictors of the trajectory of our lives than things like talent, resources, or anything else. So here, adapted from my latest book, Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control, are 25 habits that will put you on the best trajectory possible.

1. Attack the dawn. The morning hours are the most productive hours. Because in the morning, you are free. Hemingway would talk about how he’d get up early because early, there was, “no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write.” 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.

2. Quit being a slave. On an ordinary afternoon in 1949, the physicist Richard Feynman was going about his business when he felt a pull to have a drink. Not an intense craving by any means, but it was a disconcerting desire for alcohol. On the spot, Feynman gave up drinking right then and there. Nothing, he felt, should have that kind of power over him. At the core of the idea of self-mastery is an instinctive reaction against anything that masters us. We have to drop bad habits. We have to quit being a slave—to cigarettes or soda, to likes on social media, to work, or your lust for power. The body can’t be in charge. Neither can the habit. We have to be the boss.

3. Just be about the work. Before he was a big time comedian, Hasan Minhaj was asked if he thought he was going to make it big. “I don’t like that question,” he said. “I fundamentally don’t like that question.” Because the question implies that doing comedy is a means to an end—the Netflix special, selling out the stadium, doing this, getting that. “No, no, no,” he said, “I get to do comedy…I won. It being predicated on doing X or being bigger than Y—no, no, no. To me, it’s always just been about the work. I’m on house money, full time.”

4. Manage the load. “Absolute activity, of whatever kind,” Goethe said, “ultimately leads to bankruptcy.” No one is invincible. No one can carry on forever. We are all susceptible to what the American swimmer Simone Manuel has helped popularize: Overtraining Syndrome. Even iron eventually breaks, or wears out.

5. Do the hard things first. The poet and pacifist William Stafford put forth a daily rule: “Do the hard things first.” Don’t wait. Don’t tell yourself you’ll warm up to it. Don’t tell yourself you’ll get this other stuff out of the way and then…No. Do it now. Do it first. Get it over with.

6. Keep the main thing the main thing. “I wish I knew how people do good and long sustained work and still keep all kinds of other lines going–social, economic, etc,” John Steinbeck once wrote in the middle of the long grind of a novel. The truth is, they don’t! It is impossible to be committed to anything–professionally or personally–without the discipline to say no to all those other superfluous things.

7. Make little progress each day. One of the best rules I’ve heard as a writer is that the way to write a book is by producing “two crappy pages a day.” It’s by carving out a small win each and every day—getting words on the page—that a book is created. Hemingway once said that “the first draft of anything is shit,” and he’s right (I actually have that on my wall as a reminder).

8. 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.” Discipline isn’t about beating yourself up. There’s a firmness involved, for sure. Ultimately, 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.” It is an act of self discipline to be kind to the self. To be a good friend. To make yourself better. To celebrate your progress, however small. That’s what friends do.

9. Bring distinction to everything you do. Plutarch tells us about a general and statesman in Greece named Epaminondas who, despite his brilliance on and off the battlefield, was appointed to an insultingly minor office in Thebes responsible for the city’s sewers. In fact, it was because of his brilliance that he was put in this role, as a number of jealous and fearful rivals thought it would effectively end his career. But instead of being provoked or despairing at his irrelevance, Epaminondas took fully to his new job, declaring that the distinction of the office isn’t brought to the man, the man brings the distinction to the office. With discipline and earnestness, Plutarch wrote, “he proceeded to transform that insignificant office into a great and respected honor, even though previously it had involved nothing more than overseeing the clearing of dung and the diverting of water from the streets.”

10. Practice. The wonderfully curious economist Tyler Cowen has come to ask greats of various fields some version of the question: How do you practice your scales? What drills or exercises make you better at what you do? If a person wants to get better, wants to continue to develop and polish, they must know the answer to that question.

11. Be hard on yourself. “Take the cold bath bravely, ‘’ W.E.B Dubois wrote to his daughter. “Make yourself do unpleasant things so as to gain the upper hand of your soul.” By being hard on ourselves, it makes it harder for others to be hard on us. By being our own tyrant, we take away the power of tyrants over us.

