Course Summary | Daily Stoic

Course Summary

Contents

Day 1 WatCh toDay’s sunset anD tomorroW’s sunrise � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 5

Day 2 take a ColD Plunge anD shoCk your system � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 10

Day 3 FinD a PlaCe oF isolation, then Count to 1,000 � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 15

Day 4 PiCk a neW skill anD aDD it to your game this year � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 19

Day 5 Visit a Part oF your City you’Ve neVer Been to BeFore � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 23

Day 6 Write your Personal ten CommanDments � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 27

Day 7 PretenD you haVe to get a neW JoB — toDay � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 31

Day 8 oPen your minD: reaD something By someone you Disagree With � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 36

Day 9 FinD your most PrizeD Possession—anD get riD oF it � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 40

Day 10 Free yourselF From one soCial meDia aCCount or neWs aPP � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 44

Day 11 go outsiDe anD Pull WeeDs � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 50

Day 12 PiCk a PhysiCal Pr to Beat��� anD re-Beat this year � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 54

Day 13 set uP your Personal BoarD oF DireCtors � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 58

Day 14 sit DoWn, Write a letter to a FrienD aBout the neW you, anD senD it � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 62

Day 15 Cut out one reCurring exPense � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 66

Day 16 toDay, say thank you ( yes ) to eVerything � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 71

Day 17 get roasteD—learn hoW to take an insult � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 75

Day 18 Plan your PerFeCt Day, then make it haPPen � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 80

Day 19 PiCk FiVe imPortant Books to re-reaD this year � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 85

Day 20 start (anD FunD) an emergenCy reserVe � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 89

Day 21 Be someone’s hero: Do a gooD DeeD � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 94

Bonus Day : Write a eulogy � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 99

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Day 1

WatCh toDay’s sunset anD tomorroW’s sunrise

“The day has already begun to lessen. It has shrunk considerably, but yet will still allow a goodly space of time if one rises, so to speak, with the day itself. We are more industrious, and we are better men if we anticipate the day and welcome the dawn.” —Seneca, Letters From A Stoic, 122.1

In a beautiful letter reflecting on his “advancing years,” Seneca wrote of the comfort he took in the fact that so many of life’s greatest pleasures are found in beginnings and endings. The seed planted and the fruit harvested. The first day of the year and the last. The curtain opens to reveal the stage, then closes to a standing ovation.

To Seneca, the ultimate example of this was the natural cycle of the Sun’s daily appearance and disappearance. Like the first and final acts of a play, the opening and closing points of a circle, “a day has its beginning and ending, its sunrise and its sunset.”

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There are few things more pleasurable in life than watching a gorgeous sunrise or a beautiful sunset. To wake up when it’s still dark out, sitting in the quiet that’s only possible when the rest of the house is asleep, watching the night creep into the day. Then, after a long productive day, sinking into your favorite chair on the porch and watching the day fall into night as the Sun sets over the horizon.

Your challenge today is to observe this cycle: watch the sunset this evening, then get up before dawn and watch the Sun rise tomorrow. (Or if you got this email in time, watch today’s sunrise and sunset—literally the dawn of a new year.)

Go ahead right now and Google the times for sunset and sunrise. Set alarms so that you don’t forget. Identify a place with a clear view of the western horizon. Then, when the Sun sets tonight, be outside, ready to witness it all. Take in the beauty of the last light, as it ripples across the horizon and the Sun stains the sky above it with colors that feel like they don’t exist anywhere in nature other than here in this moment. Pay attention as the bottom of the Sun reaches the horizon. It’s shocking how quickly it disappears from view; one of the most signif-icant cosmic events visible from our Earth, over in a few minutes.

Tomorrow, be sure to wake up nice and early as your spot on earth swings back around in its rotation and the Sun prepares to make its reappearance. Get your coffee set up tonight so that you can have a steaming mug ready to take outside with you when the predawn darkness be-gins to lighten into that steely cobalt gray color that we only used to see in our younger days when we hadn’t gone to sleep yet.

Like the hundreds of visitors who flock to the top of Haleakalā Crater in Hawaii every morning to witness one of the world’s great sunrises, make sure you’re situated when those first bright rays peak up out of the eastern horizon and quickly turn the sky from purple to blue to red to orange. Take note of all the ways the sunrise affects your senses: The silence of night giving way to the emerging bustle of dawn. The smell of the crisp air, so cold in parts of the Northern Hemisphere it almost burns your sinuses. The feel of your skin beginning to equalize with the air temperature and your body beginning to emerge from its nightly dormancy.

Observing this cycle is an important practice, especially to kick off this year’s challenge. It combines the symbolic with the practical and it brings you up close to a primordial pro-cess of renewal and rejuvenation—two things that we want you to experience during this challenge.

It’s not just the coming and the going of the day’s light that is so important to absorb, phys-ically. It’s also the symbolism of the cycle itself—one day finished, a new day born, one year finished, one year beginning—which is a key to unlocking the perspective we want to culti-vate for the months to come.

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You see, 2019 is gone. It’s dead and buried. It’s in the past and it won’t be coming around again. And yet, because we don’t pay attention to this kind of cycle in its daily form, we allow ourselves to let one year—sometimes whole decades—bleed into the next as if they are all the same thing, just as we do with our days.

This is part of the reason it’s so easy to get stuck on the petty resentments of yesteryear and fail to make any personal progress as a result. How many of us fixate on past failures, or continue basking in the glory of last year’s successes? How often does it “feel like it was just yesterday” that all this stuff happened? Because in our minds it has been, and we’ve stagnated as a result.

The times of stagnation are over and done.

We want you to see the Sun set on today, and know that just as January 1st is over, just as 2019 is over, so too is the you that existed for that year, for that whole decade. Forget what William Faulkner said, at least for the moment; for you, the past is dead. It is in the past. And that’s where you’re leaving it.

Beautiful sunrises and sunsets happen literally every day; yet how often have you taken the time to witness them? We want you to become the kind of person who is able to stop and smell the roses, the kind of person who can appreciate the beauty that is all around us and find joy in the stillness of a quiet morning or the anticipation of night.

Of all the reasons we hear for why waking up early, alongside the Sun is so important—successful people all seem to do it, it builds momentum for the rest of the day—Seneca identified the best reason 2,000 years ago: we should do it for the delight of getting to witness life’s greatest beginning. Indeed, taking time out of your busy schedule to watch an extended sunset, then waking up nice and early to see the Sun rise the next day, is a great way to begin actually forming the new you.

And the scientific benefits of waking up early only serve to reinforce that notion. It produces:

• Lower risk of depression: Researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder and the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital studied how sleep and waking preferences affected the wellbeing of 32,470 participants. The study, published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, found that “late risers” were more likely to become depressed than those who woke up earlier each day.

• Greater positivity and proactivity: Biologist Christoph Randler conducted a study of 367 college students to assess the correlation of sleep schedule and proactivity—a trait he previosusly linked to better job performance, greater career success, and higher wages. He found that morning people are more energetic and able to take action to change a situation to their advantage.

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“The fascinating thing about our findings,” Randler said, “is that duration of sleep has nothing to do with the increased proactivity and morning alertness that we see among morning people...The timing of sleep does.”

• Healthier eating habits and increased health: A random trial of 2,000 people conducted by researchers from The Obesity Society compared “morning types” and “evening types” and found that morning types eat a more balanced diet, make better food choices, stick to regular meal times, and eat less often—all contributing to lower rates of obesity, lower risk of heart disease, and lower risk of diabetes.

As you watch the Sun set and rise, try to take Plato’s view just as Marcus Aurelius did. Zoom out! The world, he said, is in a constant state of rebirth and recreation. Everything is cycli-cal; the same things happening over and over again through the eons of history. “Whatever happens has always happened,” Marcus Aurelius wrote, “and always will, and is happening at this very moment, everywhere. Just like this.”

2019? It’s old news, it’s one for the history books. The things that bothered you about it? Petty and insignificant. Dots in the distance. Just as the Sun sets on each day, leaving it behind, you need to do the same with last year—because 2020 promises to demand all of your attention and focus. However you feel about 2019, whatever you accomplished or failed to do, whatever fortunes the year brought your way: leave it all behind.

“Counting even yesterday,” Seneca wrote, “all past time is lost time.” All past time is in the same place, he said. It all sits in the same abyss. It’s done. Finished. Gone. Any time spent thinking about the past only piles up more lost time at the bottom of the abyss.

It’s impossible to move forward confidently while you’re looking back over your shoulder. That’s how you run into walls and walk right off cliffs. That is no way to start a new year. The Sun’s coming up again tomorrow, shining for the first time on a fresh new day. And it can shine on a fresh new you, as well—if you let it.

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aDDitional resourCes:

• Sleepyti.me — Plug in the time you have to wake up to see the sunrise and Sleepyti.me will tell you the optimal time to go to sleep, based on the 90-Min-ute Rule

• Letters From A Stoic, 12: On Old Age

• How Admiring the Sunset Changes You for the Better by Linda Wasmer An-drews

• This Is the Best Way to Lift Your Mood—You Just Have to Get Up Early to Do It by Gina Ryder

• Never Let the Sun Catch You Sleeping: Why and How to Become an Early Riser by Brett & Kate McKay

• Forget Productivity Apps: What Time Do You Wake Up? By Shane Parrish

• Being In Awe Can Expand Time and Enhance Well-Being from the Journal of Association for Psychological Science

• The Health Benefits of Sungazing by Dr. Edward Group

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Day 2

take a ColD Plunge anD shoCk your system

“The body should be treated more rigorously, that it may not be disobedient to the mind.” —Seneca, Letters From A Stoic, 8.5

It’s easy to take a few seconds of cold when it’s the middle of summer. In fact, it’s refreshing. What’s harder is to seek out that bracing, bone-chilling shock in the dead of winter. It’s harder still to make a habit of it.

That’s why for our second day of the 2020 Daily Stoic New Year New You challenge, we want you to do something we’ve asked Daily Stoic readers to do before, something that will shock you out of the warm comforts of modern living and, once you’ve breathed your way through it, make you ready for anything.

Our task for you today: take the cold plunge. Immerse yourself in cold water; commit to half a minute of discomfort; and come out the other side stronger for it.

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That’s right, the cold plunge! Just as Seneca did to begin each year, with a freezing plunge into an icy pool. Two thousand years ago Seneca described himself as the “cold-water enthusiast, who… used to inaugurate the first of the year with a plunge into the Virgo aqueduct [the present-day Trevi Fountain].”

Challenging yourself to this kind of chill doesn’t just get your blood flowing or wash you clean. This kind of shock strengthens you. The idea behind the cold plunge is simple: You’re showing your body, you’re showing this morning, this new year, who is in charge. You’re show-ing everyone that you’re tough enough to handle whatever is thrown your way.

It’s a simple process: Go through your usual shower routine. Take as long as you need under the warm water—but remember, it’s not going to last forever. When you’re ready, get a timer going on your phone for 30 seconds. Then, without giving yourself time to think it through or anticipate the chill, crank the handle to cold!

Do whatever it takes to withstand the shock; even if you have to let out a scream. Listen care-fully for the timer to go off. When it does, you have permission to scramble out of your tub or shower as fast as you can.

When you’re out and thinking straight again, it’s time to reflect. Think about how cold it was…and yet how after a time, your body got used to it. Reflect on how nervous you were before you jumped in. Didn’t the prospect of a cold shower seem to almost fill you with terror?? Think about all the things that flooded your mind, all the things you’d rather have done instead of that, given a choice. Yet in the end, you knew that it was going to be just 30 seconds long—and you worked up the nerve, and you did it. You did it.

All these fears we have, all these things we play up in our minds that cause us to tremble—like the cold plunge—we quickly realize, that wasn’t so bad. “We suffer more in imagination than in reality,” Seneca said. He understood that the cold plunge makes this observation so much more tangible, so much more real.

Seneca’s frequent exposure to cold water even helped prepare him for a leisurely sea excursion that went awry. In an earlier letter, he describes a trip out at sea that turned turbulent when a storm unexpectedly struck. Seneca pleaded with the ship’s captain to make for shore, but the captain was reluctant, explaining that the coast is even rougher in a storm, and they should wait it out.

When they did finally head for the shore, “I did not wait for things to be done,” Seneca wrote, “as a veteran devotee of cold water, and, clad as I was in my cloak, let myself down into the sea, just as a cold-water bather should.” Seneca braved the cold ocean water and got back to land.

The point of exposing ourselves to discomfort like this is not self-flagellation, or to prove something to others. In Stoicism, we do these exercises to inure ourselves to difficulty, so that

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when life threatens us with involuntary inconveniences or forces us into scary situations, we have no hesitation in facing them down. We can simply do what needs to be done. Because we know we can take it. And we should do it today, while the year is young. “It is precisely in times of immunity from care,” Seneca said, “that the soul should toughen itself beforehand for occasions of greater stress.”

“Nothing has given me more mental confidence,” Twitter founder Jack Dorsey explained in a recent interview, “than being able to go straight from room temperature into the cold… Especially in the morning, going into an ice-cold tub from just being warm in bed is—it just unlocks this thing in my mind and I feel like if I can will myself to do that thing that seems so small but hurts so much, I can do nearly anything.”

Whether it’s going to a party where you don’t know anyone, mustering the courage to intro-duce yourself to a potential work connection, or even jumping out of an airplane, the fact is that challenging yourself to do uncomfortable things is a great way to grow as a person and find capabilities you never knew you had. And there is no better place to practice this skill than in the shower which you (hopefully) take each day.

Most of us live in fear of inconvenience, of even the slightest physical discomfort. And when we are matched against something unfamiliar, uncomfortable, uncertain, we panic, we melt down, we get frustrated and angry. The whole point of this shower is shock and disquietude—to teach the body and the mind an important lesson about what life is really like and who is in charge. You are training the mind to lead the body, not the other way around.

When you practice pushing yourself to (and through) the point of discomfort, you grow men-tally stronger, you begin to build resiliency. Everyday annoyances begin to feel less disruptive. They less frequently threaten your ability to remain in control. That’s what it means to be a Stoic: controlling the things you can control, not letting menial external inconveniences derail you.

It may help to know, particularly when you meet the initial pain of the cold, the long list of positive benefits that will begin to accrue to you on the other side of cold exposure:

• It reduces stress and boosts the immune system: Short-term whole body cold exposure has been shown to promote tolerance to stress and drastically reduce the chance of disease. Exposure to cold promotes the release of “cold shock pro-teins,” amino acids that have been linked to inflammation reduction, athletic recovery, and even protection from neurodegenerative diseases.

• It improves brain function and treats depression: The Department of Radia-tion Oncology at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine showed that exposure to cold activates your sympathetic nervous system and

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increases the release of neurotransmitters into your blood stream. Additionally, a cold shower sends an overwhelming amount of electrical impulses to the brain, which results in an antidepressant effect.

• It increases fat loss: According to a study in Scientific Reports, cold exposure results in fat loss as your body strives to produce heat to warm itself up.

• It reduces inflammation: Studies have shown that exposure to cold induces an anti-inflammatory response in the body, preventing damage from swollen tissue. When NFL player Kevin Everett suffered a cervical fracture during a game, doctors may have saved his ability to walk with innovative cold therapy techniques, such as “[setting] the ambulance air-conditioning... at the lowest temperature, as Everett received two liters (about two quarts) of ice-cold saline solution intravenously.”

The healing effects of a cold plunge have been known for centuries. Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine, prescribed cold baths and bathing in spring water to “allay lassitude” for many of his sick patients. The Romans built bathhouses, where health-conscious citizens would sit in a hot room for as long as it took to sweat, then dive into a frigidarium, an ice-cold swim-ming pool. Even further back, Egyptian papyrus scrolls have been found documenting the application of ice on a number of patients.

But put aside the health benefits for now. Seneca wasn’t plunging into the cold to strengthen his body or improve his physical health. And neither are we. Seneca’s goal was to cultivate an undisturbable mental resilience. So too is ours. Take your cold plunge and come out the other side a more resilient, more tested person.

And if you’re feeling like an extra challenge, ask yourself: “Now that I know what the cold plunge feels like… can I do it again tomorrow?” Now that I know I am made of tough stuff, am I ready for the week ahead? Or for the next year?

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aDDitional resourCes:

• Letters From A Stoic, 53: On The Faults Of The Spirit

• How Cryotherapy Affects the Brain, the Immune System, Metabolism, and Athletic Performance by Dr. Rhonda Patrick

• The Way of the Iceman: How the Wim Hof Method Creates Radiant, Longterm Health by Wim Hof

• The Benefits of Being Cold by James Hamblin

• Ice Bath Benefits: How Cold Therapy Improves the Body and the Brain by Katie Wells

• Scientific Evidence-Based Effects of Hydrotherapy on Various Systems of the Body from the Journal of Medical Sciences

• What Doesn’t Kill Us by Scott Carney

• Kevin Rose on Fasting, Cold Showers and Loving One’s Craft

• Comfort Will Make You Soft

• The Perils of ‘Comfort Inflation’

• Why comfort will ruin your life — TED Talk by Bill Eckstrom

• Get comfortable with being uncomfortable — TED Talk by Luvvie Ajayi

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Day 3

FinD a PlaCe oF isolation, then Count to 1,000

“Stop allowing your mind to be a slave, to be jerked about.” —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 2.2

Seneca begins one of his letters describing how thrilled he is to finally have some quiet time to himself, all thanks “to the games, which have attracted all the bores to the boxing-match.” With the gladiatorial games begun, Seneca could finally have some peace, because the city cleared out and everyone was in the stadium.

As with most fleeting moments of quiet, this excitement lasted only a short while. Eventually, Seneca complains, “a great cheer comes from the stadium,” throwing him off-kilter.

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But as he struggled to concentrate, something about those athletes—and their training and skill—inspired Seneca to wonder: “[If ] the body can be trained to such a degree of endurance that it will stand the blows and kicks,” how could the mind be toughened the same way?

