All the data about taking cold showers is bullshit to me. 

Sure, some research says that they can reduce anxiety, improve your immune system, increase metabolism to assist in weight loss, reduce the number of days you call out sick from work, and potentially even improve cancer survival.

But I don’t care about any of that. 

The reason I interrupt my warm showers by cranking the knob to the side is far more simple, in fact it’s nearly tautological. I do it to do it.

It’s making a statement about who is in charge. 

In one of his letters, Seneca describes himself as a “cold-water enthusiast.” He would “celebrate the new year by taking a plunge into the canal, who, just as naturally as I would set out to do some reading or writing, or to compose a speech, used to inaugurate the first of the year with a plunge into the Virgo aqueduct [present day Trevi Fountain].” But then he gives the real reason: “The body should be treated more rigorously that it may not be disobedient to the mind.”

I think about that every morning just before I crank the knob. Who is in charge? The courageous side of me or the cowardly side? The side that doesn’t flinch at discomfort or the side that desires to always be comfortable? The side that does the hard thing or the side that takes the easy way? 

In a Sports Illustrated story by Greg Bishop about the Los Angeles Rams’ difficult path to becoming Super Bowl champions, we learn that Rams General Manager Les Snead is a cold-water enthusiast. “As Les Snead watched his grand football experiment unfold over the course of the 2021 season,” Bishop writes, “he decided that, starting on Jan. 1, he would borrow from the Roman philosopher Seneca and plunge into the Pacific Ocean. And he did that, every morning, every week, all the way until Super Bowl Sunday.”

It wasn’t so he could improve his immune system to make it through the long season. It wasn’t to increase his metabolism. It wasn’t to reduce anxiety. Those things might have been nice ancillary benefits but they were not the point. The purpose was to become the kind of person that could do it—that could crank the handle or dive into the surf even though that’s almost certainly not going to be pleasant. 

Because that guy is also the guy who can trade a quarterback he just signed to an enormous contract. That guy is also the guy who can say ‘Fuck those draft picks’ even though everybody else in the NFL thinks that insane. 

As I write about in Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave, we can’t just hope to be brave when it counts. Courage has to be cultivated. No athlete just hopes to hit the game-winning shot—they practice it thousands of times. They take that shot in scrimmages, in pickup games, alone in the gym as they count down the clock in their head.

You know there’s that cliché: Do one thing each day that scares you. 

It’s hokey but it’s actually not bad advice! How do you expect to do the big things that scare you—that scare others—if you haven’t practiced them? Why do you think you can endure the cold reception of a bold idea if you can’t even endure cold water? How can you trust that you’ll step forward when the stakes are high when you regularly don’t do that when the stakes are low? What gives you any confidence you’ll do the hard thing when people are watching if you can’t do that even when no one is watching? 

The person who does something scary every day is less fearful than someone who can’t. The person who does something difficult every day is tougher than someone who doesn’t. And life? Well life is scary and it is tough. There is nothing worth doing that isn’t. You need those traits…unless you plan to cower and hide or get really lucky. 

We treat the body rigorously to remind it who is in charge. We push ourselves in little ways so the big ways stop seeming quite so big, quite so out of character. We minimize fear by making the act of overcoming it routine. We test ourselves to prepare for the tests of life.

Courage, self-control—all of the virtues are habits. They are superlatives paid for over the course of a life of virtuous decisions. They are not something you declare, like bankruptcy, they are something you earn, that become part of you. Just as a writer becomes one by writing—we build them by doing. By doing things like them.  

We can crank the knob in the shower to cold. We go for the run even though we’re tired. We pick up the phone and start the conversation we’ve been dreading. We agree to try what we have never tried before. 

We do something difficult, something scary, something good every day. 

We do it to do it. 

We do it because we’re in charge.

We do it so we can do it when it counts. 

P.S. Also I’m excited to announce we’re re-opening Stoicism 101: Ancient Philosophy For Your Actual Life. It’s a 14-day course designed to show people how to integrate philosophy into their everyday lives. Along with the 14 custom emails delivered daily (~20,000 words of exclusive content), there are 3 live video sessions—what we call office hours—with me where I’ll be taking all your questions about Stoicism. It’s one of my favorite things to get the chance to interact with everyone in the course—I would love to have you join us. You can learn more here! But it closes March 21 at Midnight so don’t wait.

