WATCH: Ryan Holiday talks about his everyday carries

One of my favorite quotes is from Robert Louis Stevenson: To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom. He also says it’s the beginning of being old, but I ignore that part. 

The point is I make a point to find out what I like and stick to it. While I am generally pretty minimalist—the Stoics were not big on extraneous possessions—I do have a handful of things that are of great utility (or meaning) to me and I carry them with me. And that’s the purpose of today’s piece: to show you what is in what you might call my “everyday carry.”

Some of these things are cheap. Some of them are not. Some of them are replaceable, others are not. To Seneca, the key was to be able to live—and act—as if all one’s possessions were equal, to live without worry of losing. I can’t say that I’m there yet, but I try to be. 

I also try to know what is best so I don’t waste time and energy with flawed design or products that make my life worse. 

Apple Watch — Our lives are tick… tick… ticking away. I like having the reminder on my wrist. At the same time, I don’t use it for any form of alerts or messaging. Honestly for me, it’s just an expensive pedometer/run tracker. It has actually helped me swim better because I don’t have to count laps. I post my swims/runs on Instagram and people ask what kind of watch it is all the time. Literally the most popular watch in the world!

Wedding ring — I have to be honest, I don’t wear my wedding ring everyday. Not because I don’t love my wife, but because I am afraid of losing it in the pool and also it gets too hot in Texas (and your hands swell). But I do carry my marriage with me everywhere. I cannot recommend getting married highly enough. I have a whole chapter on the importance of finding a partner in Stillness is the Key for a reason. 

Signet ring — You’ll notice in most of my author photos that I am wearing a black agate signet ring. This was my grandfather’s ring, and he left it to me when he died. Wearing it makes me feel connected to him. When I’m not wearing it, I wear a Memento Mori signet ring (which has Marcus Aurelius’ famous quote on the inside: You could leave life right now… let that determine what you do and say and think). People have been wearing signet rings for thousands of years, I love the symbolism of it, and here’s a piece we put together on the history of them. 

Power Wash Tee (or vintage tee) — Being able to wear and dress as I please is important to me—at least the freedom of it is. So I am in a T-shirt most days. I basically live in the American Apparel Power Wash Tee, which is the standard American Apparel T-shirt but treated so it mimics a shirt that has been washed roughly 50 times. Unfortunately, the company is basically a ghost ship these days, so the shirts are harder to find than they used to be. If I’m not wearing one, I usually wear vintage concert t-shirts, either that I bought myself or I found on Etsy (if you care about the environment, wearing vintage clothes is actually a basic thing you can do to reduce your footprint).

Memento Mori challenge coin — In my left pocket, I carry a coin that says Memento Mori, which is Latin for ”remember you will die.” On the back, it has one of my favorite quotes from Marcus Aurelius: “You could leave life right now.” I firmly believe the thought of our mortality should shadow everything that we do, not in a way that is depressing, but liberating. It should let you cut out bullshit, it should let you decide how you’re going to treat other people and let yourself be treated, and it should determine the quality of the work that you’re going to do.

Amor Fati coin — In my right pocket, I carry another coin that says Amor Fati on the front, and the line Friedrich Nietzsche called his formula for greatness on the back: “Not merely bear what is necessary… but love it.” The reason? To constantly remind myself that nothing bad can really happen—there is only fuel. That everything I face can be of some purpose. The line from Marcus Aurelius was that a blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it. The artist that turns pain and frustration and even humiliation into beauty. The entrepreneur that turns a sticking point into a money maker. The person who takes their own experiences and turns them into wisdom that can be learned from and passed on to others. The Stoics talk about it over and over: we don’t get to choose so much of what happens to us in life, but we can always choose how we feel about it, whether we’re going to work with it or not. Why on earth would you choose to feel anything but good? Why would you choose not to work with it? What would that accomplish? Those are the questions I have to remind myself of. 

