This Is Something You Should Always Carry With You

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

I’ve brought it to the Grammys.

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

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

I’ve brought it to restaurants and bars.

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

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

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

I am always carrying one and so should you. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s exactly right. 

Stop wasting time. 

Bring a book with you everywhere.