Life is about choices.

How we choose to see things. What we choose to say. What we choose to think.

We choose what kind of person we are going to be. 

It all comes down to choices.

And Stoicism, it could be said, is a philosophy about how to make better choices. This is what we see in a book like Meditations. We see Marcus Aurelius journaling, working to get better at choosing. Choosing the right things to value, the right things to think, the right things to focus on, the right response to a difficult situation. 

In this article, I am going to give you the best insights from the Stoics on choosing well to live better. 

Start now by making the choice to…

Say Yes Only To What Matters

Being great at anything requires concentration. It requires elimination, Seneca says. “He who is everywhere is nowhere.”

If you want to be great at whatever it is you’re doing, you have to make some choices about what you say yes to and what you say no to. Everything you say yes to means saying no to something else. And conversely, everything you say no to means saying yes to something else. 

When you say no, when you cut out the inessential, the Stoics say, it allows you to double down on what is truly essential. So the question is: are you saying no to say yes only to what matters?

Control Your Emotions

Cato was once spat on by a rival politician. He was a physically tough man, a soldier, who could have, let’s say, taken matters into his own hands. Instead, he is reported to have laughed and said, “I will swear to anyone, Lentulus, that people are wrong to say that you cannot use your mouth.”

In another case, he was punched and responded to the man’s apology by saying, “I don’t even remember being hit.”

Cato chose not to be provoked. He chose not to be dragged down to their level. He didn’t lose his temper. He didn’t let them get to him. He abided by Marcus Aurelius’s wisdom, “You don’t have to turn this into something. It doesn’t have to upset you.”

Let Go of Anxiety

This was a breakthrough I had during the pandemic. Suddenly, I had a lot less to worry about. I wasn’t doing the things that, in the past, I told myself were the causes of my anxiety. I wasn’t having to get to this plane. I wasn’t battling traffic to get somewhere on time. I wasn’t having to prepare for this talk or that one.

So you’d think that my anxiety would have gone way down. But it didn’t. And what I realized is that anxiety has nothing to do with any of these things.

Marcus Aurelius actually talks about this in Meditations. “Today I escaped from anxiety,” he says. “Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions—not outside.” He writes this during a plague, no less.

We tell ourselves we are stressed and anxious and worried because of the pressure our boss puts on us or because of some looming deadline or because of all of the places we have to be and people we have to see. And then when all that gets paired down, you realize, ‘Oh, no, it was me. I’m the common variable.’ The anxiety is coming from the inside. And you can choose to discard it. 

Stop Wasting Time

When I was 20 years old, I was thinking about becoming a writer. I had about a year left on my contract at the company I was working at. I was telling Robert Greene, one of the greatest writers of all time, about all of this, and he told me I had two options. With this next year, he said, you have the choice between alive time and dead time.

Dead time is when you waste time sitting around, waiting, hoping for things to happen to you.

Alive time is when you are in control, when you make every second count, when you are learning and improving and growing and experimenting.

Is this going to be Alive Time or Dead Time? I decided to print it out and put it on my wall. And it was one of the most productive years of my life. I read stacks and stacks of books. I filled up a box of notecards. I reached out to people and have relationships to this day that came out of that experience. 

Most of all, what I took was life is constantly asking us, Is this going to be alive time or dead time? A long commute—are you going to zone out or listen to an audiobook? A delayed flight—are you going to get a couple thousands steps around the terminal or shove a Cinnabon into our face? A contract we have to earn out—is this tying us down or freeing us up?

What you do with the time when you are not totally in control—that is the critical choice you have to constantly make. 

Focus On What’s In Your Control

99 percent of the things that you spend time on don’t matter. It’s not that they’re not important. It’s that we focus on things that are not up to us.

Epictetus said, “The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control…”

The chief choice is between things that are in our control and those that are not in our control. What other people do, what other people say, what the weather is doing, how the dice rolls—just about everything except our actions, our thoughts, our feelings—not in our control.

Our actions, our thoughts, our feelings—these are up to us. Other people, the weather, external events, these are not. But here’s the thing: our responses to other people, the weather, external events are in our control. 

