People think that leadership is something that just happens. One is anointed a leader. One is promoted to leadership. One is born into leadership. And of course, this is not the case.

“Leadership,” Eisenhower said, “is the art of getting someone else to do something that you want done because he wants to do it.” Which means that, like any art, leadership is something that has to be studied. No one comes out of the womb a leader. And yet we’re all leaders in one way or another—of families, of companies, of a team, of an audience, of a group of friends, of ourselves. So there’s no one who wouldn’t benefit from learning some essential leadership principles from some of history’s greatest leaders. These 24 by no means make a complete list–that’s why we built The Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge (registration is currently open for this year’s LIVE 9-week course) but if you implement even a couple of them, I’m comfortable guaranteeing you’ll be a better leader for it. But perhaps the first and most important lesson we learn from the leaders I talk about below is that leadership is a skill that one could refine over multiple lifetimes—so the sooner you start the better.

A Leader Is A Reader. Harry Truman famously said that not all readers are leaders but all leaders are readers—they have to be. And they certainly aren’t reading to impress people or for the mental gymnastics. It’s to get better! It’s to find things they can use. Not at the dinner table or on Twitter, but in their real lives. A leader must learn from the experiences of others. A leader must be challenged. A leader must prepare themselves for the things they’ll only be able to experience once, by learning from the experiences of others. To paraphrase the soldier-philosopher General James Mattis, it is unconscionable to fill up body bags while you get your education solely by experience, one mistake at a time. A leader must be a reader. It’s not just the best way, it’s the only way.

A Leader Puts Everything In The Calm and Mild Light. In Thomas Rick’s wonderful book Waging a Good War, he looks at what made Bob Moses one of the best (yet lesser known) of the civil rights leaders. Moses was quiet and calm. He did not seek out the spotlight. He did not make decisions out of emotion. Instead, Ricks says, quoting a colleague of Moses, he had a “‘capacity for reflection and distance from the thing that you are very much in the midst of and even leading.’” The job of a leader, George Washington similarly said, is to look at all events, all opportunities, all people through the “calm light of mild philosophy.” As leaders, we will have good days and bad, moments of heartbreak and bad luck, as well as strokes of good fortune and good timing. What matters is how we respond to these swings of fate. (That’s why we dedicate week two of The Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge to mastering your emotions.)

A Leader Always Looks For Teachable Moments. In the 1960s, IBM CEO Tom Watson supposedly called an executive into his office after his venture lost $10 million. The man assumed he was being fired. Watson told him, “Fired? Hell, I spent $10 million educating you. I just want to be sure you learned the right lessons.”

A Leader Finds A Teacher. Eisenhower was mentored by George Marshall and Fox Conner (and learned a lot about what not to do spending time under Douglas MacArthur). Marcus Aurelius spend two decades under Antoninus Pius (Hadrian had at best hoped Antoninus could offer Marcus a few years of tutoring). It was really an incredible and formative experience for him–it’s part of what we tried to distill down in the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge, especially with the experts we brought in to talk to us. The idea is, as Marcus said of his own development as a leader, to go “straight to the seat of intelligence.”

A Leader Is Imperfect. Bad leaders think that they have to appear perfect, that they have to have all the answers, that they have to cover up their weaknesses. Great leaders do the opposite. Gandhi, once being interviewed by a reporter, said, “I am very imperfect. Before you are gone you will have discovered a hundred of my faults and if you don’t, I will help you to see them.” Why would he do such a thing? Because he knew that as a leader, egotism and an outsized sense of one’s abilities is dangerous and destructive.

A Leader Seeks Out Advice And Feedback. “It is impossible to learn that which one thinks one already knows,” Epictetus says. When a leader lets their ego tell them that they have arrived and figured it all out, it prevents them from learning and it leads to mistakes. As Dwight D. Eisenhower, one of the best commanders of the last century, said of the necessity of listening to feedback: “I have no sympathy with anyone, whatever his station, who will not brook criticism. We are here to get the best possible results.”

A Leader Doesn’t Tell People What To Do. Gandhi’s friends always appreciated the grace he gave them, not judging them for their choices or for the less-strict lives they led. In one of the deep dives in the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge, General Dan Caine recounted that he has maybe given two direct orders in his entire 33 year career. Like Eisenhower said, a leader persuades, a leader motivates. A leader is a strong, inspiring example. They don’t bully and yell. They earn their authority. They are strict with themselves and tolerant with others.

