Coach Pete Carroll has said that another disappointing season with the New England Patriots���some 15 years into his career���it struck him that he didn���t actually have a coaching philosophy. He was mostly winging it.

Inspired by John Wooden���s ���Pyramid of Success��� philosophy, Carroll got to work filing binders with notes, compiling, defining, and codifying what would become known as his ���Win Forever��� philosophy���the winning actions and mindsets he aims to instill in his staff and players. It was a transformative decision: he went on to win two national championships and then a Super Bowl with the Seattle Seahawks.

Now, when Carroll gives talks, he often opens with a simple question: What���s your philosophy? I once asked him about it, and he told me it���s shocking how many people don���t have an answer. There are many CEOs and generals and investors and coaches at the highest levels who reveal, accidentally, that they have just been winging it.

Although I always saw myself as a writer and wanted that to be my life, I found myself running the marketing department of a publicly traded company by 21. I started my own company in 2012, and given how the world works now, few writers can just be writers. We now have a team of roughly 20 employees across and . Which means I���ve had to develop a leadership philosophy to try to get the best out of the people who are part of it. You can’t make every decision for people, so it���s essential to establish the principles and rules by which others make decisions and operate on a day-to-day basis.

While this post isn���t a totally comprehensive breakdown of my philosophy (if you want that, ), these are the core tenets���the maxims, rules, and reminders the people who work for me hear most often.

Sense of urgency. At The Daily Stoic offices above The Painted Porch, I hung up a sign that says, ���.��� It���s something I cribbed from the kitchens of Thomas Keller, the creator of Per Se, one of the best restaurants in the world. A sense of urgency���that���s what a great chef, a great service staff, a great organization has. While in my personal life I ���I���m a ���sense of urgency��� guy, always have been���I���d say most people could use a little speeding up. A couple of weeks ago, a shipment of books came in on a Friday afternoon. I heard someone on the staff say, ���We���ll unpack those tomorrow.��� I���m glad I heard it because I had to stop them and explain that, unless the books in those boxes were opened and the orders waiting on them were fulfilled (in time for the morning mail pickup on Saturday), they would not even begin traveling in the customer���s direction until Monday afternoon. So what seemed like a little delay until the next morning was really like a 72-hour delay. Every small delay or shortcut has second-, third-, and fourth-order consequences. That���s why it���s important���whether you���re packing boxes, replying to emails, or making big strategic calls���to think a step or two ahead. Don���t procrastinate. Do it now. Do it with urgency.

Slow down���to go faster. Yes, it���s important to have a sense of urgency. But there���s a difference between urgency and rushing, hurrying, going quickly for the sole sake of speed. There is an old Latin expression that I think captures the balance here nicely: Festina Lente, which means, Make haste slowly. A sense of urgency���with a purpose. Energy plus moderation. Measured exertion. Eagerness, with control. It is about getting things done, properly and consistently. They like to say in the military that slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

Start the clock. One of the things I say all the time is ������Have we started the clock on this?������ When someone tells me that it���s going to take six weeks for our bindery to make another run of the leatherbound Daily Stoic, I want to ���start the clock��� as soon as possible. I don���t want to add days or weeks to that process by being indecisive about how many to order or by procrastinating on finalizing the order or by being slow in processing an invoice. We don���t control how long it takes other people to do stuff, but we control whether we waste time, whether we are inefficient on our end���The project is going to take six months? Start the clock. You���re going to need a reply from someone else? Start the clock (by sending the email). It will likely take a while for the bid to come back? Start the clock (by requesting it). It���s going to take 40 years for your retirement accounts to compound with enough interest to retire? Start the clock (by making the deposits). It���s going to take 10,000 hours to master something? Start the clock (by doing the work and the study).

Don���t touch paper twice. That���s a great rule from the productivity guru David Allen. If you look at an email, begin to edit a piece of content, open a text, whatever���complete the task then and there. This has been driving me nuts on a home remodel we���re doing. The amount of decisions that have come to us more than once is insane. Because the contractor forgets things, because it turns out they didn���t give us the right parameters the first time, because they were asking before we were ready. But people do this all the time! They have bad processes that make them do more work than they need to.

What���s taking up a lot of your time? One question I regularly ask my employees���and myself���is: What���s eating your time? Sometimes this is just life but sometimes, it���s unnecessary. On one of our weekly calls not too long ago, I could tell my video producer was feeling overwhelmed. I asked, what���s taking up a lot of your time? Animations. He said it was taking hours to produce just two minutes of animated content for our Daily Stoic videos (which a previous editor had often included in our videos and become part of the style). I like animations���but not that much! So we cut way back on them and everything got better. Unless you want your boss to micromanage you, you can help them by flagging things that if they knew about they would help you fix. (And by the way, AI has now helped us do these animations faster).

Don���t punish people for improvements. Sometimes people are afraid to tell you about inefficiencies or even potential improvements because they are worried it will turn out badly for them. That you���ll get mad. Or you���ll take away responsibilities or find someone else to do it cheaper. I try to reiterate all the time: I not only won���t punish you for this, I will reward you. If you help save us money���by reducing an unnecessary vendor or service���I���ll give you a piece of it. If you find out that something in your role no longer has a positive ROI or isn���t worth doing, we���ll get rid of it and find something different and better for you to do. If you find a way to work faster with AI, I���ll celebrate that. Your job is to make the company better, not to do your ���job��� as it was originally defined.

Make a positive contribution every day. Compound interest is one of the most powerful forces on earth. And you can apply that to your own work. People sometimes ask how I write the Daily Stoic email every morning, which of course, I don���t. I write one or two every day, constantly making small deposits to the bank of emails. Over time, that compounds���we have a Google Doc we call ���UNSENT,��� which, as I type this, is 217 pages long with emails ready to go. Little things add up. The line from Zeno was that big things are realized by small steps. That���s what I try to instill in my team: every day, make a positive contribution. Most of all, I try to show this with my own writing habits.

Be there when they���re losing, not when they���re winning. When we were working on , George Raveling told me that when he got the head coaching job at Washington State, the athletic director told him, ���I���ll always be there when you���re losing,��� he said. ���I���ll never be there when you���re winning.��� I loved that. I find that I talk to my team the most when they���re struggling���when something���s broken, off-track, or unclear���not when everything���s going well. That���s the job: to help people solve problems, to help them get unstuck. If someone needs constant reassurance or regular praise to stay motivated, they usually don���t last long here. I���m reminded of a time I called Dov Charney, founder of American Apparel, about some little success I���d had on some project. He was very busy and frustrated that I���d interrupted, but politely, he said, ���Ryan, you are calling me to tell me that you did your job.���

Don���t repeat the same mistake. On the one hand, I���ve always loved the story of IBM CEO Tom Watson supposedly calling an executive into his office after his venture lost $10 million. The man assumed he was being fired. ���Fired?��� Watson told him, ���Hell, I spent $10 million educating you. I just want to be sure you learned the right lessons.��� But on the other hand, the thing that frustrates me the most���and the only reason I���ve ever fired someone���is when they keep repeating the same mistakes. If you learn from your failures, great. But if you���re just stuck in a loop, not applying the lessons, it���s not going to work.

Why is it being done that way? One day I noticed our team was packing shipments in a pretty inefficient way. I asked why. The answer? That���s how so-and-so showed me when I started. No one had questioned it since. This happens all the time���in businesses, on teams, in life. People inherit a process, follow it out of habit, and never stop to ask: Is this the best way? Does this still make sense? The most useful question in any system is often the simplest: Why are we doing it like this? This is especially important to ask of tasks that eat away at time better spent on something else.

Steal like an artist. (This is also at The Painted Porch.) At some point, I realized many of our best ideas were inspired by others. ���, one of the single best marketing and business decisions we made in the whole store���was partly inspired by a cool floor-to-ceiling tower of books about Abraham Lincoln in the museum attached to Ford���s Theater in DC. Some of our top-performing were inspired by other creators. So now, at the end of every weekly staff meeting, we go around and share one idea we���ve seen out in the world���on social media, on podcasts, on YouTube, in movies and documentaries, at other small businesses���and talk about how we might do our own version of it. Not copying, but adapting. Remixing. Borrowing what works and making it ours.

I���m leaving this with you. 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). My leadership philosophy is that when I give you a task, that���s your task. Your job is to handle it and be in charge of it. If I have to follow up with you, if I have to push you to get started, if I have to check your work, then I may as well have done it myself. If you are coming to me with problems (as opposed to solutions) or, when you are explaining something to me, not explaining your assumptions, you are putting it back on my plate. In a successful working relationship, I should be able to have an idea, go to the right person with it, and after I explain it say, ���I���m leaving it with you.���

Respect boundaries. As a leader, you have to understand that your decisions and actions have consequences for people, not all of which are immediately obvious. But you have to think about that. For example, I sometimes have to reiterate that just because I am emailing late at night or on the weekend doesn���t mean I expect a response right then. And for this reason, I���ve gotten better at scheduling emails. But the broader point is that as a boss you have to realize your actions, however seemingly small, carry weight. You have the power to blow up someone���s day or evening or weekend. Try not to do that. Try to be mindful of other people���s time and headspace.

Kids are not a distraction from your work. They are your work. I bring my kids to the office. I talk about them in meetings. When they���re a fan of the guest, I . And I encourage others to do the same. If you need to take paternity or maternity leave���take it. If you want to bring your kid to work���bring them. If you have to duck out for a school pickup���go. Especially as a father, I���ve tried to model this. I don���t want to treat my kids like a separate life I live outside of work, and I don���t want the people who work for me to feel like they have to either. Being a parent is not a liability or a distraction���. Our policies, our expectations, and our culture should reflect that.

Do things only we can do. Something that���s happened with over the years is as it has grown, so has the number of copycats. And so we���re constantly asking, what can only we do? With the bookstore, for example, we���re lucky to have authors constantly passing through to record the podcast. While they���re here, they sign books. . Those books, those experiences���you can���t get them anywhere else. , but with these AI tools making it easier and easier to copy and replicate and reproduce, it���s more important than ever to find and focus on the things only you can do.

Do the hard things first. The novelist Philipp Meyer��� (whose book ��� is an incredible read) , ���You have to be very careful about to what (and to whom) you���re giving the best part of your day.��� A corollary to this: the poet and pacifist William Stafford had a great daily rule: ���Do the hard things first.��� Well-intentioned plans fall apart as the day progresses. Our willpower evaporates. The world makes its demands. My assistant knows not to schedule anything before mid-morning because early calls and meetings don���t just take time���they sap the energy I need to do the hard work. I want to give my best self to my most difficult things. And I encourage my team to do the same: protect the early part of the day, guard your energy, and use it on what matters most.

It���s not a principle until it costs you something. There are lots of ways to make money���many of them easier and more lucrative than or . Of course, it still has to make money, but not being motivated solely by profit gives me a certain freedom: the ability to act with a heart and conscience, to take stands, to say what I think needs to be said. Every time I write something even mildly political in a , we lose a disproportionate number of subscribers. I get lots of angry emails. People accuse me of having changed or they say the Stoics would be disappointed. I sometimes remind them���if not ���that I didn���t build an audience to not write or say what I think. Or when the team alerts me to the number of followers we lost after I said something political on social media, I tell them the same. And besides, how successful are you really if you censor yourself because you���re afraid it will cost you?

Help people get to where they want to go. It���s very unlikely that anyone you hire is being hired for their dream job. They are not signing up for lifetime employment. No, this job is a waystation. I don���t think we should pretend otherwise. . When Tim Ferriss was looking for someone to run his podcast and email a few years ago, he asked me if he could hire Hristo Vassilev, who was then my research assistant. You know what I said? I said “Of course.� And he’s been Tim’s right hand ever since. Brent Underwood, who started as my intern more than a decade ago at the marketing company I was building, has gone on to write and build a hugely popular about the ghost town he owns. My last assistant currently runs a large nonprofit. To be clear, I���ve had some assistants and employees that didn���t work out. But I think I’ve got a pretty good “coaching tree� so far. In sports, a coach’s success isn���t just defined by wins and losses, but by their ���coaching tree������the players, coaches, and executives that they discovered and mentored who���ve gone on to do great things in their own careers. It’s a concept I think about a lot and ended up doing a chapter on it in because it deserves to be recognized outside of sports. It���s just a wonderful way to measure a life. Your job as a leader is to have a large coaching tree. Almost no one you hire is going to be a lifer. Chances are, you are not offering them their dream job, but you could be the one who helps them get closer to that dream job.

Don’t try to map out the whole game. Along these lines, a few years ago, during our year-end one-on-one, I asked my current researcher, Billy Oppenheimer, where he wanted to go. If you’re still working for me in this capacity in five years, I said, we both screwed up. The way to get the most out of this kind of relationship is if I have some idea of where you want to go. Then I can try to help you get there. He told me he wanted to be a writer but was just waiting to know for certain what I wanted to write about. After he described some complicated way in which he was privately writing stuff and looking for patterns to determine what to write about publicly, I told him, Just start. You���re trying to map out the whole 9 innings. Just throw the first pitch. Soon after, , which led to him now also working for Rick Rubin and signing his first book deal last year.

So yes, it���s critical to define the principles and rules you live and lead by. It���s critical to have an answer to that question, What���s your philosophy?

But as you get to work figuring out yours, keep in mind, you���re better off starting imperfectly than being paralyzed by the delusion of perfection. As they say, another way to spell ���perfectionism��� is p-a-r-a-l-y-s-i-s.

Don���t try to map out the whole game.

Just throw the first pitch.

Just start.

It was a crazy idea from the start.��

My wife and I were sitting at a cafe in Bastrop, TX and we spotted an empty storefront, a building that���s part of the National Register of Historic Places.

