As part of the launch of Courage is Calling, I wrote this piece for Inc. 

All of my biggest mistakes in business have been things my wife warned against.

So you might be surprised to learn that the idea to drop our life savings into a small-town book store shortly after our second child was born actually came from her — not from the writer in the family. As we sat at a café in Bastrop, Texas, looking across Main Street at an empty historic storefront, I was skeptical. But she was right. Even the pandemic, which forced us to sit unopened for nearly 12 months at great expense, hasn’t proved her wrong.

For most of my life as an author and entre­preneur, my work has been digital. Close to half of the sales of my books are audiobooks and e-books — and the vast majority of all sales come through a certain trillion-dollar e-commerce behemoth. Most of the advertising campaigns I’ve designed appeared online. The startups I’ve invested in, the businesses I’ve created — all primarily digital.

With digital comes the opportunity, and seemingly the obligation, to pursue scale. A live event with 500 people is a huge success. An online video with 500 views is an embarrassing failure. Back in 2009, I started an email list to recommend books to people. This month, it will go out to more than 200,000 subscribers — and that’s relatively small compared with email lists such as Morning Brew or theSkimm, which hit millions of inboxes daily. Each morning I put out a podcast episode for my site Daily Stoic, which has now reached 50 million downloads and will do revenues in the mid-six figures this year…without having to leave my house.

The decision to open an actual bookstore in a town of 9,000 people, then, resulted in culture shock, as well as sticker shock and every other kind of shock. Running an email list is close to free. The expense of a podcast measures, after the purchase of a decent microphone, in the tens of dollars in monthly hosting fees. But a brick-and-mortar business is precisely the opposite. The total cost of opening The Painted Porch, from the building to the shelves to the inventory to the trademark work, will easily surpass $1 million. And, as any small-business owner can tell you — especially a small-business owner who survived Texas’s calamitous winter storm in February 2021 — costs are never frozen in place.

So you might think I am going to warn against the folly of brick and mortar. On the contrary. I have learned a lot of lessons worth sharing by doing this. It has been a chance to apply business and marketing thinking to a different scale of problems.

For one thing, as satisfying as it is to reach large numbers of people through the enormous scale of the internet, there is even more satisfaction in doing something in real life, for real people.

Online, your customers are little blips on a screen (if they are even your customers and not just “traffic” that gets sold to advertisers). In a shop, you’re dealing with people. People who get upset if asked to wear a mask during a pandemic. People who accuse you of being a liberal if you display Michelle Obama’s book. But also people who just need a place to sit down for a minute. A kid sprinting into the store and making a beeline for one of the books you grew up loving as a child. A customer who recommends a book to another customer, and you watch a friendship emerge as they check out and go have lunch together. A few weeks ago, a father came in to buy a few books he wanted to leave to his children, as he was dying of cancer.

When we first decided to do this, I bought a course from a bookstore consultant. One of the first things that surprised me was being told that the average indie bookstore carries more than 10,000 titles. Ten thousand! As far as I could tell, it’s basically an unques­tioned assumption in the business. Not only did this strike me as expensive, but it also struck me as related to the biggest problems bookstores have, according to the con­sultant: hiring and managing employees. With 10,000 titles, you need an inventory manager. You need cashiers and sales associates. You need a place to store all those books. You need to constantly order and reorder books. You have to stay on top of every­thing new and popular coming out.

The first decision we made was to go in the exact opposite direction. At the Painted Porch, we carry roughly 600 titles. The vast majority of them are not new, but rather the so-called perennial sellers of the backlist. I have personally read nearly all of them. I also have room to put them all face out on the shelf. Do people sometimes come in and ask about titles we don’t have? Yes, and we can special order those books for them. But, more important, we can personally vouch for the volumes we do carry.

My thinking is simple: If people want a specific book, they’ll buy it on Amazon. They come to a bookstore to discover new books, to experience being in a bookstore. Amazon carries some 48 million titles. Barnes & Noble’s New York City flagship has four miles of shelving. Those com­panies get price breaks from publishers and can pass some of those savings on to customers. I can’t compete with any of that. But I can beat those companies at curation.

Having a physical space, I have found, is also a key efficiency. Having an office upstairs saves me the cost of my old office in Austin — and saves me time, the most valuable resource, on my commute. Having a beautiful space where I can host events, or make videos for the Daily Stoic YouTube channel, or shoot photos for the Daily Dad Instagram channel, is hugely beneficial. That I’m also selling books in the same space is extra.

