Life is about choices.

How we choose to see things. What we choose to say. What we choose to think.

We choose what kind of person we are going to be. 

It all comes down to choices.

And Stoicism, it could be said, is a philosophy about how to make better choices. This is what we see in a book like Meditations. We see Marcus Aurelius journaling, working to get better at choosing. Choosing the right things to value, the right things to think, the right things to focus on, the right response to a difficult situation. 

In this article, I am going to give you the best insights from the Stoics on choosing well to live better. 

Start now by making the choice to…

Say Yes Only To What Matters

Being great at anything requires concentration. It requires elimination, Seneca says. “He who is everywhere is nowhere.”

If you want to be great at whatever it is you’re doing, you have to make some choices about what you say yes to and what you say no to. Everything you say yes to means saying no to something else. And conversely, everything you say no to means saying yes to something else. 

When you say no, when you cut out the inessential, the Stoics say, it allows you to double down on what is truly essential. So the question is: are you saying no to say yes only to what matters?

Control Your Emotions

Cato was once spat on by a rival politician. He was a physically tough man, a soldier, who could have, let’s say, taken matters into his own hands. Instead, he is reported to have laughed and said, “I will swear to anyone, Lentulus, that people are wrong to say that you cannot use your mouth.”

In another case, he was punched and responded to the man’s apology by saying, “I don’t even remember being hit.”

Cato chose not to be provoked. He chose not to be dragged down to their level. He didn’t lose his temper. He didn’t let them get to him. He abided by Marcus Aurelius’s wisdom, “You don’t have to turn this into something. It doesn’t have to upset you.”

Let Go of Anxiety

This was a breakthrough I had during the pandemic. Suddenly, I had a lot less to worry about. I wasn’t doing the things that, in the past, I told myself were the causes of my anxiety. I wasn’t having to get to this plane. I wasn’t battling traffic to get somewhere on time. I wasn’t having to prepare for this talk or that one.

So you’d think that my anxiety would have gone way down. But it didn’t. And what I realized is that anxiety has nothing to do with any of these things.

Marcus Aurelius actually talks about this in Meditations. “Today I escaped from anxiety,” he says. “Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions—not outside.” He writes this during a plague, no less.

We tell ourselves we are stressed and anxious and worried because of the pressure our boss puts on us or because of some looming deadline or because of all of the places we have to be and people we have to see. And then when all that gets paired down, you realize, ‘Oh, no, it was me. I’m the common variable.’ The anxiety is coming from the inside. And you can choose to discard it. 

Stop Wasting Time

When I was 20 years old, I was thinking about becoming a writer. I had about a year left on my contract at the company I was working at. I was telling Robert Greene, one of the greatest writers of all time, about all of this, and he told me I had two options. With this next year, he said, you have the choice between alive time and dead time.

Dead time is when you waste time sitting around, waiting, hoping for things to happen to you.

Alive time is when you are in control, when you make every second count, when you are learning and improving and growing and experimenting.

Is this going to be Alive Time or Dead Time? I decided to print it out and put it on my wall. And it was one of the most productive years of my life. I read stacks and stacks of books. I filled up a box of notecards. I reached out to people and have relationships to this day that came out of that experience. 

Most of all, what I took was life is constantly asking us, Is this going to be alive time or dead time? A long commute—are you going to zone out or listen to an audiobook? A delayed flight—are you going to get a couple thousands steps around the terminal or shove a Cinnabon into our face? A contract we have to earn out—is this tying us down or freeing us up?

What you do with the time when you are not totally in control—that is the critical choice you have to constantly make. 

Focus On What’s In Your Control

99 percent of the things that you spend time on don’t matter. It’s not that they’re not important. It’s that we focus on things that are not up to us.

Epictetus said, “The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control…”

The chief choice is between things that are in our control and those that are not in our control. What other people do, what other people say, what the weather is doing, how the dice rolls—just about everything except our actions, our thoughts, our feelings—not in our control.

Our actions, our thoughts, our feelings—these are up to us. Other people, the weather, external events, these are not. But here’s the thing: our responses to other people, the weather, external events are in our control. 

Making this distinction and then choosing to focus on the things that are in your control will make you happier, stronger, and more successful. If only because it concentrates your resources in the places where they matter.

Do The More Difficult Thing

Whenever we come to a little crossroad—a decision about how to do things and what things to do—the Stoics said to default to the option that challenges you the most.

