My new book, Wisdom Takes Work, comes out in 6 DAYS!  If you’ve gotten anything out of my writing over the years, it would mean the world if you preorder a copy. Preorders are the single best way to support an author and help a book get off the ground. To make it worth your while, I’ve put together a bunch of bonuses—a signed page from the original manuscript, bonus chapters, an annotated bibliography, and more. Just head to ​dailystoic.com/wisdom before October 21st to claim your bonuses.

There I was at 19 years old, sitting across from the great Robert Greene at The Alcove in Los Feliz.

He was talking about all the trouble he was having finding a good research assistant. 

I had to restrain myself from jumping over the table.

This was literally my dream job. 

Fortunately, before I leapt out of my chair, Robert asked if I might have any interest in giving it a shot. 

Thus started for me what Robert calls in Mastery, The Apprenticeship Phase.

It didn’t start with anything glamorous. In the days before AI or even decent software, I spent hours transcribing interviews he had done for his book The 50th Law. I read obscure books he didn’t want to waste time on. I found articles. I worked on his website. I went to libraries and scanned pages. I went through old archives. I tracked people down.

And in between, I asked questions. I listened. I watched. I absorbed his research and note card system, which I continue to use to this day.

Obviously he was paying me, but I always considered having access to him—being able to ask these questions—my actual compensation. The feedback wasn’t always fun, but what would he have normally charged someone as a consultant? How many people would have killed to be able to call him or email him about anything?

When I say I was his apprentice, I don’t mean it like, “Oh, I was his intern for a few months.” I did this for close to 7 years, even after I became the director of marketing at American Apparel. I was even doing it even after I had gotten my own book deal and was working on my first books. 

Why? 

Because this is how it works. 

As the great Jack London writes in his novel Martin Eden, “no matter how peculiarly constituted a man may be for blacksmithing, I never  heard of one becoming a blacksmith without first serving his apprenticeship.”  

In Wisdom Takes Work—which there are just 6 days left to preorder!—there are multiple chapters on the art of cultivating these mentors and teachers because there is no one who is able to reach their potential totally alone. There is no one who can learn everything they need to learn by trial and error. Wisdom is not a solitary pursuit. It is often a collective effort.

For thousands of years, this is how trades—and life—were taught. Not in a classroom with hundreds of other students, but attached to a professional, who taught, largely by example, until the student was ready to head out on their own. There are some things, the tennis great Billie Jean King would say of her time  training under Alice Marble, an eighteen-​time Grand Slam Champion, “you can only learn from someone who’s been the best in the world.” Or at least, someone who is world class.

It was from Robert that I learned everything—literally everything—about being a writer. He taught me how to write a book, how to think about books, how to research them, how to market them, how to work with a publisher. He fundamentally taught me, from beginning to end, how the entire process works. In addition to telling me what to do, he showed me how a real pro does the job. 

We have to find the people who can teach us and open ourselves to learning from them. Whatever stage of life we’re in, there is someone who knows more than us, who has been through more than us, who can open doors for us.  

We are a product of our teachers and our mentors. 

There would be no Plato without Socrates. There would be no Aristotle without Plato. There would be no Alexander without Aristotle. There would be no Marcus Aurelius without Rusticus or Epictetus or Antoninus. There would be no Zeno without Crates, and thus there would be no Stoicism without Crates. 

Do you know what Crates’s nickname was in ancient Athens? He was known as “the door-opener.” Because that’s what great mentors and teachers do: They open doors to worlds we didn’t even know existed. They invite us into things we wouldn’t have discovered on our own. They help us see possibilities we’d otherwise stay blind to. 

How do you find these door-openers? How do you attract their attention? How do you make yourself worth their while?

You have to show yourself as somebody with the hunger to learn and excel. You have to show yourself as somebody who listens. Somebody who is curious. Somebody who is worth teaching. Somebody who is coachable.  

Mentors give us books to read. They give us problems to solve. They give us riddles to chew on. They provide an example that inspires or even shames…and sometimes cautions. 

