But first…​Join me live in conversation with my friend and mentor, George Raveling, on May 29th at The Painted Porch Bookshop​! George is one of the most remarkable people of the 20th century. He became the first African American basketball coach in what’s now the Pac-12 and went on to have a Hall of Fame career. He was instrumental in bringing Michael Jordan to Nike and has mentored some of the most influential coaches in college basketball. You do not want to miss this event. ​Get tickets here​!

I guess I could try to put into words how much I love this book.

I could try to explain how this 84-year-old book about an obscure 16th-century philosopher is uniquely relevant to our times.

Or I could just tell you I put my money where my mouth is:

I bought 1,000 copies of this book.

Literally.

As in, all the available stock…which I was only able to get after I had my agent connect me with the publisher, Pushkin Press, who I then begged to print one final run before it went out of print.

That is how much I loved ​this little Stefan Zweig biography of Montaigne​.

Zweig—who is best known for his haunting book ​The World of Yesterday​, about Europe and the era destroyed by WWI—wrote ​Montaigne​ while on the run from the Nazis. It would be the last thing he published before despair killed him.

Surprisingly, for such a well-read man, Zweig was not familiar with the works of Montaigne until he was in his late fifties. In the cellar of a bungalow in Petrópolis, Brazil—living in exile after the Nazis condemned him, as they had all the Jews, banned his work, and burned his books in the streets —he chanced upon a “dusty old edition” of ​Montaigne’s essays​. “Certain authors reveal themselves to us only at a certain age and in chosen moments,” Zweig would write of the man who found him at his lowest ebb.

I myself, read Montaigne’s work when I was in my mid-twenties, but I did not read ​this biography​ for the first time until 2016 (Montaigne lived through divisive political times). I read it again in 2020 (Montaigne lived through the plague). I read it again about a year and a half ago (Montaigne lived through religious wars, technological disruption, economic instability, and a kind of mass hysteria Zweig would refer to as “the herd’s rampancy”).

It’s a very surreal experience to read a book about a man turning inward amidst the cruelty and close-mindedness of his time, written some 350 years later by a man fleeing the brutality and persecutions of his time…as modern society continues to experience (and inflict) the same horrors on itself.

“It seemed to our generation that Montaigne was simply rattling chains we thought long since broken,” Zweig writes, “and we could never imagine that in fact Fate had reforged them for us, far stronger and crueller than ever before. It is precisely a generation like ours, cast by fate into the cataract of the world’s turmoil, to whom the freedom and consistency of his thought conveys the most precious aid.”

Montaigne’s was an epoch defined by fear, persecution, demagogues, rabble-rousers, civil strife, and the unraveling of long-standing institutions. It was a time of revolutionary movements. It was a time of new ideas. It was a time of technological disruption. It was a time of destabilization and conflict. The church, which had long been a unifying force, was for the first time becoming a source of bitter division. The recently invented printing press didn’t just spread knowledge and ideas but also misinformation, outrage, and hatred. “Instead of humanism,” as Zweig put it, “it was intolerance that spread.”

It was only a few decades earlier that Michelangelo had painted the Sistine Chapel. Magellan had circumnavigated the globe. Copernicus had displaced the earth from the center of the universe. The Renaissance had flowered, bringing with it beautiful art and earth-​shattering awakenings. Scientific breakthroughs reshaped the world and what seemed possible. A new continent had been discovered across the Atlantic. Trade boomed. Wealth spread.

“But always when the wave climbs too high and too quickly,” Zweig tells us, “it falls more violently, like a cataract. And just as, in our time, the miracles of technology have morphed into the most horrific elements of destruction, so elements of the Renaissance and humanism which at first seemed to offer salvation proved a lethal poison.”

Yet for all the darkness shrouding the book, it remains an incredibly consoling and, I think, hopeful, book.

Because Montaigne did the impossible. He pulled up what Zweig describes as one of the toughest tasks in the world, “maintain[ing] one’s intellectual and moral independence and preserve it unsullied through a mass cataclysm.”

How did Montaigne pull it off? How was he not ​made crazy by the craziness around him​? How did he not let the sonsofbitches turn him into a sonuvabitch? How did he, as Zweig put it, “remain human in an inhuman time”?

The answer is a lot of work.