A Leader Gets The Best Out of People. Lots of brilliant leaders and talented people have made the same mistake through the centuries: they expect of others what they expect of themselves, so they are constantly upset and let down. We know that Marcus Aurelius found a better way through. “So long as a person did anything good,” Cassius Dio wrote, “he would praise him and use him for the service in which he excelled, but to his other conduct he paid no attention.” That’s key for anyone in any position of leadership. Your standards are for you. You only control your behavior. You have to meet everyone else where they are. Get as much as you can from them and of them. See the good in them. Lean into their strengths rather than disdain their weaknesses. Focus on what is special and unique about them instead of zeroing in on the ways they are not as good as you. That’s not only the kind way to lead, it’s the only effective way.

A Leader Can Do Anything But Not Everything. In 1956, Harry Belafonte called Coretta Scott King. With her husband arrested once again, he wanted to check in with her and see how she was doing and what the movement might need. Except they could barely carry on a conversation, because Coretta kept being pulled away from the phone to attend to one of the children, to check on dinner, to answer the door. Belafonte politely asked why the Kings did not have any help at home. Because, Coretta said, Martin was worried other people would think he was enriching himself at the expense of the cause, living the high life while millions of blacks suffered. Belafonte was baffled, “He’s here in the middle of this movement doing all of these things, and he’s going to get caught up in what people are going to think if he has somebody helping you?” Then he said he was going to personally pay for staff—and that Martin had absolutely no say in the matter. This wasn’t just a nice gesture to an overworked family. It was also a strategic move. What Belafonte was buying Martin and Coretta was time, peace of mind, and more energy and more focus for the cause. “A leader,” Plutarch said, “should do anything but not everything.”

A Leader Prepares For The Inevitable Chaos. As the legendary coach Phil Jackson would explain, “Once I had the Bulls practice in silence; on another occasion I made them scrimmage with the lights out. Not because I want to make their lives miserable but because I want to prepare them for the inevitable chaos that occurs the minute they step onto a basketball court.”

A Leader Thinks Long Term. In his 1997 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos said, “We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term.” For companies—as is the case for individuals—there are always pressures to be narrow in our focus and vision. Bezos, unlike most business leaders, refused to play that game. “Rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions,” Bezos said, the real value lies in thinking decades ahead. His maxim for business opportunities is also relevant here: “Focus on the things that don’t change.”

A Leader Prioritizes Stillness. Randall Stutman has been a coach to some of Wall Street’s biggest CEOs for decades. His clients have included Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America. His consulting and advising agency, CRA, has worked with thousands of executives at hundreds of hedge funds and banks. These are people whose entire livelihood depends on them being perpetually ready to respond to the daily, hourly, sometimes even minute-by-minute volatility of the world’s financial markets. Stutman surprised me when he told me that he often asks these very busy executives how they recharge, given the all-consuming nature of their work. The best, he found, have at least one hobby that gives them peace — things like sailing, long-distance cycling, listening quietly to classical music, scuba diving, riding motorcycles, and fly fishing. There is a surprising commonality between all the hobbies: An absence of voices. For leaders, people who make countless high-stakes decisions in the course of a day, a couple hours without chatter, without other people in their ear, where they can simply think (or not think), is essential.

A Leader Has a Guiding Philosophy. Football coach Bill Walsh took the 49ers from the worst team in the league to Super Bowl champions in just three years thanks to his “Standard of Performance” philosophy. Seahawks coach Pete Carroll is known for his “Win Forever” philosophy—the winning mindset he aims to instill in his staff and players. The great coach John Wooden had his “Pyramid of Success” philosophy. These philosophies and frameworks are critical as they codify the principles and rules by which a team will make decisions and operate on a day-to-day basis. If you don’t have a philosophy, how do you expect to know what to do in tough situations? Or when things are confusing or complicated? Being reactive is never a position of strength. It is not a position a leader should find themselves in.

A Leader Always Keeps Their Cool. The journalist and author of The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel, Kati Marton, told me on the Daily Stoic podcast that she once got to sneak into Merkel’s office. On her desk, there was a plexiglass cube with the words, In der ruhe liegt die kraft (“in calm, there is strength”) “Which is truly her mantra,” Marton said. “That is among her superpowers: she does not lose her cool.” Remaining cool-headed in times of crisis and adversity is one of the most critical skills. “The first qualification of a general is a cool head,” Napoleon once said. The worst that can happen is not the event itself, but the event and you losing your cool.