���You know what would be amazing there?��� my wife said. ���A bookstore.���

We started construction the first week of March 2020.��

But somehow, we didn���t lose all our money. It didn���t blow up our marriage. It���s actually been a great experience and, even more surprising, a pretty good business too.��

Four years in, one of the first things people want to know is how our bookstore The Painted Porch is doing, whether it���s a success. I���d say so. I���ve certainly learned a lot along the way, both about business and life, as well as publishing and people and myself.��

Here are some of those lessons:��

Counterprogramming is key. So yeah, opening a physical bookstore in 2020 seemed crazy. Not just to me���everyone said so. Retail was shifting online, books were becoming digital, the pandemic was raging, bookstores were closing���not opening. But that���s exactly why it worked. It was crazy because no one else was doing it. It stands out. It���s different.��

Have more than one way to win. This was a great piece of advice I got from Allison Hill, who owns Vroman���s and Book Soup in Los Angeles: most bookstores only survive if they���re multipurpose spaces. The Painted Porch isn���t just a bookstore���it���s my office, my employees��� office, the place where we record podcasts and film YouTube videos. So if nobody comes in and buys books, we���re not necessarily losing money.�� At the same time, it probably also wouldn���t have made sense to build out this level of podcast studio or even a writing office by itself either. So multi-use allows you to do more than you ordinarily would���across the board.

Resist the pressure to scale. At least once a week, someone asks us if we���re going to open a second location. And at least three struggling bookstores have reached out about us acquiring them. The answer is a polite no. ���Do Not Go Past The Mark You Aimed For��� is one of the most important laws in . Know when you���ve won. Know what enough is. Know your limits.��

Have a unique proposition. Most bookstores carry thousands of titles. The best one in Austin, BookPeople, stocks over 100,000. We carry about 1,000. It was one of the best decisions we made���both personally and professionally. We only carry books we love. Not only did this make it cheaper and easier to run the bookstore, it makes us stand out. It gives people a reason to come in. 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. We are the only bookstore in the world with our selection. Again, counterprogramming.��

Create spectacles. Before we opened the store, I was in Bucharest, Romania for a talk. My host took me into a local bookstore that had an enormous globe hanging from the ceiling. I watched as customer after customer came in to take pictures beneath it, before checking out with books. For me, one of the key pieces of the puzzle was figuring out what kind of marquee feature we could add that would make coming to the store an experience. I recalled a particularly cool floor to ceiling tower of books about Abraham Lincoln in the museum attached to Ford���s Theater in DC.��

This inspired our now infamous book tower, which I designed to be built on top of an old, broken fireplace in the building. It���s 20 feet tall and made of some 2,000 books, 4,000 nails, and 40 gallons of glue.

It was not cheap to do. It was not easy to do. It took forever. We had to solve all sorts of logistical problems to make it work. But it���s also probably one of the single best marketing and business decisions we made in the whole store. Invariably, almost every customer that comes in takes a picture of it���plenty more come in because they heard about it and wanted to see it.

Pass it on and pay it forward. I���m proud of the books I���ve championed over the years���of paying forward what inspired me, like the Gregory Hays translation of (). I love looking around The Painted Porch and seeing books you don���t often see in other stores. Just last year, the publisher of Ann Roe���s told us they had to do another printing because we���d raved about it too much. Whether you���re a writer, a bookstore owner, a coach, an entrepreneur, a teacher, a parent���when you find something that helps you, inspires you, or moves you���pass it on. Tell people about it. Help others find what helped you..��

Reading will never get old. One of the things that gets me excited about my job is just how much stuff there is that gets me excited���that until recently I didn���t even know existed. I���ve been doing this a long time���reading seriously since high school, obsessed with Greek and Roman history for most of that time. And somehow, I only just discovered ? A book that feels like it was written for me���Memoirs of Hadrian is one of my all-time favorites���and I didn���t even know this existed? And it���s not like it���s some obscure old thing���it won the National Book Award! Then just last month I discovered The Last of the Wine, an incredible historical novel that reminded me of everything I loved about Pressfield���s Gates of Fire and Tides of War. That���s what I love about reading: the more you read the more you realize there is much more to read. Even if you have read a lot, there is not just an endless list of great authors and books still to get to, but new ones come out every day! Maybe that���s how you know you���ve found your thing: when there seems to be no end in sight, and that never stops exciting you.

If you���ve always wanted to do it���do it. This has happened to me more than once. When my wife and I moved to a farm, I couldn���t believe how many people said, ���I���ve always wanted to do that.��� Same with opening the bookstore. People hear you have a small-town bookstore and they light up������I���ve always wanted to do that.��� Casey Neistat has a great line: ���The right time is right now.��� If you���ve always wanted to do something, do it. Stop romanticizing it. Stop overthinking it. Try it. Do it small. Do it your way. But do it.

It���s one damn thing after another. My wife suggested opening the bookstore back in the fall of 2019. Then COVID delayed us a year. Then we didn���t feel right opening for another year. Then a freak storm and some political incompetence shut down the power grid���burst pipes, busted roof. Then a global supply chain crisis made books hard to get. There���s the day-to-day stuff too: employees get sick, the internet goes out, shipments arrive damaged, a toilet leaks, the door won���t shut properly all of a sudden. But that���s how it goes. With most things in life, it’s . Expect it. Work through it. Keep going.

It���s easy to focus on what���s going wrong. In any business or project, it���s easy to fixate on what���s going wrong. As I mentioned, the little daily problems don���t seem to stop. Those things demand your attention, of course. But I���ve found it helpful���even necessary���to make an effort to notice and appreciate the things that are going well, the things that are working, the little wins we get every day.

Don���t overlook simple solutions. There���s a tendency���especially when you care a lot about something���to overthink it. To assume everything has to be big, polished, expensive, professional. But great ideas can be cheap and easy too. One of my favorite bookstores in the world, Gertrude & Alice in Bondi Beach, puts sticky notes inside their books. Just little handwritten notes from employees about why they liked this or that book. No fancy plaques. No expensive signage. We started doing it at The Painted Porch too. It���s fun, it���s human, and customers love it.

Be deliberate with your space. In the book by Kate Flannery (a great guest when she came on the Daily Stoic Podcast���), there���s a story about Dov Charney walking through an American Apparel store. He stopped, pointed to the tile beneath his feet, and said, ���Do you know how much rent I pay for this tile every day? Do you know how many T-shirts we have to sell just to cover the cost of this one tile?��� I didn���t witness this one���but I saw many performances like that���and now that I own my own shop, the point stuck with me: every inch of space you control is costing you something. Are you using it well? Is it serving the purpose you think it is? In a bookstore���or any business���it pays to be deliberate about what goes where. What are you putting in your most valuable real estate?

Does it make you better or worse? In the middle of the project, when the whole thing seemed impossible and doomed to fail���as we tried to open a bookstore, raise two kids when schools were closed, and make sense of the world���I wrote a note to myself: ���2020 is a test: will it make you a better person or a worse person?��� That was the test that I reminded myself of over and over again: will this make you a better person or a worse person? If starting a business makes you a worse person���if it stresses you out, if it tears your relationships apart, if it makes you bitter or frustrated with people���then it doesn���t matter how much money it makes or external praise it receives. It���s not successful.

A sense of urgency matters. A couple of weeks ago, a shipment of books came in on a Friday afternoon. I heard someone on the staff say, ���We���ll unpack those tomorrow.��� I���m glad I heard it because I had to stop them and explain that, unless the books in those boxes were opened and the orders waiting on them were fulfilled (in time for the morning mail pickup on Saturday), they would not even begin traveling in the customer���s direction until Monday afternoon. So what seemed like a little delay until the next morning was really like a 72-hour delay. Every small delay or shortcut has second-, third-, and fourth-order consequences. That���s why it���s important���whether you���re packing boxes, replying to emails, or making big strategic calls���to think a step or two ahead. Don���t procrastinate. Do it now. Do it with urgency.

Ask why it���s being done that way. One day I noticed our team was packing shipments in a pretty inefficient way. I asked why. The answer? That���s how so-and-so showed me when I started. No one had questioned it since. This happens all the time���in businesses, on teams, in life. People inherit a process, follow it out of habit, and never stop to ask: Is this the best way? Does this still make sense? The most useful question in any system is often the simplest: Why are we doing it like this?

Know the history of your space. I was talking to Jeni Britton Bauer���the founder of Jeni���s Ice Cream���and she told me the first ice cream shops date back to the late 1600s or early 1700s. Her point was that what feels trendy or modern is often something old coming back around. That applies to bookstores, too. Or really any craft or creative business. What you���re doing might feel new or niche, but it probably has deeper roots than you think.

Learn from the cats. When we were thinking about opening a bookstore, I bought a course from a bookstore consultant. I talked to friends. I talked to bookstore owners while on a book tour. I got a lot of advice, gathered best practices, and learned what worked for others. And yet, the single most popular thing about The Painted Porch is something that never came up���. In 2021, we took , the ghost town Brent Underwood has been restoring���my kids are obsessed with his YouTube videos���and came home with two cats who have lived at the bookstore ever since. They���re literally the most popular thing about the store. As one Yelp reviewer put it: ���Nice collection of books, clean, very comfy atmosphere, but I���m not going to lie to the great people of Bastrop���I come for the cats.��� Lol. So yes, do your research. Yes, learn from others. But keep in mind, some of the best parts of any project are things you can���t possibly predetermine.

Do things only you can do. Something that���s happened with over the years is as it has grown, so has the number of copycats. And so we���re constantly asking, what can only we do? With the bookstore, for example, we���re lucky to have authors constantly passing through to record the podcast. While they���re here, they sign books. Sometimes we do live events with them. Those books, those experiences���you can���t get them anywhere else. This has always been , but with these AI tools making it easier and easier to copy and replicate and reproduce, it���s more important than ever to find and focus on the things only you can do.

Zoom out. When we were doing a small construction project at the bookstore recently, we moved an old antique bar and found some paint on the wall, covered in plaster. Carefully scraping it away, we found a date and a kind of sign: January 16, 1922. What was happening in the world that day? Who were the people who stood there and supervised it being painted? What kind of business was in this space a hundred years ago? How many others have come and gone since? It was a humbling reminder: we���re not the first people to try something in this building, and we won���t be the last. It can be very easy on a project to get caught up in the immediacy of what���s in front of you, to get caught up in the day-to-day of running a business or chasing a goal. But every project, every place, every person is part of something much bigger���something that started long before us and will continue long after.

There���s always problems you aren���t even aware of. What started as a small construction project at the bookstore recently led to uncovering another issue, which led us to another thing that needed fixing���and that led to something else entirely. We’re lucky we tackled the initial project. One thing that keeps you up at night is all the things you don’t know are happening. The controversial Samuel Zemurray���s line���per Rich Cohen���s amazing book ���was ���Never trust the report.��� He went to South America or Boston or wherever the business was being done and saw the situation up close for himself. He wanted first hand knowledge so as a leader he could make the right decisions.��

I will leave you with one final bonus piece of advice: hard things are good for you. It is only from doing hard things, as the Stoics said, that we learn what we���re capable of. Seneca would say that he actually pitied people who have never experienced challenges. ���You have passed through life without an opponent,��� he said. ���No one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.���

Opening a bookstore during a global pandemic has been the hardest thing I���ve ever done. It���s been challenging. Expensive. At times overwhelming. There were setbacks we didn���t anticipate, problems we didn���t know existed, and moments where it would���ve been easier to walk away.

Which is what���s made it one of the most interesting, meaningful, and rewarding experiences of my life. We���ve learned so much���about business, about books, about what we are capable of. We���ve built something that matters to our community and to us. And in the end, those are the things that stay with you���not the easy wins, not the shortcuts, not the stuff or the money.

So if you���re thinking of doing something difficult, if you feel called to do something big���do it. Regardless of whether it succeeds or fails, you���ll be better for it. No one will wonder what you were capable of. Not even you.

I would never say I am glad it happened.

I don���t want to dismiss the tragedy and the disruption and the loss.

But as I think about what happened five years ago, as I think about my life shutting down for the pandemic in March and April of 2020, I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude. I see how it changed me. I see what it taught me. I see the trajectory it put me on.

I���m not talking here about the resurgence of Stoicism that came from these last few troubled years, although that too has been fascinating, exhilarating and obviously good for ���business��� as an author. I am mostly just talking about how deeply those strange, quiet months���when I was forced to slow down and stay put���recalibrated what I value, what I prioritize, what I want my life to look like.

In March of 2020, as social distancing and lockdowns started, my wife and two young sons settled into our ranch on the outskirts of Austin. We���d lived there for five years, but we were able to live there in a way we���d never lived there before. No more commutes. No more daily trips to the store. No more weekly trips to the airport. No more waking up in hotel rooms. No more time apart.

We would spend literally hundreds and hundreds of days together���in a row. In a way that I don���t think I had ever spent in one place or with anyone in all my life (my parents having been rather busy people themselves). And never before so free from the mental load���the relentless cycle of logistics, scheduling, planning, packing, and worrying about where I needed to be next���that had always kept some part of me from being fully present.

There is no such thing as parental leave in my line of work. And, like a lot of driven people who work for themselves, I���m not sure if I could have taken time off, that I would have let myself. Instead, I���ve worked constantly for much of my career and much of my young children���s lives, accepting and chasing opportunities���even though that meant many nights in hotel rooms and on airport benches. This, in addition to those ordinary work-from-home days that all writers know, where you are technically home but are, in fact, very far away.

Suddenly, every single day, rain or shine, I was able to take my boys for a long walk in the morning. Most days, we also did their nap in the running stroller or a bike trailer. In the evening, we walked again. We got in the pool together almost every day. We read books. We ate every meal together. I never missed a bathtime or a bedtime.