A book — You should always have a book with you. Always. 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 quite slow. In fact, I read deliberately slow (more on this below). But what I also do is read all the time. I am always carrying 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. There’s no trick, no secret, no shortcut. I like B.H. Liddell Hart’s old line that sometimes the longest way around is the shortest way home. If you put the time in, you get the results. If you are serious about wanting to commit to being a better reader, I think you’ll like the reading challenge I put together. 

Journals — I only have to carry these with me when I travel (the rest of the time they stay at home) but when I do, I lug them everywhere. In the first one—a small blue gold-leafed notebook—I write one sentence about the day that just passed. Then in a black Moleskine, I quickly journal yesterday’s workout (how far I ran or swam), what work I did, any notable occurrences, and some lines about what I am grateful for, what I want to get better at, and where I am succeeding. Last is The Daily Stoic Journal where I prepare for the day ahead by meditating on a short prompt; the key is setting an intention or a goal for the day that I can review at the end of the day. I got asked a lot on podcasts and at events and appearances for Stillness Is The Key about the best way to develop stillness in your life. Journaling is usually at the top of that list, and so I put together this comprehensive guide to journaling. 

Pen (stolen from the last hotel I stayed in) — I always carry a pen with me to mark up the book I am carrying. As I said above, I’m a slow reader. I take notes, I ask questions, I mark anything that sticks out at me as I read—passages, words, anecdotes, stories, info. It’s what the best readers do, period. It’s called “marginalia.” Then I fold the bottom corners of the pages of the particular passages I want to come back to and when I finish a book, I go back through and transcribe them onto notecards for my commonplace book.

AirPods — I balked at the price too, but turns out they were worth every penny. Not just because I never get frustrated with tangled wires, but because it helps me leave my phone in my pocket. The more that it’s in my pocket, the more alive, present, and in control I am. Cal Newport calls it “digital minimalism”—the idea that we need to be in control of these technologies rather than be controlled by them. Because as my watch and Memento Mori coin are reminding me, this is my life and it’s ticking away every second. I want to be there for it, not staring at a screen.

iPhone — The phone is probably the antithesis of philosophy but unfortunately a part of modern life (and work). I use it only for music, podcasts, calls, and emails. No alerts. No social media. No news. No watching TV or movies. It stays in the pocket most of the time (thanks to the AirPods). For tips on using your phone less, try this piece I did a few months ago. 

***

There’s a beautiful story about a Buddhist teacher named Ajahn Chah. He lifts a crystal goblet from his side table and holds it up to the sun. “Do you see this glass?” he says to his students. “I love this glass. It holds the water admirably. When the sun shines on it, it reflects the light beautifully. When I tap it, it has a lovely ring. Yet for me, this glass is already broken. When the wind knocks it over or my elbow knocks it off the shelf and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ When you understand that this glass is already broken,” Chah says, “every minute with it is precious.”

That’s what I try to remind myself with all of these things, especially the ones that really mean something to me: that the cup is already broken. The ring is already lost. The screen on the phone is already cracked. My dog-eared copy of Meditations just fell apart. Ownership—much like existence—is transitory. So while I prize these possessions, they are also a great reminder of how ephemeral all of this is. The Stoics talk a lot about detachment, loosening the hold that possessions have on us, embracing the truth of uncertainty, having the ability to enjoy whatever is in front of you, whether that’s a brand new Tesla or a beat-up Taurus. “He is a great man who uses earthenware dishes as if they were silver,” Seneca wrote, “but he is equally great who uses silver as if it were earthenware.” 

That’s the idea. You don’t have to abstain from having nice things. If you can afford it, or if it was given to you, what’s the point? What you do have to reject is the idea that they say anything about you as a person. You have to reject the idea that these things are somehow special because they are valuable or because other people desire them. The Stoics would urge us to remember that things don’t make the man.

When I was a teenager, I began a habit that would change the course of my entire life. I don’t mean to overstate it — it was simple, just a question I would ask the people I met — but without it, I’m not sure who I would have turned out to be.

