What does Iron Maiden have to do with Stoic philosophy?

Nothing really, but this is my newsletter and it’s what I want to talk about.

I’ve been an Iron Maiden fan since I was a kid (more about how I found them below). I’ve seen them live in Sacramento, Los Angeles, Austin and San Antonio (2x). If you’ve ever seen me on a podcast or in a ​Daily Stoic video​, if you’ve come to ​one of my talks​ or bumped into me in person…there’s a very good chance you saw me in an ​Iron Maiden t-shirt​. I even wrote about them in my book ​Perennial Seller​.

But mostly, what inspired this piece is that I am taking my 8-year-old to see them later this month…exactly twenty years after I went to my first Iron Maiden concert.

So what have I learned in two decades of an unhealthy fandom of a British heavy metal band?

A lot.

Let me tell you.

Know what business you’re in. There is a story about the manager of Iron Maiden, Rod Smallwood, who has worked with the band since 1979. He is at a dinner honoring the group. A young agent comes up to him and says how much he admires his skillful work in the industry. The manager looks at him and says, “HA! You think I am in the music business? No. I’m in the Iron fucking Maiden business.” The publishing industry? The retail business? These are not the businesses I am in–just like you’re not in the coffee industry or B2B. No, you’re in the business of you. You’re in the business of serving your customers in your city with your unique offering. The trends of the bull or bear market? It doesn’t matter, just as the trendiness (or lack of trendiness) of heavy metal hasn’t mattered to Iron Maiden. What matters is their relationship with their fans. That’s who they are in service of. That’s the job. And so it goes for all of us, whatever we do.

Develop range. Bruce Dickinson, the lead singer of Iron Maiden, has incredible range. I don’t mean his voice (though it’s very impressive). I mean that he has done more than just sing in a band that’s sold millions of records. He’s done more than have a decent solo career. He wrote a couple of popular children’s novels. He became an Olympic-level fencer (seriously, nearly making the British Olympic team). Oh, and then he learned how to fly planes…like really big ones. Here’s a picture of the Iron Maiden plane…which he flies after the band performs, taking the group to their next gig.

That is preposterous! The only thing more ridiculous is that for many years he also worked for Astraeus Airlines and ​once airlifted British tourists stranded in Egypt​. It’s one thing to master one skill, but to master a couple different domains? That’s hard. But it pays off. Because we learn skills and are introduced to new ideas that we can bring back to our main thing (a bunch of the best Iron Maiden songs are about flying…and swords). A book recommendation in this regard is David Epstein’s book, ​Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World​.

Create spectacles. The “Ed Force One,” as they call the Iron Maiden plane, is not just a mode of transportation—it’s a flying billboard, a conversation starter, a part of the Maiden mythology. Wherever it lands, it captures attention, sparks curiosity, and draws people into their world. Are there cheaper, more efficient ways to travel on tour? Probably. But that’s not the point.

I always think about spectacles (albeit on a much smaller scale). When we were setting up ​The Painted Porch​, that blend of function and spectacle inspired one of the best decisions we made—making ​our book tower​. 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. 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. Because it’s the number one thing people come into the store to take pictures of.

Focus on what’s in your control. Ok, maybe there is one Stoic lesson. As you know, the core of Stoic philosophy is focusing on what’s in your control. It’s about ignoring what other people do and say and putting that energy into what you do and say. Bruce Dickinson explained Iron Maiden’s philosophy: “We have our field and we’ve got to plough it and that’s it. What’s going on in the next field is of no interest to us; we can only plough one field at a time.” Do you…you’re the only one who can. It hasn’t always been easy, but I’ve tried to remind myself that it doesn’t matter how many books other people sell. It doesn’t matter what anyone else is doing. I’m writing about an obscure school of ancient philosophy. It has its own ceiling and its own floor. I’m comfortable with that.

Success and fame are byproducts. It’s fair to say that Iron Maiden is a cult act rather than a mainstream act. And yet, it’s a very big cult. They’ve sold millions of records. ​Here’s a video of them performing in front of 250,000 people​. The point is: The band is famous. But what is fame? Marcus Aurelius would say that it’s nothing–the clapping of hands and the clacking of tongues. Actually, Bruce Dickinson has a better quote, I think, because unlike an emperor, their fame was slightly more meritocratic. “Fame is the excrement of creativity,” Dickinson once said, “it’s the shit that comes out the back end, it’s a by-product of it.” So yeah, chasing fame is not only not really worth it, but you don’t get it by chasing it either. An audience, a reputation, fame, these are ​lagging indicators​ of years of making stuff that people like and get to know you through. It’s the byproduct of doing the work.

