It’d be wonderful if it were true. 

If we could, by the power of our thoughts, shape the world around us. 

If we could manifest the reality we wanted, if “like attracted like” in our lives, just as opposites attract in magnets. 

Needless to say, this is not true.

Actually, not “needless to say,” because the “Law of Attraction” is something that millions of people do believe in, despite that fact that it is, to put it mildly, complete horseshit. And it needs to be said.

My favorite example: In 2014, Rhonda Byrne, the author of The Secret—the famous book about the Law of Attraction—listed her Santa Barbara mansion for sale for some $23.5 million. A year later, she reduced it to $18.8. Then again to $14.9. Finally, after languishing for over five years, it sold for $13.6. 5 million less than she paid for it. 10 million less than she wanted for it. 

Byrne still walked away with a lot of money, to be sure; but she also, as it happens, walked away with unfortunate proof that reality—in this case “manifesting” as the market—doesn’t care what you think. No amount of manifesting changes what something is worth. In fact, a reporter at The Wall Street Journal asked Rhonda Byrne why she didn’t just wish for her home to get the full asking price. It wasn’t a priority, she said, so she hadn’t “put in the time and energy.” 

I guess that answer is a bit more palatable than admitting you’re a con artist. 

Dave Chappelle’s joke was that Rhonda Byrne should fly to Africa and tell those starving children her secret. That all they need to do is just visualize some roast beef, some mashed potatoes, and some gravy. They’d beg her to stop filling their minds with delicious impossibilities. “No, no, no,” Chappelle says, pretending to be Byrnes, “the problem is you have a bad attitude about starving to death.”

There’s no science that says your thoughts can will reality into behaving how you wish it to. Or that thinking negative thoughts will invite negative outcomes. In fact, literally all of science contradicts this. 

BUT…

Here’s the tricky part: Our thoughts are extremely powerful. Our worldview does influence what we see. Telling yourself that something is possible or impossible can function as a kind of effective truth. 

Much more rigorous and less mystical thinkers than the Secret gurus have known this for centuries. Marcus Aurelius said, “The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes the color of your thoughts.” He also said, “Our life is what our thoughts make it.” 

To the Stoics, the discipline of perception was essential. If you saw the world as a negative, horrible place, if you saw other people as your enemies, if you believed that you were screwed, you were right. Marcus Aurelius didn’t believe you manifested the future through “energy,” but he did believe that you had the power right here and now to determine whether you’d be “harmed” by something. If you decided to see what happened as good, you could make it good. 

The Stoics would say that our thoughts determine the character of the reality we live in. If you see the awfulness in everything, your life will feel awful—even if you are surrounded by wealth and success. If you have a growth mindset, if you consider the very real chance of adversity, you won’t be easily discouraged when you fail. If you find something to be grateful for in every situation, you will feel blessed and happy where others feel aggrieved or deprived. 

The problem with the Law of Attraction is that it cuts both ways. By believing that thinking positively produces positive outcomes, it actually makes practitioners very vulnerable—because they will deliberately avoid thinking of potentially negative outcomes. And then guess what? When these outcomes do happen—because, well, life—they’re caught off guard. 

That’s why the exercise of premeditatio malorum (“the premeditation of evils”) is not dangerous, as many Secret manifesters might fear, but the epitome of safe. “Rehearse them in your mind,” Seneca said, “exile, torture, war, shipwreck. All the terms of our human lot should be before our eyes.” The unexpecting are crushed, he said, the prepared, resolute. 

Marcus Aurelius, via something he learned from Epictetus, would take a moment before he tucked his children in at night to linger briefly on their mortality. Writing in Meditations, he reveals that even two thousand years ago, some foolish people worried that this would be “tempting fate.” In fact, Marcus did tragically lose children, in line with the horrifying infant mortality rates of his time. But because he took the time to love his family, to be with them, while he had the chance, bottomless regret was not piled on top of unfathomable loss. In part because the loss was indeed fathomable, and Marcus had fathomed it on a nightly basis. 

That is actually the key: The discipline of perception is worthless on its own. What matters is what follows—the discipline of action. 

A Stoic is able to think positively because they know they can create positive outcomes with their actions. A Stoic isn’t afraid to think negatively either, because these thoughts help shape the actions they’re going to take (again, to create a positive outcome). They don’t wait for The Universe to line up perfectly with their vibrations and visualizations. They get moving. They assert agency. Action by action, Marcus said, no one can stop you from that. 

