Parenting is all about discipline. It’s about being strict and firm and unrelenting.

Not with your kids, to be clear. That’s being a disciplinarian.

When I say parenting is all about discipline, I’m talking about the only form that matters: self-discipline.

There is a story about one of those legendary Beat parties in the early 1960s. Allen Ginsberg was hosting. Jack Kerouac was there holding court. There were drugs and ideas and romance. There was effortless cool and artistic genius on display. The kind of thing a young artist would dream of being invited to, and once in attendance, never wanted to leave.

Then all of a sudden a twenty-something poet named Diane di Prima got up to do just that, heading out right as things were getting started. The babysitter was waiting, she explained sheepishly.

“Unless you forget about your babysitter,” Keroauc said to her in front of everyone, echoing the famous belief that the stroller in the hallway was the death knell of creativity, “you’re never going to be a writer.” Yet di Prima, not interested in being lectured to by a deadbeat father in the midst of drinking himself to death, left anyway.

“She believed she wouldn’t have been a writer if she’d stayed. To write and come home on time, she argued, required ‘the same discipline throughout’: a practice of keeping her word,” Julie Phillips writes about di Prima in her fascinating book on creatives and parenting, The Baby on the Fire Escape.

Before my two boys, now 4 and 6, were born, a writer gave me similar advice, much more succinctly. “Work, family, scene,” he said. “Pick two.”

You cannot have it all. You have to choose.

These choices take discipline. . . constantly.

In fact, hanging on the wall next to my desk, between two pictures of my kids, is a little sign that just says “NO.” It’s a reminder: when I say no—to a request to get coffee, to the offer to go speak somewhere across the country, to appear on the podcast (it’s always podcasts)—I am saying yes to the two most important people in the world to me. I’m saying yes to a moment in their childhood that won’t exist ever again. And the opposite is also sadly true: when I say yes—especially to things in the evening or things that involve getting on airplanes, I am by definition saying no to them, to the people I claim to put first.

The tragedy is that we all know this on some intellectual and emotional level. But it doesn’t make it easy.

There are invites in my inbox right now that I know I should pass on, but the best I can bring myself to do is ignore them and hope the silence will take care of it for me. It’s a certainty that at some point in the future I will undoubtedly be willing to trade anything for one more minute with my kids, yet here in the moment, they’re fighting against other people who are asking me if they can “pick my brain.”

Love, I’ve heard it said, is best spelled T-I-M-E. So yes, we love our families, but who do we give our time to? Them? Or random impositions? And how much of it do we waste—out of a lack of self-control, out of insecurity?

One of my favorite bits from the comedian Tom Segura is the one where he says that since becoming a parent, he’s decided he has no time for arguing. Like most comedians, he’d always been opinionated, a conversational brawler, even with strangers. But not anymore. If he expresses an opinion to someone and they say, “I disagree,” he immediately changes his position and agrees with them—whatever it takes to avoid a pointless argument. To some this might sound weak, but actually it’s a strength that parents have to muster. His time, his energy, his patience belong to someone else. And nowhere, he says, is this truer than with his own parents—whose bait he now refuses to take.

I think about this when arguing with my own children. Is this actually something I need to be right about? Am I so insecure that I have to one-up a six-year-old? Do I really need to make him accept defeat in this discussion about whether dragons exist? “If you say so” is a magic phrase. So is “Sure, suit yourself.” My favorite is “Alright,” because it is. It’s alright if you let this go. It’s alright if they think that. It’s alright if they want to do it their way.

But man, it’ll test you. I sometimes look at the Twitter feeds of very important and busy people—people who I know have babies at home or teenagers in high school—and I wonder what they’re doing. Forget all the companies he runs, Elon Musk has 9 kids, ages 1 to 18, and he’s got time to tweet 30 times a day? He’s seeking out culture war issues to get sucked into?

Alright.

“Things are not asking to be judged by you,” Marcus Aurelius writes in his Meditations. “Remember, you always have the power to have no opinion,” he says. That’s not just a philosopher and an emperor talking, it’s a man with a wife of 30 years and 14 children. He knew that the only way to make it through was to shut up. To let it go. Ignore it. Focus his energy where it had real impact, on his own behavior and his own choices.

So much of good parenting, like discipline itself, is about restraint—and you’ll find that the further upstream you go, the better you’ll be at it. The person who doesn’t fill up their pantry with junk food is less likely to grab it as a midnight snack. Deleting the app means you’ll spend less time on it. Setting up hard and fast rules means you don’t have to think about the decision. Hiring an assistant means some of the stress never even gets to you. Avoiding the provocation means you already won the argument.