How many miles did we walk on our dirt roads? How much time did we spend in the woods? How many sunrises and sunsets? How many blackberries did we pick? How many fish did we catch?

Again, I understand that this was privileged���many people had it quite badly, and I���m not just referring to the immuno-compromised. My sister spent the pandemic in a small apartment in Brooklyn. My grandmother spent it in a nursing home. We had friends who were doctors and paramedics, soldiers who were deployed. Plenty of other people still had to work in warehouses, in places and conditions they should have had to���while others lost their livelihood entirely.

So I get that it was privileged. That���s my whole point, I am saying I was incredibly lucky.

I was lucky that I got to see my own home in a new way. One thing that struck us was how beautiful that first spring was���and how new it was. Like, we���d never once, in five years, spent enough days in a row at home that we could actually track spring happening, watching the bare trees go from buds to leaves to a cool, lush forest. We���d missed blackberry season most years. We���d get home after golden hour most days. But now we noticed everything���the small, daily transformations, the subtle shifts of light through the windows, the sounds of birds we���d previously been too busy to even see.

In Chloe Dalton���s lovely new book , Dalton���an ambitious and connected political advisor���finds herself in an old house in the English countryside. On a walk one day she comes across a leveret (a baby wild hare) and nurses it back to life. What ensues is a surreal and moving friendship, as the hare becomes a free-range companion, hopping around the house, snoozing quietly by Dalton���s side as she wrote, running in from the fields when called, drumming softly on her duvet to get her attention, even giving birth and raising babies inside Dalton���s home.

These were not particularly well-known or well-understood animals, in fact, they���re largely ignored. So she had to read not just research papers, but poetry and ancient authors just to find out what they���re supposed to eat. Spending hundreds of lonely, quiet hours with the leveret���which she never named���she learned to understand its habits and needs, seeing the world from its umwelt (to use one of my favorite words) in addition to her own. And she came to see the home and countryside that she lived in differently, too.

���I felt a new spirit of attentiveness to nature,��� she writes, ���no less wonderful for being entirely unoriginal, for as old as it is as a human experience, it was new to me. For many years, the seasons had largely passed by, my perceptions of the steady cycle of nature disrupted by travel and urban life. I had observed nature in broad brushstrokes, in primary colors, at a surface level. I had been most interested in whether it was dry enough to walk, or warm enough to eat outside with friends. I could identify only a handful of birds and trees by name. I hadn���t observed the buds unfurling, the seasonal passage of birds, the unshakeable rituals and rhythms of life in a single field or wood. I now marveled at the purple tinge on the black feathers of a house martin���the smallest creature I had ever seen���which flew into the house one morning���observing the gleam of the sun on the mirror finish of its plumage, before releasing it into the air.���

It���s funny. I spent 2018 and 2019 working on my book . One of the main characters of the book is Churchill, whose own relationship with time and the natural world was changed by his love of painting, which he discovered in the midst of a nervous breakdown after WWI. He was introduced to it by his sister-in-law, who, sensing that Churchill was a steaming kettle of stress, handed him a small kit of paints and brushes her young children liked to play with. In a little book titled , Churchill spoke eloquently of the way painting, like all good hobbies, taught the practitioner to be present. ���This heightened sense of observation of Nature,��� he wrote, ���is one of the chief delights that have come to me through trying to paint.��� He had lived for forty years on planet Earth consumed by his work and his ambition, but through painting, his perspective and perception grew much sharper. Forced to slow down to set up his easel, to mix his paints, to wait for them to dry, he saw things he would have previously blown right past.

I was just finishing a very busy book tour for when the pandemic hit (I actually crossed through the Venice airport in late January on the day when those two Chinese tourists arrived from Wuhan���later identified as among the earliest COVID cases). I thought I knew what stillness was, but the world was about to teach me about real stillness.

For many of us, the pandemic brought everything to ���a screeching, unprecedented stop. I���t stripped everything down, broke it all apart and made so much of our normal lives���work and personal���unsafe, if not impossible. I wasn���t having to get to this plane. I wasn���t having to battle traffic to get somewhere on time. I wasn���t having to prepare for this talk or that one. There were no meetings, no dinners out, no get-togethers, no pressing deadlines.

For all it took from us, it gave us ���the privilege of an experience out of the ordinary,��� .

And yet, what did most of us do with this experience? We complained about it. We resented it. We focused on what was missing. We agitated for things to ���go back to normal.��� As if the way things were before was how they were supposed to be!

Because of some health issues in our household, because we had the physical space, since I had some financial comfort, and because my in-person work was certainly not essential���I did not want to be responsible for getting people together and getting them sick���we continued our social distancing in a more sustainable way longer than most. I turned down work travel. I declined most social obligations. We let our employees keep working remotely.

This was one of the best decisions I ever made. I really grew as a parent���as an equal parent. I got in a lot of reading and writing and running. And as I said, I grew to really love where we live.

As Dalton writes in her book, she had the same experience.

How glad I am now that I did not leave for the city the moment it became possible. I am grateful for every additional day that I gazed out of the window. If I had gone, I would not have seen the leverets born. I would not have built the relationships I formed around the hare, with other people and with this patch of land, and felt this unexpected, uncomplicated joy, and learned not to tamp down the emotions it generates in me. I would not have looked at my life from a different perspective, and considered both what more I might be and the things I might not need. Whereas before I sought out exceptional experiences and set myself against the crowd, I take comfort in the fact that this process of self-discovery has been felt by millions before me.

Me?

I���m grateful for something like 500 consecutive bedtimes with my boys.

I���m grateful for . I���m grateful for the projects we worked on together as a family (, and). I���m grateful for the things it forced me to notice and work on in my marriage.

I���m grateful that it forced me to confront the reality that there are many things I don���t have to do. If you���d asked me in January 2020 if I could survive���professionally and personally���with no travel, no events, no dinners out, no get-togethers, I���d have said absolutely not. As it turned out, it was . Why? Because clearly, those things I thought I had to do, I didn’t actually have to do. As it turns out, I���m better and happier when I don���t.

I���m grateful for what it taught me about human nature, about history, about adversity, about mortality, about our obligations to each other. I���m grateful that it didn���t radicalize me or turn me into an unfeeling, cruel person (what Marcus Aurelius would refer to during the Antonine Plague as the real pestilence). I���m grateful that it showed me what I needed to be most grateful for���my health, my family, the present moment. I���m grateful that it taught me how easy it can be to take so many things about our lives for granted that other people do not share and would count themselves incredibly lucky to have.

I���m grateful for what was, I think you can say, the most radical lifestyle experiment in human history. In a note to myself in the early days of the pandemic, I wrote, ���2020 is a test: will it make you a better person or a worse person?���

That was the test that I reminded myself of over and over again: will this make you a better person or a worse person?

In the process, the difficult, painful pandemic became what POW survivor, as a ���defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.���

It doesn���t exactly keep me up at night, but like most people, I have a low-level suspicion that I���m paying for a bunch of stuff I don���t need.

At the beginning of the year, I went through all the various accounts and credit cards for my businesses, and sure enough, that���s exactly what I found.

There was an IMDb Pro account still active from a podcast producer who left three hires ago. We were paying for three cloud storage services when one would have sufficed. Somehow, we ended up with two separate enterprise Zoom accounts���and one had been upgraded to handle a large number of people on a call we were doing and was never downgraded. As I dug in, I found more redundancies, I found services that had sneakily ratcheted their fees up month after month and then just stuff I don���t think we ever signed up for in the first place.

This, of course, is a microcosm of our digital and subscription economy these days. It���s also, I think, a metaphor for life. We don���t just accumulate stuff, we accumulate drag. We accumulate drains and leeches that instead of physically taking up space, overwhelm and impede our ability to operate and think.

It turns out that the monthly cost of all these unnecessary expenses was almost enough to cover the salary of a new employee! Plus my mental bandwidth���to say nothing of the corresponding emails all these services send���was increased as well. It���s basically the same feeling I get whenever I clean out the garage or organize a doom drawer.

So that���s what I am thinking about now that spring is upon us: how I can declutter my life���physically, mentally, and emotionally���and how you can do the same.

(And by the way, I’m getting together with thousands of Stoics from around the world to do some spring cleaning as part of on March 20th. It���s a set of 10 daily, actionable challenges designed to help you clean up your life and spring forward without the weight of bad habits and vices. I hope to see you there!)

Clean up your information diet. In programming, there���s a saying: ���garbage in, garbage out.��� The question is, what are you allowing in? Many of us absorb too much garbage���whether it���s from the news we watch, the people we follow on social media, or even certain people in our lives. Spring is a great time to ask: Where do misery, negativity, dysfunction, and chaos sneak into my life? And then do something about it. Look at your ���information diet.��� When was the last time Twitter actually left you feeling informed? Reddit? Cable news in an airport? If it isn���t leaving you calmer or wiser, . You don���t have to be uninformed���just be intentional about what you consume and who you engage with. Personally, I prefer reading books about history and human nature (). They���re not all fun and sunshine���there���s plenty of darkness, too���but I learn far more from that than from endless scrolling. I���m deliberate about which chats and texts I participate in and who I spend time with. I aim to let in the opposite of garbage, because that leads to the opposite of garbage out.

Destroy a DOOM box. We all have them���those boxes, bins, or junk drawers stuffed with random odds and ends we don���t actually need. This is what���s known as a DOOM box������Didn���t Organize, Only Moved.��� In one of the few jokes Marcus tells in , he writes about people who accumulate so much stuff, they don���t even have a place to shit. Seneca famously said that people aren���t just weighed down by their possessions���they are owned by them. That overstuffed box in your garage, the junk drawer spilling over, the storage closet packed with forgotten things���what are you really holding onto? If you wouldn���t go out and buy it today, why are you keeping it? Grab a bag, empty the doom box, and purge anything you don���t truly need. Whether you trash it, donate it, or sell it, clearing out physical clutter clears mental space and reduces the number of things that ���own��� you.

Quit your vices. In another sense, we can be ���owned��� by bad habits. Seneca talks about how even a powerful Roman general can be mastered by ambition. Many of us are slaves to habits or substances. There���s a story I tell in about the physicist Richard Feynman feeling a sudden midday urge for a drink. Realizing alcohol���s hold on him, he quit cold turkey. Dwight Eisenhower, a four-pack-a-day smoker, had a heart attack and simply gave himself an order to stop. He realized he was not in command���the habit was in command. Ask yourself: What has control over me? Is it caffeine, social media, Netflix, junk food���something more serious? I once heard addiction described as losing the freedom to abstain. If you struggle to avoid something you don���t truly need���as Feynman realized���you���re dealing with a compulsion. With spring on the horizon, ask yourself what you���re hooked on. Where have you lost the freedom to say no? And how can you reclaim your power by refusing to feed that habit? For some, it���s as simple as not buying junk food. For others, it may involve support groups or a treatment program. In any case, spring is an ideal time to assess who���or what���is in command, and to reassert your autonomy. If you want a happier, more fulfilling life, decide which vices you���re no longer willing to let rule you.

Limit what has access. We are way too reachable. You have Facebook messages and text messages. People can call your phone. People can call you on WhatsApp. People can hit you up on Instagram and LinkedIn and Slack and Telegram. People can send you a package at your office and send junk mail to your house. This is insane! There should not be a DOZEN ways that people can get ahold of you. Who could possibly keep track of that? I���ve limited it to three ways people can get in touch with me: You can text, email, or call me. Email is day-to-day work stuff, texts are for friends and family, and when my phone rings, it���s usually something important from either one of those groups. I no longer feel the need to check 20 different apps and inboxes 50 times a day, because I know everything that actually matters will come in through one of those three channels.

Close the loop. I have a bunch of emails in my inbox waiting on a signature, waiting on a reply, waiting on a form or a selection. Why am I just letting them sit? It always takes less time to close these loops than I think���yet I let them sit there. I���ve found it really helpful to just dedicate, say a concentrated 15 minutes, to closing as many of them as possible. The mental relief that comes from clearing them out is always worth far more than the small effort it takes to get them done.

Delete the loop. At the same time, I have a bunch of emails that I told myself I was going to reply to but honestly, I don���t need to. Or too much time has passed for it to be worth it. So another 15 minutes where I just go through and mark these as read���or better off, delete them���is time well spent, too.

Make amends. This is actually one of the challenges in : identify any grudges we���re holding���conflicts, disagreements, or sources of animosity in our lives. How can we clean those up or clear them out? What can we apologize for? Years ago, there was someone I got into a big fight with over one of my books. I eventually emailed them, saying, ���Hey, here���s what I���ve been carrying, and I wish I���d done it differently. I feel bad about the consequences for you. I���m sorry.��� I���d love to say we became friends afterward, but they didn���t accept my apology���instead, they hurled more anger at me. It was obvious they still carried a lot of resentment, but making amends is also a gift you give yourself. I said what I needed to say, so I���m no longer ruminating or waiting for an apology from them. I owned my role in it. I tried to be who I want to be. If they aren���t there yet, that���s okay���I did what I could. As Marcus Aurelius said, the best revenge is not being like the person who wronged you. Maybe they���ll never see your side, but at least you won���t turn into them. We can���t change the past, but we can take responsibility: acknowledge our mistakes, own the pain we caused, learn from it, practice empathy, and try to repair it. We also have to forgive those who���ve hurt us and seek forgiveness from those we���ve hurt. What we can���t do is pretend it never happened. Clearing away that emotional clutter is part of a true spring cleaning���a deep clean for your life.