12. View everything in the calm and mild light. George Washington had a mantra that always calmed him down when things seemed to be at their absolute worst. In a single two week period in 1797, Washington included it in three different letters. And later, in Washington’s greatest but probably least known moment, when he talked down the mutinous troops who were plotting to overthrow the U.S government at Newburgh, he said it, as he urged them away from acting on their anger and frustration. View everything, he liked to say, “in the calm light of mild philosophy.”

13. Stay in the saddle. There is an old German word sitzfleisch which means basically sitting your butt in the chair and not getting up until the task is complete. Even as it goes numb, even as one by one, the people around you call it a day. Showing up yourself, day after day, until your back aches, your eyes water, and your limbs turn to mush. Many a great conqueror in the days of horseback were called “Old Iron Ass” for their ability to stay in the saddle.

14. 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. Even the most self-disciplined of us will stagger. 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.

15. Find your comrades. 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.

16. Be a little deaf. We have to develop the ability to ignore, to endure, to forget. Not just cruel provocations from jerks, but also unintentional slights and mistakes from people we love or respect. “It helps to be a little deaf,” was the advice that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was given by her mother-in-law. It helped guide her through not just 56 years of marriage, but also a 27-year career on the court with colleagues she adored–but surely disagreed with on a regular basis.

17. Speak little. Robert Greene puts it perfectly: “Powerful people impress and intimidate by saying less.” They have the discipline and this discipline creates a powerful presence.

18. Focus. Ludwig van Beethoven was known for drifting off in social conversations. Are you even listening to me, a friend once asked. Sorry, Beethoven replied, “I was just occupied with such a lovely, deep thought, I couldn’t bear to be disturbed.” They called this his raptus. His flow state. His place of deep work. His profound concentrated periods of focus. The source of his musical greatness. We can all develop this skill. As Steve Jobs, speaking to his top designer Jonny Ive, would explain, “focus is not this thing you aspire to…or something you do on Monday. It’s something you do every minute.”

19. Delegate. Delegation is not cheap but it affords you the most expensive thing in the world: time. Not just any kind of time, but time to reflect and to think, a precious commodity to say the least. We need this space to learn, space to plan. An opportunity to examine what is important to us. To step back and look at how we’re doing in life. And when necessary, as we said above, to get back to keeping the main thing the main thing.

20. Hustle. “There’s no excuse for a player not hustling,” Lou Gehrig would say. “I believe every player owes it to himself, his club and to the public to hustle every minute he is on the ball field.” I’m not just about running, exactly, but about maximum effort. In any and every situation.

21. Slow down. There’s a difference between hustling and hurrying. They like to say in the military that slow is smooth and smooth is fast. The saying in the ancient world was festina lente. That is, to make haste slowly. Energy plus moderation. Measured exertion. Eagerness, but under control. “Slowly,” the poet Juan Ramon Jimenez would say, “you do everything correctly.”

22. Be strict only with yourself. It was said that the true majesty of Marcus Aurelius was that his exactingness was directed only at himself. He found a way to work with flawed people, putting them to service for the good of the empire, searching them for virtues which he celebrated, accepting their vices, which he knew were not in his control. Tolerant with others, he reminded himself, strict with yourself.

23. Get the little things right. Dating back, perhaps to time immemorial, is the poem and proverb about a horse. “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost,” it begins. And then because of the shoe, the horse was lost and because of the horse, the rider and because of the rider, the message and because of the message the battle and because of the battle, the kingdom. For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost. Because of poor discipline, everything was lost. Save yourself. Save the world. Get the little things right.

24. Beware perfectionism. As Churchill said, another way to spell “perfectionism” is p-a-r-a-l-y-s-i-s. Again, it’s good to have high standards but all virtues become vices if taken too far. An obsession with getting it perfect misses the forest for the trees–because ultimately the biggest miss of the target is failing to get your shot off.

