I think it’s safe to say that no one is great at anything by accident.

So in one sense, greatness is a choice.

We choose to be great.

You get to decide, ‘I’m going to take this craft, sport, talent, profession, discipline, genre, or subject as far as I am capable of taking it.’

That’s up to you.

But on the other hand, I don’t know if you get to choose what you’re great at. I don’t want to be too mystical about it, but I think what we get called to do is a confluence of circumstances that are not up to us. When we’re born—not up to us. Where we’re born—not up to us. If we’re male or female, short or tall, from a rich family or a poor one—not up to us. Why does this light me up and that lights you up? Why does math come easy to some but not to others? Why does this genre of music grab you instead of that one? Why is it writing for me and picking stocks for you? Teaching yoga for one person, teaching chemistry for another?

I don’t know, but I don’t think it is up to us.

There is something a little bit unfair about this. I think about this with my friend Paul Rabil, who I got to work with on his book ​The Way of the Champion​. Paul is considered the greatest lacrosse player of all time. He chose to be great. In the book, he talks about a coach who told him the key to being a great lacrosse player was simple: ​take one hundred shots a day​. If you get one hundred reps a day, every day, eventually, you’ll get an offer to play D1 lacrosse. He promised them.

And you know what, that’s exactly what Paul did, getting a full scholarship to play at Johns Hopkins and winning two national championships and All-America honors all four years. But it wasn’t all sunshine and roses. His calling for the game was actually a kind of curse. Because even though it’s one of the oldest sports in history, lacrosse is a fringe sport to say the least, so when Rabil got drafted to the pros first overall, it didn’t mean making millions of dollars, signing big endorsement deals, or playing before huge crowds and national TV audiences the way it does in some professional sports. No, his rookie wage was $6,000 a year. Games were played in small high school and college stadiums, often with just a few dozen fans in the stands. And there were no national TV broadcasts, just the occasional grainy webstream on some little-known site tucked in the corners of the internet.

He was the LeBron James of a sport for which transcendent greatness meant relative obscurity, as it continues to mean for the best lacrosse players in the world.

More recently, ​I had a great conversation with Candace Parker on the Daily Stoic podcast​. She is also one of the greatest to ever play her sport. She played for the University of Tennessee under Pat Summit, where they won two NCAA championships in 2007. In 2008, she was drafted number one overall in the WNBA. She was the Rookie of the Year and the MVP in her first season. She’s won two gold medals and her jersey is being retired this year by two separate teams. Yet, there are far fewer accomplished NBA players—maybe even basketball players who play overseas—that you’ve never heard of that make more money in a season than she did throughout her entire career.

Is that fair? I don’t know if fair is the right word. It’s just what it is. And what it’s always been. Jim Thorpe, one of the greatest athletes of all time, got to choose to be great, but he didn’t get to choose that he was born in 1887. He didn’t get to choose that he lived decades before sports became big business. He didn’t get to choose that professional football players of his time made less than the average college football player makes today.

It isn’t only athletes in less popular sports or from bygone times, of course, who can be world-class yet poorly paid or recognized. The best middle school teachers. The world’s leading experts on this niche topic. The once-in-a-generation talent at that obscure skill. The woman at the daycare I used to send my son to who could put thirty toddlers down for a nap at once, when I struggled to do it with just one. The list could go on and on. There are so many people out there who are utterly extraordinary at what they do, but whose greatness—for one reason or another—doesn’t translate into mass appeal, doesn’t command high compensation, doesn’t receive the recognition it deserves.

I think about this with myself. ​I write books about Stoicism​. If I wrote about something with more mass appeal or if I wrote romance novels or if I ghostwrote celebrity memoirs, maybe I would sell more books, make more money, or be known by more people.

Now, you might say, oh, why don’t you just switch to one of those things? Well, that’s the whole dilemma, right? Paul Rabil and Jim Thorpe could have switched to other professions, maybe. But Candace Parker can’t switch to the NBA. I have written books about other things, but I can tell you, it’s just not what lights me up. It’s not what gets me excited. It’s not what I feel called to try to be great at. Maybe if I had been involved in the design process, I would have chosen to be lit up by something else. But they didn’t consult me. It wasn’t up to me that writing about an obscure school of philosophy is what I find endlessly fascinating.

What is up to me is whether I choose to take it as far as I am capable of taking it.