Build a resilient career. As a British heavy metal act, there’s naturally a bunch of Churchill cameos in their work. It’s fitting because Maiden’s career bears some resemblance to Churchill’s approach to building a resilient career. In ​Perennial Seller​, I tell the story of how Churchill maintained influence even when exiled from politics in 1931. Unlike an ordinary politician, who would have been powerless when voted out of office, Churchill had something more valuable than office—a platform. Between 1931 and 1939, during his so-called political wilderness, he published 11 books, 400+ articles, and delivered more than 350 speeches. The result of this was an enormous worldwide platform that allowed him not only to survive financially but wield influence that kept him relevant and guided policy and opinion across the globe. This is not unlike Iron Maiden, whose platform transcends the typical constraints of the music industry. Instead of relying on album sales or radio play, they created a multi-faceted empire: elaborate stage shows, their iconic mascot Eddie, comic books, video games, and even their own beer. It’s what’s solidified them as a perennial force in the music industry, enabling them to endure fads and technological shifts. Of course, it’s meant financial success, but what’s even more impressive is that their platform frees them to communicate to their fans without interference from intermediaries and allows them to create work on their own terms.

Respect the boundaries. What’s interesting is that despite all Bruce’s range and all the decades Iron Maiden has made music, there’s not a huge difference between their first album and their most recent, Senjutsu. Basically–and this includes the different lead singers–Iron Maiden has been following the same formula on all their albums for the last 49 years. I don’t think that’s an insulting thing to say–it’s no small feat. It’s also something they’ve done on purpose. As Bruce has explained,

I know what my audience expects from me. I don’t find that constraining, it’s actually liberating. One of the Stoics, Cleanthes, would talk about how the ‘fetters’ of poetry actually unlock creativity–I think that’s true. You establish a contract with your audience, an expectation of the medium, and you have to deliver on that. The freedom is in the how.

What matters is that it’s interesting to you. On some level, Iron Maiden’s songs are absurd. Music is supposed to be about stuff that people relate to–falling in love, growing up, partying, having fun. Iron Maiden writes 10-minute songs about literature and history. They have songs inspired by Coleridge poems, science fiction novels, historical figures like Genghis Khan and Alexander The Great. They’ve got a song about Passchendaele (one of the most horrific battles of the First World War) songs about D-Day and the Crimean War. Steve Harris, who writes most of the band’s songs, clearly loves to read. Which is the point–he finds these things very interesting. And as a result, they become very interesting to the audience. Again, on the surface, an obscure school of ancient philosophy should be pretty boring. My publisher and most of my friends suspected it would be…but my passion for it was contagious.

Build on greatness. They don’t just write songs about ancient history. They’ve got songs based on lines from Shakespeare, the ​epic novels of Frank Herbert​ and the myth of Icarus. It’s very hard to do better than Tennyson or Coleridge (a poem of whose Iron Maiden has a 14-minute song about), so don’t fight it. Or what about Aces High, for which the music video opens with Churchill’s greatest speech? Iron Maiden is very good at incorporating great works of art into their art. Never underestimate the power of repackaging something timeless and old. In my teens, I discovered so much stuff through Iron Maiden. None of my teachers read us ​The Charge of the Light Brigade​–I heard it from Iron Maiden (my son can recite a big chunk of the poem now). I read ​Brave New World​ because they have an album based on the book. I’ve taken a lot of joy out of paying that process forward in my own books, finding stuff that I love, that I think is great and introducing people to it.

Make it a universe of true fans. There is a theory put forward by Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired magazine. He calls it 1,000 True Fans: “A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author—in other words, anyone producing works of art—needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.” Iron Maiden is this idea on a massive scale. Somebody once joked that Iron Maiden has sold more t-shirts than albums. If that’s true, it’s no small feat (the band has sold over 130 million albums) and not exactly a bad thing (you make more money on merch than music). But I think that’s why I’ve always liked the band. It’s not just music but a whole universe of art and imagery and themes. There’s even a phrase that the fans say to let each other know their identity: Up the Irons! This is something I thought a lot about with ​Daily Stoic​. I don’t just ​write books​, but I have ​designed​ and ​made things​ that continue that experience in many ​different mediums​. It can’t be, as Lady Gaga warned, “Thanks for buying my record, fuck you.” It should be, “Oh, you liked what I did? Here’s a bunch of other cool stuff that I designed for people just like you.” Don’t stop at the surface with what you’re building–make it a world. Better yet, make it a universe of hard-core, true fans.

