It was a crazy idea from the start. 

My wife and I were sitting at a cafe in Bastrop, TX and we spotted an empty storefront, a building that’s part of the National Register of Historic Places.

“You know what would be amazing there?” my wife said. “A bookstore.”

We started construction the first week of March 2020. 

But somehow, we didn’t lose all our money. It didn’t blow up our marriage. It’s actually been a great experience and, even more surprising, a pretty good business too. 

Four years in, one of the first things people want to know is how our bookstore The Painted Porch is doing, whether it’s a success. I’d say so. I’ve certainly learned a lot along the way, both about business and life, as well as publishing and people and myself. 

Here are some of those lessons: 

Counterprogramming is key. So yeah, opening a physical bookstore in 2020 seemed crazy. Not just to me—everyone said so. Retail was shifting online, books were becoming digital, the pandemic was raging, bookstores were closing—not opening. But that’s exactly why it worked. It was crazy because no one else was doing it. It stands out. It’s different. 

Have more than one way to win. This was a great piece of advice I got from Allison Hill, who owns Vroman’s and Book Soup in Los Angeles: most bookstores only survive if they’re multipurpose spaces. The Painted Porch isn’t just a bookstore—it’s my office, my employees’ office, the place where we record podcasts and film YouTube videos. So if nobody comes in and buys books, we’re not necessarily losing money.  At the same time, it probably also wouldn’t have made sense to build out this level of podcast studio or even a writing office by itself either. So multi-use allows you to do more than you ordinarily would—across the board.

Resist the pressure to scale. At least once a week, someone asks us if we’re going to open a second location. And at least three struggling bookstores have reached out about us acquiring them. The answer is a polite no. “Do Not Go Past The Mark You Aimed For” is one of the most important laws in The 48 Laws of Power. Know when you’ve won. Know what enough is. Know your limits. 

Have a unique proposition. Most bookstores carry thousands of titles. The best one in Austin, BookPeople, stocks over 100,000. We carry about 1,000. It was one of the best decisions we made—both personally and professionally. We only carry books we love. Not only did this make it cheaper and easier to run the bookstore, it makes us stand out. It gives people a reason to come in. If people want a specific book, they go to a certain trillion-dollar e-commerce behemoth. If people want to discover new books and have a unique experience, they come to us. We are the only bookstore in the world with our selection. Again, counterprogramming. 

Create spectacles. Before we opened the store, I was in Bucharest, Romania for a talk. My host took me into a local bookstore that had an enormous globe hanging from the ceiling. I watched as customer after customer came in to take pictures beneath it, before checking out with books. For me, one of the key pieces of the puzzle was figuring out what kind of marquee feature we could add that would make coming to the store an experience. I recalled a particularly cool floor to ceiling tower of books about Abraham Lincoln in the museum attached to Ford’s Theater in DC. 

This inspired our now infamous book tower, which I designed to be built on top of an old, broken fireplace in the building. It’s 20 feet tall and made of some 2,000 books, 4,000 nails, and 40 gallons of glue.

It was not cheap to do. It was not easy to do. It took forever. We had to solve all sorts of logistical problems to make it work. But it’s also probably one of the single best marketing and business decisions we made in the whole store. Invariably, almost every customer that comes in takes a picture of it—plenty more come in because they heard about it and wanted to see it.

Pass it on and pay it forward. I’m proud of the books I’ve championed over the years—of paying forward what inspired me, like the Gregory Hays translation of Meditations (I loved it so much I even put out my own edition). I love looking around The Painted Porch and seeing books you don’t often see in other stores. Just last year, the publisher of Ann Roe’s Pontius Pilate told us they had to do another printing because we’d raved about it too much. Whether you’re a writer, a bookstore owner, a coach, an entrepreneur, a teacher, a parent—when you find something that helps you, inspires you, or moves you…pass it on. Tell people about it. Help others find what helped you.. 