It began with his incredible and totally unique education as a young man (which I am so fascinated by, it is a full third of my next book, ​Wisdom Takes Work​. You can preorder that ​here​—we have some signed copies that we will certainly run out of by the time it comes out in the fall, so be sure to grab it now).

From his earliest days, Montaigne was exposed to people who were not like him. Despite his great wealth, his parents made sure he was raised amongst the common people—people they believed their son could grow up and help (and certainly never feel superior to). Later, he would strike a coin for himself to carry as a reminder. “I reserve judgment,” it said.

In a time still partly medieval, he was a lover of books. Oh how he loved books.

Perhaps no one in any epoch read, studied, and conversed with the past more than Montaigne. “Books are my kingdom,” he said. “And here I seek to reign as absolute lord.” His library, thousands of books, was a temple of wisdom. “He wanders about the room,” another biographer describes, “taking from his shelves one book after another, opening them at random, reading a scrap, and then talking about it.”

On the shelves was his copy of ​Terence​ from school. There were the Stoics. There was Lucretius, Horace, Virgil, and Diogenes Laertius. There was his beloved Plutarch. When he wasn’t home? “I never travel without books, neither in peace nor in war,” he’d say. “Books are, I find, the best provisions a man can take with him on life’s journey.”

But all this reading did not make him smug or certain. No, it made him humble and open-minded. That was his famous saying, the one that motivated him to invent the essay, or, in French, an attempt: “Que sais-je?” What do I know? In the form of rambling meditations—some no more than a page, some almost the length of a short book—Montaigne would try to find out, what did he really, truly know?

And although he’s famous for that line, his ceiling was inscribed with ones he liked better, that showed the key to his genius.

From the Greek philosopher, Sextus Empiricus, ΟΥ ΚΑΤΑΛΑΜΒΑΝΩ (I do not understand), ΕΠΕΧΩ (I stop), and ΣΚΕΠΤΟΜΑΙ (I examine). From Terence, “I am a man and nothing human is foreign to me.” From Socrates, “Impiety follows pride like a dog.” From Pliny, “The only certainty is that nothing is certain.”

Montaigne was aghast at the way people treated each other, especially people they disagreed with. He believed that ideas should be questioned and that humans were prone to error. “It is to take one’s conjectures rather seriously,” he would say, “to roast someone alive for them.” Yet that’s literally what people were doing–burning their religious opponents to death over disagreements that could never be proven.

When the New World was discovered—basically in his lifetime—he did not think that the people who lived there were savages. No, from his reading of Herodotus, he understood that every distant land has its own culture and beliefs—and that our customs would seem just as barbaric to them. In one of his best essays, ​On the Cannibals​, he writes at length about what he learned from his extensive reading and his many conversations with a French explorer who had lived among the so-called cannibals for over ten years. He was fascinated by their relationship to nature, how they trusted in its abundance and saw no need to try to alter or dominate it. He was fascinated by how they lived without all the systems and structures that define European society—no money, no written language, no math, no government, no social hierarchy, no private property, no formal economy. He was fascinated by their core values—“two things only: bravery before their enemies and love for their wives.”

And he was fascinated by the ritual meaning behind their most shocking custom, how cannibalism was, for them, “not as something done for food—as the Scythians used to do in antiquity—but to symbolize ultimate revenge.” He wasn’t defending or excusing the “horrible barbarity” of cannibalism. What struck him was that “while judging correctly of their wrong-doings we should so blind to our own.” Did the cannibals draw and quarter each other? Did they commit mass murder and atrocities? Accuse each other of black magic? Who was actually more barbaric?

Most of all, Montaigne understood what it was like to be an other. As new‐money merchants, the Montaigne family was not fully accepted by the aristocracy. Montaigne’s mother’s side of the family were Marranos, Spanish Jews who during the Inquisition converted to Christianity under the threat of death. In the Inquisition, multiple relatives of Montaigne had been burned to death, including a great‐great‐great‐grandfather. And then on the other side, his paternal uncles were Protestant.

He didn’t fit in with anyone and so he tried to be sympathetic to everyone. He tried to be open minded about everything. Because he knew where the absence of this led. This moderation, this tolerance, did not win him the friends it should have. He sensed that he was a man without a country. He knew he had a target on his back. “I was belabored from every quarter,” Montaigne lamented; “to the Ghibelline I was a Guelph, to the Guelph, a Ghibelline.”

