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Man. What a year. 

There’s not much you can say about 2020 that doesn’t include some curse words, but I will say this: It provided plenty of time for reading. It provided plenty of things that needed to be read about—from leadership to pandemics to civil rights to elections—this was one of those years that sends you to… well, I would say “the bookstore,” but that was hard, too.

Anyway, I read a lot. As I’m sure you did too. 

Every year, I try to narrow down all the books I have recommended and read for this email list to just a handful of the best. The kind of books where if they were the only books I’d read that year, I’d still feel like it was an awesome year of reading. (You can check out the best of lists I did in 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011.)

My reading list is now ~250,000 people, which means I hear pretty quickly when a recommendation has landed well. I promise you—you can’t go wrong with any of these.

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry

There is something surreal about reading a book published 15 years ago about an event 100 years ago that just happens to nail exactly what’s happening in this moment (his book Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America is also good and equally timeless.) Barry’s haunting book covers in definitive, gripping detail the Spanish flu: a global pandemic which staggered nations and cities and the brightest medical minds of the time. “It’s only the influenza,” confident officials repeated. “It’ll be over soon,” they reassured. And then the President of the United States caught it… (I’m talking about Woodrow Wilson, of course). Because the more things change, the more they stay the time. Because history is the same song happening on repeat. Anyway, reading this book at the beginning of the pandemic was not only educational, but it has helped shape my family and businesses’ responses to the crisis. Barry writes of the relief people felt when the Spanish flu seemed to be winding down. They thought it was over, but actually only the first wave was done. “For the virus had not disappeared. It had only gone underground, like a forest fire left burning in the roots, swarming and mutating, adapting, honing itself, watching and waiting, waiting to burst into flame.” You cannot relax yet. You cannot drop your shield, as the Spartans would say. You must continue to protect the line. The health of your neighbors depends on it. And I joked in February that I was deliberately not going to read The Road by Cormac McCarthy this book because of the pandemic. In truth, I got it down from my shelf and sat on my bedside table while I worked up the courage to read it again. My feelings were well-founded, because on the night I finished, all I could do was walk quietly into my son’s room and sob while he slept. The Road is just one of the most beautiful and profound depictions of struggle and sacrifice and love ever put down on the page. Worth reading again!

Leadership: In Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin 

This is an absolutely incredible book. I think I marked up nearly every page. The book is a study of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR and Lyndon Johnson, and it is so clearly the culmination of a lifetime of research… and yet somehow not overwhelming or boring. Distillation at its best! I have read extensively on each of those figures and I got a ton out of it. Even stuff I already knew, I benefited from Goodwin’s perspective. This is the perfect book to read right now—a timely reminder that leadership matters. Or as the Stoics say: character is fate. Or as I wrote about in this piece about leadership during the plague in ancient Rome: when things break down, good leaders have to stand up. After Goodwin, I picked up Leadership in War: Essential Lessons from Those Who Made History by Andrew Roberts, who I find to be funny, insightful and quite good at capturing the essence of unique historical figures. I also recommend Roberts’ biographies of Churchill and Napoleon (you can listen to my interview with Roberts here). As I said, now is the time to get perspective and to learn from the past.

Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 by Taylor Branch

I’ve raved about some of my favorite epic biographies before: Robert Caro’s LBJ, William Manchester’s Churchill, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Well, add another to the list. Taylor Branch’s definitive series on Martin Luther King Jr. and the American civil rights movement has not only been riveting, eye-opening and humbling, it’s been the perfect vehicle to help me understand what’s happening in the world right now. I finished Parting the Waters and immediately picked up Volume II, Pillar of Fire. I’ve come to believe that one of the best ways to become an informed citizen in the present is not to watch the news, but to read history. The actor Hugh Jackman said in an interview a few months ago that he’s been getting his news by keeping his eye on the big picture—going through the Ken Burns catalog and reading books like Meditations. “That’s the way you should understand events and humanity,” he said, “with that sort of 30,000-foot view.” If you want to understand what’s happening in the United States right now as it pertains to race, get off Twitter and read these books. On that note, I re-read Invisible Man, first published in 1952, in light of the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. There are many “anti-racist” reading lists floating around, but how many of the books on those lists will still be readable in 70 years? Do yourself a favor and read this. It’s not going anywhere because it is timeless—and sadly, very timely. I also learned so much from Edward Ball’s Life of a Klansman (and when I interviewed him) and just as much from Albion W. Tourgee’s A Fool’s Errand (Albion was one of the legal advisors in Plessy v. Ferguson). Strongly recommend one or both of these books to anyone who wants to become better informed instead of more partisan. My study of this history has been ongoing, but I feel I have learned far more these books than I have from the trendy white fragility books going around. Also if you’re interested, here’s a step I have taken in regards to Confederate monuments (that is: literal white supremacy monuments, as you’ll learn in these books and some of my interviews on the topic) in my town. 

