Earlier this month, I gave a talk in Colorado. I got in late, but it was OK because I knew they were putting me up in a really nice hotel, one I remembered staying in before. As I walked to my room, I was struck by how run down the hotel was. The furnishings seemed staid. The walls were scuffed. The decor was tired. Even the electronics in the room were old. 

Weird, I thought, this hotel used to be new and trendy. 

Then it hit me: It used to be. Time had passed. I might have been in my twenties the first time I stayed there! And then it really hit me: I used to be new and trendy. I’m pretty worn down myself! Those same years have been working on me, too. 

There is a similar observation from Seneca. He’s visiting the house he grew up in and is lamenting the poor state of the landscaping. All the trees that lined the road on the way in were dying. Then he realized, this wasn’t a maintenance issue. The trees, which he had planted himself were dying…of old age. And he himself was not in much better shape. 

I’m writing this birthday post—my 37th birthday and my 12th post in this series—in a COVID brain fog (I picked it up on my book tour). I’m not great at math, but when I was born, life expectancy was roughly 75 years…that puts me at the halfway point. I know medicine is better these days but that still hits me. It hits me like the vibe of that hotel hallway. 

Not that I feel old. If anything, I feel like I am at the height of my powers creatively. I love my life. I love my work. If you told me that this was the halfway point of my life, I’d be grateful. In fact, if you told me this was the end, I’d feel pretty good about that too—I have well more than 37 years to show for the 37 years I’ve gotten. 

So with that in mind, I thought I’d pass along some lessons I’ve learned this year (and beyond) as I have in previous years (check out 36, 35, 34, 33, 32, 31, 30, 29, 28, 27, and 26).

1. “We’ve got nowhere to be and nothing to do,” my seven-year-old said a couple of weekends ago when we tried to prod him to finish something up. He was right and I’m trying to make this a little bit of a mantra. It’s not exactly true but it’s a nice counterbalance to my more natural inclination of doing, doing, doing.

2. I’m not sure I’ve ever opened a social media app and then after logging off thought, “Wow, I’m so glad I did that.”

3. Conversely, I have never taken a walk without thinking, after, “I am so glad I did that.”

4. George Raveling told me that when he wakes up in the morning, he says to himself, “George, you’ve got two choices today. You can be happy or very happy. Which will it be?”

4b. Voltaire put it another way I love: The most important decision you make is to be in a good mood.

5. I was talking to a friend and he said something I can’t stop thinking about: “Having a contrarian view that turns out to be correct can be a brain-destroying experience.”

6. One more from George: he told me a story from when he was a kid—“George,” his grandmother asked him, “do you know why slave owners hid their money in their books?” “No, Grandma, why?” he said. “Because they knew the slaves would never open them,” she told him. 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. My entire career has been made possible by what I read.

7. There is a fine line between complacency and using your success to be more deliberate and intentional. Or maybe it’s not such a fine line…that’s why I’m trying to use that advice from my 7-year-old to remind myself that if success doesn’t afford you the luxury of picking your shots (or some autonomy over your schedule), what good is it?

8. Epictetus said that an athlete doesn’t think about whether a throw is good or bad. They just catch it and throw it back. This is life. Everything is a catchable throw. You gotta get there and then you gotta toss it back.

9. Another sports analogy…the great ones tune out the crowd. It’s been a journey for me to wrap my head around tuning out not just the cheers but the reality of the fact that the bigger your audience is, by definition the bigger the amount of people who don’t like you also. (I shudder to think how many people out there think I suck…so I don’t think about it!)

10. “‘​Rich’​ is how much you see your kids,” I’ve been saying at Daily Dad. “‘​Power’​ is how much power you have over your own schedule.”

11. I don’t have any goals. None. I have things I like doing—writing, running, etc—and I do them. My only goal is to keep doing those things. Results and accomplishments are the byproduct of this process.

