View a complete list of my favorite books from 2023 at The Painted Porch

It was a great year of reading once again. Not because the titles published this year were particularly great–as always, my reading is usually rooted in stuff that’s older, in a more serendipitous process than catching titles as they come out. It was great because I found so many books that were new to me and in their own way, helped form a new me. I learned about perspectives I didn’t have before, learned things I didn’t know, and even connected with people I otherwise wouldn’t have known. It was wonderful and I feel so lucky to have so many more books I still want to read.

At the end of every year, I try to narrow down all the books I read and recommended in this email list to just a handful of the best. The kind of books where if they were the only books I’d read that year, I’d still feel like it was an awesome year of reading. You can check out the best of lists from 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011… I can’t believe it’s been 13 years of these roundups!

My reading list is now ~270,000 people, which means I hear pretty quickly when a recommendation has landed well. I promise you—you can’t go wrong with any of these.

​The Son by Philipp Meyer

You never know why a book is going to jump out at you or why it will speak to you. I found this one at a Barnes and Noble on the Gulf Coast of Florida on vacation with my family. How could I have known that this epic Western–one of the greatest I’ve ever read–was largely based in Bastrop, where I live and where my bookstore, The Painted Porch, is? How cool is that? As it happens, Philipp came out and was the first in-person episode of The Daily Stoic Podcast–recorded in a building that dates roughly to the period of the book. And then just a few weeks ago, I was at a small rural grocery store in Red Rock, Texas and in a bin of used books, I found a pristine 1st edition hardcover of The Son (which I am going to have him sign for me when we go deer hunting later this month). Again, the magic of books! Anyway, on the little sign I put next to the book in the bookstore, I say that The Son is on par with the show Yellowstone, but better. If you’re looking to read more fiction this year, start here. It’s an epic book that spans multiple generations, from the Comanche raids of the 1800s to the border raids of the early 1900s and the oil booms of the 20th century. I also recommend Philipp’s other novel, American Rust,which reminded me of one of my absolute favorite books last year, Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland. Meyer is so in tune with the themes that we see ruminating in our country every day–the dignity of work, the despair of not being able to get ahead, the terrible cost of so many shortsighted economic decisions by American industry. But all of that is subsumed here in a great novel with great characters. It pairs nicely with Cormac McCarthy’s border trilogy as well (All The Pretty Horses is an all-time favor for me). But back to the topic of Texas, two amazing Texas books are Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne and Comanches: The History of a People by T.R. Fehrenbach.

​Pontius Pilate by Ann Wroe

How did I find this book? No recollection–but I feel so much gratitude for having found it. Ann Wroe’s biography of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judaea–the man who sentenced Jesus to his gruesome death–was so overwhelmingly good that I could only read a couple pages at a time. How on earth did Wroe manage to produce such a rich and fascinating, 432-page book about a guy for which the historical record is not more than a couple artifacts and inscriptions? I don’t know… but it makes it a masterwork. Fitzgerald said genius was the ability to hit a target no one else could see…that’s what happened here. What so captivated me about this book is that although it is of course about the most seminal moment of the Christian world, it is happening inside the Roman world–the world of Seneca, literally. Seneca’s brother is in this book (he adjudicates a case involving St. Paul). Lucilius, who Seneca is writing his famous letters to, has the same job in a different province as Pontius. And by the way, that’s the most radical thing about this book: That you get to look at Pontius Pilate, the man who sentenced Christ to death, as a guy with a job. Did he do it well? How did it go so sideways? He said several times that he did not think Christ was guilty…he tried several times to get out of sentencing him to be crucified…yet in the end, he relented and did what he knew was wrong. What can that teach us? This was one of the most interesting and creative books I’ve read in a very long time. I also had Ann Wroe on The Daily Stoic Podcast earlier this year (listen here).

​Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be by Dr. Becky Kennedy

I know how I found Dr. Becky’s work–my wife recommended it. I should know by now to put such books at the very top of my to-read pile, but this one took a while to get to. I regret that because WOW this book is good! It’s another that I could make it a couple pages at a time before I had to just stop and think. And then to go back through it for my notecard system took equally long, there was just so much stuff I had to get down. I’ve already written close to a dozen Daily Dad emails about lessons from the book–from parenting anxieties and frustrations to being present and asking tough questions. But as much as this is a parenting book, it’s also just classic Stoic principles applied toward being a person–because what is parenting but stress, situations you don’t control, worry, anxiety, fear, fatigue and frustration? I took so much out of this book. I just interviewed Dr. Becky too but I don’t think it will come out until January. Stay tuned and in the meantime, you just HAVE to read this book.

More…

As much as I tried, I really can’t leave it at just three books. As you’ve seen in the list this year, I published a book myself in May, The Daily Dad. I quite enjoyed The Book of Charlie: Wisdom from the Remarkable American Life of a 109-Year-Old Man by David Von Drehle. It’s a short, great read. I even got to talk to David about Charlie on The Daily Stoic Podcast (listen here). The Past That Would Not Die by Walter Lord is a riveting, must read narrative nonfiction thriller about James Meredith’s brave and bold campaign to integrate Ole Miss in 1962. An equally moving and related book was Three Lives for Mississippi by William Bradford Huie. I’m not sure you can fully understand America or the darkness that humanity is capable of without reading these books. I found Jan Morris’ Conundrum to be an honest, eye-opening, and just very human memoir from someone who is trans (and also an amazing historian, veteran and fascinating person). The world would be a better place if more people read this book. I loved Joan Didion’s Blue Nights even more than I loved The Year of Magical Thinking as it is much more about parenting and one’s own mortality. If you’re a Joan Didion fan, check out The Daily Stoic Podcast on Youtube, the table we sit at is hers. Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska by Warren Zanes is a great insight into not just the creative process but also the business and branding and career process. It’s fantastic and almost unbelievable. Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way is a wonderful discussion of what made the Greeks so special, what they can teach us and how they thought about life. I was lucky enough to interview Arnold Schwarzenegger twice for his new book, Be Useful. We met once in Los Angeles in his Bavarian-themed office (listen here) and then again on stage in NYC. And finally, Robert Greene released a 25th anniversary edition of ​The 48 Laws of Power. It’s one of the coolest designed books I’ve ever seen. If you flip the gold pages in one direction, you see Machiavelli’s hidden face…and if you flip them in the other direction, Robert’s face appears. It’s an amazing version of an amazing book which I continue to think everyone needs to read. And if you don’t want to read it because you think it’s ‘immoral,’ well then you definitely need to read it.

Children’s Books

My oldest is obsessed with Minecraft and so we were very excited when we found out that Max Brooks wrote a novel about Minecraft called The Island (the audiobook is narrated by Jack Black). It’s so funny to see him absorb and get excited by what are effectively Stoic lessons but be open to them because it’s fictionalized through a video game. If I were to say any of the same things, he’d roll his eyes. I missed out on Harry Potter as a kid (just a tad old when they came out) and I never saw the movies so having kids was my first time interacting with the stories at all. We’ve loved making our way through the Illustrated Editions of Harry Potter this year. It’s a great way to read them and they’re beautiful books (if only JK Rowling could go read Jan Morris’ memoir and shut up). For my youngest, who is obsessed with bunnies, I read The Velveteen Rabbit for the first time and we both fell in love with the story. It inspired two Daily Dad emails that you can read here and here. If you haven’t read either The Boy Who Would Be King or The Girl Who Would Be Free, I would love for you to check them out. Stoicism is a philosophy I wish I had found earlier…and I wrote these books to help kids do exactly that.

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As always, I appreciate you supporting my bookstore, The Painted Porch. Please note that because a lot of the books we sell are backlist titles, there can sometimes be delays in stocking/sourcing. And with that, I hope that you’ll get around to reading whichever of these books catch your eye and that you’ll learn as much as I did. Whether you buy them at The Painted Porch or on Amazon today, or at your nearest independent bookstore six months from now makes no difference to me. I just hope you read!