A Leader Stays Humble. Success, money and power can intoxicate a leader. Right before he destroyed his own billion-dollar company, Ty Warner, creator of Beanie Babies, overrode the objections of one of his employees and bragged, “I could put the Ty heart on manure and they’d buy it!” A leader benches the ego. A leader never believes they have the Midas touch.

A Leader Does The Right Thing. “Just that you do the right thing,” Marcus Aurelius told himself, “the rest doesn’t matter.” That would be his legacy, that would be his source of pride, not the buildings he erected or the conquests he made. A leader means making hard but costly decisions—like Marcus Aurelius making the decision to sell off palace jewels when the Antonine plague wiped out much of the Roman army. The people couldn’t afford to pay taxes for new troops. “So Marcus held a vast auction of contents of the imperial palace, Brand Blanshard writes in Four Reasonable Men, “and sold gold, crystal and myrrhine drinking vessels, even royal vases, his wife’s silk and gold-embroidered clothing, even certain jewels in fact, which he had discovered in some quantity in an inner sanctum of Hadrian’s.”

A Leader Seizes The Opportunity for Greatness. In early April 2020, Queen Elizabeth II gave a rare public speech with essentially that message. One of Britain’s last living links to World War II, the Queen compared it to the way she today can look back with admiration for those who acted bravely. “I hope in the years to come, everyone will be able to take pride in how they responded to this challenge,” the Queen said, “and those who come after us will say that the Britons of this generation were as strong as any. That the attributes of self-discipline, of quiet good-humored resolve, and of fellow-feeling still characterize this country.” When the Stoics say the obstacle is the way, this is what they were talking about–it’s an opportunity to be great.

A Leader Knows How to Prioritize. One of the great lessons from Eisenhower is his decision matrix that helps separate and distinguish immediate tasks from important ones. It asks you to group your tasks into a 2×2 grid deciding whether a task is either important or not and whether it is urgent. Most of us are distracted by what’s happening right now—even though it doesn’t matter—and as a result neglect what is critical but far in the future.

A Leader Makes People and Situations Better. Seneca said, “Happy is the man who can make others better, not merely when he is in their company, but even when he is in their thoughts!” That is the essence of being a great leader, a great Stoic, a great human being. As Randall Stutman told us in week one of the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge. “At the base of leadership, what all great leaders have in their heads and their expressions is the idea that they want to make people and situations better.”

A Leader Is Rarely Surprised. Seneca said every leader needs to regularly practice premeditatio malorum—a meditation on all that could go wrong…before it goes wrong. He liked to quote Fabius: the only inexcusable thing for a commander to say was, “I did not think that could happen.” And of course, he is right: The job of the leader is to be prepared, to have a plan, to anticipate all possible and probable outcomes. Whether it’s a military campaign, a creative project, or a business negotiation.

A Leader Keeps The Main Thing The Main Thing. John DeLorean was a brilliant engineer but a poor manager (of people and himself). One executive said he was always “chasing colored balloons”—he was constantly distracted and abandoning one project for another. It’s just not enough to be smart or right or a genius. Conversely, Jony Ive, the top designer at Apple would recount how Steve Jobs was always asking Ive and other Apple employees about what they were focused on and specifically, “How many things have you said no to?” because to focus on one thing requires not focusing on other, less important things. Jobs would have liked the motto of Los Angeles Rams GM Les Snead: keep the main thing the main thing.

A Leader Trusts, But Verifies. Samuel Zemurray’s line—per Rich Cohen’s amazing book The Fish That Ate the Whale—was “Never trust the report.” He went to South America or Boston or wherever the business was being done and saw the situation for himself. He wanted first hand knowledge so as a leader he could make the right decisions. A leader can’t simply accept whatever trickles up from below them—they have to see for themselves. They have to, as the Russian proverb goes, “trust, but verify.”