Reading will never get old. One of the things that gets me excited about my job is just how much stuff there is that gets me excited…that until recently I didn’t even know existed. I’ve been doing this a long time—reading seriously since high school, obsessed with Greek and Roman history for most of that time. And somehow, I only just discovered Augustus by John Williams? A book that feels like it was written for me—Memoirs of Hadrian is one of my all-time favorites—and I didn’t even know this existed? And it’s not like it’s some obscure old thing—it won the National Book Award! Then just last month I discovered The Last of the Wine, an incredible historical novel that reminded me of everything I loved about Pressfield’s Gates of Fire and Tides of War. That’s what I love about reading: the more you read the more you realize there is much more to read. Even if you have read a lot, there is not just an endless list of great authors and books still to get to, but new ones come out every day! Maybe that’s how you know you’ve found your thing: when there seems to be no end in sight, and that never stops exciting you.

If you’ve always wanted to do it…do it. This has happened to me more than once. When my wife and I moved to a farm, I couldn’t believe how many people said, “I’ve always wanted to do that.” Same with opening the bookstore. People hear you have a small-town bookstore and they light up—“I’ve always wanted to do that.” Casey Neistat has a great line: “The right time is right now.” If you’ve always wanted to do something, do it. Stop romanticizing it. Stop overthinking it. Try it. Do it small. Do it your way. But do it.

It’s one damn thing after another. My wife suggested opening the bookstore back in the fall of 2019. Then COVID delayed us a year. Then we didn’t feel right opening for another year. Then a freak storm and some political incompetence shut down the power grid—burst pipes, busted roof. Then a global supply chain crisis made books hard to get. There’s the day-to-day stuff too: employees get sick, the internet goes out, shipments arrive damaged, a toilet leaks, the door won’t shut properly all of a sudden. But that’s how it goes. With most things in life, it’s one damn thing after another. Expect it. Work through it. Keep going.

It’s easy to focus on what’s going wrong. In any business or project, it’s easy to fixate on what’s going wrong. As I mentioned, the little daily problems don’t seem to stop. Those things demand your attention, of course. But I’ve found it helpful—even necessary—to make an effort to notice and appreciate the things that are going well, the things that are working, the little wins we get every day.

Don’t overlook simple solutions. There’s a tendency—especially when you care a lot about something—to overthink it. To assume everything has to be big, polished, expensive, professional. But great ideas can be cheap and easy too. One of my favorite bookstores in the world, Gertrude & Alice in Bondi Beach, puts sticky notes inside their books. Just little handwritten notes from employees about why they liked this or that book. No fancy plaques. No expensive signage. We started doing it at The Painted Porch too. It’s fun, it’s human, and customers love it.

Be deliberate with your space. In the book Strip Tees by Kate Flannery (a great guest when she came on the Daily Stoic Podcast—listen to the episode here), there’s a story about Dov Charney walking through an American Apparel store. He stopped, pointed to the tile beneath his feet, and said, “Do you know how much rent I pay for this tile every day? Do you know how many T-shirts we have to sell just to cover the cost of this one tile?” I didn’t witness this one—but I saw many performances like that—and now that I own my own shop, the point stuck with me: every inch of space you control is costing you something. Are you using it well? Is it serving the purpose you think it is? In a bookstore—or any business—it pays to be deliberate about what goes where. What are you putting in your most valuable real estate?

Does it make you better or worse? In the middle of the project, when the whole thing seemed impossible and doomed to fail—as we tried to open a bookstore, raise two kids when schools were closed, and make sense of the world—I wrote a note to myself: “2020 is a test: will it make you a better person or a worse person?” That was the test that I reminded myself of over and over again: will this make you a better person or a worse person? If starting a business makes you a worse person—if it stresses you out, if it tears your relationships apart, if it makes you bitter or frustrated with people—then it doesn’t matter how much money it makes or external praise it receives. It’s not successful.