Marcus Aurelius wrote in Meditations about holding the reins in his non-dominant hand as both an exercise to practice and a metaphor for doing the difficult thing. Seneca talked about how a person who skates through life without being tested and challenged is actually depriving themselves of opportunities to grow and improve. 

It is both these ideas that informed one of the things I wanted to do with my book Courage is Calling. I wanted to alter people’s perception of courage. To get people to stop thinking our courage only as what happens on the battlefield or when destiny calls you onto the world’s stage. Courage is a kind of craft, something you pursue day in and day out just as one pursues the mastery of any profession or skill. It’s something you do, something you make a habit of.

Jump into the colder pool. Walk instead of drive. Pick up the book instead of your phone. Take responsibility instead of hoping it goes unnoticed. It matters big and small, courage is choosing the more difficult option. Make it a habit. Iron sharpens iron, after all. You’ll be better for it—not only for the improvement that comes from the challenge itself, but for the willpower you are developing by choosing that option on purpose. 

When you have two choices, choose the more difficult one. Choose the one, as Marcus would agree, that allows you to take the reins in any situation.

Grab The Smooth Handle

If you’ve ever been stuck in Los Angeles traffic at night, you know it’s miserable. But if you’ve ever seen a helicopter shot of Los Angeles at night, you’ve seen how this same miserable experience can suddenly be made to seem beautiful and serene. We call one a traffic jam, the other a light show.

Same thing, different perspective.

Life is like this. We can look at it one way and be scared or angry or worried. We can look at it another and find an exciting challenge. We can choose to look at something as an obstacle or an opportunity. We can see chaos if we look up close, or order if we look from afar. 

As Epictetus said, each situation has two handles—one that will bear weight and one that won’t. We get to choose how we look at things. We get to look for the best handle to grab. As Marcus would put it, we get to choose the thoughts we dye the world with.

Little Choices Make For a Big Change

These choices are all very minor, I get that. But that’s the point. These little choices we make–the choice to direct our attention, to grab the right handle, to not get upset–this adds up. 

To what?

To freedom, the Stoics would say. To be in control of your life…even when so much of what happens in life is outside your control. 

***

P.S. Happy Texas Independence Day! One of the best choices I ever made was moving to Texas back in 2013. I continue to fall deeper and deeper in love with the Lone Star State. At The Painted Porch, we have a section just for books about Texas. The one I most recommend is the wonderful and important book, Forget the Alamo. Bryan Burrough, one of my all time favorite authors, and his co-writer Jason Stanford came out to The Painted Porch and signed copies of Forget the Alamo. Bryan also signed my two favorite books of his: Public Enemies and The Big Rich. You can check any of those out here!

The piece below is about banned books, which I feel so strongly about that I’ve decided to give away free physical copies of banned books. If you come by The Painted Porch today from 2-6pm or on February 19 from 10am-2pm, we’ll be giving away free copies of books such as Fahrenheit 451, Lawn Boy, and Out of Darkness.

The tragic irony of many books we are assigned in school is that we are far too young to understand what they really mean. 

Like many public school kids, I was assigned Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in high school. I remembered the book as a warning against totalitarian censorship by the government. It was only later, re-reading it as an adult, that I realized Bradbury—who had written the book on purchased time at a library typewriter—was depicting something much more insidious. 

As Captain Beatty explains to Montag, who had begun to doubt his terrible profession, censorship was what the people wanted. This horrendous burning of books hadn’t been forced on them by a tyrant. They had chosen this. 

“Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo,” he says, using terms that today would render the book politically incorrect, if not entirely canceled. “Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping. Burn the book.” 

Bradbury’s message is a much more salient warning to modern Americans than many of us are ready for upon first reading. America is, and always has been, in less danger of top-down Chinese or Soviet style suppression and much more vulnerable to short sighted or even well-intentioned democratic censorship. 

I didn’t grasp this as a high schooler, but I can see it now. Because here we are in 2022 where book banning is not only popular with state legislatures and local school boards, but a pastor in Tennessee held a literal book burning, which featured worshippers willingly tossing books into a bonfire that appears to reach ten or fifteen feet in the air. 

Depending on where you live, this might all seem very distant. As a writer and bookseller in rural Texas, it hits closer to home for me. Interestingly, Marcus Aurelius—who I write about often—makes an appearance in Fahrenheit 451. “Wasn’t he a European,” Montag’s wife asks. “Wasn’t he a radical?” Nobody knew…like today, people were willing to burn a book because of what they thought might be in it, or because of what someone else said was in it. 

