At birth, each of us is original. Our DNA has never existed before on this planet. No one will ever have our unique set of experiences. No one will ever have our totally unique point of view.

There has never been anyone like us…and there never will be again. We have been given a complete and total monopoly over the business of being us.

Yet what do we do with this rarest of rarities? We give it up! We choose not to be ourselves. We become our own trustbuster.

That’s something I’ve always loved about the Stoics. They were characters. The Stoics were not afraid to be themselves, to be seen as weird. Epictetus tells us about the Stoic Agrippinus being asked why he was so difficult, why he couldn’t just conform to the same practices as everyone else. “I want to be the red, that small and brilliant portion which causes the rest to appear comely and beautifully…’be like the majority of people?’ And if I do that,” Agrippinus liked to answer, “How shall I any longer be the red?”

Sure, being ‘red’ got Agrippinus into trouble. It also made him great. It made him one of the only people who actively resisted the tyranny and injustices of Nero’s regime. It made him famous for all time.

When we are ourselves, we have value. When we are like everyone else…we are fungible. We are replaceable–by definition. We have little value…by definition.

Peter Thiel has said before that the only kind of business worth making is one where you can have a monopoly. The profits, he said, are in owning an entire market. So it goes with ourselves as individuals. You want to be just another investment banker? You want to be another business writer publishing the same boring books that quote the same boring studies with the same bland covers fighting for spots at the same bland conferences?

No way.

BE YOU. Be the only one of you in the whole world. Be the red. That’s where the fun is (without having to fake it). That’s where the money is (you can name your price). That’s where the value is (you can’t be replaced).

When my wife and I decided to open a bookstore, I bought a course from a bookstore consultant. One of the first things they told me was we’d have to carry at least 10,000 titles. That’s what the average indie bookstore carries. It was, as far as I could tell, an unques­tioned assumption in the business.

Naturally, the first thing we did was the opposite of that. At the Painted Porch, we carry roughly 600 titles. The vast majority of them are not new, or even particularly famous. But they are books we have loved over the years.

It was one of the best decisions we made–both personally and professionally. Not only did this make it cheaper and easier to run the bookstore, it makes us stand out. The store reflects who we are. If people want a specific book, they go to a certain trillion-dollar e-commerce behemoth. If people want to discover new books and have a unique experience, they come to us. There are a lot of bookstores in the world, but there are none like ours.

The Stoics had a head for business in that way. Two thousand years before Peter Thiel said that, “competition is for losers,” Epictetus quipped that, “You can always win if you only enter competitions where winning is up to you.”

When you’re the fortieth Indian restaurant in town, your chances of success are dependent on so many things that are outside your influence: how good the other restaurants are, who gets the best location, whether the critic at the local paper likes your biryani. The margins of victory are likely to be small, even if you do get lucky, because the spoils are split between so many competitors. Worse still, if your success and happiness are dependent on winning that kind of difficult contest and you don’t win, you have set yourself up to be a double loser.

It’s far better then, if you were to launch a restaurant, to come up with something totally new, or to create a new kind of dining experience for which you can have a monopoly (there is a wonderful book on this called Blue Ocean Strategy). Where the contest is not with other people, but with being the best version of yourself. It’s better still that you so enjoy this endeavor that your happiness comes from the process and the pursuit itself, rather than the outcome. In this way, you’re set up, if not guaranteed, to be a double winner.

Too many people pointlessly enter contests where the outcome is dependent on forces outside their control. They think it’s safer to be like everyone else…when in fact, what they’re really doing is hiding themselves in the chorus, protecting themselves from judgment. They’re less likely to be singled out and laughed at, sure, but they’re guaranteeing that they’ll never really be noticed or appreciated. Theirs becomes the Indian restaurant that will never be great, but it will never be closed. That is the best you can expect when you’re not playing to win…you’re playing not to lose.

How sad that is. What a waste of their uniqueness.

I read an interview recently with the great architect and designer Frank Gehry. “When I teach a class” he said, “the first thing I do with students is ask them to write their signature on a piece of paper. And we spread them out and I say, ‘They all look different and that’s you, and that’s you, and that’s you, so stay with that forever.’”