Which is the part that people who believe in positive visualization ironically seem to miss. I always laugh when I see authors I know in the self-help world point to the successes they have manifested… when I saw how it actually happened: Hustle. Creativity. Commitment. The publicist they hired… 

Russell Wilson is a big proponent of visualizing the outcome he wants to see. Is that what put a Super Bowl ring on his finger? No, it was the work. It was pass after pass after pass in practice. It was the hundreds of hours of film. It was pushing through injuries and doubters and losses. 

Which does the credit lie? In the thoughts? Or the action?

Positive thinking won’t magically give you more. It won’t magically make you famous or sell your house for 10% above asking. It won’t prevent pain or tragedy either. 

But it will help you appreciate your life. It will help you endure adversity that others can’t handle. It will put you in the right mindset to act. 

The best part of this is that it’s no secret either. It’s just common sense. 

So let’s practice that—the law of action.

To me, it’s all about habits. The actions you take every single day. I built Daily Stoic’s Habits for Success, Habits for Happiness Challenge to help people build better systems for a better life. It’s an awesome, six-week experience—inspired by the best habits from Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus and my own life—that will help you ditch your bad habits for good and get you great new ones to replace them. Join us here.

By most of what seems like the current criteria, the ancient Stoics are ripe targets for cancellation. 

They were white. They were rich. They wrote about being “manly.” They even referred to foreigners as barbarians! Inexcusably, the philosophy at times argues for the now-heretical idea of accepting that certain parts of life—like other people’s opinions—may in fact be, gasp, outside our control. 

But even allowing for this political incorrectness, it’s indisputable: The Stoics owned slaves. They fought in wars of aggression. They were implicated in the persecution of Christians. It’s hard to defend Seneca’s years inside Nero’s regime. 

So should we cancel them? Ban them from schools? Do the students at Brown know that the replica of Marcus Aurelius which sits on their campus was put there by a Gilded Age robber baron? Maybe the Twitter mob will demand action.

Thankfully, there haven’t been too many calls to do this… yet. I suspect it will come soon enough. After all, The New York Times is already worried about the trend of wealthy entrepreneurs “determined to make themselves miserable” via Stoicism. A Quartz headline claimed that Silicon Valley is “using an ancient philosophy designed for Greek slaves as a life hack,” egged on by a Cambridge professor who seems intent to link Stoicism to Donald Trump. Even the Ayn Rand Institute has joined in, not just writing a piece titled The False Promise of Stoicism, but spending a sizable ad budget to promote the piece to any curious soul who dares google Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus. 

I hope we do not cancel the Stoics, and not only because this is the philosophy I have been lucky enough to write about and introduce to groups from NATO forces to NFL teams. I say this because the more I study Stoicism, the more I find that it possesses the exact formula for getting society out of this polarized, selfish, and deranged mess in which it’s currently submerged. 

First, we should stop with this “old white guys” stereotype, because it’s not even true. The Stoics, unique among the philosophers, hailed from the far-flung corners of the known world, from Cyprus, Turkey, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Spain, and Iraq. Some were rich, but many were poor. Epictetus was a slave. Cleanthes made his living as a manual laborer. He also wrote a book titled On the Thesis That Virtue Is the Same in a Man and a Woman, a tradition that modern female Stoics like Arianna Huffington, Michele Tayofa, and the musician Camila Cabello help prove today. 

But the primary knock against Stoicism—often propagated by academics who should know better—is that the philosophy is apathetic. Sure, Marcus Aurelius talked about the “art of acquiescence,” but that was to things—like the weather or the loss of a loved one—outside our control. But he also spoke of the importance of serving and protecting the common good more than eighty times in his brief Meditations. The idea that the Stoics were indifferent to current or political events is preposterous, not only because Cato held multiple public offices, Panaetius was a diplomat, Publius Rutilius Rufus was an anti-corruption crusader, and more recently Admiral James Stockdale ran for Vice President. 

Seneca and Thrasea and Helvidius all died defying Nero’s tyranny (and Porcia Cato, daughter of Cato the Younger, committed suicide rather than submit to the Second Triumvirate). In fact, it was their example, alongside the earlier example of Cato, that inspired the Founding Fathers to start the American Revolution. George Washington even put on a play about him in the bitter winter at Valley Forge. It was a translator of Epictetus, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who raised and led one of the first black regiments for the Union in the Civil War. 