Modern psychology and science has proven Seneca was right. The skill of attaining stillness—something useful in school, work, and self-improvement—can be learned with adequate prac-tice.

Today’s challenge is about beginning the mental training that Seneca contemplated. Your job is to find a solitary place, and slowly, quietly, count to 1,000. Without distraction. Without drifting.

To some of you that will sound easy. To others that seems impossibly hard.

Forget that. Just go do it. The experience will be revealing.

Getting to 1,000 will be a task even without distractions, so find a place free of them: No TV, no video games or computer, no cellphone, no AirPods, no anything. We want you to focus your mind and spirit for one solid session of stillness. Without outside distractions, it will be easier to concentrate on one thing and one thing only, but make no mistake: your mind is plenty good at creating its own distractions, so prepare yourself.

Once you’re ready, don’t delay; plunge in, just like you did with Day 2’s cold plunge. Count one digit per second—which adds up to a little more than 15 minutes—and don’t rush through. Don’t mentally celebrate when you get through a set of 100, or when you’re halfway through. Just keep going. Stay present. Stay on task. You’ll have to concentrate your mind on your count. Concentrate on setting an even pace. Don’t make up songs to go along with your count, don’t whistle, don’t be antsy—seek out the stillness in your mind, the stillness that you’re adding to and building up with each new second of counting.

What’s the point of all this? There is no point...and that is the point. This quarter of an hour will be one of the most present fifteen minutes of your year, possibly even your life. You will have demonstrated that you are in control. If Seneca were around, he’d envy the strength of mind you just displayed. At that point, you can get up and go about your day, confident that the sense of stillness you reached, the mental toughness you built, will stay with you.

Consider using this practice, or one like it, to continue your pursuit of stillness. Literal count-ing is great; it’s almost like using a mantra, having to concentrate on maintaining the pattern like that. But you can also just sit still in silence for a predetermined period of time.

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One of the biggest concerns Epictetus had with his students was that they couldn’t seem to remember the importance of mental poise. He observed that most people have minds that are easily pulled in every direction. He compared this to a child surrounded by adoring adults, their attention being drawn to every new clap or snap. He said even those that understand how powerful the mind is don’t take the time to train it.

It can be so hard to sit still, to stare at a wall or a ceiling, to focus without distraction on a blank page until the words come. Epictetus couldn’t have fathomed the number of distractions we have to contend with in modern life. Every moment of every day. This time especially, in the beginning of 2020, a most uncertain year headed into a fraught 24/7 presidential election in the US will be a noisy one.

But the solution today is the same one Epictetus lectured to his student: quieting the mind, sitting in the present moment, cultivating stillness. And, as he said, training this essential ability doesn’t have to be rigorous.

• Doing your morning run without bringing your headphones along to drown out the noise—that’s mental training.

• Reading a book with your phone in the other room.

• Working on your laptop at a coffee shop,

• Staring at the smudge on the wall and counting to 1000.

These are all practices for achieving stillness in a world flooded with noise. Where our minds are being pushed and pulled every which way. Personal and professional problems overwhelm us. We can hardly see our desk beneath the piling papers, or hold onto our sanity as it drowns in the anxiety that results.

“People look for retreats for themselves in the country, by the coast, or in the hills,” Marcus Aurelius, who was hugely influenced by Epictetus’s lectures, wrote. “There is nowhere that a person can find a more peaceful and trouble-free retreat than in his own mind...So constantly give yourself this retreat, and renew yourself.”

Remarkably, we receive this same message from the Eastern philosophers, almost identically so from Siddhartha: “Within you there is a stillness and sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself, just as I can. Few people have that capacity and yet everyone could have it.”

The mind is such an important and sacred place. We have to spend the time training it. Noth-ing exhaustive or extensive. Seventeen minutes is all you need.

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aDDitional resourCes:

• Letters From A Stoic, 14: On The Reasons For Withdrawing From The World

• Letters From A Stoic, 56: On Quiet and Study

• Meditations, 4.3

• Stillness Is The Key by Ryan Holiday

• When We Are Alone With Ourselves

• You Must Carve Out Time For Quiet

• ABC News’ Dan Harris on Ambition, Mindfulness and Reaching Peace of Mind

• How To Meditate

• Is silence golden? Effects of auditory stimuli and their absence on adult hip-pocampal neurogenesis from the Journal of Brain Structure & Function

• Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind from the Journal of Science

• Solitude: An Exploration of Benefits of Being Alone from the Journal for Theory of Social Behavior

• Awareness Is A Superpower from the Rich Roll podcast

• 12 Little Things That Can Happen to Your Body After Just 15 Minutes of Meditation by Denise Mann, MS

• How to Be Alone: An Antidote to One of the Central Anxieties and Greatest Paradoxes of Our Time by Maria Popova

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Day 4

PiCk a neW skill anD aDD it to your game this year

“Just as nothing great is created instantly, the same goes for the perfecting of our talents and aptitudes. We are always learning, always growing. It is right to accept challenges. This is how we progress to the next level of intellectual, physical, or moral development.” — Epictetus, A Manual For Living, p.74

James Harden has led the NBA in scoring for the past two seasons. In his first ten seasons, he’s been named an All-Star seven times, he’s made the NBA First Team list five times, and he was the 2018 Most Valuable Player. Every discussion or debate over the best basketball player in the world includes James Harden.

But perhaps what is most impressive about Harden is that he refuses to use all of his success as a reason to stagnate. Like the legends who came before him—Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant—he famously commits to adding one element to his game every offseason.

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When videos went around of Harden, already a prolific shooter, shooting these bizarre one-legged fade-away three pointers during the preseason, most assumed the superstar was just messing around. In fact, he was working. “I’m always trying to get better,” Harden explained of the one-legged shot. “This is my 11th year, and every single year I want to get better. I don’t want to stay the same. You’ve got to find ways to keep growing.”

Whether in sports, business, or life, the greats are known for how they’re always looking to add a new element to their game. Today, your challenge is to do the same: Pick a new skill that you’ll add to your game this year—and then take the first step towards acquiring that skill.

It’s 2020. We’re on the doorstep of a new era and uncertain times, what better moment to increase the tools in your toolkit, to make yourself more interesting, more employable, more cultured, more resilient, more...whatever you’d like really. And there has never been a better time in history to do it. No matter what you might want to learn, there’s a dozen ways for you to learn it.

Maybe you’ve wanted to pick up a second language—well, download Duolingo and commit to 30 minutes of practice a day. Or sign up for italki and book a few trial lessons in your desired language.

Maybe you want to get over a fear of public speaking. Sign up to attend a Toastmasters event near you.

Maybe you want to learn how to change the oil in your own car. Or how to cook for yourself. Or drive a stick shift. Or learn how to defend yourself. Maybe you’re an expert programmer. Is there another programming language you could pick up? Maybe you’re a writer. Is there a new genre you’d like to explore? Think about your interests, your job, your life. What crucial skill would improve your life?

Whether or not it’s actually critical to acquire this skill you’re interested in, what is certain is that with all the technology and freelance services at our disposal, there is no excuse for wait-ing any longer to learn? Watch that YouTube video, sign up for that class, hire that instructor, put your name up for that new internship, do whatever it takes to add something new to your game.

Take the first step now, even if that first step feels like it’s the hardest or the highest or the longest. Which, if we’re being honest with ourselves, is natural. It’s human nature to eschew our vulnerabilities and our weaknesses, to instead focus our attention on our strengths and on what routinely returns positive outcomes. But when we do that, we fall into what David Epstein, author of Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, calls the “rut of competence.”

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“Once we become competent in a certain activity,” David explained in a recent interview, “we tend to just keep doing the same thing, even when that ceases to be the road to improve-ment. It’s like lifting the same weights the same number of times every day. You might not get worse, but you also won’t get much better.”

Epstein’s advice: “Keep an eye on continually broadening your toolbox.”

The billionaire entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer Marc Andreesen put it bluntly: “I think skill acquisition, literally the acquisition of skills and how to do things, is just dra-matically underrated.” Underrated? It’s the most important thing on the planet!

A Stoic should always have an eye on self-improvement. Where can I get better? What is lacking from my game? What skill can I add to my repertoire? As Epictetus said, quoting Socrates, we must delight in our own improvement the way that other delight in improving their property. You should be asking yourself where you can get better, because nobody’s perfect. And in a changing world, what is great today might not be good enough tomorrow. Even James Hard-en, one of the best basketball players alive, still actively works to remake himself every year, to come back to the league even more unstoppable than he was the season before.

Epictetus loved to remind his students that he only wanted those who were committed to a lifetime of work and training. He said that he’d never seen someone “perfectly formed.” His baseline expectation? “At least show me someone actively forming themselves.” That’s all Epic-tetus wanted in his classroom: people focused on making incremental progress.

The fiction author Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for her first book, Interpreter of Maladies. Her next novel was turned into a movie. Then, Lahiri did something unexpected: she moved to Italy to try her hand at writing in a language she didn’t yet speak. “What I was wanting to get away from in moving to Rome was the sense of me being an expert,” Lahiri explained. “Here, I have felt free and invisible, and have felt that sense that there’s another mountain to climb, I’m at the bottom of it, and that’s the great challenge.”

Lahiri is a special type of person, one who doesn’t just linger comfortably with their expertise but instead chooses the uncertainties that come with starting something anew. And that’s the thing: it’s just a choice. Not a burden or a sacrifice or a demand. It’s simply a choice, once each of us can make in the pursuit of self-improvement. Lahiri recognized the freedom that comes with the decision to start fresh. There’s nowhere left to go at the top of a mountain. Opportunity, potential, achievement, progress, growth—it all comes with each new challenge you choose to accept.

Today’s challenge is to make the choice to become that special type of person. It’s easy to come up with a list of things you don’t have—traits and characteristics and skills that you want to acquire. Part of becoming a new you is not just incorporating those things into your life, it’s

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also becoming a person who is willing and able to take positive action to make those things happen.

Today, we exhort you to hone in on your desire, whether that’s learning to code, learning a new language, learning to cook a new type of cuisine, or something else equally mind-expand-ing, and add it to your game. Because the 2020s promise to be a decade of incredible, vibrant change. Millions of people across the world are doing their part to change the world for the better. The least you can do is change yourself for the better along with it. Make the choice to become more capable, to be a person who can make the most of the opportunities the next ten years have in store, and you will reap the rewards.

aDDitional resourCes:

• The Adult Brain Makes New Neurons, and Effortful Learning Keeps Them Alive from the Journal of Current Directions in Psychological Science

• The Impact of Sustained Engagement on Cognitive Function in Older Adults: The Synapse Project from the Journal of Psychological Science

• Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

• Rev Up Your Thinking Skills by Trying Something from Harvard Health Pub-lishing

• On Becoming Skillful: Patterns and Constraints from the Research Quarterly Journal

• The Neuroscience of Skill Acquisition by Dominique Stasulli

• The Art and Science of Learning Anything Faster by Tim Ferriss

• The 4-Hour Chef by Tim Ferriss

• Accelerated Learning with Tim Ferriss

• The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin

• Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter Brown

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Day 5

Visit a Part oF your City you’Ve neVer Been to BeFore

“You wander hither and yon, to rid yourself of the burden that rests upon you, though it becomes more troublesome by reason of your very restless-ness...As it is, however, you are not journeying; you are drifting and being driven, only exchanging one place for another, although that which you seek, – to live well, – is found everywhere.” — Seneca, Letters From A Stoic, 28.3-5

Ralph Waldo Emerson traveled widely: to England and Italy, France and Malta and Switzer-land, and across America. He was able to see the wonder that lies in all of these distant lands, and could understand the excitement and fascination of “educated Americans” who visited them.

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But, he points out in his Self-Reliance essay, all those magical, extraordinary, attractive places we marvel at from afar were constructed by people who weren’t travelling. Rather, Emerson said, “they who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the earth.” The places Emerson visited didn’t spring out of the ether by some miracle; they were constructed, each and every day for hundreds of years, per the painstaking vision of the brilliant, dedicated person who designed it.

A lot of work and sacrifice, both just and unjust, went into the cities and edifices which Emer-son was fortunate enough to glimpse. And it shouldn’t take going on vacation to recognize the small wonders that humanity can create, because the truth is, they’re all around us, every day.

Today, we ask you to see as Emerson did, but with a destination closer to home. Today’s chal-lenge: pick some part of your town or city or region that you’ve never visited, and go see it. Take off the blinders. Soak it in. Walk it top to bottom. Touch the walls. Eat the food. Talk to the people. Look at the wonders hiding in plain sight, the hidden gems of a place you may have otherwise taken for granted.

Philosopher and Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer once said, “In the hopes of reaching the moon, men fail to see the flowers that blossom at their feet.” Home can lull us into this kind of cruise control. We become creatures of routine. Day after boring day, we drive the same roads, walk the same sidewalks, see the same faces, and slip into a Groundhog Day-like trance. How many gardens’ worth of flowers have we trampled or ignored as we went about our normal day with our head in the clouds or buried in our phones?

Our guess is, too many. So snap out of it! Get into the vacation mindset—excited to get out and explore, open to the day’s possibilities, keenly observant of what might be around every corner—but do it at home. Even in the smallest town, there are places of amazing beauty, both natural and man-made; you just have to look.

If you’re not sure how, or where, here are some suggestions:

• Visit a local attraction that you’ve always been too busy to see. We’re not talking about the places everyone goes, like the Hollywood Walk of Fame or Big Ben. Instead, find a local museum with amazing curation that you’d never had a chance to visit before. Take a walking tour of the local architecture. Have lunch in the botanical gardens. Make a point to visit the tallest peak, a scenic beach, or even the local marsh or bayou.

• Go for a one-hour walk. Just step out the front door and go. Even in our own neighborhoods, we often linger in certain areas—our home, friends’ houses, whatever businesses we happen to frequent—and ignore the parts that aren’t already part of our lives. But this is your neighborhood! It already is part of your life, and you should treat it that way. Take a walk and see the wonderful places

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that surround you. Are there businesses you can visit for the first time? Areas of natural beauty, small parks or reservoirs that you can visit? Go see what you can find, and come back a better neighbor. Better yet, if you can, walk or bike to work today—along some route you don’t normally take.

• Visit parts of your community thrumming with people— the local community center, library, a farmer’s market, etc.—and start a conversation with a stranger at each place. A study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology by a team of behavioral psychologists confirmed their hypothesis that striking up a conversation with a stranger has positive effects on the mood and wellbeing of the initiator. What they didn’t expect to find was that the person with whom the conversation was initiated was equally positively impacted.

• If you have more time and want to get really crazy, go sign up for a guided tour somewhere. Or get on one of those ridiculous red buses. Hire a real estate agent to show you houses in a neighborhood near yours. Literally be a tourist in your own home. See your home through new eyes, catch the contagious energy of the people who are not nearly as jaded as you.

Like so many of us, Marcus Aurelius must have pined to get away from the stress of his daily grind. Maybe to a house in the country, or to a seaside resort. Or to visit the distant ruins of a city like Athens, whose culture he tried to embody. Clearly, he deserved a break—being emperor is a hard job.

Yet, from Meditations, we get the sense that he actively resisted this urge. It was his private diary, so he could have written about how much he wanted a vacation and how much he de-served it. But instead, he reminded himself that the best vacations required no physical action. “People look for retreats for themselves in the country, by the coast, or in the hills,” Marcus wrote. “There is nowhere that a person can find a more peaceful and trouble-free retreat than in his own mind...So constantly give yourself this retreat, and renew yourself.”

When we interviewed media titan Arianna Huffington, she told us that Marcus’s message about inner retreat was her favorite quote from any of the great Stoic thinkers. In fact, she has laminated copies of it in her wallet, on her desk, and on her nightstand, as well as on every page of Thrive Global’s website. “It perfectly illustrates the current moment,” she explained. “The only way to find peace and thrive is to take breaks from the world and make time to regularly renew ourselves by reconnecting with ourselves.”

You don’t need to buy a plane ticket to do that. Like Marcus and Arianna, you can get relief here and now, right outside your front door. No logistics required. You may not even need to spend a dollar.

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“Anywhere you can lead your life, you can lead a good one,” Marcus wrote. He meant that as long as he was developing inwardly, making use of his curiosity, discipline, and strength, he could be good and do good and live good anywhere he went. If you want to be happy, if you want to relax, look inward. Take the trip closest to home. Look down at the flowers at your feet, not out beyond the horizon. Travel inside your heart and your mind.

“A quick visit should be enough to ward off all,” Marcus wrote, “and send you back ready to face what awaits you.”

aDDitional resourCes:

• The Art of Noticing by Rob Walker

• On Looking by Alexandra Horowitz

• Letters From A Stoic, 28: On travel as a cure for discontent

• Letters From A Stoic, 57: On the trials of travel

• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, 4.3

• How To Travel — Some Contrarian Advice by Ryan Holiday

• Emerson On Travel

• Seeing The World Through The Eyes Of A Child by Lisa Rosas

• Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees by Lawrence Weschler

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Day 6

Write your Personal ten CommanDments

“ Say to yourself what you would be and then do what you have to do.” —Epictetus, Discourses, 3.23.2

In the book of Exodus, after Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt, God gives Moses the spir-itual and moral laws that he intends the Israelites follow, laws that became known as the Ten Commandments. The story is fascinating because it’s one of the few times in the Bible where God makes explicit his instructions to humanity, rather than using prophecy or interpreta-tion. It shows the importance that the Biblical God placed upon making a singular statement of principles, one so simple and clear that the Israelites would rely upon it forevermore.

Jim Mattis, the retired USMC general and former Secretary of Defense, is also someone who appreciates the importance of having good principles, and adhering to them. In the opening chapter of his book Call Sign Chaos: Learning To Lead, Mattis talks about the fundamental

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lessons he learned in his early years as a Marine. In particular, on the subject of conviction, he writes:“Know what you will stand for and, more important, what you won’t stand for… State your flat-ass rules and stick to them.”