These decisions help us be the person and the parent we aspire to be.

For instance, when I look back on a day that didn’t go well in our house—where tempers were lost, where things went sideways, when I wasn’t present enough, where we didn’t eat well or spent too much time on screens—they tend to all have one thing in common: I screwed up my morning. If I sleep well, wake up early, and get some exercise in, if I don’t get immediately sucked into my phone or some work issue that can wait, if I spend a few minutes with my journal, then it really doesn’t matter if the rest of the day blows up. I will have the capacity to deal with it. I can be what they need.

Yet again, discipline.

The other thing my wife, Samantha, and I are working on is just doing less. That was the word we set out as our intention for 2023: less. Less commitments. Less drama. Less busyness. Less screen time. Just less.

Part of the reason I want less is so I have room for more. More stillness. More presence.

The other day my family of four went into town for a children’s birthday party, and when we wrapped up, we decided to head down the street for dinner. It was going to be tight with bedtimes coming up, but it might be fun? Then we caught ourselves: less means trying to squeeze less stuff in. Discipline meant heading home, being content with the fun and relaxed day we’d already had. Especially when there were already signs of fatigue and the exhaustion of personal reservoirs. Discipline meant being fair to the kids, setting them (and us) up for success by not overdoing it, not trying to see how many straws the camel’s back can hold.

It’s easy to focus on the disciplinarian side of being a parent: These are the rules*. Listen to me.* In reality, we have so much less control than we think. What we truly have control over is ourselves, our choices, our decisions.

The most basic premise of Stoicism is the “dichotomy of control,” knowing what’s up to us and what isn’t. In fact, Epictetus, one of the great Stoic philosophers, would say that this is the chief task of the philosopher:coming to terms with what you have control over and what you don’t.

As the Stoics say, first you decide what you want to be. Then you need the discipline to make that happen.

This piece was originally published for The Free Press here. You can subscribe at thefp.com.

I wouldn’t have thought that a book about an obscure school of ancient philosophy would put me in the manufacturing business, but life is full of surprises. Several years ago, after writing a book called The Daily Stoic, I started an email list that delivered one philosophical meditation each day. From there, I expanded the business into prints and then into an e-commerce company that sells all sorts of physical products–statues, coins, printed books–all over the world.

The Daily Stoic Store is a small business in the sense that there are only six or seven of us in the office every day–and yet it’s not really small at all, ranking in the top 1 percent of all Shopify stores. The result has been a surprising thrust into a world I had experienced before only from the outside. Labor practices, manufacturing practices, environmental practices–these were no longer abstract issues that other companies grappled with. They were things that I had to face, firsthand.

We all have opinions about big sweeping issues. We tell ourselves that if we were in charge, we would do things differently. If we were a multi­national conglomerate, we wouldn’t use chemicals that harm the environment. If we were the decision makers, we’d have a diverse workforce, we’d be family-friendly employers, we’d speak out on political issues. We would pay a living wage. We wouldn’t do business with an overseas company that uses child labor.

But then the order for company T-shirts comes across your desk and you suddenly have to choose between the $9 option from China and the $19 one manufactured in the U.S. The right thing is still obvious. It’s just harder.

I’ll give you an example: At Daily Stoic, we sell challenge coins inspired by philosophical concepts (one says Memento Mori, another Amor Fati). After receiving many bids, I learned that it would be significantly cheaper to manufacture those coins in China than in the United States. Although I might have previously nodded my head in agreement with people who criticized outsourcing, now the tradeoffs directly affected my own bottom line.

Suddenly, it was ethics versus expenses: It was out of my wallet that the higher cost per unit would come. I would be the one who would have to go to customers and ask them to pay a higher price. It was me they might balk at.

Eventually, I made the difficult decision to go with a U.S.-based company called Wendell’s (in business since 1882). Then, a few months later, I stumbled across something else I could not ignore. The coins were going straight from the manufacturer to the third-party shipping contractor and then to the customer. And it wasn’t until an order got shipped to me that I realized each coin came shrink-wrapped in its own plastic covering.

How much of this plastic was being produced for my company? How much ended up in the trash–or, worse, in the ocean?