12. Gandhi was once asked what worried him most. His reply? “Hardness of heart of the educated.” When I look around right now, I think of this hardness of heart—the embrace of cruelty, ‘owning the libs,’ etc—as one of the big problems of our time. But that’s always been there. There has always been dark energy in human affairs. What is more alarming is the way that good people have become utterly exhausted and detached as a result of going on eight years of resisting this energy.

13. By the way, that’s what the dark energy is after. They don’t actually hope to convince a majority of anything. They hope to exhaust a majority and then grab the steering wheel for a bit (again or for a bit longer). That’s what happened during Reconstruction. That was what Southern politicians hoped for during Civil Rights. That’s the movement afoot right now (both candidates are the same et al).

14. “You just have to keep going back,” the civil rights attorney John Doar said. You can’t let them wear you down. You can let them make you give up.

15. If success—more knowledge, more ability, more money, a promotion, whatever—doesn’t make you a better person, it’s not success.

16. Along similar lines, a friend of mine was torn about leaving a very important job that a lot of people would kill for, but made him miserable. I told him, “If you can’t walk away, then you don’t have the job…the job has you.”

17. It’s amazing the amount of work we’ll put into humoring other people. It’s amazing what we’ll put up with from other people. It’s amazing how patient (or how many times we’ll repeat ourselves) we can be with a clueless colleague or client. Yet we just cannot bring ourselves to figure out how our own children can stand to watch YouTube videos of people playing video games. We can’t bear to ask them to do something a third time. We just cannot remember the names of our spouse’s friends or that thing they were telling us about. What the hell?

18. Speaking of hotels, you know you can just leave when you’re ready to go. Checking out is for amateurs…

18b. What I’m really saying is figure out how the pros–the people who do whatever you’re doing, be it travel or banking or shopping for a car or whatever–do it and see what efficiencies you can pick up. See what assumptions can be questioned.

19. I struggle with calibrating how to have high standards without hanging oneself on them. Of course, deciding willy-nilly what time you start each day is a recipe for slowly, steadily drifting towards starting later and later. On the other hand, sweating five minutes here or there—especially when what you’re rushing through is school dropoff or traffic that’s outside your control—is a recipe for misery and missing the point. A book, for instance, is a project that takes months and years. Pace yourself accordingly.

19b. This is what John Steinbeck was talking about when he talked about the ‘indiscipline of overwork.’ It was, he said, the falsest of economies (​more about that here​).

20. Why did it take so long for me to get a water bottle to carry around? What percentage of my issues as a child–and arguments I’ve gotten into as an adult–were the result of mild dehydration?

20b. The other day I had just enough ice in there that the water and the ice had sort of combined into a slush. It just hit me that this was the kind of pleasure that Epicurus was chasing. It’s not much…but it’s so wonderful.

21. Like a lot of men of my generation, I’ve learned about this concept of “mental load” in relationships (the way, unthinkingly, a lot of responsibilities, emotional obligations and tasks are placed on women). This has necessitated a lot of changes in my life, not all of which have been easy. But I will say this concept has also helped me as a boss, realizing ways in which I was carrying mental loads for people/projects and allowed me to make changes in how I manage and what my expectations are for my employees.

22. Which brings me to something I talked about in ​Ego Is The Enemy​. Almost invariably, making improvements in your personal life or your self-development will make you better professionally. The converse is less often true—getting better and better at what you do is not necessarily going to make you a better spouse, parent, citizen.

23. At Per Se, Thomas Keller put up signs that say “A Sense of Urgency.” While I may need to work on slowing down a bit, I’d say most people could use a little speeding up. One of the things I say at work is ​“Start the clock”​ or sometimes, out of frustration, “Why the fuck have we not started the clock on this?” The point is: Stuff takes time. When you add time in front (by taking too long to start) or in the middle (by taking too long to reply) or at the end (by taking too long to process and start the next thing) you are making it take longer. How long other people take to do their parts is not up to you, how long you take to do your stuff is.