A Leader Has The Courage To Stand Apart. The lesser known philosopher Agrippinus talked about how people are like threads in a garment. Most people see it as their job to match the other threads in color and style. They want to blend in, so the fabric will match. But “I want to be the red,” Agrippinus said, “that small and brilliant portion which causes the rest to appear comely and beautiful…’Be like the majority of people?’ And if I do that, how shall I any longer be the red?” That’s the leader’s job. It is not to go along to get along. It is not to default to the status quo. It is not to be another replaceable thread in an otherwise unremarkable garment. The leader’s job is to stand up. To stand out. To speak the truth. As Sam Walker writes in his wonderful book The Captain Class about the unsung leaders who have taken their teams on incredible championship runs, one of the traits great leaders share is they have “strong convictions and the courage to stand apart.”

A Leader Assumes Formlessness. Cato, one of the most vaunted and towering Stoics, built a reputation and a career out of his refusal to compromise his principles. But Cato’s inflexibility did not always best serve the public good. Indeed, no one did more than Cato to rage against his Republic’s fall, but few did more to bring that fall to pass. Cato’s refusal to compromise was driven by moral principles but ultimately hastened the end he so dreaded. A leader learns from Cato’s fatal mistake. A leader obeys Robert Greene’s 48th law of power: Assume Formlessness. “Accept the fact that nothing is certain and no law is fixed,” Robert writes. “The best way to protect yourself is to be as fluid and formless as water.” While we admire the high integrity and uprightness of the Catos of the world, the truth is that the inflexible, uncompromising, “pure” person who cannot adjust, who cannot conceive of doing things anyway but their own, is extremely fragile.

As I said, leadership can’t be distilled down into some list. It’s a process. It’s a mindset. It’s a lifelong commitment. That’s what we’ve been trying to do for the last few years now with the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge, our most in-depth (and most popular) course.

We designed this 9-week challenge to mirror the kind of education that produced historically great leaders like Marcus Aurelius. Specifically, we built it around one of the key lessons from Marcus’s own development: the idea that leadership is less a position and more a process.

This is our first live version of this course since 2021, so we’ve got some great leadership experts lined up for FIVE Deep Dive sessions. It’s a great opportunity to hear from some of the best, and get your questions answered.

I really hope you join us for this leadership masterclass. Registration is now open, and the course begins on September 25. Head over to dailystoic.com/lead today to enroll!

It’s a weird thing to say, but I guess I’m a professional reader. That’s really what authors are. 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.

I’ve written 15 books now, which has meant reading many thousands of books in the process. Once a month for the last 15 years, I’ve recommended many of those books in the Reading List Email. And in 2021, I opened my own bookstore filled with my all-time favorites.

So the question I am asked most often is:

How do you read so much? What’s the secret?

The answer is not “I’m a speedreader.” As I’ve written before, speed reading is a scam. The answer is that I have a system, a process that helps me be a productive reader. It’s not my system exactly, as I’ve taken many strategies from history’s greatest readers. Nor is this a system designed around speed or quantity. Reading is wonderful in and of itself, why would I try to rush through it? No, I try to do it well. I try to enjoy it.

In this email, I thought I would detail some of the rules I’ve come to follow over the years. They don’t all make me faster, but they do make me better.

–Do it all the time. Bring a book with you everywhere. I’ve read at the Grammy’s and in the moments before going under for a surgery. I’ve read on planes and beaches, in cars and in cars while I waited for a tow truck. You take the pockets of time you can get.

–Physical books only.

-It’s not that I have a problem with audiobooks–if it gets you reading, I’m all for it. I just think there’s something very special about the physical form. I just read a great book about this actually called Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf.

–Hardcover over paperback.

–Bring a pen with you too. Reading is better if you’re taking notes.

–Keep a commonplace book. As Seneca wrote: “We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application—not far far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech—and learn them so well that words become works.” (Here’s a video on my commonplace book method).

–Err on the side of age. Classics are classics for a reason.

-Beat them up. Books are not precious things. As an author, I love it when people hand me a book to sign that has had real miles put on it. When people hand me a pristine copy and tell me it’s their favorite, I assume they are just flattering me. It’s obvious what my favorite books are…because they’re falling apart (here’s my copy of Meditations for instance).

–In every book you read, try to find your next one in its footnotes or bibliography. This is how you build a knowledge base in a subject—it’s how you trace a subject back to its core.

-Same goes when you find an author you love, read them ALL. I read Cecil Woodham-Smith’s book on the charge of the Light Brigade…only to find she had also written a biography of Florence Nightingale. It was that discovery that shaped a full third of my book Courage is Calling.