Staying with that forever doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be the biggest or most popular thing in the world. But it does mean you’ll have a monopoly. And that you’ll always be a winner.

The wise, whether it’s an Epictetus or a Peter Thiel, know that the better contest is with yourself. They know the best route to success is to be yourself.

And to stay that way forever.

***

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I dropped out of college.

When this happened it was a big deal—to my parents anyway. Then it was a big deal when people met me because they were constantly surprised by it. You didn’t finish college?! But for all the warnings and then surprise, there has been literally zero times where my lack of a degree has come up in the course of any business deal or project.

So I am always surprised by the lengths people will go to get their degree. I read a fascinating book a couple years ago about the Varsity Blues scandal and the parents who bribed their kids into various colleges—many of which were not even that hard to get into. The parents were so convinced that college mattered that they were willing to do just about anything to make sure their kids got in…even in one case where one of the girls had millions of YouTube followers and didn’t want to go to college. Or another where the daughter wanted to be an actress and the mother was an actress, but she still tried to cheat on her daughter’s SAT’s to get into Juilliard (even though Julliard doesn’t require SATs!)

It reminds me of a line from Peter Thiel who pointed out that we can get so good at trying to win that we don’t stop and ask if we’re playing the right game.

Here’s something I thought mattered a lot: The New York Times Bestseller list. When my first book came out I worked very hard to sell a lot of copies so I could say I was an NYT bestseller. I missed it (for somewhat suspicious reasons) and hit the WSJ list instead. As it turns out, this had absolutely no impact on the sales of the book or my ability to have a writing career. What mattered was whether the book continued to sell well over time and whether I continued to have interesting things to say.

Literally no one ever bought the book because it hit one list…and certainly no one didn’t buy it because it wasn’t on the other.

But I found it quite funny in the years since that when people would introduce me for talks they would call me “a New York Times Bestselling author” because they just assumed, and it sounded like something important. So in one sense the term did matter and mean something…yet the fact they couldn’t tell or care about the difference was a reminder to me that it didn’t really matter at all.

I would write more than a half dozen other books before I did become “a New York Times Bestselling author” in fact and let me tell you, nothing changed. And when I did debut on the list for my book Stillness is the Key, it was at the #1 spot. But nobody threw me a parade. My speaking fee and my royalties did not go up. The publisher sent me a cool plaque but it wasn’t that cool…my wife asked that I keep it at the office instead of the house.

Still, whenever I talk to first-time authors and ask them what they hope to do with their book, hitting the list is almost always at the top of their list. I realize it’s easy for me to say that it doesn’t matter, since I have the plaque in my office, but it’s true. I wouldn’t trade my sales numbers for more weeks on the list. I wouldn’t trade having written books I’m proud of to spend more time there either. Writing a book that I’m proud of, saying what I have to say, growing as a writer in doing it, making something that reaches people, that makes a difference in their lives? That’s way more important.

But this is what we do—we put way too little time and energy into the things that do matter (e.g. being a decent person) and way too much time and energy into the things we think matter…but don’t (e.g. getting into a decent college).

Sometimes our kids can help us realize this (as the Varsity Blues kids often tried in vain to do). We did an email about David Letterman for DailyDad.com recently (sign up!). After becoming the longest-serving late night talk show host in the history of American television (33 seasons), the king of late night decided to walk away. He went and told his young son Harry, “I’m quitting, I’m retiring. I won’t be at work every day. My life is changing; our lives will change.” Who knows what Letterman expected his son to say, but certainly he expected more than, “Will I still be able to watch the Cartoon Network?” Letterman replied, “I think so. Let me check.”

We spent our energy—our lives—slaving away, chasing things that don’t matter. Worse, we tell ourselves we’re doing it for some specific reason—for our careers, for our kids…but it’s all based on nothing! They don’t care! Not like we think they do.

Why do we do this? One, I guess it’s because we don’t know, we don’t listen. We only realize the things are worthless once we get them…even though plenty of people had already returned to the cave and told us we were chasing shadows.