25. Do your best. In an interview with Admiral Hyman Rickover for a chance to join the nuclear submarine program, a young Jimmy Carter was asked how he ranked in his class at the Naval Academy. “59th in a class of 840 sir,” Carter replied with pride. Rickover followed up with, “Did you always do your best?” Carter began to instinctively answer that of course he always did his best, but something inside of him caused him to pause and reconsider. “No, sir, I didn’t always do my best.” Rickover didn’t say anything and just looked at Carter for a long time. Then he stood up, asked one final question, “Why not?”, and walked out of the room.

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The Stoics believed that, in the end, it’s not about what we do, it’s about who we are when we do it. They believed that anything you do well is noble, no matter how humble or impressive, as long as it’s the right thing. That greatness is up to you—it’s what you bring to everything you do.

Temperance, as Cicero claimed, can be the fine polish on top of a great life.

It’s not a palace or a throne that makes someone impressive, the Stoics would say, but kingly behavior that does. It’s discipline, self-control. He wasn’t after power or status, he said, but, “perfection of character: to live your last day, every day, without frenzy or sloth or pretense.” He was after becoming the best version of himself possible, putting a fine polish on top of everything he did, no matter how humble or impressive.

The aim of Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control, is to teach you how to harness the powers of self-discipline. The Stoics believed that we are all born to fulfill a great destiny. And while not everyone’s destiny is the same, everyone’s destiny is achieved with self-discipline and self-control. Discipline is Destiny is a book that will help you fulfill yours.

Because we’d like to encourage you to preorder Discipline is Destiny right now, we’ve put together some exciting bonuses, including a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at dailystoic.com/preorder.

Unlike the “pen-and-ink philosophers,” as the type was derisively known even 2,000 years ago, to the Stoics, Stoicism is something you DO. They were most concerned with how one lived. The choices you made, the causes you served, the principles you adhered to in the face of adversity. They cared about what you did, not what you said.

Throw away your books, Marcus Aurelius said. “Don’t talk about what a good man is like. Be one.”

So in this article, I want to show you some DOERS. I want to share with you some of the most extraordinary, most inspiring moments of Stoicism in the real world, in history, practiced by real philosophers—whether they knew that’s what they were doing or not.

Shunzo Kido

At the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, California, a flashy Japanese equestrian named Shunzo Kido gave one of the most remarkable performances in the history of sports.

He was competing in the 22 ½ mile, 50 obstacle jump endurance horse race. It wasn’t his usual event. His horse wasn’t trained for it. But a teammate was injured and without hesitation Kido replaced him. Off to a solid lead, he surprised the crowd and was in a position for gold. But just as he pulled away from the pack going into the finish and cleared the second-to-last jump, he stunned the crowd by pulling the reins and dropping out of the race.

Why?

He could feel the horse struggling and sensed that even just a few more seconds at full speed would kill the horse as it crossed the finish line.

As the plaque on the Friendship Bridge along the Mount Rubidoux Trail commemorating his unprecedented displayed of sportsmanship reads,

“Lt. Col. Shunzo Kido turned aside from the prize to save his horse. He heard the low voice of mercy, not the loud acclaim of glory.”

As the Stoics would say—it’s not winning that counts. It’s character.

Epaminondas

Plutarch tells us about a general and statesman in Greece named Epaminondas who, despite his brilliance on and off the battlefield, was appointed to an insultingly minor office in Thebes responsible for the city’s sewers.

In fact, it was because of his brilliance that he was put in this role, as a number of jealous and fearful rivals thought it would effectively end his career.

But instead of being provoked or despairing at his irrelevance, Epaminondas took fully to his new job, declaring that the distinction of the office isn’t brought to the man, the man brings the distinction to the office.

With discipline and earnestness, Plutarch wrote, “he proceeded to transform that insignificant office into a great and respected honor, even though previously it had involved nothing more than overseeing the clearing of dung and the diverting of water from the streets.”

By the way, this story is adapted from my latest book, Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control. The aim of the book is to teach you how to harness the powers of self-discipline and self-control so that like the many great men and women throughout the book, you too can fulfill a great destiny. It officially releases on 9/27, but you can pre-order it right now!