The high school my sons will go to has been in the news for challenging a book called Out of Darkness, about segregation in a Texas oil town in the 1930s. More comically, another parent angrily protested an example of gay sex from a book called Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison at one of our school board meetings in September…but as the school librarian later pointed out, the school doesn’t even carry that book. The mother had confused it with another book literally about a boy who mows lawns. Just the other day, a man came into our bookstore snarling about all our “liberal” and “woke” books and our Google reviews have been briganded by anti-maskers and COVID-deniers. 

America has many problems. Reading too many books is not one of them. In fact, I would argue that our problems stem from the exact opposite. We spend too much time online. We watch too much real-time (partisan) news. We have a poor understanding of history and our founding principles. We say experience is a great teacher and neglect the hard won experiences of the people who came before us and did us the service of writing that all down. 

As a lifelong autodidact, I’ve been known to mispronounce many words that I had never heard outside the pages of a book. I always smile when I see someone doing the same thing—there goes a reader, I think. When Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene decried Nancy Pelosi’s “​​Gazpacho Police,” I knew that was a very different kind of error—the kind that comes from someone who has not read a single book about the Nazi Party. In fact, when I look at her cruel mockery of school shooting victims, heinous anti-semitism and dangerous pandemic misinformation, I can’t escape thinking: This is what happens when people don’t read books at all.

I don’t mean to single her out. There are plenty of politicians on both sides of the aisle who very obviously don’t read—or read only things that confirm what they already believe. 

In our world, it seems, reading and studying has become almost a revolutionary act. 

In Bradbury’s world, Montag strikes back against the regime simply by memorizing passages from books in order to protect and preserve them. As my wife and bookstore partner Samantha reminded me, to sit by while the government or your fellow citizens ban books is to endorse it. Each of us has an obligation to push back against the anti-intellectual bent of our time—whether it comes from the right or the left. When a book is banned or attacked—whether because it contains Critical Race Theory or because Critical Race Theorists are attempting to cancel the author—read it! As Stephen King has said, “Don’t spend time waving signs or carrying petitions around the neighborhood. Instead, run, don’t walk, to the nearest nonschool library or to the local bookstore and get whatever it was that they banned. Read whatever they’re trying to keep out of your eyes and your brain, because that’s exactly what you need to know.”

In a time of misinformation and disinformation, that quote might not always be right but directionally the argument is good. We shouldn’t insulate our kids from uncomfortable ideas, we should expose our kids to them and encourage them to engage with that discomfort. Moreover,  we have to model the lifelong pursuit of knowledge in our own reading habits as adults, if for no other reason than so we can be their guides. We certainly can’t leave their fate in the hands of school board members  and  local elected officials who fear what might happen to a young person given free reign in a library. 

The good news is that these people have less control over us than they once did. In the digital world, books are more plentiful than ever. It’s harder to truly suppress important perspectives. I am proud to have called in a favor with the folks at Scribd, a subscription service for ebooks and audiobooks, to make a number of these “banned” books accessible to anyone who wants them. They’ve also helped donate thousands of copies of books like Not My Idea by Anastasia Higginbotham, King and the Dragon Flies by Kacen Callender, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, and New Kid by Jerry Craft, among others, to give away to students in my local community (as a result, one small publisher told me they’re having to print extra copies of some banned titles). 

In big letters on our front window, we have stenciled the words “Good Things Happen In Bookstores.” But really, good things happen anywhere books are plentiful—even offensive or strange or uncomfortable books. 

The converse is also true, as the playwright Heinrich Heine tragically predicted of his German homeland. “Wherever they burn books,” he warned, “they will also, in the end, burn human beings.”  

It’d be wonderful if a new year magically marked a new beginning. But 2021, like all years, reminds us that the same things keep happening, that world events continue on in their own unpredictable way and that in the end, we control very little but our own actions and opinions. 

One of my favorite quotes—enough that I have it inscribed on the wall across the back of my bookstore—comes from the novelist Walter Mosley. “I’m not saying that you have to be a reader to save your soul in the modern world,” he said. “I’m saying it helps.”

2022 stands before us promising nothing but the same difficulties and opportunities that last year and every year before it promised. What are you going to do about it? Will you be ready for it? Can you handle it?

Books are an investment in yourself—investments that come in many forms: novels, nonfiction, how-to, poetry, classics, biographies. They help you think more clearly, be kinder, see the bigger picture, and improve at the things that matter to you. Books are a tradition that stretches back thousands of years and stretches forward to today, where people are still publishing distillations of countless hours of hard thinking on hard topics. Why wouldn’t you avail yourself of this wisdom?