Do this, don’t do that. Draw the bottom line. That explicitness is incredibly useful. It removes uncertainty. It clears out the ambiguity that leads to decision fatigue. For those of us who follow the path of Stoicism, the idea of such a document might even produce some envy. Where is our list of rules? What are our commandments? Why didn’t Marcus or Epictetus provide us similar directions?

Their failure is an opportunity for us. Today, your job is to create your own personal Ten Commandments. What principles do you live by? What principles do you want to live by? This is the day you muster the courage to define your rules, to articulate them, and to hold yourself to them. Write down your personal Ten Commandments that describe the person you wish to be.

These should be foundational rules, just like the Ten Commandments were to Moses and the Israelites. We’re not talking about habits or chores: brush my teeth before I go to bed, take the garbage out every night. These are rules that oblige you to be virtuous, that function as a North Star as you attempt to navigate the turbulent seas of the year to come and manage the winds of Fate and Fortune that may come from any direction at any time:

• I don’t control the world around me, only how I respond.

• I always respond with courage, temperance, wisdom, and justice.

• Any job worth doing is worth doing properly; don’t half-ass it.

• Set a good example for your children.

• Never stop learning. Never stop seeking wisdom.

• Don’t Punch Down

• Honor people who have helped you. They didn’t owe you anything.

• Just do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter.

• Kant’s categorical imperative: “Act as if the maxims of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature.”

• Forgive. Forgive. Forgive.

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According to billionaire Ray Dalio, it’s the writing down of the principles that is so important. Once they’re written out, they can be posted, discussed, and applied. They become rules to live by, rather than vague ideas bouncing around in our head.

Indeed, what would the Ten Commandments be if they weren’t chiseled into stone?

That’s why today’s challenge isn’t just brainstorming. It’s not about contemplation, it’s about composition and construction. Composition of your commandments as you continue the con-struction of the new you.

Create Ten Commandments to be looked at. Put them in a display befitting their impor-tance. Frame your commandments and hang them on your bedroom wall or put them on your desk, a place where you’ll see them every day so you can always heed them and never run away from them. Let them be a reminder for all of 2020 and beyond of what type of person you want to be.

Marcus Aurelius’ writings are his attempts to wrestle with the virtues that make a person good, and a life worth living. They are his answer to the difficult questions he had been confronted with: You have been made emperor: what kind of emperor will you be? What kind of person will you be? What defenses do you have against the temptations and dilemmas that will come your way?

His answer to those questions comes in Book 10 of Meditations, where he writes: “Epithets for yourself: Upright. Modest. Straightforward. Sane. Cooperative. Disinterested.”

Even a child could follow his instructions. It’s easy to understand those goals; it’s clear what behavior is necessary to adhere to them. That is what we’re aiming for in today’s challenge.

Seneca once said, “If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.” Marcus Aurelius made sure to pick his destination—his moral destination. It didn’t mean he always perfectly embodied those epithets. But whenever he caught himself veering off course, he could instantly steer the ship back on track. He could read his list of epithets, and he could make decisions that aligned with the person he wished to be.

Think about the constant temptation Marcus would have faced: to amass more and more control over the Roman Empire, to conquer more territory, to build more monuments to himself. He could have spent his time accumulating all the baubles and trinkets he desired. Yet there’s not a mention anywhere of those kinds of inclinations. Instead, Marcus wanted to be a good person. He set moral, not material, destinations. Upright. Modest. Cooperative. These were virtues which could not be taken from him, even if his empire were wrested away, and all of his power with it.

Ultimately, what Marcus shows us with his example is that if one focuses on living virtuously, material success is not far away. That is why your job today is to stop winging it.

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Sit down and answer the tough but essential questions about who you wish to be. Turn that answer into something physical, something that can be referenced and looked to. Then comes the really hard part: You have to live up to the ideals your commandments call you towards.

That’s what Stoicism is all about.

“When the standards have been set,” Epictetus said, “things are tested and weighed. And the work of philosophy is just this, to examine and uphold the standards, but the work of a truly good person is in using those standards when they know them.”

Follow Epictetus’ instructions: Set your standards—and uphold them, every day.

aDDitional resourCes:

• Letters From A Stoic, 95: On the Usefulness of Basic Principles

• Letters From A Stoic, 74: On Virtue as a Refuge From Worldly Distractions

• Meditations 10.8

• Your One Word by Evan Carmichael

• Principles by Ray Dalio

• Some Rules For The Self

• Epithets For Yourself

• A Better Ten Commandments: A guide to living life with, and on purpose by James Miller

• 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan Peterson

• An Updated Ten Commandments from The School of Life by Alain de Botton

• The Road To Character by David Brooks

• Values and Principles: A Forgotten Life Compass by Brian Pennie

• 12 Rules for (a Stoic) Life

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Day 7

PretenD you haVe to get a neW JoB — toDay

“What is quite unlooked for is more crushing in its effect, and unexpectedness adds to the weight of a disaster. This is a reason for ensuring that nothing ever takes us by surprise. We should project our thoughts ahead of us at every turn and have in mind every possible eventuality instead of only the usual course of events... Rehearse them in your mind: exile, torture, war, shipwreck. All the terms of our human lot should be before our eyes.” — Seneca, Letters From A Stoic, XCI

Any number of economists have been predicting the demise of the global economy for most of the last decade. Fortunately, they’ve all been wrong. Unfortunately, eventually they’re going to be right. And there’s a good chance the odds are going to to catch up to us in the 2020s.

Since March 2009, we’ve been in the longest-running bull market in history. Depending on the results of elections, various geopolitical machinations, and the arrival of certain technology

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at scale, 2020 could very well be the year that the market corrects. That unemployment finally starts heading in the wrong direction again. That the economy suffers some sort of collapse and the masses have to retrain and rebuild like economists thought they would have to (but didn’t) after the 2008 financial crisis.

It’s a scary proposition. It would likely financially cripple, then mentally destroy, a lot of peo-ple. That doesn’t have to be the case for us, though. We can build resilience and optionality into ourselves.

As a young man, the great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig traveled all over the world. A fan of the Stoics, Zweig liked to play an interesting game, one that embodied the Stoic concepts of practicing poverty and preparing for future adversity.

In each new city, Zweig would pretend that he was moving there permanently, in desperate need of a job, a home, and friends. He would go from store to store, checking to see if the owners were hiring, searching the newspaper for Help Wanted advertisements, and actually interviewing with prospective employers. No one knew he was a famous novelist, he just looked like—and he must have felt like—a regular person in desperate need of work.

But he didn’t just look for a job. Zweig would introduce himself to people around town. He’d check out different neighborhoods to see where he could afford to live. He’d attend local events, too. By the end of the process, Zweig would inevitably have a job offer in hand, as well as a newfound understanding of his current city. More importantly, he’d have a newfound confidence in himself.

Whatever happened in an uncertain future, he had proven to himself that he could land on his feet.

Do you feel that way? Do you know that you could start over if you had to? Are you ready to meet new people? Are you prepared for whatever stones life might throw at you?

Because life can do that. It did it to Zweig, that’s for sure. With Hitler’s rise, Zweig was forced to flee his native Austria, first to England and later to the United States, and then to Brazil. On the run from Hitler, his possessions and livelihood stolen, Zweig really did have to start over. And his comfort with starting from square one could have only helped.

Zweig’s comfort with the unknown is something we want you to emulate. No matter how sat-isfied you are with your current life, how comfortable you are with your current employment, your current home, your current group of friends, your current routine—your challenge today is to pretend you’ve washed up in a new town and have to completely rebuild your life.

What does that look like? Well, you’ll need new employment, a new home, a new group of friends; a whole new routine.

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What job could you quickly land to buy yourself some time? Go around to local businesses—restaurants, cafes, book or retail stores—and see who is hiring. Explore all the freelance or gig economy options out there and see where you might be able to quickly secure a flow of income. This isn’t about landing that dream career job. It’s about knowing that if, in February 2020, the bottom were to fall out of the market, or the ax were to drop and you lost your job, you’d be just fine.

Once your income is sorted, we need to figure out a living situation. Find an affordable Airbnb or hostel you could camp out at while you look for something long term. Check out Zillow or Craigslist and get acquainted with apartment prices in different parts of town. You can even send an inquiry or two just to see how quickly you could lock down a place. Search Google and LinkedIn for local realtors. Reach out and tell them you’re curious what your op-tions would look like within a price range you can afford with the amount of money in your checking account and however much money you’d ge bringing in with this new job you’ve just found.

With a job and housing taken care of, the next task is to make all that effort worthwhile. As Marcus said, humans were made for each other—to really set up a new life, you need some friends. Zweig loved writing, so he would find out where the local writers hung out, he’d show up and introduce himself, then ask if they wouldn’t mind if he joined them. Follow Zweig’s lead, and find your new circle of friends.

There are countless ways to meet new people, many of them facilitated by apps or websites. Download Bumble BFF and find people who seem cool to you. Visit Meetup.com and sign up for a group that shares your favorite interest. Whatever it is, the point is to show that you’re not beholden to your current circumstances—that you can reorient and reestablish yourself wherever, whenever, without any handouts.

Because that’s going to be the ultimate skill to possess in the 2020s. It’s been 10 years since the Great Recession, and we are due for an economic downturn—if not in 2020, certainly at some point in the next decade. More than that, think of how much economic disruption the world has seen in the 2010s. The rise of the gig economy, the decline of manufacturing, “learn to code,” side hustles, the student loan debt crisis, the housing crisis. All of these trends and more took a sledgehammer to the security we thought we had—and this decade, it’s only going to heat up.

But it’s not just skills we’re cultivating. Hopefully you can see that we are trying to create both skills and fearlessness. The person who can adapt...but also doesn’t mind adapting, who isn’t afraid of change: that is the person who will crush it in the next decade.

We want you not just to hope, but to know that whatever life throws at you, you will be able to bounce back. We don’t just want you to accept uncertainty. Like Zweig, we want you to seek it out and fight against its capacity for turning life upside down.

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What would it do for your peace of mind to know that if you lost everything, if you got fired, if you had to start over—you’d be able not just to survive, but to thrive? All you need is the proof. Today’s challenge is how you get it.

It’s about freedom. It’s about becoming the master of your life—about becoming comfortable with the uncomfortable so you’re not defined by it, so you don’t fear it. Zweig forced himself to experience what it would be like to start from nothing, to have to make his way anew in the world again. When he proved to himself that he could do it, he was free—free from fear, free from uncertainty, free from misfortune. And free to pursue his dream of being a writer. How many people deprive themselves of chasing their dreams out of fear of failing? Fear of losing their steady paycheck? The comedian Bill Burr has spoken brilliantly about this:

Realize that sleeping on a futon when you’re 30 is not the worst thing. You know what’s worse, sleeping in a king bed next to a wife you’re not really in love with but for some reason you married, and you got a couple kids, and you got a job you hate. You’ll be laying there fantasizing about sleeping on a futon. There’s no risk when you go after a dream. There’s a tremendous amount to risk to playing it safe.

“Each day,” Seneca said, “acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes as well.” What could be better than knowing that you could escape adversity? That you could start over if you needed to?

At the heart of Stoicism is an admission that life is unfair and largely out of our control. Bad stuff happens to everyone, the vast majority of it not even remotely our fault. The Gods, the logos, or luck, or Fate—that’s who is responsible for these untimely deeds. If we deny this, we are at a greater risk of being completely undone by their fickleness. But if we accept it, we can fortify and free ourselves.

So get to it. Start over. Rebuild—before events actually require it. Prove your mettle. To your-self and to Fortune.

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aDDitional resourCes:

• Letters From A Stoic, 91: On the Lessons To Be Drawn From the Burning of Lyons

• Letters From A Stoic, 96: On Facing Hardships

• Letters From A Stoic, 98: On the Fickleness of Fortune

• Letters From A Stoic, 110: On True and False Riches

• Putting It Together Again When It’s All Fallen Apart: 7 Principles for Re-building Your Life by Tom Holladay

• He Who Relies On Fortune Less…

• The Stoic Art of Negative Visualization

• A Stoic Response to Fear

• Premeditatio Malorum

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Day 8

oPen your minD: reaD something By someone you Disagree With

“It is likely that you will ask me why I quote so many of Epicurus’s noble words instead of words taken from our own school. But is there any reason why you should regard them as sayings of Epicurus and not common property? How many poets give forth ideas that have been uttered, or may be uttered, by phi-losophers! What a quantity of sagacious verses lie buried in the mime!” —Seneca, Letters From A Stoic, 8.8

2020 is a big election year in the United States, possibly the most important one in a gener-ation. And this election, like many across the world, has brought with it a popular wave of vitriol and anger. We find ourselves increasingly polarized by the huge emotions being stirred up by the changes in our society, with our way of life. The people on the other side of the divide from us aren’t just wrong, they’re malicious, unpatriotic, traitors.

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This perception has fueled one big problem in particular: the inability to engage with those you don’t agree with. By writing off large swathes of your fellow citizens as “beyond reaching” or “hopeless” or “deplorables,” you prevent the possibility of any kind of rapprochement. Worse, you deprive yourself of knowledge and insight, among the most valuable assets a Stoic can possess. It’s a rare person indeed who has nothing at all to teach. By refusing to listen to anyone “on the other side,” you harm only yourself; you cut off your nose to spite your face.

Our goal is for the new you to forsake no sources of knowledge, to cultivate the ability to engage with your opponents—and even learn from them. Today’s challenge is to read some-thing by someone you disagree with, and find within those writings something you do agree with. Challenge yourself today by opening yourself up to learn something new from the unlikeliest of teachers—your intellectual, philosophical, political opposite.

Choose something concise for this first attempt: an essay, or an article. Find a podcast you would normally never listen to, with a perspective you would typically shield yourself from. Pick the author or host carefully. You need to be discerning. Find a reputable source, someone with whom it is possible to have measured, considerate disagreement.

We’re not talking about Alex Jones here. The point isn’t to put money in the pocket of char-latans or demagogues. We want you to find the ones making well-reasoned arguments, the ones who have respect for the intellects of their opponents and seek to persuade with evidence rather than fast talk, angry rhetoric, or appeals to the crowd.

Someone who sequesters themselves away from dissenting thoughts stagnate will find them-selves becoming artifacts of yesteryear. It’s a waste of your potential, and it’s a disservice to the person you can become.

Think of Hegel’s thesis and antithesis. Two diametrically opposed ideas come together in the synthesis, the newer and stronger argument that’s all the better for having integrated aspects of both of its predecessors. When you submit to criticism; when you don’t just tolerate dissent, but actively seek it out; when you search for the holes in your worldview so that you can patch them and make it all the stronger: that’s how you become the new you.

A great example of “learning from one’s enemies” comes from the philosophical schools of Stoicism and Epicureanism. The Stoics believed that living virtuously is the highest good; the Epicureans claimed that pleasure is the “beginning and end of the blessed life.” Yet even with this core disagreement, there is no name that appears more often in the work of Seneca, one of the preeminent Stoic thinkers, than Epicurus.

Why did Seneca so frequently refer to the founder of the rival school? Because, he said, “I’ll never be ashamed to quote a bad writer with a good saying.” He was never ashamed to be seen reading a bad writer either. He was always ready to learn. He was not turned off by labels.

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In our interview with Laura Kennedy, the grief columnist for The Irish Times, she shared some of the most important lessons she’s taken away from her study of Stoicism. In particular, she spoke on what the Stoics teach us about putting aside ego. She brought up a quote from Epictetus—“It is impossible to learn what we think we already know”—then elaborated on its relevance:

Now more than ever (in the current climate at least), both dialogue and dialectic are essential. It becomes impossible to share ideas if we decide what someone else thinks before we engage with them. I interpret this directive by Epictetus as recom-mending that we shut up and listen to one another without becoming overly mired in emotion or preconceived ideas.

As Kennedy said, we need this kind of open-mindedness now more than ever. True under-standing is impossible to attain for the close-minded tribalist, constantly at risk of being upset and disturbed because someone else, someone with views different than their own, has the power to say or do or think for themselves.

A Stoic, on the other hand, is open-minded. They relish the opportunity to have their own views challenged, because they know they grow stronger for it. There is always something to learn and we should always be open to that.

So today, instead of reflexively disregarding the arguments and invective of your opponents, do the opposite: seek out and learn from them. Use their words and ideas to strengthen your own. We’re hopeful that beginning this process today will kick off a positive feedback loop in your reading habits. The search for opposing arguments isn’t just a matter of what you read, but how much as well. The more time you devote to learning from your opponents, the more well-versed in their arguments you will become—and you may even be able to find some common ground.

Seneca knew that he didn’t have a monopoly on wisdom, and sought it out from whoever he could, wherever he could. It is only right that you do the same.

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aDDitional resourCes:

• Letters From A Stoic, 2: On Discursiveness In Reading

• Letters From A Stoic, 40: On The Proper Style For A Philosopher’s Discourse

• Letters From A Stoic, 45: On Sophistical Argumentation

• On The Utility Of Changing Arguments, Hypothetical Arguments And The Rest by Epictetus, Discourses, 1.7

• On The Art Of Argumentation by Epictetus, Discourses, 2.12

• Don’t Be A Snowflake

• Don’t Get Upset By What You Disagree With

• You Can Admit You Were Wrong

• Them: Why We Hate Each Other—And How to Heal by Ben Sasse

• The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser

• Free Yourself From Your Filter Bubbles TED Talk by Joan Blades and John Gable

• Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations by Amy Chua

• The Lost Art of Good Conversation: A Mindful Way to Connect with Others and Enrich Everyday Life by Sakyong Mipham

• The Net Delusion by Evgeny Morozov

• So, You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

• The Stormtrooper Problem: Why Thought Diversity Makes Us Better by Shane Parrish

• The Art of “Negative Capability”: Keats on Embracing Uncertainty and Celebrating the Mysterious by Maria Popova

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Day 9

FinD your most PrizeD Possession— anD get riD oF it

“And if you can’t stop prizing a lot of other things? Then you’ll never be free—free, independent, imperturbable. Because you’ll always be envious and jealous, afraid that people might come and take it all away from you. Plotting against those who have them—those things you prize. People who need those things are bound to be a mess—and bound to take out their frustrations on the gods. Whereas to respect your own mind—to prize it—will leave you satisfied with your own self.” —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6.16

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus was born a slave, but eventually received his freedom and formed a school attended by emperors and other high standing figures. He made a good living and over time, he fell for the trappings of the good life. With his hard-earned money, he bought something valuable: a brass lamp, which he kept burning in his “household shrine.”