Get out in nature. There���s a Japanese term I love���shinrin-yoku���which translates to ���forest bathing,��� getting outside in nature. Marcus Aurelius talked about ���washing away the dust of earthly life,��� and getting outdoors is one of the best ways to do that. Whether it���s a long walk, a bike ride, or just a quiet moment outdoors, nature has a way of clearing away a cluttered mind. I live out in rural Texas partly because I love the beauty of the natural world. Seneca called it a ���temple of all the gods.��� Yet so many people spend their lives in cubicles, offices, or cars���one sealed environment to another���missing the world���s beauty. Recently, during a trip to Utah, I went for a run, cut through a cemetery, and spotted deer running by. I returned to my hotel feeling amazing. So the question is, how are you making time for nature? You might get dusty or muddy, but you���ll come back feeling cleaner and clearer than ever.

Delegate and automate. Something I often find myself asking myself, is this something only I can do? If the answer is no���and you can afford to, delegate it. If you can���t yet afford to, automate it. Time is the most precious resource. You have to find people who are good at things and empower them to help you. You have to be strong enough to hand over the keys, to relinquish control so that you can keep the main thing the main thing and not be distracted and weighed down by the rest.

Eliminate a pointless, recurring meeting. The recurring meeting gets on our calendar for a good reason or with a clear purpose. But it doesn���t take long for it to become a ���wretched habit,��� as Musonius Rufus said. Take a look at your calendar. Ask: is this meeting still necessary? Or could the same result of a dragged-out meeting be accomplished in a couple of minutes over email? If so, time to eliminate it.

Be protective of your time. One question I regularly ask my employees���and myself���is: What���s eating your time, and is it really a good use of it? A brief ���time audit��� can be eye-opening. Think about what you spend the most time on. Maybe it started small but ballooned into an enormous time sink. Just like a nutritionist might ask, ���What are you eating?��� and have you keep a food diary, try to keep track of how you spend your day. My screen-time app, for instance, might show how much time I spend on texts, email, Instagram���then I have to ask, Is that the best use of my time? As we head into spring, it���s not just about decluttering physical items; Marcus Aurelius gives us a test: Ask yourself, if I were to die soon, would I be afraid because I couldn���t keep doing this? The truth is, we often spend our time on frivolous or wasteful activities. At work, I remind my team���and myself���that if something���s taking up too much time, maybe there���s a better way. Now, before life gets busy again, is the perfect moment to identify those time drains.

Simplify your to-do list. When we were working on , George Raveling told me that once in a meeting at Nike, the president asked the team, ���Would we be better off doing 25 things good or 5 things great?��� George said he still applies that day-to-day. ���My day really revolves around just three or four things���I try to declutter the day and say, ���Okay, if I can get these four things done today, it will be a good day.������ As for me���every day, on a notecard, I write down 5-6 things I want to get done that day. Every day, I cross these off and tear up the card. That���s it. That���s the system.

Eliminate the inessential. We have a lot on our plates: emails to answer, calls to make, meetings, errands, groceries, kids to drop off, social media���the list goes on. Marcus Aurelius said if you want more tranquility���if you want to improve���you have to ask: Is this essential? Most of what we do or say isn���t. If we eliminate the inessential, he says, we gain the double benefit of doing the essential things better. So, to declutter your life, you have to say NO more often. Remember: No is a complete sentence. You don���t need to explain or justify it. As Seneca reminds us, many of us live in a state of ���busy idleness,��� endlessly doing things we don���t need to do. So as spring arrives (and every other season, too), keep asking yourself, Is this essential? What if you said no? How much more productive, happy, and content could you be with stronger boundaries and clearer priorities? You only have one life���stop wasting it, and stop letting people steal your time. Say no, and do less.

***

That���s some of the things I���m doing to declutter and find clarity in my life.

If you���re ready to take your own efforts to the next level, I���d love for you to join me in the from Daily Stoic.

It���s packed with powerful exercises rooted in the best Stoic insights and strategies, and thousands of people around the world will be participating.

Sign up at ���we start on March 20th. I hope to see you there, ready to clear out the clutter and make room for what truly matters.

Like most people, I am a product of my mentors.

But when I talk about one of the most influential people in my life, everyone usually assumes I am referring to Robert Greene. Robert, of course, taught me so much and I continue to learn from him.

Actually���there���s someone else. Someone whose wisdom, generosity, and curiosity have shaped my life, work, and thinking more than almost anyone I���ve met. Someone who has influenced how I approach relationships, how I treat others, and how I try to give back.

That someone is George Raveling.

Who is George Raveling? I think he���s one of the most remarkable people of the 20th century. His story is extraordinary. His father died when he was young. His mother was placed in a mental institution, and he was raised by his grandmother. He went to a series of Catholic schools, thrived as a basketball player at Villanova, and after serving briefly in the Air Force, found his calling in coaching. He became the first African American basketball coach in what���s now the Pac-12 and went on to have a Hall of Fame career, leading programs at Washington State, the University of Iowa, and USC. He was instrumental in bringing Michael Jordan to Nike and has mentored some of the most influential coaches in college basketball. I���ve watched John Calipari, Shaka Smart, and Buzz Williams all call him to get his advice on something when I���ve spent time with George. In college basketball, he���s known as the Godfather.

And if that weren���t enough, George owned the original typewritten draft of the ���I Have a Dream��� speech, which Martin Luther King Jr. handed him while he was working security at the March on Washington. In an extraordinary gesture, in 2021, George donated the historic document to his alma mater, Villanova University, on the condition that they collaborate with the Smithsonian and the National Museum of African American History to loan it out, ensuring that more people can see and be inspired by it.

He���s been a mentor and friend to me, someone whose message I���ve tried to help share with the world. Most recently, I played a small role in bringing to life his memoir, , which I pitched to my publisher. It just came out yesterday.

In this article, I wanted to share some of the many lessons I���ve learned from George over the years and in the process of working on the book with him. His wisdom and example have influenced my life in ways I never could have imagined���I hope these 21 lessons impact you as much as they have impacted me���

��� You have two choices today. George told me that when he wakes up in the morning, as he puts his feet on the floor but before he stands up, he says to himself, ���George, you���ve got two choices today. You can be happy or very happy. Which will it be?��� (Voltaire put it another way I love: The most important decision you make is to be in a good mood.)

��� Always be reading. 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.

��� Go learn things and meet people. It���s not enough to read���you have to go down rabbit holes, look up words you don���t know, share interesting ideas with others, earmark pages, and make notes in the margins. A few years ago, George was reading a book when the word ���mastermind��� caught his eye. He���d never heard it before. As was his habit, he circled it and made a note to look it up later. That sent him down a rabbit hole���researching the concept, reading articles, and learning about an event called Mastermind Dinners. He shared what he found with a few friends, including me. As it happened, I knew the guy who ran the Mastermind Dinners and offered to connect them. ���Go for it!��� George replied. Not long after, I got a photo of him at the conference in Ojai, California. He was the oldest person there. The only one not an entrepreneur. The only one from sports. The only one retired. But by the end, he was everyone���s favorite. People told me afterward that George was the highlight of the event. He asked great questions, he listened, he shared, he made people think. He could have told himself he didn���t belong. Instead, he showed up, stepped outside his comfort zone, and kept learning���at eighty-three!

��� Keep a commonplace book. At his house, George has these big red binders filled with notes. He calls them his ���learning journals.��� They���re his version of a commonplace book���a collection of ideas, quotes, observations, and information gathered over time. The purpose is to record and organize these gems for later use in your life and work. It���s a habit he���s kept since 1972. To this day, he told me, ���I go back and just read through them. I���ll just get one of the binders and I’ll sit down at the kitchen table and start reading through it. Sometimes I come across stuff that is more applicable today than it was when I wrote it in there.���

��� Live like it���s the 4th quarter. George nearly died in a brutal car crash at 57. When he woke up in the hospital, a police officer told him, ���Coach, you don���t know how lucky you are.��� He took that to heart���treating every day after as a second chance, an opportunity to do more, learn more, and give more. He went on to have a whole second act, joining Nike, shaping the future of basketball, and achieving things he never imagined. We shouldn���t need a near-death experience to wake us up to what we have. Seneca put it well: Go to bed each night saying, I have lived. If you wake up, treat it as a gift.

��� Learn from everyone. George once said in an interview that I was his mentor, which, of course, is preposterous. But I���ll take the point: you can learn from anyone. It doesn���t matter if they���re younger than you, if they live a completely different life, or even if you disagree with them on 99% of things. Everyone can teach you something. Anyone can be your mentor.

��� Do the most important thing. When George became Nike���s Director of International Basketball at 63, he had no prior corporate experience and was overwhelmed by self-doubt. Until a mentor gave him a simple system: ���When you leave the office every day, leave a yellow pad in the middle of the desk, and when you come in the morning, write down the three most important things you gotta get done that day in that order. That day, do not do anything else but the first thing on the pad. And if you get the first one, then you go to the second one.��� That structure put order to his day and gave him a sense of purpose. Instead of spinning his wheels or getting lost in distractions, he focused on what mattered most. One thing at a time.

��� Choose opportunity over money. George once told me, ���Never take a job for money. Always take a job for opportunity.��� That���s how he���s lived his life, and that���s why he���s had such an incredible life. It���s why he took the job at Nike, not despite the fact that he had no experience as a global corporate executive���but precisely because he had no experience as a global corporate executive. It was a chance to step into something completely new, to learn, to grow, to challenge himself. He didn���t take the job because it was safe. He took it because it was filled with opportunities���to meet fascinating people, travel the world, immerse himself in different cultures, and bring the game he loves to new places and new people. Most people would have stuck to what was comfortable and familiar, but George went where the opportunity was.

��� Always be prepared. When we were working on , George and I had weekly calls that ran for one to two hours. It was my job to pull stories and lessons out of him. George is obviously the boss and the questions were largely about his life, so it could have been pretty relaxed, but that���s not his style. He clearly spent hours preparing for each hour we were on the phone, always coming intensely prepared with notes, questions, and ideas ready to go. He treated every call the way I imagine he prepared for a big game back in his coaching days or a high-stakes meeting at Nike. In one of our calls, he told me, ���Right to this day, I think it���s disrespectful to go into a meeting and not be prepared.���

��� Trust is earned. George and Michael Jordan have known each other for decades. Their relationship is built on trust���so much so that George told me, ���Other than my mom and my grandma, never in my life have I had anybody who trusts me as much as Michael Jordan.��� And he���s never done anything to jeopardize it. In all their years of friendship, even when he ran Michael���s basketball camps for 22 years George said, ���I���ve never asked Michael for anything in my life���no money, no tickets to games, nothing.���It shouldn���t be a surprise, then, that when George told Jordan he should seriously consider signing with Nike, Jordan listened. That billion-dollar decision was the result of the trust Coach built when he coached Jordan on the ���84 Olympic Team. As Jordan writes in the foreword (not something he does often!) to What You���re Made For, ���There are all kinds of stories out there, but George is truly the reason I signed with Nike. As I���ve said before, I was all in for Adidas. George preached for Nike, and I listened.���

��� Practice the art of self-leadership. George once told me, ���One of the most underrated aspects of leadership is our ability to lead ourselves.��� Before you can lead a team, a company, or a family, you have to be able to lead yourself. And isn���t that what the Stoics say? That no one is fit to rule who is not first ruler of themselves?

��� Be a positive difference maker. George has a powerful question he often asks: ���Are you going to be a positive Difference Maker today?��� It���s a question that challenges you to think about the impact you want to have each day. I think about it all the time.

��� Find the good in everything. George once texted me out of the blue, ���I am absolutely unequivocally the luckiest human being on planet Earth.��� He sees everything that’s happened to him, even the terrible things, even the adversity, even the unfair things. He sees them as all leading up to who he is now. He walks through the world with a sense of gratitude and appreciation and a belief in his ability to turn everything into something positive.

��� Tell them what they mean to you. When we would do our calls for the book, it caught me off guard at first. George, before hanging up, would say, ���I love you.��� I���m not used to that���at least not from people outside my family. But George never hesitated. ���I���ve learned that it���s hard for people, especially men, to say ���I love you,������ he told me. Even with his own son, he noticed that for years it felt uncomfortable for him to say it back. ���It���s strange,��� George said, ���because every one of us has a thirst to be loved, appreciated, acknowledged, respected. And yet, for some reason, we struggle to express it.��� So George has made a habit of saying things like, ���I appreciate you.��� ���I respect you.��� ���I���m glad you���re my friend.��� ���I���m here for you.��� Simple words that so many people rarely hear. George didn���t assume people knew how he felt���he told them.

��� It���s up to you. George used to give a talk at basketball camps titled, ���If it���s to be, it���s up to me.��� He said, ���At the end of the day, either our hands are gonna be on the steering wheel of our lives or someone else���s hands are gonna be on the steering wheel of our lives.���

��� Do less, better. Once in a meeting at Nike, the president asked the team, ���Would we be better off doing 25 things good or 5 things great?��� George said he still applies that day-to-day. ���My day really revolves around just three or four things���I try to declutter the day and say, ���Okay, if I can get these four things done today, it will be a good day.��� Every day, on a notecard, I write down 5-6 things I want to get done that day. Every day, I cross these off and tear up the card. That���s it. That���s the system.���

��� Cultivate relationships. While we were working on the book, George told me, ���Often people say, how do you account for what���s happened to you in your life? And the one word I use to capture it all is: relationships. My whole life has been built on relationships. People seeing something in me that I didn’t see in myself.��� When I look at my own life, the most pivotal moments, the biggest opportunities���they all came from relationships. From people who believed in me when I didn���t believe in myself. Relationships aren���t just about networking; they���re about surrounding yourself with people who see your potential, sometimes before you do.