More…

I really can’t leave it at just three books. I loved Cecil Woodham Smith’s books, Florence Nightingale and The Reason Why: The Story of the Fatal Charge of the Light Brigade. I loved Julian Jackson’s biography of de Gaulle and McCullough’s biography of Truman. I loved even more Wright Thompson’s The Cost of These Dreams. The best thing I read about writing was Steinbeck’s Journal of a Novel. The best two bits of philosophy I read were Plutarch’s How to Be a Leader and Carlin Barton’s Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones (an expensive primer on the Stoics, really—but very good). As far as kid’s books goes, we read The Scarecrow together many times. Every night we read A Poem for Every Night of the Year (edited by Esiri Allie). We’ve also done several tours through the stories in Fifty Famous Stories Retold by James Baldwin. Finally, I spent a lot of time with Marcus Aurelius during the pandemic… because he himself lived through one. The big thing I took away, which pertains to so much of what’s in these books: “You can commit injustice by doing nothing. “Be free of passion but full of love.” “No, it’s not unfortunate that this happened, it’s fortunate that it happened to me.”

Of course, I also put out a book this year, Lives of the Stoics, which debuted at #1. I also released a box set of The Obstacle Is the Way, Ego Is the Enemy and Stillness Is the Key. You can get them anywhere books are sold OR we have signed, personalized editions in the Daily Stoic store. They make great gifts!

But most importantly, I hope you join me in the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. 

New Year, New You is a set of 21 actionable challenges—presented one per day—built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. Each challenge is specifically designed to help you:

• Stop procrastinating on your dreams

• Learn new skills

• Quit harmful vices

• Make amends

• Learn from past mistakes

• Have more hope for the new year

• And much much more…

21 challenges designed to set up potentially life-changing habits for 2021 and beyond.

There are over 30,000 words of exclusive content that I don’t post anywhere else. Each day also has an audio companion from me, weekly group Zoom calls, a Slack channel for accountability, and a lot more. It’s one of my favorite things I do each year and really enjoy interacting with everyone in the challenge. Click here to learn more.

We’ve heard it. 

We’ve said it.

When things go back to normal.

I found myself thinking that this very morning as I took my sons for our morning walk. How much longer is it going to go on like this?

It’s understandable of course. This all feels very strange. A pandemic that has disrupted our lives. Everything seems so polarized. The election is still being contested. This is not how stuff usually is, right?

But of course, that’s not true at all. Any student of history knows that 2020 is hardly abnormal.

A hundred years ago we had a pandemic much worse than this one…in the middle of a world war. We had a great depression after that. There was a pandemic in the ‘50s. In ‘68, not only were there massive civil rights protests and riots, but there was also a flu pandemic that killed some 100,000 people in the U.S. and over a million across the globe. In fact, I defy you to find me a single “normal” decade in American history.

The last two decades have hardly been peaceful and simple. They began with a contested election and legal challenges. They were followed by a terrorist attack that left 3,000 dead. Then we had a financial crisis on par with the Depression. Now here we are, simultaneously facing a pandemic, a nationwide protest movement, and an economic crisis.

The Stoics were fond of quoting Heraclitus: the only constant is change.

It’s true, but the funny thing is that even change seems to rhyme with itself, if not outright repeat.

As the Bible tells us, “The thing that hath been,” we read in one part, “it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun… That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past.”

Did Marcus Aurelius read Ecclesiates? Or did he discover for himself that, “Whatever happens has always happened and always will, and is happening at this very moment, everywhere. Just like this.”