And this is no small thing. I would actually argue there is a moral imperative to take your talents as far as they can go—irrespective of what the market says about them. After Rabil took his talents as far as they could go—multiple championships and MVP awards, two gold medals with Team USA, 10 All-Star teams, and the all-time record for career points in professional lacrosse—in 2018, he founded the Premier Lacrosse League, a pro league that rivaled and then overtook the 20-year incumbent. The PLL today has a major media rights deal with ESPN, pays its athletes full-time salaries with equity, and includes investors like The Chernin Group, the Raine Group, billionaire Joseph Tsai, NBA star Kevin Durant, and many others.

Because he chose to be great at the thing that had chosen him, Paul has raised the sport’s ceiling so that today’s lacrosse players can take their talents further than was possible when he was playing.

What makes his decision remarkable is that he had been presented with a highly tempting alternative. When Paul was 24, a couple of years into his professional lacrosse career—living with his parents and working a day job—he got a call from New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick.

“I told Paul he could be a strong safety in the NFL,” Belichick writes in the foreword to ​The Way of the Champion​. “I thought he had the size, the speed, and the toughness to play in our league. I had a good sense of his transferable skills because, like him, I grew up playing lacrosse.” Belichick had also had success converting athletes from other sports into great NFL players.

After several conversations, Belichick laid out the options: Paul had the tools to be a pretty good NFL player, and he had the opportunity “to define the pinnacle of a sport.” “Everything worth anything in life comes at a sacrifice,” Belichick said. What did he want to sacrifice? Millions of dollars, perhaps a Super Bowl or two, and the prestige of being an NFL player? Or the call to be one of the greatest lacrosse players of all time? “I would go all in on lacrosse,” Paul writes. “This was my path.”

That’s the choice in front of all of us.

Eventually, we all come to this crossroads—between being pretty good and being great, between what looks impressive from the outside and what lights us up on the inside, between what’s lucrative and what’s calling us.

Where this calling comes from doesn’t matter.

What matters is where we take it.

Come see me live in Austin and San Diego this year. ​Get your tickets here​.

It’s ironic that the only thing we all seem to agree on lately is that there’s a lot to be angry about.

This is what traditional media and social media both fuel…and then there is also the fact that reality itself is pretty awful.

Our airports suck. Our politicians are cowards. Our systems are broken. Things are too expensive. Our environment is being ravaged. Horrible things are being done by people who seem to revel in the pain and anguish their actions cause.

I mean, how could you not be pissed off?

As they say, if you’re not outraged, “You’re not paying attention.”

And actually, the fact that a lot of people aren’t paying attention is another thing to be mad about!

Except…this is exactly the wrong response. To injustice. To inefficiencies. To broken systems. To frustrations.

Because anger doesn’t make things better. It always makes things worse.

If anger were something that made people better, do you think athletes would work so hard to get under the skin of their opponents? Do you think lawyers would try to attack and frustrate witnesses under cross-examination? Of course not. It is precisely because anger is blinding, because it makes us irrational, that one opponent uses it to undermine another.

What we need—in sports, in life, in activism—is restraint, not rage.

Oh, but that’s very privileged of you to say, one might think. You wouldn’t be so blasé if things were worse for you personally.

History overwhelmingly disproves the idea that self-composure is a synonym for resignation. Think of Abraham Lincoln. A defining moment of his life came in 1841 when he, then no more than a successful Midwestern lawyer, saw a group of slaves chained together on a riverboat like “so many fish on a trotline.” Abolitionists had long witnessed such scenes and many became radicalized. Lincoln’s reaction was different—not anger, but a deep, profound sadness at the injustice. This was key. For all the abolitionist passion, it was Lincoln who spent the next two decades plotting political change that achieved what generations had failed to do. Unlike even the radicals, he never doubted the Union could be preserved, the war won. He steered the ship unswervingly through those terrible times, preaching understanding, forgiveness, and mutual culpability—even keeled in his determination to improve the world.

The Women’s Rights Movement—while many of the suffragettes involved had blind spots, even abhorrent views about class or race—was defined by their remarkable ability to put aside differences and come together for the cause. “For the first time in the woman movement,” Carrie Chapman Catt would say at the opening of the seventh conference of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Budapest in 1913, “it is expected that Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, Mohammedan, Jewish and Christian women will sit together in a Congress uniting their voices in a common plea for the liberation of their sex from those artificial discriminations which every political and religious system has directed against them.”