But I think the biggest reason is actually the biggest thing we chase that doesn’t matter. We chase achievements and money and status because we’re trying to create a legacy. Because we want people to remember us, for our stuff to last.

You want to talk about what really doesn’t matter? Other people’s opinions of you when you’re dead! As Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations, “people who are excited by posthumous fame forget that people who remember them will soon die too. And those after them in turn.” And suppose all those people you want to remember you were immortal, Marcus says, “what good would it do you?” You’ll still be dead!

A couple of years ago, I worked on an album that won a Grammy. I got to go on stage and accept it with a group of producers who all had to share one statue together. So a few months later, I had my own commemorative with a little reminder: “When you die, this will go in the trash alongside all your other ‘accomplishments.’”

None of that external stuff matters.

Only right now matters. The life you’re living—that’s the only monument that counts. Who you are in this moment, how you treat people, how you treat yourself—that is what you think doesn’t matter…but does. That is the real legacy.

And it’s passing you by as you read this.

***

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In his letters, Seneca writes about the habit of finding one thing each day that makes you smarter, wiser, better. One nugget. One quote. One little prescription. One little piece of advice. And that’s how most of Seneca’s letters close: Here’s a lesson, he says. Here’s 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 grab 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, coming now a few days after a quiet Father’s Day camping with my kids along the Llano River in Texas, I wanted to share some of the best pieces of parenting advice I’ve picked up from conversations with people on the Daily Dad podcast (which you can subscribe to here), reading, and interactions with other ordinary parents.

If you’re a parent or will be one day, these are 25 pieces of advice you will want to regularly return to:

–When your child offers you a hand to hold, take it. That’s a rule I picked up from the economist Russ Roberts. You might be tired, you might be busy, you might be on the other line—whenever they reach out, whenever they offer you a hand to hold, take the opportunity.

-There is no such thing as “quality” time. On my desk, I keep a medallion that says Tempus Fugit (”time flies”) on the front and “all time is quality time” on the back, so I think about Seinfeld’s concept of quality time vs. garbage time every day. 

-This solves most problems. When you’re grouchy and frustrated and anxious and short with your spouse and your kids—you might just be hangry. In 2014, Researchers from Ohio State University found that most fights between couples are because someone is hungry. Same goes with parents and kids and between kids, I imagine. 

-Just be. Before we had kids, I was in the pool with my wife. “Do you want to do laps?” I said. “Should we fill up the rafts?” “Here help me dump out the filter.” There was a bunch of that from me. “You know you can just be in the pool,” she said. Now when I’m with my kids, I remind myself, Just be here now. Just be here with them. 

-Do this over dinner. Some families watch TV at dinner. Some families eat separately. Some families talk idly about their day. Dinner at the philosopher Agnes Callard’s house is different. She told me that she, her husband, and her children have philosophical debates over dinner. The topics range from serious to silly, but it’s the activity itself that really matters. It’s that for an hour or two every night, she is not doing anything but connecting with the people she loves. My kids are younger, so our dinner discussions range from silly to sillier. But again, it’s the time together that really matters.

–Routine is EVERYTHING.

–You are constantly losing them. Every parent’s deepest fear is losing their child. And the terrible, beautiful tragedy of parenthood is that, indeed, we are constantly losing our children. Day, by day, by day. Not literally, of course, but in the sense that they are constantly growing, changing, becoming someone different. On a daily, if not an hourly, basis. On the podcast, Professor Scott Galloway told me about the profound grief he felt looking at a picture of his 11-year-old, who was now a great 14-year-old. The 11-year-old, Galloway realized, was gone for good. 

-A child’s life should be good, not easy. There is a famous Latin expression. Luctor et Emergo. It means “I struggle and emerge” or “wrestle with and overcome.” The gods, Seneca writes, “want us to be as good, as virtuous as possible, so assign to us a fortune that will make us struggle.” Without struggle, he says, “no one will know what you were capable of, not even yourself.”

–There’s a difference between having a kid and being a parent. In one of his Father’s Day messages as president, Barack Obama pointed out that the ability to have a kid isn’t what makes you a parent. It’s actually raising a child that makes someone a father – or a mother.