24. All success (indeed all failure, too) ​is a lagging indicator​. What are the choices you’re making now to give you what you want later?

25. Sometimes I’ll take a caffeine mint right before I go for a run or a bike ride. I have a lot of reasons to be glad I’m alive, but that right there is one of them. Epicurus would be jealous.

26. How does this stop you? This was the question the Stoics asked. How does this situation stop you from acting with ​courage​, ​discipline​, ​justice​ and wisdom? How could it?

27. I am getting better at recognizing when my brain is not functioning optimally. So like, I can say, when someone tries to explain something to me, “Sorry, I am not in a position to understand this right now.” Or, I can recognize, hey, this is not a good time to have this discussion with my wife. I used to brute force everything, even when I was tired or burned out, but what you find is that this itself just requires more work later, when you have to undo the mistakes you made because you were too fried to think clearly.

28. You are almost certainly not saying enough positive stuff. You’re not saying ‘good job’ enough. ‘Thank you’ enough. ‘I love you enough.’ You are not complimenting, congratulating, or appreciating enough.

29. The fewer opinions you have, the happier you’ll be. Or at least, if you do have to have opinions about things that don’t really matter, hold them lightly and in good humor.

30. Everybody thinks Jimmy Carter was a bad president because he was too nice or too idealistic or whatever, that he should have waited until reelection to do some of the things he did. Turns out the real reason he struggled (and why he wasn’t re-elected) was that he tried to get away with not having a Chief of Staff (read Chris Whipple’s book ​The Gatekeepers​). This is an important lesson, I think: At the end of the day, it comes down to how well-organized you are and how tight a ship you run. Most everything else is secondary.

31. If you want to understand the present moment, go read about the past. Read something about a similar moment from a long time ago. ​The Great Influenza​ is an amazing book to understand the pandemic. ​It Can’t Happen Here​ and ​All The Kings’ Men​ are two great novels to understand the political moment. ​Invisible Man​ is a great way to understand the conversation about race. ​Jan Morris’ memoir​ from 1974 helped me understand what it means to be transgender.

32. I posted ​a picture of my positive COVID test​ and a bunch of people got extremely upset. This struck me as really weird because one of the things I have learned as a parent is anything you can do to avoid getting your family sick, you should probably do.

33. But this is just a life lesson too: Not just, why should my kids have to miss out on things they were looking forward to this week because I picked up something on my book tour? Not just why should my wife be rewarded with a fever for holding down the fort while I was gone, but why should my employees have to take something home to their kids, why should an old person I stood next to at CVS end up in the hospital when I could have worked from home and gotten things delivered? And this has nothing to do with this very specific (and strangely controversial) virus but has to do with all colds, bugs, and illnesses, it has to do with how you choose to drive on the road, it has to do with all sorts of little choices we make. The ​virtue of justice​ is considering how your actions impact other people. The only positive we should take from the pandemic is how interconnected and interdependent we all are.

34. And by the way, if you look back at COVID–something that killed more than 1.2 million Americans and at least 7 million people worldwide and you think we overreacted, I just don’t know what to say to you.

34b. Should we have done a bunch of things differently? Did the government make a bunch of indefensible mistakes? Did a lot of the assumptions turn out to be incorrect? Yes. But the indefensible reality is that we could have and should have done more, and when we look at this period as a historical moment, that’s what our children and grandchildren will say to us.

35. At the beginning of 2023, I made the decision to push ​the book I was working on​ an extra year. It was the first time I’ve ever done that. I think maybe I thought that it would be a nice chill and easy year but if anything, it was much harder. This is a good reminder: We often work and stay busy as an excuse to not deal with harder problems at home and with ourselves.

36. One of my favorite chapters in ​Right Thing, Right Now​ is the one on ​‘coaching trees.’​ A successful coach or leader should not just be judged on what they achieve, but also on what the people they discover, scout, hire, and develop are able to achieve. At the end of your life, you’re going to be most proud of the impact you’ve had on people.