“Time is a flat circle,” Rustin Cohle says in the first season of True Detective. “Everything we have done or will do we will do over and over and over again forever.” And so it was that another generation found out about Nietzche’s idea of “eternal recurrence.” Did Nietzsche read Marcus? Did Nic Pizzolatto read Nietzsche? Or Marcus? Or Ecclesiastes? 

Or is this realization just something you can’t help but pick up if you’re paying attention?

It’s interesting to observe that Marcus’s reign was not really that different from the reign of Vespasian. It was filled with people doing the same things: eating, drinking, fighting, dying, worrying, and craving. Can you imagine if, during the crises he faced, he chose to “just wait for things to go back to normal” instead of doing, well, anything?

Everything that happens is normal. There is nothing unusual about any of this. 

Life is life. The only surprise is that we’re surprised. 

Sure, you’d rather not be working from home. You’d love to be traveling freely. Maybe you would like anyone to have been president rather than Donald Trump. But who is to say having or not having these things is “normal?”

They just are.

And you can’t just wait them out. 

Because what you’re waiting to end…is life. It’s now. It’s the present moment. 

One of the reasons to study history is that it gives you perspective. Distance has the effect of sanding down the edges and smoothing the transitions between things. When you read about the Great Influenza, when you immerse yourself in the characters of Shakespeare, when you visit a Civil War battlefield or an ancient castle, you gain a better understanding of how similar the past was to the present. How the more things change, the more they stay the same—how our petty plans and projections have very little impact on the tides of time. There’s nothing to take personally. 

It just is. 

History is violent. History is hard. History is confusing and overwhelming. History didn’t care about the people who had to live through it. History is like this because history is just a recording of life, and life is like that. 

But does that mean we can’t have peace or happiness within this chaos? That because there is no such thing as “normal” we should be anxious and depressed?

On the contrary!

I remember once reading a book about the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann—the adventurer who found the lost city of Troy. In the 1860s, he immigrated to America and worked his way across the country on a variety of jobs. It was incredible to notice that this guy had lived through the Civil War, which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, and it never even appeared in his diaries or changed his plans. He had found his own personal normal inside the craziness of world events. He’d simply gone on with his life. 

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera writes, “No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, in Hitler’s time, in Stalin’s time, through all occupations… against the backdrop of blue hills, they were as beautiful as a lullaby.” 

That’s what I came to realize on my walk this morning. Yeah, this time is weird. It’s maybe not what I’d want, if I had a choice. But I don’t have a choice, because this is just life. 

Why should I pine for it to be over or different? What matters is right now. What matters is the quiet hour we had together on that road. What mattered was the sunrise coming up behind us. What matters is that the last eight months have been eight months of being alive—and I chose to live them.

How much longer will it be like this? How much longer until the next change? 

No one can say. Nobody knows anything for certain except that change will eventually come. 

If people could manage to find happiness and purpose and stillness amidst war, under the rule of tyrants, through plagues far worse than this one, what excuse do we have?

None. This is normal.

This is life. 

Accept it and love it. 

In his letters—the pre-digital medium for distant long-form conversation—Seneca instructs his friend Lucilius to find one thing each day that will fortify him against death, despair, fear, or adversity. Just one thing. One nugget. And that’s what most of Seneca’s letters to his friend are about. They have a quote in them. Or a little prescription. Or a story. But in each case, Seneca is explicit. Here’s your lesson for the day, he says. Here’s your one thing.

Obviously that’s the logic behind the daily emails I write (Daily Stoic and Daily Dad) but it’s also the way I try to live. Every time I listen to a podcast or record one myself, I try to walk away having grabbed at least one little thing. That’s how wisdom is accumulated—piece by piece, day by day, book by book, podcast by podcast.

So today, I wanted to honor that Stoic process by sharing some of the lessons I’ve picked up over a couple thousand hours of listening to podcasts, being interviewed on podcasts, and interviewing people for the Daily Stoic podcast (which you can subscribe to here and here). And with over 30 million downloads of Daily Stoic’s episodes so far, I get really excited to think about how much cumulative knowledge that’s created for people.