–Let them know your suitcase is packed. One of my favorite stories we’ve written about at Daily Dad is one about Jim Valvano’s dad. In high school, Valvano told his dad he was not only going to be a college basketball coach, but he was going to win a National Championship. A few days later, his dad pointed towards the corner of his bedroom, “See that suitcase?” “Yeah,” Jim said, “What’s that all about?” “I’m packed,” his dad explained. “When you play and win that National Championship I’m going to be there, my bags are already packed.” As Nils Parker pointed out on the Daily Dad podcast: The suitcase is a metaphor. It may have literally contained clothes, but it was really full of love and faith and limitless support. Valvano’s father was not making a statement about basketball. He wasn’t even telling his son that he expected him to be a great coach. What he was saying was much simpler, much more visceral. He was saying, I believe in you. He was saying, I support you. No matter what it is you want to do, or where life pulls you, I will be there for you.

-Be demanding and supportive. From Angela Duckworth: “The parenting style that is good for grit is also the parenting style good for most other things: Be really, really demanding, and be very, very supportive.”

-Spend money to teach values. Ron Lieber—the longtime “Your Money” columnist for The New York Times and author of The Opposite of Spoiled: Raising Kids Who Are Grounded, Generous, and Smart About Money (one of my all-time favorite titles)—told me a story about a time his three-year-old daughter asked, “Daddy, why don’t we have a summer house?” He said that she clearly had been pondering the question for some time, that she clearly had an interest in where her family stood in relation to other families, and that she clearly had a hunch that her family could have a summer house but made a decision to not have a summer house. It struck Lieber in that moment: how you spend money is a signal of what you value. “Our choices, not just our words, but our choices have meaning. They are modeling something. They model a certain form of trade-off.”

-Go the f*ck to sleep. That’s the advice of a book I love to read to my kids: Go the F*ck to Sleep! Morning routines are great but a bedtime routine is maybe more important. 

-Give power to get power. Randall Stutman, leadership coach to some of Wall Street’s biggest CEOs, told me his teenage kids taught him an important lesson about power. You gotta figure out how to get people to think it’s their idea to do what you want them to do. “You gotta give up power to keep power,” he said. “You gotta give up power to maintain power.” One of the interesting things about power is that the harder you try to hold on to power, the less of it you actually have. The harder you try to force your kids to do things, the less likely they are to do those things. Whatever it is you want them to do, you gotta figure out how to get them to think it’s their idea.

-Give what you didn’t get. Josh Peck never met his dad. Thoughts about his absent father haunted him throughout his life. When he died in his 80s, Josh was 26 and for six straight years, he was haunted by the thought of never getting amends. Then at 32, Josh and his wife had their first child. “When I had my son,” he told me, “I realized that I received the amends I’d always been looking for.” How? “By being the father to him that I never felt that I got. Correcting generational trauma can be as easy as just not giving it to the next generation.”

–Let them see you loving your work. Our instinct is to find “work-life balance.” Our instinct is to take the job that can afford the best life for our kids. But what if these instincts are wrong? Paul Graham has written about how these instincts can actually do more harm than good. “If you take a boring job to give your family a high standard of living, as so many people do, you risk infecting your kids with the idea that work is boring. Maybe it would be better for kids in this one case if parents were not so unselfish. A parent who set an example of loving their work might help their kids more than an expensive house.”

-Carve out sacred time for yourself. Speaking of not being so selfless, James Clear, author of the wonderful bestseller Atomic Habits, told me that when he became a father, he carved out “two sacred hours” in the morning to do his writing. Sometimes he gets more, but never less. This idea of sacred time is important. You have to carve it out. You have to stick to it like clockwork, protect it like you would a doctor’s appointment or a big meeting. You’ll marvel at what you can accomplish in that sacred time you’ve kept all to yourself.

-You can only pick two. I asked the prolific artist and father of two, Austin Kleon, how he makes time for it all. “I don’t,” he said. “The artist’s life is about tradeoffs.” And then he added a little rule that we should all keep with us always: Work, family, scene. Pick two.