We’ve put together some exciting bonuses, including a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at Dailystoic.com/preorder.

Jackie Robinson

In 1945, a couple years before Jackie Robinson broke into Major League Baseball, he had a meeting with Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey. “l’m looking for a ball player,” Rickey said, “with the guts not to fight back.”

There would be hotel clerks refusing him a room, rude waiters, and opponents shouting slurs. Any bit of retaliation, Rickey knew, would not only end Robinson’s career, but would set back his grand experiment of breaking MLB’s color barrier for at least a generation.

The manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, Ben Chapman, was particularly brutal. “[He was] the most vicious of any of the people in terms of name calling,” Robinson said.

Despite, as he later wrote, wanting to, “grab one of those white sons of bitches and smash his teeth in with my despised black fist,” Robinson never retaliated. Not only that, but a month after playing the Phillies in 1947, he agreed to take a friendly photo with Chapman to help save the man’s job.

The thought of touching, posing with such an asshole, even sixty years removed, almost turns the stomach. Robinson would write in I Never Had It Made, “I have to admit that having my picture taken with this man was one of the most difficult things I had to make myself do.” He was willing to do it, he said, because it was part of a larger plan.

Knowing what he wanted and needed to do in baseball, it was clear what he would have to tolerate in order to do it.

Marcus Aurelius, who also brushed up against a fair share of terrible people, said that asking to never encounter a shameless person is to ask for the impossible, but, “the best revenge is not to be like that.”

George Marshall

George Marshall never wanted anything more. It was the promotion he worked for his entire career, the opportunity he dreamed of his entire life. To lead a historic military invasion—it’s what a soldier’s reputation depends on. It was Marshall’s for the taking. But he turned it down.

The U.S. was preparing to launch the invasion at Normandy. Marshall wrote the document outlining the strategy. It was assumed he would command the invasion.

But President Franklin Roosevelt wanted to keep Marshall in Washington. Marshall was his chief of staff. In the waging of a global war, Roosevelt said he didn’t think he’d be able to sleep without his chief of staff in Washington. But Roosevelt also knew what Marshall wanted. He wanted to storm the beaches of Normandy. He wanted to be an American hero.

So Roosevelt left it up to Marshall. If he wanted the command, it was his.

No, Marshall said, this isn’t about what I want. He told Roosevelt to, “act in whatever way he felt was to the best interests of the country…and not in any way to consider my feelings.”

Roosevelt gave the job to Marshall’s protégé, Dwight Eisenhower. The next day, Marshall had to draft the letter to President Stalin, informing him that, “The appointment of General Eisenhower to command of OVERLORD has been decided upon.” Roosevelt added the word “immediate” before “appointment” then signed it. Marshall sent the original copy of the letter to Eisenhower with the note: “Dear Eisenhower: I thought you might like to have this as a memento. It was written very hurriedly by me as the final meeting broke up yesterday, the president signing it immediately. G.C.M.”

Eisenhower became the famous leader of the Normandy invasion. Eisenhower became president. Eisenhower became the American hero. Not Marshall.

Eisenhower later called that copy of the letter, “one of my most cherished mementos of World War II.”

Martin Luther King Jr.

At the SCLC conference in 1962 in Birmingham, Ala., Martin Luther King, Jr. stood before a large, integrated audience and gave the closing address. As King spoke, thanking the audience and reminding them of plans for the next year, a white man named Roy James walked onto the stage and began to savagely beat him.

The first punch struck King with such force in the face that he spun around. King turned to face his assailant and dropped his hands, “like a newborn baby,” as one observer recalled, to receive more blows.

The next blows came in rapid succession, hitting him in the head and the back, filling the now silent auditorium with the sickening sound of bone connecting with flesh.

He was opening himself to an attacker, instinctually, under fire, proving his commitment to nonviolence.