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One night, Epictetus heard a noise downstairs. He rushed down and found that a thief had stolen his prized lamp. He was shocked, disappointed, and felt violated—someone had entered his home without permission and stolen one of his most expensive possessions.

But then, he caught himself. The teacher remembering his teachings. “Tomorrow, my friend,” he said to himself, “you’ll get a cheaper, less attractive one made of clay. A man only loses what he has… Loss and sorrow are only possible with respect to things we own.” Epictetus kept that clay lamp for the rest of his life, a reminder to avoid material attachments. (When he died, an admirer, clearly missing Epictetus’s point, purchased the clay lamp for 3,000 drachmas.)

Your challenge today is to teach yourself the same lesson: Pick one of your prized posses-sions and “get rid of it.”

Maybe you take your brand new gaming computer or video game console and loan it to a friend for a few days. Or you hide your expensive chef ’s knife on a high shelf and go buy a $10 version from the grocery store. Or you park your fancy car in the garage for a week and take the bus to work instead. Whatever it is, pick something that you love and find a way to make it inaccessible. Or, better yet, get rid of it for good—if you’ve got the stomach.

Being deprived of your favorite object may cause some unease. You’ll sit down on the couch and grab for a game controller that you’ve lent out, or search through your bookshelf for a minute or two for a prized book that you belatedly realize you’ve hidden in the back of a closet. If it feels like the phantom pain some people feel after losing limbs to accident and to war, take a moment to think about what is causing this feeling and to get some perspective.

Is it the monetary value of this possession that has you anxious? Is it a proxy for other feelings? Like self-worth? Or is it actually an escape, a distraction? Are you absorbed in the Cadillac of video games setups because it’s a way to avoid studying for classes you don’t really want to take?

None of this is great. So try to live without your prized possession for a good chunk of time. Try not to use it for a week. The idea is to truly deprive yourself of this thing that you care so much about. That’s the only way you’ll be able to break its hold over you.

After a few days, you may reflect on the fact that your possession is gone—but you’re still here. The loss of this treasured item, which feels like an extension of you, or a piece of your identity, is indeed survivable. At the end of the day, you still have other things—your job, your family and friends, your reputation—which ultimately matter so much more in your life than any material object ever could.

Removing this object from your immediate orbit also helps you reckon with the reality that the loss of all earthly possessions is inevitable. Nothing lasts forever. Cars deteriorate. Video game consoles and expensive computers all go from state-of-the-art to rubbish. Clothes get

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outgrown. By choosing to wed yourself to an object, what you end up doing is setting yourself up for a fall. If you see yourself in these items, as they deteriorate, so then does that part of you. And we simply cannot have that. It’s impossible to build a new you on old habits.

Now, maybe you don’t throw away your prize object just yet. When you pull the chef ’s knife down after a week or your friend brings back your video game console, maybe you choose to keep it, even with that risk. At least it’s a risk you’re now aware of.

When we loosen the hold that possessions have on us, when we embrace the truth of uncer-tainty, we liberate ourselves and become stronger as a result. We pay better attention to the things that actually matter, and pay no mind to the rest.

“Everything’s destiny is to change, to be transformed, to perish,” Marcus Aurelius wrote. “The universe is change.” It’s a harsh reality, but it is the reality: loved ones—our friends, our spous-es, our own breath—will be stolen from us. That’s an inescapable fact. Only you can soften its impact.

That’s really what today’s challenge is about. It’s premeditatio malorum in practice. We are preparing for the inevitability of change and loss by reducing our attachment to material things and replacing it with appreciation for the moment. You’re losing a possession today, but you’re gaining a sense of resolve and preparedness that vastly outweigh its material value.

One of the most interesting patterns in the writings of the Stoics is the way they look at rich and successful people. They see people who have everything—conquerors, heiresses, Senators, emperors, Olympians—and observe how miserable they often are.

It’s usually because all they had was not enough; they felt poor because they wanted more. Compare them to the Stoic philosophers, who managed to be utterly content and serene de-spite living through vicious wars, complete and utter poverty, or even imprisonment.

Be careful that the things you own don’t end up owning you, the age-old warning against materi-alism goes. It is a notion at the core of one of Seneca’s most powerful metaphors: the slave owner owned by their slaves; the powerful tyrant who is lorded over by a mistress; the lawyer who fights for the freedom of his clients but who can’t retire, afraid to relinquish the legal profession itself.

There is a version of this idea in Eastern philosophy as well. Xunzi explained: “The gentleman makes things his servants. The petty man is servant to things.”

It was this, AA Long writes, that is really the core of Epictetus’s understanding of Stoicism: “You can be externally free and internally a slave...conversely you could be externally obstruct-ed or even in literal bondage but internally free from frustration and disharmony.”

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Today, we exhort you to let go of your prized possessions, and in so doing break free from their control over you. Start small, with a single possession, and see how momentary the ini-tial shock is, how it is replaced by a newfound sense of independence. Keep Epictetus’s lesson in mind. And keep your prized possessions, or don’t—because you don’t need them anymore.

aDDitional resourCes:

• Discourses by Epictetus — 1.18.5-15, 4.4.33-39, 4.4.23

• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius — 6.13, 6.16, 8.33

• Of Consolation To Helvia by Seneca — Ch V

• Lives Of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius — 6.2

• One Of The Impediments To Enlightenment Is Attachment — Lecture by Jordan Peterson

• The High Price Of Materialism by Tim Kasser

• Minimalism: A Documentary About The Important Things

• The Only Real Estate You Actually Control

• Who Owns Who?

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Day 10

Free yourselF From one soCial meDia aCCount or neWs aPP

“Wipe it clean—every annoyance and distraction—and reach utter stillness.” —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 5.2

“We should spend our time with those who are calmest, more easygoing and least anxious and depressed, since we take on the natures of our associates; just as some diseases jump over onto those we have touched, so the mind infects those closest to us with its evils.” —Seneca, De Ira, 3.8

In a 2016 interview, Robert Caro, the author of The Power Broker and a critically-acclaimed series of books about LBJ, was asked about Chartbeat, a tool used by newsrooms to ana-lyze how articles are performing. Caro listened as the interviewer described how Chartbeat shows the number of people reading an article on a huge wall display at the office, and how

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journalists compete with each to have the most views and to get as many people on the site at one time. “Winning” was making the speedometer on the interface go faster and faster.

His response? “What you just said is the worst thing I ever heard. [Laughs]”

Caro was rightly skeptical of a system that rewards the things that exploit the highly volatile emotions within all us humans to get attention and achieve success. A social media apparatus that is, arguably, almost singularly responsible for the division and acrimony that has been seeded in the culture over the last decade, and is set to blossom into something potentially far more damaging if we don’t do something to take control of it.

News media, too, has taken on some of the worst aspects of social media, in part because of the incentives that social media ordains. Instead of providing us information, much of the media presents to us stories that are designed to inflame our emotions, which in turn causes us to react rather than think. (This is something Ryan has been writing about since 2012.)

One can only imagine that Marcus Aurelius and Seneca would be right there with Caro in his condemnation, or at least suspicion, of these “tools.” Their message was all about avoiding the churn and the chaos, finding the things that matter, the things that last.

What the Stoics valued was basically opposite of what Twitter and Instagram and Snapchat and CNN give us. In some cases, the content is literally built to disappear after 24 hours. Does that sound like something meant to last, something worth focusing on, something that inspires stillness, happiness, the good life...anything good? At least good and timeless.

Social media and the constant flow of news hits are some of the biggest obstacles to living a still, Stoic life. The constant interruptions and distractions prevent us from living a life of moderation. The instinct they create to divide us runs in contravention of the ancient Stoic principle of sympatheia and of what Marcus wisely said about what is good for the bee should be good for the hive. Indeed, the pursuit of likes and retweets and all the other fake dopa-mine-laced rewards that social media offers and news outlets chase has stymied our pursuit of the lasting rewards that come with a measured, communal life.

That’s why today, your challenge is to take a small but critical step backwards (and yet forward) by deleting one social media or news app from your phone.

We want you to remove a single digital distraction. That one icon on your phone’s home screen that your fingers navigate to without thinking. It’s really that simple. We want you to free up space for the important things in life. And we believe with this simple action, a mea-sure of time returns to you, time that you can use productively toward self-enrichment.

So right now, pick one social media or news app and hit delete. Or have a friend change the password and promise not to give it to you for another 11 days, or maybe the rest of the

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month even. If you’re careful, if you make sure that your use of other social media apps doesn’t expand to fill the void, you’ll find something new, something valuable: free time.

Instead of pursuing retweets and shares, gathering likes and comments like they’re actual tangible things, you’ll have time to devote to things that matter, things of value: friends, family, education, the study of Stoicism.

Self-improvement, in a word.

You don’t have to get rid of social media or swear off the news entirely, to be clear. This is not an intervention. But you should establish some boundaries with your remaining accounts. Commit to a time limit each day. Only use them after you’ve done the important things. Use it like a reward for a job done. Bring a little more consciousness to that reach for the phone. Put some hurdles up. Regain control of your actions.

Let us say before we go any further, we know this isn’t so simple. It’s easy to just say stop, but like we said at the beginning of the challenge, not every day is going to be a walk in the park (even when we ask you to take a walk). To get some insight on that, we interviewed Cal Newport, the author whose mission is to help us focus our limited time on deep work and all the things that matter: family, friends, being present, even the study of philosophy. In talking about his book, Digital Minimalism, Newport explained two reasons why it’s increasingly harder to put our devices down. The first is that there are really smart computer scientists and user experience designers who have specifically engineered these devices and social media platforms to foster compulsive use. The second is more deep-seated:

It fills a void. Life is hard. This hardness is especially manifested during those periods of downtime when you’re alone with your thoughts. People avoid these confrontations through constant, low quality digital distraction much in the way that people of another era might have dealt with these difficulties with heavy drinking. But this is just a band-aid over a deeper wound.

How should we fill the void? Newport continues:

As the ancients taught us, the sustainable response is to instead dedicate your free time toward things that matter. Take on as much responsibility as you can bear, seek out quality for the sake of quality (as Aristotle recommends in The Ethics), serve your community, connect with real people in real life and sacrifice for them.

All of this can seem daunting as compared to clicking “watch next” on your Netflix stream, but once engaged in these deeper pursuits, it’s hard to go back to the shallow.

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An average user reaches for their phone more than 2,600 times per day. What if we replaced half a dozen of those instances of phone-use with something more constructive, and instead picked up a journal and a pen? Or a book? Or what if we reached for nothing at all and instead went for a contemplative walk outdoors? There are few problems you couldn’t solve if those 931 hours a year were spent thinking instead of scrolling.

And according to a 2017 report by the American Psychological Association, 95% of Amer-ican adults follow the news regularly, even though more than half of them say it causes them stress and over two-thirds say they believe the media blows things out of proportion.

2,000 years ago, Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations, “Are you distracted by breaking news? Then take some leisure time to learn something good, and stop bouncing around.”

So get your phone out. And do this:

And this:

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And this:

It wasn’t that long ago that we didn’t have these social media platforms. Somehow, life was still quite fulfilling. Deep conversations were had. Difficult problems were surmounted and triumphs were exalted.

Now, we unconsciously reach for our phone as soon as our work challenges us with even the slightest bit of critical thinking. We reach for it at the first lull in a conversation, when the momentary silence makes us uncomfortable. When we’ve been sitting alone for 30 seconds, we pull out our phones rather than risk a moment’s boredom. What if we didn’t avoid think-ing, or silence, or being alone? What if we embraced it?

“Nothing, to my way of thinking,” Seneca said, “is better proof of a well-ordered mind than a man’s ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.” Would you pass that test? Can you actually be alone with your own thoughts? Can you experience your own life? Or are you too addicted to the chatter and the scrolling?

Break the addiction today. Delete one social media or news app from your phone. Free your-self from the digital dopamine drip and fill the void with things that add value to your life. Live life in the real world, not through your phone.

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aDDitional resourCes:

• Seriously, You—Ok, We—Need To Stop Watching The News This Year

• Why Everyone Should Watch Less News

• Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

• Stoicism And Digital Minimalism: An Interview With Computer Scientist And Bestselling Author Cal Newport

• Medieval Technology and Social Change by Lynn White Jr.

• The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

• You Are Not A Gadget and Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier

• Connected, But Alone? — TED Talk by Sharon Turkle

• 12 Ways Your Smartphone Is Changing You by Tony Reinke

• What Your Smartphone Addiction is Costing You — Tony Robbins Podcast

• Mobile Blindness by Seth Godin

• How to Configure Your iPhone to Work for You, Not Against You by Tony Stubblebine

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Day 11

go outsiDe anD Pull WeeDs

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” — Marcus Tullius Cicero

The Roman general Scipio Africanus, known in the contemporary literature as The Terror of Carthage, is one of the greatest military strategists the world has ever seen. But you might not guess it by his appearance in Seneca’s letters. Writing from “the country-house which once belonged to Scipio Africanus himself,” Seneca writes at length, not about his military prowess but of the “tiny recess” of a home where “[Scipio] used to bathe a body wearied with work in the fields [for] he was accustomed to keep himself busy and to cultivate the soil with his own hands.”

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Scipio was one of the heroes of Rome, someone who had earned a life of luxury. Yet instead of surrounding himself with luxuries and sinking into excess, Scipio prided himself on get-ting down in the dirt and putting in an honest day’s work. The smell of plants on your hands, the weariness of a day’s hard labor, the satisfaction at seeing his seedlings grow into plants, and his plants grow toward the Sun, protected from encroaching weeds by his own hand, much the way he protected his beloved Rome: those were the rewards he sought during his life after service.

Your challenge today is to model Scipio later life in your own; to get outside and down in the dirt as he did, and “pull weeds” to seek in that work the same sense of satisfaction he did in manual labor.

Abandon the warm creature comforts of the inside today, get down and dirty in the earth, and get a garden in order. If you don’t have a yard with a garden, head to a local public space that could use some tending. Walk the local park with a trash bag and a hand shovel. If it’s snowed recently, visit your neighbor and volunteer to shovel their driveway. The point is to do some hard, physical, dirty labor.

The four-time English Prime Minister William Gladstone had an unusual hobby: He loved going out into the woods near his home and chopping down trees. From his diary alone, we know that on more than one thousand occasions he went to the forest with his axe, often bringing his family along and making an outing of it. It was said that he found the process so consuming, he had no time to think of anything but where the next stroke of his axe would fall.

Gladstone’s arboreal activity was a way to rest a mind that was often wearied by politics and the stresses of life. This kind of hard labor was a release valve, but it was also teaching him things like persistence, patience, and doing your best. So the benefits were physical, emotion-al, spiritual, and neurological—all from getting out and getting his hands dirty. The neurolo-gist, author, and garden-enthusiast Oliver Sacks wrote beautifully about this in a meditation on his affection for gardens, posthumously published in his Everything in Its Place:

As a writer, I find gardens essential to the creative process; as a physician, I take my patients to gardens whenever possible. All of us have had the experience of wandering through a lush garden or a timeless desert, walking by a river or an ocean, or climb-ing a mountain and finding ourselves simultaneously calmed and reinvigorated, engaged in mind, refreshed in body and spirit. The importance of these physiological states on individual and community health is fundamental and wide-ranging. In 40 years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical “therapy” to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.

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And we can’t leave out the philosophical benefits. The stereotype of the philosopher is a person who spends all day and night with their dense textbooks and their denser thoughts. But the truth is that the great philosophers who made the most brilliant insights into human nature were often involved in a wide variety of endeavors and activities, not just intellectual ones.

Cleanthes, who would become the second scholarch of the Stoic school, was a water carrier for gardens. It informed both his later declaration that the goal of Stoicism is “to live consistently with nature” and his decision to continue his manual labors even as he rose to prominence in the Athenian agora. At a lecture, the Macedonian king Antigonus finally asked him the ques-tion surely others in his midst were thinking: Why? Cleanthes answered plainly, “Is drawing water all I do? What? Do I not dig? What? Do I not water the garden? Or undertake any other labor for the love of philosophy?”

You will discover things about yourself from being on your hands and knees, pulling weeds, picking trash, scraping ice, shoveling snow. It’s what the Ancients called “leisure.” Back then, leisure didn’t mean “lounging around and doing nothing.” In Greek, “leisure” is rendered as scholé—that is, school. To them, leisure meant freedom from the work needed to survive, freedom to follow intellectual or creative pursuits. It was learning through physical action. Leisure wasn’t about carving out space to do nothing, it was about making the time to focus on improving yourself.

Ben Franklin talked about how living virtuously was “a task of more difficulty than I had imagined...while my care was employed in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another.” It’s better to approach improvement, he realized, like a person who, “having a garden to weed, does not attempt to eradicate all the bad herbs at once, which would exceed his reach and his strength, but work on one of the beds at a time.”

Whether pulling weeds or working on improving ourselves, we can’t think about the end. We move forward one step, one habit, one problem at a time. We focus on the thing right in front of us and get to the others later. We take care of pulling the weeds currently visible, not the ones that might pop up sometime in the future. We roll up our sleeves and go to work.