But here’s some top-line stuff you can use right now:

***

• Interviewing is a skill like any other. It seems easy—aren’t we all good at having conversations? No we are not! I’m always looking to see masters at work and I try to learn from them when I get a chance to watch. Trying to myself, and seeing how hard it was, has been a great lesson.
• Brian Koppelman’s podcast is called The Moment. It’s about the critical moment in every aspiring artist’s life. When the craft they have long elevated as magic or beyond their grasp suddenly becomes a bit more comprehensible. When they begin to see the medium in a new way. When they realize that on the other side of the work they admire and love is just another human being. And I’m a human being too—which means that if I work hard enough, I can do the same thing. I wrote about my moment here.
• What should a person do after they screw up? What can they do? It occurred to me when I was asked to be on Lance Armstrong’s podcast a couple years back. What does Lance call his podcast? He calls it The Forward. Because that’s really the only thing you can do in life: go forward. That’s what Lance is trying to do with his life now. You don’t have to like him. You don’t have to forgive him. But move on and move forward, is all he can do.
• It’s not fair. When I interviewed Tim Ferriss for the Daily Stoic podcast, he advised that we strip those three words out of our vocabulary. Because they are impotent and meaningless. Because they don’t do anything but make us upset or make us believe we don’t have options. We talked about that Epictetus line, “It is not things that upset us, but our judgements about those things.” “Fair” is an opinion we have about an objective reality we’re in.
• Also from Tim. Tim has always stressed the value of evergreen long-form content. As he told me in my interview with him, “Long-form content isn’t dead; it’s simply uncrowded and neglected. I double-down when formats are out of favor.”
• Matthew McConaughey told me why he shut down his production company and his music label. “I was making B’s in five things. I wanna make A’s in three things.” Those three things: his family, his foundation, his acting career.
• Another from McConaughey. He told me he’s known in Hollywood as “a quick no and a long yes.” What a great expression! Before he says yes to doing a movie, he sleeps on it for ten days to two weeks in the frame of mind that he’s not going to do it. If he sleeps well, he doesn’t do it. If the thought that he has to do it wakes him up at night, he does it.
• An amazing chat with James Altucher on his podcast inspired my piece on envy and jealousy and a thought exercise I still do. We’re usually envious of certain aspects of a person’s life. Instead, picture that you can change places with them in every way. Would you? The answer is always no. You gotta stay on your path. Don’t be distracted by others.
• The legendary basketball coach George Raveling told me he sees reading as a moral imperative. “People died,” he said, speaking of slaves, soldiers, and civil rights activists, “so I could have the ability to read.” If you’re not reading, if books aren’t playing a major role in your life, you are betraying the legacy that they left for the generations after them.
• An essential piece of advice I got from the author Steven Pressfield: There are professional habits and amateur ones. Which are you practicing? Is this a pro or an amateur move? Ask yourself that. Constantly.
• I asked Jocko Willink what his advice would be for someone reeling from the events of the pandemic. “Really, it just comes down to having humility.” People who accept reality can change and adapt. People who let their ego get out of control and deny the severity? Those are the people he’s been seeing get their asses kicked.
• Just a few more years, we tell ourselves. Just until I make enough money. These are the lies we all tell ourselves, the rationales for why we’re doing the thing we hate or being the kind of person we’d rather not be. The brilliant comedian and writer Pete Holmes called it the lie of the “One Last Job.” It’s the lie that bank robbers tell themselves, just as comedians or musicians do—one more tour, one more album, then I’ll slow down. But it never happens. You could leave life right now, Marcus Aurelius reminds us. We have to let that determine what we do and say and the jobs we take and the work we do.
• Pop star Camila Cabello talked about that metaphor from Stillness about looking at the human race as a single person and yourself as an individual part of that person. Just like it’s not the hand’s job to be the best eye, Camilla said, “It’s not everybody’s job to be number one. It’s just your job to be you. The world needs you to be you.”
• Wright Thompson’s book The Cost of These Dreams was one of the books I recommended everyone should read in 2020. I liked his line in our interview, “It’s over now—was it worth it?”
• I was surprised to hear Olympic gymnast Dominique Dawes say that she doesn’t miss or reminisce on being at the Olympics or standing on the podium. “When I dream about exciting moments and memories in my life, those don’t come up… It’s those moments with your family. It’s those moments with your spouse. It’s those moments knowing you planted an amazing positive seed in a stranger’s life. Those are the moments that fulfill us.”
