When I was a teenager, I began a habit that would change the course of my entire life. I don’t mean to overstate it — it was simple, just a question I would ask the people I met — but without it, I’m not sure who I would have turned out to be.

Every time I would meet a successful or important person I admired, 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.)

Who I asked the question to first, or how I came to the habit, I can’t recall, but the results stayed with me. I can reel off the titles of the books that came out of it like they are tattooed on my body:

• 48 Laws of Power
• Meditations
• Autobiography of Malcolm X
• History of the Peloponnesian War
• What Makes Sammy Run?
• Man’s Search for Meaning

The question that produced these books as answers was not borne of idle curiosity. It was my way of cutting through a personal conundrum, which was this:

I loved books and was very hungry for the good stuff — what Tyler Cowen has called “quake books.” The ones that shake you. That knock everything over and turn it upside down. But I also understood that there are so many books out there, and only so much time. It was overwhelming.

Which books should I read? Should I read books about physics or books about history or books about self-improvement? And even if I knew the genre I preferred, which authors should I read and why? Should I read new books or old books? The books getting rave reviews or the classics or the ones on the featured table in the front of the store?

I didn’t know. So this question was my hack.

If a book changed someone’s life — whatever the topic or style — it was probably worth the investment. If it changed them, I thought, it might at least help me.

What resulted was a kind of ad-hoc reading list of transformational books and surprise rabbit holes that I would have never expected. Because the books that change people cut across the entire spectrum of intellectual pursuits: philosophy, psychology, literature, poetry, and self-help. The discrete topics of those books, individually, are as varied as the individuals who answered this question.

You could fill up an entire life of reading with just these books and that would be enough.

Eventually, I applied this little trick beyond just people that I met. Whenever I read interviews of interesting people and they mentioned a book that was particularly influential or important to their development, I would buy it.

I didn’t need to be told in person. I didn’t even need to be the one asking the question. (The New York Times By The Book column is a good place to start)

I read an interview where Neil Strauss mentioned John Fante’s Ask the Dust, so I bought it, read it, and fell in love with it…and in reading about John Fante, I learned that he’d been influenced by Nietzsche and Knut Hamsun, so I read both of them. Napoleon and Alexander Hamilton were changed by Plutarch’s Lives (and so were about a million other people across history), so of course, I read it. I heard that Phil Jackson recommended his players read Corelli’s Mandolin, and that Pete Carroll recommends The Inner Game of Tennis. Lots of successful people have reading lists that they either post on their blogs or that have been compiled by biographers after their deaths. I made my way through those too, book by book. 

This strategy has lead me to some busts, of course, Elon Musk supposedly loves Twelve Against The Gods, but I didn’t quite get what the fuss was about (the used copy I bought cost $139). I saw entrepreneurs I admired who swore by Ayn Rand and read Atlas Shrugged, and even in my early twenties, I thought it was a bit ridiculous. Tim Ferriss loves Zorba the Greek, but it didn’t do it for me. But even in these books, I got something out of them. I got more out of them than I would have gotten from most of the forgettable titles the New York Times was slating for review or whatever was tearing up the bestseller lists at that moment.

Socrates supposedly said that we should employ our time improving ourselves by other men’s writings, and that in doing so we can “come by easily what others have labored hard for.” Yes. That’s the point of literature — it is the accumulation of the painful lessons humans have learned by trial and error. For 5,000 years we’ve been recording this knowledge in books. The more hard knocks we can avoid by reading them, the better. (This quote, attributed to Mark Twain, says it well: “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”)

Not only have we been creating books for thousands of years, but humans — particularly the smart and successful ones — have been reading them for just as long. We’ve been reading on cuneiform tablets, on scrolls, on books created out of stretched animal skins, and now on mass-produced paperbacks and via Audible. Over those centuries, there has been an incredible filtering mechanism working for us, finding and highlighting the books that contain the most wisdom.

