This piece is excerpted from my forthcoming book, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave. Part 1 of the book is about the forces that stand between you and doing what you want, can, and should. It’s about the battle we all fight—the battle against fear. Because real greatness is impossible if we don’t win that battle, if we don’t learn how to conquer fear. 

Jerry Weintraub wanted to be an actor.

He made it into the Neighborhood Playhouse. He studied under Sandy Meisner. One of his classmates was James Caan. There’s a reason you’ve seen movies with James Caan and none with Jerry Weintraub, and that reason is fear.

Or rather, fear by its other identity: Shame.

Sent to get clothes for a dance class—taught by Martha Graham, no less—Jerry and Hames went to a store on Broadway. As he tried on tights, Jerry, a tough kid from the Bronx, took one look in the mirror and knew there was no way he’d ever let himself be seen this way in public. James Caan, who came from the same neighborhood, whose father had been a butcher, who had the same view of himself as a tough guy, looked in the same mirror. He did not let self-consciousness win.

As the author Rich Cohen writes, “This was the dividing line, the moment of truth. Jimmy Caan put on the slippers and tights, so his name appears in the credits as, say, Sonny Corleone in The Godfather. Jerry Weintraub, because he was filled with normal, decent human shame, did not put on the slippers and tights, so his name appears in movie credits as producer.”

One would be nominated for Academy Awards, the other would package The Karate Kid. Both would be successful, but only one realized that shared early dream—only one was able to stand boldly, bravely in front of the camera, and own it.

While most of us will not make our living on the screen, we all have to face this reluctance to be seen. Our fear of what other people think, of embarrassment or awkwardness, is not the same fear that holds a man back from running into battle, but it is a limitation, a deficiency of courage that deprives us of our destiny all the same.

There is no change, no attempt, no reach that does not look strange to someone. There’s almost no accomplishment that is possible without calling some attention on yourself. To gamble on yourself is to risk failure. To do it in public is to risk humiliation.

Anyone who tries to leave their comfort zone has to know that.

Yet we’d almost rather die than be uncomfortable.

The comedian Jerry Seinfeld once noted that people rank public speaking as worse than the fear of death, which means, quite insanely, that at a funeral the average person would rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy.

In ancient Rome, there was perhaps no better orator than Crassus, famed for his brilliant speeches and prosecutions of the corrupt and the evil. At least that’s how he appeared to his audiences. You would not have known, as he later admitted, that at the outset of every speech he would “Feel a tremor through my whole thoughts, as it were, and limbs.” Even as a master, he still experienced doubt—still felt waves of overwhelming anxiety and fear crash over him before he went onstage.

At the beginning of his career, it was even worse. He recounts his eternal debt and gratitude to a judge who, at one of Crassus’s first public appearances, could tell how “absolutely disheartened and incapacitated with fear” the boy was, and adjourned the hearing until a later date. We can imagine those merciful words from the judge, sparing Crassus as he no doubt prayed he would be spared, as we have prayed a thousand times, second only to his hope that he might be struck down and killed rather than have to go on.

Yet we would not be talking about Crassus had he not pushed through that fear.

Would he have rather practiced law from the privacy of his study? Sure, just as Serpico probably wished he could’ve dressed as he liked without comment. Such is life. It doesn’t care about our rathers. You will have to stand alone from time to time. If you can’t even do that to deliver a talk, how will you possibly have the courage to do it when it counts?

You put on the tights. You push through the stage fright—the fright that persists even after you’ve mastered the art of public speaking. You enter the witness stand. You deliver the hard news to the assembled employees. You just learn to stop thinking about what they think. You’ll never do original work if you can’t. You have to be willing not only to step away from the herd but get up in front of them and say what you truly think or feel. It’s called “public life” for a reason.

We don’t get to succeed privately.

It’s ironic, the Stoics would say, that for all our selfish cares about ourselves, we seem to value other people’s opinions about us more than our own. The freed slave Epictetus says, “If you wish to improve, be content to appear clueless or stupid.” Can you do that? You’ll have to.

When we flee in the direction of comfort, of raising no eyebrows, of standing in the back of the room instead of the front, what we are fleeing is opportunity. When we defer to fear, when we let it decide what we will and won’t do, we miss so much. Not just success, but actualization.

Who might we be if we didn’t care about blushing? What could we accomplish if we didn’t mind the spotlight? If we were tough enough to put on the tights? If we were willing not only to fail but to do so in front of others?