I’ve said before that what I love so much about the Zweig biography is how timely it is. While reading this book, it’s hard to not see alarming warning signs about today’s world and how it’s verging on becoming like Montaigne’s and Zweig’s. The same forces that haunted their eras—intolerance, extremism, misinformation, institutional decay, fanaticism and fundamentalism, technological disruption, demagogues, charlatans, and con artists—are once again reasserting themselves all around us, eroding trust, stirring division, and making it a challenge to be sane, rational, informed, decent humans.

But what I also love about the Zweig biography is that it also gives us solutions: Turn inward. Master yourself. Take your education into your own hands. Do “not fall for every smooth talker,” as Marcus Aurelius would say. Read, study, and converse with “the rich souls of times past,” as Montaigne said, for “history,” Zweig added, “is [the] great instruction manual.”

This is why I started giving ​Zweig’s little book on Montaigne​ to people in chosen moments—in 2016, during the pandemic, before and after the recent election. It’s why I pick up my copy and reread it whenever I need or want to step back and get a little distance from the craziness of our epoch. And it’s why I bought those 1,000 copies—because I wanted to continue to be able to rave about it and never run out of stock at the bookstore.

Because Montaigne really is a man for our times…

A wise and insightful thinker who never took himself too seriously.

A man obsessed with figuring himself out: why he thought the way he did, how he could find happiness, his fetishes, his near-death experiences.

A man who lived in a time of dysfunction and coped by looking inward.

A man who devoted his life to the work of wisdom, the work of living the philosophical life, of living those ​four virtues​.

We’re lucky that he did, and we must do the same. We must take from his example the need to be always curious, always questioning, always ready to learn something new.

Montaigne kept learning until the day he died, and indeed, the questions he devoted his life to, the inner journey he relentlessly applied himself to, continues on through each of us today.

We must be brave and disciplined enough to pick up the task he laid before us. The task of remaining human in an inhuman world. Of thinking clearly and independently. Of mastering ourselves in a world where so much conspires to try to pull us into being part of the mob and rabble. Of, in short, becoming wise.

It takes study. It takes reflection. It takes experience. It takes humility.

It is a battle to be won over ego, over ignorance, over the self, over the mob, over “the vortex of pandemonium,” Zweig said, and “the deranged prejudices of others.”

Most of all, ​it takes work​.

Financially, I’m doing pretty well.

My books sell more than you’d think books about ancient philosophy would sell (​actually, you can preorder the new one here​)…and it turns out that ​starting a bookstore in a small town in rural Texas​ was not actually the dumbest business idea in the world.

I was lucky to have a decent ten years in marketing before I became a full-time author, and I made some good investments along the way. I’ve saved and I try to live within my means.

So when I say that when I look at my life, I feel poorer than I’d like to be, I don’t mean I’m not doing well. This would be insulting to the single mothers out there, the people crippled by medical debt and to the underclasses that the modern economy exploits.

The reason I am thinking about this at all comes after a conversation I had with Sahil Bloom, who has a new book about the different types of wealth, on the Daily Stoic podcast (​you can listen to the episode here​ or watch it on YouTube). Along with financial wealth, there is time wealth, he says. And social wealth. And mental wealth. And physical wealth.

He’s right.

I’ve met some billionaires that I would have no trouble describing as poor—not just because they had an endless desire for more (​which was Seneca’s definition​), but because their lives were a mess, because they were preposterously insecure, because they were estranged from their families, because they had few friends, because they didn’t take care of themselves.

I don’t say this to judge; after all, I started this very piece by alluding to the fact that I’m not as rich as I’d like to be in a few areas.

For instance, as I’ve said before, I feel like—despite my net worth and career success—I am far too anxious and stressed out. Not so much about the state of the world, but about things needing to go well.

I often get nervous when I fly. Not because we might crash, but what if we’re delayed and I miss the talk I am supposed to be giving? Or what if I’m delayed and my schedule gets messed up and I fall behind? Objectively, this is silly! I would be fine financially if I had to cancel something or if events conspired to prevent it from happening. I am way ahead of my deadlines and am perfectly able to absorb some setbacks. Yet here I am, acting like I’m on the razor’s edge.