That’s why I started asking people for the books that changed their lives. We should seek out the literature that has shaped the people we admire and respect — we can cut down even on the discovery costs of looking for those books. They’ve given us a shortcut to the treasure map.

Everybody seems to want a mentor. Meanwhile, they’re passing up the opportunity to learn directly from the people who taught the people you aspire to be like. When someone like John McCain spends his whole life raving about For Whom The Bell Tolls, why would you not check it out? Clearly, it got him through some shit. Peter Thiel credits Rene Girard and Things Hidden Since The Foundation Of The World with shaping his worldview. Clearly, it’s made him some money—you’re not going to pick that up? Angela Merkel—Forbes’ number 1 most powerful women twelve of the last thirteen years—lists Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov as her favorite reads. Add them to the list!

The people you admire or want to be like in your own space, something made them the way they are. They didn’t come out of the womb that way. It wasn’t only experiences that contributed to what they know and how they think. Right now I am reading How The Classics Made Shakespeare…which is literally a book about all the books that taught the greatest playwright who ever lived. 

Why not try to find these books? You’re just going to figure it all out on your own? You’re going to just pass on this opportunity for connection? (I’ll tell you, there is nothing people like hearing more than thoughtful questions about their favorite book or author.)

C’mon.

Send an email. Raise your hand and ask a question. Stop by office hours. Dig through old interviews.

Then…

Go to the library. Pull up Amazon and buy the cheapest used copy you can find. “Borrow it” from a friend.

Whatever it takes.

And after these books change you, as wells as other books you discover on your own, you have one important job: You have to pay it forward.

Because that’s what we’re trying to do here — we’re trying to help others learn from the wisdom of other’s experiences. We’re trying to filter the good stuff to the top — to upvote it — to make it even more readily available than it was in our own lives.

That’s why I keep my own list now, of books to base your life on. It’s why I run my reading list newsletter each month. And it’s why I’ll almost always stop, no matter how tired I am or how many emails I have in my inbox, to respond when people ask: What books changed your life? What do you think I should read?

Because it’s the most important question in the world.

***

* There are other versions of the question you can ask:

• “What book do you wish you read earlier in life?”
• “What book shaped your career as a _______ more than any other?”
• “Is there a book out there that really changed your mind?”
• “I’m dealing with ___________ right now; what authors would you recommend on that topic?”

______

Want To Take Your Reading To The Next Level?

We’ve created a challenge at Daily Stoic that’s perfect for you: Read to Lead: A Daily Stoic Reading Challenge

Reading is the shortest, most established path to total self-improvement. We know intuitively that this is true. The question is: what active steps are we taking toward our better selves, to improve every aspect of our lives, to ensure success? We created the Read To Lead challenge as a way to give you an answer to that question.

When you’re too busy aiming for it, you miss the moments in front of you

It’s one of those lines we throw out casually: “I want to spend more ‘quality time’… ” whether it’s with friends, with family, with your kids, or with yourself.

While the phrase certainly comes from a good place, there’s a disconnect: The perfectionist side of our brain, fueled by movies and Instagram, wants everything to be special, to be “right.” But that’s an ideal that the busy, ordinary, doing-the-best-we-can versions of ourselves can’t always live up to.

The result? An inevitable sense of disappointment. We feel awful for the deficiency, so out of guilt, we plan elaborate vacations. We project enormous expectations and pressure on ourselves. We think “Oh, if only I had more money, or a better job, or lived in France where the child care benefits were different, then I could be happy.”

That’s not fair. And it’s also damaging.

The reason is that there is no such thing as “quality time.” Jerry Seinfeld, who has three teenage kids, put it well:

I’m a believer in the ordinary and the mundane. These guys that talk about ‘quality time’ — I always find that a little sad when they say, ‘We have quality time.’ I don’t want quality time. I want the garbage time. That’s what I like. You just see them in their room reading a comic book and you get to kind of watch that for a minute, or [having] a bowl of Cheerios at 11 o’clock at night when they’re not even supposed to be up. The garbage, that’s what I love.