A sense of urgency matters. A couple of weeks ago, a shipment of books came in on a Friday afternoon. I heard someone on the staff say, “We’ll unpack those tomorrow.” I’m glad I heard it because I had to stop them and explain that, unless the books in those boxes were opened and the orders waiting on them were fulfilled (in time for the morning mail pickup on Saturday), they would not even begin traveling in the customer’s direction until Monday afternoon. So what seemed like a little delay until the next morning was really like a 72-hour delay. Every small delay or shortcut has second-, third-, and fourth-order consequences. That’s why it’s important—whether you’re packing boxes, replying to emails, or making big strategic calls—to think a step or two ahead. Don’t procrastinate. Do it now. Do it with urgency.

Ask why it’s being done that way. One day I noticed our team was packing shipments in a pretty inefficient way. I asked why. The answer? That’s how so-and-so showed me when I started. No one had questioned it since. This happens all the time—in businesses, on teams, in life. People inherit a process, follow it out of habit, and never stop to ask: Is this the best way? Does this still make sense? The most useful question in any system is often the simplest: Why are we doing it like this?

Know the history of your space. I was talking to Jeni Britton Bauer—the founder of Jeni’s Ice Cream—and she told me the first ice cream shops date back to the late 1600s or early 1700s. Her point was that what feels trendy or modern is often something old coming back around. That applies to bookstores, too. Or really any craft or creative business. What you’re doing might feel new or niche, but it probably has deeper roots than you think.

Learn from the cats. When we were thinking about opening a bookstore, I bought a course from a bookstore consultant. I talked to friends. I talked to bookstore owners while on a book tour. I got a lot of advice, gathered best practices, and learned what worked for others. And yet, the single most popular thing about The Painted Porch is something that never came up…the cats. In 2021, we took a family road trip to Cerro Gordo, the ghost town Brent Underwood has been restoring—my kids are obsessed with his YouTube videos—and came home with two cats who have lived at the bookstore ever since. They’re literally the most popular thing about the store. As one Yelp reviewer put it: “Nice collection of books, clean, very comfy atmosphere, but I’m not going to lie to the great people of Bastrop…I come for the cats.” Lol. So yes, do your research. Yes, learn from others. But keep in mind, some of the best parts of any project are things you can’t possibly predetermine.

Do things only you can do. Something that’s happened with Daily Stoic over the years is as it has grown, so has the number of copycats. And so we’re constantly asking, what can only we do? With the bookstore, for example, we’re lucky to have authors constantly passing through to record the podcast. While they’re here, they sign books. Sometimes we do live events with them. Those books, those experiences—you can’t get them anywhere else. This has always been good advice, but with these AI tools making it easier and easier to copy and replicate and reproduce, it’s more important than ever to find and focus on the things only you can do.

Zoom out. When we were doing a small construction project at the bookstore recently, we moved an old antique bar and found some paint on the wall, covered in plaster. Carefully scraping it away, we found a date and a kind of sign: January 16, 1922. What was happening in the world that day? Who were the people who stood there and supervised it being painted? What kind of business was in this space a hundred years ago? How many others have come and gone since? It was a humbling reminder: we’re not the first people to try something in this building, and we won’t be the last. It can be very easy on a project to get caught up in the immediacy of what’s in front of you, to get caught up in the day-to-day of running a business or chasing a goal. But every project, every place, every person is part of something much bigger—something that started long before us and will continue long after.

There’s always problems you aren’t even aware of. What started as a small construction project at the bookstore recently led to uncovering another issue, which led us to another thing that needed fixing…and that led to something else entirely. We’re lucky we tackled the initial project. One thing that keeps you up at night is all the things you don’t know are happening. The controversial Samuel Zemurray’s line—per Rich Cohen’s amazing book The Fish That Ate the Whale—was “Never trust the report.” He went to South America or Boston or wherever the business was being done and saw the situation up close for himself. He wanted first hand knowledge so as a leader he could make the right decisions. 

I will leave you with one final bonus piece of advice: hard things are good for you. It is only from doing hard things, as the Stoics said, that we learn what we’re capable of. Seneca would say that he actually pitied people who have never experienced challenges. “You have passed through life without an opponent,” he said. “No one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.”