As an angry crowd of people tried to come to King’s defense, he shouted, “Don’t touch him! We have to pray for him.” As the crowd began to pray and sing, King spoke kindly to the man who had just beaten him, reassuring him that he would not be hurt. After he went to a private office where he was given two aspirin by Rosa Parks, King concluded the conference as he held an ice pack to his face.

I tell this story in more detail in Discipline is Destiny—King appears throughout the book and is one of the great examples of what one can achieve with self-discipline and self-control. As I said above, Discipline is Destiny officially releases on 9/27, but you can pre-order it right now!

Zeno

Zeno lost everything. He was forced to start over. He could have resented this. He could have been bitter. It could have broken him. Instead, he used his disaster to change the world.

He was a merchant from a family who made their fortune trading Tyrian, the purple dye used to dye the robes of kings.

On a voyage across the Mediterranean, Zeno’s ship and all its cargo sank.

No one knows how it happened. All we know is that Zeno was stranded somewhere in Athens, while his ship sat at the bottom of the sea.

He made his way to the nearest city and walked into a bookstore where the bookseller happened to be reading works about Socrates. Spellbound, Zeno asked the bookseller where he could meet someone like Socrates. He introduced Zeno the famous Cynic philosopher Crates of Thebes.

Zeno trained with Crates and other Socratic philosophers for the next twenty years. Eventually he founded his own school on a public porch in Athens called the Stoa Poikile

“Well done,” Zeno would later say to Fortune, “to drive me thus to philosophy!” “I made a prosperous voyage when I suffered a shipwreck,” he said.

Theodore Roosevelt

It was over a century ago now that Theodore Roosevelt walked out of the Gilpatrick Hotel on his way to the Milwaukee Auditorium to give a speech to a packed crowd as part of his independent campaign for president.

As he approached the venue, a man rushed from the crowd and shot him at close range.

The bullet—a .38 caliber—hit Roosevelt in the chest but was miraculously slowed by the eyeglasses case and the thick folded speech he had in his overcoat pocket.

His staff tried to rush him to the hospital, but Roosevelt insisted he still had to give the speech.

He walked on stage, quieted the crowd, and said, “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot—but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.”

When something goes wrong, a Stoic isn’t cowed by it. They don’t quit. They say to themselves, It’s going to take a lot more than that to stop me. They don’t just accept that it happened, they love that it happened.

Marcus Aurelius said when things happen that we would have preferred didn’t happen, there’s basically two kinds of people: people who see an obstacle and people who see an opportunity. He loved the metaphor of fire—he wanted to be like the “blazing fire [that] takes whatever you throw on it and consumes it, and rises higher” because of it.

Like a Bull Moose, a blazing fire, a Stoic, next time something goes wrong, say to yourself: it’s going to take more than that to stop me.

Steve Scott

In 1996, Tiger Woods headed into the U.S. Amateur Championship having won thirty straight matches. With a win at Pumpkin Ridge Golf Club, Tiger would become the first golfer to ever win three straight U.S. Amateur Titles.

The first five rounds of match play were uneventful. Woods advanced to the finals where his opponent was the relatively unknown 19-year-old Steve Scott.

After the first 18 of the 36-hole final, no one could believe it: Scott led by 5 holes.

The final 18 holes were a battle. Tiger cut Scott’s lead to 1 by the back 9. On the par-3 10th, Scott drained a flop shot from the deep rough to stretch his lead back to 2. Then Tiger sank a legendary thirty-five-foot putt for eagle to move within 1.

On the 16th hole, down two with three holes to play, Tiger hit his wedge shot within six feet of the pin. He placed a quarter to mark his ball before picking it up. The marker was in Scott’s putting line, so he asked Tiger to slide it over, and so he did. Scott made his par putt.

Forgetting he’d moved his marker, Tiger put his ball down and was about to putt from the wrong spot. If he did, he’d automatically lose the hole and the tournament.

But before Tiger could make this historic mistake, Scott intervened, “Hey, Tiger, did you move that back?”