P.S. If you have gotten anything out of my writing, I’d love for you to consider pre-ordering  Courage is Calling. Pre-orders make a huge difference for authors as they try to get a book off the ground. And to make it worth your while, I’ve put together a bunch of cool pre-order bonuses, including signed pages from the drafts of the book as I wrote them. Click here to learn more about all the bonuses and how to receive them!

All the talk about morning routines makes it easy to overlook that a good morning is impossible without a good evening. 

I am reminded just how essential a good evening routine is as I write this from an RV in Balmorhea, Texas—as I drive across the country to do some media for my new book, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave (awesome pre-order bonuses here).

It was one of Seneca’s observations—that nearly everything in life is circular: there’s an opening and a close, a start and a finish. Life, he says, is a collection of large circles enclosing smaller ones. Birth to death. Childhood. A year. A month. “And the smallest circle of all,” he writes, “is the day; even a day has its beginning and its ending, its sunrise and its sunset.”

To the Stoics, every day was to be lived as if it closed the story, every night ended as if it was the last night we had. They’re right. How we close out the day matters. The decisions we make. The reflection we encourage. The time we drift off to sleep. All of it is about finishing well…because then and only then can we start tomorrow better too. 

So what does a good evening routine look like? Whether I’m home or on the road, these are the 9 things I try to do every evening. Each is rooted in the wisdom of the ancient Stoics and when applied, as Seneca said, “let us go to our sleep with joy and gladness.” 

Make Time For Leisure

The opposite of work is not laziness or lounging around, it’s leisure. 

In the ancient world, leisure meant scholé. School. But not the get good grades and get ahead kind of school. No, in the ancient world, it meant learning and studying and pursuing higher things to enrich one’s soul and spirit.

Seneca wrote thoughtful letters to friends. Zeno gathered at the Stoa Poikile to discuss ideas. Marcus Aurelius attended philosophical lectures. My family reads together. 

Marcus said it was a requirement to “Give yourself time to learn something new and good, and cease to be whirled around.” And as Seneca wrote in his essay On the Tranquility of the Mind, “We must be indulgent to the mind, and regularly grant it the leisure that serves as its food and strength.” 

After indulging the mind, you’ll have worked up the appetite to… 

Enjoy A Philosophical Dinner

Some people watch TV at dinner. Some people eat at their desk and answer emails between bites. Some people eat as fast as they can so they can get back to work.

In The Learned Banqueters, written just after the time of Marcus Aurelius, we learn that the sixth Stoic scholarch Antipater routinely invited friends over for dinner and long discussions about philosophy. 

A few decades after Antipater, Cato would become famous for his philosophical dinners. Even his last meal—before his famous suicide—he was debating the very implications of life and death, good and bad, at such a dinner.

More recently, the philosopher Agnes Callard told me on the Daily Stoic podcast that she, her husband, and her children have philosophical debates over dinner. The topics range from serious to silly, but it’s the activity itself that really matters. It’s that for an hour or two every night, she is not doing anything but connecting with the people she loves. 

My kids are younger, so our dinner discussions range from silly to sillier. But again, it’s the time together that really matters. 

(Speaking of which we are hosting a philosophical dinner at The Painted Porch as part of a pre-order bonus for Courage is Calling. Learn about how to attend that here.)

After filling up our stomachs, it’s time to…

Go For A Walk

After a meal, but before it’s dark, it is a wonderful time to get active.

Seneca wrote about taking a walk outdoors as a kind of medicine. In a notoriously loud city like Rome, peace and quiet would have been hard to come by. The noises of wagons, the shouting of vendors, the hammering of blacksmiths—all filled the streets with piercing violence. So Seneca said, “We should take wandering outdoor walks, so that the mind might be nourished and refreshed by the open air and deep breathing.” 

Marcus Aurelius too talked about the cleansing effects of a walk in nature. On his evening walks, he liked to take a moment to look up at the stars to “wash off the mud of life below.” Freud was known for his walks around Vienna’s Ringstrasse after his evening meal. David Sedaris likes to take nighttime strolls on the back roads of his neighborhood in the English countryside and pick up garbage. Dan Rather talked about how “One of my favorite things long has been taking a leisurely stroll with wife Jean at twilight time.”