36b. I can’t pay Robert Greene back for things he did and the doors he opened for me, but I can pay it forward.

37. Remember, you don’t die once at the end of your life. You are dying every second that passes. We are going in one direction. Don’t rush through it. Don’t miss it. Have something to show for it.

In 1950, a man grieving his young son who had just died of polio got a letter from Albert Einstein. Now, one might think that as a man of science, Einstein would have had a rather resigned view of the tragic nature of the human condition.

We’re born. We’re buffeted by forces beyond our control, beyond our comprehension, and then we die. Often for no reason, leaving profound suffering in its wake.

Given the immensity of the events of the middle of the twentieth century—the Holocaust and the violence of the atomic age—it was quite reasonable that Einstein might be inured to the loss of a single child to whom he had no relation.

Instead, Einstein’s letter was one of profound and philosophic condolence.

“A human being,” he wrote, “is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.”

Einstein was expressing one of the few things that physics and philosophers and priests seem to agree on: That everything and everyone is far more connected than we are prone to think. We shared an animating force, an energy, a unity that no matter what happens or how different things seem is always there. Even in our suffering, in our grief, we are tapping into something eternal and vast, something that makes us realize we are very much not alone.

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” James Baldwin wrote, “and then you read.” It was books, history, philosophy, Baldwin said, that taught him that “the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”

We are all one. It’s so easy to forget it, but it’s true.

The virtue of justice–what my new book Right Thing, Right Now is all about–is this idea that because of interconnectedness and interrelatedness, we have an obligation. Stoicism is not lone-wolfness. It’s the understanding that we are one single organism and that the fate of one is the fate of all.

As I wrote in Stillness is the Key, no one has felt this more profoundly than the astronauts who had the unique experience of seeing the Earth from space. Whether they were American or Russian or Chinese, they were all overwhelmed by what has been called the “overview effect,” an instantaneous global consciousness, an inescapable sense that everyone is in the same boat, no matter where they live or what they believe.

What they experienced looking at the “Blue Marble” that is our planet was the exact thing that Hierocles, the 2nd century Stoic, was trying to teach people about two thousand years ago. Yes, we naturally think of ourselves and the people we love first, but with work, we can expand that circle of concern larger and larger until we see everything that is alive as one enormous organism. Astronauts experience the exact same thing that Gandhi, who never even flew in a plane, never saw humanity from above more than a few stories up in a building, called the great oneness.

Realizing this, letting it wash over us, sitting in awe of it—it’s more than just humbling. It also makes us more generous, more courageous, more committed to what’s right. It makes us less concerned with petty nonsense, with meaningless distinctions, with grudges or our own pain.

It’s euphoric. It can also be existentially devastating.

The actor William Shatner, after a lifetime of exploring space on film, finally visited the cosmos at age ninety. He thought he’d marvel at the beauty of all that he beheld. Instead, looking at the Earth from afar, all he felt was sadness.

Because, he realized, everything that mattered was down there on Earth and everyone was taking it for granted. They were destroying this thing of beauty, abusing it, stealing it from generations unborn.

The garment of interdependence, the great bundle of humanity that Frances Ellen Watkins Harper spoke of, it’s real. But what kind of shape is it in these days? The environment is reeling. Billions live in poverty. Millions perish of totally preventable causes. Injustice tears at the fabric that binds us together.

How long can it go unchecked before everything comes apart?

I am convinced that people are much better off when their whole city is flourishing than when certain citizens prosper but the community has gone off course. When a man is doing well for himself but his country is falling to pieces, he goes to pieces along with it, but a struggling individual has much better hopes if his country is thriving.

Is that the lament of a modern politician? The manifesto of some early-twentieth-century socialist revolutionary?

No, it’s Pericles in 431 BC.

The whole point of government and the social contract is built around this idea. All government, it was said by one of the Founders, have as its sole goal the common welfare.