��� Build your team. George sometimes refers to his family as Team Raveling, and his wife, Delores, as the CEO of their family. He talks about how too many people put more thought, effort, and strategy into their careers than they do into their families. They chase professional success with careful planning, clear goals, and relentless discipline���but expect their relationships to work out on their own. You wouldn���t expect a company to succeed by just winging it. A family is no different���it can���t thrive without leadership, communication, clearly defined roles, and a shared vision. Whether it���s your spouse, close friends, or a chosen family, you have to build your team with the same intention and commitment you bring to your work.

��� Listen. George is one of the best listeners I���ve ever met. He says, ���The quality of your conversations is greatly dependent on the quality of your listening.��� I used to think I was a good listener, but watching George taught me how much better I could be. He doesn���t just wait for his turn to talk���he listens to understand.

��� Become the go-to. When George was a player at Villanova, initially, he wasn���t getting much playing time. So he looked around and noticed something: no one on the team was a great rebounder. And he figured if he became the best rebounder on the team, his coaches would have no choice but to play him. So he made it his role. He invented his own rebounding drills and practiced them every day. By the time he graduated, he had set multiple rebounding records and was one of the best rebounders in the game. I love the idea of inventing a role for yourself���finding something that���s being overlooked or not addressed and deciding to become the go-to person for it. It���s not just a good strategy for athletes���it���s a way to make yourself indispensable in any field.

��� Know your boundaries���and enforce them. I once connected George with someone interested in working on a project with him. Everything was going well���until they sent over the proposed terms. George didn���t argue or negotiate. He sent back a clear, firm email terminating the discussion. The other party was surprised and followed up to ask why. ���The offer was insulting and ridiculous,��� George explained. He didn���t waste time debating or trying to make it work. He knew his worth, and he wasn���t going to entertain anything less. Too many people accept bad deals out of fear or politeness, but George believed in setting clear boundaries���and enforcing them.

�

I will leave you with this�

Although he���s famous for being a coach, that���s not what it said on the door of his office. Instead, it said,

George Raveling

Educator

He, to this day, sees himself as a teacher. And he teaches by example, by how he lives his life. That���s why, even though I never played for George Raveling, I���ve learned so much from him. By watching how he carries himself, how he lives, and how he treats others, I���ve learned more than I ever could have from words alone.

.

It struck me as chatted that I was in a sort of human wormhole.

When George was born in 1937 (he writes about this in his beautiful new book that I was lucky enough to play a small part in getting published), the Golden Gate Bridge had just opened, the Great Depression ravaged America and Pablo Picasso was putting the finishing touches on his haunting, heartbreaking anti-war mural, ���Guernica��� as Europe plunged itself back into violence.

When Richard Overton was born in 1906, just a few miles down the road from my ranch, Theodore Roosevelt was president. As a child in Texas, he remembered seeing Civil War veterans walking around. Not many, but they were there���men who had fought for a Confederacy that had enslaved his ancestors. When he was a kid, Henry L. Riggs, a veteran of the Black Hawk War, was still alive. Riggs was born in 1812. And when Riggs was born, Conrad Heyer���a Revolutionary War veteran and the earliest-born person to ever be photographed���was still alive.

It���s easy to forget how little time separates us from what we think of as ���history.��� Richard plus two other people takes you back to before America was a country. He was a teenager during WWI, served in WWII, and then lived long enough to be the nation���s oldest living veteran at 112 and to hold my son, who, born in 2016, might live to see the 22nd century.

Here���s my son with Richard Overton

It���s easy to see history as this distant thing that happened to other people���people on the page or in old portraits. George played college basketball against Jerry West���the man who became the NBA logo. George Raveling was there the day of the March of Washington in 1965. Martin Luther King Jr. came down the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and handed him the copy of the speech he gave that day. And then just a few decades later, George helped bring a young rookie named Michael Jordan to Nike, beginning a process that would turn Jordan into a billionaire. George would meet six or seven presidents starting with Truman. Richard would be flown to the White House to meet Obama.

Just two guys and you have a good chunk of American���and world���history. Just two guys shaking hands or witnessing or taking part in events and people that resound to this day.

History isn���t something distant or abstract. It���s just a few handshakes away. Just a few degrees of separation, it turned out, from one of my neighbors.

The past is not dead and distant, Faulkner observed. It���s not even past.

Did you know that England���s government only recently paid off debts it incurred as far back as 1720 from events like the South Sea Bubble, the Napoleonic wars, the empire���s abolition of slavery, and the Irish potato famine? For more than a decade and a half of the twenty-first century, there was still a direct and daily connection to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even today, the United States continues to pay pensions related to the Civil War and the Spanish-American War.

Did you know that in 2013 ��� born��� before Melville published ? Or the world���s oldest tortoise, Jonathan, lives on an island in the Atlantic and is 192 years old? Or that President John Tyler, born in 1790, who took office just ten years after little Jonathan was born, still has living grandchildren?

And that���s all relatively ���modern��� history. The woolly mammoth was still roaming the earth while the pyramids were being built. Cleopatra lived closer to our time than she did to the construction of those pyramids. When British workers dug the foundations for Nelson���s Column in Trafalgar Square, they found the bones of actual lions���creatures that had once roamed the exact spot they were standing on. History isn���t some far-off, untouchable thing. It���s right under our feet.

When we were doing a small construction project , we moved an old antique bar and found some paint on the wall, covered in plaster. Carefully scraping it away, we found a date and a kind of sign���January 16, 1922. What was happening in the world that day? Who were the people who stood there and supervised it being painted? A young Richard might have walked by and looked at it (from the outside, of course, as it was probably segregated).

When I lived in New Orleans, my apartment was partitioned out of a 19th-century convent. I���d head uptown , hopping on the longest continually running streetcar in the world, the St. Charles Avenue Streetcar Line. A train that has traveled the same tracks for nearly 200 years. How many millions of people have ridden those same rails? Sat, even, in the same seat? Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy, Shelby Foote, George Washington Cable, Edgar Degas���could have looked out those very windows. They, along with so many others not as easily remembered, lived and struggled just as I did. Just as you do.

In Goethe���s (a favorite of Napoleon���s), there is a scene in which Werther writes to a friend about his daily trip to a small, beautiful spring. He sees the young girls coming to gather water and thinks about how many generations have been doing that���have come and had the same thoughts he is having.

���When I sit there,��� he explains, ���I see them all. The ancestral fathers, making friends and courting by the spring, I sense the benevolent spirits that watch over springs and wells. Oh, anyone who cannot share this feeling must never have refreshed himself at a cool spring after a hard day���s summer walking.���

I think about the things that happened in George���s life. I think about the horrible things that happened during Richard���s. I think about the progress made in both. I think of how much has changed���and how much has remained the same. I remember as I sat there on the porch, as Richard told me about a tree he had planted that was, some seven decades later, pushing up the foundation of the house, thinking of the Bible verse that Hemingway opens his book, , with: ���One generation passeth, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever. The sun also riseth, and the sun goeth down, and resteth to the place where he arose.��� It was this passage, his editor would say, that ���contained all the wisdom of the ancient world.���

Richard Overton on his porch (2017)

The view from Overton’s porch

And what wisdom is that? One of the most striking things about history is just how long human beings have been doing what they do. Though certain attitudes and practices have come and gone, what���s left are people���living, dying, loving, fighting, crying, laughing.

Instability. Uncertainty. Danger. Division.

This is one of the most consistent themes of the Stoics and particularly of , the way that events flow past us like a river, the way the same things keep happening over and over again. That���s what history was, Marcus Aurelius said, whether it was the age of Vespasian, his own, or some time even more distant���it was ���people doing the exact same things: marrying, raising children, getting sick, dying, waging war, throwing parties, doing business, farming, flattering, boasting, distrusting, plotting, hoping others will die, complaining about their own lives, falling in love, putting away money, seeking high office and power.���

From this angle, human life looks very small. But also a connection with the past can make you feel very big���like you���re a part of something. That we are much more interconnected and closer to the center of things than it sometimes feels.

Indeed, these wormholes, illustrating the ���great span��� as they do, give us perspective. They remind us how many have been here before us and how close they remain. That even though we are small, we are also a piece of this great universe.

���Look at the past,��� Marcus Aurelius writes in , ���and from that, extrapolate the future: the same thing. No escape from the rhythm of events.���

There���s something lovely about intersecting with the past, about connecting with it.

I���ll cherish that day with Richard and George, as long as I live.

Hopefully, that will be a long time in the future���but even if it���s not, I feel like by spending time with them my life has already stretched far enough back in time.

I can���t predict the future, but I feel pretty confident in predicting that the next four years are going to be crazy.

For political reasons, sure, but we don���t need to agree about that. I know I am right because you can���t find a four-year period in history that wasn���t filled with chaos, upheaval, and uncertainty. Never forget, Seneca reminds us, Fortune has a habit of behaving exactly as she pleases. Why would the next four years be an exception to this rule? There is no normal in this life���except disruption, change, and surprise.

And yet, I do think these next four years are going to be particularly challenging. We���re five weeks into the year and there have already been horrendous wildfires, intense political fighting, earthquakes, wars dragging on, a terrorist attack. My kids have already been sick. And 2025 is yet young!

Need I remind you what happened from 2020-2024? Or 2016-2020? Or 1940-1944? How about the first four years of Marcus Aurelius��� reign, which saw a brutal war with Parthia, a devastating plague that killed millions, and one of the worst floods in Rome���s history, leaving the city in famine?

The question, then, is not how we can avoid these challenges but how we can prepare for them.

Does that mean I am building a bomb shelter? Stockpiling supplies? Fleeing to a foreign country?

No, I���m not doing anything quite so severe. But I am future-proofing myself. Not with panic, paranoia, or an escape plan, but with a handful of ideas and practices���many from the Stoics���that have carried people through uncertain and turbulent times throughout history���

I���m focusing on what I can control. Epictetus described this as our ���chief task in life.��� We have to get real clear about what���s up to us and what isn���t. What Putin does? Inflation? Tariffs? My mother���s health? The weather? Not up to me. My attitude? My emotions? My wants? My desire? My focus? My response to these things? That is up to me. Who I am is up to me. So that���s what I am focusing on.

I���m reading old books, not watching the news. If you want to understand current events, don���t rely on breaking news. Find a book about a similar event in the past. Read history. Read psychology. Read biographies. Go for information that has a long half-life, not something that���s going to be contradicted in the next week. As I said, 2025 will be crazy and weird and tough. But probably not any more than the year 1925. Or the year 25 AD. That means there are lots of books, lots of ideas, lots of history that can help us with what lies ahead���because it will rhyme with what lies behind us. Whether we���re navigating personal trials, global upheavals, or moments of inspiration, books remain one of the most reliable tools to help us prepare for what���s to come. They challenge us, ground us, and offer us the wisdom of centuries. I put together a list of books for my Reading List Newsletter () that might be helpful for you to read this upcoming year. Books like , , , ��� all books that I will certainly be returning to this year. .

I���m reminding myself what my job is. Things don���t always go the way we want. There will always be uncertainty, upheaval, unfairness. So when the dust settles���after a crisis, a setback, a disappointment���you might find yourself glued to the news, caught in endless speculation, wondering: What happens next? What if it gets worse? You���re not wrong to ask these questions. But you���d be mistaken to think that any of it changes what���s expected of you. The Stoics understood this. No matter what happens���good times or bad, fair or unfair, order or chaos���our job remains the same. It doesn���t matter who is in charge, what obstacles appear, or how much the world changes. Your job is still your job. Your obligation is still your obligation. ���Whatever anyone does or says, for my part I���m bound to the good,��� Marcus Aurelius wrote. ���An emerald or gold or purple might always proclaim: ���Whatever anyone does or says, I must be what I am and show my true colors.������ Helvidius Priscus understood this. When Emperor Vespasian warned him to stop speaking out, he refused. ���It is in your power not to allow me to be a member of the Senate,��� he said, ���but so long as I am, I must say what I think right.��� Vespasian warned him again: ���If you do, I shall put you to death.��� Helvidius answered simply, ���You will do your part, and I will do mine.��� Our job���today, tomorrow, always���is to be good, to be wise, to stand up for what���s right, to resist what is wrong. The stakes may change. The consequences may change. The duty does not.

I���m trying to raise my kids well. One of my favorite things to do each day is sit down and write the . It���s one piece of wisdom���drawn from history, science, literature, and other ordinary parents���that goes out to about 100,000 parents around the world. But really, I���m writing it for myself. I���m reading, researching, and collecting the best ideas because I want to be a better parent. I want to be more patient. I want to set a good example. I want to give my kids the wisdom and resilience they���ll need to navigate the world. Raising kids is the most important thing I���ll ever do. So I study it the way I study philosophy, history, or business���because I want to do it well. If you want to have a multi-generational impact, if you want to make the future better���raise your kids right.

I���m keeping a journal. The Stoics lived through turbulent, chaotic times���through Nero and Domitian and Claudius yet they remained clear-headed and principled. How? The answer is, as it is for most things, hard work. The Stoics worked hard to maintain their perspective, to shake off the misinformation and the noise, to find the truth, to maintain control over the greatest empire���themselves. ���To see what is in front of one���s nose needs a constant struggle,��� Orwell wrote of living through totalitarianism and authoritarianism. One thing that helps toward it,��� he said, ���is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of record of one���s opinions about important events.��� If you don���t examine your own mind, who will? If you���re not dumping your frustrations out on the page, who are you dumping them on instead? If you���re not using your journal to gain self-awareness, to cut through noise and illusion, how will you ever see what���s right in front of you? You have to do this. Every day. ()

I���m using my platform to support what I think is important. I have a platform, and I want to use it well. That means amplifying ideas, voices, and causes that matter���not just whatever gets the most clicks. Plenty of podcasters will put anyone on their show, no matter how ridiculous or toxic, just because controversy drives views and downloads. I���m not interested in that. I���m not giving a megaphone to trolls, conspiracy theorists, or bad actors���no matter how much engagement it might generate. My goal isn���t just to get attention���there are things I value a lot more than money. We don���t control what other people spread and say, sure, but we can all say, ���Not through me.��� And better yet, we can put out good and helpful and essential stuff ourselves.