The image of the resigned Stoic, indifferent to suffering and injustices of the world, is a preposterous strawman that modern critics of Stoicism have repeated enough times that it feels true… when really, all the evidence is to the contrary. (The third of Stoicism’s four main virtues is literally “justice.”) 

So if the Stoics were not just rich white guys dedicated to preserving the status quo, who were they? 

They were flesh-and-blood human beings—good ones, ones we should be trying to model ourselves on and inspiring our children to do the same. One of Seneca’s best quotes echoes down to us today: “Wherever there’s another human being, there is an opportunity for kindness.” This was a man born just four years before Jesus, who in the same empire as Christ, was saying things like “Nature bore us related to one another… She instilled in us a mutual love and made us compatible… Let us hold everything in common; we stem from a common source.” 

Epictetus’s lectures on mental freedom, developed while he himself was a slave, would go on to inspire James Stockdale while he was a POW as well as the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture. Marcus Aurelius remains one of history’s few exceptions to the idea that absolute power corrupts absolutely. This was a man who sold off the treasures of the imperial palace during the Antonine Plague in order to pay off Rome’s debts. This was a man who opens Meditations by thanking one of his Stoic teachers for helping him understand the importance of a “society of equal laws, governed by equality of status and of speech, and of rules who respect the liberty of their subjects above all else.” This leadership was also deeply instructive to General James Mattis, who carries a copy of Meditations with him always. As he told a group of cadets at the Virginia Military Institute, 

Marcus Aurelius had a very tough life… He’s the Emperor of Rome but he’s got everything going wrong in his home life. His wife and his son were not people that you’d want to spend much time with. He spends almost all of his time up on the fringes of the Empire trying to protect the thing and the one time he leaves the German forest seems to be to go kill one of his friends who’s revolted against him in another place. It was a tough life and yet the humility and the dignity with which he conducted his life—the commitment to his country, to his troops, really comes through as you read those pages.

In short, he did the best he could. Just like you and I are trying to do. 

The purpose of Stoicism was to help human beings become better, to rise above their circumstances. Did they always succeed? Were they perfect practitioners? Did they manage to meet our modern expectations and morals always? Of course not. 

But who has time to complain or judge that? Instead, we should remember Marcus Aurelius’s famous dictum—edited only to be slightly less gender-specific—that we must “waste no more time arguing what a good person should be. Be one.”

Hey Dad,

Our relationship is strained.

It feels like it has been for a while. For the last four years, there has been an elephant in the room—I’d joke and call it an orange elephant, but I’m nervous that might end this earnest conversation before it even begins.

Have I changed? I mean, yes, of course I have. I’ve gotten older. I’ve had two children. I’ve tried to read and learn as much as possible, just as you taught me.

In fact, that’s sort of the weirdest thing. I don’t think I’ve changed much. I still believe, deep in my bones, all the fundamental things you not only talked to me about, but showed me when I was little.

I believe in character.

I believe in competence.

I believe in treating people decently.

I believe in moderation.

I believe in a better future and I believe in American exceptionalism, the idea that the system we were given by the Founding Fathers, although imperfect, has been an incredible vehicle for progress, moral improvement, and greatness, unlike any other system of government or country yet conceived.

I believe this exceptionalism comes with responsibilities.

Politically, I’m pretty much the same, too. Government is best when limited, but it’s nonetheless necessary. Fair but low taxes grow the economy. Rights must be protected, privacy respected. Partisanship stops at the water’s edge. No law can make people virtuous—that obligation rests on every individual.

So how is it even possible that we’re here? Unable to travel, banned from entry by countless nations. The laughingstock of the developed world for our woeful response to a pandemic. 200,000 dead. It hasn’t been safe to see you guys or grandma for months, despite being just a plane ride away. My children—your grandchildren—are deprived of their friends and school.

Meanwhile, the U.S., which was built on immigration—grandma being one who fled the ravages of war in Europe for a better life here—is now a bastion of anti-immigrant hysteria. Our relatives on your side fought for the Union in the Civil War. Great-grandpa fought against the Russians in WWI, and granddad landed at Normandy to stop the rise of fascism. And now people are marching with tiki-torches shouting, “the Jews will not replace us.” What is happening?! Black men are shot down in the streets? Foreign nations are offering bounties on American soldiers?

