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The (Very) Best Books I Read in 2018

Every year, I try to narrow down all the books I have recommended and read for this email list down 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.

I know that people are busy, and we don’t always have time to read as much as we like. Nothing wrong with that (though if you want to read more—don’t look for shortcuts—make more time!). What matters is that when you do read, you pick the right books.

This list is now 125,000+ 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. But…before I get into my favorites this year, I wanted to tell you about something I’m really excited about for 2019. We are kicking the year off with a 14 Day—New Year, New You—Challenge for Daily Stoic. The one we did in October was awesome, and I had an amazing time doing it alongside thousands of you. This one is going to be even better and actually has some reading related challenges that I think you’ll love. Give it a look.

Also if you want signed or personalized copies of my books as Xmas gifts this year, BookPeople.com is offering those, and we also have some cool gift ideas in the Daily Stoic Store!

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A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts To Nourish the Soul by Leo Tolstoy

I read one page of this book every single day in 2018. It’s basically a collection of Tolstoy’s favorite passages from the ancient and classic texts, with excellent supplements from his own considerable wisdom. Each day draws on Chinese, Jewish, Stoic, Christian, Indian and Arabic sources (he quotes everyone from Emerson to Marcus Aurelius to Lao-Tzu) and manages to give good, actionable advice from all of these differing schools. It’s no wonder the Communists banned and suppressed this book, because it challenges everything they were trying to deny about human nature and the human experience. But luckily it did survive and has finally been translated into English. This book should be much, much, more popular and I promise your mornings will be improved if you start them with it.

The Captain Class: A New Theory of Leadership by Sam Walker

This was definitely the best business/leadership book I read this year. It was recommended to me by the lacrosse player Paul Rabil when I did his podcast. What a book! It proves that we have really missed what makes great teams and organizations work. It’s not star players, it’s not even how much they can spend–it’s whether they have great captains. Athletes like Bill Cartwright on the Chicago Bulls, Carla Overbeck on the US Women’s Soccer team, Yogi Berra of the New York Yankees and Jack Lambert of the Pittsburgh Steelers were not by any means the most famous or the most talented players, but they were the glue that held the team together. Walker’s chapter on “carrying the water” had some great insights re: Ego is the Enemy and I think this incredibly well-written book should be studied by anyone trying to build a great organization (or trying to find a role for themselves inside one). Related, and lesser known recommendation: Everyone should read Sadaharu Oh’s autobiography, A Zen Way of Baseball. He’s the greatest home run hitter of all time, a Zen master, and basically nobody outside of Japan knows who he is. Brilliant and beautiful book.

Victoria: The Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire by Julia Baird and Clementine: The Life of Mrs. Winston Churchill by Sonia Purnell

I read so many biographies this year and these two biographies of two extraordinary British women were two of my absolute favorites. I knew nothing about Queen Victoria but Julia Baird does an amazing job of making her accessible and interesting–and captures just what life was like for a woman in the 19th century, even if she was a queen! I knew a lot more about Churchill but Sonia Purnell’s examination of Winston’s better half was truly revelatory. (Churchill said the best decision he ever made in his life was marrying Clementine and this book make it clear just how many times she saved his ass). Both of these books are entertaining, insightful and teach a ton about the times the subjects lived in. Any other biographies I liked this year? Thank you for asking! I was riveted (and appalled) by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian’s biography of Tiger Woods and probably talked to more people about about this book than anything else I read this year. I got around to reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Da Vinci just in time to go see The Last Supper in Milan. Truly excellent book about one of history’s all time greats. Evan Thomas Being Nixon: A Man Divided is one of the best books I’ve ever read about a politician. It’s worth reading whatever country you live in and whatever your political beliefs are. A final book I’d add this collection would be Rosanne Cash’s memoir, Composed. I heard about it from Steven Pressfield and it’s excellent.

Honorary Mentions: Robert Greene’s The Laws of Human Nature came out this year and it was well-worth the half-decade wait since Mastery. He is a living treasure and everyone should read this new one. I think the best book I’ve ever written, Conspiracy, came out this year as well (The New York Times said it was genius, so that counts for something…). Camus’ The Fall was the best novel I read this year. I really enjoyed the new series of translations that Princeton University Press has done of Cicero and Epictetus and Seneca. They are worth reading for sure. Kate Fagan’s book What Made Maddy Run? was one of the books I most recommended to sports coaches and parents I know. Finally, I made a concerted effort to read more eastern philosophy this year and really got a lot out of Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy by Philip J. Ivanhoe which is a collection of most of the classic Confucian and Taoist writings. After that I read The Bhagavad Gita, which is something I wasn’t ready for before, but glad to finally understand.