When we’re home, we get the kids in the stroller and do as much as three miles on the dirt road around our house, or in the backwoods and pastures on our farm. We see rabbits and deer and cows and armadillos. We stop and pet the donkeys. Like Sedaris, we pick up garbage. These are some of the very best moments in life. When it’s quiet. When we’re fully present and there. When we’re around people we love. As Rather said, “I gently recommend it. Just walk slowly in the time after the sun sets and before night descends.” 

Once back from a walk, we…

Tuck The Kids In 

Not everyone has kids, but everyone can learn from this exercise. Marcus Aurelius, borrowing from Epictetus, tells us that…

As you kiss your son good night, whisper to yourself, “He may be dead in the morning.” Don’t tempt fate, you say. By talking about a natural event? Is fate tempted when we speak of grain being reaped?

What is the point of this morbid exercise? It’s not about trying to reduce the affection you feel for the people you love. It’s not about preparing for the pain of losing a child (nothing can prepare you for that). It’s about not wasting a single second of the time you do get with the people you love. 

A person who faces the fact that they can lose someone they love at any moment is a person who is present. Who loves. Who isn’t rushing through moments. Who doesn’t hold onto stupid things. 

Marcus lost 5 children. 5! It should never happen, but it does. There’s nothing we can do about that. We can, however, drink in the present before we…

Review The Day

Winston Churchill was famously afraid of going to bed at the end of the day having not created, written or done anything that moved his life forward. “Every night,” he wrote, “I try myself by Court Martial to see if I have done anything effective during the day. I don’t mean just pawing the ground, anyone can go through the motions, but something really effective.”

In a letter to his older brother Novatus, Seneca describes the exercise he borrowed from another prominent philosopher. 

“When the light has been removed and my wife has fallen silent,” Seneca wrote, “I examine my entire day and go back over what I’ve done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by.”

Every night, Seneca sat down and forced himself to questions like these:

What bad habits did I cure?

What temptations did I resist?

In what specific way am I now better than I was yesterday?

Success and happiness require self-awareness. Self-reflection. Be unflinching in your assessments. Notice what contributed to your happiness and what detracted from it. Write down what you’d like to work on or quotes that you like. 

Writing, analyzing, reflecting, interrogating, taking inventory of how you spent the day—this is how you continue improving. Asking yourself questions. Questioning every experience, every day. 

Did I follow my plans for the day? Was I prepared enough? What could I do better? What have I learned that will help me tomorrow? These simple questions make an enormous impact. So I spend some time every night answering them.

After this reflection, my evening routine is drawing to a close. It’s time to…

Count Your Blessings

This is another exercise from Seneca. He said we should wrap up each day as if it were our last. The person who does this, who meditates on their mortality in the evening, Seneca believed, has a super power when they wake up. 

“When a man has said, ‘I have lived!’” Seneca wrote, then “every morning he arises is a bonus.” 

Think back: to that one time you were playing with house money, if not literally then metaphorically. Or when your vacation got extended. Or that appointment you were dreading canceled at the last moment. 

Do you remember how you felt? Probably, in a word—better. You feel lighter. Nicer. You appreciate everything. You are present. All the trivial concerns and short term anxieties go away—because for a second, you realize how little they matter. 

Well, that’s how one ought to live. Go to bed, having lived a full day, appreciating that you may not get the privilege of waking up tomorrow. And if you do wake up, it will be impossible not to see every second of the next twenty-four hours as a bonus. As a vacation extended. An appointment with death put off one more day. As playing with house money. 

And now, as the day comes to a close, it is time for the most important part, to…

Go To Bed At A Set Time

All the other habits and practices listed here become irrelevant if you don’t have the energy and clarity to do them. What time you wake up tomorrow is irrelevant…if you didn’t get enough sleep tonight. 

One thing every parent knows is that kids are a mess when they don’t sleep. But for some reason, we think we’re different. We think we can get away with pulling an all-nighter here and there. We think we can substitute stimulants for sleep. 

Nonsense. 

We only have so much energy for our work, for our relationships, for ourselves. A smart person understands this and guards their sleep carefully. The greats—they protect their sleep because their best work depends on it. The clearer they can think and the better their mental and physical state—the better they perform. In other words, the more sleep, the better. 

The philosopher and writer Arthur Schopenhauer used to say that “sleep is the source of all health and energy.” He said it better still on a separate occasion: “Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death. The higher the interest rate and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.”

Me? I get my 7-8 hours every night. Sleep is one of the most important parts of my work routine, period. All-nighters are for people who don’t know how to plan, who put things off to the last minute. 