To be fair, Seinfeld is the master of the mundane. Banality has made him a near-billionaire. But there is a deeper truth to what he’s getting at. Special days? Nah. Every day is special. Every minute can be “quality time.”

I remember when my book The Obstacle Is the Way first starting making its way through professional sports, I was invited to see the Seahawks training camp up in Renton, Washington. I had just gotten married and my career was really firing, so I asked Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll how coaches manage to make a personal life work with such insane hours. Pete, who has been married for more than 40 years, looked at me and said, “You have to find the moments between moments.”

It’s something I’ve seen inside the buildings of most of the sports teams I’ve visited. Yeah, the coaches and staff often get there before the sun comes up and leave long after it’s gone down. Yeah, they travel a lot. But their families are always around. They’re doing lunches and dinners at the office. They are taking time between sessions to sit and talk, to hang out, to work out, to do things together.

It’s all about the moments between the moments for ordinary people, too. I’ve never understood parents who complain about “being a chauffeur” to their kids. “What am I, your driver?” they say. Sure, it can be a pain in the ass to drive your kids around. To day care. To school. To a friend’s house. To a doctor’s appointment. To soccer practice. Sometimes it can feel like this is all parenting is — driving a little person around. For free.

But instead of seeing the drive as an obligation or an inconvenience, why not choose to see it as a gift? A moment between moments. In fact, it’s a lot of moments. Even better, it’s captive time. You are stuck together! This is wonderful. This is what you wanted, right? An opportunity to connect? To bond? To have fun? So use it!

As many parents with older children will tell you, something changes when kids are in the car with you. Suddenly, you’re not the parent. You’re just a companion, a fellow human being equalized by traffic. Kids will share things in the car they wouldn’t say anywhere else. Better yet, when their friends are in the car too, you fade into the background and suddenly you can watch how your kid is with other people. It’s like you’re a detective watching through one-way glass. You’ll learn things about your own son or daughter that you’d never know otherwise. You’ll get a glimpse into who they are in a way they could never articulate to you directly.

This isn’t only true for kids. Some of my best memories with my wife, or friends, have happened in the car. Or when we were sitting at the gate, waiting for a delayed plane. Sometimes these awkward, in-between moments allow for conversations that never would have happened otherwise. Even some of my best writing and thinking have come when I was stuck somewhere I didn’t want to be, or doing something I didn’t want to do. When you’re out of excuses for being busy, when you can’t defer or plan for some idealized future, you’re forced to just make do with what’s in front of you. The distinction between “quality” time and “garbage” time falls away and you’re left with what simply is.

Often when we are trying really hard to attain something, we end up missing the fact that we’ve had it in our hands the whole time. Sure, letting your kids blow off school for a fun day together can be wonderfully special — but so can the 20-minute drive in traffic to school. So can mailing a letter or watching a garbage truck meander through the neighborhood.

All time with your kids — all time with anyone you love — is created equal. What you do with it is what makes it special. Not where. Or for how long. Or at what cost.

Think back to your own childhood. Rushing around to get somewhere on time. Packing for that trip to Disneyland. Getting all dressed for those ridiculous matching group photos. “Why are we doing this?” you asked when you were old enough to notice that it seemed really stressful and not fun. The answer was always something like: “Because we’re a family.” As if you couldn’t be a family anywhere, doing anything. As if you couldn’t do it right here and now.

This is worth remembering in all facets of life: You can be a family without getting dressed and leaving the house. You can be in love in the McDonald’s drive-through. You can be romantic near the eggs at the grocery store. You can be a writer as you ride the elevator down to take out the trash. You can be a good person in how you answer the phone or how you send emails.

There’s a Tolstoy quote I love: “There is no past and no future; no one has ever entered those two imaginary kingdoms. There is only the present.”