With that in mind, here are 16 books—some new, some old—that will help you meet the goals that matter for 2022, that will help you live better and be better.

The Daily Laws: 366 Meditations on Power, Seduction, Mastery, Strategy, and Human Nature by Robert Greene

I’ve always loved the “daily read” format, I’ve recommended some of my favorites here before, I’ve been lucky enough to publish one of my own, and now I feel even luckier to have been able to help Robert bring this book into existence. People ask me all the time, Where should I start with Robert Greene? What book should I read first? It’s been impossible to answer, so I suggested he do a book that was a kind of greatest hits album, a book that captures the totality of his brilliant, life-changing thinking. And now that book exists! Even though I’ve read and reread all of Robert’s books, this book has not left my desk since I got my copy. Here’s my hour long video with Robert, filmed in LA.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport 

Cal is not just one of my favorite thinkers, not just one of my favorite authors, but also one of my favorite people to talk to. I think Cal holds the record for most appearances on the Daily Stoic podcast (you can listen to our conversations here, here, here, and here). But anyone doing knowledge work in the 21st century has to be familiar with Cal’s concept of deep work. This is a book that explains how to cultivate and protect that skill—the ability to focus, be creative, and think at a high level.

Meditations: The Annotated Edition by Marcus Aurelius (translation by Robin Waterfield) 

I first read Meditations more than fifteen years ago. I’m a champion of the Gregory Hays translation but it was a treat (and an eye-opening experience) to read this new annotated edition by Robin Waterfield. Marcus, like Heraclitus, believed we never step in the same river twice. Reading a new translation of a book you’ve read (or love) is a great way to see the same ideas from a new angle…or find new ideas you missed on the previous go-arounds. The annotations (presented as footnotes) here also provide great context. If you haven’t read Marcus Aurelius or if you have…you should read this book and then read it again. I also did a two-hour interview with Robin, which you can listen to on the Daily Stoic podcast (Part 1, Part 2). But whichever translation you go with, the amazing thing about reading Marcus is, year after year, he feels both incredibly timely and incredibly timeless. There’s a reason this book has endured now for almost twenty centuries.(Here are some lessons from me having read Meditations more than 100 times). 

Atomic Habits by James Clear

It’s when things are chaotic and crazy, when the world feels like it’s falling apart, that we most need to develop good habits. I think about James Clear’s concept of atomic habits on a regular basis. To me, this is a sign of a great book—that even just thinking about the title has an impact on you. I love the double meaning of the word atomic—not just meaning explosive habits, but also focusing on the smallest possible size of habit, the tiniest step you can take to start the chain reaction that can in fact lead to explosive results.

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

The Moviegoer is almost truer now for the millennial (or generational) experience than it was in the 1960s when it was published. Any reader will relate to the rather ageless angst of the next generation trying to find its meaning and purpose in the world. It is exactly the novel that every one stuck in their own head needs to read. The main character, on what he calls “the search,” is so in love with the artificiality of movies that he has trouble living his actual life in the real world.

Letters to a Young Athlete by Chris Bosh 

I was lucky enough to help Chris bring this book into existence. Obviously, I am biased, but I think this is a book that very much needs to exist and Chris is a wonderful thinker and philosopher about sports, craft, the drive to win and responding to adversity. You can listen to my interview with him (recorded at the front table at the bookstore) here, but do read the book. He’s great. I think this is a future classic. 

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman 

As I’ve said before, I carry this memento mori coin in my pocket to remind me: You can leave life at any minute. Let that determine what you do and say and think. (I also have a piece of a tombstone on my bathroom counter). Oliver Burkeman’s new book illustrates the same point well–we have roughly four thousand weeks on this planet. How will we spend them? How should we think about them? And don’t be deceived by medical advancements. As I said in my monuments talk, I got to know a guy who lived to be 112. That’s still ‘only’ like 5,800 weeks. You can listen to my conversation with Oliver as well. 

The Choice: Embrace the Possible by Dr. Edith Eger

Dr. Edith Eger is a complete hero of mine. At 16-years-old, she’s sent to Auschwitz. And how does this not break a person? How do they survive? How do they endure the unendurable? And how do they emerge from this, not just not broken, but cheerful and happy and of service to other people? The last thing Dr. Eger’s mother said to her before she was sent to the gas chambers was that very Stoic idea: even when we find ourselves in horrendous situations, we can always choose how we respond to them, who we’re going to be inside of them, what we’re going to hold onto inside of them. Dr. Eger quotes the one and only Dr. Viktor Frankl, who she later studied under, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” It was this idea that allowed Dr. Eger to not only endure unimaginable suffering, but to find meaning in it. She went on to become a psychologist and survives to this day, still seeing patients and helping people overcome trauma. I had the incredible honor of interviewing Dr. Eger and the joy and energy of this woman, this 93-year-old Holocaust survivor, was incredible.