The process is not always fun. It will often be painful. As Epictetus would tell his students, having modeled himself on his mentor Musonius, “The philosopher’s lecture hall is a hospital. You shouldn’t walk out of it feeling pleasure, but pain, for you weren’t well when you entered.” 

Valuable things are rarely free. An apprenticeship is one of them. 

But it’s also priceless. 

I wouldn’t be here without it. 

There’s no way I can repay Robert for his kindness and his patience and his generosity. But as I explain in the “Grow a Coaching Tree” chapter in Right Thing, Right Now (the third book in the Virtue Series), as well as in the “Be a Teacher” chapter in Wisdom Takes Work, the only thing we can do is pay that forward. The next step is to become a teacher, to help mentor someone else. 

Because we learn as we teach. 

Because we carry debts from those who helped us—debts that can only be discharged through helping others.

And because, at the end of your career and your life, you’ll be prouder of what you helped others accomplish than what you achieved yourself. 

But only if you put the work in now…working as hard to open doors for others as you work to open doors for yourself.  

***

For the past six years I’ve been lavishing all my working hours on the Stoic Virtues series and I can honestly say Wisdom Takes Work, the fourth and final book in the series, is the culmination of my life’s work.

There are just SIX DAYS left to pre-order Wisdom Takes Work! 

Each time I release a book, I like to do a run of preorder bonuses like signed and numbered first editions, early access to the introduction, bonus chapters, and even an invite to a philosophy dinner at my bookstore, The Painted Porch. 

Just head to ​dailystoic.com/wisdom before October 21st to claim your bonuses.

My new book, Wisdom Takes Work, comes out in 13 DAYS! If you’ve gotten anything out of my writing over the years, it would mean the world if you preorder a copy. Preorders are the single best way to support an author and help a book get off the ground. To make it worth your while, I’ve put together a bunch of bonuses—signed and numbered first editions, a signed page from the original manuscript, bonus chapters, an annotated bibliography, and more. Just head to ​dailystoic.com/wisdom before October 21st to claim your bonuses.

I thought I knew a lot about Lincoln. 

I’ve read biographies—an embarrassing amount of them honestly. I’ve watched documentaries. I’ve interviewed scholars. I’ve traveled to many of the sights. I’ve read many of his favorite books. I’ve immersed myself in the world he lived in. I once stood transfixed, for hours, in front of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s art piece, which projected the faces and experiences of American veterans on the face of Lincoln’s statue in Union Square  Park in New York.

I’ve even written about him quite a bit in my books. 

So when I sat down to put together what was intended to be Part III of Wisdom Takes Work, I thought I was set. 

It turns out I wasn’t even close. 

I was stuck and I could not find the words. That might seem like writer’s block but it wasn’t—because writer’s block doesn’t exist. What is real is lacking material and that’s what I was facing. 

So I got to work. 

I read Michael Gerhardt’s 496-page book on Lincoln’s mentors. 

I read Hay and Nicolay. 

I read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 944-page Team of Rivals. 

Still, there was more to know. 

So I read David S. Reynolds’s 1088-page Abe, David Herbert Donald’s 720-page Lincoln, and Garry Wills’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book specifically about the Gettysburg Address (Wills’s book has many more pages than the address has words). 

I spoke with the documentarian Ken Burns about him, and Doris too. 

I went back through the books I’d already read (William Lee Miller, especially, but also Harold Holzer, Joshua Wolf Shenk, and Carl Sandburg). 

I read Lincoln’s own writings, his letters and his speeches. 

I reviewed my pictures from trips to Gettysburg, Antietam, and Ford’s Theater. 

I went, multiple times in the course of writing the book, and looked up at the Lincoln Memorial. 

In the end, I spent hundreds of hours reading thousands and thousands of pages on the man. Here’s what that looks like in physical terms. 