Backstage of the Tamron Hall Show

Find ways to spread. When I was on ​Jocko’s podcast last year​, he asked me how I became an Iron Maiden fan. ​As I explained​, I was trying to illegally download a Metallica album and ended up with an Iron Maiden album. But then again, how else was I going to discover them? It had been years since they were on regular rotation on MTV and unlike Metallica, rarely got radio play. Solving the problem of discovery is the thing all arts and companies have to figure out. Sometimes traditional avenues are open, but often they are not–or they are very clogged. When Iron Maiden sells out a stadium in Brazil or Colombia or India, how do you think most of those fans heard about them? In a lot of cases, it was via bootlegs. It was YouTube. The same is true for writers. Obviously, piracy is not ideal. It would be better if everything was legitimate and affordable. But that’s not the case. If you want to maintain relevance and sustain an audience, you have to embrace these other channels. You can’t sweat every YouTube upload or every time someone rips you off. In fact, you can appreciate that what it’s doing is adding to the universe you’ve created. There’s a reason I give away the vast majority of stuff that I make–I want to find its way to people, I want the barriers of entry, of discovery, to be as low as possible. You never know what kind of journey you might kick off for someone who comes across your stuff.

Play the long game. Iron Maiden has been at it for nearly 50 years and counting! They’re playing the long game, defying every stereotype in the music business. 17 studio albums, 14 live albums, 2,000 concerts in 59 countries, over 130 million albums sold. They performed for 250,000 people as the headliners of the Rock in Rio festival—26 years after the band formed. This empire wasn’t built on one hit album or a viral single. It’s the result of applying a perennial seller mindset to everything they do. It’s easy to chase quick wins, but Maiden reminds us that real magic happens when you zoom out. When I first started listening to Iron Maiden, I remember reading that they had sold something like 50 million albums. That was a lot then, but what’s amazing is that twenty years later, that number has almost tripled. Do you know how insane it is to sell that many records these days? But that’s the thing–time and momentum are incredibly powerful forces. In the beginning, small efforts might seem insignificant. But they accumulate and compound over time. Whether it’s a decades-spanning discography, a business, a career or an anthill, impressive outcomes start with humble beginnings.

The more the merrier. In 1990, Adrian Smith, one of the band’s best guitarists, left the band. He was ably replaced by Janick Gers for 9 years, until Adrian asked to rejoin the band. There is something special about original lineups so you might expect that Gers left the band, but nope. The band just switched to having three guitarists! And why not? It just means more guitar solos for everyone! Is there an applicable lesson here? I dunno, I’ve just always liked it.

My Iron Maiden Christmas sweater

Just keep going. How has Iron Maiden lasted through the years? It wasn’t just by making great work—it was by making a lot of it over and over again. Some of Iron Maiden’s greatest songs are on “Brave New World” (released 25 years after the band was formed) or “Dance of Death” (released 28 years in). It’s easy to be intimidated by success, or to be made complacent by it or to give in to the fan’s reverence for the past. But it’s better for you and your art to put those feelings aside, to keep trucking along, to keep making stuff. When I first heard Iron Maiden in 2001, they had already been going for 26 years at that point. And they’re still going! Every time I see tour dates, I get nervous and tell myself, I should probably catch them one more time. That’s what I did on this tour and then you know what I saw? They announced another tour for 2025. But that’s the thing when you make great, perennial work–it creates momentum for you to keep going. Not only that, it means it will live on well after you stop.

I’m nearly two decades into my career. Sometimes I get tired, but that’s when I remind myself that I have a lot further to go, that I’ve got a lot more in me. Just keep going. Maiden taught me that.

Iron Maiden shoes backstage of The Daily Show

I don’t have goals.

I know that might seem a little crazy, but it’s true. I don’t.

There’s not a certain amount of books I’m trying to write. There’s not a certain amount of books I’m trying to sell. I don’t have a “number” that I’m trying to hit financially. There’s not a certain number of downloads I’m trying to get ​my podcast​ to or followers I want to reach.

I run every day, but I’m not training to run a marathon. I swim a lot (​as we talked about recently​) and bike, too, but it’s not because I want to do an Iron Man.

That’s sort of the point. What I want to do is run and swim, what I want to do is write—to me that is the win.

