The Daily Stoic

Robert Greene’s five international bestsellers earned him descriptions like genius and master of human behavior. His newest book was just released. The Laws of Human Nature is the culmination of his life’s work to understand why . Why do humans behave the way we do?  As well as penning manifestos on subjects inherent to the human experience, Robert Greene has been a student of Stoic philosophy for...

“The hunter worthy of the name always willingly takes the bitter if by so doing he can get the sweet, and gladly balances failure and success, spurning the poorer souls who know neither.” Theodore Roosevelt was talking about the philosophy of hunting when he said this, but he was also describing his philosophy of life. This is how the Stoic looks at things as well.  So much of life is outside of o...

Michael Lombardi is a former NFL coach, GM and front office strategist who is largely responsible for introducing Stoic philosophy to professional sports. In 2014, he read The Obstacle is the Way and spread it around the locker room of the New England Patriots. They went on to win the Super Bowl that year and Stoicism became a favorite of teams not just in football but in the NBA, MLB, the NHL and...

In the late 1800s, Theodore Roosevelt was on a hunting trip in Big Hole Basin in Montana. The trip did not get off to a good start. Upon getting off the train, and searching for a wagon to transport them, Roosevelt and his party immediately ran into the first of many issues. The wagon they found was overpriced, the harnesses were rotting and falling apart, and the horses were spoiled and ill-train...

There is a repeated pattern of failure in Marcus Aurelius’s life , and no matter how much we might admire him, it’s hard to deny it. His step brother, Lucius Verus, who he elevated to co-emperor, was a ne'er-do-well who never proved himself worthy of Marcus’s respect. His wife, despite his praise for her, was probably unfaithful. His son, despite Marcus’s love for Commodus, was deranged and c...

Varlam Shalamov was a brilliant writer who was sentenced in 1937 to years of hard labor in a Soviet gulag. If that were not painful enough, though he was eventually freed, his writings were more or less lost to history until today—his book, Kolyma Tales , is finally enjoying a well-deserved resurgence. In a piece published by the Paris Review , Shalamov lists things he learned in the Gulag: “I am...

One of the early members of Alcoholics Anonymous defined ego as “a conscious separation from.” From what?  From everything and everyone, including our own nature.  When we are in the sway of ego, we are arrogant, selfish, shortsighted. We are mean, we are superficial, we are insecure, we are fragile. In short, we are everything a Stoic is not supposed to be.  “It’s impossible to learn that which w...

Is there anything sadder than a person whose work is their life? They neglect their family, they put in crazy hours, they have no interests, no hobbies outside what they do at the office. It’s bad enough to be stuck next to them at a party, but imagine what it must be like to be inside their heads. The only thing they care about is work...work that few notice or even understand and fewer still wil...

There’s a moment that almost everyone remembers from their childhood. They have just received something they really liked--a new shirt, a new toy, a haircut they thought was cool--and showed up for school with it...only to be mercilessly teased and mocked for it. Many a trash can has been filled by this experience. The toy, the shirt, the opinion no longer the same now that some jerk has weighed i...

George Ball, the diplomat and advisor to President Kennedy (one of who David Halberstam would call ‘the best and the brightest’ ), once observed about Lyndon Johnson that LBJ was hardly disadvantaged by his lack of an Ivy League education. Rather, he said, LBJ suffered from his sense of lacking that education. That is, LBJ’s insecurity about his deficiency was far worse than any actual deficit tha...

1981 was a tough year for tennis great Billie Jean King. That year, she sat down to write her memoir having endured serious betrayal on multiple fronts. One was emotional and financial: a woman she’d had an affair with attempted to extort her, creating a massive scandal. The other was physical and inevitable: Her body had begun to betray her mastery of the game. She was getting older, the other pl...

Death and dying are the worst parts of life, right? After all, they do end the whole thing.  So while it does make sense, generally, to try to avoid dying, Seneca marvelled at the terrible things people do to stay alive--things much worse than death. We’ll betray friends, he said, betray our most closely held beliefs, people will even sell out their own children and grandchildren--as the elderly o...