Anxiety, I’ve come to realize, is a very expensive habit. It has cost me so much. A lot of misery, a lot of frustration, countless hours of sleep. It’s caused me to miss out on a lot of things that are important to me. How many family dinners have I ruined by letting my mind wander to what could go wrong? How many minutes of vacations have I missed out on because I was preoccupied, lost in spirals about things that hadn’t happened? How many opportunities have I passed up because I was too caught up in my own fears? How many nights did I waste lying awake at night, worrying about what might or might not happen?

The tragedy of anxiety is that it feeds on itself. Like the ancient symbol of the snake devouring its own tail, anxiety consumes resources that could be used to discard it.

​I carry this reminder with me​—a medallion engraved with Epictetus’ phrase, ta eph’hemin, ta ouk eph’hemin (“What is up to us, what is not up to us”). On the back is a quote from Seneca: “He who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary.”

It creates real problems from its obsession with imaginary ones. When you have fears that you might run out of money or luck or you feel like your career could end, it affects how you organize your life and your finances. You leave hours earlier for the airport than you need to, only to sit at the gate. You ruminate on the past or the future at the expense of the project you could be working on. You stress about money so much that you don’t put it to use in ways that would make your life less stressful. My wife and I, as we repeatedly try to remind each other, should not be living the way we are. That is to say, we have too much on our plates and not enough people helping us. We’re doing too well financially to feel so anxious, so stressed out, so compelled to do and put up with certain things.

When you live this way, it doesn’t matter your income—you are spending down your capital. You are depleting the accounts of your relationships and of your own happiness.

I am not as busy as some people I know, but I am too busy. Just this week, I was trying to put a doctor’s appointment in my calendar and found I could not. Some people can’t afford to go to the doctor, but some of us, for very different reasons, apparently can’t ‘afford’ it either. I would have to cancel something or miss out on something.

If you’re too busy to take care of your health…can you really say you’re doing well?

I know I would be better off if I had more friends. That’s one of the downsides of success, too. Not only can it isolate you and alienate you from others—this thing we call ‘fame’ is weird, especially if you are already introverted—it makes you a little suspicious. It makes you a little guarded. It makes you a little more inclined to stay in the privacy of your home or office. But mostly what success does is suck up your time. As my friend Austin Kleon has said, “work, family, scene—pick two.” I love my family and I love my work. That doesn’t leave as much time for friends. And he and I talked about that very thing last time we hung out: Why don’t we do this more? Of course, we both know why. It’s a shame…and it’s a privileged impoverishment.

It’s weird to think that as a kid, when I had no money, I would just go over to a friend’s house and just hang out. Nothing scheduled. We didn’t even have anything to do, but we’d spend hours together. It’s weird to think back and be jealous of that kid…but I am. He had something I don’t have any more.

I love where I live, this little ranch we have outside Austin. It was a huge swing, financially, when we bought it. Getting the mortgage almost didn’t happen–banks weren’t exactly lining up to lend money to a self-employed writer at the beginning of his career, trying to buy farm land. We managed to get it and it’s one of the best things we’ve ever done.

We’re tucked away from the noise, the distractions, the rush of the city. We live off an unpaved road. It’s pitch black at night…we’re surrounded by thousands of trees. I look out over a lake, filled with fish and ducks and turtles. We raise cows and donkeys. I can hunt deer and hogs. I love just standing there in the evening and watching the Texas sunset settle over the ranch.

But you know what? I don’t spend enough time at it…or rather, on it. I used to do most of the repairs myself. My wife and I would go out and feed the cows every day I delivered the hay each week. I checked the fences after a storm. Not so much anymore. Partly, because we got the place in pretty good and self-sustaining shape—that was the systems-thinkers in us. We also bought out a neighbor and instead of dragging away the mobile home that sits in a corner of that property, found a wonderful family that we rent it out to in exchange for help with all those chores.

It’s a relief, for sure, but you know what? I miss it. Weeks go by sometimes, and I realize I have not walked more than a few paces from our house (our family walks are usually on our road). It makes me think of one of the most moving and insightful passages in John Graves’ classic book ​Goodbye to a River​,

If all I’m doing is looking at it from the back window, do I really own it? Do I really need to own it?

I guess what I am saying is that when I think about a “rich life”—to borrow a phrase from my friend Ramit Sethi—I don’t think that much about money. Actually, that’s my point: Isn’t that the point of having money? To not have to think about it? It’s a life where you feel good, where you feel secure, where you think about what you want to think about.