Tiger paused, returned his marker then his ball to the correct spot, and made the putt. He birdied 17 to force a sudden death playoff. On the second playoff hole, Scott’s putt lipped out, and Tiger tapped his in for the victory and his place in history.

It would be Scott’s one and only moment in the spotlight. He hoped to have a career on the PGA Tour but it didn’t quite pan out. But in an interview for a piece commemorating the twenty-year anniversary of that 1996 match, Scott said “[I’ve] gone on to have a great life. I think I’m walking proof that you can win in life without winning.”

“Runners in a race ought to compete and strive to win as hard as they can,” the Stoic Chrysippus said, “but by no means should they trip their competitors or give them a shove. So too in life; it is wrong to seek after the things useful in life; but to do so while depriving someone else is not just.”

Frederick Douglass

It was the 1840s. Only a couple years after Frederick Douglass had escaped the slave state he was born in and “bade farewell…to that slavery which had been my abhorrence from childhood.”

The young man, still in his early twenties, was on a mission. A member of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass toured all across the Northeastern United States. He attended abolitionist meetings. He told the story of his escape from bondage. He lectured at churches and chapels and universities and small town centers and anywhere there was a chance people might congregate.

Traveling somewhere in Pennsylvania, Douglass was forced to move and ride in the baggage car because of his race.

A white supporter rushed up to apologize for this horrible offense. “I am sorry, Mr. Douglass, that you have been degraded in this manner,” the person said.

Douglass wouldn’t accept any of the gentleman’s consoling.

No, he wasn’t angry. He wasn’t hurt. He replied with great fervor: “They cannot degrade Frederick Douglass. The soul that is within me no man can degrade. I am not the one that is being degraded on account of this treatment, but those who are inflicting it upon me.”

The ancient Stoics—because of their independent thinking, their positions of leadership, and their willingness to stand on principle—were often the subjects of verbal and physical mistreatment.

But it was Epictetus, the slave turned Stoic teacher, who said that a person can only degrade you with your consent. “It is not enough to be insulted or to be harmed. You must believe that you are being harmed. If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation.”

James Stockdale

On September 9, 1965, Admiral James Stockdale’s A-4 Skyhawk jet was shot down in Vietnam.

“Five years down there, at least,” Stockdale said after ejecting from his plane. “I’m leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.”

The North Vietnamese used thirteen prisons and prison camps. The Hỏa Lò Prison was famously the worst. Hỏa Lò means “fiery furnace” or “Hell’s hole,” which is what it was—a dark dungeon where captives were physically and mentally tortured to the unimaginable extreme.

It was the center of North Vietnam’s propaganda exploitation and psychological warfare where no limits were placed on getting the enemy to break down and confess war crimes. So if you were a high ranking American troop that got captured, you went to Hỏa Lò.

Stockdale was not only high ranking, of the 800 prisoners estimated to enter Hỏa Lò, Stockdale had no superior. Victory then for the captors in the “Hanoi Hilton,” as Stockdale and his fellow inmates would come to call it, was getting Stockdale to break.

His captors kept him in the main torture room in the most isolated part of the prison. After a month straight of torture, they thought they had him. They thought he was broken and ready to be marched down town to commit treason in front of television cameras.

Before they could, they needed him to look presentable, so they took him out of the torture room to a bathroom where he’s told to shower and shave.

Left alone in the bathroom, Stockdale grabbed the razor he was given to shave, and sliced open his scalp. He’s bandaged and thrown in a cell while his captors look for something to cover the wounds, now even more determined to parade him in front of cameras.

Stockdale, realizing he needed to further disfigure himself, took a wooden stool and bashed his face until he could barely see.

Guards rushed in and debated with one another about what to tell their commander. “You tell him,” Stockdale interrupted, “that the captain will not be going downtown.”

The sheer bravery and strength. It’s just unreal—a living embodiment of what Epictetus said, “you may bind up my leg, but not even Zeus has the power to break my freedom of choice.” His captors deprived him. They tortured him. They beat him. They stripped him of his possessions. But they could not break him.