We put a lot of thought into making distinctions about what’s urgent and what’s not. We put a lot of effort into planning. We have our conservative calculations for retirement and our ambitious ones. We have a bucket list that includes the things we want to do now, in the future and in the way way off distant future. All of which presumes we’ve got plenty of time with which to do it all. The thoug...

In Game of Thrones, the people of the Iron Islands believe they have been entitled by God to steal and seize whatever they like. Women, land, possessions, even the rightful kingdom of one’s own brother--all of this is capriciously taken by the ironborn if they think they’d like to have it. "I take what is mine. I pay the iron price,” Balon Greyjoy says. It’s a tradition that the Roman empire, even...

It’s interesting, if you think about Greek and Roman mythology, that the Gods were so active and busy. Athena and Circe and Hermes all worked to help Odysseus. Apollo guided Achilles. Zeus and Jupiter were always getting involved in this squabble or that one. Sort of weird, right? They were Gods, they could do anything...or nothing...and yet they still worked really hard to keep the universe in ba...

The anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun and the song it inspired, One by Metallica, tell the story of Joe Bonham, a soldier who has been grievously injured on the battlefield in World War I. Upon waking in the hospital, the soldier finds that he cannot walk or speak, see or hear. Modern science has saved his body—or at least part of it—and he is left questioning what kind of life this actually is. T...

One of the best passages in all of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations is the opener to Book V. In it, Marcus has a dialog with himself as he struggles to get out of bed in the morning. It’s just marvelously relatable. Here we have an extraordinary man, some twenty centuries ago, struggling just like every ordinary man and woman has, to get up the willpower to get up from his warm bed and get to work. W...

In Walter Isaacson’s wonderful new biography of Leonardo Da Vinci, he spends a lot of time dissecting and exploring the ideas in Da Vinci’s notebooks. From his military sketches to his lesser known fables to self-portraits and scientific breakthroughs, Da Vinci poured his best self onto these pages (in fact, he often carried them around on a rope attached to his belt so they were always at hand)....

Why are good people attracted to serving bad people or bad causes? Aristotle taught Alexander the Great. Seneca advised Nero. Da Vinci attached himself to Cesare Borgia. Mattis accepted a cabinet position from Trump. There are, of course, many other examples of academics who were blind to the horrors of the Soviet system or the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge, just as everyday there are good people...

It’s easy to stir up resentment, harder to create common ground. It’s easy to point out what’s wrong, it’s much more difficult to come up with a solution. Our current political and social dialogue has taken the easy road, no question, which is why we’re divided and despair of solving any of our problems. The Stoic rejects this, resists the urge to point fingers or label other groups “the enemy.” A...

All of us have day jobs. Even professional philosophers are still professors or authors, which means they have other responsibilities than just thinking and reading. That means that like the rest of us, they’ve got meetings to take and phone calls to make and paperwork to do and politics to play. And that’s okay. It’s only an issue when, if we’re not careful, those “other” things grow and grow unt...

Confucius was once asked for advice by a student, and in replying essentially urged him to wait and be patient. Later he was asked for advice by another student, and advised that student to not be patient and to solve the problem immediately. An observant third student noticed the seemingly contradictory nature of Confucius’ responses and asked him to explain. Confucius replied, “Ran Qiu is over c...

It was on this day in the year 86 AD, that Antoninus Pius, the man who would become best known as the stepfather of Marcus Aurelius, was born. Most people, even followers of Stoicism, don’t know much about Antoninus. This is sad because he was a truly great man. “Antoninus would have had the reputation of being the best of sovereigns,” Joseph Ernest Renan writes, “if he had not designated for his...

It’s famously said that you should learn from the mistakes of others because you can’t live long enough to make them all yourself. In that way, the books we read and the information we digest gives us an advantage to those who choose to learn by painful trial and error. In studying the Stoics, we’re able to adopt a mentality battle tested by some of history’s most successful warriors, artists, bus...

In Aaron Thier’s novel The World Is A Narrow Bridge (the title is a proverb we have written about before), one of the main characters is a runner. His wife teases him for his dedication to this hobby, which he claims settles his mind and makes him feel less crazy. She jokes that “it’s a craziness problem that makes you run and run.” His reply absolutely nails it, as any runner knows. “It’s the run...