Opening a bookstore during a global pandemic has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It’s been challenging. Expensive. At times overwhelming. There were setbacks we didn’t anticipate, problems we didn’t know existed, and moments where it would’ve been easier to walk away.

Which is what’s made it one of the most interesting, meaningful, and rewarding experiences of my life. We’ve learned so much—about business, about books, about what we are capable of. We’ve built something that matters to our community and to us. And in the end, those are the things that stay with you—not the easy wins, not the shortcuts, not the stuff or the money.

So if you’re thinking of doing something difficult, if you feel called to do something big…do it. Regardless of whether it succeeds or fails, you’ll be better for it. No one will wonder what you were capable of. Not even you.

I would never say I am glad it happened.

I don’t want to dismiss the tragedy and the disruption and the loss.

But as I think about what happened five years ago, as I think about my life shutting down for the pandemic in March and April of 2020, I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude. I see how it changed me. I see what it taught me. I see the trajectory it put me on.

I’m not talking here about the resurgence of Stoicism that came from these last few troubled years, although that too has been fascinating, exhilarating and obviously good for ‘business’ as an author. I am mostly just talking about how deeply those strange, quiet months—when I was forced to slow down and stay put—recalibrated what I value, what I prioritize, what I want my life to look like.

In March of 2020, as social distancing and lockdowns started, my wife and two young sons settled into our ranch on the outskirts of Austin. We’d lived there for five years, but we were able to live there in a way we’d never lived there before. No more commutes. No more daily trips to the store. No more weekly trips to the airport. No more waking up in hotel rooms. No more time apart.

We would spend literally hundreds and hundreds of days together…in a row. In a way that I don’t think I had ever spent in one place or with anyone in all my life (my parents having been rather busy people themselves). And never before so free from the mental load—the relentless cycle of logistics, scheduling, planning, packing, and worrying about where I needed to be next—that had always kept some part of me from being fully present.

There is no such thing as parental leave in my line of work. And, like a lot of driven people who work for themselves, I’m not sure if I could have taken time off, that I would have let myself. Instead, I’ve worked constantly for much of my career and much of my young children’s lives, accepting and chasing opportunities—even though that meant many nights in hotel rooms and on airport benches. This, in addition to those ordinary work-from-home days that all writers know, where you are technically home but are, in fact, very far away.

Suddenly, every single day, rain or shine, I was able to take my boys for a long walk in the morning. Most days, we also did their nap in the running stroller or a bike trailer. In the evening, we walked again. We got in the pool together almost every day. We read books. We ate every meal together. I never missed a bathtime or a bedtime.

How many miles did we walk on our dirt roads? How much time did we spend in the woods? How many sunrises and sunsets? How many blackberries did we pick? How many fish did we catch?

Again, I understand that this was privileged—many people had it quite badly, and I’m not just referring to the immuno-compromised. My sister spent the pandemic in a small apartment in Brooklyn. My grandmother spent it in a nursing home. We had friends who were doctors and paramedics, soldiers who were deployed. Plenty of other people still had to work in warehouses, in places and conditions they should have had to…while others lost their livelihood entirely.

So I get that it was privileged. That’s my whole point, I am saying I was incredibly lucky.

I was lucky that I got to see my own home in a new way. One thing that struck us was how beautiful that first spring was—and how new it was. Like, we’d never once, in five years, spent enough days in a row at home that we could actually track spring happening, watching the bare trees go from buds to leaves to a cool, lush forest. We’d missed blackberry season most years. We’d get home after golden hour most days. But now we noticed everything—the small, daily transformations, the subtle shifts of light through the windows, the sounds of birds we’d previously been too busy to even see.

In Chloe Dalton’s lovely new book ​Raising Hare​, Dalton—an ambitious and connected political advisor—finds herself in an old house in the English countryside. On a walk one day she comes across a leveret (a baby wild hare) and nurses it back to life. What ensues is a surreal and moving friendship, as the hare becomes a free-range companion, hopping around the house, snoozing quietly by Dalton’s side as she wrote, running in from the fields when called, drumming softly on her duvet to get her attention, even giving birth and raising babies inside Dalton’s home.