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aDDitional resourCes:

• Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education by Michael Pollan

• Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening by Vigen Guroian

• The Healing Power of Gardens by Oliver Sacks

• Gardening and the Secret of Happiness by Maria Popova

• Emily Dickinson’s Gardening Life: The Plants and Places That Inspired the Iconic Poet by Marta McDowell

• How to Be Mindful While Gardening by David Gelles

• If You Want to Practise Mindfulness, The Garden is the Place To Be by Tom Smart

• The Body is a Garden, The Will is a Gardener

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Day 12

PiCk a PhysiCal Pr to Beat��� anD re-Beat this year

“The human soul degrades itself...when it allows its action and impulse to be without a purpose, to be random and disconnected: even the smallest things ought to be directed toward a goal.” —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 2.16

The saying in the ancient world was that “But for Chrysippus, there had been no Porch” (the stoa in Stoicism). As Diogenes Laertes recounts in Lives of Eminent Philosophers, the Stoic Chrysippus trained as a long-distance runner. Every day, Chrysippus would set a time to beat, then to repeatedly beat again and again. That’s what runners do, what athletes do—they try to get better everyday. One can only imagine the influence this hard training had on him, and how it led him toward a philosophy based on self-discipline, inner-control, and endurance.

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As we’ve been talking about throughout the New Year New You challenge, the 2020s will be a decade that requires each of those three traits: self-discipline, inner-control, and endur-ance. The discipline to not overreact to the whims of Fortune during uncertain times. The inner-control to say focused only on those things within your domain of influence. The en-durance to persist through difficult and uneasy days.

Your challenge today encompasses the practice of all of those things, and will require you to use all of them to succeed. Your challenge is to set a fitness goal, a personal record, that you will accomplish in 2020. And in so doing, you will demonstrate to yourself and to those around you that slow and steady really does win the race—maybe even literally, in your case.

What does that look like? Well that’s up to you. What do you want to set yourself to?

Running your fastest mile. Lifting the most weight in the bench press. Swimming all the way around the lake by your house without stopping. Your max pushups in under two minutes.

Any kind of fitness goal will do. But whatever it is, just make sure it is something specific—and something you are (to be honest) slightly skeptical about achieving.

Start this challenge today. Pick a physical activity where you want to up your game in 2020. Anything physical will work. Then do a fitness test. Find out how many reps you can perform, how many miles you can go, how much weight you can lift, and so on. In order to beat your-self, you’re going to need to set a baseline.

It can be an activity you’ve never done before: perhaps this is the year you go from sedentary to running 5Ks. From watching UFC to training MMA. It can be a sport or exercise you already do; if you’re an avid cyclist, or just love spin classes, see if you can get out on the road and do a century this year. Your PR can be low-impact—set a goal for how many nights in a row you can go walking for a half-hour after work—or high-impact—try to make the podium at an amateur jiu-jitsu tournament.

The point of this exercise is to become a person who is making progress toward something, someone who has a goal they are inching their way towards that does not depend on other people (on their boss, on the economy, on their co-workers or even on the weather).

You want to be the kind of person who can take small steps toward a goal, even when the odds and expectations and circumstances are allied against you. Someone who can work through the sweat and frustration, even when the light at the end of the tunnel seems so weak and far away. You want to be the kind of person who knows that the feeling of exhilaration and satisfaction that comes when the goal has been reached is worth any amount of soreness in the present.

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Seneca wrote about how greatness, achievement, excellence—regardless of the endeavor— is often curbed simply due to our aimlessness. “Our plans miscarry because they have no aim,” he said. “When a man does not know what harbour he is making for, no wind is the right wind.” Too many of us, he says, leave too many things to chance. But you will do the opposite.

Your goal, your personal record: that’s what you have to set today and take the first steps to-wards a year of progress toward. Once it’s decided, your attention must shift to implementing the systems that will ensure you achieve it. Set up a training schedule to ensure you get the practice you need. Commit to a diet that will aid your performance in the gym. Opt against that second glass of wine with dinner. Taking the stairs instead of the elevator. Reading a book to help improve your form.

It will require shifting some things around, it will mean sacrifice. But this is the new you. The one worth prioritizing over habits from the past. “Don’t be surprised if so great a goal costs you many a sacrifice,” Epictetus said. The shifting and sacrificing soon won’t be considered as such—they are simply what you do.

Unlike other days of the New Year New You challenge, this day’s challenge isn’t something you’ll be done with in one hour, or even 24. Once you establish your baseline, you will need to devote time and energy to surpassing it. Be like Chrysippus—break your record again and again and again. Make the struggle for achievement part of your daily struggle.

The road to success—whether it’s winning championship titles in sports or running your fast-est mile—is just that: a road. It’s a process. Though not easy, it is simple. You break it down into steps. Excel at this one, then the next, and then the one after that. What are the steps required to hit your fitness goal? Lay them out. Master them. One at a time. Then, success—hitting your target—isn’t just in your control; it’s inevitable.

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aDDitional resourCes:

• Why I Run by Ryan Holiday

• Forget Meditating, Just Go For A Swim by Ryan Holiday

• Finding Ultra: Rejecting Middle Age, Becoming One of the World’s Fittest Men, and Discovering Myself by Rich Roll

• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

• Why I run by Malcolm Gladwell, Denise Lewis, Sadiq Khan and more from The Guardian

• This is the Greatest Weightlifting Lesson I’ve Learned by James Clear

• Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds by David Goggins

• Living with a SEAL: 31 Days Training with the Toughest Man on the Planet by Jesse Itzler

• Lose The Limits by Christian R Chasmer

• The Zen of Weightlifting by Brad Stulberg

• Relentless by Tim Grover

• Looking Past Limits — TED Talk by Caroline Casey

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Day 13

set uP your Personal BoarD oF DireCtors

“Avoid fraternizing with non-philosophers. If you must, though, be careful not to sink to their level; because, you know, if a companion is dirty, his friends cannot help but get a little dirty too, no matter how clean they started out.” —Epictetus, Discourses, 33.6

Nero is perhaps the most infamous of a long list of Roman Emperors who, even if they possessed some good qualities, spiraled out of control and reigned over a frightened, cowed populace. There’s Caligula, who declared himself a god and brought charges of treason against enemies real and imagined—he declared war against the sea and is said to have told his troops to attack the waves with their swords. There’s Domitian, who also demanded to be called a god and arbitrarily banished all philosophers from Rome (Epictetus was forced to flee as a result). And, of course, Commodus, the son of Marcus Aurelius, is one of the worst examples, having indulged his own fascination with the gladiatorial games to the point where the rest of the realm suffered for lack of attention.

What did they all have in common?

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According to the great ancient Roman historian Cassius Dio, Commodus became “the slave of his companions, and it was through them that he at first, out of ignorance, missed the better life and then was led on into lustful and cruel habits, which soon became second nature. And this, I think, Marcus clearly perceived beforehand. Commodus was nineteen years old when his father died, leaving him many guardians, among whom were numbered the best men of the senate. But their suggestions and counsels Commodus rejected.”

What’s most interesting though, as Dio wrote in his Roman History about Commodus, “[He] was not naturally wicked, but, on the contrary, as guileless as any man that ever lived.” This innocent young man became one of history’s most wicked beings because he made the deliberate decision to reject the advisors his father had bequeathed him and, as a result, had no one to protect him from his worst impulses. He inaugurated a megalomaniacal cult of personality in the Roman capital, one that ended only with his assassination.

Commodus’ story is similar to that of Nero. The fatal flaw of Nero’s reign was perhaps best captured in a fascinating statue of the emperor with his advisor, the Stoic philosopher Seneca, created by the Spanish sculptor Eduardo Barrón in 1904. It shows Nero sitting across from Seneca...definitely not listening. Seneca was one of the wisest advisors an emperor could have. Yet Nero wasted Seneca’s obvious acumen, and eventually turned on him completely.

Now, let’s compare Commodus and Nero to Marcus. From his deathbed, Marcus was arrang-ing for the best and brightest to advise his son. Why? He knew he was nothing without the advisors and mentors who influenced his own life—Antoninus and Rusticus and Herodes Atticus and Fronto and Cinna Catulus and Apollonius. “Even when he was emperor,” Cassius Dio writes of Marcus, “he showed no shame or hesitation about resorting to a teacher.”

A ruler, a CEO, a head coach, it doesn’t matter who you are or what you do or even what your goals are, if you listen to advisors who possess talents and skills and insights you lack, you can achieve great things. If you don’t? Success is much harder and the risk of spinning off the planet into delusion because much more real.

Which is why your challenge today is to create your personal board of directors. A trusted college professor, a parent or sibling, a personal or business mentor, a friend, or a friend of a friend—whatever the relationship—pick five people to appoint to your board. Five people with skills you need, with experience you lack, with relationships you can leverage, with perspectives you can trust, if not always agree with. You don’t have to tell these people that your board of directors exists, but you do have to commit to checking in with them over the next twelve months on important matters in your life.

You’ll want to come up with some way to mimic the function of a corporate board but in your personal life. Maybe it’s quarterly calls? Maybe it’s taking individual members out for drinks or coffee once a month? You’ll figure out what works for you, just remember that we’re

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not talking about gathering a group of people here who have power over you. In this case, the board of directors is fulfilling an advising role. It is those experts in your life who can be trusted to give you good advice and sound information when you really need it. People you keep apprised of all you’re doing so they can get you to think about what you’re not thinking about, so they can ask you tough questions and so you can benefit from the fact that they flat-out have more experience and wisdom.

Whether this decade is kind or harsh to you, you’ll want that help. And it will require some serious self-analysis. What are your weaknesses and deficiencies? Who is smarter than you? Where do you still have a lot left to learn? What do you routinely struggle with? These might be hard questions for you to answer. It will require humility to admit your weaknesses and to accept you need help. It will require courage to seek it out and ask for it. But it’s a fact of life that we need it. “Don’t be ashamed to need help,” Marcus wrote.

For 11 years, Jordan Harbinger hosted one of the most successful podcasts in the world with over 4 million monthly downloads. He interviewed countless influencers—people like Tim Ferriss, Robert Greene, Gretchen Rubin, and Kevin Rose. An amicable split with his business partners went awry, and Jordan was left with nothing. But he overcame it and rebuilt his career from scratch. How? We asked him exactly that:

I decided I’d whined enough and sought advice… I spoke to a lot (-A LOT!) of wise people who had been through situations similar to what I had, and more.

In other words, Jordan went to his “board of directors” to help him through. It was nothing miraculous or remarkable. He needed advice, he was in a situation where he had no expe-rience, he admitted it, and he asked people who held the crucial knowledge that he sought. Like Marcus, Jordan resorted to his teachers, his advisors. People with whom he’d developed and maintained meaningful relationships over time. And that is the key to the personal board of directors: cultivating relationships, relationship management, building rapport. Calls and emails out of the blue from someone you haven’t heard from in ten years—or ever—tend not to get returned or replied to.

So create what Jordan had: a team of people who can help you recover when you hit your lowest point—or push you to maximum performance when the time is right.

We all get stuck. We’ve all experienced a lack of motivation, struggle, less progress than we know we’re capable of. And we’ve all been thrown problems we’ve never had to face before—you are not alone. The Jordan Harbinger and Marcus Aurelius types, they know this, and they call on their board of directors to help them keep moving forward. The Nero and Caligula types think they can do it alone—and inevitably they self-destruct.

Who are you going to be?

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aDDitional resourCes:

• Letters From A Stoic, 109 On The Fellowship of Wise Men

• Letters From A Stoic, 6: On Sharing Knowledge

• Letters From A Stoic, 52: On Choosing Our Teachers

• Letters From A Stoic, 94: On The Value of Advice

• Assembling Your Personal Board of Advisors from MIT Sloan Management Review

• Finding a mentor by Ryan Holiday

• What Nobody Tells You About Finding Mentors by Ryan Holiday

• More On Mentors by Ryan Holiday

• Tribe Of Mentors by Tim Ferriss

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Day 14

sit DoWn, Write a letter to a FrienD aBout the neW you, anD senD it

“Your letter has given me pleasure, and has roused me from sluggishness.” —Seneca, Letters From A Stoic, 74.1

Where would we be if the Stoics had not so loved the art of letter writing? Certainly, without much of the wisdom we now take for granted.

But sadly, this kind of communication has become a lost art.

Seneca even writes about how, though it would be preferable to physically see each other more than life permits, maintaining communication by itself still confers a valuable benefit:

“I thank you for writing to me so often...I never receive a letter from you without being in your company forthwith. If the pictures of our absent friends are pleasing to us...how much more pleasant is a letter, which brings us real traces, real evidences, of an absent friend!”

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That is the power of letters. Of sitting down, dedicating that time and the physical space of the pages on which you will write, to share the news of yourself with someone in your life. These little surprises can completely transform your mood and make your day better when you are the recipient of them. But you can have that effect on people too. You can be the thoughtful initiator. You can change someone’s day, every day, and it couldn’t be easier.

Today, your challenge is to write and send a letter to someone close to you. A real letter, one that you’ve handwritten, stamped, and dropped off in your mailbox. Use that letter to reach out to someone important to you—maybe even someone on your new board of direc-tors—and talk to them about the ideas we have been challenging you with over the last two weeks. Talk to them about the person you plan to be in the next twelve months, talk to them about the changes you are making and how you plan to get there.

This isn’t just going to be a letter where you shoot the breeze, exchange pleasantries, or catch up on life. We want this letter to help you realize the goals we have set and begun our work on for 2020—specifically, the goal of becoming the new you.

Tell the letter recipient about the New Year New You Challenge. Tell them what you’re strug-gling with. Be vulnerable and tell them something real.. Bring them into your headspace and along on your journey, so you’ll be more likely to actually continue on it...and so that they can help hold you accountable.

There are so many people you could pick to write to. You could reach out to a mentor figure and tell them what it is about them that you’re going to begin modeling in 2020. You could revive your relationship with a dear friend you wish you hadn’t lost touch with. Or that high school teacher or college advisor who constantly went above and beyond to help you all those years ago—show them that you haven’t forgotten them, and that you’re still inspired by them to make positive changes in your life.

The point is to sit down by yourself, put pen to paper, and open yourself up a bit. Just by writing them a letter, you show them you care, that you’re thankful to have them in your life, that you appreciate the relationship you share with them. It’s always great to receive a letter from a friend—in part because it’s such a rare pleasure, nowadays. By sending the letter, you’re inviting them to send one back, to do the same for you.

It’s easy to see, with the quick pace of modernity, why people have so little time or inclination to sit down and write a letter. Life happens. Things gets busy. We all go in different directions. Social media, politics, our own hobbies: all of these things and more take up plenty of time. And nearly every bit of technology created in the last decade has been designed to automate how we engage with those things in this decade. They’ve taken our time and our attention, but allowed our effort and our care to atrophy as a result.

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Just think about what has suffered most in the last decade. We would argue it’s one of the most important parts of life: Friendship. Real friendship, real connection, takes work. But it’s so easy, in the age of social media and texting, to foster only relationships which can be maintained with digital tools alone—and to believe those relationships have the same weight and power as the ones forged with blood, sweat, tears, and ink—that we’ve stopped writ-ing letters altogether and unintentionally abandoned one of the tried-and-true methods for building a deeper connection with another person. And then we wonder why we’ve never been more connected to the far corners of the globe, yet more estranged from the person living next door to us.

The good news is, the power to change this dynamic is entirely within your reach. It’s as easy as grabbing a pen.

In the past year, for whatever reason, you may have let your relationships fall by the wayside. You may have assumed that these relationships would tend to themselves. You’re finding out now that that’s just not the case. The best friendships require cultivation; they need to be attended to, in order that they not just survive, but thrive.

Marcus wrote it over and over: we’re social beings. We are made for each other, he said. We are all part of the same hive. Friendship makes life worth living. If we want to fully enjoy the honey that results from the harmony of the bees in the hive working together, we must take time to invest in our relationships. We must make our deposits long before we plan to make withdrawals. It’s fine that you are busy. Yes, distance can make it hard. Family time will takes precedence; that’s life. But if you can find the time to check Twitter five times a day, you can find time to write a letter to a person who makes life better.

Of course, there is self-interest here too. Writing helps us clarify our thinking. Seneca said that we learn while we teach, we also learn while we express ourselves. There’s a reason that Amazon—one of the most valuable companies in the world—stresses writing as its main form of internal communication. Meetings are vague. Phone calls drift. Writing forces you to get to the point. It forces you to see your own thoughts from even a slight distance. It makes you better.

Grab a pen. Or pull up an old typewriter. Get a nice piece of stationary. And discover, as Haruki Murakami said, “How wonderful it is to be able to write someone a letter! To feel like conveying your thoughts to a person, to sit at your desk and pick up a pen, to put your thoughts into words like this is truly marvelous.” Write a letter to someone, tell them about the changes you’re making in your life. They’ll feel better for having seen a hidden side of you; you’ll be happy for having put it down in concrete form and shared it with a friend.

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aDDitional resourCes:

• Letters From A Stoic, 9: On Philosophy and Friendship

• The Letters Page

• The Lost Art of Letter Writing by Eavan Boland

• How to Write Letters: A 19th-Century Guide to the Lost Art of Epistolary Etiquette by Maria Popova

• Eight Or Nine Wise Words About Letter-Writing by Lewis Carroll

• The Forever Letter: Writing What We Believe For Those We Love by Elana Zaiman

• The Art of the Personal Letter: A Guide to Connecting Through the Written Word by Margaret Shepherd

• To the Letter: A Celebration of the Lost Art of Letter Writing by Simon Garfield

• Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience by Shaun Usher

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Day 15

Cut out one reCurring exPense

Of all the things that are, some are good, others bad, and yet others indifferent. The good are virtues and all that share in them; the bad are the vices and all that indulge them; the indifferent lie in between virtue and vice and include wealth, health, life, death, pleasure, and pain. —Epictetus, Discourses, 2.19.12b-13

The financial philosopher and economist George Goodman wrote about the spirit of excess that seems to fill the long years of a boom economy, before the recession hits.

It is, he said, as if “we are at a wonderful ball where the champagne sparkles in every glass and soft laughter falls upon the summer air. We know at some moment the black horsemen will come shattering through the terrace doors wreaking vengeance and scattering the survivors. Those who leave early are saved, but the ball is so splendid no one wants to leave while there is still time. So everybody keeps asking—what time is it? But none of the clocks have hands.”