Basically, what I was doing was a deep dive. Fittingly, Lincoln’s own education was itself a kind of lifelong series of self-directed deep dives. He got his start in law, for instance, when he met a lawyer named John T. Stuart, who allowed Lincoln to borrow some of his law books. “If you wish to be a lawyer,” Lincoln would later tell a young man, “attach no consequence to the place you are in, or the person you are with; but get books, sit down anywhere, and go to reading for yourself. That will make a lawyer of you quicker than any other way.”

His campaign against slavery, too, began by going deep. “He searched through the dusty volumes of congressional proceedings in the State library,” William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner, recalled, “and dug deeply into political history.” His way, Herndon observed, was to dig up a question by the roots and dry it out by the fires of the mind, until he could see it for what it was.

Do you know what Lincoln did after the Civil War broke out? He broke out an old habit, which he’d had since his time in Washington as a congressman: He called for books from the Library of Congress, reading everything he could about strategy and tactics, including books published by his own generals. He was, by the end of the war, according to General W. F Smith, “the superior of his generals in his comprehension of the effect of strategic movements and the proper method of following up victories to their legitimate conclusions.”

Nowhere was this ability to see things plainly more evident than in the Gettysburg Address, which was just 271 words long. You might think such a short speech was easy to write, in fact, it was the descendent of a decade-plus-long deep dive into language, elocution, rhetoric, history, law, politics and the founding ideals of the nation—a word he repeated in the speech five times. It was an expression of the work Lincoln did to get to the “nub” of a subject, as his law partner said. As Wills writes in Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America, Lincoln was able to, as a result of his masterful understanding of the issues and opportunity at hand, to effectively redefine and refound the nation in a single speech, in a way that two and a half years of war had not been able to. 

Going deep in order to get to the nub of subjects—this is a skill you need to have. Whether you are an author, a politician, a lawyer, entrepreneur, scientist, educator, parent—it doesn’t matter you have to be able to pursue an idea, a question, a thread of curiosity until you’ve wrapped your head completely around it.

In Right Thing Right Now, I spend a lot of time talking about the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, who like Lincoln was able to strike a defining blow against slavery. Obviously this is what we’re talking about when we talk about justice. But how did he do it? Clarkson knew slavery was wrong. He even wrote a convincing essay on it.. But he soon realized that if he was going to do something about it, he would really have to understand slavery—as a business, a logistical enterprise, and a set of cultural assumptions passed down for thousands of years to justify it. So he immersed himself in the abolitionist movement, meeting and learning from the earliest activists, reformers, and freed slaves. He visited slave ships. He would recall that the almost uninhabitable quarters, the chains and grates, filled him “with melancholy and horror,” kindling, he said, “a fire of indignation.” But now his anger was fueled by facts, and he wanted more. He spoke to everyone he could find who had been to Africa, recording their accounts in his notebooks. He scoured records at the Custom House, poring over muster rolls, ship logs, trial transcripts, and insurance files.

Often falling asleep over paperwork, surrounded by his research, Clarkson persisted for years. By the end, no one knew more about the slave trade—he was more informed than many traders and investors themselves, since so much of what they did depended on deliberate ignorance.

You can’t solve a problem you don’t understand. You can’t lead a field you haven’t immersed yourself in. You must go down the rabbit hole. You must go deep. You must swarm the topic. 

This has been my approach to pretty much everything I’ve done since dropping out of college. It’s how I figured out how to be a writer. It’s how I figured out how to be a researcher. It’s how I figured out how to be a parent. It’s how I figured out how to run a bookstore. Indeed, my whole life has been built on deep dives.

If our goal is to get not just smarter or more knowledgeable, but wiser, we cannot be content to learn in half measures. We must go as deep as we possibly can. We don’t just read a book on a topic. We have to read everything we can find on it. We don’t just ask a question or find an expert. We have to find every expert we can and ask them every question they’re willing to answer. We don’t just look at what’s there. We have to explore the remotest corners, every facet, from every angle. We have to hear from people we agree with and from people we disagree with. We have to go out and get real experience.