I remember earlier in my writing career, a time when I would take pretty much every opportunity to do an interview for any newspaper or magazine or podcast or radio show, I got an email one evening to appear live on a radio show the next morning. As I started to reply that I would do it, I thought, I have to change my whole day around tomorrow for this. Which was not unusual—I often reluctantly moved things around for these kinds of things. What was unusual was the next thought, which was, I don’t have to do this. Even if the appearance somehow led to 10,000 extra book sales, it wasn’t going to change my life in any meaningful way. So why not just keep the day I already planned? That moment of realization—that I could say no—changed my life more than any amount of money ever had.

That’s a step towards the life I want.

There are people with enormous fortunes who don’t have that freedom. It’s like that scene at the beginning of Billions where he says, What’s the point of having ‘fuck you money’ if you never say ‘fuck you’? That’s too rude, obviously, so what about just, No thanks. Or, Not right now.

We talk about this in ​the Daily Stoic Wealth Challenge​. You might think Seneca was the richest of the Stoics, but in fact, he is our model of “The Poorest Stoic” throughout the challenge. He was under the thumb of money and ambition and power and status—the things that attracted him to Nero’s service. In thirteen years working for a man who was clearly deranged and evil, Seneca became one of Rome’s richest men, something he paid a tremendous price for. “Many people,” Seneca himself would write, “have riches just as we say that we ‘have a fever,’ when really the fever has us.” The fever had Seneca, trapping him in a gilded cage he eventually realized he couldn’t buy his way out of.

Epictetus, by contrast, clawed his way out of slavery, but was actually far richer and far more free than Seneca and the other ‘rich’ and ‘powerful’ men and women of the time who who had been acquired and ruled by Nero, by ambition, by money, by desire, by fame, by their jobs, their insecurities, their possessions. There’s a great story I love about Epictetus being robbed of a prized lamp, but he shrugs it off because he doesn’t care that much about material possessions. He was able to live just as happily without them. “Wealth consists not in having great possessions,” he said, “but in having few wants.”

About a year ago, I was working in my office above the bookstore and called my wife to see what she was up to. “Hey,” she said, “the kids and I are at the park.” “Oh,” I said, “I’ll just come over there.” And I got up from my desk in the middle of the work day and walked over to play with them at the park.

I can do that because of financial reasons. I can do that because of lifestyle logistics reasons, because we chose to live in this little town. I can do that because my wife and kids want to be around me and I want to be around them. I can do that because, fortunately, I’m in decent physical shape. I can do that if I do the work on myself and remember that I don’t have to be stressed about this or that deadline.

And as I walked over to the park, it hit me,

Oh, this is what I work for.

How lucky am I? How great is this?

I could be a billionaire and not be able to do this.

Now if I could just stay in that state of mind more of the time, well, I’d really be doing well.

In the fall of 1961, Commander James Stockdale began a course at Stanford he had eagerly anticipated on Marxist theory. “We read no criticisms of Marxism,” he recounted later, “only primary sources. All year we read the works of Marx and Lenin.”

It might seem unusual that the Navy would send a 36-year-old fighter pilot to get a master’s degree in the humanities, but Stockdale knew why he was there. Writing home to his parents that year, he reminded them of a lesson they had instilled in him, “You really can’t do well competing against something you don’t understand as well as something you can.”

At the time, Marxism was not just an abstract academic subject, but the ideological foundation of America’s greatest geopolitical enemy. The stakes were high—the Soviets pushed a vision of global communism and the conflict in Vietnam was already flashing hot, the North Vietnamese fueled by a ruthless mix of dogma and revolutionary zeal. ‘Marxism’ was, like today, also a culture-war boogeyman used by politicians and demagogues.

Just a few short years after completing his studies—September 1965—Stockdale was shot down over Thanh Hóa in North Vietnam, and as he parachuted into what he knew would be imprisonment and possibly death, his mind turned to the philosophy of Epictetus, which he had been introduced to by a professor at Stanford.

The North Vietnamese had many prisons and prison camps, but 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. Stockdale would spend the next seven years in Hỏa Lò—or the “Hanoi Hilton,” as his fellow inmates would come to call it—in various states of solitary confinement and brutal torture.

His captors—sensing perhaps that he held terrible secrets, including having flown in the Tonkin Gulf the night of the so-called “incident”—sought desperately to break him. Stockdale famously drew on ​the Stoicism of Epictetus​, but he also leveraged his knowledge of the practices and the mindset of his oppressors.