These were not particularly well-known or well-understood animals, in fact, they’re largely ignored. So she had to read not just research papers, but poetry and ancient authors just to find out what they’re supposed to eat. Spending hundreds of lonely, quiet hours with the leveret–which she never named–she learned to understand its habits and needs, seeing the world from its umwelt (to use one of my favorite words) in addition to her own. And she came to see the home and countryside that she lived in differently, too.

“I felt a new spirit of attentiveness to nature,” she writes, “no less wonderful for being entirely unoriginal, for as old as it is as a human experience, it was new to me. For many years, the seasons had largely passed by, my perceptions of the steady cycle of nature disrupted by travel and urban life. I had observed nature in broad brushstrokes, in primary colors, at a surface level. I had been most interested in whether it was dry enough to walk, or warm enough to eat outside with friends. I could identify only a handful of birds and trees by name. I hadn’t observed the buds unfurling, the seasonal passage of birds, the unshakeable rituals and rhythms of life in a single field or wood. I now marveled at the purple tinge on the black feathers of a house martin—the smallest creature I had ever seen—which flew into the house one morning…observing the gleam of the sun on the mirror finish of its plumage, before releasing it into the air.”

It’s funny. I spent 2018 and 2019 working on my book ​Stillness is the Key​. One of the main characters of the book is Churchill, whose own relationship with time and the natural world was changed by his love of painting, which he discovered in the midst of a nervous breakdown after WWI. He was introduced to it by his sister-in-law, who, sensing that Churchill was a steaming kettle of stress, handed him a small kit of paints and brushes her young children liked to play with. In a little book titled ​Painting as a Pastime​, Churchill spoke eloquently of the way painting, like all good hobbies, taught the practitioner to be present. “This heightened sense of observation of Nature,” he wrote, “is one of the chief delights that have come to me through trying to paint.” He had lived for forty years on planet Earth consumed by his work and his ambition, but through painting, his perspective and perception grew much sharper. Forced to slow down to set up his easel, to mix his paints, to wait for them to dry, he saw things he would have previously blown right past.

I was just finishing a very busy book tour for ​Stillness​ when the pandemic hit (I actually crossed through the Venice airport in late January on the day when those two Chinese tourists arrived from Wuhan—later identified as among the earliest COVID cases). I thought I knew what stillness was, but the world was about to teach me about real stillness.

For many of us, the pandemic brought everything to ​a screeching, unprecedented stop. I​t stripped everything down, broke it all apart and made so much of our normal lives–work and personal–unsafe, if not impossible. I wasn’t having to get to this plane. I wasn’t having to battle traffic to get somewhere on time. I wasn’t having to prepare for this talk or that one. There were no meetings, no dinners out, no get-togethers, no pressing deadlines.

For all it took from us, it gave us “the privilege of an experience out of the ordinary,” ​as Dalton beautifully put it​.

And yet, what did most of us do with this experience? We complained about it. We resented it. We focused on what was missing. We agitated for things to ‘go back to normal.’ As if the way things were before was how they were supposed to be!

Because of some health issues in our household, because we had the physical space, since I had some financial comfort, and because my in-person work was certainly not essential–I did not want to be responsible for getting people together and getting them sick–we continued our social distancing in a more sustainable way longer than most. I turned down work travel. I declined most social obligations. We let our employees keep working remotely.

This was one of the best decisions I ever made. I really grew as a parent–as an equal parent. I got in a lot of reading and writing and running. And as I said, I grew to really love where we live.

As Dalton writes in her book, she had the same experience.

Me?

I’m grateful for something like 500 consecutive bedtimes with my boys.

I’m grateful for ​the road trips we took​. I’m grateful for the projects we worked on together as a family (​designing the bookstore​, ​writing The Boy Who Would Be King​ and​ The Girl Who Would Be Free​). I’m grateful for the things it forced me to notice and work on in my marriage.