What good is our success if it comes at the expense of others? How safe are we if our safety leaves others vulnerable? What good are we if we can’t help others? We are all bound up in this thing called life together. We share this planet together. When we forget that, or lose track of how our own actions affect others, that’s when injustice flourishes.

Marcus Aurelius’s line that “what’s bad for the hive is bad for the bee” could just as easily be a quip in an upcoming political debate as it could be a New York Times op ed. It’s something that he needed constant reminders of, just as we do. He strove to see the world “as a living being—one nature and soul . . . [where] everything feeds into that single experience, moves with a single motion. And how everything helps produce everything else. Spun and woven together.” Did his policies and decisions always reflect that? No. And his biggest failings—the persecution of the Christians by the Romans at that time—are a reflection of what happens when we lose track of that ultimate north star.

“I am not conscious of a single experience throughout my three month stay in England and Europe,” Gandhi observed after one of his visits, “that made me feel that after all East is East and West is West. On the contrary, I have been convinced more than ever that human nature is much the same, no matter what clime it flourishes.”

This was why he couldn’t hate. Why he couldn’t turn his back. Why he dreamed of a better world with fewer divisions, where problems were never solved by violence or domination. “Life will not be a pyramid with an apex sustained by the bottom,” he explained, sounding like Hierocles. “But it will be an oceanic circle whose centre will be the individual always ready to perish for the village, the latter ready to perish for the circle of villages, till at last the whole becomes one life composed of individuals, never aggressive in their arrogance but ever humble, sharing the majesty of the oceanic circle of which they are integral units.”

This is what the last years of his life were dedicated to, why he was willing to die not just for independence but for equality for the untouchables and for Muslim and Hindu peace. “I am a Muslim,” he said, “a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Christian, a Jew, a Parsi.”

And so are you. We all are.

We are one and the same. All mortal. All flawed. All gifted with incredible potential. All deserving of justice and respect and dignity. All unique individuals and yet an inseparable part of humanity, of the past, present, and future.

Truman kept a line from a Milton poem in his wallet that read simply:

The parliament of Man, the federation of the world.

That’s what we belong to. That’s what we must protect.

This article is actually a chapter from the third book in my Stoic Virtues Series, Right Thing, Right Now: Good Values. Good Character. Good Deeds. which is officially available wherever books are sold! This is a book I’ve been thinking about for five years and writing for two. I’m really proud of it and hope you’ll check it out.

If you missed out on preordering, we’re still honoring bonuses (including signed and numbered pages from the original manuscript, bonus chapters, and even an invitation to a long book-themed dinner at The Painted Porch) at dailystoic.com/justice for a limited time.

There aren’t too many of us who are satisfied with the person we currently are.

That is, we know we could be better. We know we should be better.

And by better, we don’t mean at our jobs, at lifting weights, or looking better, or having more money.

We know we could be better people–that is to say, kinder, more generous, more patient, more thoughtful, more reliable.

But how many of us actually do anything about this? How many of us are as focused on being good?

“A better wrestler?” Marcus Aurelius asked himself, rhetorically, referring to the time he spent improving at one of his hobbies. “But not a better citizen, a better person, a better resource in tight places, a better forgiver of faults?”

What is your most important job? he emphasizes. “To be a good person.”

When the Stoics talked about the virtue of justice, they weren’t talking about a legal system of rules and codes. They were talking about what Marcus was talking about—actively working to be a better citizen, a better person, a better resource, a better forgiver of faults.

That’s what I spent a lot of time thinking about as I wrote my newest book, ​Right Thing, Right Now​ (…which you can ​preorder…right now​). It’s about this key Stoic virtue, the virtue that challenges us to put in the work to be good, not just to be great. You know, values, character, deeds.