Anyway, that’s a lot of books I just mentioned and they should keep you plenty busy. However, if you want more, you can check out the best of lists I did in 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011.

And of course, you can get a lot of these books on Scribd, which is basically unlimited ebooks and audiobooks (and a New York Times subscription) all in one app for one low monthly price. Worth trying for sure.

December 16, 2018 by Ryan Holiday

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Here’s How You Stop Anger From Making You Do Something Stupid

In February, during the launch of my last book, I had one of those experiences that explain why many people don’t like or trust the media. I’ll leave the details vague for reasons that the rest of this article will make clear, but suffice to say, a reporter acting in what was clearly bad faith, took their best shot at undermining the book. And then, when confronted, politely but firmly, by my publisher, they lied about it and refused to make even a token effort at righting the situation.

I was pissed.

Understandably so, I think.

I had worked ceaselessly for a year and a half on this book. I had gone to extreme measures to protect the exclusives and original reporting featured in its pages. Yet a chunk of that work was undone in a matter of seconds by a jealous and unethical person. A person I had taken pains to reach out to during the writing process and tried to treat with respect.

So, like I said, I was upset.

I also had the goods. I had clear proof of their wrongdoing and a big enough platform that I was able to make a public case for it. For anyone who has had the experience of calling someone out, you know that as mad as you are there is an odd pleasure in anger. The sweet part of the bittersweetness of being wronged is the adrenaline rush of obsessing and defending yourself. In a way, a “justified” evisceration is a writer’s dream because to successfully ether someone calls up all of one’s writing talent. Seeing it all land exactly as planned? Intoxicatingly satisfying.

Yet as I rushed to put this all together and assemble a reply which I fantasized would right all the wrongs that had been inflicted upon me (and be followed by reams of publicity), I was stopped cold by three things I read over the next three days. They were short questions that I came across in the normal course of my morning and evening ritual of quiet reading and journaling.

Here they are in order:

Why get angry at things, if anger doesn’t change it?
Why am I telling myself that I’ve been harmed?
Will I even remember this fight in a few months?

Now if you’re a follower of mine, those questions might sound familiar. Because I wrote them. They are in fact the prompts of The Daily Stoic Journal, which I, along with many people all over the world, journal to every day.

I’m not one who throws around the idea of things being fated or of divine providence too often, but in this situation, I couldn’t help but be struck by the timing of it all. I was spoiling for a fight, about to angrily and aggressively escalate a conflict with an uncertain ending, and there, filtering back to me were my own words — my own criticisms — in exactly the moment, in exactly the tone, addressing the exact situation that I had found myself in.

Emerson talked about how we come back to our own rejected thoughts with a kind of “alienated majesty,” but in this case, the thoughts were not rejected. They had simply been written long enough ago (first as part of my book The Daily Stoic and then as questions in the journal) that I had forgotten about them. Yet the perfection of their ordering from February 22 to February 24th — first questioning the efficacy of anger, then questioning the perception of the slight itself, and the finally, a question of perspective, of how much this will matter in just a short while — could not have been more suited to my situation. Of course, as the person who had chosen this ordering I knew there had been no foresight but the randomness had worked out as if it had been selected only for me.

It might seem weird to have learned something from my own writing, but that thought misses what Stoicism really is. Stoicism is a practice as much as it is a philosophy. Like most people, I know you’re not supposed to react emotionally to things, but again, like most people, that rarely stops the anger from rising up inside us and fantasizing about revenge. Nor is there any “ownership” of the ideas. It is instead a tradition where one repeats and refines the same basic premises as we struggle to understand and apply them.

In my case, I was just a few seconds away from hitting “publish” on my reply, one I knew would do well, and perhaps stand as an indelible black mark on the career of the person who had thrown the first punch. But it was the practice of the philosophy that acted as the check to my anger. Stoicism is a philosophy you engage with daily, or repeatedly throughout the day. In my personal routine, I begin each day with my journal, spending time thinking deeply about the day’s prompt and then I revisit it again in the evening as a final reflection before bed.

There, even in the sway of my rage, my routine forced me (on a quiet Saturday morning) to sit with the question, “Why get angry at things, if anger doesn’t change it?” Then 12 or so hours later that same day, I was there again with that same question, and already I was having second thoughts about my plan. By Sunday, forced to ask myself twice why I was so convinced I had been harmed, I was leaning towards calling the plan off. And then on Monday, when reckoning whether I would even care about any of the things I was upset with in the future, whether I would even remember it, the answer was clearly no.