I���m focusing on the things that don���t change. In his 1997 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos said, ���We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term.��� For companies���as is the case for individuals���there are always pressures to be narrow in our focus and vision. Bezos, unlike most business leaders, refused to play that game. ���Rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions,��� Bezos said, the real value lies in thinking decades ahead. His maxim for business opportunities is just as relevant for navigating uncertainty in life: ���Focus on the things that don���t change.��� A lot of people will spend the next four years fixated on trends, fads, and momentary crises. I���m focused on what will still matter in five, ten, fifty years. Character. Discipline. Patience. The value of hard work. These are constants���no matter who���s in office, no matter what���s happening in the headlines. That���s why I structure my life and work around things that stand the test of time. In my writing, I try to study and share wisdom that has endured for thousands of years. In my business, I invest in ideas that create lasting value. In my personal life, I prioritize family, health, and relationships over fleeting distractions. The world will always be chaotic. There will always be noise. The only way to stay grounded is to focus on what actually lasts.

I���m treating people well. I don���t control the cruelty in the world. I don���t control how others act, how unfair or thoughtless or selfish they can be. But I do control how I run my team. How I show up for my family. How I treat strangers. The world will always have its share of rudeness, dishonesty, and indifference. That doesn���t mean I have to contribute to it. Kindness, patience, fairness���these are always within my control.

I���m prioritizing stillness. The next four years are going to be noisy. Chaotic. Overwhelming. If I want to navigate them well, I need to be able to think clearly���not reactively, not emotionally, but with perspective and intention. This requires stillness. Randall Stutman has been a coach to some of Wall Street���s biggest CEOs for decades. His clients have included Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America. His consulting and advising agency, CRA, has worked with thousands of executives at hundreds of hedge funds and banks. These are people whose entire livelihood depends on them being perpetually ready to respond to the daily, hourly, sometimes even minute-by-minute volatility. Stutman surprised me when he told me that he often asks these very busy executives how they recharge, given the all-consuming nature of their work. The best, he found, have at least one hobby that gives them peace���things like sailing, long-distance cycling, listening quietly to classical music, scuba diving, riding motorcycles, and fly fishing. There is a surprising commonality between all the hobbies: an absence of voices. In a noisy world, a couple of hours without chatter, without other people in our ear, where we can simply think (or not think), is essential. I can���t control the chaos of the world, but I can control whether I get sucked into it. If I want to be steady, clear-headed, and effective over the next four years, I need time to step back. To think. To reset. That���s why I���m making stillness a priority. (Lots of other great bits of wisdom in my conversation with Randall Stutman, .)

I���m contributing to my community. America���s communities have been hollowed out. Big box stores replaced small businesses. Digital replaced physical. So much of modern success is subtractive���extracting, optimizing, squeezing more for less. I���m trying to do the opposite. In 2021, my wife and I bought , a little place that���s been in business in our small, rural town since 1940. We also opened , a small-town bookstore down the street. Neither of these are the most rational business decisions���it���s risky, expensive, and deeply local. But what���s the point of success if you only spend it trying to be more successful? We like these things because they matter. Because they are real.

I���m not always having an opinion. It���s possible, Marcus Aurelius said, to not have an opinion. , he reminds himself. You don���t have to let this upset you. You don���t have to think something about everything. Do you need to have an opinion about the scandal of the moment���is it changing anything? Do you need to have an opinion about the way your kid does their hair? So what if this person likes music that sounds weird to you? So what if that person is a vegetarian? ���These things are not asking to be judged by you,��� . ���Leave them alone.��� Especially because these opinions often make us miserable! ���It���s not things that upset us,��� Epictetus says, ���it���s our opinions about things.��� The fewer opinions you have, especially about other people and things outside your control, the happier you will be. The nicer you���ll be to be around, too. Of course, this is not to say that we shouldn���t have any opinions at all, but that we should save our judgments for what matters���right and wrong, justice and injustice, what is moral and what is not. If we spend our energy forming opinions about every trivial annoyance, we���ll have none left for the things that actually matter.

I���m picking up the half-dead crow. I���m helping the starfish. In Milan Kundera���s , Tereza, the sensitive, compassionate female protagonist, tells her husband: ���It is much more important to dig a half-buried crow out of the ground than to send petitions to a president.��� Of course, politics matter. But so do the small, easily overlooked acts of kindness. The Jains of India wouldn���t make pilgrimages during the rainy season for fear of trampling new grass���a simple, beautiful reminder that even the smallest choices ripple outward. Gandhi���s nonviolence grew from this reverence for life. The Stoics, too, sought to expand the definition of who we owe justice and kindness to. There���s the famous story of the boy and the starfish. Thousands are stranded on the beach, dying. The boy starts throwing them back, one by one. A bystander scoffs, ���You���ll never make a difference.��� The boy tosses another: ���It matters to this one.��� We tend to think in grand solutions, sweeping reforms���ignoring the power of small, immediate acts. But no change is possible without that first step, that first act of care. That���s why I���m focusing on what���s right in front of me. The people I can help. The burdens I can ease. The kindnesses I can extend. One of the ways we do that for is through a partnership with Feeding America () and GiveDirectly ().

I���m refusing to become cynical. In , I quote General Mattis who said cynicism is cowardice. It takes courage to care. Only the brave believe, especially when everyone else is full of doubt. Losers have always gotten together in little groups and talked about winners. The hopeless have always mocked the hopeful.

I���m looking for the helpers. There���s a quote from Mr. Rogers I love: ���When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ���Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.������ We decide what we look for in life. If you focus on chaos, dysfunction, and selfishness, that���s all you���ll see. But if you look for the people who step up, you���ll find them everywhere. The firefighters battling wildfires in California. The doctors and nurses working through exhaustion. The neighbor who quietly steps in to help. Their presence restores your faith in humanity. Not that I���m sitting on the sidelines, watching. The point of looking for the helpers isn���t to take comfort in their existence���it���s to look for ways to follow in their footsteps, however we can.

I���m grabbing the sturdy handle. Every event has two handles, Epictetus said: ���one by which it can be carried, and one by which it can���t. If your brother does you wrong, don���t grab it by his wronging, because this is the handle incapable of lifting it. Instead, use the other���that he is your brother, that you were raised together, and then you will have hold of the handle that carries.��� This applies to everything. When bad news comes, do I grab the handle of despair or the handle of action? When I���m slighted, do I grab the handle of grievance or the handle of grace? When things feel uncertain, do I grab the handle of fear or the handle of preparation? I don���t get to choose what happens. But I do get to choose how I respond. And if I want to carry the weight of whatever comes next, I have to grab the handle that���s strong enough to hold.

I���m focusing on my expertise. Every morning, goes out to over one million people around the world. That���s where I can make a difference. Not in random comment sections or text threads, drowning in endless, useless debates about everything wrong in the world. I can have an impact in my work, sharing ideas that help people navigate uncertainty and live better lives. Our work���whatever it is���has the power to shape the world far more than our opinions do. So I focus on that, doing it well for as long as I can.

I���m not letting the sonsofbitches turn me into a sonuvabitch. This might be the hardest task in the world right now���to not let assholes turn you into an asshole. To not let cruelty harden you, to not let stupidity make you bitter, to not let outrage pull you down to its level. ���The best revenge,��� Marcus Aurelius wrote in , ���is to not be like that.��� I am disappointed by some of the things people I know are saying and doing; I am more focused on making sure I don���t follow suit.

I���m doing difficult things. The Stoics kept themselves in fighting shape, they liked to say, not for appearance���s sake, but because they understood life itself was a kind of battle. They knew that when we feel awful, we act awfully. A person disgusted with themselves has less patience for others. A person who easily loses their breath more easily loses their temper or their courage or their self-control. During COVID, I got in good shape by running, biking, and walking at least a couple thousand miles. Lately, I���ve been running or swimming in the morning. I���ve been biking more than I used to ���because of an ankle injury���. I���ve been doing more weight training, too. I try every day to keep my practice because, as the Jews say of the Sabbath, it keeps me. Regardless of the time, place, or distance, it���s never a bad idea to find out what your body is capable of. I like the way legendary coach Phil Jackson practices this with his players: ���Once I had the Bulls practice in silence; on another occasion I made them scrimmage with the lights out. Not because I want to make their lives miserable but because I want to prepare them for the inevitable chaos that occurs the minute they step onto a basketball court.���

I���m choosing to be philosophical. Not just in the sense that I���m reading philosophy���though I am���but in how I���m thinking. I���m taking the long view. Have there been bad leaders before? Have there been moments of chaos? Have people felt like the world was unraveling? Of course. This is what living through history looks like. The 1960s were filled with war, assassinations, and unrest. Have you read Bryan Burrough���s ? In 1968, there was a flu epidemic���and TWO THOUSAND terrorist bombings in the United States! The Great Depression left millions in despair. It wasn���t fun to live through Watergate, the Six-Day War, the 1973 oil embargo, or the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nobody wanted to experience the Reformation, the Cultural Revolution, or one of the countless civil wars of the past. It was scary. It was weird. It was confusing. That���s what history is. It���s only the passage of time that turns down the volume on these moments, reducing them to a neat passage in a book. The fall of Rome must have felt like the end of the world. And yet, people endured. We don���t get to choose whether we live in normal times or not. We only get to choose how we respond. The Stoics remind us that history is cyclical���chaos is the rule, not the exception. But they also remind us that through reason, courage, and discipline, we can rise above it. So I focus on what I can control. I do my work. I refuse to be broken by things beyond my power.

I can���t predict the future, so I don���t know what the year will bring, but I feel pretty confident in predicting that 2025 will be challenging.

First of all, because what year hasn���t brought challenges? Never forget, Seneca reminds us, Fortune has a habit of behaving exactly as she pleases. Why would 2025 be an exception to this rule? There is no normal in this life���except disruption, change and surprise.

Second, because it already is challenging. We���re three weeks into the year and there have already been fires and wars, political dysfunction, attacks and earthquakes. My kids have already been sick. And we���re just getting started.

The question, then, is not how we can avoid these challenges but how we can prepare for them. One of my favorite quotes, inscribed across the back of , comes from Walter Mosley: ���I���m not saying that you have to be a reader to save your soul in the modern world. I���m saying it helps.���

2025 will be crazy and weird and tough. But probably not any more than the year 1925. Or the year 25 AD. That means there are lots of books, lots of ideas, lots of history that can help us with what lies ahead���because it will rhyme with what lies behind us. Whether we���re navigating personal trials, global upheavals, or moments of inspiration, books remain one of the most reliable tools to help us prepare for what���s to come. They challenge us, ground us, and offer us the wisdom of centuries.

With that in mind, here are some books���some timeless, some timely���that I recommend for 2025. Each one offers something unique to help you grow, reflect, and thrive. .

by Cal Newport
As we head into 2025, the pressure to do more, to be constantly busy, to fill every moment with productivity and progress feels more intense than ever. In , Cal Newport, one of my favorite writers and thinkers, rethinks what productivity can and should mean, making a strong case for the power of doing less but doing it better. It���s funny, people think I work a lot, but I don���t. I���m much closer to Cal���s outline in . I take my kids to school every day. I get home well before dinner every night. I take a lot of walks (). I just do this steadily and consistently. When Cal came on the podcast (), we talked about this idea of Festina lente���make haste slowly���that is my philosophy for the most part.