So here, riffing on some ideas from the ​new book​, are 10 habits that will make you better at your most important job—being a good person:

1. Tell the truth. “I’m going to be honest with you…”. How many times have you heard this phrase or said it yourself? It seems casual or like a way to establish trust. But beginning a remark by claiming we’re going to give it to you straight is of course implying that most of the time we’re not doing that. Honesty should not need a preface, Marcus Aurelius would say. An honest person should be like a smelly goat in the room—you know when they’re there. In matters big or small, public or private, convenient or inconvenient, tell the truth. Don’t be a jerk about it. Don’t give everyone your unsolicited opinion about how they should live or look or act. “Speak the truth as you see it,” Marcus reminded himself, “but with kindness. With humility. Without hypocrisy.” Be honest, not hurtful. Be a bastion of truth in a time of lies. This is more than just the right thing to do, it’s your job. As a friend. As a parent. As an employee. As a human being.
2. Respect others. Clementine Churchill once left a note for her husband. “My Darling Winston,” she wrote, “I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not so kind as you used to be.” Yes, he had power, she noted, but if you keep disrespecting people, “You won’t get the best results.” The way you treat others sets off a chain reaction that shapes your life in profound ways. Disrespect, rudeness, pettiness, jealousy—these things repel. But dignity, equanimity, politeness, calm—they attract. They draw people in. They bring the best out of others. Choose wisely.
3. Give, give, give. When Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote a book, he avoided procrastination and overthinking. His only ritual before starting was to make a small donation to a charity he and his wife supported. Like ancient sacrifices to gods before battle, the rabbi waged the war of art by first striking with an act of kindness. Generosity is admirable, and many of us wish we could be better at it. There’s only one way to improve, and it happens to be the same way one gets better at writing or any other craft: by doing it. Not later, once we’re better off or once somebody really needs it. But consistently, regularly, habitually. Money is not the only currency of generosity. You can give your time, your energy, your words of encouragement, your patience, your kindness. Seneca reminds us that every person we meet is an opportunity for kindness. For expressions of generosity. How are you doing? Do you need anything? Can I help you with that? These opportunities are everywhere, every day. Start to seize them. Make a habit of it.
4. Find the good. During one of his many stints in prison, Gandhi made a pair of sandals for General Jan Smuts, the prime minister of South Africa, who put Gandhi in jail. Somewhere in Smuts, despite his complicity in a racist and exploitative system, there was goodness, Gandhi believed. Smuts wore the sandals and thought of Gandhi’s grace and goodness as he did. Smuts eventually tried to return them, saying he felt unworthy to stand in the shoes of such a great man. To his credit, he made an effort to fill those shoes. He contributed to the founding of the League of Nations, drafted the UN Charter, and helped find a homeland for Jews after the Holocaust. He said Gandhi inspired him to redeem himself. Each of us, the Holocaust survivor Edith Eger would later write, has both a Hitler and a Corrie ten Boom (one of the Righteous Among the Nations honorees) inside us. Which one are you letting out? Which one are you seeing in others?
5. Choose a north star. I watched Dov Charney go from a hero in the fashion business to one of its villains. In the early days, he was focused on challenging the broken assumptions of the business. He cared about his workers. He cared about the environment. Later, it became all about him, all about his urges, all about his power. This is the power of a north star. It can take you on an amazing journey or get you hopelessly lost. Your values, your aspirations, the things pushing and pulling you—whatever they are, they foretell a prophecy. They determine where you’ll end up…and who you’ll be when you get there. Cash is a bad but easy north star to default to. Same with ego, fame, power, a desire for revenge or dominance—they will lead you astray. Loyalty, mastery, a love of the game, a desire to keep your hands clean, to be an open book, have a clear conscience. These things take you north. They lead you forward. They cut through the noise. Of the cardinal directions, justice is the clearest, the Stoics said—it points you north, shows you where to go. Follow it, and you’ll end up in a good place…and you’ll be a good person when you get there.