The right choice for me was clear too: Let it go. Move on.

It was Epicurus, Seneca’s favorite philosopher to quote despite their disagreements, who had said that vain was the word of the philosopher that does not heal the suffering of man. Anger, as we all know, is something we suffer like a fever. It consumes us, takes over our body, and changes the very temperature at which we operate. I was very much in the throes of a feverish anger in late February. I had been wronged and I wasn’t going to let that go unpunished, even at the risk of escalating the very kind of feud and conflict my book Conspiracy was partly a warning against.

Philosophy was designed to help us break the fever of our destructive emotions and impulses.

When you’re sick, you take aspirin, you lay down, you put a cool rag on your forehead and you rest while you give your body room to do what it needs to do. In the same way, philosophy is a kind of balm, a process that gives our ruling reason the space it needs to do what it needs to do. You let your mind question and then override your impulses.

All I had needed was a day or two for that process to happen. By the third day, I was over it and had redirected my energies at something productive. My suffering had ended and I had no desire to create more suffering by getting into some pointless shouting match.

Besides, a few days later I came again across something else the Stoics had written which confirmed to me who had really been harmed in the whole experience.

“The person who does wrong, does wrong to themselves. The unjust person is unjust to themselves — making themselves evil.” Marcus Aurelius

So why would I need to punish the person who had hurt me? They had taken care of it themselves.

This was originally published on Thought Catalog.

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June 5, 2018 by Ryan Holiday

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How Your Daily Routine Can Turn Into Your Biggest Enemy

Routine and ritual are everything, including, if you’re not careful, a dangerous weakness.

A few weeks ago, I got a letter — yes, an actual letter — from an NCAA player who will probably go pro. His question was a simple one: Like many basketball players he was big on pregame rituals and routines, but he was worried that these patterns made him vulnerable to being disrupted. What if the team plane was late and he had to rush his usual warmup? What if his headphones were dead or he forgot to pack his gameday socks?

Would his competitive edge — the comfort and confidence he took from these practices — suddenly turn into a liability?

This is a perfectly reasonable concern. Because while rituals can be a source of strength to an athlete or a writer, they can also be a form of fragility. Take Russell Westbrook, who is famous for his pregame routine, which begins three hours before a game. It starts with him warming up exactly three hours before tipoff. Then one hour before the game, Westbrook visits the arena chapel. Then he eats the same peanut butter and jelly sandwich (buttered wheat bread, toasted, strawberry jelly, Skippy peanut butter, cut diagonally). At exactly 6 minutes and 17 seconds before the game starts, he begins the team’s final warm up drill. He has a particular pair of shoes for games, for practice, for road games. Since high school, he’s done the same thing after shooting a free throw, walking backwards past the three point line and then walking back to take the next shot. At the practice facility, he has a specific parking space, and he likes to shoot on Practice Court 3. He calls his parents at the same time every day. And on and on.

The point is, while this process is likely very calming and reassuring in an entirely chaotic and emotional game, it also reads like a recipe for how one might throw someone off their game. A teammate vying for Westbrook’s playing time, a competitor who will stop at nothing, or just Murphy’s Law could all wreak havoc on that system and get inside his head. All it takes is “accidentally” parking in the wrong spot, or the right insult right before a free throw to send the whole thing sideways. And what if the trainer is sick and can’t make the sandwich? Or what if the arena chapel is closed due to a leaky ceiling?

Any routine junkie can tell you what happens when your routine gets messed up: Your thoughts race. You get frustrated. You feel what is almost like withdrawals. I can’t do this. This isn’t right. Something bad is going to happen. You doubt yourself. Then all of a sudden you aren’t getting warmed up or falling into the zone as easily as you usually do.

This problem is compounded the more successful you get or the more you specialize in a certain feild, because you get used to and feel entitled to have things your way. People enable this dependence because they want you to be your best, which makes it all the more frustrating and surprising if the script is suddenly deviated from.

I came face to face with this reality with the birth of my son in 2016. A few months before he was born I was profiled for the New York Times, and as part of the article, the reporter had me walk her through my fairly extensive set of morning and daily routines (what time I got up, how I journaled, where I sat, what my workout was, etc). She remarked that it would be interesting to see how this would all hold up with a newborn. Confidently, I told her nothing would change.

Ugh.

But of course she was right — because kids are, if anything — wrecking balls for the carefully built order of our lives.