When you realize there is no such thing as “quality time,” when you become okay with “garbage time,” you end up getting the best kind of time there is. You get the moment right in front of you.

If you’re looking for parenting advice, I highly recommend you check out Daily Dad. I write a daily email about how to become a better parent, every day. One piece of timeliness advice, delivered to your inbox each morning. It’s free! Check it out here.

There are two tragedies in life, Oscar Wilde once said: not getting what you want and getting everything you want. The last, he lamented, is much worse. 

I wanted to be a writer. I don’t know when that dream started, but for a very long time, I craved accomplishment in this creative calling that very few are lucky enough to make a living in, let alone find success in. 

Of course, like most people, I also fantasized about what it would be like to have money, or more specifically, to have lots of it. It’d be cool to be a little famous too, while I was at it. To be connected with or have influence over important people, to be sought after for advice or input. That has to be awesome too, right? 

Maybe, apart from the genuine love of writing, that’s what attracted me to being an author. It was a way to have all those things. And indeed, in the last year or so, it has become harder to deny that I have accomplished most of them. 

My books have sold extremely well. They have been reviewed in major newspapers and are translated in dozens of languages. Looking at my bank account here, as I write this, I am relieved to say that I don’t really need to think about money anymore. Few authors make that life-changing, generational kind of wealth, but I’ve done well enough to have my and my family’s needs met without worry, probably for good. If that weren’t lucky enough, I regularly get invited to speak with all sorts of interesting people from the worlds of politics, finance, sports, and entrepreneurship, to name a few. 

So how does that feel? How does it feel to have everything you ever wanted in life? To have it earlier than you ever could have realistically expected?

I can tell you: It feels like nothing. 

Hitting #1 on the bestseller list?

Looking at a comfortable bank balance?

Sitting across the table from some powerful person as they hang on your every word?

Nothing.

In the new Taylor Swift documentary she talks about that moment where 1989 came out and utterly dominated the music industry. “Oh god that was all you wanted,” was the only thought in her head as she won Album of the Year for the second time. “That was all you wanted. That was all you focused on…. You get to the mountaintop and you look around and you’re like, ‘Oh God, what now?’

Ten years ago, I probably would have scoffed at that, whether I was hearing it from a  mega-famous mega-millionaire or a grandparent. I know that was my reaction a long time ago to a beautiful passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald:

“From that period I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.”

But today, I get it. I understand that existential angst. You work so long and hard to accomplish what feel like crazy pie-in-the-sky dreams, then when the opportunity knocks, you answer, and success comes flooding in, you expect the high to last. You expect it will feel wonderful and exciting, but it doesn’t. In fact, it doesn’t really feel like anything at all. 

Maybe it feels even worse than nothing because you expected something so different.

I was mowing the lawn when I found out my book hit #1 this year. I saw the email come in and went right back to mowing the lawn. Nothing was different. Nothing changed. I was still me. And when I hit it two more times over the next twelve months? The same…only less because the novelty had worn off. The news wasn’t new anymore. 

I wish I could tell you that this feeling is the exception, but it’s probably closer to the rule. 

It’s what Olympic medalists feel, it’s what politicians feel the day they are sworn in, it’s what actors feel when they win an Oscar, it’s what scientists feel when they are awarded the Nobel Prize. 

We all think some external accomplishment is going to change everything, but it never seems to. It doesn’t change how you see yourself, it doesn’t change how you go through the world, it doesn’t change what you feel like when you wake up in the morning. 

Yet even as I write those words, I know most people won’t hear me. We’re hard-wired not to—and to delete them instead. It makes complete sense from an evolutionary point of view why we would believe that achievement will make life better, why it will be worth all the sacrifice and pain, how it will transform and change everything bad in our lives into something good. It’s that drive that has sent many an explorer off on another dangerous voyage into the unknown, kept an inventor in their workshop despite all the wealth and admiration in the world, it’s what made someone want to be not just a king but the king of kings. But just because something is good for progress, doesn’t mean it’s good for a person. You have to learn the lie of our biology by experience. 