Before we opened the store, I was in Bucharest, Romania, for a talk. My host took me into a local bookstore that had an enormous globe hanging from the ceiling. I watched as customer after customer came in to take pictures beneath it, before checking out with books. I recalled a particularly cool floor-to-ceiling tower of books about Abraham Lincoln in the museum attached to Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. Back home, I decided to surround an old, broken fireplace in our building with a tower of books. It took more than 2,000 volumes, 4,000 nails, and many gallons of glue to build this 20-foot spectacle. And now, almost every customer who comes in takes a picture of it. Some come in specifically because they heard about it.

The irony is not lost on me that the attraction of a physical space is the ability to take a picture that you can share on social media. But it’s also a focusing device for me. The Painted Porch can succeed not despite its having a physical store­front, but because of it. If all people cared about was price, they’d buy online. If they want to do something cool on a weekend, they come by.

From the moment my wife suggested we open a small-town bookstore, everything has taken longer and been harder than we expected. Besides the ongoing pandemic, we’ve had to deal with that freak winter storm and a $40,000 air conditioner replacement. But we grow from committing to crazy things and then adapting before they over­whelm us. I won’t say that the challenges helped our marriage — but we’re still standing, and that says something.

On the window of our shop, we have written in large letters: “Good things happen in bookstores.” I have repeatedly been reminded of this fact since we opened. I might even expand it: Good things happen in small businesses.

P.S. I would love it if you came and visited us at The Painted Porch. You can also support the store by picking up some books online. We have signed copies of all of my books, including Courage is Calling, The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy, and Stillness is the Key. If you buy from those links, your books will be shipped from us here in Bastrop, Texas!

Quick exciting news: I just found out that my new book, Courage is Calling, debuted on the New York Times bestseller. Thank you to everyone who supported it. If you haven’t already picked up your copy, you can still get signed copies and a bunch of cool bonuses over in the Daily Stoic store. 

This piece was originally published in USA TODAY.

In September, as I traveled for the first time in almost exactly 18 months to spend the first night away from what had been 535 consecutive bedtimes with my boys, it struck me how much I had changed as a parent.

I entered the pandemic as a driven young writer and entrepreneur, who happened to be the parent of two kids under 4. If you had asked if it was possible, in March of 2020, to go even a few months with no travel, no ability to speak to groups, to consult with clients or organizations? I would have told you absolutely not, financially or professionally. And if we’re being honest, I suspect my wife would have said it wasn’t possible maritally either.

Like so many people, but especially parents, I have been profoundly changed by the events of the last year and half. The biggest reason was precisely the passage of all that time … together.

There is no such thing as parental leave in my line of work. And, like a lot of driven people who work for themselves, I’m not sure if I could have taken time off, that I would have let myself. Instead, I worked constantly for the first years and months of my young children’s lives, accepting and chasing opportunities – even though that meant many nights in hotel rooms and on airport benches. This, in addition to those ordinary work from home days that all writers know, where you are technically home but are, in fact, very far away.

Suddenly, every single day, rain or shine, I was able to take my boys for a long walk in the morning. Most days, we also did their nap in the running stroller or a bike trailer. In the evening we walked again – picking wild blackberries in the spring, splashing in puddles in the winter and summer showers. As I do the math, I’d estimate we covered somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 miles together.

Never before and perhaps never again will we get to spend that amount of uninterrupted time together. Certainly, never at this age.

It was on those many walks that something slowly began to seep in. Namely, that this was what I wanted my life to look like. Not just being outside, but not being rushed, not having so many things in the calendar, no meetings, no waking up in hotel rooms or eating food from airport kiosks.

From my many conversations with other parents and the daily email I send out each morning, amid the complaints and frustrations about COVID policy and failures, I have heard many similar awakenings.

I suspect this is why many people have decided to move during the pandemic or change careers. Forced to actually slow down for a minute, they got a better sense of what they actually wanted their lives to look like.

Because we almost always have a career and a life before we have children, we usually try to find a way to make the latter fit in with the former. I have come to see the pandemic as the largest lifestyle experiment in human history. It stripped everything down, broke it all apart and left so many of us, especially in the early months of the first and second surges, clinging tightly to our children and thinking about how we would restructure our lives around them.

Surely, there is some privilege in being able to do this. But this luxury is also insidious, because you know what choosing family over work will cost you, in real dollars.

In one of his Father’s Day messages as president, Barack Obama pointed out that the ability to have a kid isn’t what makes you a parent. It’s actually raising a child that makes someone a father – or a mother. This was something that came back to me at countless vexing decisions we had to make as parents during the pandemic. 