The first couple months of his life, I struggled. It actually wasn’t the lack of sleep that was the problem. It was the unpredictability of that lack of sleep. Some mornings I was up at 5am. Some at 10am. Sometimes there was a baby I was supposed to quietly take care of while my wife slept, other times we were all up, other times it was just me while they slept. Was he napping at 2pm or not at all? Did I need to get home early for his dinner and bath or was the whole schedule blown apart by something that happened earlier in the day?

All of a sudden quiet time every morning, not checking email, going for a long run or swim in the afternoon, writing from 8–12am every day — this was not possible. At least not possible to do in the same way in the same order each day.

I experienced something similar years before when my career took off. I was used to working at home and then suddenly I was on the road a lot. Lot of flights. Living out of suitcases. Meetings and events that I had to go to. But early on I could compensate for this by spacing the trips out, setting up camp in each city for a few days and approximating some version of my normal routine there. As the trips increased and I got older, this became less tenable (even more so after accumulating a wife and a kid), and my reliance on my capital-R Routine became a weakness. A couple days on the road would completely set me back. It would also make me frustrated — even though I had chosen to say yes to these opportunities.

In both cases, my cherished routines either crumbled or were blown apart. But I still had to do my job (writing) and if anything, the stakes were higher than before. Which meant I’ve spent a lot of time thinking routine ever since.

What I’ve come up with might not seem that profound but the impact has been enormous for me: It’s not about having a routine. It’s about having routines.

I no longer have a writing routine or a morning routine. I have several. I have a routine when I get up early on the farm (We go for a walk, then I write until breakfast, and then resume writing). I have a routine for when I am on the road (run or exercise early, slot writing/work in as the top priority between whatever the scheduled events for the day are). I don’t have one shirt I wear each time I give a talk, I have a set of 3–4 that I choose from. Depending on what city I am in and what time of year, I have different mornings and plans that I’ll do. When I fly, I either read, answer old emails from starred folder, or sleep. I don’t eat before I perform, but if I do, I eat the same thing. If I get interrupted and can’t journal the way I want for a morning or two, so be it — but I’ll make sure I quickly resume my old habit. And on and on.

Depending on circumstances, I have strategic flexibility. I’m not winging it, but I am not such a creature of habit that I am flustered when disrupted (or can I really even be disrupted since I am indifferent to Plan A, B, C, D, E). Think about musical scales — the notes themselves are fixed but they can be played in a limitless amount of combination. This allows the musician to improvise while still maintaining a base they can return to and derive confidence and comfort in. That’s how you want to be with your routine. Not so rigid that you can’t respond to the moment, not so free that you can do everything in the moment.

There is a line from the Super Bowl-winning coach Bill Walsh about how most individuals are like water, they naturally seek out lower ground. By that he meant that without discipline or order, we are not our best selves. Ultimately, this is what routine is about: creating practices and habits and rules that force us to be better.

Without a routine of any kind, Resistance is given too much room to operate. Doubt, chaos, laziness — if you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile. Routines are essential in that battle.

In creative or athletic or entrepreneurial fields, the uncertainty and stress of the endeavor makes us crave simplicity and dependability. When Russell Westbrook was asked the reasons behind his many specific, very detailed practices, he replied, “No particular reason. I just do it.” Actually there is a reason. The reason is reassurance. As a player, Westbrook is emotional, chaotic, intense. The game he plays is random, difficult and overwhelming. Doing the same things the same way at the same time, creates comfort and order as well as superior performance.

We can get addicted to that. In fact, it may actually take more discipline to be moderate in your discipline than to be insane about it. There is an interesting Michael Lewis article about the NFL kicker Adam Vinatieri who actually works at making sure he doesn’t wear the same socks twice or having too many rituals because of how easily this can descend into superstition and thus psyching oneself off. But without this work, we end up beating on ourselves for falling short.

It’s better to remember Marcus Aurelius’s line…

“When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstance, 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 ongoing back to it.”

In a way, this is what I’ve worked on most with my routines lately. Can I purposely disrupt them? What happens if I change things up? Am I still me? Am I still able to do what I do well? I want to be sure that the tail is not wagging the dog, that I am in control of the routine and not the other way around. Because the last thing you want to do is become ossified and unable to handle change.

Because life is change. Murphy’s Law is real, and you will drive yourself insane thinking you can simply outwill or white knuckle your way through the inevitable tendency for things to go exactly the way you’d rather they not go.

Discipline is a form of freedom, but left unchecked becomes a form of tyranny.So the key is the ability to rotate from routine to routine, discipline to discipline, according to the needs of the day and the moment.

Otherwise you’re not only going to be miserable…you’re an easy opponent to defeat.

This was originally published on Thought Catalog.