“In Hanoi, I understood more about Marxist theory than my interrogator did,” Stockdale explained. “I was able to say to that interrogator, ‘That’s not what Lenin said; you’re a deviationist.’”

This was a story I intended to tell the midshipmen at the U.S Navy Academy a couple of weeks ago, where Stockdale, as a graduate of the class of 1947 and Medal of Honor winner, is revered. For the last four years, ​I’ve been delivering a series of lectures on the cardinal virtues of Stoicism​ and was scheduled to continue on April 14th with a talk to the entire sophomore class on the theme of wisdom.

But roughly an hour before my talk was to begin, in my hotel room getting ready, I received a call—Would I be willing to refrain from any mention in my remarks of the recent removal of 381 supposedly controversial books from the Nimitz library on campus? My slides had been sent up the chain of command at the school, who was now, as they explained, extremely worried about reprisals from the Secretary of Defense or appearing to openly flout Executive Order 14151 (an anti-DEI order.)

When I declined, my invitation—as well as a planned speech before the Navy Football team, with whom my books on Stoicism are popular—was revoked.

In his writings and speeches after his return from the Hanoi Hilton, Stockdale often referred to what he called “extortion environments” to describe his experience in prison. He and his fellow POWs were pressured to comply with demands—answering simple questions, performing seemingly innocuous tasks, appearing in propaganda videos, confessing to war crimes—under the threat that if they declined, there would be consequences.

No one at the Naval Academy intimated any consequences for me, of course, but it was extortionary all the same—I had to choose between my message (to say nothing of my rights as a private citizen) or my continued access and welcome at an institution that has been one of the honors of my life to be associated with.

As an author, I believe deeply in the power of books. As a bookstore owner in Texas, ​I have spoken up about book banning many times​ already. In fact, when they tried to remove certain books from the high school library in our town, my wife and I partnered ​with Scribd to give out hundreds of copies of them to local residents​. That’s why the window of our store currently features this quote from one of my favorite Rage Against the Machine songs:

But setting all of that aside, even if I had no previous connection to this issue, I had been invited to the Naval Academy to deliver an address on the virtue of wisdom. How could I not mention what had gone on just a few hundred yards away?

As I explained repeatedly to my hosts, I had no interest in embarrassing anyone or discussing politics directly (although they had had no issue with ​the talk I gave at this very lecture series entirely about Jimmy Carter​, another Academy graduate, one year earlier). Nor did I want to cause trouble or put someone’s job at risk. I did, however, feel it was essential to make the point that the pursuit of wisdom is impossible without engaging with (and challenging) uncomfortable ideas.

​Seneca​, another Stoic philosopher, used a military metaphor to make this very argument. We ought to read critically and dangerously, he said, “like a spy in the enemy’s camp.” This is what Stockdale was doing when he studied Marxism on the Navy’s dime. It is what Seneca was doing when he read and liberally quoted from Epicurus, the head of a rival philosophical school.

The current administration is by no means unique in its desire to suppress ideas it doesn’t like or thinks dangerous. As I intended to explain to the midshipmen, there was considerable political pressure in the 1950s over what books were carried in the libraries of federal installations. When asked if he would ban communist books from American embassies, however, Eisenhower resisted.

“Generally speaking,” he told a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune at a press conference shortly after his inauguration, “my idea is that censorship and hiding solves nothing…” He explained that he wished more Americans had read Hitler and Stalin in the years previous because it might have helped anticipate the oncoming threats. “Now, gentlemen,” he concluded, “…let’s educate ourselves if we are going to run a free government.”

The men and women at the Naval Academy will go on to lead combat missions, to command aircraft carriers, to pilot nuclear-armed submarines, and run enormous organizations. We will soon entrust them with incredible responsibilities and power. But we fear they’ll be hoodwinked or brainwashed by certain books?

It is good that Mein Kampf was not one of the books removed from the Naval Academy library…but this makes the fact that ​Maya Angelou​ was, all the more inexplicable. Whatever one thinks of DEI, we are not talking about the writings of external enemies here, but ​in many cases, art, serious scholarship and legitimate criticism of America’s past​. One of the books is about black soldiers in WWII, another is about the memorialization of the Holocaust. Another was written by ​a person I had interviewed on the Daily Stoic podcast​, and had been interviewed by a week earlier! No one at any public institution should have to fear losing their job for pushing back on such an obvious over-reach, let alone veterans who have served this country in combat, yet here we are.