The Civil Rights Movement—per Martin Luther King’s leadership as well as the leadership of brave people like John Lewis—was defined not by anger, but by love. By a call to our better angels, not our worst ones. So was Gandhi’s. New to South Africa after a couple of frustrating years struggling to establish himself as a lawyer in India, Gandhi was humiliatedat a Maritzburg train stop in 1893, thrown off a train because of his race. But it wasn’t anger that he stewed in as he sat there shivering in the cold waiting for a ride, it was something deeper, something he later referred to as the most profound spiritual experience of his life. “I began to think of my duty,” he wrote. “Should I fight for my rights or go back to India?…It would be cowardice to run back to India…The hardship to which I was subjected was superficial—only a symptom of the deep disease of color prejudice. I should try, if possible, to root out the disease.” There at that train station, in that moment of pausing to weigh his options, a floundering young lawyer made the choice that would turn him into the crusader who changed the world.

It’s not that things aren’t awful. It’s not that things aren’t outrageous. It’s not that you should simply accept the injustices and the cruelty that are happening all around you. As ​we often talk about over at Daily Stoic​, to think that this is what the Stoics would advise is to miss who they were and what they did. Cato fought valiantly, selflessly in the hopes of preserving the Roman Republic. George Washington fought valiantly, selflessly in the hopes of forming one. Epictetus and Musonius Rufus were exiled for their transgressive teachings. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the translator of Epictetus, led black troops for the Union in the Civil War. The Stoics were involved in public life, they were involved in important causes, they lived in a scary world where outrageous things happened on a daily basis.

And it is precisely for this reason that the Stoics cultivated poise and restraint and self-command. Because the outrages and injustices of their time demanded it. Not apathy, but the ability to step back and be objective, to be strategic, to be diplomatic, to not despair or scream or alienate.

In fact, Washington’s favorite expression, borrowing from a play about Cato, draws on this idea, that we must be able to look at everything “in the calm light of mild philosophy.” It was in the calm and mild light that Washington approached the news that one of his generals was slandering him behind his back. It was in the calm and mild light that Washington dealt with the saddening realization that he and his wife could not have children. It was in the calm and mild light that Washington approached a mob-like meeting of his officers who threatened mutiny against the new American government, slowly, masterfully, talking them back from treason.

In June 1797 alone, Washington wrote this reminder in three separate letters, trying to stop himself from rushing to judgment or losing control of his emotions and instead looking at the situation with the temperament befitting the father of a country.

Washington refused to get upset, he refused to get angry—no matter the insult, no matter the injustice, no matter the betrayal. And it was precisely this self-control that allowed him to direct his efforts towards his great task—freeing a colonial people from the subjugation of a capitalistic imperial empire, to put it in modern language—so it cannot be argued that he simply tolerated the status quo.

Like the rest of us, this was not his natural disposition. He was not exempt, a friend said, from the “tumultuous passions which accompany greatness, and frequently tarnish its luster.” Fighting them was the first and longest battle of his life—and, as another friend said in his eulogy, his greatest victory: “so great the empire he had there acquired, that calmness of manner and of conduct distinguished him through life.” As Washington’s great biographer ​Ron Chernow told me on the Daily Stoic podcast​, “He wanted to see things through the calm light of mild philosophy—it was always an ideal. It was not something that was easy to achieve. And occasionally, his self-command would break down. But he imagined that he had to embody the nation and had to live up to a certain ideal of courage, temperance, wisdom, and justice. That became a description of George Washington, but again, this was something earned, something achieved, over many years.” Washington wasn’t naturally Stoic; he made himself this way. Not permanently but anew every minute, every day, in every situation, as best he could. He had the initial reactions we all do, but he tried to put every situation up for a kind of review, searching for a better light to explain and understand it.

We need this view more than ever today, especially if we hope to change things for the better. We can’t fly off the handle. We can’t say everything we think. We can’t give in to those initial feelings of disgust, rage, contempt, or resentment.

No, we must do as the Stoic Athenodorus told the emperor Augustus—something he wanted him to follow always. “Whenever you feel yourself getting angry, Caesar,” he instructed, “don’t say or do anything until you’ve repeated the twenty-four letters of the alphabet to yourself.” Or try the principle that artist Marina Abramović lays down in her book ​Walk Through Walls​. “If you get angry,” she writes, “stop breathing and hold your breath until you can’t hold it anymore, then inhale fresh air.”

We know that between every stimulus and its response, every piece of information and our decision, there is space, one with room enough to insert our philosophy. Will we use it? Use it to think, use it to examine, use it to wait for more information? Or will we give in to first impressions, to harmful instincts, and old patterns?

The pause is everything.

The one before . . .

. . . jumping to conclusions

. . . prejudging

. . . assuming the worst

. . . rushing to solve your children’s problems for them (or put them back to sleep)

. . . forcing a problem into some kind of box

. . . assigning blame

. . . taking offense

. . . turning away in fear.