• I asked one of my favorite writers, Rich Cohen, about how he’s able to be so consistently productive at such a high level. He said he approaches a big project like he approaches a cross-country road trip. “The way you deal with long road trips is you set yourself a minimum number of hours a day, no matter how you feel.” The point is that “not much” adds up if you do it a lot. That what Zeno said too: “Well-being is realized by small steps, but is no small thing.”
• The great basketball coach Shaka Smart said something similar. He tells his players not to figure out their priorities, but to figure out their priority. “The root of the word ‘priority’ is singular… It was a singular word—the one thing. In modern times, we’ve turned it into ‘priorities,’ but then all of a sudden it turns into eight, ten, 15 things and that defeats the purpose.” Just do one high-quality thing every day, he said; it adds up.
• Another great basketball coach, Buzz Williams, told me that he keeps a list of what-ifs. Ten times a day, he asks himself, “What if?” What if the college basketball season is canceled? What if we can’t travel for recruiting? What if I experimented with a new routine? “The what-if scenarios force me to think how I can be prepared no matter which way this all unfolds. Because on the other side of this… the people who are going to be the most successful are the ones that can pivot the quickest.”
• One of the first greek words I ever came across was in a lyric of a MxPx song: “First step to Kairos is to take the shells out of our eyes.” I’ve always wondered, what the hell does that mean? I finally got to ask MxPx singer and songwriter Mike Herrera, what the hell does that mean? It’s his spin on the biblical line about hypocrites: “First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the splinter out of your brother’s eye.”
• We do a bad job imagining ourselves on the other side of the judgment we swiftly render against other people. As Billy Bush told me, “We have to be able to fail. We have to tell our children, ‘It’s OK to fail and to not be at your best and to screw up, and then build yourself back up.’ People have to allow other people to do that. It’s not sustaining to not allow people to do that because, at some point, it’s going to be you looking for that welcoming, empathetic embrace.”
• Along similar lines, Rich Roll said, “It’s only through weathering obstacles and grappling with difficulties and you know making mistakes that we truly learn who we are and as a consequence grow.” (Or the obstacle is the way…)
• Austin Kleon talked about being a parent: “You have to be the kind of man that you want them to be. You have to become the kind of human being that you want them to become.” Marcus Aurelius was talking about being a human being: “Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.”
• I loved what the philosopher Quill Kukla said on Tyler Cowen’s podcast about why they love boxing: “From a philosophical point of view, why is boxing good for me? I think philosophers who only do philosophy and nothing else tend to be bad, boring philosophers… I think that if you just do philosophy, you literally don’t have material… Imagine if you were a stand-up comic, and all you did is sit there and try to write comedy all day long. You wouldn’t have any material.”
• Danica Patrick talked about the surreal reality that’s been her life as an international celebrity. “It made me realize that the stuff that we see—the celebrities, the magazines we pick up—we just think, ‘Oh, they’re famous.’ No, they’re being made famous. Somebody’s paying for that… So early on, I realized that there’s a lot of bullshit out there. And that there’s an agenda behind everything.” This is something I try to remember whenever I see someone getting attention and wonder, “Why am I not getting that?”
• One of the great perks of my life is getting to have regular conversations with one of the great writers of our time, Robert Greene. We recently decided to record one of those conversations. I asked him about what I think is the thread through all his books, something which is also in short supply these days: an unflinching commitment to reality, even when it’s inconvenient. “Whenever I hold a belief, or I’m writing a book,” Robert explained, “I always start with the premise that I’m probably wrong, that i’m actually quite ignorant, that my idea is pretty stupid. And I look at the evidence on the other side and I examine it and I try to convince myself that my initial idea was right. And if it isn’t, then I change it.”

***

The line from Zeno was that we were given two ears and one mouth for a reason. That reason? To listen more than we talk.

Today and everyday, we should try to honor the Stoic virtue of wisdom. Get your one thing.

Two ears, one mouth.

Listen accordingly.

You can subscribe to the Daily Stoic Podcast here (Daily Dad here). Also, we have signed copies of all of my Stoic books (including the limited leatherbound edition of The Daily Stoic) available at Daily Stoic’s web store.