You’re welcome to email me questions or raise issues for discussion. Better yet, if you know of a good book on a related topic, please pass it along. And as always, if one of these books comes to mean something to you, recommend it to someone else.

I promised myself a long time ago that if I saw a book that interested me I’d never let time or money or anything else prevent me from having it. This means that I treat reading with a certain amount of respect. All I ask, if you decide to email me back, is that you’re not just thinking aloud.

Enjoy these books, treat your education like the job that it is, and let me know if you ever need anything.

All the best,

Ryan

The past year has been all about LESS for me.

At the end of 2022, actually as part of The Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge (​new one starting on Jan 1 if you want to join us​), my wife and I picked a word we were going to use as our lodestar for the year. We picked ‘less’ because we felt like we were too busy, too overwhelmed, too stressed, too frustrated. I was just exhausted as December ended and I felt like my health, my family, and my quality of life could not face another year of the same.

So as I wrote here, ​in an article​, my goal was:

Less. Less commitments. Less drama. Less busyness. Less screen time. Just less. Part of the reason I want less is so I have room for more. More stillness. More presence.

Looking back, I think we did a pretty good job. I was strict about passing on stuff I didn’t want to do. I asked my assistant not to schedule appointments or interviews or calls on Fridays. I pushed ​my book​ back a year—which required some serious negotiations with my publisher and facing a lot of ideas in myself about what it meant to not be so busy and always being doing, doing, doing.

What did this ‘less’ translate to? Certainly not a lot of ‘nothing,’ which is what I think we suspect we’ll turn into if we start saying that powerful word ‘no’ or if we start slowing down. Instead, what happened is that I did a lot more. I did more school lunches and school drop offs. We went on more trips together. My wife and I hung out more. I spent more time on the book that I delayed, and now it’s much, much better.

Now, staring down the barrel of a new year, I intend to continue this trend of less (to get the double benefit, as Marcus Aurelius writes in ​Meditations​, of doing the essential things better). But I also wanted to pick a new word to aim at.

This year, the word for me is: Systems.

In ​Ego Is The Enemy​, I tell the story of the day of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s inauguration.

In 1953, Eisenhower was entering the White House as the newly inaugurated president, having just returned from his parade. As he walked into the Executive Mansion, his chief usher handed Eisenhower two letters marked “Confidential and Secret” that had been sent to him earlier in the day.

“Never bring me a sealed envelope,” Eisenhower said firmly. “That’s what I have a staff for.”

He wasn’t a snob nor was he being lazy. Eisenhower was a man who lived by systems. He saw the need for an efficient, orderly executive branch, mirroring the way his military units had been. His focus was on delegating, trusting his staff, and maintaining order. As his chief of staff later put it, “The president does the most important things. I do the next most important things.”

A system is a way to do more by doing less. By setting up processes—which can be work up front—you find efficiencies. By setting up clear and defined roles, you can effectively delegate. By setting up standards and expectations, you can not only hold people accountable, but you can measure and optimize those processes to be even more efficient. It’s a positive feedback loop.

What’s an example of a good system?

I’ve talked about ​my notecard system​ before, that’s a system by which I research and write my books. I don’t just wing it. It’s a process by which I—and other writers—try to take an enormous and overwhelming task and try to make it manageable. As Robert Greene, who taught me the notecard system, says, “A lot of books fail because the writer loses control of the research. You are either a master of the material or it’s the master of you.”

Sometimes a system is something like that—a process. Other times, systems are a person or a group of people, like Eisenhower was referring to with his staff. “A system,” as Donella Meadows defines it in ​Thinking in Systems​, “is a set of related components that work together in a particular environment to perform whatever functions are required to achieve the system’s objective.”