It is a brief space, to be sure, but in it lie the choices that shape the course of events in our own and each other’s lives. Using that all-important space to respond isn’t easy. As I said above, this is not something that comes naturally to most of us. It’s a discipline, something one gets better at through practice and repetition. To get better at this in my own life, as a kind of tool to strengthen my own practice of using the space between stimulus and response, ​I carry this coin in my pocket​. One side reads DELAY IS THE REMEDY (a nod to Seneca’s line, “The greatest remedy for anger is delay”), which is encircled by the 24 letters of the alphabet (a reminder of Athenodorus’ advice to silently run through them before reacting in heated moments). The reverse is a polished, mirror-like surface, inspired by Seneca’s suggestion to look at oneself when gripped by anger—not only because the sight of our own unflattering reflection can be jarring enough to prevent an unflattering response, but also because “whoever comes to a mirror to change himself has already changed.” Encircling the mirror are the words Pausa et Reflecte, Latin for pause and reflect.

Today, as people throughout history always have, we face—individually and collectively—problems and injustices that are complex and urgent. Which requires that we bring our best, calmest, most focused selves to them. We don’t want to hand our enemies extra ammunition. We don’t want to make things worse. We don’t want to widen divides and deepen hostility. Instead, we must meet these problems and injustices with precisely the opposite traits of those that created them in the first place. Like Lincoln, Gandhi, Washington, the leaders of the Women’s Rights and Civil Rights Movements, we must meet cruelty with compassion, hardship with courage, provocation with self-control, and injustice with the calm, mild determination to improve things.

Whether it’s a triggering post on social media or a costly mistake at work, an obvious lie someone tried to deceive us with, an insubordinate employee, a difficult obstacle, a casual insensitivity, or a complex problem—everything must be met with a measured and mellow eye.

We can’t make decisions on impulse. Again, that’s not to say we won’t have impulses. It’s that we must be disciplined enough not to act on them.

Not until we’ve paused and reflected.

Not until we’ve counted the letters of the alphabet, inhaled fresh air, and looked in the mirror.

Not until we’ve sat for a bit in the space between stimulus and response.

Not until we’ve put things under or in the calm light of mild philosophy.

This originally ran in The Free Press.

Poems have always been earnest. That’s why some of them are so cringe. 

Rhapsodizing about nature. Pouring out your heart to a lover. Finding deep meaning in small things. Brooding on mortality.

But a few years ago, I was talking to Allie Esiri for the Daily Stoic podcast about her wonderful book A Poem For Every Night of the Year, which I have been reading to my sons since they were little. I mentioned that I was struck by the earnest desire for self-help and self-mastery in many of the 19th-century poems written by male authors. 

You might be familiar with some of them. 

Kipling’s If— is obviously a classic of this genre. So is Henley’s Invictus. Adam Lindsay Gordon’s Ye Weary Wayfarer is another one of my favorites. 

“Life is mostly froth and bubble,

Two things stand like stone,

Kindness in another’s trouble,

Courage in your own.”

It must be acknowledged that many of the most famous of these poems were products of the British Empire at the height of its imperial power. While I’m pleased that we no longer publish poems calling a generation to pick up ‘the White Man’s burden’ or celebrating the suicidal (and avoidable) charge of the Light Brigade, I would like to point out that there was once a time, not that long ago, when an average person would pick up their daily newspaper and find a totally straightforward, understandable poem full of advice on how to be a good person or navigate the difficulties of life. 

Perhaps because it doesn’t have any jingoism or machismo—just the source code for existence—one of my favorites of this genre has always been one that is uniquely American: Longfellow’s A Psalm of Life.

It opens quite powerfully, 

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

     Life is but an empty dream!—

For the soul is dead that slumbers,

     And things are not what they seem.

 

Life is real! Life is earnest!

     And the grave is not its goal;

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

     Was not spoken of the soul.

 

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

   Is our destined end or way;

But to act, that each to-morrow

   Find us farther than to-day.

I was a kid in the 90s. I was in high school in the early 2000s. I started my career in the citadel of hipsterdom, American Apparel. Everything was couched in irony. There was a self-consciousness, an almost incapacity to be serious. The drugs and the partying and the sex were, I suspect, hallmarks of a culture distracting itself with pleasure so it would not have to look inward and come up empty. 

Is that really what we’re here for, Longfellow asks? No, he says, we’re here to work on ourselves and to get better, to make progress—for tomorrow to find us a little bit further along than we are today. 

Do things! Make things! Try your best! You matter! That’s what Longfellow is saying.