��� by Dr. Edith Eva Eger
Dr. Eger is a complete hero of mine. At 16-years-old, she���s sent to Auschwitz. And how does this not break a person? How do they survive? How do they endure the unendurable? And how do they emerge from this, not just not broken, but cheerful and happy and of service to other people? The last thing Dr. Eger���s mother said to her before she was sent to the gas chambers was that very Stoic idea: even when we find ourselves in horrendous situations, we can always choose how we respond to them, who we���re going to be inside of them, what we���re going to hold onto inside of them. Dr. Eger quotes , who she later studied under, ���Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms ��� to choose one���s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one���s own way.��� It was this idea that allowed Dr. Eger to not only endure unimaginable suffering but to find meaning in it. I���ve had the incredible honor of interviewing Dr. Eger twice ( and ) and the joy and energy of this woman, this 95-year-old Holocaust survivor, is just incredible.

by Stefan Zweig
about what a Stoic should be thinking about in times like these. It might be of use to you. Me? I picked up my copy of Zweig���s little book on Montaigne, which has been of solace and strength since I read it back in 2016. There are two kinds of biographies: Long ones which tell you every fact about the person���s life, and short ones which capture the person���s essence and the lessons of their life. This biography is a brilliant, urgent and important example of the latter. It is what I ���that is, a book that teaches you how to live through the story of another person. If you���ve been struggling with the onslaught of negative news and political turmoil, read this book. It���s the biography of a man who retreated from the chaos of 16th-century France to study himself, written by a man fleeing the chaos of 20th-century Europe. When I say it���s timely, I mean that it���s hard to be a thinking person and not see alarming warning signs about today���s world while reading this book. Yet it also gives us a solution: Turn inward. Master yourself. This book helped me get through 2024, no question. is another one I���d add to the moral biography genre, which I used to help me write .

by Robert A. Caro
As much as I love those short, moral biographies, there is nothing I love more than door-stopper biographies. You know those magisterial, epic books that seem like they couldn���t possibly be worth reading, but somehow you���re riveted on every page? If you want to try one of those this year, start with Robert Caro. Just these four books alone could tie you up for the whole year, and that alone would be well spent. It���s unquestionable to me that Caro is one of the greatest biographers to ever live. His intricate, complicated, sprawling investigation into Lyndon Johnson will change how you see power, ambition, politics, personality and justice. If there is one line that sums up the whole series it���s this: It���s that power doesn���t only corrupt. That���s too simple. What power does is reveal.

by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy said that his most essential work was not his novels but his daily read, . Before he wrote it, he dreamed of creating a book composed of ���a wise thought for every day of the year, from the greatest philosophers of all times and all people��� Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Pascal.��� As he wrote to his assistant, ���I know that it gives one great inner force, calmness, and happiness to communicate with such great thinkers��� They tell us about what is most important for humanity, about the meaning of life and about virtue.��� As you can imagine, I am a big fan of daily devotionals. Check out and for the free daily email versions I do.

by Richard Reeves
I���ve got two young boys (thus the ), so I���ve been following Richard Reeves’s work for some time. This book could so easily have been culture war fodder, but thankfully, he is so much above and beyond that. The gains society has made for women���especially in America���have been utterly unprecedented. But men are struggling, or rather, young boys are struggling. How do we help them? How do we show them a better path? How do we teach them to fulfill their potential and contribute their unique contribution to society? Given my work with Stoicism, I think we���ve gone too far in describing masculinity as ���toxic��� () but I would say there are many toxic examples (and thinkers) out there who are misleading young men (). If you���re a parent or a teacher or a policy maker, you have to read this book. .

by Julia Baird
So when I was in Australia, I sat down with Julia to talk about her new book, , which is all about the idea of grace (). We are wicked people living amongst wicked people, Seneca said, that���s why we need to be patient with each other, why we need to forgive each other. I would say this is especially true coming out of the pandemic and the recent election.

by David Halberstam
I was deeply moved, in some cases to tears, by David Halberstam���s , when I first read it in 2022. It tells the story of the early days of the Civil Rights Movement from the perspective of the young activists who played pivotal roles in the struggle for racial equality and grew up to lead the movement. It���s an incredibly powerful book about youth and social change���and how it comes from brave young people. I haven���t stopped thinking about it since I first read it. Trust me,

, , and by Taylor Branch
Another long biography series���I was blown away by Taylor Branch���s epic three-part biography on Martin Luther King Jr. when I first read it back in 2020���it was truly life-changing for me. I was once again profoundly impacted by this series as I picked it back up to do research for . This trilogy does a phenomenal job of revealing the ways that an individual person really can have an impact on the collective. It���s a masterpiece of a series, made even better by the fact that Branch began the series when his son was born, and finished it with the help of that same son years later ().

by Morgan Housel
Too often, we give way too much attention to what is shiny and new or urgent and timely instead of focusing on what truly matters���the things that are perennial and enduring. Morgan () put together a great book of anecdotes and musings on the constants of human nature and history. In a world that seems to change faster every year, reminds us of the things that stay the same���and why they matter. If you loved Morgan���s , this book is a natural next step. It���s not just about what we know���it���s about what we understand about ourselves, our behavior, and the world we live in. , reflect on, and revisit.

��� by Robert Greene
Speaking of things that never change���there are some awful people and awful movements on the march around the world. This feels new, but of course, it���s not���these people have always existed. The problem is they are just not well understood. Worse, good people are not often armed with the tools (or the cunning) to defeat or to effectuate change. If you want to live life on your terms, climb as high as you know you���re capable, and avoid being controlled by others���you need to read . You���ll leave not just with actionable lessons, but an indelible sense of what to do in many trying and confusing situations. Is there a darkness to this book? Yes. But there is a darkness to life, too. You have to understand it and be able to defend against it. If you don���t want to read it because you think it���s ���immoral,��� well then you definitely need to read it, .

by Sinclair Lewis
One of my reading rules is: If you want to understand current events, don���t rely on breaking news. Find a book about a similar event in the past. It���s also true that fiction helps us understand the human heart and the events of history more than nonfiction can. will make you so uncomfortable you���ll probably pick it up and put it down several times. One of America���s most famous writers wrote a bestselling novel in 1935 about an appalling populist demagogue who won the presidency of the United States. Life imitates art. Change the dates, places and names and it���s no longer fiction, it���s real. If you don���t read the book, at least please read about it. Because you need to know. It can happen here.

by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor
This is another timely book to pick up this year. It���s a short but important read about a series of letters between two business partners (one Jewish, one not) during the rise of Hitler in Germany. One is slowly corrupted by the events happening around him, his heart closing to the people and ideas he once believed in. It���s a heartbreaking but eye-opening look at the banality of fascism. People don���t just suddenly become evil or awful. It���s a process, a slide, even a response to incentives. It can happen to anyone. We should all be careful! I first read years ago, but I was reminded of it again when I read by Helene Hanff last summer which is about a New York TV writer and a British bookseller exchanging letters in the aftermath of WWII. Read and then follow it up with .

��� by Peter Singer
Even though Stoicism is a ruggedly individual philosophy, at the core of it is this idea of ���the circles of concern.��� Our first concern, the Stoics said, is ourselves. Then our family, our community, our country, our world, all living things. The work of philosophy is to draw these concerns inward���to learn to care about as many people as possible, to do as much good as possible. I dedicated an entire chapter in my book to this idea, titled ���Expand The Circle��� (). So when I had and mentioned this book, he said he only chanced on a similar metaphor, not knowing its Stoic origins. is a great book about expanding our focus on the welfare of family and friends to include, ultimately, all of humanity���animals, the environment, all of it.

by James Clear
A perennial favorite because it works. It���s when things are chaotic and crazy, when the world feels like it���s falling apart, that we most need to develop good habits. I think about James Clear���s concept of atomic habits on a regular basis. To me, this is a sign of a ���that even just thinking about the title has an impact on you. I love the double meaning of the word atomic���not just meaning explosive habits, but also focusing on the smallest possible size of habit, the tiniest step you can take to start the chain reaction that can in fact lead to explosive results.

by Inaz�� Nitobe
I can���t remember which subscriber emailed me about this book, but I really liked it. Written in 1905, was the first book written for a Western audience about the code of conduct that governed the lives of Japan���s ruling class. It gets to ���the soul of Japan��� by answering the question of why certain ideas and customs prevail. It was a huge sensation in the U.S. when it came out. I believe Theodore Roosevelt read it. It���s a lovely peon to the virtues of an ancient tradition and deserves to be read up there with and (two other favorites of mine). Fictionally, there is also , which is another great read.

by Donald Robertson
I remain as ever a big fan of Donald Robertson. His biography of Marcus Aurelius is one of the best books I���ve read and I loved his other book on Marcus Aurelius, . There���s a hilarious quote by Macaulay that I used in the Wisdom book (just finishing it): ���The more I read about Socrates the less I wonder that they poisoned him.��� Because while the dialogs are fun to read now, they weren���t fun for the people he was making a fool of. Socrates considered himself the ���gadfly��� of Athens. People hate flies! , this was one of the things I wanted to ask him about���that for all Socrates��� wisdom, he seemed to lack social intelligence. Emily Wilson talks about this in her book quite a bit (a good companion to Donald���s book). Fascinating book about a guy who, like Cicero, I can���t decide if I like.

��� by Marcus Aurelius
This will always be my ultimate book recommendation. No matter who you are, where you live, how old you are, or how many times you���ve already read Marcus Aurelius��� , it���s time for you to read it. I���m a champion of the , but if you are re-reading it, I���ve found that a new translation of a book you���ve read (or love) is a great way to see the same ideas from a new angle���or find new ideas you missed on the previous go-arounds. So if you haven���t read . There���s a reason this book has endured for almost twenty centuries ( from me having read more than 100 times). If you haven���t read Marcus Aurelius or if you have���you should and then read it again.

Stop watching cable news, it���s bad for you.

Stop filtering the world through social media, it���s a cesspool.

Turn off those breaking news alerts on your phone���none of them are as important as you think.

But isn���t it my responsibility to be an informed citizen?

Absolutely.

The problem is, we���ve fooled ourselves into thinking that endless news consumption is how you stay ���informed���.

About 15 years ago, I made an abrupt turn in my life. Souring on the marketing world, I wrote , a book about media manipulation. Although a lot has changed since it came out in 2012 (and a lot has changed ), it���s alarming how relevant the book continues to be. It was, if anything, ahead of its time. Today, we are awash not just with fake news but with too much news, period. Too much information. Too much noise.

I had a few aims with that book but one of my hopes was that when people saw how the sausage was made, they would eat a lot less sausage (and certainly less factory-farmed sausage).

Yet here we are���across the political spectrum���consuming way too much of it. No wonder we���re miserable! No wonder we���re overwhelmed. No wonder we���re easier to manipulate than ever.

In some countries, like Finland, they teach kids media literacy and how to spot propaganda (largely due to their border with Russia). But the rest of the world? We���re just not equipped for the environment we are in.

And that���s my argument today: If you want to make a positive difference in the world���or simply maintain your sanity���you need to step back. You need to learn how to be more ±è³ó¾±±ô´Ç²õ´Ç±è³ó¾±³¦²¹±ô��ï¿�which means being more discerning about what you let into your mind and learning how to see the big picture, calmly and with perspective.

As I said, being informed is essential. The problem is that breaking news isn���t about informing you. It���s about grabbing and holding your attention���news that is, by definition, not the complete story. It is almost certainly going to be changed as events unfold. George S. Trow observed this decades ago: ���Notice that the news is written in such a way that all these ���dramatic��� ravelings and unravelings are reported in detail���but should the thing finally come together, the news will just stop.��� Today, it doesn���t stop���it keeps going and going with endless updates, speculation, and hot takes to keep you in the 24/7/365 cycle.

And social media? It���s even worse. The constant stream of opinions and outrage���how can you possibly have time to think and reflect when your brain is being buzzed by attention-seekers trying to outdo each other?

When you watch sports shows during the day, it���s easy to laugh at the manufactured drama. It���s easy to see that Stephen A. Smith or Skip Bayless are masters at finding things to be upset about, finding things to make you upset about, spinning storylines about who���s overrated, whose game is in decline, and whose job is in jeopardy. It���s all nonsense���not because it���s about sports, but because it’s just meaningless noise: opinions about past events or speculations about future ones, masquerading as meaningful discussion. As if having those opinions is anything but a form of mental masturbation.

Cable news and social media follow the same playbook as the sports media cycle. They just hide the ball better.

And all this isn���t even touching on the bad actors who exploit the incentives of this system (which is what really explores). The media strategist behind Donald Trump, for example, has been very clear about how they ���flood the zone with shit��� to distract and disorient people. Foreign powers use similar methods: They don���t suppress information so much as they overwhelm people with contradictory and divisive information, propping up fringe viewpoints to turn people against each other. People like Tucker Carlson tell their audience one thing and then in private, say the complete opposite (). They are not informed experts. They are not your friends. They are con artists, provocateurs and profiteers who are preying on you.

This is not an environment conducive to understanding, to say the least. Some people���s media habits remind me of that line from The Simpsons: ���Not only am I not learning, I’m forgetting stuff I used to know!�

There is almost nothing on the news or social media that is not intentionally designed to agitate and outrage. It���s there to distract you. To consume your attention. That there are teams of designers, behavioral scientists, and engineers paid gobsmacking amounts of money to keep you watching and scrolling���posting and waiting for replies.

The same goes for every other publisher or platform. Television doesn���t want you to get up and take action, they want you to sit through the commercial break. A news outlet doesn���t want you to be so outraged by an article that you do something, no, they want you to stay and click another article at the bottom���or one of those scammy AI-written Taboola ads at the bottom (which again, and still exist!).

Stop falling for it.

When I���m not feeling great physically���tired, irritable, sluggish���usually it���s because I���m eating poorly. In the same way, when I feel mentally scattered and distracted���I know it���s time to clean up my information diet.

���If you wish to improve,��� Epictetus once said, ���be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters.���

One of the most powerful things we can do as human beings in our hyperconnected, 24/7 digital media world is to turn our attention to things that last, to get out of the hellscape of noise and go to truth. It���s a transgressive act, I think, to pick up a book these days���better yet, an old book. If you wish to understand the present moment, you���ll gain more clarity by studying the past than you will from following the breathless news cycle. Put distance between you and the attention merchants. Read philosophy. Read history. Read biographies. Study psychology. Study the patterns of humanity.

During the pandemic, I learned more from reading John M. Barry���s (about a pandemic 100 years earlier) than I did from any daily news briefing. My understanding of the demagogues of this moment has been shaped not just by my reading of history but also by fiction���I strongly recommend and . Want to understand America and the EU right now? Read Mike Duncan���s about Rome and the hundred years of political dysfunction that preceded Julius Caesar. Want to understand what happened in the days after the 2020 election? Read . Want to understand how the system is supposed to work? Read Jeffrey Rosen and Tom Ricks’s books on the philosophical influences on the founders ( and ).

I have not just read these things, but I���ve reached out to the authors (when possible) and interviewed them. I didn���t do this so much for the audience as I did for my own understanding���I wanted to hear from actual experts, not professional opinion-havers. (Here���s me talking to media experts like and . Historians like , , and . Here���s my talking to a , . Here���s me talking to . Here���s me talking to .)

What I���m always trying to do is ground my sense of what���s happening in reality. I’m trying to get perspective. I���m trying to get context. I don���t always get it right���I sometimes get caught up in the ���current thing��� or get anxious or worked up about stuff that doesn���t matter���but I���ll tell you what: I don���t wake up every day miserable. I have also avoided, unlike many people I know, .