Wendell’s explained the protective benefits of the plastic–and I’m sure 95 percent of the world’s excessive packaging exists for that reason. The company also explained the plastic bags weren’t really costing me anything; this was just the way it had been doing things for a very long time. But, in this case, the environmental footprint was on my conscience, and only I could make it go away.

In our inter­connected world, we entrepreneurs have more power than we think we do, and more than we might have had in earlier eras.

I say “could” because I wasn’t obligated to reduce the plastic my products were adding to the world. It’s not illegal to seek cheaper labor overseas. Most of my customers probably wouldn’t have noticed a change. But how could I have justified sorting my recycling at home if I was sending little plastic sheaths into thousands of homes every year? I asked Wendell’s to stop using the plastic. And if making that decision caused damage to a product during shipping, we’d deal with it. Nobody threw me a parade, but I, for one, felt better.

When John Mackey, co-founder of Whole Foods, espouses conscious capitalism–the idea that the purpose of business is creating value not simply for shareholders but also for employees, consumers, suppliers, and the planet–it’s easy to assume he’s talking to other powerful captains of industry. But, no, he’s talking to all of us.

As the great novelist and political theorist Leo Tolstoy once suggested, we all feel qualified to reform humanity’s issues–but we are less inclined to reform ourselves. The Stoic school of philosophy, the thinkers whose ideas are the foundation of my business, would say that talking about what you believe in is much less important than embodying that belief, filtering your basic daily actions and choices through your philosophy. We can despair at the enormity of the world’s problems, or we can get to work where we work.

The truth is that in our interconnected world, we entrepreneurs have more power than we think we do, and more than we might have had in earlier eras. With a click of a button, we have unprecedented reach. We can plug into international supply chains. We can access the kinds of resources that compel great powers to go to war.

Just over a year ago, I watched horrified as Vladimir Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine. And, as the geopolitical experts and military leaders explained Putin’s strategy, it wasn’t a bunch of unpronounceable words and distant places to me. I found myself understanding exactly what was happening, ­because I had recently purchased the rights to publish a leather-bound edition of one of my books and had begun working with a small company in Texas to do it–a company that had also been manufacturing Bibles in Belarus for decades.

Belarus sits above Ukraine, and the Dnipro River winds its way through the country and down through its southern neighbor, past Kyiv, entering the Black Sea not far from Crimea. Alexander Lukashenko, the leader of Belarus, is one of Russia’s closest allies, and in the early days of the war, Lukashenko seemed likely to get involved at any moment; both he and Putin hope to gain control of a valuable shipping route, which in turn would make their countries more attractive to businesses like mine and much bigger ones. For a year and a half, I had been using raw materials that came in through this area and then trucking finished books to a port to be shipped out. This meant the invasion mattered to me as an American not just from a logistics standpoint–how our goods might manage to get through a war zone from printer to customers–but also from an ethical standpoint.

I spoke with a handful of experts, including two members of Congress. Their answer was quite clear: It may not have been illegal to do business with Belarus, but it was effectively the same as doing business with Russia. Is that what I wanted to do? Is that what I should be doing?

This was not the answer I wanted to hear. Further, a solution to the problem was not exactly obvious. I liked the people I was working with in Belarus. The bids I got from manufacturers in the U.K. were as much as 200 percent higher. It struck me, however, that the very book I was printing included a relevant line from Marcus Aurelius, the great Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor: “Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter.”

I decided I didn’t want any part of contributing to the economy of a country that does the bidding of China or Russia. I couldn’t change the world, but I could change this. I could get as far away as possible from something I found abhorrent.

Sure, it was more expensive. It would take long­er. Almost no one would have known if I had simply continued with what I’d been doing. But that doesn’t matter. I would have known.

In the end, it wasn’t a cost-benefit analysis that swayed me. The math wasn’t in my favor. I think you have to start with what you believe is right, and then try to make the math work from there.

I’m not McDonald’s or Apple or General Motors doing business overseas. And I’m not saying that I always make the right decisions, or that I have examined every inch of the supply chain and personally vetted every person or company involved. I haven’t. But, like many other entrepreneurs, what I’m doing is my best.

Each of us has the power to contribute to a problem or to be part of the solution. The decision to reform oneself is not an isolated one. It may matter only a tiny bit in the big scheme of things, but it does matter. All the decisions we make as business owners matter. We have agency, we have a say.

The question we all face, then, is obvious: How will we use it?

This piece was initially published in the May/June 2023 issue of Inc. Magazine and can be found on their website here. 