Can we see people? Are we comfortable sending the kids to school? What activities are essential? Should we find child care or a nanny-share? Should we lift the mask mandate in the bookstore my family runs now that all the other businesses on the street have?

An ordinary person has to think only of themselves; a parent has to put somebody else first.

I still find myself shuddering every time I hear someone point out that the chances of a child dying of COVID are very low. What kind of standard is that? And yet it is shocking and painful to me in retrospect to consider how often I must have brought home bugs and viruses from the road – including mono in 2018 – without much of a thought.

At the top of my list of changes in my parenting style is a clearer understanding of both risk as well as responsibility. No longer can I be “too busy” to think about this or that. Certainly, I can never go back to trusting that someone else – politicians or school boards or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – is on top of it for us.

It was the highly transmissible delta variant that obliterated the one of the only silver linings for parents – that there seemed to be few cases in children. Now as hospitals and ICU beds nearly fill up in Texas, I find myself thinking not just of that wonderful streak of consecutive bedtimes but its relation to an exercise practiced by Stoic parents in the ancient world, which involved privately meditating on your child’s mortality as you tucked them into bed at night.

While this was something I understood intellectually, it was not until there was a deadly virus that the weight and power of this practice truly hit me. The purpose of this memento mori is not detachment but the exact opposite. It’s about connection. It’s about presence. It’s about gratitude.

There’s no reason to rush through bedtime. There’s no reason to rush through anything or to anywhere. Because what we’re rushing from is our children and the limited time we get with them – the amount of which is never guaranteed.

It was another reminder to slow down, to take a few more minutes with them, another book with them, another night where they fell asleep on my chest or next to me, unknowingly turning this difficult, painful pandemic into what a POW survivor, Admiral James Stockdale, would describe as a “defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”

I know my kids wouldn’t either.

One of my favorite things to do each day is to sit down and write the Daily Dad email. It’s one piece of wisdom from history, science, literature and other ordinary parents. You can join over 60,000 parents and get it delivered to your inbox every morning by subscribing at email.dailydad.com.

We’re afraid.

We know what we want to do, what we could do, what we should do. 

It’s an idea for a new business. It’s dropping out of college. It’s telling someone how we feel. It’s trying something radically different. 

But something gets in the way. The voice in our head. The voice of others inside our head. People tell us that our idea is crazy, that the odds are slim, that people like us do things like this, not like that. 

Oh, what this costs us. “Apprehension, uncertainty, waiting, expectation, fear of surprise, do a patient more harm than any exertion,” Florence Nightingale, a woman who resisted her calling for a good chunk of the first thirty years of her life, once wrote. Yet these pedestrian but powerful fears—they keep so many of us from our destiny. They give us a million reasons why. Or why not. 

But it must be said that greatness is impossible without taking the risk, without leaping into uncertainty, without overcoming fear. Name one good thing that did not require at least a few hard seconds of bravery. If we wish to be great, if we wish to realize our potential, we must learn how to conquer fear, or at least rise above it in the moments that matter. So here, adapted from my just-released book Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave, are 15 ways to do just that…and to hopefully get a little closer to reaching your potential. 

Defeat Fear With Logic

In sobriety circles they use the acronym F.E.A.R. “False Evidence Appearing Real.” That’s what fear is. False impressions that feel real. We must break fear down logically. Go to the root of it. Explain it. Tell yourself: It’s just money. It’s just a bad article. It’s just a meeting with people yelling at one another. Is that something you need to be afraid of? “There are more things,” Seneca wrote, “likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” Break it down. Really look at the facts. Investigate. Only then can we really see.

Block Out Other People’s Opinions 

Almost everything new, everything impressive, everything right, was done over the loud objections of the status quo. Most of what is beloved now was looked down on at the time of its creation or adoption by people who now pretend that never happened. When I talked to the rapper Logic on the Daily Stoic podcast, he talked about how every time he puts out a new album, the haters come out in droves. When he put out his first album, they wanted the sound and style of his mixtapes. When he put out his second album, they wanted the sound and style of his first album. When he put out his third album, they wanted the sound and style of his second album. And on and on. This is how it goes. This is how it has always gone. Some two thousand years, Cicero wrote about the haters, the gossipers, the side-line commentators. “Let other people worry over what they will say about you,” he said. “They will say it in any case.” Don’t value the opinion of faceless, unaccountable strangers above your own considered judgment.