If you want to be great at what you do, start going to bed earlier. Give yourself a bedtime that you honor and respect and enforce. Value sleep. Take care of yourself. Put yourself in a good spot to…

Start Again

As I say in the title of this piece, the perfect day begins with a good evening. A good evening routine is just priming us to have a great day—there is still work to be done when we wake up. It’s for a reason that one of our fifty rules for life from the Stoics is “own the morning.” Well-begun is half done, as they say. Fortunately, the Stoics—in their writing and in their example—left us even more wisdom on what a good start to the day looks like. I’ve written about that here and then adapted it into a video that now has over a million views. 

P.S. If you have gotten anything out of my writing over the years, I’d love for you to consider pre-ordering my new book, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave. It’s being released in less than a month on 9/28. I’m confident it’s one of my best and I think the blurbs and early reviews already hint that it is. Academy Award Winning Actor Matthew McConaghey called the book an “urgent call to arms for each and all of us.” General Jim Mattis called it “a superb handbook for crafting a purposeful life.” And Classics Professor Shadi Bartsch was nice enough to say it’s “a heartfelt and passionate book.”

Pre-orders make a huge difference for authors as they try to get a book off the ground. So it’d really mean a lot to me if you pre-ordered…and to make it worth your while, I put together a bunch of cool preorder bonuses, including signed and numbered pages from the original manuscript of the book as I worked on it. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at dailystoic.com/preorder

Yesterday, I announced on Instagram that my newest book, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave, is available for preorder. It will be my 12th book in 10 years, and so there were a bunch of comments from people who wondered how I was able to get another one done so quickly. 

How do you write books faster than I read them? 

What’s your secret to writing so many books? 

The answer is that I have a system, a process that helps me be productive. It’s not my system exactly, as I’ve taken many strategies from the greatest writers to ever do it. Although I talk about the creative process at length in my book Perennial Seller (which for some reason is currently $1.99 everywhere you get your ebooks), I thought I would detail some of my rules that I follow as a writer. I think they can help anyone be more productive. 

[1] Read. Read. Read. 

A book is made of books. “The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading; a man will turn over half a library to make one book,” Samuel Johnson said. As I was putting together the bibliography for Courage, I counted something like 300 books I was directly sourcing from. 

[2] Always be researching

The bulk of the work is researching—collecting stories, anecdotes, and data to marshal your argument. The writing is stringing those pieces together. I’ve found stuff I’ve used in in-flight magazines, discovered snippets on social media, even heard things mentioned on TV. As Shelby Foote put it in an interview with The Paris Review: “I can’t begin to tell you the things I discovered while I was looking for something else.”

[3] Put good advice where you work

Print and put a couple of important quotes up on the wall to help guide you (either generally, or for a specific project). When I was working on Ego is the Enemy, I had this quote from Machiavelli on the wall to inspire its style and ethos: “I have not adorned this work with fine phrases, with swelling, pompous words, or with any of those blandishments or external ornaments with which many set forth and decorate their matter. For I have chosen either that nothing at all should bring it honor or that the variety of its material and the gravity of its subject matter alone should make it welcome.” I have another quote that I put up for this book from Martha Graham: “Never be afraid of the material. The material knows when you’re frightened and will not help.”

[4] Make commitments

I turn in a book proposal for my next book before my latest one comes out. When I have a commitment that I know I have to meet, Resistance doesn’t have the time or space to creep in. Right now I am on a book year path for the next four years. It keeps me honest and keeps me working. Meet deadline, or death. 

[5] Work with great people

Success requires greater investment in the creative process. Pay for professional help. There’s that saying: if you think pros are expensive, try hiring an amateur. 

[6] Have something to say

“To have something to say,” Schopenhauer said, “by itself is virtually a sufficient condition for good style.”

[7] Have a model in mind

Thucydides had Herodotus. Gibbon had Thucydides. Shelby Foote had Gibbon. Every playwright since Shakespeare has had Shakespeare. Everyone has a master to learn from. For me, it’s been Robert Greene

[8] Know where you’re going

You don’t “find the book as you write.” You have to do the hard work of solving the problem first. You have to figure out the best route, too. One of the best pieces of writing advice I ever got was to–before I started the process–articulate the idea in one sentence, one paragraph and one page. This crystallizes the idea for you and guides you—Nassim Taleb wrote in Antifragile that every sentence in the book was a “derivation, an application or an interpretation of the short maxim” he opened with. 