Making this distinction and then choosing to focus on the things that are in your control will make you happier, stronger, and more successful. If only because it concentrates your resources in the places where they matter.

Do The More Difficult Thing

Whenever we come to a little crossroad—a decision about how to do things and what things to do—the Stoics said to default to the option that challenges you the most.

Marcus Aurelius wrote in Meditations about holding the reins in his non-dominant hand as both an exercise to practice and a metaphor for doing the difficult thing. Seneca talked about how a person who skates through life without being tested and challenged is actually depriving themselves of opportunities to grow and improve. 

It is both these ideas that informed one of the things I wanted to do with my book Courage is Calling. I wanted to alter people’s perception of courage. To get people to stop thinking our courage only as what happens on the battlefield or when destiny calls you onto the world’s stage. Courage is a kind of craft, something you pursue day in and day out just as one pursues the mastery of any profession or skill. It’s something you do, something you make a habit of.

Jump into the colder pool. Walk instead of drive. Pick up the book instead of your phone. Take responsibility instead of hoping it goes unnoticed. It matters big and small, courage is choosing the more difficult option. Make it a habit. Iron sharpens iron, after all. You’ll be better for it—not only for the improvement that comes from the challenge itself, but for the willpower you are developing by choosing that option on purpose. 

When you have two choices, choose the more difficult one. Choose the one, as Marcus would agree, that allows you to take the reins in any situation.

Grab The Smooth Handle

If you’ve ever been stuck in Los Angeles traffic at night, you know it’s miserable. But if you’ve ever seen a helicopter shot of Los Angeles at night, you’ve seen how this same miserable experience can suddenly be made to seem beautiful and serene. We call one a traffic jam, the other a light show.

Same thing, different perspective.

Life is like this. We can look at it one way and be scared or angry or worried. We can look at it another and find an exciting challenge. We can choose to look at something as an obstacle or an opportunity. We can see chaos if we look up close, or order if we look from afar. 

As Epictetus said, each situation has two handles—one that will bear weight and one that won’t. We get to choose how we look at things. We get to look for the best handle to grab. As Marcus would put it, we get to choose the thoughts we dye the world with.

Little Choices Make For a Big Change

These choices are all very minor, I get that. But that’s the point. These little choices we make–the choice to direct our attention, to grab the right handle, to not get upset–this adds up. 

To what?

To freedom, the Stoics would say. To be in control of your life…even when so much of what happens in life is outside your control. 

***

P.S. Happy Texas Independence Day! One of the best choices I ever made was moving to Texas back in 2013. I continue to fall deeper and deeper in love with the Lone Star State. At The Painted Porch, we have a section just for books about Texas. The one I most recommend is the wonderful and important book, Forget the Alamo. Bryan Burrough, one of my all time favorite authors, and his co-writer Jason Stanford came out to The Painted Porch and signed copies of Forget the Alamo. Bryan also signed my two favorite books of his: Public Enemies and The Big Rich. You can check any of those out here!

The piece below is about banned books, which I feel so strongly about that I’ve decided to give away free physical copies of banned books. If you come by The Painted Porch today from 2-6pm or on February 19 from 10am-2pm, we’ll be giving away free copies of books such as Fahrenheit 451, Lawn Boy, and Out of Darkness.

The tragic irony of many books we are assigned in school is that we are far too young to understand what they really mean. 

Like many public school kids, I was assigned Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in high school. I remembered the book as a warning against totalitarian censorship by the government. It was only later, re-reading it as an adult, that I realized Bradbury—who had written the book on purchased time at a library typewriter—was depicting something much more insidious. 

As Captain Beatty explains to Montag, who had begun to doubt his terrible profession, censorship was what the people wanted. This horrendous burning of books hadn’t been forced on them by a tyrant. They had chosen this. 

“Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo,” he says, using terms that today would render the book politically incorrect, if not entirely canceled. “Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping. Burn the book.” 

Bradbury’s message is a much more salient warning to modern Americans than many of us are ready for upon first reading. America is, and always has been, in less danger of top-down Chinese or Soviet style suppression and much more vulnerable to short sighted or even well-intentioned democratic censorship. 