Question Your Extrapolations

In Courage is Calling, I tell the story of Ulysses S. Grant early in his military career on a long journey across East Texas. It was just him and one other man crossing creeks and rivers in hostile territory filled with thick scrub bush and rattlesnakes and “the most unearthly howling of wolves.” Grant wanted to turn back and prayed that his companion would suggest it. The other officer, a little more weathered and experienced than Grant, smiled and pushed on. “Grant, how many wolves do you think are in that pack?” he asked. Not wanting to seem stupid or a coward, Grant tried to casually underestimate the threat that terrified him. “Oh, about twenty,” he said with nonchalance that betrayed his racing heart. Suddenly, Grant and the officer came upon the source of the sound. There, resting comfortably, with mischievous confidence, were just two wolves. So unnerved by a danger with which he was unfamiliar, it had never occurred to him to question the racing of his heart or the extrapolations of his mind. The night is dark and full of terrors. We face many enemies in life. But you have to understand: They are not nearly as formi- dable as your mind makes you think.

Define Your Fears

What we fear, we do not exactly know. We never actually define what so worries us. Our fears are not concrete, they are shadows, illusions, refractions. The entrepreneur and writer Tim Ferriss has spoken of the exercise of “fear setting”—of defining and articulating the nightmares, anxieties, and doubts that hold us back. Indeed, the ancient roots of this practice go back at least to the Stoics. Seneca wrote about premeditatio malorum, the deliberate meditation on the evils that we might encounter. Vague fear is sufficient to deter us; the more it is explored, the less power it has over us.

Focus On The Other Side Of Fear

Don’t worry about whether things will be hard. Because they will be. Instead, focus on the fact that these things will help you. This is why you needn’t fear them. Our bruises and scars become armor. Our struggles become experience. They make us better. They prepared us for this moment, just as this moment will prepare us for one that lies ahead. They are the flavoring that makes victory taste so sweet. If it were easy, everyone would do it. If everyone did it, how valuable would it be? The whole point is that it’s hard. The risk is a feature, not a bug. Nec aspera terrent. Don’t be frightened by difficulties. Be like the athlete, knowing what a hard workout gives you: stronger muscles.

Find Your Agency

Fear determines what is or isn’t possible. If you think something is too scary, it’s too scary for you. If you don’t think you have any power…you don’t. If you aren’t the captain of your fate…then fate is the captain of you. We go through life in two ways. We either choose that we have the ability to change our situation, or that we are at the mercy of the situations in which we find ourselves. We can rely on luck…or cause and effect. It’s said that in the midst of adversity, there’s two types of people. There’s the type who asks, What’s going to happen to me? And then there’s the type who asks, What action am I going to take? Or as General James Mattis often reminded his troops: “Never think that you are impotent. Choose how you respond.”

Fear What You Won’t Become

All growth is a leap in the dark. If you’re afraid of that, you’ll never do anything worthwhile. If you take counsel of your fears, you’ll never take that step, make that leap. There’s no way around it—there is no progress without risk. If fear is to be a driving force in your life, fear what you’ll miss. Fear what happens if you don’t act. Fear what they’ll think of you, what you’ll think of yourself, down the road, for having dared so little. Think of what you’re leaving on the table. Think of the terrifying costs of playing small.

Take Heart From This Tradition

People who walked over land bridges to new continents, who rebuilt after fires, who cinched on armor and ran into battle, who demanded inalienable rights from their governments, who stared down mobs, who stole away from slavery or lack of op- portunity in the dead of night, who explored the frontiers of science—those people, eventually, indirectly and directly cre- ated you. Their blood surges through your veins. Their DNA is infused in yours. You come from fighters and survivors. You come from people who squared up against fate, took her punches, threw their best shot. They failed, they made mistakes, they were knocked down, but they survived. They survived long enough to put in motion the events that carry us forward today. When we are afraid, we can look up at those who came before us.

Replace Fear With Confidence

“Know-how is a help,” opens the Army Life handbook that the U.S. Army brass handed to each of its millions of soldiers in the Second World War. Although fear can be defined and explained away, it’s more effective to replace it. With what? Competence. With training. With tasks. With a job that needs to be done. Training is not just something that athletes and soldiers do. It is the key to overcoming fear in any and all situations. Confidence is a simple matter of knowing your shit.  As Epictetus says, the goal when we experience adversity is to be able to say, “This is what I’ve trained for, for this is my discipline.” What we are familiar with, we can manage. Danger can be mitigated by experience and by good training. Fear leads to aversion. Aversion to cowardice. Repetition leads to confidence. Confidence creates the opportunity for courage.