Indeed, the decision not to protest the original order—which I believe flies in the face of basic academic freedoms and independence—is what put the current leadership in the academy in the now even stickier position of trying to suppress criticism of that decision. “Compromises pile up when you’re in a pressure situation in the hands of a skilled extortionist,” Stockdale reminds us. “You can be had if you make that first compromise, offer to make that ‘deal,’ or ‘meet them halfway.’”

Of course, I write about many of these topics—holding the line, developing competence, having integrity, not compromising—in ​Right Thing, Right Now​. I have not always managed to do this in my own life and career (as I confess to my regret and shame in the Afterword to ​Courage is Calling​). These decisions are not easy nor are they always clear. I very much sympathize with the leadership (in uniform and otherwise) who have been put in this impossible situation. I also know firsthand, it is very difficult to go along with policies that compromise your values without becomingcompromised.

As I say in the preface to each book in the series, the virtues are interrelated and inseparable. Yet, there’s a reason that ​wisdom​ is considered the mother of the virtues. It is wisdom that helps us find what Aristotle called the “golden mean” between two vices. It is wisdom that tells us when to apply courage, the midpoint between cowardice and recklessness. It is wisdom that teaches us how to stand firm and persist when we know we are doing right. And it is wisdom that finds the line between good and evil, right and wrong, fair and unfair, ethical and unethical.

I felt I could not, in good conscience, lecture these future leaders and warriors on the virtues of courage and doing the right thing—as I did in ​2023​ and ​2024​—and then fold when asked not to mention such an egregious and fundamentally anti-wisdom course of action. I could not give a talk on the subject of wisdom and not address a very timeless and unfortunately, very prevalent tendency to get rid of books that we disagree with or think controversial. What good is it to speak about leadership and character in the abstract and avoid the very real challenges in front of us? As our constitutional order and our very laws are being placed under incredible strain—to say nothing of our basic morals and decency.

In many moments, many understandable moments, Commander Stockdale had an opportunity to do the expedient thing as a POW. He could have compromised. He could have obeyed. It would have saved him considerable pain, preventing the injuries that deprived him of full use of his leg for the rest of his life, perhaps even returning him home sooner to his family. He chose not to do that. He rejected the extortionary choice and stood on principle.

For me, with slightly less on the line, to do the expedient thing, it would have been a betrayal not just of Stoicism, the philosophy I have tried to apply in my life, but also a betrayal of Stockdale in whose name I was giving the lecture and whose story I was telling in the talk that I was going to give.

And so there in the hotel after receiving the phone call and having my talk cancelled, I packed up and headed to the airport. On my flight home, I decided I wasn’t going to go quietly. In line with the idea that the obstacle is the way, ​I was going to try to use this​. Mid-flight, I took out my computer and wrote ​a piece that ended up running in The New York Times​ and getting picked up by many other outlets and publications (​CNN​, ​The Free Press​, ​The Preamble​, ​ABC​, ​Yahoo News​, and more).

After finishing the draft and turning the slides I had prepared over in my mind, I thought, they can prevent me from going on stage but they can’t prevent me from delivering the talk. So in my studio in Texas where we record The Daily Stoic Podcast, ​I gave the talk that I was going to give at the Naval Academy​. It was obviously a slightly different environment—no stage, no slides on a projection screen behind me, no live audience—but it is more or less the talk that I would have given to those midshipmen.

“The greatest educational fallacy,” ​Stockdale would write​, “is that you can get it without stress.” The road to wisdom, to living the philosophical life, living by those four virtues, leads through a long path of stress and toil and struggle.

It takes work, as I put in the title of the ​new book​.

It is the work of our life.

Stockdale’s example—forged by his liberal education at two of America’s best institutes of higher learning—stands there for all of us to follow in matters big and small.

For the last six years, I’ve been working on The Stoic Virtues Series. And now, the fourth and final book—​Wisdom Takes Work​—is complete.

I wrote this book because wisdom—true wisdom—is the commitment of a lifetime. It is a battle to be won over ego, over ignorance, over the self. It takes study, it takes reflection, it takes experience. Most of all, it takes work. I hope you’ll do that work with me. ​The book comes out in the fall, but you can preorder it today​.