Simone Biles

She was called “selfish,” a “quitter,” a “shame to the country,” and the proof that, “we are raising a generation of weak people.”

But actually, what she did was incredibly disciplined and unselfish.

At the Tokyo Olympics, four-time gold medalist Simone Biles withdrew from the all-around competition, an event she won gold in at the Rio de Janeiro games. Had she competed, Biles would have been vying to become the first woman to win back-to-back gold medals in the all-around in over fifty years.

The day before she made the decision to withdraw, Biles felt off. Her take-offs felt off. Her aerials felt off. Her landings felt off. And she knew, if she were to perform the way she was performing, she would have cost her teammates a medal.

So Biles put the team first. “I can’t risk a medal for the team,” she explained, “so I need to call it.” She admitted, “you usually don’t hear me say things like that because I’ll usually persevere and push through things, but not to cost the team a medal.”

Stoicism, being disciplined, is not about punishing yourself. It’s a firm school, for sure, but as Seneca, after a lifetime of study of philosophy, came to judge his own growth: “What progress have I made?” he wrote. “I have begun to be a friend to myself.”

It is an act of self discipline to be kind to yourself, to rest when you’re not feeling your best, to put the team first—that’s what friends do.

Marcus Aurelius

Late in his reign, sick and possibly near death, Stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius received surprising news. His old friend and most trusted general, Avidius Cassius, had rebelled in Syria. Having heard the emperor was vulnerable or possibly dead, the ambitious general declared himself Caesar and assumed the throne.

Marcus should have been angry. After all, this man was trying to take his job and possibly his life. If we think about what other emperors did to their rivals and enemies–for instance Nero killed his own mother and Otho had Galba murdered in 69 A.D. and paraded his head around Rome–it makes Marcus’s response all the more unusual. Because he didn’t immediately set out to crush this man who had betrayed him, who threatened his life, his family, and his legacy. Instead, Marcus did nothing. He even kept the news secret from his troops, who might have been enraged or provoked on his behalf—and simply waited: Would Cassius come to his senses?

The man did not. And so Marcus Aurelius called a council of his soldiers and made a rather extraordinary announcement. They would march against Cassius and obtain the “great prize of war and of victory.” But of course, because it was Marcus, this war prize was something wholly different.

Marcus informed them of his plan to capture Cassius, but not kill him. Instead, he would “forgive a man who has wronged one, to remain a friend to one who has transgressed friendship, to continue faithful to one who has broken faith.”

In a true Stoic fashion, Marcus had controlled his perceptions. He wasn’t angry, he didn’t despise his enemy. He would not say an ill word against him. He would not take it personally. Then he acted—rightly and firmly—ordering troops to Rome to calm the panicking crowds and then set out to do what must be done: protect the empire, put down a threat.

As he told his men, if there was one profit they could derive from this awful situation that they had not wanted, it would be to “settle this affair well and show to all mankind that there is a right way to deal even with civil wars.”

It brings to mind a line from another Stoic, Seneca: “Bestow pardon for many things; seek pardon for none.” This is a common theme in Stoicism—one we hear often in the writings of Marcus Aurelius: Hold yourself to a very high standard, and don’t make excuses when you fail to meet it. Meanwhile, leave other people to their standards and make every excuse you can when they fail. Be tough on yourself; be understanding to your fellow citizens.

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Stoicism is not a philosophy for school. It never has been. It’s been a philosophy for life.

“Show me a Stoic, if you know of one,” Epictetus said. “Show me someone untroubled with disturbing thoughts about illness, danger, death, exile or loss of reputation. By all the gods, I want to see a Stoic!”

So go and do as the Stoics have done all throughout history. Do the right thing. Be strong in the face of adversity. Show us a Stoic. Show us the actions of a philosopher.

Today. Tomorrow. Always.

I have lived on a rural country road for many years.

It is unpaved and unmaintained by the county or the state, lined with trees, and more frequently crossed by deer and jack rabbits than people.

It’s a throwback to an older, simpler way of life.