As an old man Marcus Aurelius would reflect on the most important lesson he had learned from his philosophy teacher Rusticus: “to read attentively—not to be satisfied with ‘just getting the gist’ of things.” Go “directly to the seat of knowledge,” he said. Immerse yourself in the craft, business, sport, or profession. Seek out tutors and mentors and peers. Travel. Observe. Ask questions. Go way beyond the “gist.”

The great biographer David McCullough talked about swarming the subjects he wrote about—reading their diaries, their favorite books, biographies of their heroes, newspapers from their time, and, most importantly, spending time in the places they had spent time. “I believe strongly,” he once said, “that terrain, landscape, the physical environment is not just important in understanding someone or something—it’s elemental. Therefore, I go to where things happened.”

The jazz legend Miles Davis didn’t just go down to the  club and listen to music. “I would go to the library and borrow  scores by all those great composers, like Stravinsky, Alban  Berg, Prokofiev. I wanted to see what was going on in all of  music,” he explained. All of music. Old stuff. New stuff. The  greats. The weirdos. “Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is  slavery,” he said, “and I just couldn’t believe someone could be  that close to freedom and not take advantage of it.” 

The Wright brothers didn’t discover flight through a single epiphany but through countless hours watching birds. “We couldn’t help but thinking they were just a pair of poor nuts,” one Kitty Hawk resident recalled. “They’d stand on the beach for hours, watching the gulls flying, soaring, dipping.” They even studied how paper fell and floated to the ground, again and again.

Wilbur’s notebooks are filled with drawings of birds, notes on flight techniques across species, and how weather affected flight. They include sketches of wind-tunnel tests and designs. Others had observed birds, but no one had gone so deep—or spent so much time—studying the mechanics of flight and wings.

To capture the progression from ignorance to knowledge to wisdom, McCullough used the example of the pilot’s cockpit. You can get a pretty good understanding from someone describing what a cockpit is. An even better understanding from reading about cockpits. An even better understanding from looking at pictures. An even better understanding from watching videos. An even better understanding from sitting in a cockpit. And an even better understanding from flying a plane.

This is our job. To make things clear. To get to the nub of things. To find what is important and discard the rest. To go deep. To swarm. 

This, of course, takes time. 

It takes curiosity.

It takes patience and persistence. 

Most of all, as I put in the title of the ​new book, it takes work.

***

For the past six years I’ve been going deep on the four virtues, and I can honestly say Wisdom Takes Work, the fourth and final book in the Stoic Virtues series, is the culmination of my life’s work.

The book comes out October 21st, but it would mean the world to me if you could preorder the book from ​dailystoic.com/wisdom. Preordering a book is the number one thing you can do to support an author as they get a book off the ground. It’s how publishers determine how many copies to print, whether other bookstores will carry it, and where the book will land on the bestseller list.

To make ordering it early worth your while, I put together a bunch of bonuses like signed and numbered first editions, a signed page from the original manuscript, bonus chapters, an annotated bibliography, and a bunch of other stuff. Just head to ​dailystoic.com/wisdom before October 21st to claim your bonuses.

My new book, Wisdom Takes Work, comes out in a few weeks. Get signed & numbered first editions here!

I have a hobby and it’s weird. 

It started in a pretty normal way. 

I’d always liked taking walks and then I had young kids. 

Because it was often the only way I could get them to sleep–or to keep them out of the house so my wife could sleep–I would spend hours and hours walking on the rural country road that we live on. 

It is unpaved and unmaintained by the county or the state, lined with trees, and more frequently crossed by deer and jack rabbits than people. We’d do miles and miles, first in the baby bjorn, then the single stroller and then the double stroller. We see the sun come up or the sun go down. We crunch the frost and the mud. We’d do it in the heat and the cold, on ordinary days, for the interminable months of the pandemic, weekdays and weekends, rain or shine.

It’s a throwback to an older, simpler way of life.

It’s also a throwback to a scene I’ve always remembered from Mad Men, where Don Draper and his family finish their roadside picnic and then nonchalantly throw all their trash into the grass below.