-That comment from (the disgraced and indicted FTX founder) Sam Bankman Fried about how every book could be a 900 word blog post is preposterously stupid. The whole point of reading is to really understand something. So if all you’re after is the ‘gist,’ skip books and stick with blog posts.

–If you see a book you want, just buy it. Don’t worry about the price. Reading is not a luxury. It’s not something you splurge on. It’s a necessity. Even if all you get is one life-changing idea from a book, that’s still a pretty good ROI.

-That might sound privileged, but Warren Buffett considers the foundation of his multi-billion dollar empire to be a book. At 19-years-old, he bought a copy of The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. We don’t know exactly what he paid for it, but in the early 1950s, a hardcover typically went for $1.30–the best investment he ever made, he’s said. Today, Buffett’s worth $108.7 billion, having given away some $37 billion to charitable causes. Not a bad ROI!

–Some people might recoil at categorizing a book that way, but as a lover of literature, I have no problem with it. I myself wouldn’t be writing this to you today if I hadn’t bought a paperback of Meditations in 2006 for $8.25 on Amazon. That book of philosophy taught me not just about life, but also schooled me in the art of writing, in working with and managing people, and gave me the speciality which I now write my own books about. Again, not a bad ROI.

–Don’t just read books, re-read books. There’s a great line the Stoics loved—that we never step in the same river twice. The books don’t change, but you do.

–As I said, speed reading is a scam. You just have to spend a lot of time reading.

–If a book sucks, stop reading it. The best readers actually quit a lot of books. Life is too short to read books you don’t enjoy reading.

–The rule I like is ‘one hundred pages minus your age.’ Say you’re 30 years old—if a book hasn’t captivated you by page 70, stop reading it. So as you age, you have less time to endure crap.

-Embrace serendipity. So many of my favorite books are just random things I grabbed at bookstores (this is why I say don’t sweat buying a book–just roll the dice). That’s what bookstores are for, what I’ve tried to build mine around. It’s a discovery engine better than any algorithm.

-Don’t just build a library, build an anti-library—a stack of unread books that humbles you and reminds you just how much there is still to learn. It’s a sign of what you don’t yet know. It’s also a resource there whenever you might need to do a deep dive into that topic.

–Emerson’s line was, “If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.” When I was a teenager, I got in the habit of doing this. Every time I would meet a successful or important person I admire, I would ask them: What’s a book that changed your life? And then I would read that book (in college, for instance, I was lucky enough to meet Dr. Drew, who was the one who turned me on to Stoicism).

–Speaking of Emerson…in his essay “Reading,” he put down his three rules: “1. Never read a book that is not a year old [because only good books survive]. 2. Never read any but famed books [same reason]. 3. Never read any but what you like.”

–Whenever I’m in a reading funk/dry spell (most commonly, around book launches), I find I’m able to get back into a groove by re-reading some of my favorite novels. What Makes Sammy Run? The Great Gatsby. Ask the Dust. The Moviegoer.

-Speaking of Ask the Dust, I read that because my friend Neil Strauss said in an interview it was his all-time favorite novel. He also turned me onto Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, which he had also raved about. When people rave about something, don’t dismiss it. If someone says a book changed their life? Consider it seriously. They’re talking about something powerful.

-I find myself sometimes reluctant to read something that’s super popular. That snobbishness never serves me well. More often than not, when I get around to those bestsellers I kick myself–they were bestsellers for a reason! They’re great! Don’t be a book snob.

–You say you don’t have time to read but what does the screen time app on your phone say? What does your calendar say?

–If you want to understand current events, don’t rely on breaking news. Find a book about a similar event in the past. Read history. Read psychology. Read biographies. Go for information that has a long half-life, not something that’s going to be contradicted in the next bulletin.

-Examples: Read The Great Influenza to understand COVID. Read It Can’t Happen Here to understand modern threats to democracy. Read First Principles to understand American politics.

–Ruin the ending. I almost always go straight to Wikipedia and figure out the plot–especially if I am reading something tough like Shakespeare or Aeschylus. Who cares about spoilers? Your aim as a reader is to understand WHY something happened, the what is secondary.

–One of the things that people in publishing know is that readers tend to skip prefaces and forewords. This is crazy! Those things are there for a reason. They often have a ton of helpful and interesting stuff about the context around when the person was writing, who the work ended up influencing, and other tidbits that sometimes stick with you longer than even the work itself.