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Does this sound familiar to you? In a world where new SaaS- and app-developing billionaires are minted every month and there’s always a new hot IPO being floated, or sinking beneath the waves, it’s easy to see this dynamic starting to play out before our eyes.

Some 2200 years earlier in On Agriculture, the oldest surviving work written in Latin, Cato the Elder stressed the importance of managing money and tastes. “A farm is like a man,” he wrote, “however great the income, if there is extravagance but little is left.”

Cato the Elder’s advice to the aspiring farmer, in contrast to the denizens of the party econo-my George Goodman described, was to run lean, to live below their means, to eliminate any unnecessary expenses. “Look over the live stock and hold a sale. Sell your oil, if the price is satisfactory, and sell the surplus of your wine and grain…” Cato describes this as possessing the selling habit. He juxtaposes it with the buying habit, where one seeks to accumulate more and more, heedless of their finances, until it leads to disaster.

If you have the buying habit, eventually there will be nothing left and nowhere to go. For you, the wonderful ball will end in a desperate, disastrous riot. That’s why today, we ask you to begin your transition or increase your tendency to the selling habit.

Your challenge today is to delete a recurring expense.

Identify one of your recurring expenses. Look at your purchases, your memberships and mag-azine subscriptions and subscription boxes and streaming accounts, and see which ones you can prune. Of course, you should cut the dead weight: the streaming service you signed up for with a free trial but never bothered to cancel; the membership in a gym you visit once a month, the magazine you subscribe to but haven’t read in ten months.

But also, turn a discerning eye to the things you enjoy. Sure, you like Netflix, but if you’re al-ways complaining that you don’t have time to read because of all the Great British Baking Show seasons you have left to watch, maybe you should question your priorities. Use this challenge as an opportunity to cut out not just the services that you don’t use, but the ones that waste your time as well.

The reason we included this challenge has to do with something called the snowball effect. The idea is that a snowball grows as it rolls downhill, gathering momentum and accelerating to faster and faster speeds. By slow and steady accumulation, something with small beginnings can grow to become a gigantic unstoppable force.

To be clear, the snowball effect can be a positive thing and occur in any part of your life, whether you save more and more dollars and cents toward that round-the-world vacation you’ve always wanted to go on, write 300 words every day until you’ve written a novel in a year, or do one more pushup each week until you’ve reached 100 at a time.

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But when it comes to money, more often than not the snowball effect is working against you. If you spend more than you need to on entertainment or inessentials, that extra money that could have helped you achieve your new goals will snowball, until one day that dream of the New You on a vacation around the world is shattered into a million pieces at the bottom of the hill and you see only the empty space where your savings could have been.

Too many people have the very problem that Cato the Elder warned against: they have a ter-rible buying habit, spending their money on unnecessary recurring expenses. Have a look at this 2019 graphic from GOBankingRates:

The majority of these things, Musonius Rufus said, are done “by following wretched habit.” It’s money spent on conveniences, where a more disciplined person would have gone without. The money spent on many of these things—getting takeout, or expensive drinks—is money whose presence in your life disappears as soon as it’s been spent. Many of us follow these “wretched habits”:

• Stopping at Starbucks on the way to work, instead of making coffee at home

• Going out for a couple of drinks after work, every night

• Having more than a couple of drinks and having to call an Uber

• Needing cable and wi-fi and a Netflix subscription and Apple TV and Disney+ and Hulu and and and and

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And so, like a hamster on a wheel, we inevitably find ourselves doing things we don’t love to afford things we don’t need. To avoid this as best he can, Tim Ferriss keeps a sign that says one word: Simplify. “From 2008 to 2009,” Ferriss said, “I began to ask myself, ‘What if I could only subtract to solve problems?’ when advising startups. Instead of answering, ‘What should we do?’ I tried first to hone in on answering, ‘What should we simplify?’”

Or as Marcus Aurelius put it: Ask yourself, “Is this necessary?” Do less. Have less. A minimal-ist credit card statement is the sign of a house and a life in order. Today’s challenge is about taking one tiny step in that direction. (And we hope you’ll take this one repeatedly over the next 12 months.)

So break the wretched buying habit. Simplify. Go through your recurring expenses. Take even just the last three months. Get a piece of paper and a pen, pull up your bank statement, and write down every purchase. Categorize all the non-necessities: coffee, alcohol, eating out, entertainment subscriptions, ride shares, new things. Add up the total cost of each category. Pick the most expensive one. And delete it. From here on out, the new you goes without it.

If you want to be really precise and really make the most of your money, there’s a service called Trim that helps you manage your day-to-day finances through the use of artificial intelligence. Along with identifying those unnecessary recurring expenses, Trim can do things like nego-tiate your cable, internet and/or phone bills with any provider. It links to your financial ac-counts and is free to sign up. Use this service, or another like it, or even just do the task your-self. The point is to become more fastidious with how you spend your money—because what’s the point of earning it if it’s just going toward things you don’t need, accounts you don’t use?

“If you seek tranquillity,” Marcus Aurelius wrote, “do less.” And today, spend less.

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aDDitional resourCes:

• Trim - automated service to cut recurring expenses

• On Freedom by Epictetus, Discourses, 4.1

• Letters From A Stoic, 17: On Philosophy and Riches

• Letters From A Stoic, 110: On True and False Riches

• It’s About The Pairing Down

• Cutting Off Those Recurring Charges You Forgot About by Ron Lieber

• Cutting Out These 25 Expenses Will Save You $14,992.52 a Year by John Csiszar

• 10 Expenses Destroying Your Budget by Susannah Snider

• Essentialism by Greg McKeown

• The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown

• Simple Matters: Living with Less and Ending Up with More by Erin Boyle

• Wealthy, Successful People Who Choose Less over More: 10 Real-Life Stories of Minimalists by Melissa Burns

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Day 16

toDay, say thank you ( yes ) to eVerything

“Don’t hope that events will turn out the way you want, welcome events in whichever way they happen: this is the path to peace.” —Epictetus, Enchiridion, 8

“Accept the present—all of it. Convince yourself that everything is the gift of the gods.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 10.1

In his newest book, Comedy Sex God, the comedian Pete Holmes is open about the disso-lution of his marriage and about how, after his wife cheated on him and their subsequent divorce, he was hit with a long-developing crisis of faith in the religion he had grown up in.

Holmes came up with a mantra that lifted him above his pain, that shifted his world view, that restored his hope and happiness. All with just three simple words: “Yes, thank you.” That is: He leans into, gets excited about, doesn’t fight, anything that comes his way in life.

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Getting up at 3am with a crying baby? Yes, thank you. I know she is alive and now I get to spend time with her, just she and I.

Nine hour flight delay? Yes, thank you. Now I can sit and read.

Show cancelled? Yes, thank you. Now I can go home, spend more time with my family, do more writing.

Because there is no point in fighting what is done or what must be done. It is better, as the Stoics say, to assent. To learn how to love it.

So this is the challenging we are laying in front of you today—to repeat this mantra every chance you get. And no, we’re not talking about literally saying “Yes” to every offer or request you face today. Today’s challenge is more about accepting everything that you face in the day—indeed, being grateful for it.

Any day is full of obstacles and tests, whether it’s bad traffic on the way to work, a tense meet-ing with your boss, that person who spills coffee on you, your kid coming down with a cold, a tough conversation with a friend, or just a negative environment where it’s difficult to find stillness. It’s easy to find yourself getting frustrated and caught-up in these things. Instead of letting go, we often find ourselves returning to these irritated feelings and indulging them over and over again, like scratching a bug bite until it bleeds, even though we know it’s not good for us. “The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts,” Marcus Aurelius said. Approach things from a negative perspective and you can’t help but ignore the dark clouds’ silver linings.

For today’s challenge, we ask you to follow another route. Do not spend time complaining about the bad things that happen to you today, or even feeling bad about them. Instead, look at them and say “Yes, thank you.”

Marcus Aurelius called this the “art of acquiescence.”

Epictetus said, “The proper work of the mind is the exercise of choice, refusal, yearning, re-pulsion, preparation, purpose, and assent. What then can pollute and clog the mind’s proper functioning? Nothing but its own corrupt decisions.”

Too many people go through life kicking and screaming, raging against the obstacles they face. But when things don’t go our way, we can choose what we think—we can refuse the temptation to sink into sadness and instead prepare for our next move, for our response to these tests, without which we would never have cause to progress.

To everything that happens, we can say, “Yes, thank you.”

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In our interview with cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist, historian, and Stoic Donald Rob-ertson about his new book How To Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius, he talked about some of the 2,000-year-old Stoic concepts that inspire many psychological strategies practiced in the modern world.

The faculty of assent was the central psychological strategy the Stoics employed, Robertson said. It is now called cognitive distancing; the idea is summed up by what Epictetus famously said: “It’s not things that upset us but rather our opinions about things.” In practice, therapists ask clients to imagine that they’re wearing colored spectacles, Robertson explained:

If you believe the world is actually rose-tinted or dark and gloomy because of the lenses before your eyes, that’s like fusing your beliefs with reality. Realizing that the world isn’t really that color—it’s just the glasses—is like cognitive distancing. It’s the difference between telling yourself “Life sucks!” and “I’m just assuming that ‘life sucks.’”

When you inevitably get frustrated with someone or something today, remember that you have the power to change the lens through which you view these exchanges. You have the power to say, “Yes, thank you.” You can look with that lens. When you find out that a trusted friend is actually a liar, you have the power to become furious and labor endlessly over the text you are going to send them to show your dismay and then hold a boundless grudge—or, you can say, “Yes, thank you. I now know exactly who this person is. I no longer have to associate with someone who’s clearly flawed,” and move on with your life.

When you get that final exam grade back and it’s much worse than you expected, you’re not going to waste time being upset with the professor. You’re not going to complain about how the study guide didn’t match what was on the exam, and you’re not going to beat yourself up. Instead, you can say, “Yes, thank you. I know now that there is something up with my study habits that needs to be addressed. Imagine if I hadn’t figured this out sooner! It’s great that I can finally fix whatever’s wrong so that I can do better in my subsequent classes.”

Marcus Aurelius’ quote about the soul becoming dyed with the color of its thoughts is a powerful visual. But there’s another great quote from the flip side of that perspective, from Seneca: “A good person dyes events with his own color... and turns whatever happens to his own benefit.” If you see everything bad that happens to you as an opportunity to learn and grow, then you will be able to use those instances as lessons and opportunities—a powerful habit to inculcate.

No matter the size of the wound, no matter the magnitude of the loss or defeat, you can always turn it around. It’s not easy to do. That’s why we want you to practice today. Make saying “Yes, thank you” a habit. Remember the snowball effect we spoke about yesterday? Small acts of acceptance each day can build up until you are able to accept almost any kind

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of strike against you with equanimity. You’ll be able to live out Jesus’ admonition to “turn the other cheek.”

Any time something doesn’t go the way we wanted, or someone hurts our feelings, or some-thing makes us upset, we are complicit in the offense. We choose our reaction. We choose what glasses we see things through. We don’t have to let it frustrate or upset us. We can always say, “Yes, thank you.”

aDDitional resourCes:

• Comedy, Sex, God by Pete Holmes

• Amor Fati: Learning To Love And Accept Everything That Happens

• Accepting The Little Facts of Life

• Let Us Argue With Reality No More

• The No Complaining Rule by Jon Gordon

• Be Grateful for Everything—Even the Tough Stuff

• Every Day Is A Thanksgiving

• A Complaint Free World by Will Bowen

• A Stoic Response to Complaining

• Don’t Complain or Blame

• Stop Your Complaining: From Grumbling to Gratitude by Ronnie Martin

• The Science of Happiness: Why complaining is literally killing you by Steven Parton

• How Complaining Rewires Your Brain for Negativity by Travis Bradberry

• Complaining Is Terrible for You, According to Science by Jessica Stillman

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Day 17

get roasteD—learn hoW to take an insult

“Remember that it is we who torment, we who make difficulties for ourselves—that is, our opinions do. What, for instance, does it mean to be insulted? Stand by a rock and insult it, and what have you accomplished? If someone responds to insult like a rock, what has the abuser gained with his invective?” —Epictetus, Discourses I, 25.28–29

It shouldn’t surprise us, given their independent thinking, their positions of leadership, and their willingness to stand on principle, that the Stoics were often the subjects of withering criticism.

But even if they hadn’t been overtly contrarian, if they were just ordinary people living ordinary lives, it’s not as if that criticism would have disappeared completely. Like any of us, they would have found themselves the target of teasing, of personal attacks and insults, from people they knew and people who presumed to know them.

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Is it fair? Not usually. Unfortunately, that’s just a part of life, of growing up and getting along as we walk through the world.

The larger question though isn’t about the propriety of this behavior, it’s about how they handled it. Did it bother them? Did rude comments send them into a spiral of shame or hurt feelings as it seems to do for so many of us?

No. It didn’t.

We know of one exchange, in fact, where Epictetus was insulted and instead of being sensitive about it laughed it off. “If this person really knew me, they would have said even worse,” he said. He even went one step further, believing that it wasn’t possible for someone to hurt our feelings—not without our consent anyway. “Remember,” Epictetus said, “it is not enough to be insulted or to be harmed. You must believe that you are being harmed. If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation.”

The Stoics worked hard to build immunity to that tendency of the human mind. Their train-ing made that possible. To know that any insult directed their way only hurt if they chose to let it. The Stoics didn’t care about the whims of the crowd or the scorn that was cast upon them. These ephemeral temperamental moments were unimportant; they simply did not matter.

To have that level of confidence would be a superpower this year, wouldn’t it? Indeed, the prospect of that kind of social immunity, that kind of care-free resilience is what we’re pursu-ing now. Today’s challenge is designed to thicken your skin and help you take back control of your self-worth, your self-perception, and your ego from the world.

Today, your job is to get roasted—to deliberately take an insult and choose not to care about it.

Just imagine, if you embrace this challenge fully, instead of contorting yourself in accordance with public opinion on a daily, hourly, tweet-by-tweet basis, you could be confident in who you are and how you live your life at every turn. That’s what we’re seeking to instill today. The humility and levity you suffer the slings and arrows of criticism, then come out the other side—realizing that no one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

To be sure, there are all sorts of ways you can “get roasted” if you don’t know where to start today. You just have to figure out a level that makes you just uncomfortable enough to put a pit in your stomach or quicken your pulse, but not so bad that it makes you want to change your name and go into witness protection. We’ve come up with some suggestions here:

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• Upload a picture of yourself to R/RoastMe. Let the mob lob their meanest insults at you.

• Upload an embarrassing photo from your most awkward childhood phase on social media.

• Post about an embarrassing recent failure.

• Poke fun at an insecurity of yours when you’re with friends.

• If you’re a more private person, sit down with a notecard and roast yourself. Act as if you have been assigned the job of riffing for 2-3 minutes on all that is ridiculous about yourself. What flaws would you point out?

• Ask 2-3 close friends for a list of ridiculous or funny things you’ve done over the years—failures, gaffes, awkward encounters.

• Look back at old photos of yourself on your phone and see how easy it is to find things to make fun of yourself for (then realize that you could flash forward a few years and repeat the same exercise about today).

This might all sound mortifying. And that’s the point. No one is just born ready to endure these kinds of insults and criticisms. From an early age, we are taught to be deeply socially conscious animals. We are terrified of being made to seem different. Of being singled out, humiliated, castigated, or having our honor impugned.

It was true in Rome, and it’s true in most parts of society today—not just high school. So you’ll have to train yourself to get over it.

As a young philosopher, Zeno had a crippling bout of self-consciousness. So his teacher, Crates, set out to cure him of it. Sensing that his charge cared too much about what others thought, Crates assigned him the menial task of carrying a heavy pot of lentil soup across town.

Zeno tried to sneak the pot through town, taking back streets to avoid being seen doing such a humiliating task. Tracking him down, Crates cracked the pot open with his staff, spilling the soup all over him. Zeno shook with embarrassment and tried to flee. “Why run away, my little Phoenician?” Crates laughed. “Nothing terrible has befallen you.”

We can imagine that it took Zeno a little bit of time to come around to Crates’ point, but eventually he did.

It’s going to hurt a little, today, to be teased, but that’s OK.

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Cato, who Seneca considered the perfect Stoic, knew the power of getting comfortable with standing out and embracing who you are, even if others don’t get it. He never wanted to let other people’s opinions dictate his life. But Cato knew it would take work to get there.

So he invited insults. Plutarch writes about his habit: “Seeing the lightest and gayest purple was then most in fashion, he would always wear that which was the nearest black; and he would often go out of doors, after his morning meal, without either shoes or tunic; not that he sought vain-glory from such novelties, but he would accustom himself to be ashamed only of what deserves shame, and to despise all other sorts of disgrace.”

The rest of the Senate members mocked Cato. They yelled at him, hated him, looked down at him, and tried their best to humiliate him whenever possible. Cato knew that they were only revealing their weaknesses and securities—not his. And in the end, when Julius Caesar had his designs on empire, Cato was the last man standing when Rome’s Republic fell—alone. Having rejected the criticism of his fellow senators as not worthy of his time, he was able to withstand the tide of Caesar’s popular acclaim to do the right thing.

To be clear, this isn’t about subjecting ourselves to mockery because of our differences, or to figure out what people don’t like so you can change that part of you. No, this is about realizing the pettiness of those who indulge in mockery and loving the parts of your personality that make you different from everyone else, that make you unique:

Epictetus said that if you wish to improve, if you want to achieve wisdom and the stillness that the mob does its best to prevent, you have to be content to appear clueless or stupid. He liked to tell the story of the philosopher Agrippinus and a wealthy man named Florus. There was a festival coming up honoring the emperor Nero. Those not in attendance risked fatal punishment. Florus was torn. Agrippinus didn’t even consider taking part. Why, Florus asked, why not just be like the rest of us and go? Agrippinus responded:

Because you consider yourself to be only one thread of those which are in the tunic. Well, then it was fitting for you to take care how you should be like the rest of men, just as the thread has no design to be anything superior to the other threads. But I wish to be purple, that small part which is bright, and makes all the rest appear graceful and beautiful. Why then do you tell me to make myself like the many? and if I do, how shall I still be purple?

