I’m going on tour next month (Portland and SF) and then a bunch of other places around the world in the early fall. Come see me talking Stoicism—grab tickets here. 

I hated writing essays in high school, but they changed my life.

Not because of the subject matter or anything. With one exception, I can’t remember what any of them were about.

The one I remember is an 11th-grade English assignment. My teacher had us write an essay on this prompt: “Analyze how and why The Great Gatsby is an exploration of the American Dream as it exists in a corrupt period.” 

The day after I handed in my essay, Mrs. Kars printed it out and we spent the entire period reviewing it with the class.

It was the first time anything I had ever written had been recognized. Now that I think about it, it may have been one of the first times in my life that I had ever felt like I might be anything but average. 

I would later ask Mrs. Kars ​for a letter of recommendation​ to a college I did not get accepted to, but I can still remember a line from it. “I have no doubt,” she said, “that Ryan will someday be a literary giant.”

I don’t know about that. But I can say that that essay—which upon re-reading is not that good—and the many others I had to write did what essays have done for generations of young people: they taught me how to use my brain. In having to write them, I learned how to think, I learned to think hard about something and then most importantly how to articulate what I thought about it.

This is slow, tedious, difficult work. It takes discipline and patience. The hours and hours of sitting with frustration and confusion. It takes trial and error. 

In Wisdom Takes Work, I tell a story about Eisenhower when he was a promising young general. Just days after Pearl Harbor in 1941, he was called in to see George Marshall, the chief of staff of the US Army. Japan was going to seize the Philippines and dozens of other islands in the Pacific, Marshall explained. America faced a war in two theaters with supply lines stretching thousands of miles. “What should be our general line of action?” Marshall asked Eisenhower.

A certain type of officer would have started thinking out loud, riffed, brainstormed. Not Eisenhower. His career and potentially millions of lives hung in the balance. 

“Give me a few hours,” he said. At a spare desk in the War Plans Division, Eisenhower requisitioned paper, a pen, and a typewriter and got to work. What did Marshall want to accomplish? What was possible? What was of the highest priority? What risks were acceptable? 

After a period of reflection, he wrote his thoughts out. What Marshall needed was “short, emphatic…reasoning,” not “oratory, plausible argument, or glittering generality.” The writing exercise helped him synthesize ideas from conversations he’d had with his mentor General Fox Conner, from books he’d read, from courses at the Army War College, and from his three decades in uniform. As dusk fell, Eisenhower handed Marshall a three-hundred-word briefing on yellow lined paper titled “Assistance to the Far East/Steps to Be Taken.”

Almost certainly Marshall had already considered most of what Eisenhower had written. The assignment was, in a way, a test. What kind of a thinker was this young officer? How did he approach problems? How good was he at responding under pressure? Could he see the big picture? Could he effectively communicate what he knew and what he wanted to do?

“I agree with you,” Marshall eventually replied about Eisenhower’s plan, and then told him to execute it. Thus began one of the most effective partnerships of the war, propelling Eisenhower to the presidency. 

Successful campaigns and careers—whether they involve leading people into battle or saving their souls or selling them things—depend on this kind of thinking process.

This is what worries me about what AI is doing to writing—and the school essay especially. 

As I write this line, not only does software make suggestions on spelling and help me eliminate errors, it suggests how I might finish sentences or word them better. If I want, I could simply click over to other software and ask it to write the draft for me. But these fast, easy ways to produce what resembles a finished piece of writing would defeat the purpose. Which is to engage and struggle with the material for an extended period of time. To take my time. To go over things again and again. To be immersed. To be focused, patient, and disciplined. To come to understand things deeply. 

A couple of years ago, I asked Robert Greene what ​he thought about AI. “I think back to when I was 19-years-old and in college,” Robert said. It was a class where they were  to read and translate classical Greek texts “They gave us a passage of Thucydides, the hardest writer of all to read in ancient Greek,” he explained. “I had this one paragraph I must have spent ten hours trying to translate…That had an incredible impact on me. It developed character, patience, and discipline that helps me even to this day. What if I had ChatGPT, and I put the passage in there, and it gave me the translation right away? The whole thinking process would have been annihilated right there.”

For an entire generation of young people, the whole thinking process is being annihilated. How will they figure out what they think? How will they develop critical thinking skills? How will they develop focus, patience, discipline? How will they come to understand things deeply?

We think as we write. Indeed, we cannot finish a sentence until we have carried the thought all the way through. We ponder opposing ideas as we pause between keystrokes, the pen becomes our third eye. On the page we see the pattern. Transcribing the passage or a quote, we get to feel real genius and insight pass through our mind and our fingers, processing each word, weighing and understanding the wisdom. We see what we didn’t see before. And when we take edits and feedback from others, we see even more, because editing is a kind of interrogation, a process by which we are refining and sharpening our thinking, a way to get our story straight. 