To be clear, I am not writing this to the person who is still early in their career, who has yet to put that first big win on the board. That person is not ready to hear what I am saying. I am instead writing to the person who has already done it, who is asking, as Taylor Swift and countless other people have before and since asked: What now? What do I do now?

First: Do not deceive yourself. The ‘nothing’ you feel is not because what you did is nothing, or not enough. A second ring is not the answer. It does not prove the existence of the first ring, nor increase its luster. Proving to yourself and critics that this was not an accident is not possible. Advancing higher in the ranks, moving the goalposts a little further back, telling yourself that it will be different next time—this is the definition of insanity (expecting new results from the same inputs). 

Second: Do not despair. The problem for most people is that they have put so much pressure on this moment—not when the work is complete, but rather when the achievement is recognized—that when it comes it wrecks them. They turn to drugs. They act out and self-sabotage. Or they quit and walk away. The grief over this lost hope can destroy you. Because you’re not sure what to live for now, you’re even less sure how to keep going. 

What you must do instead is realize that what you have been doing is not the problem, it’s the why. You thought that doing important or impressive work will make you happy. This was precisely wrong. It’s that being happy will help us do important and impressive work, quite possibly better and more pure work. 

There is a story I wrote about in Stillness is the Key in which Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, the authors of Slaughterhouse Five and Catch-22, respectively, were once at a fancy party in New York. As they stood in the home of some billionaire, Vonnegut needled his friend. 

“Joe,” he said, “how does it feel that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel has earned in its entire history?” 

“I’ve got something he can never have,” Heller replied. 

“And what on earth could that be?” Vonnegut asked. 

“The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”

Enough. 

This is actually the best place to work from, to live from.

Over the last year, I have tried to see if I can’t operate from a place of fullness rather than craving, realizing that I already have everything I want and, in fact, have since the moment I was born. That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped working—Joseph Heller didn’t—but it means that I now see the results as extra, not as entitlements or rewards or just dues. 

“We are here as if immersed in water head and shoulders underneath the great oceans,” the great Zen master Gensha once said, “and yet how piteously we are extended our hands for water.” 

To be alive, that is the accomplishment. To have your health. To have people you love. This is winning. To get to do the work—that’s the reward, not whether the work is recognized. Which is all we control anyway. 

Theodore Roosevelt was a published author by age 23. He had wealth, fame, medals and power. But eventually he realized that “far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.” 

I’ve come to realize along those lines that there is a difference between being a writer and an author. What I love, what I should chase is the writing, being an author is about results. That’s why I always found rewards underwhelming. I was focusing on the wrong prize, missing that I had it along. 

The irony is that winning great prizes not only feels like nothing, but understood properly should change absolutely nothing! We should accept the honors with gratitude, we should cash the checks (saving the money responsibly), we should enjoy the parties or the praise, and then we should, as soon as possible, get back down to work.

Do the verb, rather than be the noun. 

Not to prove anything to anyone. Not to scale a higher mountain because it will feel different. Not to really get our parents to notice this time. Not because flying private is even better than flying first class is better than economy. 

No.

We get back to work because the dream is the doing. The lucky break is the opportunity. It’s the process that we have always loved, it’s the joy of realizing our potential that should never get old or let us down. 

It is the only fruit that doesn’t underwhelm or spoil. 

***

P.S. My latest book Stillness is the Key was an instant #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal Bestseller. Whether you’ve achieved everything you dreamed of and don’t know what to do now, or you’re feeling overwhelmed, or you need a simple but inspiring antidote to the stress of 24/7 news and social media, Stillness is the Key is for you. I think it’s the best writing I’ve ever done, and I also think it’s the most important topic I have ever written about.