Of all the things in life we don’t control, the past is the clearest. It already happened. It’s done. It’s set in stone. 

Perhaps we could have controlled and changed it, but the fact is, we didn’t. And now it is what it is, forever a was. 

For this reason, the Stoics were not big on regret. Neither am I. There’s no reason to whip yourself or be paralyzed by the “What Ifs” of life. Still, we can learn and grow, and in fact, we must. 

I once interviewed the peerless Dr. Edith Eger, Holocaust survivor and the author of one of my favorite books, The Choice. At the beginning of the podcast (you can listen here), I ask her about something I regretted, a relationship I had messed up. She looked at me and said she could give me a gift that would solve that guilt right now. “I give you a sentence,” she said, “One sentence—if I knew then what I know now, I would have done things differently.” That’s the end of that, she said. “Guilt is in the past, and the one thing you cannot change is the past.” 

So below are some things that, while I try not to regret, I do wish I had done differently or sooner or better. I think you might benefit from doing them sooner too…

-I look back at stuff I was so worked up about, things I fretted about, fought about, took personally, held onto, and now think, WHAT? If I had to go back and give a younger version of myself one word of advice it would be: “Relax.”

-This line from Bruce Springsteen captures, in retrospect, almost every argument or grudge I’ve held onto: We fought hard over nothin’ / We fought till nothin’ remained / I’ve carried that nothin’ for a long time. There are very few arguments I’ve had with my wife that I care that much about anymore.

-Writing Trust Me I’m Lying, I was 90% conscious about what other people might think and 10% following what was in my heart as an artist. The book I am most proud of is my book Conspiracy. The only parts of it I wish I could do differently are the few instances which, in retrospect, I was too conscious of what other people might think (particularly journalists). I’ve flipped the ratio by this point, but I wish I had gotten to that happier place sooner.

-I also should have fought harder on the title of my first book (I wanted to call it Confessions of a Media Manipulator, not Trust Me, I’m Lying), and I should have stuck to my guns about the prologue of Ego is the Enemy (I didn’t want to be in it, they wanted me in it). In creative disputes, the publisher/studio/investors/etc are not always wrong, but often they are. And even when they’re not, you have to remember, that whatever the decision, you have to live with it in a way they do not. I’ve regretted anytime I did not go with what was in my heart as an artist.

-As far as saving and investing money goes, there are so many different automatic transfers I should have set up earlier. I don’t know what my block was, but I stuck with doing things by hand for too long. Meanwhile, every account I have and did eventually set up scheduled transfers for–for my retirement, for my kids college, rainy day fund etc–constantly surprises me with how large the balances have been. Set it and forget it…the sooner you do it, the more you’ll have. You won’t regret compound interest. 

-Man, I ate like garbage for so long. When you’re young you can get away with it. Mostly, I just didn’t know any better. But when I started cutting stuff out? Soda, lots of carbs, most sugar, etc etc, I just felt incredible. I look at pictures of myself in my early twenties and even though I was a runner, I was just doughy. But mostly I think about how crappy I must have felt and not even knowing that I was feeling crappy or why I was feeling crappy. 

-There are many books I regret powering through, far fewer that I regret quitting. Life is too short to put up with bad writing—bad anything really. If the food sucks, don’t finish it. If the speaker is boring, get up and leave. If the party is no fun, go home. Stop powering through crap.

-Maybe it’s because I’m a 90s kid, but there’s a part of me that is instinctually a little bit skeptical of stuff that’s popular. If a book really pops or I hear a bunch of people tell me it’s a classic, part of me goes: “Well, I’m not going to read that!” Yet almost every time I have pushed through that, I’m more than pleasantly surprised: David McCollough’s biography of Truman is as good as everyone said it was. Malcolm Gladwell has sold millions of books for a reason. Erik Larson too. 

-People are waiting longer and longer to have kids. I wish we’d have done it earlier. Having kids at 29 has changed my life for the better in almost every single way…I’m glad I didn’t do it at 19. But there were a couple years there where I was ready, I was just telling myself I wasn’t. 

-I should have taken care of my skin more when I was younger. I should have worn sunscreen more. So should you. 

-Do I regret writing Trust Me I’m Lying? Like I said, regret is a tricky word. I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t. It was the only first book I could have written. I don’t like all the ways it was received and used, but the main thing I wish is that I had been compelled to write it earlier–or more accurately, I wish I had been aware enough to question my life and my choices and my industry sooner. That might have actually made the book impossible, the stories less interesting, but I would have been a better person. I was just too blind, too caught up at being good at something to figure out it wasn’t a good thing to be good at. 