I’m grateful that it forced me to confront the reality that there are many things I don’t have to do. If you’d asked me in January 2020 if I could survive—professionally and personally—with no travel, no events, no dinners out, no get-togethers, I’d have said absolutely not. As it turned out, it was ​not only rewarding but immensely productive in every sense​. Why? Because clearly, those things I thought I had to do, I didn’t actually have to do. As it turns out, I’m better and happier when I don’t.

I’m grateful for what it taught me about human nature, about history, about adversity, about mortality, about our obligations to each other. I’m grateful that it didn’t radicalize me or turn me into an unfeeling, cruel person (what Marcus Aurelius would refer to during the Antonine Plague as the real pestilence). I’m grateful that it showed me what I needed to be most grateful for–my health, my family, the present moment. I’m grateful that it taught me how easy it can be to take so many things about our lives for granted that other people do not share and would count themselves incredibly lucky to have.

I’m grateful for what was, I think you can say, the most radical lifestyle experiment in human history. In a note to myself in the early days of the pandemic, I wrote, “2020 is a test: will it make you a better person or a worse person?”

That was the test that I reminded myself of over and over again: will this make you a better person or a worse person?

In the process, the difficult, painful pandemic became what POW survivor, ​Admiral James Stockdale, would describe​ as a “defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”

It doesn’t exactly keep me up at night, but like most people, I have a low-level suspicion that I’m paying for a bunch of stuff I don’t need.

At the beginning of the year, I went through all the various accounts and credit cards for my businesses, and sure enough, that’s exactly what I found.

There was an IMDb Pro account still active from a podcast producer who left three hires ago. We were paying for three cloud storage services when one would have sufficed. Somehow, we ended up with two separate enterprise Zoom accounts…and one had been upgraded to handle a large number of people on a call we were doing and was never downgraded. As I dug in, I found more redundancies, I found services that had sneakily ratcheted their fees up month after month and then just stuff I don’t think we ever signed up for in the first place.

This, of course, is a microcosm of our digital and subscription economy these days. It’s also, I think, a metaphor for life. We don’t just accumulate stuff, we accumulate drag. We accumulate drains and leeches that instead of physically taking up space, overwhelm and impede our ability to operate and think.

It turns out that the monthly cost of all these unnecessary expenses was almost enough to cover the salary of a new employee! Plus my mental bandwidth–to say nothing of the corresponding emails all these services send–was increased as well. It’s basically the same feeling I get whenever I clean out the garage or organize a doom drawer.

So that’s what I am thinking about now that spring is upon us: how I can declutter my life—physically, mentally, and emotionally—and how you can do the same.

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

Clean up your information diet. In programming, there’s a saying: “garbage in, garbage out.” The question is, what are you allowing in? Many of us absorb too much garbage—whether it’s from the news we watch, the people we follow on social media, or even certain people in our lives. Spring is a great time to ask: Where do misery, negativity, dysfunction, and chaos sneak into my life? And then do something about it. Look at your “information diet.” When was the last time Twitter actually left you feeling informed? Reddit? Cable news in an airport? If it isn’t leaving you calmer or wiser, ​maybe it’s time to cut it off at the source​. You don’t have to be uninformed—just be intentional about what you consume and who you engage with. Personally, I prefer reading books about history and human nature (​here’s a list of timely books I put together for 2025​). They’re not all fun and sunshine—there’s plenty of darkness, too—but I learn far more from that than from endless scrolling. I’m deliberate about which chats and texts I participate in and who I spend time with. I aim to let in the opposite of garbage, because that leads to the opposite of garbage out.