This is exactly what one of the early Stoics said was the job of the philosopher. We���re supposed to think for ourselves. We���re supposed to be above the fray.

So I���m not saying you need to disconnect completely. What I���m saying is you can���t possibly hope to keep your bearings about you these days if your understanding of the world is primarily dependent on the news of the day. No, you need to be rooted in something deeper than the so-called ���first draft of history��� or the ticker tape of what the sociologist E. Robert Kelly once called the ���specious present.��� Ask yourself: Is this thing that I���m consuming likely to still be relevant, still important, in a day? Or in five days, or in a week or in a year or five years?

Then ask yourself: Am I consuming or contributing? Because too often we conflate these things. The time spent scrolling or reacting on social media could be spent engaging with your community, voting, attending a city council meeting, teaching your children, making ethical decisions in your own business, or simply having a meaningful conversation.

If we could break free from this loop, not only could we get some meaningful work done, but we might be able to connect with each other in ways that are productive instead of divisive.

There is a tradeoff here: by choosing deliberate ignorance of the nonsense and chatter, we gain the ability to prioritize and see with clarity. It���s a swap���generalized outrage for the capacity to focus on what truly matters. Whether you see the next four years as the beginning of real positive change or the beginning of the end���one thing is certain: you will be able to think about it all more objectively if you followed the breathless news cycle less.

Meanwhile, Trump���a news and social media addict if there ever was one���is charged not with campaigning for president anymore but with being president. That���s going to require ignoring the talking heads���the ones that hate him and the ones that love him���or the apps on his phone and focusing on doing one of the toughest jobs on the planet. Social media will only be a source of aggravation and distraction for them and for us. Catering to the people who sell our attention for money will not only deprive us of any potential common ground, it will actually make us less accountable to each other.

Of course, this isn���t just about politics or presidents. You can replace ���Trump administration��� with whatever you care about and leaders of all types. The point remains: there is plenty of important work to do in this world and plenty to be vigilant about.

But let���s stop pretending that the ceaseless news feed is anything other than what it is: addiction and manipulation masquerading as a social good. Then we wonder why we���re left sapped of reason and willpower and perspective.

Stay informed.

But do it differently:

Pick up a book.

Be a philosopher.

When I lived in New Orleans, I used to get my haircut by this guy named Pat in the French Quarter. I remember looking around the Monteleone Barber Shop, which had two conspicuously empty chairs, and asking why Pat never had anyone else working in the shop with him.

���I used to,��� he said, ���but the other barbers kept speaking badly about the President so I let them go.��� Ordinarily, I would have just left it at that���this was the Deep South and politics are always risky���but I had to know.

���What president?��� I asked.

���Jimmy Carter,��� he said like I should have known.

I remember thinking, ���lol ·É³ó²¹³Ù?��ï¿� Had he really been holding onto this grudge for thirty years? And who white knights for Jimmy Carter?

But that curious exchange sent me down a rabbit hole. Over the years, I read a chunk of the books Carter wrote (I would not have guessed he wrote 30+ books). I also read several big biographies on Carter and became genuinely fascinated by a man that I���m not sure I���d heard a single good thing about growing up.

But because of Pat, slowly but surely, Jimmy Carter became one of my heroes. In fact, I���d argue he is the hero of my book , and largely the inspiration for the title. He appears in and some of my favorite stories in (like ). And back in April, it was one of the honors of my life to give a speech about Carter at the U.S. Naval Academy, which Carter graduated from in 1946 right across from the recently named Carter Hall. ( or at the link below and check out the others in my four virtues series and and ).

Well, less than two weeks ago, Jimmy Carter died at age 100. 100! The longest-living president in American history. That doesn���t tell us anything, though. Seneca���s line was that it���s not how long you live but how well you live that matters. He was pointing out that many people live to be old but have little to show for it.��

What I wanted to talk about today is some of the things that Jimmy Carter has to show for the century he spent on this planet.

The reviews of his presidency are unfairly mixed���this was a man whose term was without wars, without corruption, first addressed climate change, mandated the seatbelt in cars, returned the Panama Canal to its rightful owners, a historic peace deal for the Middle East.

As he summed up his own time in office: ���We told the truth, we obeyed the law, and we kept the peace.���

Pretty good.

But his time as an ex-president is unquestioned. After he left office, Carter founded The Carter Center to promote global health, democracy, and human rights, earning him a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. In particular, Carter was relentless in his efforts to eradicate Guinea worm disease. At a 2015 press conference, Carter famously said, ���I’d like for the last Guinea worm to die before I do.��� When he started working on the problem, the disease afflicted more than 3.6 million people a year in 21 countries. As of the latest report at the end of 2022, there are just 13 cases in 4 countries.

Beyond wiping out diseases, he���s acted as an international mediator in North Korea, Haiti, and other nations. He was an active volunteer, focusing particularly on housing for the poor���still personally building houses into his 90s. He wrote numerous books on various subjects, from policy to his personal life and even poetry. He enjoyed a 77-year marriage to his beloved Rosalynn, ���the foundation for my entire enjoyment of life,��� Carter once said. Together, they had four children and 22 grandchildren and great-grandchildren.��

In short, it was a life of service and a life of virtue. Not virtue in the pious, judgmental sense, but in the Stoic sense���active in public life, active in the world, equal parts compassionate and muscular, he was a man deserving to command because he commanded himself first. And so, here are some of the very best lessons from the great Jimmy Carter on how to live a good and honorable life:

. In the 1930s and 40s, the African Americans who entered the Naval Academy left because of appalling racism. Wesley Brown was on the brink of leaving when Carter, who was two years ahead, popped by his dorm room and said, ���Hang in there.��� Because Carter grew up in a small, rural, segregated town in Georgia, he was expected to be racist. And so, one classmate recalled, ���he was treated as if he was a traitor.��� Still, Carter would often put his arm around Brown and let him know he was there for him. Brown would hang in there and become the first African American graduate of the Naval Academy in 1949.

. Even when he was president, Carter blocked out an hour in the mornings for reading, thinking, and prayer.

. Carter���s reading habit began as a child. Growing up, reading was done as a family. Each evening, his mother sat down for dinner with a book. The children were encouraged to follow suit. It wasn���t considered rude, Jimmy would later reflect, because reading at the table was simply a Carter Family habit. What a beautiful scene that must have been, even if it was a little untraditional: each of their faces buried in a book, each of them learning, entertaining themselves, widening their horizons. Carter carried this tradition on with his own family even as they moved into The White House in 1977.

. In an interview with Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear Navy, Carter proudly said he was ranked 59th in a class of 840 at the Naval Academy. Instead of being impressed, Rickover asked, ���Did you always do your best?��� Carter answered honestly that he did not always do his best. After a long pause, Rickover asked, ���Why not?��� and then walked out of the room. Carter would never forget this question. This question became the lodestar of Carter���s life.

Do it now. In 1970, Jimmy Carter won a surprise victory for governor of Georgia. During his inauguration in 1971, he announced: ���I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over.��� The crowd was stunned. He had just run a conservative campaign in a conservative state, did he really have to make that statement right then? ���It���s impossible for me to delay something that I see needs to be done,��� Carter later explained. He always said that he never wanted to do anything to hurt his country���that���s why he made that bold declaration the moment he became governor. This is a lesson for all of us. There are so many things that we want to do in life, but we delay because it will be too hard, too controversial, too time-consuming. The danger in the delay, Carter understood, is that we don���t say we won���t do it, we say we���ll get to it later. And then we never do. No one knows how much time we have. The longer we wait, the more likely it is that we���ll never get around to it. So stop delaying. Do what needs to be done. Do it now.

Seriously, do it now. Six years after that stunning speech in Georgia, Carter was elected president of the United States. On his very first day in office, just hours after his inauguration parade, he held a meeting���literally his first appointment���with a disabled army veteran named Max Cleland to discuss yet another stunning announcement. After asking Cleland to head the Veterans Administration, Carter instructed him to begin working on a blanket pardon for everyone who had evaded serving in Vietnam. He believed the time for forgiveness and understanding had come. Cleland, who supported the idea, warned the president that it would be unpopular in the Senate and might be worth delaying, perhaps until his second term. ���I don���t care if all 100 of them are against me,��� Carter replied. ���It���s the right thing to do.���

Be generous. During the Depression, wanderers and hobos would often stop at Carter’s childhood home in Georgia, which was not far from the railroad tracks. Carter���s mother would always fix them something to eat. Later, Jimmy Carter would learn that the community of homeless people during the Depression had a series of symbols to communicate which houses were decent and kind and which were heartless and cruel and to be avoided. The idea of this mark���of earning it from those in need���stayed with him all his life. It���s why, even into his nineties, he donated his time and money to help others and built houses for those who could not afford their own.

Use your powers for good. The Carter family met a woman named Mary Prince when they moved into the Georgia governor���s mansion in 1971. She had been assigned to their staff as part of a work program for incarcerated inmates. Carter���s wife, Rosalynn, quickly became convinced of Prince���s innocence and was appalled at the details of her conviction���Prince, a black woman, had been convinced by her lawyer to plead guilty to manslaughter. The lawyer then had her plead to murder, for which she received a life sentence. The Carters asked that Prince be assigned to nanny their young daughter, Amy, and eventually secured her parole and a full pardon. She came to live with them in The White House. After his presidency, Carter bought her a house down the street from the Carters��� in Plains, Georgia. They remained close friends for the rest of their lives. Carter would dedicate a book called to her in 2006.

. As he was setting up his administration in The White House, Carter told the ambitious staff, ���We are going to be here a long time, and all of you will be more valuable to me and the country with rest and a stable home life.���

. Carter said that���s what drove him: ���I feel I have one life to live. I feel like God wants me to do the best I can with it. And that���s quite often my major prayer. Let me live my life so that it will be meaningful.���

Run a tight ship. Everybody thinks Jimmy Carter was a bad president because he was too nice or too idealistic, 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 ). He was a good man, but he had trouble managing all the demands on his time and attention. 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.

. Jimmy Carter, once evaluating his relationship with his faith, asked himself: ���If I was tried for being a Christian, would I be convicted?��� It���s sort of a breathtaking question���imagine suddenly taking your word for it wasn���t enough. Imagine you were actually being investigated. What would the record show? This is such an important question to ask yourself not just of faith, but as a parent, as a spouse, as a friend, as an employee, as a boss. Are you as committed as you say you are? Would the evidence be compelling? Or would it turn out that you talked a good game, but didn���t actually walk it? In the end, it doesn���t matter what you say. It matters who you are.

. When Jimmy Carter���s mother was 68 years old, she saw an ad on television for the Peace Corps that said ���Age is no barrier.��� So she joined. Almost 70 years old, she went to India and taught nutrition and family planning! Is it any wonder then, that Jimmy Carter’s post-presidential years were so productive and service-oriented? Even at age 96, he built houses for Habitat for Humanity, wrote books and taught Sunday school. Carter knew that age was no barrier���especially when it comes to doing the right thing.

A young Jimmy Carter was pulled aside by his father one day: ���There is something I want you to promise me,��� his father said, ���I don���t want you to smoke a cigarette until you are twenty-one years old.��� This was the late 1930s when something like 40% of the population smoked (Carter���s dad himself was hopelessly hooked). ���I won���t,��� Jimmy promised. In his lifetime, Carter smoked only one cigarette, at age twenty-one while in the Naval Academy. He hated it and never did again. Tragically, his siblings and mother picked up his father���s smoking habit and each died of cancer in one form or another. Jimmy, as we know, lived to be 100. Take care of yourself. It allows you to do more good.��

A Democratic congressman once said of Carter: ���If that son of a bitch asks me to do the right thing one more time, I���m going to kick his ass.��� No matter what you do, someone is going to be unhappy about it. This is a simple fact of life. But you can���t let it stop you.

Don���t cheat the gift. As a young man, Jimmy Carter heard the Parable of the Talents, which tells the story of three servants who are given money from their master to protect while he is away. When the master returns, he asks each servant what they did with the money. The first invested the money, the second put it in a bank, and the third buried it in fear of the responsibility. ���I gather from this episode,��� Carter says of the parable, ���that we should use to the fullest degree whatever talents or opportunities we have been given, preferably for the benefit of others.��� To whom much is given, the lesson from the parable goes, much is expected. Do your best. Become what you can be. You owe the world that much.

Be loyal. One campaign reporter once remarked that of all the presidents he covered in the 20th century, Jimmy Carter was the only president that he can say with absolute certainty was faithful to his wife. Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalyn, were together for 77 years, which is the longest-running marriage in the history of American Presidents.

Be tough on yourself, understanding of others. Jimmy Carter held his life to a high standard, but he was also honest with himself about his flaws and made sure never to boast. The famous ���scandal��� where Carter admitted to having ���lust in his heart,��� was Carter trying to say that he didn���t judge people who did have affairs because he himself was not without sin. ���The guy who is loyal to their wife ought not be condescending or proud because of his relative degree of sinfulness,��� he once said in an interview. Strict with yourself, Marcus Aurelius would say, and tolerant of others.

—â¶Ä”â¶Ä�

On the one hand, I was sad to hear of Carter���s passing. On the other, I wasn���t that sad. Because no one could say that he was taken from us too soon. Not because he was given plenty of time on this planet, but because of what he did with that time. This man certainly lived.

I thought about this a few months ago when I went back to that barber shop while I was in New Orleans on business.

Pat didn���t remember me and I wasn���t sure if I remembered the conversation right, so I sort of danced around it. But I found a way to bring it up.

�����Who doesn���t like Jimmy Carter?��� he said, when I asked him again about the other barbers. ���He���s one of the most decent men who ever lived.�����

Agreed!