6. Hold the line. Your north star will illuminate a line in your life. That is, the line between good and evil, right and wrong, ethical and unethical, fair and unfair. Courage requires you to put your ass on that line. Self-discipline tells you to get your ass in line. Justice is holding that line. It’s what you will do and what you won’t. What you will stand for and what you won’t stand for. It’s the decisions you make, the actions you take. Indeed, all the philosophical and religious traditions–from Confucius to Christianity, Plato to Hobbes and Kant—are best preached not with words but with actions. Each action is like a lantern that hollows darkness and uncertainty. Each decision to do the right thing is a statement that our peers, children, and future generations will hear. So draw the line and hold it.
7. Develop competence. Keeping your word, taking responsibility, having compassion, good intentions, and good values are great. So is wanting to change things, to take on evil or injustice. But these feelings are worthless without competence. Florence Nightingale is often portrayed as an angelic nurse gliding through the halls of hospitals. The reality is much more impressive. She was a tireless seeker of knowledge, a stern teacher and trainer of a generation of talented nurses, a fierce advocate for resources, a diligent fundraiser, and a skilled steward of that money. If a problem is to be solved, it must be studied. If progress is to be made, if positive change is to happen, it will be paved not with good intentions but rock-hard competence. It will require courage, discipline, and wisdom. Of course it will. If change, if being of service, if developing smarts, capability, and competence were easy, everyone would do it and no one would be impressive.
8. Love. In the struggle against injustice, it’s easy to let bitterness and hatred harden your heart. As Marcus Aurelius wrote: “What doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness.” When we close ourselves off to love and hope, we naturally experience less love and hope. The Bible reminds us that “whoever hardens their heart falls into trouble.” And James Baldwin, that “hatred…has never failed to destroy the men who hated.” Hatred corrodes. It takes you south, backward, down, down to depths. Love, on the other hand, protects, trusts, hopes, preserves. Love does not fail. It takes you north, it leads you forward. It always wins. Which way are you going? Is your heart growing or shrinking? Is your love and compassion and connection for other people, your hope for a better future, growing or shrinking?
9. Just be kind. How did Hadrian know that Antoninus would be a worthy mentor to Marcus Aurelius? That he could give his absolute power to another man with only a promise that Antoninus would protect and guide Marcus to one day rule in his place? Because he felt he had glimpsed into Antoninus’ true character when he had once watched Antoninus help his elderly stepfather up a flight of stairs. He didn’t know anyone could see. It wasn’t a performance. It wasn’t ‘virtue signaling’ as we call it today. It was actual virtue—what Antonius brought to his twenty years as Marcus’ guardian and to the Roman people as their leader. Character is fate, the Stoics said. Small acts are no small thing, they said. A helping hand, a smile, a door held open, a favor rendered—you never know who might be watching. You never know what low moment you might be rescuing a person from. You never know the ripple effect your small gesture can have. But that’s not why we do it. We do it because it’s right—because people deserve kindness and because kindness makes us better. We do it because it’s the discipline we practice.
10. Leave this place better than you found it. There’s a sign at the track I used to run at in Austin that reads: “Leave This Place Better Than You Found It.” It was put up by the Hollywood Henderson, who paid for the track (and made the neighborhood better). You don’t have to save the planet. You don’t have to save someone’s life. Can you make sure you pick up a piece of trash when you see it? Can you do something nice for a stranger? Can you just make things a little bit better every day?

Life is short.

Be good. Do good. Find the good.

Draw the line and hold it. Be respectful, kind, competent. Love and be loved.

Do the right thing.

Right now.

If you enjoyed this article, then I promise you’ll like my new book: ​Right Thing, Right Now​. This book comes out June 11th, but it would mean the world to me if you could preorder the book from ​dailystoic.com/justice​. 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 they’ll give an author a book tour, 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, and a bunch of other stuff. Just head to ​dailystoic.com/justice​ before June 11th to claim your bonuses.

And one last thing before I go… I’m celebrating the launch of ​Right Thing, Right Now​ in New York City at the ​Barnes & Noble Union Square​ on June 11th. I’d love for you to join me. There will be a live Q&A, book signings, and more. Learn more and register ​here​.