-I also distinctly remember as I sold that book to my publisher feeling so rushed. Like it had to come out right away, or I would miss the window, that the ideas wouldn’t hold true. Lol. It was a book about ‘fake news’ before that phrase even existed! I wasn’t late, I was early. I have since learned the importance of being patient, that taking your time, getting it right instead of first, is much less likely to be something that leads to regret than the alternative. 

-In the afterword of Courage is Calling, I tell the story about being asked to do something terrible at American Apparel. I didn’t do it, but I also didn’t take much of a stand about it. Why? I didn’t want to get fired. Only much later did it fully occur to me how ridiculous that is: A job where you have to be worried about getting fired for not wanting to do something wrong is not a job worth keeping!

-I’ve made a few very costly mistakes as an entrepreneur/business person. I noticed one trend: My wife was against them all at the time. It took me longer than it should have to notice this very illuminating signal. 

-I should have drawn better boundaries with my parents sooner. 

-It’s clear to me in retrospect that my desire for approval, for being seen, for being a part of something important or newsworthy or exciting, blinded me to the character of certain people I worked for. Of course, this was something those people understood and exploited in me and lots of other more vulnerable victims, but it’s still on me. You have to wake up to the ways that the wounds you experienced as a kid make you a mark, or create patterns in your life. It’s not your fault things happened to you, it is your fault if you don’t learn how to adjust accordingly.

-You know deep down that accomplishing things won’t make you happy, but I think I always fantasized that it would at least feel really good. I was so wrong. Hitting #1 for the first time as an author felt like…nothing. Being a “millionaire”…nothing. It’s a trick of evolution that drives us, and no one is immune from making this mistake. The mistake to really avoid though is the one that comes after the anti-climatic accomplishment, the one where you go: “Ah, it’s that I need to repeat this success, it’s that I didn’t get enough. More will do it.” You know this but then you act otherwise…

–In many interpersonal conflicts over the years I have come to rue acting quickly, responding emotionally or getting personal. I have never regretted taking my time, being firm but still understanding, and trying to give the other person a way out, a way to save face.

-With 36 years of data now, I can confidently say that I have never once lost my temper and afterwards said, “I’m so glad I did that.” 

-When I look back at my old writing, the main thing I regret is usually tone. Certainty does not age well. Life is complicated. Situations are nuanced. My books have gotten longer as I’ve gone on. I don’t think I’m being self-indulgent, I think I am being more fair, more compassionate, more truthful. 

-If you keep having to put down your horses, it’s because you’re riding them too hard. Unfortunately, I have lost a lot of otherwise great talent because I put too much on them. Just as athletes have to think about personal load management, coaches and GMs have to think about it for the whole team (and understand that every person has a different threshold).

-With the exception of the kind of people for whom no contact is a necessary strategy, I have never regretted the impulse to send someone a check-in text or call. And I have twice regretted neglecting the impulse to reply or reach out to my friends Seth and Bret, because I never got another chance, as I detailed here.

-Every repair or improvement I put off doing for my house, when necessity eventually came around and I had to do it anyway, I’ve thought: What did I put this off for? It cost the same and I deprived myself of the enjoyment in the interim. I’m trying to get better at not kicking cans down the road. 

-Most of all, I wish that I had enjoyed my work sooner. A few years ago, I was talking to a retired pro athlete and they were telling me how they regretted not enjoying the game as much when they played, that they hadn’t had more fun while they played. It wasn’t a particularly unique insight. I’ve heard it in a million speeches and interviews, but I was in the middle of a particularly hard writing project at the time and not having much fun. I remember thinking: I’ve made it. I’m a pro at this really cool job…why am I not enjoying myself? 

I’ve made a conscious effort since to consciously appreciate that I get to do this, to not let it turn into a grind or a slog. You don’t know if you’ll actually make it to publishing a book–you could die, the book could die–so why not have fun while you’re doing it? Why not make each day the win, the joy, the experience as opposed to the end result? 

As Marcus Aurelius said, it’s insane to tie your wellbeing to things outside of your control. Success, mastery, sanity, Marcus writes, comes from tying your wellbeing “to your own actions.” If you did your best, if you gave it your all, if you acted with your best judgment—you’ve won.