-”Don’t be satisfied just getting the ‘gist’ of things,” is what Marcus Aurelius learned from his philosophy teacher Rusticus. One of the reasons I try to spoil the plot, make my way through the intro and the preface, read reviews and articles about the books I’m reading, watch videos about them, and read other books on the topic is because I want to really understand what I’m dealing with. If I don’t, if I only want a surface take, why read a book at all?

–When intelligent people read, they ask themselves a simple question: What do I plan to do with this information?

-My favorite line from Harry Truman is, “not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” When we read, we aren’t learning to impress people, to win some game of mental gymnastics. It’s to get better, to find things you can use in your real life. If you’re looking to expand what you do with the books you’re reading, I highly recommend our Read to Lead course. It’s been taken by over 10,000 people, and is our most popular for a reason.

–Read widely and from people you disagree with. The Stoics believed that we should actively engage with anyone who can be a source of wisdom to us, regardless of their origin. If there is wisdom out there to be had, we’d be wise to avail ourselves of it.

-Pretentiousness is bullshit. Epictetus once heard a student talking proudly about having made their way through the dense works of Chryssipus. You know, Epictetus told him, if Chryssipus had been a better writer, you’d have less to brag about.

–Look for wisdom, not facts. We’re not reading to just find random pieces of information. What’s the point of that? We’re reading to accumulate a mass of true wisdom—that you can turn to and apply in your actual life.

-Another line from Seneca is about how people get too caught up in the facts and figures and they miss the message. I totally agree. On the literary snobs who speculate for hours about whether The Iliad or The Odyssey was written first, or who the real author was (a debate that rages on today), he said, “Far too many good brains have been afflicted by the pointless enthusiasm for useless knowledge.”

–If a book is good, recommend it and pass it along to other people.

It’s the last one that I follow the most. I’m proud of the books I’ve been able to champion and turn people onto over the years. I feel like I am paying forward what the Gregory Hays translation of Meditations did for me (I loved it so much I put out my own edition you can grab here).

I love looking around my bookstore and seeing titles that I don’t see in other bookstores very often. Just recently, Ann Roe’s publisher of Pontius Pilate told us they had to do another printing because we’d raved about it too much. I heard something similar about William Seabrook’s Asylum. That’s the job of a reader and a writer–to find great stuff and suck everything you can out of it as you read it and re-read it.

And to help others do the same.

I hope these rules help you help yourself and help others.

Parenting is all about discipline. It’s about being strict and firm and unrelenting.

Not with your kids, to be clear. That’s being a disciplinarian.

When I say parenting is all about discipline, I’m talking about the only form that matters: self-discipline.

There is a story about one of those legendary Beat parties in the early 1960s. Allen Ginsberg was hosting. Jack Kerouac was there holding court. There were drugs and ideas and romance. There was effortless cool and artistic genius on display. The kind of thing a young artist would dream of being invited to, and once in attendance, never wanted to leave.

Then all of a sudden a twenty-something poet named Diane di Prima got up to do just that, heading out right as things were getting started. The babysitter was waiting, she explained sheepishly.

“Unless you forget about your babysitter,” Keroauc said to her in front of everyone, echoing the famous belief that the stroller in the hallway was the death knell of creativity, “you’re never going to be a writer.” Yet di Prima, not interested in being lectured to by a deadbeat father in the midst of drinking himself to death, left anyway.

“She believed she wouldn’t have been a writer if she’d stayed. To write and come home on time, she argued, required ‘the same discipline throughout’: a practice of keeping her word,” Julie Phillips writes about di Prima in her fascinating book on creatives and parenting, The Baby on the Fire Escape.

Before my two boys, now 4 and 6, were born, a writer gave me similar advice, much more succinctly. “Work, family, scene,” he said. “Pick two.”

You cannot have it all. You have to choose.

These choices take discipline. . . constantly.

In fact, hanging on the wall next to my desk, between two pictures of my kids, is a little sign that just says “NO.” It’s a reminder: when I say no—to a request to get coffee, to the offer to go speak somewhere across the country, to appear on the podcast (it’s always podcasts)—I am saying yes to the two most important people in the world to me. I’m saying yes to a moment in their childhood that won’t exist ever again. And the opposite is also sadly true: when I say yes—especially to things in the evening or things that involve getting on airplanes, I am by definition saying no to them, to the people I claim to put first.

The tragedy is that we all know this on some intellectual and emotional level. But it doesn’t make it easy.