I didn’t grasp this as a high schooler, but I can see it now. Because here we are in 2022 where book banning is not only popular with state legislatures and local school boards, but a pastor in Tennessee held a literal book burning, which featured worshippers willingly tossing books into a bonfire that appears to reach ten or fifteen feet in the air. 

Depending on where you live, this might all seem very distant. As a writer and bookseller in rural Texas, it hits closer to home for me. Interestingly, Marcus Aurelius—who I write about often—makes an appearance in Fahrenheit 451. “Wasn’t he a European,” Montag’s wife asks. “Wasn’t he a radical?” Nobody knew…like today, people were willing to burn a book because of what they thought might be in it, or because of what someone else said was in it. 

The high school my sons will go to has been in the news for challenging a book called Out of Darkness, about segregation in a Texas oil town in the 1930s. More comically, another parent angrily protested an example of gay sex from a book called Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison at one of our school board meetings in September…but as the school librarian later pointed out, the school doesn’t even carry that book. The mother had confused it with another book literally about a boy who mows lawns. Just the other day, a man came into our bookstore snarling about all our “liberal” and “woke” books and our Google reviews have been briganded by anti-maskers and COVID-deniers. 

America has many problems. Reading too many books is not one of them. In fact, I would argue that our problems stem from the exact opposite. We spend too much time online. We watch too much real-time (partisan) news. We have a poor understanding of history and our founding principles. We say experience is a great teacher and neglect the hard won experiences of the people who came before us and did us the service of writing that all down. 

As a lifelong autodidact, I’ve been known to mispronounce many words that I had never heard outside the pages of a book. I always smile when I see someone doing the same thing—there goes a reader, I think. When Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene decried Nancy Pelosi’s “​​Gazpacho Police,” I knew that was a very different kind of error—the kind that comes from someone who has not read a single book about the Nazi Party. In fact, when I look at her cruel mockery of school shooting victims, heinous anti-semitism and dangerous pandemic misinformation, I can’t escape thinking: This is what happens when people don’t read books at all.

I don’t mean to single her out. There are plenty of politicians on both sides of the aisle who very obviously don’t read—or read only things that confirm what they already believe. 

In our world, it seems, reading and studying has become almost a revolutionary act. 

In Bradbury’s world, Montag strikes back against the regime simply by memorizing passages from books in order to protect and preserve them. As my wife and bookstore partner Samantha reminded me, to sit by while the government or your fellow citizens ban books is to endorse it. Each of us has an obligation to push back against the anti-intellectual bent of our time—whether it comes from the right or the left. When a book is banned or attacked—whether because it contains Critical Race Theory or because Critical Race Theorists are attempting to cancel the author—read it! As Stephen King has said, “Don’t spend time waving signs or carrying petitions around the neighborhood. Instead, run, don’t walk, to the nearest nonschool library or to the local bookstore and get whatever it was that they banned. Read whatever they’re trying to keep out of your eyes and your brain, because that’s exactly what you need to know.”

In a time of misinformation and disinformation, that quote might not always be right but directionally the argument is good. We shouldn’t insulate our kids from uncomfortable ideas, we should expose our kids to them and encourage them to engage with that discomfort. Moreover,  we have to model the lifelong pursuit of knowledge in our own reading habits as adults, if for no other reason than so we can be their guides. We certainly can’t leave their fate in the hands of school board members  and  local elected officials who fear what might happen to a young person given free reign in a library. 

The good news is that these people have less control over us than they once did. In the digital world, books are more plentiful than ever. It’s harder to truly suppress important perspectives. I am proud to have called in a favor with the folks at Scribd, a subscription service for ebooks and audiobooks, to make a number of these “banned” books accessible to anyone who wants them. They’ve also helped donate thousands of copies of books like Not My Idea by Anastasia Higginbotham, King and the Dragon Flies by Kacen Callender, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, and New Kid by Jerry Craft, among others, to give away to students in my local community (as a result, one small publisher told me they’re having to print extra copies of some banned titles). 

In big letters on our front window, we have stenciled the words “Good Things Happen In Bookstores.” But really, good things happen anywhere books are plentiful—even offensive or strange or uncomfortable books. 

The converse is also true, as the playwright Heinrich Heine tragically predicted of his German homeland. “Wherever they burn books,” he warned, “they will also, in the end, burn human beings.”