Start Small

The French speak of petites actions— those first small steps, the builders of momentum, the little things that add up. We would do well to think of that concept when we feel afraid or when we despair in the face of an enormous problem. We don’t need to lead a grand charge. Put aside thoughts of some death-defying gesture. Sometimes the best place to start is somewhere small. “Never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small,” Florence Nightingale said, “for it is wonderful how often in such matters the mustard-seed germinates and roots itself.” Eliminate one problem. Move things one iota. Write one sentence. Send one letter. Make a spark. We can figure out what’s next after that.

Just Do. Just Go

How do you get over the fear? All the reasons not to do whatever it is you’re thinking about setting out to do? In the words of the decorated Navy SEAL Jocko Willink, to get over fear, you go. You just do. You leap into the dark. It is the only way. Because if you don’t, what looms? Failure. Regret. Shame. A lost opportunity. Any hope of moving forward. Fear wants you to spend the day in deliberation, courage knows you have to get on with it, you have to get going. “In matters like this,” de Gaulle once explained to some reticent members of his administration, “one must move or die. I have chosen to move; that does not exclude the possibility of also dying.” No one can guarantee safe passage in life, nothing precludes the possibility of failing or dying. But if you don’t go? Well, you ensure failure and suffer a different kind of death. Later, you’re going to wish you did something. We always do. Which means, right now, you gotta go.

Make Courage A Habit

There is that clichéd bit of advice: Do one thing each day that scares you. As it happens, it’s not bad. How do you expect to do the big things that scare you—that scare others—if you haven’t prac- ticed them? How can you trust that you’ll step forward when the stakes are high when you regularly don’t do that even when the stakes are low? So we must test ourselves. We seek out challenges. “Always do what you are afraid to do,” Ralph Waldo Emerson said. Or as William James wrote, we want to “make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.” We must make courage a habit. 

Associate with Brave People

When another country called on Sparta for military help, the Spartans wouldn’t send their army. They sent one Spartan commander. This was all it took. Because courage, like fear, is contagious. One person who knows what they are doing, who isn’t afraid, who has a plan is enough to reinforce an outnumbered army, to buck up a broken system, to calm chaos where it has taken root. And so a single Spartan was all their allies needed. So it goes for you. Courage is contagious. Who are you catching it from? Like a virus, courage spreads by contact. It spreads through the air. So get yourself in the vicinity of that person who exudes it. Let their excess strength shed onto you. 

Love Arms Us Against Fear 

It is almost too perfect that the root word of “courage” means “heart.” James Stockdale and his fellow POWs would signal back and forth to one another the letters U and S. What did it mean? United States? No: Unity over Self. They would say that to one another when they were lonely, when they were pulled away to be tortured, and when they sat in the cells beating themselves up for what they might have said under torture. What unified whole are you a part of? What is the love that’s powering you? Who are you brave for? Country? Cause? Comrade? Family? That’s the flip side of what about me. That’s how we rise above our limits.

Ask For Help

Sometimes that’s the strongest and bravest thing to do. “Don’t be ashamed to need help,” Marcus Aurelius wrote. “Like a soldier storming a wall, you have a mission to accomplish. And if you’ve been wounded and you need a comrade to pull you up? So what?” Exactly. So what? It’s okay to need a helping hand. To need reassurance, a favor, forgiveness, whatever. Need therapy? Go! Need to start over? Okay! Need to steady yourself on someone’s shoulder? Of course! We’re in this mission together. We’re comrades. Ask for help. It’s not just brave, it’s the right thing to do.

—

Whatever it is you are trying to do, whoever it is you dream of becoming—there will be so many reasons why this will feel like the wrong thing to do. There will be incredible pressure to put these thoughts, these dreams, this need, out of our mind. That’s what Florence Nightingale went through. For 30 years, her family, society, pressured her into deferring, ignoring her calling. How many lives did that cost? How wrong did they turn out to be? Depending on where we are and what we seek to do, the resistance we face may be simple incentives . . . or outright violence.

Fear will make itself felt. It always does.

Will you let it prevent you from answering the call? Will you leave the phone ringing?

Or will you inch yourself closer and closer, will you steel yourself, prepare yourself, until you’re ready to do what you were put here to do?

As of yesterday, my newest book, Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave is available everywhere books are sold! I am so proud of this book—if fear is killing your potential, I know this book will help you answer the call to do what you are meant to do. That’s what many of the early reviews of the book have said. General Jim Mattis said it’s “a superb handbook for crafting a purposeful life.” The great Shadi Bartsch called it a “clarion call to act on your convictions.”

If you have enjoyed my writing, if you have gotten anything out of my writing, I’m confident in telling you that you will love Courage is Calling. I believe it’s my best book yet. We are still offering bonuses to everyone who orders over in the Daily Stoic store.