Joan Didion described writing as a “hostile act.” By that she meant that the writer is trying “to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture.” But Keynes was even closer to the mark when he referred to writing as the “assault of thought on the unthinking.” A battle against our own wild thoughts, against the preconceived assumptions of others, against all the alternative ideas (and tempting facts) out there. 

The purpose of the school essay—of any piece of writing at all—is not the end product on the page. It’s the person YOU are on the other side of having done it. It’s the thinking long and hard about something. It’s the slow, tedious, difficult work of figuring out what you actually work. And the equally hard work of finding the words for what you think. 

AI can you give you an essay, an article, a book, or a briefing.

What it can’t give you is the person you can only become by doing the writing yourself.

Quick note: I’m hitting the road for a Stoicism speaking tour throughout the rest of the year. So far, dates are set for Portland, SF, Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Australia, and New Zealand, with more to come. Get tickets (and updates when new dates are added) here!

Sitting on my desk as I write this is a book I paid $8.25 for nearly twenty years ago.

The cover is taped back on. Nearly every page is marked or folded. They have yellowed with age, in some cases becoming almost translucent. Nearly every passage has something noted or underlined. There are spills and stains everywhere. 

I bought it when I was 19 years old. I had been invited to a small, private summit of college journalists that Dr. Drew, then the host of Loveline, was hosting. After it ended, he was standing in the corner and I cautiously made my way over to nervously ask if he had any book recommendations. He said he’d been studying a Stoic philosopher named Epictetus and that I should check it out.

I went back to my hotel room, and I can’t remember why, but I didn’t order the Epictetus book. Maybe I did a quick search about Stoic philosophy and learned that Marcus Aurelius was also a Stoic, and since I knew him from Gladiator, I decided to start there? I don’t know. But I ended up ordering Marcus’ Meditations, along with a couple other books I’d had my eye on to qualify for free shipping (Amazon Prime didn’t exist back then).

I seem to remember my copy arriving right away after I purchased it, but recently searching my email for the order number, I found an angry customer service ticket, where teenage-me is angrily complaining about a few days’ shipping delay.

How badly I needed the words I would find in Book 6 of Meditations! “You don’t have to turn this into something,” Marcus writes. “It doesn’t have to upset you.”

I had no idea that the money I spent on that book—and the couple days of waiting—would become the single best time and money I ever spent. I had no idea that it would change the course of my life. And I had no idea that I was just another link in a multi-century chain of people discovering that the right book at the right time is a powerful thing.

In fact, it can change the whole course of your life.

Marcus Aurelius himself would probably understand my feelings here, for he himself notes in the opening pages his gratitude to his philosophy teacher, Rusticus, “for introducing me to Epictetus’s lectures—and loaning me his own copy.” The life of a future king was changed by the wisdom of a Greek slave who had triumphed over torture and exile, whose lectures were fortuitously recorded by a student in the early second century A.D. (and, just as unpredictably, survive to be read by us today).

Epictetus himself found freedom from slavery, long before he was legally free. How? In the writings of the Stoics, in the words of Musonius Rufus. He read his way to freedom, literally and figuratively, as Frederick Douglass would do in America two thousand years later. 

The late basketball coach George Raveling tells the story in his book What You’re Made For about his grandmother, who raised him. One night, as they were cooking dinner, she told him that back in the days of slavery, plantation owners would hide their money in the books on the shelves of their libraries.

“Why did the slave masters hide their money in books, George?” she asked him.

“I don’t know Grandma,” George replied, “why did they do that?”

“Because they knew the slaves couldn’t read,” she said, “so they would never take the books down.”

It’s a dark subject to bring up with a young boy. But George—who would go on to become the first African American basketball coach in what’s now the Pac-12, win 2 Olympic medals, and earn a Hall of Fame induction—said it was this early lesson that began his lifelong “love affair with books.”

To me, the moral of that story is not just that there is power in the written word (that’s why they made it illegal to teach slaves to read), but also that what’s inside them is very valuable. And the truth is that books still have money between the pages, though not because someone put it there in order to keep it from you. 

Think about how many people want to get better—at something, anything, everything. Look at how many people are desperate to be successful, or to extricate themselves from this cycle of mediocrity that has trapped so many of our generation. These people look everywhere for the solution to their problems. They seek out secret formulas, shortcuts, gurus. They will turn their entire world upside down before they stop and look at the one place where you can always be sure to find answers—the book shelf. 