It’s also a throwback to a scene I’ve always remembered from Mad Men, where Don Draper and his family finish their picnic and then nonchalantly throw all their trash into the grass below.

My experience walking and running and biking and driving on this road has been to witness the return of that attitude. People dump tires and old mattresses. They dump debris from construction sites. They dump beer bottles and candy wrappers. They dump illegal deer kills and for some inexplicable and alarming reason, a lot of dead dogs.

At first, this just pissed me off—especially because the nails kept giving me flats. It made me angry at humanity and the place that I lived. I tried calling the police and animal control and my local politicians—of course, they did nothing. I put up cameras which did nothing. I despaired about the climate and the future. I thought about moving.

But then one morning on my walk with my kids, a thought hit me that was both freeing and indicting. How many times do I have to walk past this litter, I thought, before I am complicit in its existence. Even if I moved to a place where this didn’t happen, I thought, it would still be happening here. Marcus Aurelius was right when he said that you can also commit injustice by doing nothing.

So I started cleaning it up. The tires went into the back of my truck—and I paid to have them properly recycled. I was down in the gullies by the side of the road picking up soda bottles and plastic bags. I tossed countless nails and screws into the trash. I have put on face masks and gloves and scooped up dead goats, a dead calf and dead dogs which I burned or took to the back of my ranch to decompose in a less disruptive place.

I can’t say the experience was pleasurable, but it was empowering.

The Stoics would agree that the world can be ugly and awful and disappointing. They would just remind us that what we control is what we do about this. We control what difference we try to make. We control whether it makes us bitter or makes us better—whether we complain or just get to work.

But the ultimate reward came more recently, because we spent the last few weeks at the beach as a family. My kids were excited to play in the ocean and to build sand castles and have ice cream, of course. Yet they seemed to have the most fun running up and down the empty beach in the morning—unprompted by me—picking up trash left by the beach goers the day before and asking for my help lifting them up so they could put it in those paper bag trash cans that the county puts up every few hundred yards.

I posted about it on Instagram once and people showed me there was a whole hashtag of people doing this. It started with a viral Facebook post in 2019, which has 335,000 shares and 102,000 likes (and counting). A guy posted before and after photos with this caption:

The challenge spread globally thanks to the #TrashTag hashtag. You can see people cleaning up a beach in Mumbai, filling up dumpsters full of trash in Kansas City, and collecting garbage in Vietnam.

A Daily Stoic reader emailed me a little while back to tell me about how his picking up trash spread locally. In his townhome community, there’s a trash dumping problem. “It was driving me mad,” he wrote. He put up cameras to try to catch offenders. He stayed up late to see if he could run them off. Then he came across the video I made and instead of policing his area, he began cleaning it up. “I saw it rub off on some of my neighbors and family,” he said. And now, the number of neighbors picking up trash outnumbers the number of neighbors dumping trash.

The Stoics spoke of our “circles of concern.” Our first concern, they said, is our mind. But beyond this is our concern for our bodies then for our immediate family then our extended family. Like concentric rings, these circles were followed by our concern for our community, our city, our country, our empire, our world.

The work of philosophy, the Stoics said, was to draw this outer concern inward, to learn how to care as much as possible for as many people as possible, to do as much good for them as possible.

There’s a sign by the track I run at in Austin, put there by the football player Hollywood Henderson (who paid for the track). It says, “Leave This Place Better Than You Found It.”

To me, that’s a pretty good life philosophy. In things big and small (but mostly small). As Zeno said, “well-being is realized by small steps, but is truly no small thing.” You don’t have to save the planet. You don’t have to save someone’s life. Can you just make things a little bit better?

There is a Mr. Rogers quote I love. “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news,” Rogers said, “my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”

We decide what we look for in life—do we get mad at the people making the mess or do we look towards the people cleaning things up? We decide whether to despair or find hope and goodness.

But I actually think we can go further. Do we decide to be one of the helpers? Do we decide to pick up the trash? Do we decide to leave this place a little better than we found it?

That’s what makes the difference…and life better for everyone, but especially you.