Agrippinus refused to conform. He was content, at peace, with who he was and what he stood for. While the world around him was in great tumult, he could “shrug it all off,” as Marcus said we must do, “and reach utter stillness.”

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Embrace who you really are, embrace what makes you unique. Don’t conform just because everyone else is doing it. Follow your truths. Be different. Those are the insults you will face today. Someone who is roasting you wants to assail your quirks, your weirdness, your insecu-rities. But as Cato and Agrippinus teach us, they are nothing to be ashamed of. Those small parts make the rest bright. They make you, you.

aDDitional resourCes:

• Thanks For The Feedback by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen

• 20 Years Ago, Steve Jobs Demonstrated the Perfect Way to Respond to an Insult by Justin Bariso

• The Power of Vulnerability by Brené Brown

• The Best Way to React to an Insult by Susan Krauss Whitbourne Ph.D.

• The Imaginary Audience by Ryan Holiday

• Egocentrism in Adolescence by David Elkind

• The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are by Brené Brown

• The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts

• Reddit RoastMe

• Stoicism Can Help Put Criticism In Perspective

• How To Respond To Unfair Criticism

• The Harshest Burns from the Roast of Justin Bieber

• The Harshest Burns from the Roast of James Franco

• Top 10 Celebrity Roasts

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Day 18

Plan your PerFeCt Day, then make it haPPen

“You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 2.11

People tell themselves stories about why they slog away at a job they hate or study for a degree they don’t care about. As they sit in one meeting after another, they have decided not to fight. As they drive a long commute that they know is not sustainable, they convince themselves this is just temporary, I’ll fix this eventually, and then they mindlessly hit the accelerator heading in whatever direction they were already headed for however long they’ve been headed that way.

Indeed, if you actually asked them where they were going and when they were going to get there, they’d have trouble telling you. They just believe—in their heart—that this is a tem-porary state of affairs, that this is part of the process for reaching a future that will magically be better and that they will definitely be around to enjoy. These people accumulate money or resources, or play politics and build their networks, so that one day, some day, they will finally have their dream lives and retire on a beach somewhere. Yet they never actually look at how much that would cost, or how feasible it would be to live their dream lives right now, or

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whether your dream life could ever be what you imagined it to be after enduring the decades of struggle and strife and sacrifice to get there.

David “DHH” Heinemeier Hansson is someone who has accumulated the kind of money that could buy him just about any life he might want to live. His advice?

Nobody is going to care or remember whether you flipped some startup for $100M in 50 years...Trading the best decades of your life to compress work into it so you can live in retired leisure afterwards is a mistaken pursuit. Life isn’t meant to be con-quered. I’ve made all the money in the world, and the vast majority of my favorite things don’t require any of it. Programming Ruby. Reading. Learning. Playing video games. Taking photos. Playing with my kids and talking with my wife.

We are unhappy, stressed or dreaming about a far-off future that needn’t be so far-off. We’ve worked this hard. We’ve accomplished this much. We carved out skills, built relationships, discovered interests. For what? To keep putting off the day where we live truly happily? A day when the faculties we need to fully enjoy our ideal life have left us because of age or infirmity? No. Now is the time.

This is your challenge today: We want you to sit down and make a deliberate plan for a perfect day. But not some idealized, Disney-fied perfect day where all the lights are green and your favorite song has just started every time you change the station on the radio and the sun is perfectly warm. We’re talking about the ideal day in a perfect life. The life you think you are currently paying dues for. Schedule the day out as if you were writing a diary of what you just did. Plan it.

Sit down and brainstorm all the things that would go into the perfect day. Take the time to describe a day where you discard other people’s ideas of what you should be doing and instead focus on what’s best for you and your happiness. If you had all the money or opportunities in the world, no preconceived notions, how would you spend your time? What would that day really look like?

We’re not talking about the hypothetical “If you were scheduled for the electric chair tomorrow, what would you do today?” Or pretending you suddenly have no responsibilities, and get to live like you’re on vacation. We’re talking about putting some bones on that vague notion you have about the future, or about what you believe would make you happy, fulfilled, balanced. It’s that life, and those dreams, you entertained in your youth, when it still felt okay to think crazy thoughts and aspire to crazy futures. Not the “I want to play quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys” dreams, but the ‘I’m good at something and have potential and know what makes me feel complete and content” dreams. And it’s the kind of day we’re talking about where you fulfill your duties and accomplish your tasks, make progress on a new skill, see everything you want to see, and go to sleep rejuvenated for having done so.

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But again, you have to actually do this. Block out a half-hour or an hour. Grab a sheet of paper and list out everything that you would potentially include in this day. Think about what we learned on Day 11, about leisure. Back then, we told you that leisure meant “freedom from the work needed to survive, freedom to follow intellectual or creative pursuits.” What do you love doing? What gives you fulfillment? Think about what role work would play in your life, who you’d spend time with, and how you’d be contributing to the polis—the community you live in. What is best for you and your family? What brings out the best in you physically and mentally? Where have you been happiest? Where would you live?

Conversely, what does your ideal day not have in it? What would you never do, never think about if you had a choice? What are you regularly agreeing to do that you secretly dread? What would you have to eliminate to get rid of those obligations or sources of misery?

And then realize, for example, what good is dreaming of retiring to a cliffside home on the beach if you have to beat up your body to get there and by the time you do, you can no longer walk up or down the stairs from your balcony to the sand which, today, are the thing that makes this home your dream in the first place?

There is that famous saying, often attributed to George Bernard Shaw, that youth is wasted on the young. Its point is that there is so much opportunity in front of us when we’re young, and because of that we often take it for granted, until one day we look up and realize we’re not so young anymore. And that’s the precise moment we feel trapped in our current circumstanc-es—meetings, commutes, calls, obligations—and start plotting our way out of them, or bar-gaining with ourselves as a way to rationalize our decision not to seize what opportunity still remains for us to be the person we envisioned in our youth, and to do the things we dreamed about, and instead defer that perfect life for retirement.

The great irony, though, is that most people have totally reasonable, attainable dream lives. The things that made them happiest when they were young, they’re still there. They’ve always been there. We just put a lot of junk in between us and them (this is part of where deleting recurring expenses comes into play, by the way), so that they feel further away and more un-attainable.

But if you just embrace this challenge, and sit down with a piece of paper and pencil, and list out the elements of a perfect day in a truly happy life, you will slowly realize just how doable all the stuff is. It will require some sacrifices and some big decisions about how you’re current-ly living your life—but it won’t demand that you be a different person with different abilities. The world will not need to spin the other way for your world to change. You’ll just need to acknowledge the life you want to live and then quit wasting time and energy putting all that unnecessary stuff between you and it.

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In our interview with Cal Newport for DailyStoic.com, he referenced Arnold Bennett’s guide from the early 20th century, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day. In it, Bennett laments the practice of spending the morning commute reading the newspaper, rather than doing something practical or helpful. He poses a haunting question: Which of us is free from that uneasy feeling that the “great spending departments” of his daily life are not managed as they ought to be?

In other words, how many of us are wasting our days and the time allotted to us, when we could be using for our own betterment?

Now pair Bennett’s question with this equally haunting reminder from Seneca’s The Short-ness of Life: “Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: It snatches away each day as it comes and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today…The whole future lies in uncer-tainty: Live immediately.”

Think of someone who has internalized the idea of memento mori. They live knowing they are on a deadline. They make each day their “perfect day”—because they know it may also be their last day. So why don’t you? Take the perfect day you performed for this challenge, and do what you can to follow it with another one, and another one after that.

As the great American poet Carl Sandburg once said, “The greatest certainty in life is death. The greatest uncertainty is the time.” Pay heed to those words. Carve out this 24-hour chunk of time and make it perfect—because no one can know for sure if you even have enough time left to experience it.

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aDDitional resourCes:

• On The Shortness of Life by Seneca

• Letters From A Stoic, 92: On The Happy Life

• Letters From A Stoic, 93: On The Quality, As Contrasted With the Length, Of Life

• You Could Have Today. Instead You Choose Tomorrow. by Ryan Holiday

• Why Don’t We Know How to Protect Our Time? by Ryan Holiday

• The Perfect Day Formula: How to Own the Day and Control Your Life by Craig Ballantyne

• Own The Day, Own Your Life by Aubery Marcus

• What Does Your Ideal Day Look Like by Paul Cunningham

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Day 19

PiCk FiVe imPortant Books to re-reaD this year

“Throw away your books; stop letting yourself be distracted...Stop allowing your mind to be a slave, to be jerked about by selfish impulses.” —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 2.2

“I tell you that it is the sign of an overnice appetite to toy with many dishes; for when they are manifold and varied, they cloy but do not nourish. So you should always read standard authors; and when you crave a change, fall back upon those whom you read before.” — Seneca, Letters From A Stoic, 2.4

We tend to think how much we read is proof we’re making progress. We like to show off our library. We listen to audiobooks on 2x or 3x speed. We think, “Less is more? Quality over quan-tity? Not with books!” We think: because reading is a good thing, wouldn’t more be better?

Far from it. Reading widely can be rewarding—but it’s also important to focus one’s attention on key works, and to read with intent, to read with a goal.

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In fact, one of the most illuminating things you can do is re-read books from your past. The books that you’ve read in the past hold the promise of new lessons, lessons that you are equipped to pick up on precisely because you’ve changed since last you read them—often, at least in part, because of them. You can elide the parts that you’ve already internalized, and focus on the new things that pop out and surprise you.

Your challenge today is to pick five books to re-read this year.

We want you to linger among a limited number of your favorite writers and thinkers, and re-absorb their works. Look for the lessons that you missed before, or that you weren’t ready to learn just yet.

First, make a list of your all-time favorite books. The ones from middle school that sparked your love for reading. The one from college that helped you decide what you wanted to do post-graduation. The one that introduced you to Stoicism. Any and all of the important books that impacted your life. Get them all listed. Then, pick five to re-read this year. Commit to digging one out of storage tonight and reading the first twenty pages before bed.

Even if you’re not a huge reader, even if you’ve only read ten or twenty books by choice in your life. Pull from them, re-read them to figure out what about them resonated with you. What pulled you through to the final page? What did you learn from them that you carry with you still? And where might you find that again in the future?

The Stoics often spoke about focusing one’s inputs. They point out that the goal of reading is to achieve mental clarity and gaining control over our thoughts and perceptions. To them, darting from one subject to the next, one author to another, is a fantastic way to not gain any clarity.

“Be careful,” Seneca writes; “this reading of many authors and books of every sort may tend to make you discursive and unsteady.” If you were trying to heal a wound, he says, nothing slows the healing process more than incessantly altering ointments. If you were trying to grow a plant, nothing would inhibit its growth more than to constantly move it from one room to another. Isn’t that exactly why we read? To heal and to grow?

So what is the proper mix of books when it comes to reading? Seneca again:

You do not run hither and thither and distract yourself by changing your abode; for such restlessness is the sign of a disordered spirit...This reading of many authors and books of every sort may tend to make you discursive and unsteady. You must linger among a limited number of master thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind. Everywhere means nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many ac-quaintances, but no friends. And the same thing must hold true of men who seek

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intimate acquaintance with no single author, but visit them all in a hasty and hur-ried manner...There is nothing so efficacious that it can be helpful while it is being shifted about. And in reading of many books is distraction.

By narrowing our focus, worrying less about more and new books, resisting the urge to flit from topic to topic, author to author, we will be in a better place to actually absorb and under-stand what we are reading. “Everybody agrees that no one pursuit can be successfully followed by a man who is preoccupied with many things,” Seneca said. “Since the mind, when distract-ed, takes in nothing very deeply, but rejects everything that is, as it were, crammed into it.”

And as it turns out, everybody does agree, even the modern science that has proven Seneca’s belief in deep reading. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist and leading expert in the science of reading, draws from research on the evolution of the brain, neuroscience, psychol-ogy, and the history of literacy to explain the incredible benefits of “deep reading”:

• Deep reading taps into the same brain regions that would activate if the reader were experiencing the event. Deep reading exercises the brain and has been shown to increase empathy, as the reader dives deeper and adds reflection, anal-ysis, and personal subtext to what is being read.

• More time spent in deep reading increases our capacity for critical thinking and analysis. Without deep reading, we begin to have a different approach to the complexity of the issues that face us and our ability to problem-solve dimin-ishes.

In Seneca and Marcus Aurelius’s time, it was uncommon for the average person to have access to any books, let alone many specific varieties of texts. If a person found a book of interest, they devoured it over and over. It makes sense that their writings reflect perfect clarity of thinking. They stayed with the material, taking it in deeply, allowing it to win firm hold in their mind.

Today, in contrast, we have conflicting information coming at us from every direction. Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens, Homo Deus, and 21 Lessons For The 21st Century, says he worries about a world flooded with information. “It’s common to say that information is power or knowledge is power, and this was true for much of history,” he has said. “But we now live in a very different age when we are flooded by enormous amounts of information. We have far too much of it…In this age, clarity is more important than ever before.”

Interestingly, Marcus used a similar analogy to the one we mentioned above from Seneca about treating books like medicine. “Return to philosophy,” he said, “as patients seek out re-lief in a treatment of sore eyes or a dressing for a burn, or from an ointment. Regarding it this way, you’ll obey reason without putting it on display and rest easy in its care.”

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Our mind gets cloudy, scattered. We must return to a regimen rooted in clarity, good princi-ples, and good health. The great books are medicine for the soul. They relieve us of the vul-nerabilities of modern life. They restore to us the energy we need to thrive. Return to them. Let them do their healing.

NOTE: If you particularly enjoyed today’s challenge and want even more like it, sign up for Read to Lead: A Daily Stoic Reading Challenge today! It’s 13 days of activities that will completely revamp your relationship with books, and make you a better leader...and reader. Plus, sign up by 1/22 and we’ll even give you 25% off. Just use discount code NYNUBOOKS in the Daily Stoic store.

aDDitional resourCes:

• On Discursiveness In Reading by Seneca

• Of Peace Of Mind by Seneca — Ch IX

• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius — 2.3

• 100 Things I Learned in 10 Years and 100 Reads of Marcus Aurelius’s Med-itations by Ryan Holiday

• Centireading Force: Why Reading A Book 100 Times is A Great Idea by Stephen Marche

• Read, Reread, Re-reread, Re-re-reread, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring

• The Hidden Benefits of Reading a Book More Than Once by Srinivas Rao

• Rereading as Rebirth: Young Susan Sontag on Personal Growth, the Plea-sures of Revisiting Beloved Books, and Her Rereading List by Maria Popova

• 11 Reasons You Should Reread At Least One Book Every Month — Magnetic Memory Method Podcast

• James Altucher Read Denis Johnson’s “Jesus’ Son” Over 200 Times by Gino Sorcinelli

• The Question To Ask Yourself With Everything You Read

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Day 20

start (anD FunD) an emergenCy reserVe

“It is precisely in times of immunity from care that the soul should toughen itself beforehand for occasions of greater stress, and it is while Fortune is kind that it should fortify itself against her violence.” —Seneca, Letters From A Stoic, 18.5

In one of Seneca’s letters to his friend Lucilius, he describes a disaster that befell a friend of theirs. “Our friend Liberalis is now downcast,” Seneca opens Letter 91, reporting that Liber-alis’ beloved hometown of Lyons was wiped out by “a fire so destructive as to leave nothing for a future fire to consume.”

The town of Lyons wasn’t the only thing destroyed by the fire; the boldness and virtue of Liberalis were also reduced to ash. “Usually so steadfast and erect in the face of his own trials,” for Liberalis the fire also destroyed “the strength of his own character,” something Seneca had long admired in his friend.

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Seneca saw the destruction of Lyons as a reminder of how fickle Fortune can be. He talked about this frequently, about how when we see something bad happen to a neighbor, we may cry or mourn or even think privately that they got what they deserved, when what we really should be thinking about is how easily the same thing could happen to us.

Today, we want you to spend some time thinking about that possibility—and then prepare for it. Your challenge today is to create an emergency fund, to save for a rainy day, to prepare for and anticipate the unexpected.

What could be more welcome than the knowledge that even if disaster struck tonight, you’d be ready to face tomorrow with an unbending resolve? That was the root of Seneca’s disap-pointment with Liberalis. That fire didn’t only engulf his home, his possessions, his monetary assets—it swallowed up his spirit, his will, his very character. When Liberalis was put to the ultimate test, his training went out the window.

And it’s not as if the risk of a city-reducing fire was completely unexpected; the very same summer that Lyons burned to the ground, its destruction was preceded by the Great Fire of Rome (you know, the one with Nero and his fiddle). Liberalis must have known of the massive fire in Rome, so his complete lack of preparedness for a similar occurrence in his own town is even less understandable.

We want you to make sure that you don’t ever find yourself in Liberalis’ shoes. We want the new you, the one that you’ve been building for the past three weeks, to be able to withstand and endure the unexpected. Here’s how you set up an emergency fund:

• Determine How Big You Want Your Rainy Day Fund To Be. The general rule is to have three to six months of basic living expenses—utility bills, rent, car/home payments, gas, groceries, etc.—in an emergency fund. If that is realistic for you, here is an easy way to calculate what you should set aside. For some, that just isn’t feasible. For others, that’s not nearly big enough. Maybe you want to have the kind of fund that lets you take big risks as far as making your dream day a reality goes. Maybe you want to be majorly insulated from even a huge market crash, or a fundamental shift in the market in which your business operates. Whatever it is, the good news, says Paul Golden, the managing director for the National Endowment for Financial Education, is that starting with a small goal, of even just $500, “improves people’s psychological well-being and shows you have the ability to set (and meet) an achievable goal.” Set an easy goal for the next couple of months, then see if you can keep moving that bar higher.