[9] Focus on What You Control

As Epictetus says, there’s some stuff that’s up to us, some stuff that’s not. The work is up to you. Everything else is not. If you’re in this for external rewards, god help you. A Confederacy of Dunces was rejected by publishers. After the author’s suicide, it won the Pulitzer. People don’t know shit. YOU know. So love it while you’re doing it. Success can only be extra.

[10] Embrace draw-down periods

You need what the strategist and theorist John Boyd called the “draw-down period.” Take a break right before you start. To think, to reflect, to let things settle. I started Courage is Calling on my birthday, but not before I took an extended period of just thinking. 

[11] Listen to the same song on repeat

I’ve found that picking one song—usually something I am not proud to say I am listening to—and listening to it on repeat, over and over and over again is the best way to get into a rhythm and flow. It not only shuts out outside noise but also parts of my conscious mind I don’t need to hear from while I’m writing. 

[12] Make little progress each day

One of the best rules I’ve heard as a writer is that the way to write a book is by producing “two crappy pages a day.” It’s by carving out a small win each and every day—getting words on the page—that a book is created. Hemingway once said that “the first draft of anything is shit,” and he’s right (I actually have that on my wall as a reminder). 

[13] Don’t let the tools distract you 

Great artists work. Mediocre artists talk a lot about tools. Software does not make you a better writer. If classics were created with quill and ink, you’ll probably be fine with a Word Document. Or a blank piece of paper. Don’t let technology distract you. Helen Simpson has “Faire et se taire” from Flaubert on a Post-it near her desk, which she translates as “Shut up and get on with it.”

[14] Get some strenuous exercise every day

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought of a great line or solved an intractable writing problem while running or swimming. Exercise is also an easy win every day. Writing can go poorly, but going on a run always goes well. 

[15] Write about the things you’re afraid to talk about.

James Altucher has a great rule that I have stolen: write what you’re afraid to say. If your stuff isn’t scaring you, you’re not pushing yourself enough. 

[16] Journal every morning

Each morning, I journal in three small notebooks. The whole ritual takes 15 minutes and by the time I am finished, I am centered, I am calm and most importantly, I am primed to do my actual writing.

[17] Don’t talk about the book (as much as you can help it)

Don’t talk about projects until you’re finished. Save that carrot for the end. Talking and doing fight for the same resources. 

[18] Stop on the “wet edge”

Hemingway advised fellow writer Thomas Wolfe “to break off work when you ‘are going good.’—Then you can rest easily and on the next day easily resume.” Brian Koppelman has referred to this as stopping on “wet edge.” It staves off the despair the next day.

[19] Make something that does a job

My editor Niki Papadopoulos once told me, “It’s not what a book is. It’s what a book does.” This is why musicians follow the “car test” (how does the song sound in a car driving down the highway). It’s just about whether you like it…but about what it does for the people buying it. 

[20] Cut out the jargon

This was Ogilvy’s rule: “Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.” The other one I like is: “Never use two words where one will do.”  

[21] Talk it out

When you get stuck, talk the ideas through with someone you trust. As Seth Godin observed, “no one ever gets talker’s block.”

[22] It’s OK that it’s hard

Thomas Mann described a writer as “someone to whom writing does not come easy,” he was putting it lightly. Walker Percy said “that writing is like suffering from a terrible disease for a certain period of time. Then when you finish you get well again.” That’s why there is the old saying: Painters like painting. Writers like having written.

[23] Remember … it’s all material

As Vivian Gornick explains, “What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.”

If all you do after reading this is start asking more often, “How can I use this to my advantage?”—your creative output will not only get better, your life will too.

I hope some of these help you become more productive, and if you want to really take your creative process to the next level, I do recommend my book Perennial Seller. As I said up top, the ebook is currently $1.99—I don’t know if it will ever be cheaper than that. 

And if you have gotten anything out of my writing over the years, I’d love for you to consider picking up my new book, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave. I’m confident it’s one of my best and I think the blurbs and early reviews already hint that it is. Academy Award Winning Actor Matthew McConaghey called the book an “urgent call to arms for each and all of us.” General Jim Mattis called it “a superb handbook for crafting a purposeful life.” And Classics Professor Shadi Bartsch wrote that it’s “a heartfelt and passionate book.”

To make it worth your while, we’ve put together a bunch of cool preorder bonuses—among them is something I’ve never given away: a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript of the book. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at dailystoic.com/preorder