Warren Buffett is one of the richest men in the world, today worth $140 billion. Do you know what he traces his fortune back to? His single best investment decision? A book! The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham, which he first read at the age of 19. We don’t know exactly what he paid for it, but in the late 1940s, a hardcover typically went for $1.30. “Of all the investments I ever made,” he said, “[it] was the best.” In the late 1940s, books would have cost perhaps a dollar but even if Buffett had paid millions for it, it’d have still been a pretty good ROI.

I myself wouldn’t be writing this to you today if I hadn’t spent that $8.25 back in 2006. That book didn’t just teach me about life. It taught me how to write. It schooled me in the art of working with and managing people. It gave me the subject that I’ve now spent nearly two decades writing my own books about—books that have somehow sold millions of copies and helped bring this two-thousand-year-old philosophy back into the world.

Again, not a bad ROI!

And of course, the real investment wasn’t the money I spent on the book. It’s the time I’ve spent and continue to spend on it. The time spent reading it. The time spent rereading it. The time spent reading Gregory Hays’s peerless introductory remarks that preface his translation. The time spent reading other editions (e.g. Robin Waterfield’s fully annotated edition). The time spent reading other books (e.g. Pierre Hadot’s Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius) and essays (e.g. Matthew Arnold’s Marcus Aurelius) about the book. The time spent reading biographies about Marcus (e.g. Donald Robertson’s Marcus Aurelius: The Stoic Emperor). The time spent tracking down and interviewing people like Hays, Waterfield, and Robertson. The time spent traveling to Rome to immerse myself in the world he lived in (see the picture at the top of this article). 

In one of the first passages in Meditations, Marcus said one of the things he learned from his philosophy teacher Rusticus was “to read attentively—not to be satisfied with ‘just getting the gist of it.’” If I’d stopped at “just getting the gist” of Meditations, my entire life would have turned out differently.

Buffett didn’t just stop at “the gist” either. He didn’t just read The Intelligent Investor. He read it and reread it and reread it. And a few years later, he decided to apply to Columbia Business School where Graham was a teacher. He went “straight to the seat of intelligence,” as Marcus wrote of his own development as a leader, and struck up a friendship with Graham, who later hired Buffett.

It’s not enough to read—you have to go down rabbit holes, look up words you don’t know, reach out to experts, share interesting ideas with others, earmark pages, and make notes in the margins. 

FYI: This is the idea behind the Daily Stoic How to Read Meditations Guide we put together—a digital guide that distills all of my reading, rereading, and rabbit-holing of Meditations into a kind of roadmap designed to help you get out of the book in a few weeks what took me twenty years. As part of Meditations Month, as we refer to April over at Daily Stoic, get the guide before April 26th—Marcus’s birthday—to join us in the live Q&A I’m hosting on the 27th!

Some people might recoil at all this talk categorizing books as investments, as things that owe us a return of some kind. But that’s exactly what books are. That’s exactly what makes them unique. In Book 1 of Meditations, Marcus himself writes that it was one of the great lessons he learned from his great-grandfather—to invest in learning “and to accept the resulting costs as money well-spent.”

It’s why one of my reading rules is, if you see a book you want, just buy it. Don’t worry about the price. Reading is not a luxury. It’s not something you splurge on. It’s a necessity. Even if all you get is one life-changing idea from a book, that’s still a pretty good investment. 

Have I applied this rule and bought books that turned out to be duds? Hundreds of times. Maybe thousands. But that’s how any investment strategy works. The winners pay for the losers, and then some. 

So never forget that it’s in your self-interest to read. There’s incredible power and money hidden in books.

But only if you spend the time. 

Only if you go way beyond the “gist.”

P.S. As I mentioned briefly above, April has been Meditations Month over at Daily Stoic, where I’m rereading Meditations alongside our Daily Stoic Community as part of our How to Read Meditations Digital Guide. 

In addition to the 11 in-depth modules of the guide, we’re having discussions on our private platform and I’m hosting a live Q&A on April 27th, where I’ll take your questions. 

Just get the guide before April 26th (Marcus Aurelius’ birthday) to receive your invite to the Q&A.

This month only, you can also purchase the leatherbound edition of ​Meditations to get the digital guide and access to the Meditations Month exclusives FREE. Just head to dailystoic.com/meditations. 

I hope to see you on the 27th!

I’m going to be on a Stoicism speaking tour this summer and fall—Portland, SF, Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit plus a bunch of dates in Australia and New Zealand. Come see me!

I’ve brought it to the Grammys.

I’ve brought it to NFL games…and kids BJJ practices. 

I’ve brought it into the green room backstage before talks.

I’ve brought it to restaurants and bars.

I’ve carried it into museums and meetings and to Disneyland. 

I’ve brought it to use before surgery, on planes, beaches, in cars, lines, waiting rooms, helicopters, at the White House, at the DMV, to zoos and parks, car dealerships and shopping malls, while waiting for a movie to start, and on and on.