I don’t fault other people for having goals—if that’s what motivates you, enjoy. And obviously, companies and coaches need to set goals for their staff and for their team—this is how they evaluate and compare performance. A public company has to have revenue targets because investors demand them.

They’re just not for me.

I’m much more focused on process.

That is to say, I focus on doing the thing as opposed to achieving some particular thing.

Why?

It mostly has to do with control, that central issue for the Stoics.

Most goals are rooted in an external result that’s not in your control. Writing a book is not the goal most people have. No, their goal is hitting a bestseller list. Only you determine whether you write a book or not, but the bestseller list? That’s up to the New York Times. Winning a Grammy? That’s up for the Recording Academy. A Nobel Prize? That’s up to the folks in Stockholm. Even competitive goals like being the fastest person in a race or the richest person in the world—these depend on what your competitors do.

The fixation on external results that are not in your control carries a hidden cost. It consumes a significant amount of time and energy that would be better spent doing things that actually generate those results. A musician chasing a spot on the charts churns out derivative work, never finding their unique sound. A speaker fixated on the audience’s reaction loses their train of thought. A swimmer who glances over at the competition or up at the finish creates drag and slows down.

Over the years, I’ve worked on lots of book and product launches for people. One thing I like to find out right away is what ‘success’ might look like to them. When a person starts to talk about very specific numbers like “Success is hitting #1 on the New York Times Bestseller List” or “Success is making [$$$,$$$$$,$$$$]” or “Success is selling one million copies,” I get a little pit in my stomach for them. First, because of how random these goals tend to be. I remember asking one guy why he had chosen “two million books” as his number and his answer was because someone else he knew had done one and a half million. He’d just pulled the number out of his ass! (And of course, he never came close to this number because almost no books do).

Second, I am struck by what they didn’t say. They didn’t say “Success is making something amazing that really helps people” or “Success is creating something that I’m deeply proud of”. All they’re thinking about is some benchmark, rather than thinking about what it takes to even have a chance at hitting such a benchmark: being present, dedicated, pure-hearted, disciplined, creative, self-aware, patient. Someone who comes right out and says they’re chasing a number, competing against someone else, or needing external validation often reveals that they lack those very qualities.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t strive to accomplish great things or to do and be all that you’re capable of—you definitely should. It’s that in my experience, the best work comes out of just that: doing the work. Not in visualizing success. Not in trying to reverse engineer what’s working for someone else. Not in setting a “big hairy audacious goal” as some advise. But in the quiet day-to-dayness of the work. In immersing yourself in the craft, not the charts. In being process-driven, not goal-driven.

It comes from loving the process, not from thirst.

When I was chatting with Buzz Williams, the basketball coach for Texas A&M, on The Daily Stoic Podcast (​listen here​), he talked about the idea of being an everyday guy: “Whatever it is that you’re trying to do, are you tough enough to do that every day?” he asks. “If you’re basing it on talent, well at some point in time it might prevail, but not always. And so if you remove talent, then it comes down to consistency, discipline, and how you are spending your time.”

I’d say when you remove goals, that’s what it comes down to. Do you have the consistency and discipline to show up every day? Are you working on getting better every day?

In ​Discipline Is Destiny​, I write about the practice of Kaizen, the Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement. Always finding some way to make a little progress. Focusing on the joys of getting a little bit better every day. This is the secret to being internally driven, to being Every Day. “Just as one person delights in improving his farm, and another his horse,” Epictetus would say, riffing, as it happens, on Socrates, “so I delight in attending to my improvement day by day.”

I like the way Sam Altman, an entrepreneur who has helped thousands of startups over the years at Y Combinator and then created Open AI, talked about this idea in an interview with Tyler Cowen. “Strive to be internally driven,” Altman said. “Driven to compete with yourself, not with other people. If you compete with other people, you end up in this mimetic trap, and you sort of play this tournament. Even if you ‘win’, you lose. But if you’re competing with yourself, and all you’re trying to do is be the best possible version you can—there’s no limit to how far that can drive someone to perform.”

And Sam has done pretty well for himself, hasn’t he?

In a way, I think getting rid of goals is actually more ambitious.

Goals, by their nature, are finite and fleeting. Once you achieve them, what then? You might experience a brief moment of pleasure and satisfaction, but soon, you’re left with two choices: either stop doing the thing altogether, having reached your destination, or realize that there is no destination, that you keep going and going and going.

You just keep looking for new ways to challenge yourself, new ways to do things, going towards the harder way, as ​we talked about a couple of weeks ago​. You just keep showing up and getting better, wherever that leads.