Destroy a DOOM box. We all have them—those boxes, bins, or junk drawers stuffed with random odds and ends we don’t actually need. This is what’s known as a DOOM box—“Didn’t Organize, Only Moved.” In one of the few jokes Marcus tells in ​Meditations​, he writes about people who accumulate so much stuff, they don’t even have a place to shit. Seneca famously said that people aren’t just weighed down by their possessions—they are owned by them. That overstuffed box in your garage, the junk drawer spilling over, the storage closet packed with forgotten things—what are you really holding onto? If you wouldn’t go out and buy it today, why are you keeping it? Grab a bag, empty the doom box, and purge anything you don’t truly need. Whether you trash it, donate it, or sell it, clearing out physical clutter clears mental space and reduces the number of things that “own” you.

Quit your vices. In another sense, we can be “owned” by bad habits. Seneca talks about how even a powerful Roman general can be mastered by ambition. Many of us are slaves to habits or substances. There’s a story I tell in ​Discipline is Destiny​ about the physicist Richard Feynman feeling a sudden midday urge for a drink. Realizing alcohol’s hold on him, he quit cold turkey. Dwight Eisenhower, a four-pack-a-day smoker, had a heart attack and simply gave himself an order to stop. He realized he was not in command—the habit was in command. Ask yourself: What has control over me? Is it caffeine, social media, Netflix, junk food—something more serious? I once heard addiction described as losing the freedom to abstain. If you struggle to avoid something you don’t truly need—as Feynman realized—you’re dealing with a compulsion. With spring on the horizon, ask yourself what you’re hooked on. Where have you lost the freedom to say no? And how can you reclaim your power by refusing to feed that habit? For some, it’s as simple as not buying junk food. For others, it may involve support groups or a treatment program. In any case, spring is an ideal time to assess who—or what—is in command, and to reassert your autonomy. If you want a happier, more fulfilling life, decide which vices you’re no longer willing to let rule you.

Limit what has access. We are way too reachable. You have Facebook messages and text messages. People can call your phone. People can call you on WhatsApp. People can hit you up on Instagram and LinkedIn and Slack and Telegram. People can send you a package at your office and send junk mail to your house. This is insane! There should not be a DOZEN ways that people can get ahold of you. Who could possibly keep track of that? I’ve limited it to three ways people can get in touch with me: You can text, email, or call me. Email is day-to-day work stuff, texts are for friends and family, and when my phone rings, it’s usually something important from either one of those groups. I no longer feel the need to check 20 different apps and inboxes 50 times a day, because I know everything that actually matters will come in through one of those three channels.

Close the loop. I have a bunch of emails in my inbox waiting on a signature, waiting on a reply, waiting on a form or a selection. Why am I just letting them sit? It always takes less time to close these loops than I think…yet I let them sit there. I’ve found it really helpful to just dedicate, say a concentrated 15 minutes, to closing as many of them as possible. The mental relief that comes from clearing them out is always worth far more than the small effort it takes to get them done.

Delete the loop. At the same time, I have a bunch of emails that I told myself I was going to reply to but honestly, I don’t need to. Or too much time has passed for it to be worth it. So another 15 minutes where I just go through and mark these as read—or better off, delete them—is time well spent, too.

Make amends. This is actually one of the challenges in ​Spring Forward​: identify any grudges we’re holding—conflicts, disagreements, or sources of animosity in our lives. How can we clean those up or clear them out? What can we apologize for? Years ago, there was someone I got into a big fight with over one of my books. I eventually emailed them, saying, “Hey, here’s what I’ve been carrying, and I wish I’d done it differently. I feel bad about the consequences for you. I’m sorry.” I’d love to say we became friends afterward, but they didn’t accept my apology—instead, they hurled more anger at me. It was obvious they still carried a lot of resentment, but making amends is also a gift you give yourself. I said what I needed to say, so I’m no longer ruminating or waiting for an apology from them. I owned my role in it. I tried to be who I want to be. If they aren’t there yet, that’s okay—I did what I could. As Marcus Aurelius said, the best revenge is not being like the person who wronged you. Maybe they’ll never see your side, but at least you won’t turn into them. We can’t change the past, but we can take responsibility: acknowledge our mistakes, own the pain we caused, learn from it, practice empathy, and try to repair it. We also have to forgive those who’ve hurt us and seek forgiveness from those we’ve hurt. What we can’t do is pretend it never happened. Clearing away that emotional clutter is part of a true spring cleaning—a deep clean for your life.