A to do list is a system. A chain of command is a system. A rule that says “I never say ‘yes’ in the room” is a system for making better decisions. In fact, there was another insight from Eisenhower called the Eisenhower Decision Matrix that he would use to prioritize stuff. To separate and distinguish immediate tasks from important ones, Eisenhower would group tasks into a 2×2 matrix: urgent and important (quadrant I), important but not urgent (quadrant II), urgent but not important (quadrant III), and not important and not urgent (quadrant IV). It is a system for channeling focus onto tasks that are truly important and contribute to your long-term goals, rather than just reacting to what seems urgent at the moment.

Contrasting with Eisenhower, in ​Ego Is The Enemy​, I also tell the story of John DeLorean, whose management style was once described as “chasing colored balloons.” Coming out of the bureaucratic management style of General Motors, DeLorean tried to make himself the center of everything. The result was chaos—chaos that both fueled his ego (somebody always needed him) and destroyed what was actually a pretty visionary car company.

Few of us are that bad, but we could all do better with better systems. Because it’s really easy, when you don’t have a system, to get caught up just winging it–handling whatever is urgent, whatever someone has randomly brought you, or whatever pops up in your email or whatever you feel like doing in the moment.

One of the reasons I am deciding to focus on systems this year is that it’s unavoidable. For a long time, I kept my life and my business deliberately very small. Brass Check, my marketing company, never had any full-time employees. It wasn’t until 2019 that ​Daily Stoic​ hired its first editor/manager. In that time, we’ve significantly increased the scale and scope of what we do–​as I wrote about before​, part of that stemmed from the decision to be good stewards of our success and direct our profits back towards content that people can consume for free. And then on top of all this, I’ve got kids, our ranch, and a ​bookstore​.

Even after I have eliminated stuff I don’t want to do, it’s just not even remotely possible to operate without good systems.

For example, I’ve had to develop a system to handle speaking requests when they come in: Early in my career, everything ran through me. I wanted to be involved. I wanted to know what was up. But then I got busy and now all the offers go through the folks at VaynerSpeakers. Again, in the early days, I was open to pretty much every offer that came my way. As I have taken on more things in my life, I’ve had to give Vayner strict criteria as to what I won’t even consider, what a fee range is, how I prefer events to go, things I will do/won’t do, even seemingly minor stuff about what microphones I like or how long before the event I’ll arrive (and my rules about how many bedtimes I’m willing to miss from my kids), how I like stuff entered into my calendar. They handle travel, they handle payments, they even handle following up with the event after, sending whoever booked me a thank you gift (usually a personalized and signed special edition of ​The Daily Stoic​). This is a system that separates serious offers from not serious ones, and it streamlines run-of-show at events so everything runs smoothly and I can just show up and do my job.

Before the system, I was at the mercy of everything going right. With a system, things are more likely to go right.

It wasn’t easy to set up and it required a lot of trial and error.

But for me, as I think about 2024, I am thinking about other parts of my life that could benefit from this kind of system.

I want to stop winging it. I want to stop being caught off guard by stuff. I want to stop making the same mistakes multiple times. I want to stop wasting resources (and other people’s energy) on doing things that don’t need to be done or burning them out with inefficiencies. I want to have people and processes in place to prevent preventable errors from happening.

I want better systems for dealing with mail. I want better systems for onboarding new employees. I want better systems for travel. I want better systems for my house. I want better systems for managing inventory at the ​bookstore​. I want better systems for producing ​The Daily Stoic Podcast​. I want better systems for taking care of my animals. I want better systems for keeping my car from becoming a mess. I want better systems for managing my retirement and savings accounts.

Why?

So I can show up and do my job…as a writer, as a professional, as a parent.

So I can do a better job at all these things.

Robert Greene said above that the lack of systems is why a lot of books fail, but it’s also why a lot of people fail in general. You are either a master of the items on your to-do list or the day will master you. You either set clear priorities and focus on what truly matters or you get lost in the noise of trivial tasks. You either implement structures and processes that streamline your workflow or you get overwhelmed by the chaos of disorganization. You either delegate effectively and leverage the strengths of others or you try to do everything yourself, struggle in isolation, and burn out. You either have systems or you don’t.

It might mean some more work up front but the sign of a good system is that once you do that work up front, you end up having to do LESS later.