Every time I would meet a successful or important person I admired, I would ask them: What’s a book that changed your life?* And then I would read that book. (In college, for instance, I was lucky enough to meet Dr. Drew, who was the one who turned me on to Stoicism.)

Who I asked the question to first, or how I came to the habit, I can’t recall, but the results stayed with me. I can reel off the titles of the books that came out of it like they are tattooed on my body:

• 48 Laws of Power
• Meditations
• Autobiography of Malcolm X
• History of the Peloponnesian War
• What Makes Sammy Run?
• Man’s Search for Meaning

The question that produced these books as answers was not borne of idle curiosity. It was my way of cutting through a personal conundrum, which was this:

I loved books and was very hungry for the good stuff — what Tyler Cowen has called “quake books.” The ones that shake you. That knock everything over and turn it upside down. But I also understood that there are so many books out there, and only so much time. It was overwhelming.

Which books should I read? Should I read books about physics or books about history or books about self-improvement? And even if I knew the genre I preferred, which authors should I read and why? Should I read new books or old books? The books getting rave reviews or the classics or the ones on the featured table in the front of the store?

I didn’t know. So this question was my hack.

If a book changed someone’s life — whatever the topic or style — it was probably worth the investment. If it changed them, I thought, it might at least help me.

What resulted was a kind of ad-hoc reading list of transformational books and surprise rabbit holes that I would have never expected. Because the books that change people cut across the entire spectrum of intellectual pursuits: philosophy, psychology, literature, poetry, and self-help. The discrete topics of those books, individually, are as varied as the individuals who answered this question.

You could fill up an entire life of reading with just these books and that would be enough.

Eventually, I applied this little trick beyond just people that I met. Whenever I read interviews of interesting people and they mentioned a book that was particularly influential or important to their development, I would buy it.

I didn’t need to be told in person. I didn’t even need to be the one asking the question. (The New York Times By The Book column is a good place to start)

I read an interview where Neil Strauss mentioned John Fante’s Ask the Dust, so I bought it, read it, and fell in love with it…and in reading about John Fante, I learned that he’d been influenced by Nietzsche and Knut Hamsun, so I read both of them. Napoleon and Alexander Hamilton were changed by Plutarch’s Lives (and so were about a million other people across history), so of course, I read it. I heard that Phil Jackson recommended his players read Corelli’s Mandolin, and that Pete Carroll recommends The Inner Game of Tennis. Lots of successful people have reading lists that they either post on their blogs or that have been compiled by biographers after their deaths. I made my way through those too, book by book. 

This strategy has lead me to some busts, of course, Elon Musk supposedly loves Twelve Against The Gods, but I didn’t quite get what the fuss was about (the used copy I bought cost $139). I saw entrepreneurs I admired who swore by Ayn Rand and read Atlas Shrugged, and even in my early twenties, I thought it was a bit ridiculous. Tim Ferriss loves Zorba the Greek, but it didn’t do it for me. But even in these books, I got something out of them. I got more out of them than I would have gotten from most of the forgettable titles the New York Times was slating for review or whatever was tearing up the bestseller lists at that moment.

Socrates supposedly said that we should employ our time improving ourselves by other men’s writings, and that in doing so we can “come by easily what others have labored hard for.” Yes. That’s the point of literature — it is the accumulation of the painful lessons humans have learned by trial and error. For 5,000 years we’ve been recording this knowledge in books. The more hard knocks we can avoid by reading them, the better. (This quote, attributed to Mark Twain, says it well: “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”)

Not only have we been creating books for thousands of years, but humans — particularly the smart and successful ones — have been reading them for just as long. We’ve been reading on cuneiform tablets, on scrolls, on books created out of stretched animal skins, and now on mass-produced paperbacks and via Audible. Over those centuries, there has been an incredible filtering mechanism working for us, finding and highlighting the books that contain the most wisdom.

That’s why I started asking people for the books that changed their lives. We should seek out the literature that has shaped the people we admire and respect — we can cut down even on the discovery costs of looking for those books. They’ve given us a shortcut to the treasure map.