Only out here, because the police don’t seem to mind or our local government is non-existence, they dump tires and old mattresses. They dump debris from construction sites. They dump beer bottles and candy wrappers. They dump out of season deer kills and for some inexplicable and alarming reason, a lot of dead dogs.

At first, this just pissed me off—especially because the nails kept giving me flats. It would make whole segments of the road unwalkable with the kids because of the stench. I tried calling the police and animal control and my local politicians—of course, they did nothing. I put up fake cameras which did nothing to deter. I thought about moving.

But then one morning on my walk with my kids, a thought hit me that was both freeing and indicting. How many times do I have to walk past this litter, I thought, before I am complicit in its existence? Why do I keep expecting someone else to do something about it if I won’t? So I started cleaning it up…and I actually enjoyed it. We started cleaning it up. 

I have a bag, one of those sticks with a spike on it, and I go up and down the country roads where we live. I have a claw and gloves (I have gone through many many pairs of gloves). I go down in the gullies by the side of the road picking up soda bottles, plastic bags, food wrappers, nails, and screws. I have disposed of dumpsters worth of garbage over the years. I have loaded tires into the back of my truck and paid to have them properly recycled. (I’ve even paid a contractor to come out with a tractor for some particularly heavy stuff). I have put on face masks and scooped up dead goats,  dead calves  and dead dogs which I burned or took to the back of my ranch to decompose in a less disruptive place. I have paid my children an ungodly amount of bribes to get them to participate too.

I don’t just do it at home either. I do it when we go to the beach. I do it when we go on hikes. I do it when I’m pacing in a parking lot, taking a phone call. I think I’d want someone to grab this if they saw it, so I’ll do the same. 

Does it make a difference? In the big scheme of things, no. Does it create a moral hazard? Maybe. Perhaps word has gotten out—dump your stuff down here because it mysteriously disappears a few days later. 

I’m not sure my neighbors have noticed. In fact, one time, as I loaded up a mattress in my truck, someone who lives down the road accosted me, thinking I was the dumper. Honestly, the only time anyone has ever said thanks happened in another country. I was in Greece this summer and I passed a flattened water bottle in the street, which I reached down and grabbed and tossed in a nearby trash can. An old man sitting in a cafe stood up and began clapping and bowing and shouting in unintelligible Greek. I assume he was saying thanks, but maybe he was making fun of me. 

I’ll tell you it doesn’t earn you karma, not at least during this lifetime. Despite all the work my wife and I still get a flat tire every month or so. 

But that’s not why I do it.

I do it for me. 

In a world where everything seems to be falling apart and so much is beyond my control, there is something deeply empowering about this simple, weird act. I can see the difference every time I drive home—the road is cleaner, safer, more beautiful. I’m outside instead of stewing indoors. I’m moving instead of scrolling. I’m solving a problem instead of complaining about it.

There is a Mr. Rogers quote I love. “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news,” Rogers said, “my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”

We decide what we look for in life—do we get mad at the people making the mess or do we look towards the people cleaning things up? We decide whether to despair or find hope and goodness.

But I actually think we can go further. Do we decide to BE one of the helpers? Do we decide to pick up the trash? Do we take ownership of the things within our control? 

That’s what makes the difference…and life better for everyone, but especially you.

***

For the past six years I’ve been lavishing all my working hours on the Stoic Virtues series and I can honestly say Wisdom Takes Work, the fourth and final book in the series, is the culmination of my life’s work.

Wisdom Takes Work is a book about the work of our lives: the work it takes to acquire wisdom. The book is filled with the example and insights of some of history’s wisest people, and how we can follow in their footsteps.

It comes out on October 21st, but is available for preorder over at dailystoic.com/wisdom. Each time I release a book, I like to do a run of preorder bonuses like signed and numbered first editions, early access to the introduction, bonus chapters, and even an invite to a philosophy dinner at my bookstore, The Painted Porch. 

Check out all the bonuses here!