The Inner Citadel by Pierre Hadot

The “inner citadel” is a concept that comes to us from Marcus Aurelius. The Stoics believed you’ll have far better luck toughening yourself up than you ever will trying to take the teeth out of a world that is—at best—indifferent to your existence. So the inner citadel is the fortress inside of us that no external adversity can ever break down. An important caveat is that we are not born with such a structure; it must be built and actively reinforced. During the good times, we strengthen ourselves and our bodies so that during the difficult times, we can depend on it. We protect our inner fortress so it may protect us. 

Turning Pro: Tap Your Inner Power and Create Your Life’s Work by Steven Pressfield

This book is so good and so perfect for the moment, whether you’re an artist or an entrepreneur, a parent or a movie producer. Because the early 2020s have been separating the amateurs from the pros. When times are good, you can be soft and lazy. But when the going gets tough? I hope this book can be an investment in yourself this year. As Steven writes, “I wrote in The War of Art that I could divide my life neatly into two parts: before turning pro and after. After is better.”

How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell

The book is spectacular. It was a bestseller in the UK and was featured in a 6 part series in The Guardian. The format of the book is a bit unusual, instead of chapters it is made up of 20 Montaigne style essays that discuss the man from a variety of different perspectives. Montaigne was 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. He lived in tumultuous times too and he coped by looking inward. We’re lucky he did, and we can do the same.

Leadership: In Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin 

This is an absolutely incredible book. I think I marked up nearly every page. The book is a study of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR and Lyndon Johnson, and it is so clearly the culmination of a lifetime of research… and yet somehow not overwhelming or boring. Distillation at its best! I have read extensively on each of those figures and I got a ton out of it. Even stuff I already knew, I benefited from Goodwin’s perspective. This is the perfect book to read right now—a timely reminder that leadership matters. Or as the Stoics say: character is fate. Or as I wrote about in this piece about leadership during the plague in ancient Rome: when things break down, good leaders have to stand up.

America in the King Years by Taylor Branch (Vol.1, Vol. 2, Vol. 3)

I’ve raved about some of my favorite epic biographies before: Robert Caro’s LBJ and William Manchester’s Churchill, among others. Well, add another to the list: Taylor Branch’s definitive series on Martin Luther King Jr. and the American civil rights movement. I’ve come to believe that one of the best ways to become an informed citizen in the present is not to watch the news, but to read history. The actor Hugh Jackman said in an interview that he gets his news by keeping his eye on the big picture—going through the Ken Burns catalog and reading books like Meditations. “That’s the way you should understand events and humanity,” he said, “with that sort of 30,000-foot view.” If you want to be informed, get off Twitter and read these books.

Phosphorescence: A Memoir of Finding Joy When Your World Goes Dark by Julia Baird

I LOVED Julia Baird’s biography of Queen Victoria and have raved about it many times. When I heard she was writing a follow up, I assumed it would be another biography. I did not expect this powerful, inspiring book about resilience and powering through. Through some dark times, Julia said what sustained her was “yielding a more simple phosphorescence—being luminous at temperatures below incandescence, having stored light for later use, quietly glowing without combusting. Staying alive, remaining upright, even when lashed by doubt.” She’s basically talking about Stoicism…without talking about Stoicism (though she does that too). I found myself marking dozens of pages in this one and just continually smiling throughout. It’s a great little book and, among other things, reminds me why I need to get back into swimming. I had a great conversation with Julia on the podcast, which you can listen to here.  

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As I have published different versions of this piece over the last couple of years (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021), I made one final recommendation worth repeating: Pick 3-4 titles that have had a big impact on you in the past and commit to reading them again. Seneca talked about how you need to “linger among a limited number of master thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind.”

We never read the same book twice. Because we’ve changed. The perceptions about the book have changed. What we’re going through in this very moment is new and different. So this year, go reread The Great Gatsby. Give The Odyssey another chance. Sit with a few chapters from The 48 Laws of Power. See how these books have stood the test of time and see how you’ve changed since you’ve read them last.

It can be some of the best time you spend with a book this year. Happy reading!