Everybody seems to want a mentor. Meanwhile, they’re passing up the opportunity to learn directly from the people who taught the people you aspire to be like. When someone like John McCain spends his whole life raving about For Whom The Bell Tolls, why would you not check it out? Clearly, it got him through some shit. Peter Thiel credits Rene Girard and Things Hidden Since The Foundation Of The World with shaping his worldview. Clearly, it’s made him some money—you’re not going to pick that up? Angela Merkel—Forbes’ number 1 most powerful women twelve of the last thirteen years—lists Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov as her favorite reads. Add them to the list!

The people you admire or want to be like in your own space, something made them the way they are. They didn’t come out of the womb that way. It wasn’t only experiences that contributed to what they know and how they think. Right now I am reading How The Classics Made Shakespeare…which is literally a book about all the books that taught the greatest playwright who ever lived. 

Why not try to find these books? You’re just going to figure it all out on your own? You’re going to just pass on this opportunity for connection? (I’ll tell you, there is nothing people like hearing more than thoughtful questions about their favorite book or author.)

C’mon.

Send an email. Raise your hand and ask a question. Stop by office hours. Dig through old interviews.

Then…

Go to the library. Pull up Amazon and buy the cheapest used copy you can find. “Borrow it” from a friend.

Whatever it takes.

And after these books change you, as wells as other books you discover on your own, you have one important job: You have to pay it forward.

Because that’s what we’re trying to do here — we’re trying to help others learn from the wisdom of other’s experiences. We’re trying to filter the good stuff to the top — to upvote it — to make it even more readily available than it was in our own lives.

That’s why I keep my own list now, of books to base your life on. It’s why I run my reading list newsletter each month. And it’s why I’ll almost always stop, no matter how tired I am or how many emails I have in my inbox, to respond when people ask: What books changed your life? What do you think I should read?

Because it’s the most important question in the world.

***

* There are other versions of the question you can ask:

• “What book do you wish you read earlier in life?”
• “What book shaped your career as a _______ more than any other?”
• “Is there a book out there that really changed your mind?”
• “I’m dealing with ___________ right now; what authors would you recommend on that topic?”

______

Want To Take Your Reading To The Next Level?

We’ve created a challenge at Daily Stoic that’s perfect for you: Read to Lead: A Daily Stoic Reading Challenge

Reading is the shortest, most established path to total self-improvement. We know intuitively that this is true. The question is: what active steps are we taking toward our better selves, to improve every aspect of our lives, to ensure success? We created the Read To Lead challenge as a way to give you an answer to that question.

When you’re too busy aiming for it, you miss the moments in front of you

It’s one of those lines we throw out casually: “I want to spend more ‘quality time’… ” whether it’s with friends, with family, with your kids, or with yourself.

While the phrase certainly comes from a good place, there’s a disconnect: The perfectionist side of our brain, fueled by movies and Instagram, wants everything to be special, to be “right.” But that’s an ideal that the busy, ordinary, doing-the-best-we-can versions of ourselves can’t always live up to.

The result? An inevitable sense of disappointment. We feel awful for the deficiency, so out of guilt, we plan elaborate vacations. We project enormous expectations and pressure on ourselves. We think “Oh, if only I had more money, or a better job, or lived in France where the child care benefits were different, then I could be happy.”

That’s not fair. And it’s also damaging.

The reason is that there is no such thing as “quality time.” Jerry Seinfeld, who has three teenage kids, put it well:

I’m a believer in the ordinary and the mundane. These guys that talk about ‘quality time’ — I always find that a little sad when they say, ‘We have quality time.’ I don’t want quality time. I want the garbage time. That’s what I like. You just see them in their room reading a comic book and you get to kind of watch that for a minute, or [having] a bowl of Cheerios at 11 o’clock at night when they’re not even supposed to be up. The garbage, that’s what I love.

To be fair, Seinfeld is the master of the mundane. Banality has made him a near-billionaire. But there is a deeper truth to what he’s getting at. Special days? Nah. Every day is special. Every minute can be “quality time.”