This not only keeps things interesting, but it insulates you, ever so slightly, from outcomes, ego, self-doubt, and misfortune. It’s not that you don’t care about results—it’s that you have a kind of trump card. Your successes don’t go to your head because you know you’re capable of more. Your failures don’t destroy you because you are sure there wasn’t anything more you could have done.

You don’t control what happens to you, what adversity gets placed in your path, but you always control whether you show up every day and give your best or not. No one can stop you from that.

You don’t have to end up number one in your class. Or win everything, every time. In fact, winning is not particularly important. What matters is that you gave everything, because anything less is to cheat the gift.

The gift of your potential. The gift of the opportunity. The gift of the craft you’ve been introduced to. The gift of the responsibility entrusted to you.

Immerse yourself in the work, in the process, in the daily practices that make up the bulk of your life.

Forget goals.

Be process-oriented.

Be internally driven.

Be Every Day.

Some people travel for the food.

Others for the nightlife.

Some travel for work.

Others travel to get away.

I travel for the swimming.

I mean that’s not really why I travel–I’m usually on the road because I’m giving a talk or I have a meeting–but if I am on the road, what I am looking for is somewhere to swim.

Believe it or not, I actually planned the ​Stillness Is The Key​ book tour around cities that had cool athletic club pools. In 2019, I swam at the ​Olympic Club in San Francisco​, the Washington Athletic Club in Seattle, the basement pool at the University Club in DC (I prefer the William H. Rumsey Natatorium near the Library of Congress), the New York Athletic Club overlooking Central Park and the Denver Athletic Club, too.

I once accepted an offer from my Dutch publisher to speak in Amsterdam on the condition that they show me a good time while I was there. And by that I meant, to their surprise, that they’d find me a cool swimming pool. (I am in Toronto, Vancouver, London, Dublin and Rotterdam in November. ​You can get tickets here​…or give me some swimming recommendations).

It was Robert Greene who first got me hooked in 2007. I grew up on swim teams but had fallen out of the habit in favor of running. When I started working in Downtown Los Angeles for American Apparel, he told me to join the Los Angeles Athletic Club because it has one of the greatest swimming pools in the country. It’s one of the oldest athletic clubs in the country (1888!) and the pool they built in 1912 is an engineering marvel–8 feet deep, six stories off the streets below, beneath a glass atrium and chandelier you’ve seen in a million movies and never known where it was from.

But the real secret, he told me, was their reciprocal benefits. I will never in my life be able to afford (let alone be invited) to join the New York Athletic Club…but for like $100 a month, my membership to the Los Angeles Athletic Club got me in the door. (To be clear, it’s a back door…they make us plebes use a special staircase so as not to touch the regular members).

Swimming laps at the Los Angeles Athletic Club

It was also Robert who told me that the ocean rock pools in Sydney were bucket-list-level good more than 10 years ago. I was blown away on my first trip there in 2013–I think I accepted the speaking gig just to have an excuse to go. This summer, I brought my family for my two talks in Sydney and Melbourne and crossed a bunch off my list.

I’d already done Icebergs and Bronte and Clovelly but this time I also squeezed in South Curl and North Curl, Manly, as well as a short swim at Cook and Philip Park and the Melbourne Public Baths.

Over the years and hundreds of thousands of miles on the road, I’ve seen some amazing pools and ponds and swimming holes and lakes. Hampstead Heath. Balmorhea. Yrjönkatu in Helsinki (where you have to swim naked). The Biltmore in Downtown LA. Gellert in Budapest. Sydney’s Olympic Pool. Badeschiff (a pool floating in the River Spree). The saltwater pool at the New Orleans Athletic Club. The Venetian Pool in Coral Gables. Swimming against the current and the billowing Texas rice plants in the San Marcos River. ​Slide Rock in Sedona​. ​Lake Tahoe​. ​The Blue Hole in New Mexico​. Jacob’s Well. And countless streams and oceans and bays and hotel pools and public parks.

But why? What’s so special about swimming?

Sure, it’s low-impact whole-body exercise and it’s good for you to be active, but I consider all that as a bonus.

What I love about swimming is that it’s one of the few places on Earth where screens can’t reach you. My phone doesn’t ring. My eyes can’t wander to the big TV playing CNN or CNBC the way they do at the gym. My eyes can’t wander at all actually, they stay locked at the bottom of the pool or the pond, ‘prisoner of the black line’ to paraphrase Joni Mitchell. It’s just the rhythm of kick, stroke, breath over and over ahead in a kind of wonderful, active meditation.