-Hang their pictures on your wall. In 2019, Volodymyr Zelenskyy gave a twenty-minute presidential inaugural address to the people of Ukraine. Despite being one of his country’s greatest success stories, making a fortune in the entertainment business and then holding its highest office, Zelenskyy asked not to be celebrated or held up as a model. “I really do not want my pictures in your offices, for the President is not an icon, an idol or a portrait,” he said. “Hang your kids’ photos instead, and look at them each time you are making a decision.” 

-Everything you say “YES” is saying “NO” to something else. Related to the last two bullets, a few years ago, Dr. Jonathan Fader, an elite sports psychologist who spent nearly a decade with the New York Mets, gave me a picture of Oliver Sacks. Sacks is in his office speaking on the phone, and behind him is a large sign that just says, “NO!” I have that photo hanging on the wall in my office now. On either side of it, hang pictures of each of my sons. I can see them—all three photos—out of the corner of my eye even as I am writing this. It’s a sort of embodiment of the options Austin Kleon had laid out. I’m working. I have my two kids and my wife. I’m tapped out. 

-Your living is the teaching. Socrates’ students said of their teacher that for all the genius he possessed, Plato and Aristotle and all the other sages who learned from him “derived more benefit from [his] character than [his] words.” 

-Make fast transitions. Another from Randall Stutman: “​​Your job as a leader is to make really fast transitions…Your job is not to carry the last conversation…if that means you need to settle yourself and sit out in your car for a couple of minutes before you walk in the house so you can now be Dad, then that’s what you need to do. But your job is not to walk into that house and carry with you anything that came from before.”

-Don’t do everything for them. General H.R McMaster, a father of a millennial, told me about how he and his daughter jokingly refer to her peers as the “start-my-orange-for-me generation.” Meaning, they can’t even peel an orange without having their parents get it going first. And why is that? Because for as long as they’ve been conscious of it, their parents have been doing stuff like that, whether it was with science fair projects or arguing with teachers over their grades or funding the downpayment for a house. There are lots of reasons for this snowplow, helicopter parenting style: Narcissism, fear, insecurity, economic uncertainty and, of course, real love. But regardless of the emotion behind it, the effect is the same: It creates a kind of learned helplessness. It creates dependency. It creates resentment too—at the parents, at the world—as they face difficult problems without the necessary tools for solving them. I think Plutarch’s line about leaders applies to parents too: “A leader should do anything but not everything.”

-They do most of it. When the comedian Pete Holmes heard that Mitch Hurwitz, the creator of Arrested Development, had two daughters who were both in their twenties, he congratulated him. “You did it!,” he said, acknowledging that his friend had made it through the gauntlet, successfully raising two daughters to adulthood. But Hurwitz refused to take the compliment. “You know, they did most of it,” he joked. Which is true! While being a parent is incredibly important…we’re not nearly as important as we think we are. Our kids are doing the most of the work. 

-Every situation has two handles. And as Epictetus said, we always get to choose which handle we grab. The pandemic has been hard on our family, like all others, but instead of grabbing onto that, I grab onto one of the things I’m most grateful for: the time at home it gave me with my family—all the meals together, all the time in the pool with my kids, all the bathtime and bedtimes, and all the time working on… 

Last year, Daily Stoic put out The Boy Who Would Be King. I’m excited to share that we’re following it up with Epictetus’s story—from a slave to a symbol of the ability of human beings to find freedom in the darkest of circumstances—in another all-ages fable, The Girl Who Would Be Free.

I’ve probably read The Girl Who Would Be Free to my kids 50-60 times over the last year.It started out as rough notes on pieces of scrap paper, then coalesced into a narrative and then were laid out as the drawings came in from my awesome collaborator Victor Juhasz. They saw it not just evolve, but be trimmed and tightened and then ultimately made real, into this thing we can hold in our hands. I’m really proud of it and hope you check it out. It is available right now for pre-order over at dailystoic.com/girl where we are offering a bunch of exclusive bonuses and deals to everyone who orders The Girl Who Would Be Free through the Daily Stoic Store BEFORE July 8, 2022.

Anyway, I look forward to hearing what your family takes from this delightful story ​​filled with timeless lessons.

[Pre-order The Girl Who Would Be Free]