Get out in nature. There’s a Japanese term I love—shinrin-yoku—which translates to “forest bathing,” getting outside in nature. Marcus Aurelius talked about “washing away the dust of earthly life,” and getting outdoors is one of the best ways to do that. Whether it’s a long walk, a bike ride, or just a quiet moment outdoors, nature has a way of clearing away a cluttered mind. I live out in rural Texas partly because I love the beauty of the natural world. Seneca called it a “temple of all the gods.” Yet so many people spend their lives in cubicles, offices, or cars—one sealed environment to another—missing the world’s beauty. Recently, during a trip to Utah, I went for a run, cut through a cemetery, and spotted deer running by. I returned to my hotel feeling amazing. So the question is, how are you making time for nature? You might get dusty or muddy, but you’ll come back feeling cleaner and clearer than ever.

Delegate and automate. Something I often find myself asking myself, is this something only I can do? If the answer is no—and you can afford to, delegate it. If you can’t yet afford to, automate it. Time is the most precious resource. You have to find people who are good at things and empower them to help you. You have to be strong enough to hand over the keys, to relinquish control so that you can keep the main thing the main thing and not be distracted and weighed down by the rest.

Eliminate a pointless, recurring meeting. The recurring meeting gets on our calendar for a good reason or with a clear purpose. But it doesn’t take long for it to become a “wretched habit,” as Musonius Rufus said. Take a look at your calendar. Ask: is this meeting still necessary? Or could the same result of a dragged-out meeting be accomplished in a couple of minutes over email? If so, time to eliminate it.

Be protective of your time. One question I regularly ask my employees—and myself—is: What’s eating your time, and is it really a good use of it? A brief “time audit” can be eye-opening. Think about what you spend the most time on. Maybe it started small but ballooned into an enormous time sink. Just like a nutritionist might ask, “What are you eating?” and have you keep a food diary, try to keep track of how you spend your day. My screen-time app, for instance, might show how much time I spend on texts, email, Instagram—then I have to ask, Is that the best use of my time? As we head into spring, it’s not just about decluttering physical items; ​it’s also about shedding “time sucks.”​ Marcus Aurelius gives us a test: Ask yourself, if I were to die soon, would I be afraid because I couldn’t keep doing this? The truth is, we often spend our time on frivolous or wasteful activities. At work, I remind my team—and myself—that if something’s taking up too much time, maybe there’s a better way. Now, before life gets busy again, is the perfect moment to identify those time drains.

Simplify your to-do list. When we were working on ​​What You’re Made For​​, George Raveling told me that once in a meeting at Nike, the president asked the team, “Would we be better off doing 25 things good or 5 things great?” George said he still applies that day-to-day. “My day really revolves around just three or four things…I try to declutter the day and say, ‘Okay, if I can get these four things done today, it will be a good day.’” As for me—every day, on a notecard, I write down 5-6 things I want to get done that day. Every day, I cross these off and tear up the card. That’s it. That’s the system.

Eliminate the inessential. We have a lot on our plates: emails to answer, calls to make, meetings, errands, groceries, kids to drop off, social media—the list goes on. Marcus Aurelius said if you want more tranquility—if you want to improve—you have to ask: Is this essential? Most of what we do or say isn’t. If we eliminate the inessential, he says, we gain the double benefit of doing the essential things better. So, to declutter your life, you have to say NO more often. Remember: No is a complete sentence. You don’t need to explain or justify it. As Seneca reminds us, many of us live in a state of “busy idleness,” endlessly doing things we don’t need to do. So as spring arrives (and every other season, too), keep asking yourself, Is this essential? What if you said no? How much more productive, happy, and content could you be with stronger boundaries and clearer priorities? You only have one life—stop wasting it, and stop letting people steal your time. Say no, and do less.

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That’s some of the things I’m doing to declutter and find clarity in my life.

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

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

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