And the President of the United States defends, rationalizes, or does nothing to stop this?

I’d say that’s insane, but I’m too heartbroken. Because every step of the way, I’ve heard you defend, rationalize, or enable him and the politicians around him. Not since I was a kid have I craved to hear your strong voice more, to hear you say anything reassuring, inspiring, morally cogent. If not for me, then for the world that will be left to your grandchildren. This does not feel like a good road we are going down…

Look, I know you’re not to blame for this. You hold no position of power besides the one we all have as voters, but I guess I just always thought you believed in the lessons you taught me, and the things we used to listen to on talk radio on our drives home from the lake. All those conversations about American dignity, the power of private enterprise, the sacredness of the Oval Office, the primacy of the rule of law.

Now Donald Trump gushes over foreign strongmen. He cheats on his wife with porn stars (and bribes them with illegal campaign funds). He attacks whistleblowers (career army officers, that is). He lies blatantly and habitually, about both the smallest and largest of things. He enriches himself, his family members, and his business with expenditures straight from the public treasury. And that’s just the stuff we know about. God knows what else has happened these last four years that executive privilege has allowed him to obscure from public view.

I still think about the joke you made when we walked past Trump Tower in New York when I was kid. Tacky, you said. A reality show fool. Now that fool has his finger on the nuclear button—which I think he thinks is an actual button—and I can’t understand why you’re OK with this. I mean, the guy can’t even spell! You demanded better of me in the papers I turned in when I was in middle school.

I know you don’t like any of it. If you’d have had your choice, any other Republican would have been elected but Trump. You’re not an extremist, and you’ve never once said anything as repulsive as what people now seem comfortable saying on TV and social media (and in emails to your son, I might add). Four years ago, I wrote to you to ask you not to vote for Donald Trump. But this time around, that’s no longer enough.

At some point, just finding it all unpleasant and shaking your head at the tweets, while saying or doing nothing more about it, is moral complicity. You told me that as a kid! That the bad prevail when good people do nothing.

A while back I emailed a friend of mine who is an advisor to the administration. I said to him, why do you think my dad’s support of Trump bothers me so much more than yours? Because it does. This is someone who helped put Trump in office and wants to keep him there, but we’re still friends. Talking to him doesn’t hurt my heart the way it does when politics come up over family meals.

The man’s answer was telling, and I am quoting. He said, “Because I am irredeemable, but your dad ought to know better.”

Does that register with you at all?

One of the things you taught me well was how to spot a scam. Double check everything, you said. Do your research. Look at what the people around them say. Look at their history. Remember when you used to quote Reagan’s line to me, “Trust, but verify”?

I’ve been lucky enough to make a few trips to Washington the last few years. I’ve sat across from Senators and Congressmen. I’ve talked to generals who have briefed the president, and business leaders who worked with him before the election. This is a guy who doesn’t read, they said, a guy with the attention span of a child. Everybody avoided doing business with him. Because he didn’t listen, because he stiffed people on bills, because he was clueless. He treated women horribly. He’s awful, they said. I thought this was a particularly damning line: If Donald Trump were even half-competent, one elected official told me, he could probably rule this country for 20 years. I have trouble figuring what’s worse—that he wants to, or that he wants to but isn’t competent enough to pull it off. Instead, Washington is so broken and so filled with cowards that Trump just spent the last four years breaking stuff and embarrassing himself.

I learned from you how to recognize a dangerous or unreliable person. If you don’t trust the news, could you trust what I’m bringing you, right from the source? Let’s trust our gut, not our political sensibility. Based on what I’ve told you, and what you’ve seen: Would you let him manage your money? Would you want your wife or daughter to work for him without supervision? I’m not even sure I would stay in one of his hotels, after what I’ve read.

Watching the RNC a few weeks ago, I wondered what planet I was on. What’s with all the yelling? How is this happening on the White House lawn? Why are his loser kids on the bill? His kid’s girlfriend??? And what is this picture of America they are painting? They are the ones in charge! Yet they choose to campaign against the dystopian nightmare that is 2020… which is to say, they are campaigning against themselves.

Look, I agree there is crazy stuff happening in the world. The civil unrest is palpable, violence is on the rise, and Americans have never been so openly divided. Sure, rioting and looting are bad. But who is to blame for all the chaos? The President. Remember what you told me about the sign on Truman’s desk? The buck stops here. (May we contrast that with: “I don’t take responsibility at all.”)