I remember when my book The Obstacle Is the Way first starting making its way through professional sports, I was invited to see the Seahawks training camp up in Renton, Washington. I had just gotten married and my career was really firing, so I asked Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll how coaches manage to make a personal life work with such insane hours. Pete, who has been married for more than 40 years, looked at me and said, “You have to find the moments between moments.”

It’s something I’ve seen inside the buildings of most of the sports teams I’ve visited. Yeah, the coaches and staff often get there before the sun comes up and leave long after it’s gone down. Yeah, they travel a lot. But their families are always around. They’re doing lunches and dinners at the office. They are taking time between sessions to sit and talk, to hang out, to work out, to do things together.

It’s all about the moments between the moments for ordinary people, too. I’ve never understood parents who complain about “being a chauffeur” to their kids. “What am I, your driver?” they say. Sure, it can be a pain in the ass to drive your kids around. To day care. To school. To a friend’s house. To a doctor’s appointment. To soccer practice. Sometimes it can feel like this is all parenting is — driving a little person around. For free.

But instead of seeing the drive as an obligation or an inconvenience, why not choose to see it as a gift? A moment between moments. In fact, it’s a lot of moments. Even better, it’s captive time. You are stuck together! This is wonderful. This is what you wanted, right? An opportunity to connect? To bond? To have fun? So use it!

As many parents with older children will tell you, something changes when kids are in the car with you. Suddenly, you’re not the parent. You’re just a companion, a fellow human being equalized by traffic. Kids will share things in the car they wouldn’t say anywhere else. Better yet, when their friends are in the car too, you fade into the background and suddenly you can watch how your kid is with other people. It’s like you’re a detective watching through one-way glass. You’ll learn things about your own son or daughter that you’d never know otherwise. You’ll get a glimpse into who they are in a way they could never articulate to you directly.

This isn’t only true for kids. Some of my best memories with my wife, or friends, have happened in the car. Or when we were sitting at the gate, waiting for a delayed plane. Sometimes these awkward, in-between moments allow for conversations that never would have happened otherwise. Even some of my best writing and thinking have come when I was stuck somewhere I didn’t want to be, or doing something I didn’t want to do. When you’re out of excuses for being busy, when you can’t defer or plan for some idealized future, you’re forced to just make do with what’s in front of you. The distinction between “quality” time and “garbage” time falls away and you’re left with what simply is.

Often when we are trying really hard to attain something, we end up missing the fact that we’ve had it in our hands the whole time. Sure, letting your kids blow off school for a fun day together can be wonderfully special — but so can the 20-minute drive in traffic to school. So can mailing a letter or watching a garbage truck meander through the neighborhood.

All time with your kids — all time with anyone you love — is created equal. What you do with it is what makes it special. Not where. Or for how long. Or at what cost.

Think back to your own childhood. Rushing around to get somewhere on time. Packing for that trip to Disneyland. Getting all dressed for those ridiculous matching group photos. “Why are we doing this?” you asked when you were old enough to notice that it seemed really stressful and not fun. The answer was always something like: “Because we’re a family.” As if you couldn’t be a family anywhere, doing anything. As if you couldn’t do it right here and now.

This is worth remembering in all facets of life: You can be a family without getting dressed and leaving the house. You can be in love in the McDonald’s drive-through. You can be romantic near the eggs at the grocery store. You can be a writer as you ride the elevator down to take out the trash. You can be a good person in how you answer the phone or how you send emails.

There’s a Tolstoy quote I love: “There is no past and no future; no one has ever entered those two imaginary kingdoms. There is only the present.”

When you realize there is no such thing as “quality time,” when you become okay with “garbage time,” you end up getting the best kind of time there is. You get the moment right in front of you.

If you’re looking for parenting advice, I highly recommend you check out Daily Dad. I write a daily email about how to become a better parent, every day. One piece of timeliness advice, delivered to your inbox each morning. It’s free! Check it out here.