There are invites in my inbox right now that I know I should pass on, but the best I can bring myself to do is ignore them and hope the silence will take care of it for me. It’s a certainty that at some point in the future I will undoubtedly be willing to trade anything for one more minute with my kids, yet here in the moment, they’re fighting against other people who are asking me if they can “pick my brain.”

Love, I’ve heard it said, is best spelled T-I-M-E. So yes, we love our families, but who do we give our time to? Them? Or random impositions? And how much of it do we waste—out of a lack of self-control, out of insecurity?

One of my favorite bits from the comedian Tom Segura is the one where he says that since becoming a parent, he’s decided he has no time for arguing. Like most comedians, he’d always been opinionated, a conversational brawler, even with strangers. But not anymore. If he expresses an opinion to someone and they say, “I disagree,” he immediately changes his position and agrees with them—whatever it takes to avoid a pointless argument. To some this might sound weak, but actually it’s a strength that parents have to muster. His time, his energy, his patience belong to someone else. And nowhere, he says, is this truer than with his own parents—whose bait he now refuses to take.

I think about this when arguing with my own children. Is this actually something I need to be right about? Am I so insecure that I have to one-up a six-year-old? Do I really need to make him accept defeat in this discussion about whether dragons exist? “If you say so” is a magic phrase. So is “Sure, suit yourself.” My favorite is “Alright,” because it is. It’s alright if you let this go. It’s alright if they think that. It’s alright if they want to do it their way.

But man, it’ll test you. I sometimes look at the Twitter feeds of very important and busy people—people who I know have babies at home or teenagers in high school—and I wonder what they’re doing. Forget all the companies he runs, Elon Musk has 9 kids, ages 1 to 18, and he’s got time to tweet 30 times a day? He’s seeking out culture war issues to get sucked into?

Alright.

“Things are not asking to be judged by you,” Marcus Aurelius writes in his Meditations. “Remember, you always have the power to have no opinion,” he says. That’s not just a philosopher and an emperor talking, it’s a man with a wife of 30 years and 14 children. He knew that the only way to make it through was to shut up. To let it go. Ignore it. Focus his energy where it had real impact, on his own behavior and his own choices.

So much of good parenting, like discipline itself, is about restraint—and you’ll find that the further upstream you go, the better you’ll be at it. The person who doesn’t fill up their pantry with junk food is less likely to grab it as a midnight snack. Deleting the app means you’ll spend less time on it. Setting up hard and fast rules means you don’t have to think about the decision. Hiring an assistant means some of the stress never even gets to you. Avoiding the provocation means you already won the argument.

These decisions help us be the person and the parent we aspire to be.

For instance, when I look back on a day that didn’t go well in our house—where tempers were lost, where things went sideways, when I wasn’t present enough, where we didn’t eat well or spent too much time on screens—they tend to all have one thing in common: I screwed up my morning. If I sleep well, wake up early, and get some exercise in, if I don’t get immediately sucked into my phone or some work issue that can wait, if I spend a few minutes with my journal, then it really doesn’t matter if the rest of the day blows up. I will have the capacity to deal with it. I can be what they need.

Yet again, discipline.

The other thing my wife, Samantha, and I are working on is just doing less. That was the word we set out as our intention for 2023: 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.

The other day my family of four went into town for a children’s birthday party, and when we wrapped up, we decided to head down the street for dinner. It was going to be tight with bedtimes coming up, but it might be fun? Then we caught ourselves: less means trying to squeeze less stuff in. Discipline meant heading home, being content with the fun and relaxed day we’d already had. Especially when there were already signs of fatigue and the exhaustion of personal reservoirs. Discipline meant being fair to the kids, setting them (and us) up for success by not overdoing it, not trying to see how many straws the camel’s back can hold.

It’s easy to focus on the disciplinarian side of being a parent: These are the rules*. Listen to me.* In reality, we have so much less control than we think. What we truly have control over is ourselves, our choices, our decisions.

The most basic premise of Stoicism is the “dichotomy of control,” knowing what’s up to us and what isn’t. In fact, Epictetus, one of the great Stoic philosophers, would say that this is the chief task of the philosopher:coming to terms with what you have control over and what you don’t.

As the Stoics say, first you decide what you want to be. Then you need the discipline to make that happen.

This piece was originally published for The Free Press here. You can subscribe at thefp.com.