I bring it everywhere. Phone, wallet, keys—as Adam Sandler says—and a book. 

I am always carrying one and so should you. 

People often assume something about me: that I’m a speed reader. It’s the most common email I get. They see all the books I recommend every month in my reading newsletter and assume I must have some secret. They want to know my trick for reading so fast. 

The truth is, even though I read hundreds of books each year, I actually read at a pretty normal pace. In fact, I deliberately read slowly. But what I also do is read all the time. I always carry a book with me. Every time I get a second, I crack it open. I don’t install games on my phone—that’s time for reading. When I’m eating, on a plane, in a waiting room, or sitting in traffic in an Uber—I read. 

It’s an old habit actually. For centuries, busy people have made sure they always had a book within reach.

In her book The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism, Doris Kearns Goodwin writes about how Roosevelt prioritized his reading time, “snatching moments while waiting for lunch or his next appointment.” “He always carried a book with him to the Executive Office,” Taft recalled, “and although there were but few intervals during the business hours, he made the most of them in his reading.”

Before the Vietnam War, James Stockdale was given a copy of Epictetus by one of his professors at Stanford. Soon after, in a three-year span, Stockdale spent three seven-month missions in the waters off Vietnam. He was flying in combat near daily, “but on my bedside table, no matter what carrier I was aboard,” Stockdale said, “were my Epictetus books…I didn’t have time to be a bookworm, but I spent several hours each week buried in them.”

Those weren’t consecutive hours, one must imagine, but little chunks here or there, stolen away—turning dead time into alive time, as Robert Greene famously said.

Look, I get it. You have kids. You have a job—maybe two. You have these things you are trying to accomplish. You have to get to the gym. You have all these projects around the house. 

With all this, you say, I just don’t have time to read. And maybe it’s true that you don’t have time to be buried in a book several hours a day. Who does? But you can snatch a few pages here, a few pages there—on your commute, while the coffee brews, between meetings, over lunch, every time you’d otherwise reach for your phone. Use every pocket of time you get!

And if you never crack it open—well, books make great accessories. My wife has a tote bag with a cartoon of a guy packing a book before leaving the house, captioned: “I better bring my book just in case I want to spend all day carrying my book.” I have plenty of those days. I lug around a four-pound, 900-page biography and the book never leaves my bag. Or I end up taking it for a walk, tucked under my arm, and never actually get time to open it. But I’ve never regretted bringing it. I’ve only ever regretted leaving it behind. It’s like a little Flat Stanley that I show the sights too…or like a handweight to add some resistance to my everyday activity. 

Does it mean they get dirty and beaten up? That the corners fray and the covers get a little battered? Yes, but that’s what books are for. Books are not precious things. They are durable, well-designed pieces of technology. As an author, I love it when people hand me a book to sign that has had real miles put on it. When people hand me a pristine copy and tell me it’s their favorite, I assume they are just flattering me. A well-worn book is a well-loved book. It’s obvious what my favorite books are…because they’re falling apart (here’s my copy of Meditations for instance) or filled with food stains (lol, here are some pictures).

Is your phone also a book? Sure. But the point is, we all want to spend less time on the phone and in front of screens. There is something about a physical book that your phone will never replicate—the weight of it, the feel of the pages, the fact that it does exactly one thing. It doesn’t buzz with notifications. It doesn’t tempt you to swipe over to social media the moment your attention wavers. It doesn’t have an algorithm deciding what you see next. And isn’t that the irony? We all say we don’t have time to read…but the screen time app on our phone sure proves otherwise. 

There’s something else too. Reading a book on a phone doesn’t look like you’re reading a book. It just looks like you’re on your phone. Some of my favorite random encounters have started with someone asking what I’m reading, or me asking them. I’ve discovered so many great books that way. I’ve gotten to recommend ones I love. I just had a nice conversation at my son’s lacrosse practice last week. A guy was reading The Count of Monte Cristo and I turned him onto a book that deserves to be better known, Tom Reiss’ The Black Count, which is about Dumas’ father (I was reading The Best and the Brightest, which I’ve dragged around so much recently—including on a camping trip—that the paperback is warped and bent). All of that is lost if you’re just sitting there staring at a screen. 

Elsewhere in The Bully Pulpit, Goodwin tells the story of a journalist commissioned to write a profile of Roosevelt. At his office in the New York City police department, in the few moments between one meeting ending and the next beginning, Roosevelt picked up a book on the culture of Sioux Indian tribes. The journalist was amazed. It was only enough time to read a page, maybe two. 

“It is surprising,” Roosevelt told the journalist, “how much reading a man can do in time usually wasted.”

That’s exactly right. 

Stop wasting time. 

Bring a book with you everywhere.