A 13-year-old Richard Milhous Nixon was given a copy of A Psalm of Life, which he promptly hung up on his wall, memorized, and later presented at school. Perhaps it’s because of people like Nixon—or Napoleon or Hitler—that we shy away from talking about individuals changing the world these days. The ‘Great Man of History Theory’ is problematic. It’s dangerous. It’s exclusionary. The problem is that in tossing it, we lose the opportunity to inspire children that they can change the world for the better, too. 

Many of Longfellow’s poems do precisely this: There’s one about Florence Nightingale, an angel who reinvents nursing. There’s another about Paul Revere and his midnight ride to warn revolutionary Patriots of approaching British troops. He celebrates Native American heroes in “The Song of Hiawatha.” They are not always the most historically accurate accounts, but to borrow a metaphor from Maggie Smith’s poem, “Good Bones”—which, again, some pretentious folks might find cringe—when we read poems to our children, we are trying to “sell them the world.” Will we sell them a horrible one? Or we will sell them on all the potential, the idea that they could “make this place beautiful”?

One of the reasons I find so many modern novels boring and end up quitting most prestige television is that everybody sucks. Nobody is trying to be good. Nothing they do matters. I’ve even found that many children’s books fall into the same trap. They are either about nonsense (pizza, funny dragons, etc) or they are insufferably woke (pandering to parents instead of children). Academia has been consumed by the idea that everything is structural and intersectional and essentially impossible to change. History was made by hypocrites and racists and everything is rendered meaningless by the original sins and outright villainy of our ancestors.

To be up and doing, as Longfellow advises, laboring and waiting, they would claim, is therefore naive. His privilege is showing when he tells us to live in the present and have a heart for any fate. One Longfellow critic has referred to the poem’s “resounding exhortation” as “Victorian cheeriness at its worst.”

But what’s the alternative? Because it’s starting to feel a lot like nihilism. I’m not sure that’s the prescription for what ails young men these days. In fact, isn’t that the cause of the disease?

I draw on one of the lines from A Psalm of Life in my book Perennial Seller, about making work that lasts: “Art is long, and Time is fleeting.” There’s a famous Latin version of this expression: Ars longa, vita brevis. 

I find it depressing how ephemeral and transactional most of my peers are. They chase trends and fads. They care about the algorithm and the whims of the moment—not about making stuff that matters and endures. Longfellow urges us to resist the pull of what’s hot right now—to think bigger and more long-term, to fight harder:

In the world’s broad field of battle,

   In the bivouac of Life,

Be not like dumb, driven cattle!

  Be a hero in the strife!

That stanza is an epigraph in another one of my books, Courage is Calling. I return to it throughout the book because that’s what these things—earnestness, sincerity, the audacity to try, to aim high, to do our best—require: courage. It takes courage to care. Only the brave believe, especially when everyone else is full of doubt and indifference. As you strive to be earnest and sincere, people will laugh at you. They will try to convince you that this doesn’t matter, that it won’t make a difference. Losers have always gotten together in little groups and talked about winners. The hopeless have always mocked the hopeful.

It’s been said by many biographers—often with a sneer—that the key to understanding Theodore Roosevelt (who would have certainly seen Longfellow strolling through Cambridge while he was an undergrad at Harvard) is realizing that he grew up reading about the great figures of history and decided to be just like them. Roosevelt actually believed. In himself. In stories. In something larger than himself. It is precisely this idea that Longfellow concludes Psalm with:

Lives of great men all remind us

   We can make our lives sublime,

And, departing, leave behind us

   Footprints on the sands of time;

But this is not mere hero worship, because Longfellow qualifies it immediately with a much more reasonable, much more personal goal, explaining that these are,

“Footprints that perhaps another,

     Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,

A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,

     Seeing, shall take heart again.

 

Let us, then, be up and doing,

   With a heart for any fate;

Still achieving, still pursuing,

   Learn to labor and to wait.

Indeed, Longfellow would hear, not long after the poem’s publication, of a soldier dying in Crimea, heard repeating to himself with his final words, “footprints on the sands of time, footprints on the sands of time, footprints on the sands of time…” 

A Psalm of Life is a call to meaning. A call to action. A call to be good. A call to make things that matter. A call to try to make a difference—for yourself and others. A reassurance that we matter. That although we return to dust, our soul lives on.

That’s why I read it to my sons. That’s the lesson that I want to pass along, a footprint I am trying to leave behind for them now, so that they might draw on it in some moment of struggle far in the future. So that they can always remember why we are here:

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

   Is our destined end or way;

But to act, that each to-morrow

   Find us farther than to-day.

One foot in front of the other. One small act after one small action. One little thing that makes a difference, for us and for others.