I forget whether it was at the 24 Hour Fitness off 35th or the YMCA off Town Lake in Austin, but someone came up to me once and said they were reading my book ​Ego is the Enemy​. I said thank you and laughed, telling them that I’d written a good chunk of the book in that very pool. They were surprised but it’s true, just like when I run, I’m amazed at the words that pop into my head when I have gotten up and left the computer to do something other than writing. And because I can’t immediately write it down, I have to run the phrases or the idea through over and over again…often forgetting my lap count in the process.

Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to keep swimming.

It’s not the only problem I’ve solved in the pool. I’ve had investment ideas. I’ve planned difficult conversations. I’ve gotten over grudges. I’ve calmed down. I’ve gotten much-needed space.

I remember waking up early one morning in Los Angeles, while on the book tour for ​Stillness Is The Key​. It was the day I was supposed to find out whether I’d hit the bestseller lists…or not. Glancing at the home screen of my phone, I could see there were texts from my agent and from my editor. I knew they could either be congratulations or condolences, but instead of checking, I took the elevator down to the 6th floor and swam for a mile. It was just another ordinary, rewarding swim.

I came back to the room and found out that not only had I hit the New York Times Bestseller list for the first time, but I’d debuted at #1. It was wonderful news but I was prouder of that little act of discipline that preceded it–ignoring the phone, insisting on that stillness. And if I hadn’t hit the list? I’d have been glad for the wonderful morning swim all the same, glad that I hadn’t ruined it.

It’s fitting, too, because I wrote in ​Stillness Is The Key​ that there are few better ways to settle yourself in the present moment—to wash away the distractions and the noise and the troubles of everyday life—than through being in or around water. More specifically, natural water. There’s just something about it. The sight of it contrasted against the environment it’s in. The sound of it. The feel of it closing in on you once you finally take the plunge.

Sometimes I think that half the victory of swimming is just that–the initial jump or dive in. The payoff is different depending on the season. In the summer, Barton Springs in Austin is a welcome relief against the heat. But in the winter–Robert and I once went on a snowy Austin morning a few hours before I got married–the reward is different. The aliveness creeps back into your body as you shiver to get warm, invigorated by doing something so crazy.

It was actually that abrupt entrance into a cold body of water that drew Seneca back to the Tiber River year after year. A self-proclaimed “cold-water enthusiast”, Seneca “celebrated each new year by taking a plunge into the canal.” Seneca couldn’t have known any of the since-proven health benefits of a cold plunge. He wasn’t competing or on a swim team. He wasn’t going down to the canal to literally clean himself, but he was starting the year clean. Even better, he was starting it with a challenge.

Water played a big role in Marcus Aurelius’ life, too. He liked to spend time in the many bath houses across the Roman Empire, where he’d wash off the dust of everyday life. In Budapest, you can still sit in baths that draw from the same thermal pools that Marcus would have used.

In her incredible book, ​Why We Swim​, Bonnie Tsui discusses the human inclination toward water and uncovers the deeper instincts that pull us to it. When Bonnie came on The Daily Stoic Podcast (it’s one of my favorite episodes, ​you should definitely give it a listen​), I asked her to share a discovery she made while writing the book that stood out to her, even as a lifelong swimmer and water enthusiast. “I loved learning about how we are biologically driven to respond to certain set points in the environment—that our brains love to be near water and blue spaces,” she said. “We love immersion and the feeling of physically being in water because our brains produce more alpha waves—those wavelengths associated with relaxation, calm, and creativity—when we are merely listening to or looking at it. There is a benefit to both body and mind to get in and swim.”

For all of these reasons, swimming has been a predominantly solitary practice for most of my life. But as I’ve gotten older and have a family of my own, it’s become something we all do together. In the last month alone, we’ve done the Blue Hole in Georgetown, Landa Park in New Braunfels, Barton Springs, Deep Eddy, and Krause Springs. At first, the kids are hesitant to jump in, maybe a little intimidated by a rope swing or a diving board. The same goes for us as parents, only the night before. How will the day go? Will it be a disaster? Isn’t there a bunch to pack up?

But after they, after we, work up the courage and do it? Well, you’re always glad you did.

I guess that’s the real message of this post–to pass along the wonderful habit that Robert Greene gave to me all those years ago. It made my life better and I bet it will make yours better, too.