As I said, one of my systems each year is doing ​The Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge​. We build out a new one every year and this year it’s 21 days of challenges—presented one per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. ​Sign up here​ before it starts on January 1st.

The challenges are designed to help you:

• Stop procrastinating
• Learn new skills
• Abandon harmful habits
• Be more generous
• Develop immunity to distractions
• Strengthen your character
• Become the best version of yourself….

You can expect:

• Over 24,000 words of all-new content
• Three live Q&A sessions
• Access to a community platform where you’ll engage with fellow Stoics
• A custom printable 21-day calendar to track progress

This challenge is a big part of my year each year—kicking things off with something that challenges me—and I hope you’ll join us on January 1st. Demand more for yourself this year and head to ​dailystoic.com/challenge​ and sign up TODAY.

The new year is not real. It’s an artificial, made up event. Nothing has really changed. Nothing has actually happened.

We know this because there are so many different ways of tracking ‘the year.’ There is the fiscal year. There’s the academic year and the agricultural year. There are regular years and leap years. There’s the Chinese year, which varies each year, typically starting somewhere between January 21st and February 20th and lasting until a similar date the following year.

In actuality, every single day is a new year…because one year has elapsed since that day, one year earlier.

But still, there is something to the New Year. Even the Stoics acknowledged it. Seneca started each year by plunging into the frigid Tiber River in Rome—I think he was washing off the old year and starting fresh for a new year, as well as starting by doing something challenging and difficult.

Sure, you could start fresh any day, but would you? Do you know?

So let’s use the close of 2023 and the beginning of 2024 as an opportunity—however forced, however artificial—to reexamine, reorient and restart. That’s what Epictetus said, “First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.” He asked how much longer we were going to wait to demand the best of and from ourselves?

Here are some habits, some things I am going to ask of myself in 2024, many of which were inspired by The Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge, which starts on January 1st. It’s a big part of my year each year—kicking things off with something that challenges me—and I hope you’ll join us on January 1st. (Sign up here, more info below).

Think Small

The writer James Clear talks about the idea of “atomic habits” (and has a really good book with the same title). An atomic habit is a small habit that makes an enormous difference in your life. He talks about how the British cycling team was completely turned around by focusing on 1% improvements in every area. That sounds small, but Clear emphasizes that repetitive actions accumulate and add up in a big way over time.“Well-being is realized by small steps,” Zeno would say looking back on his life, “but is truly no small thing.” If you want to start reading more—don’t promise yourself you’re going to read more books this year; instead, commit to reading one page per day. If running a mile seems daunting—that’s fine, start with a walk around the block. If your eating habits are a mess—start by making one healthy food choice a day. Just focus on getting started, because once you start, you can build.

Embrace Hofstadter’s Law

Starting small only works if you have patience, though, if you stay at it. Hofstadter’s Law says it always takes longer than you think it’s going to take…even when you think it’s going to take a long time. As I wrote about a little while back, I’ve learned this repeatedly throughout my career. I started blogging in 2005. My first book came out in 2012. The Obstacle is the Way came out in 2014…and took six years for it to hit any bestseller list. I didn’t hit the New York Times Bestseller list until 2019, on my 13th book. My wife suggested we open a small-town bookstore back in the fall of 2019. We were delayed opening by a year because COVID, then for another year we didn’t feel right opening, then a freak storm (and political incompetence) shut down the power grid, leading to burst pipes and a busted roof, then books were unavailable due to a global logistics crisis. It was, you might say, one damn thing after another.

That’s life. That’s how success works. And that’s not even getting into my actual journey as a person and as a writer, progress in which has been slow to say the least! I feel like I’m just becoming capable of stuff that I set out to improve on years ago.

The point is: It always takes longer than you want. So, one of the most important habits is the habit that makes all other habits possible: patience. It doesn’t matter if it’s writing a book, opening a small business, getting in shape, establishing a reading or meditation practice—it always takes longer than you expect. It takes longer than you’re willing to wait. In any case, it takes however long it takes. We want our progress now. We want our success now. We want our rewards now. But if you can practice delayed gratification, if you can understand that all good things take time, that it’s a process, you’re almost always going to be more successful.