• Decide Where To Put It. You’re simply setting aside a portion of your month-ly income. That could be in a checking account, a savings account, a safe in your closet, or a shoebox under your bed. Consumer banking expert Spencer

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Tierney recommends putting your emergency fund in a high-yield savings account because it is federally insured... The money earns interest, and you can access your cash quickly when needed, whether through withdrawal or funds transfer.” If you have more than just your expenses covered, then be smart about how it is invested, so there is a return on your savings. Compounding interest is one of the most powerful forces on Earth—it is wonderful to have it working as a counterbalance to Murphy’s Law.

• Determine A Monthly Deposit Plan—Make It Automatic. OK, you know the ex-act amount of money that you will set aside each month, and you know where that money is going. Now, you need to make sure it’s actually getting there. Treat each new deposit to your emergency fund like a recurring bill, due on the first of every month. A great way to set this up is with an automatic recurring deposit. You can set this up with your bank, or your employer may even be able to do it on their end. You wouldn’t miss a credit card payment—don’t miss a payment to yourself. Another great option is something like Acorns, which automatically rounds up your credit card purchases to the nearest dollar and invests the change (This link will start you off with $5 free dollars). The more you automate, the more you’ll save and the more prepared you’ll be.

If all this sounds basic and common sensical to you, great! Then push yourself to get even more aggressive about automating your savings and your investing (this will help you with tomorrow’s challenge, which is partly about giving). Set a big goal: The freedom to retire a year or a two earlier. To not have to care about what your boss says, “Because you don’t actually need this.” Because you’ve now done all the work to live the perfect day of an ideal life, and to survive—and thrive—when Fortune has other ideas.

“Nothing ought to be unexpected by us,” Seneca tells Lucilius. “Our minds should be sent forward in advance to meet all problems, and we should consider, not what is wont to happen, but what can happen.” Nothing is stable. It is an inevitable law of life, Seneca says, that far too many people neglect until it is thrust upon them. Of the few that prepare and anticipate, however, “a reverse has but made room for more prosperous fortune.”

Most people are not financially ready for an emergency. According to a survey from Bank-rate, 57 % of Americans couldn’t cover a $500 unexpected expense. And 45% of Ameri-cans reported incurring a major unexpected expense in the past 12 months. More than 150 MILLION Americans don’t have an emergency fund and are just a few hundred dollars away from financial hardship. That’s as easy as getting in an unexpected fender bender, or spilling coffee on your laptop.

You cannot be so vulnerable. You must prepare for any obstacles that stand the potential of diverting you from becoming the new you that you’ve already spent so much time and energy

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and resources on. It’s so easy to prevent that from happening. Just a few dollars a day for a few months and you’ll be ready.

Setting up an emergency fund also presents other opportunities to be Stoic. For instance, Seneca wrote frequently about practicing poverty. He said we should “establish business rela-tions with poverty,” and he would regularly dine on “the scantiest and cheapest fare” during the week. What if on your next coffee break, you take the money you would have spent on a latte from Starbucks and deposit it directly in your emergency fund? Or you’re at a bar with your friends. When you get that last round of drinks, make yours a water—and save the money instead.

Another way to fund your emergency fund: Heed the advice of Marcus Aurelius and Epicte-tus to reduce our attachments. Go through all of your possessions and put everything to the test of that question from Marcus: Is this necessary? You could have a garage sale, list things on Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist, and put all your profits into your emergency fund. Removing your recurring expenses is part of this too. Switching from a recurring debit to a recurring credit (in your reserve accounts) is a double bonus.

It may take a few months to get your emergency fund to where you want it to be. But one thing’s for certain: On that final day, you’ll feel relieved that you’ve finally insulated yourself to some extent from disaster. You’ll feel safe.

In On Anger, Seneca wrote, “Fabius used to say that the basest excuse for a commanding officer is ‘I didn’t think it would happen,’ but I say it’s the basest for anyone. Thinking ev-erything might happen; anticipate everything.” It’s one of the few things you can be absolutely certain of: the rainy day will come, things will go wrong. The potential misfortune that has you saying “But that will never happen to me” WILL happen to you. It happens to everyone.

The only way to mitigate life’s inevitable setbacks is through planning and anticipation. That means having an emergency fund—whatever that means to you, whatever your current sta-tion in life—to make things at least a little bit easier to handle.

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aDDitional resourCes:

• Digit — app that will “analyze your income and spending, and find money it can safely set aside for you”

• I’ve been using the personal-finance app Digit for nearly 3 years, and it’s helped me save $20,000 by Jackie Lam from Business Insider

• Letters From A Stoic, 91: On the Lessons To Be Drawn From the Burning of Lyons

• Letters From A Stoic, 98: On the Fickleness of Fortune

• How to Cover an Emergency Even When You’re Scraping by Tim Stobierski

• The 6 best money moves you can make to set you up for 2020, according to a wealth manager and CEO by Sofia Pitt

• Why it’s important to make your rainy day fund a top money priority in 2020 by Ivana Pino

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Day 21

Be someone’s hero: Do a gooD DeeD

“We Stoics … take pleasure in bestowing benefits, even though they cost us labor, provided that they lighten the labors of others.” —Seneca, On Benefits, IV.13

“Seeking the very best in ourselves means actively caring for the welfare of other human beings.” —Epictetus, The Art Of Living, p.150

It is the last day of the New Year New You challenge, so it’s fitting that today’s challenge is the simplest, and yet perhaps the most difficult of all the days’ challenges to perform, in spite of the fact it may even seem familiar to you. For aren’t we told all our lives of the most important rule, the Golden Rule?

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Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Today we’re taking it further: Do for the world what you wish the world would do more of.

It’s so easy to hear this message, yet it can be so difficult to put it into practice. Most of us can spend our lives not being actively malicious; but when’s the last time you did something actively selfless, something which cost you time and resources and whose rewards accrued to everyone but you?

That’s why today’s last challenge is this: Do a good deed.

The shape and form of this good deed are up to you: Whether it’s giving time or money to someone in need, forming a connection with another human being when they are truly in need of one, or just holding a door open for the person behind you. Regardless of the scope of your good deed, or its duration: Go out of your way to do something to make the world a bit brighter for someone.

Because the new you isn’t just out for self-improvement, you’re out to improve this crazy difficult uncertain world we are stepping into in 2020. After all, part of the reason we seek virtuousness is that by embodying it, we become able to improve the lives of those around us—a wholly Stoic path to take.

In April 1956, the German scholar and historian Ludwig Edelstein delivered a series of lec-tures at Oberlin College that would be published posthumously as The Meaning Of Stoicism. In the third of four lectures, “The Stoic Way Of Life,” Edelstein says, “[The Stoics] asked the individual to learn that it is necessary for him to live for others and that he is born for human society at large, of which he must always feel himself to be a member rather than a fragment separated off.”

Kindness is one of the principal virtues that makes a Stoic. It wasn’t something you did to feel good about yourself. It was a practice that benefited society. “The reward for all the virtues lies in the virtues themselves,” Seneca wrote. “For they are not practiced with a view to recom-pense; the wages of a good deed is to have done it.”

Generosity, charity, kindness, these are fundamental to being a human. Justice, Marcus said, was the most important of the four virtues—the “source” of the others. He wasn’t using justice in the legal sense either; for him, it meant acting reputably and equitably with and for other people in society.

It was in De Officiis (On Moral Duties), Cicero’s comprehensive study and writing of the eth-ical system of the Stoics of his time, where he first presented the four Stoic virtues. Justice, he explains, is “the principle which constitutes the bond of human society and of a virtual com-munity of life.” The Stoic teacher Epictetus said, “Seeking the very best in ourselves means actively caring for the welfare of other human beings.”

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That’s what the final challenge calls on you to do today—and ideally every day. Get out in your community and do something good. It can be something little, or something big. It can be running for the cure, or running to pick up your elderly neighbor’s groceries. There are countless things you can do:

• Go for a walk and pick up all the trash you see.

• Anonymously cover the check of the young family dining near you at dinner.

• Donate half of first paycheck of the year to a charity (or better, related to what we talked about in Day 20, automate this giving).

• Fill a trash bag with warm clothes and give them to a homeless person, or bring them something to eat.

• Stop by and help someone new who is struggling in your office, let them know they’ll get the hang of it and that they can come to you with questions.

• Go to the local nursing and retirement home and spend a couple hours with the residents

• Fund a few teacher’s projects on DonorsChoose.

• Tip a barista or waitress way more than your bill dictates.

• Send flowers and a nice message to a coach who believed in you.

• Donate blood at the local Red Cross.

As Seneca said, wherever there is a person, there is an opportunity for kindness. And scientific research seems to be catching up with what the Stoics already knew 2,000 years ago: unselfish acts are one of the most beneficial things you can do for yourself:

• Research from Emory University found that when you are kind to another per-son, your brain’s pleasure and reward centers light up, as if you were the recip-ient of the good deed—not the giver. This phenomenon is called the “helper’s high.”

• Dr. Martin Seligman, Director of the Penn Positive Psychology Center, says, “Doing a kindness produces the single most reliable increase in wellbeing [for the doer] of any exercise we’ve tested.”

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• There’s a reason the last step of the Alcoholics Anonymous 12 Step program demands recovering alcoholics be of service to others. Maria Pagano, an addic-tion researcher at Case Western University, used data from one of the largest studies of addiction to compare those AA members who made an effort to help others to non-helpers. She found that 40 percent of helpers avoided taking a drink in the 12 months following the 3-month treatment period, while only 22 percent of non-helpers stayed sober—a doubling effect rarely seen in social science research, she says.

Although Stoicism is a philosophy that stresses independence and strength, moral rectitude and inner life, it’s essential that we don’t mistake this as a justification for isolation or loneli-ness. Suppose we think of Stoicism as a sort of toolkit of strategies for being more determined, more focused, and stronger. It’s important to then ask: what are we using those tools for?

The Stoics wanted to be less distracted so they could do more good for the world. They want-ed to think more clearly so they weren’t distracted by temptations like wealth or fame. They wanted to be stronger and more determined, because that’s what was required to endure the obstacles that life threw their way. Their ultimate goal in becoming more virtuous was to live the best lives possible—and that means living in a world full of other people, helping them and making everything around all of you better at the same time.

Cato, the most towering and courageous of the Stoics, was famous for what he did for other people. He loaned money to friends without interest. He protected the little guy, he refused to tolerate corruption or government waste. He forgave easily. He took meandering walks around Rome to help those in need and, as Plutarch tells us, “he made it his business to salute and address without help from others those who met him on his rounds.” He was not “guided by views of honor and profit,” Peter Fredet writes in Ancient History, “but he thought ‘that a good citizen ought to be as solicitous about the public good, as a bee is about her hive.’”

That’s what Stoicism is about. Over and over and over again, the Stoics talk about community, partnership, fellowship, neighborliness, and our relation to a larger whole. It is what makes everything else worthwhile. After all, how impressive is courage if it only serves one’s self-in-terest? What good is wisdom if not put to use for the whole world?

Phrases like “Acts for the common good” appear more than 80 times in Meditations. We are not islands, we are social animals. We need community, we need friends. We get something out of giving, and we are made better for caring and being cared for.

The human heart clamors for that warm feeling of knowing you’re a part of a larger whole—always has, always will. Chase that feeling today, with your last challenge, the last step on this part of the path to a new you.

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aDDitional resourCes:

• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius — 7.74, 8.34

• Doing Good Better by Will MacAskill

• How To Do The Most Good: An Interview With Will MacAskill

• Doing Good Is Simple: Making a Difference Right Where You Are by Chris Marlow

• The Power of Serving Others: You Can Start Where You Are by Gary Morsch

• Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness by Sharon Salzberg

• Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success by Adam Grant

• Hack Your Happiness: How doing favors for others can make you happier

• 80,000 Hours: Find a fulfilling career that does good by Benjamin Todd

• Giving Is Living by Marnie Howard

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Bonus Day : Write a eulogy

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This challenge is adapted from our 2019 21-Day Daily Stoic Freedom Challenge. One of the most critical components of Stoicism is the idea of memento mori, of remembering that one day we all will die, and that we need to live now while that’s still possible. A great way to strengthen that conviction is to actually picture your own funeral, and to write the eulogy that may be delivered there. What accomplishments will you list? What would you want people to remember when you are gone? You may find that there are gaps that need filling—a task you can start working on today.

If you like this challenge, remember that by joining Daily Stoic Life, you get ALL of our chal-lenges for free. There are plenty of other benefits as well—check them out here.

Our friend Bassus seemed to me to be attending his own funeral, and laying out his own body for burial, and living almost as if he had survived his own death, and bearing with wise resignation his grief at his own departure. For he talks freely about death, trying hard to persuade us that if this process contains any element of discomfort or of fear, it is the fault of the dying person, and not of death itself. — Seneca, Letters From A Stoic, 30.5

It’s one of the funniest scenes in all of literature. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huck, Tom and Joe Harper sail off to Jackson’s Island for a few days without telling anyone that they’re leaving, let alone where they are going. Their families panic, convince themselves the boys have drowned, and then prepare a funeral for them the following Sunday. Tom, having snuck back home, overhears the plan for their funeral, convinces his cohorts to wait a few days before they all return home so they can march in on their own funerals. Twain describes the scene in chapter 17:

The minister related many a touching incident in the lives of the departed, too, which illustrated their sweet, generous natures...The congregation became more and more moved, as the pathetic tale went on, till at last the whole company broke down and joined the weeping mourners in a chorus of anguished sobs, the preacher himself giving way to his feelings, and crying in the pulpit. There was a rustle in the gallery, which nobody noticed; a moment later the church door creaked; the minister raised his streaming eyes above his handkerchief, and stood transfixed! First one and then another pair of eyes followed the min-ister’s, and then almost with one impulse the congregation rose and stared while the three dead boys came marching up the aisle, Tom in the lead, Joe next, and Huck, a ruin of drooping rags, sneaking sheepishly in the rear! They had been hid in the unused gallery listening to their own funeral sermon!

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Today, we have one final bonus challenge for you: write your funeral scene. Not surrepti-tiously from the gallery of a church like an adolescent mischief-maker, but from an honest appraisal of your life as it has been truly lived up to this point in time.

Take your time. Find some quiet. Think about your life, your family and friendships, your greatest accomplishments and deepest regrets. Think about what most people know about you, and by comparison what you wish they knew (and didn’t know). Think about what it means to you to have lived a good, principled, virtuous life; and whether, if today were to be your day to leave this earth, if you have lived such a life?

How many people will gather to celebrate your life, do you think? Who will give your eulogy? How many will be moved to stand in front of the assembled mourners, to steady themselves against the waves of emotion crashing over them, and to share with them stories, moments, feelings that were once maybe only yours and theirs? How many in the crowd, hearing these old stories for the first time, will struggle to keep their composure and allow those waves of emotion to pull them under? Who will it be? Your mother? Your partner or your kids? Your best friend? Maybe an uncle who you haven’t seen in awhile but was an important part of your life for a long time?

What does your funeral look like? Is this a celebration of life? Is it a joyous monument to a life well lived? Or a memorial to unfulfilled potential and missed chances? Will there be lively music or somber dirges? Will there be smiles through the tears? Will it be laughter catching those tears or wails of anguish?

Or will there be no one there at all? No joy or sadness. No laughter or sorrow. Just nothing.

In his best-selling book The Road to Character, David Brooks coined the idea of “eulogy virtues” and “résumé virtues.” As Brooks writes, “The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funer-al — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful...We all know that the eulogy virtues are more important than the résumé ones. But our culture and our educational systems spend more time teaching the skills and strategies you need for career success than the qual-ities you need to radiate that sort of inner light. Many of us are clearer on how to build an external career than on how to build inner character.”

The question for us today is, when we look at our own funeral, do we like what we see? Do we like the stories being told in reminiscence? Do we like the number of and quality of people who have turned up to celebrate our life?

Maybe you’ve achieved some career success, but has your depth of character followed the same trajectory? Maybe you have an admirable work ethic, but have your relationships taken a hit because of that? Maybe your life is rich by all external measures, but is your list of material possessions longer and more impressive than that of your moral possessions?

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Marcus Aurelius’ writings are, in a sense, his wrestling with eulogy and résumé virtues. They are his attempt to answer the incredibly difficult question he had been confronted with as a result of the decisions made by others on his behalf before he was old enough to think for himself: You have been made emperor, what kind of emperor will you be? What kind of person will you be?

One of his most direct answers to those questions comes in Book 10, which we talked about on day 5, when he writes, “epithets for yourself: Upright. Modest. Straightforward. Sane. Cooperative. Disinterested.”

Think for a second about the constant temptation Marcus would have been confronted with to pad his résumé virtues—to amass more and more control, to conquer more territory, to build more monuments to himself. He could have been building the resume of a great and powerful emperor. Yet there’s not a mention anywhere in his writings of those sort of aspira-tions.

Instead, he wants to be a good person. He didn’t aim at things he can’t control: growing the most powerful empire, turning the citizens of Rome into Stoics, creating an undying legacy. There’s nothing of that in his words. He sets moral destinations. Upright. Modest. Coopera-tive. These are virtues which cannot be taken from him, even if his empire were wrestled away and all of his power with it.

Ultimately, what Marcus shows us is that in focusing on eulogy virtues, the resume virtues will take care of themselves. Of course, the inverse does not—focusing on your work or your success does not guarantee that you will be a good person or that people will feel you made a positive impact on their lives.

The entrepreneur and bestselling author Gary Vaynerchuk has talked about how he makes career decisions and measures success, “I have no interest in making the most money in the world. I have an interest in having the most people at my funeral...I genuinely want to leave a positive impact on the world. Not only on my friends and family and the 150 people closest to me.”

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Writing your own funeral scene is really about trying to answer these essential life ques-tions: Who am I? What do I stand for? How would people describe me? Have I lived a true, virtuous life? Was I up to the challenge?

Leo Tolstoy said, “This is the entire essence of life: Who are you? What are you?” Those are the questions he grappled with in his journal, which he called “an instrument of self-perfection.”

So get your journal out, write your funeral scene. Take as much time as you possibly can. This could be the exercise that changes your life, and that shows you how to live it.