In any case, what some crazy people in Portland are doing is not ours to repeatedly disavow. What the president does? The citizens are complicit in that. Especially if we endorse it at the ballot box come November 3rd.

Besides, what credibility do we have to insist on the ‘rule of law’ when eight of the president’s associates have faced criminal charges? His former lawyer went to jail, too! And then the president commutes their sentences, dangles pardons to keep them quiet, or tries to prevent them from cooperating with authorities? When he’s fined millions of dollars for illegally using his charity as a slush fund? When he cheats on his taxes? When he helped his parents avoid taxes, too?

I remember you once told me the story of a police officer in your department who was caught filling up his personal car with gas paid for by the city. The problem, you said, wasn’t just the mistake. It was that when he was confronted by it, he lied. But the cameras showed the proof and so he was fired, for being untrustworthy most of all.

Would you fire Trump if he worked for you? What kind of culture do you think your work would have had if the boss acted like Trump?

As for the lying, that’s the craziest part, because we can, as the kids say, check the receipts: Was it bad enough to call John McCain a loser? Yes, but then, of course, Trump lied and claimed he didn’t. Bad enough to cheat on his wife? Yes, but of course, he lied about it, and committed crimes covering it up (which he also lied about). Was it bad enough to solicit help from Russia and Wikileaks in the election? Yes, but then he, his son, and his campaign have lied about it so many times, in so many forums, that some of them went to jail over it. Was it stupid that, in February, Trump was tweeting about how Covid-19 was like the flu and that we didn’t need to worry? Yes, but it takes on a different color when you listen to him tell Bob Woodward that in January he knew how bad it was, how much worse it was than even the worst flu, and that he was deliberately going to downplay the virus for political purposes.

I’m sure we could quibble over some, but The Fact Checker database currently tallies over 20,000 lies since he took office. Even if we cut it in half, that’s insane! It’s impossible to deny: Trump lied, and Americans have died because of it.

A friend of mine had a one-on-one dinner with Trump at the White House a while back. It was actually amazing, he said. Half the evening was spent telling lies about the size of his inaugural address. This was in private—not even for public relations purposes, and years after the controversy had died down. That’s when he realized: The lying is pathological. It can’t be helped. Which is to say, it makes a person unfit to lead.

Politics should not come before family. I don’t want you to think this affects how I feel about you. But it does make it harder for us to spend time together—not just literally so, since Trump’s bumbling response to the pandemic has crippled America and made travel difficult.

It’s that I feel grief.

I feel real grief—were the lessons you taught me as a kid not true? Did you not mean them? Was it self-serving stuff to make sure I behaved? Was I a fool for listening?

Or is it worse, that my own father cares more about his retirement accounts—and I’ll grant, the runup of the market has been nice for me, too—than the future he is leaving for his children? Are you so afraid of change, of that liberal boogeyman Limbaugh and Hannity and these other folks have concocted, that you’d rather entrust the country to a degenerate carnival barker than anyone else? I see all this anger, what is it that you’re so angry about? You’ve won. Society has worked for you. My own success is proof.

So what is it? Because it can’t possibly be that you think this guy is trustworthy, decent, or kind. It’s definitely not about his policies… because almost every single one is anathema to what Republicans—and you—have talked about my entire life.

The one thing I hold onto is hope. I believe in America. I believe in the goodness of hardworking people like you and Mom. I know that this is not what you wanted to happen, that this is not the America you grew up in nor the one you would like for me and my kids to grow up in.

I hold onto hope that you’re tired enough to draw the line. That you are not irredeemable as that Trump advisor allowed himself to become. The right thing is always the right thing, you’ve said. Even when it’s hard. Even when it goes against what your friends think, or what you’ve done in the past.

The right thing is obviously to end this. To cancel this horrendous experiment with its cavalcade of daily horrors and vulgarities and stupidities and historical humiliations.

America is a great nation. The world depends on us being great. Your grandchildren deserve that greatness.

You know this has not been it. You know this goes against everything you’ve ever asked or expected of yourself, and your children, and anyone you’ve ever led or worked for.

I need you not just to not vote for Trump this year, Dad. I need you to speak up. I need you to do something.

Your loving son,

Ryan

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