Make A Commitment

In 2018, we did our first Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge, full of different challenges and activities based on Stoic philosophy. It was an awesome experience. Even I, the person who created the challenge, got a lot out of it. Why? Deciding what we want to do, determining our own habits, and making the right choices is exhausting. Handing the wheel over to someone else is a way to narrow our focus and put everything into the commitment.

To kick off 2024, we’re doing another Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge. The idea is that you ought to start the New Year off right—with 21 great days to create momentum for the rest of the year. If you want to have better habits this year, find a challenge you can participate in. Just try one: it doesn’t matter what it’s about or who else is doing it.

Cut Out The Inessential

One of the challenges in last year’s New Year New You Challenge was to pick a word for the year. The word of 2023 for my wife Samatha and I is the word we’re choosing again for 2024: LESS. Less stuff. Less distractions. Less screen time. Less commitments. Less so we can have more—more presence, more peace. Matthew McConaughey told me he shut down his production company and his music label because “I was making B’s in five things. I want to make A’s in three things.” Those three things: his family, his foundation, his acting career (you can listen to our conversation here). Marcus Aurelius would say that doing less “brings a double satisfaction.” You figure out what’s really essential and you do those things better. Along the same lines, Maya Smart told me she had to start saying “No” so she could say “Yes” to writing her first book (which you can pick up at the Painted Porch Bookshop). “I had to start setting boundaries,” she said “Steven Pressfield writes about this idea that you do this shadow work. For me, it was volunteering…So I started resigning from boards and telling people, ‘I’m no longer able to do this thing that I used to do because I’m focused on this book.’” Me? As I wrote about last week, I surround myself with physical reminders that make it impossible to avoid considering each opportunity and each ask carefully. What’s at stake is my finite resources. So are yours!

Treat The Body Rigorously

Adopting a new habit always seems daunting at first. As I write about in Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave, we can’t just hope to be brave when it counts. Courage has to be cultivated. To do the big things that scare you, start with smaller things—start with developing the ability to push yourself to do stuff you’re reluctant to do. To be able to endure the cold reception of a bold idea, start with enduring a cold shower. To be able to step forward when the stakes are high, regularly do that when the stakes are low. To be able to embrace the discomfort of a major life change, accustom yourself to minor discomforts. We treat the body rigorously, Seneca said, so that it may not be disobedient to the mind. We push ourselves in little ways so the big ways stop seeming quite so big, quite so out of character. We minimize fear by making the act of overcoming it routine. We test ourselves to prepare for the tests of life. By methodically and deliberately exposing ourselves to small challenges, what once seemed daunting becomes manageable, even routine.

Do The Essential Things First

​Hugh Jackman reads right after he wakes up (early) in the morning. For many years, he and his wife would read outloud to each other for thirty or so minutes. “It’s the best. I recommend it to anyone…It’s the greatest way to start the day. Right now I’m reading Stillness Is the Key…I’m really into philosophy. So we read, and we talk, because stuff’s on your mind…That way, no matter what happens through our day, we know that we’ve had quality time together. You always think, tonight; after work; after this; when we put the kids to bed, but that doesn’t always happen.”

​Camilla Cabello told me she starts her day by reading the Daily Stoic email (which you can sign up for here) and then one page from The Daily Stoic. I like to read from Tolstoy’s A Calendar of Wisdom or Robert Greene’s The Daily Laws.

I try to get some exercise in the morning, and I for sure write in the morning. My assistant knows not to schedule calls or meetings in the morning because they make it too easy to let the day get away from you. They sap your willpower early. By tackling writing first, by getting some time outside (with the kids usually) first, I already won the day. Everything else is extra from there. Well-intentioned plans fall apart. Our willpower evaporates. So it’s key not only that we prioritize the essential things, but that we habitualize doing them first thing.

Get Help

Whenever I speak to military groups, I like to tell them about one of my favorite quotes in Meditations,

I like the way he says that with a shrug. So what? There’s nothing shameful about needing help. Whether that’s going to therapy, asking for advice, or hiring someone to work for you, ‘help’ is the secret to getting better—to unlocking potential breakthroughs, gains or efficiencies.

Tim Ferriss has a great question related to this, What would this look like if it were easy? The idea is that things don’t need to be hard if you’re doing them right. Just as with managing a business, forming new habits often requires putting in place the right kind of support and building a supportive infrastructure around you. Identify the barriers that make a habit difficult and find ways to remove them. If you need a helping hand, so what? If you need a coach or a trainer and you can afford it, hire one. It’s not a moral failure to have childcare or an accountant. If you don’t know exactly what to do or how to do it, ask someone who does. We’re in this mission together. We’re comrades. Get help.

Go The F*ck To Sleep

All the other habits and practices listed here become irrelevant if you don’t have the energy and clarity to do them. We have to follow the advice of a book I love to read to my kids: Go the F*ck to Sleep! What time you wake up tomorrow is irrelevant…if you didn’t get enough sleep tonight. In the military, they speak of sleep discipline—meaning it’s something you have to be good at, you have to be conscious of, something you can’t let slip. We only have so much energy for our work, for our relationships, for ourselves. A smart person knows this and guards it carefully. A smart person knows that getting their 7-8 hours of sleep every night does not negatively affect their output, it contributes crucially to their best work.

Don’t Just Read, Re-Read

I’ve always loved Seneca’s line: “You must 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.” Because the world is constantly changing, we are changing, and therefore what we get out of those books can change. So I re-read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations (check out the leatherbound edition of my favorite translation) every year. Before I start any book project, I take a few hours and re-read The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, maybe the greatest book ever written on the creative process. Kressmann Taylor’s Address Unknown was something I re-read in light of the alarming rise of anti-semitism. This year, I’ll re-read some of my favorite novels, and I’m going to re-read some books that I think pertain to the subject I’m writing about now. When I re-read, I learn things I wasn’t ready to learn before, and I gain things that I missed the first time. We never step in the same river twice, Marcus Aurelius said. The books don’t change, but you and your circumstances do. If you want to get better this year, don’t just read…re-read.

Pick Yourself Up When You Slip Up

The path to self-improvement is slippery, and falling is inevitable. You’ll sleep in and not be able to read that page, you’ll cheat on your diet, you’ll say “yes” and take on too much, or you’ll get sucked into the rabbit hole of Twitter. That’s okay. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. You’re only a bad person if you give up.

​I told Dr. Edith Eger I felt guilty about how I had lost touch with someone and only recently reconnected with them. She cut me off and told me she could give me a gift that would solve that guilt right now. “I give you a sentence,” she said, “One sentence—if I knew then what I know now, I would have done things differently.” That’s the end of that, she said. “Guilt is in the past, and the one thing you cannot change is the past.”

No one is perfect. We all have bad days. We can’t change that. When we mess up, we can’t go back and fix it. But we can move forward. We can be better here and now. We have to. “Disgraceful,” Marcus Aurelius would say, “for the soul to give up when the body is still going strong.”

All of us have fallen short in the last year…and the years before that. We broke our resolutions. We lost touch with people we care about. We made the same mistakes again and again. We were “jarred, unavoidably, by circumstances,” as Marcus said. But now it’s time to pick ourselves up and try again. It’s time, Marcus continues, to “revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help. You’ll have a better group of harmony if you keep on going back to it.”

In other words, when you mess up, come back to the habits you’ve been working on. Come back to the ideas here in this post. Don’t quit just because you’re not perfect. No one is saying you have to magically transform yourself in 2024, but if you’re not making progress toward the person you want to be, what are you doing? And, more importantly, when are you planning to do it?

I’ll leave you with Epictetus, who spoke so eloquently about feeding the right habit bonfire. It’s the perfect passage to recite as we set out to begin a new year, hopefully, as better people.