The Daily Stoic

Know how is a help opens the Army Life Handbook that the US Army brass handed each of its millions of soldiers in the Second World War. There is more mental comfort, it continues more personal satisfaction in knowing your place and part in this army than in any other single thing you can now do for yourself.

Yeah. You don't, you know, and I, I wrote, I wrote a book about, you know, being a mom. I wrote a, you know, I wrote a book called, Mama Rama, which was a lot of it was about this. Like how to, you know, balance all those different, but I don't, I don't even like you were balanced, how to like throw yourself into the convulsions of parenting, you know, working, playing, and, and having an identity that isn't just about parenting,

But I feel like it always did a bad job, communicating how what a kind of an interesting tradition it had.

But then Joan Didion is from Sacramento, like really from Sacramento. She has a great book called Where I Was From, but her family came to Sacramento with the Donner party.

Actually, let me pull it up here because I recommended it recently. Polio, an American story by David M. Ashinsky, which I believe won a National Book Award. That was fascinating.

I think it was will bow in might be the pronunciation BOWN in any case it's the 30-day no complaint experiment yes I think this is the first blog post you ever read it was a very early blog post and if you want to change your life you put a bracelet on could be a rubber band and every time you complain you switch to the wrist it's might be 21 days but it's three or four weeks and if you make concerted effort to not complain at all for and you achieve a solid let's call it even two weeks without switching that bracelet your quality of life will change completely if you have some improvement let's just say yeah that can be gained which I would say is true for most people and it it's a forcing function for a lot of the stock practices

he has this new book coming out

his latest Learning to Love Midlife 12 reasons why life gets better with age

you can check out his new book Learning to Love Midlife 12 reasons why life gets better with age

i'm a big fan of lind twist throughout The Soul of Money

have you read it's a novel from a round that shared it's called the fools errand

was written by Albian Torre I don't know he's one of theater Roosevelt's friends he's he's the you know the I write about this encourages calling but there's this famous letter between him and theater Roosevelt where theater Roosevelt is explaining why he invited Booker T. Washington to dine with him at the White House and he says I know it's going to kill me in the Southern states but the fact that I consider that would kill me in the Southern states is why I did it

he writes this novel called the fools errand which is loosely based on his experience in that he's an officer in the union um the war goes well but he fights in the South it kind of falls in love with it and he moves to Alabama or some of the plot of the novels he moves to Alabama and he's just going to be an American in Alabama because this is all the United States and he sort of quickly discovers that that's not how it is and that the people who just waged this horrendous war their minds didn't change because they were beaten on the battlefield and he sort of discovers that also it wasn't even that they'd sort of rationally gotten to think what they had thought but that there was this whole reinforcing structure that had existed that made it impossible to question like that there are all these laws in place and a culture of intimidation that's that hey if you question any of these institutions will inshew will intimidate you will destroy everything you have and so he describes it as this fools errand thinking that you could go into the South during reconstruction and reconstruct it right he basically bumps into the unreconstructed South for which his basic conclusion was like there are there isn't an army big enough in the world to sort of to occupy and change these people's minds

the first book my first sort of offer to do a book came in like 2008 or 2009 oh and the ops which which what which I ultimately did with the ops school is away but the ops school is waiting to come out to 2014 it was good to say okay and Robert Green who was my sort of mentor was like you have to turn this down and I was like are you kidding me he's like first off it's a shitty deal like they're offering you no money upfront it's not like a big publisher like he's like but that all aside content wise like you're not ready to do this and that was extremely hard like you're getting your shot and I have to like be like oh wait for a later shot that might not come around it's the hardest thing it was so hard but he was totally right because if I was if I'm now looking back at the ops school and what is the way I'm like I'm a little young it would have been insane to write that at 22

he says in on tranquility of the mind let all your efforts be directed to something let it keep that end in view it's not activity that disturbs people but false conceptions of things that drive them mad

There's a book I'm reading at the moment called Notes from a fellow traveler by Darren Browne. He's a magician. Yeah, yeah. He's really into Stoic's oh he's a book happy. He's very good at basically all about Stoic's.

But I really like the title of that book Notes from a fellow traveler. He's sort of a book written for other magicians but that framing like a fellow traveler. I really like that because he's not trying to be a guru, he's not saying I've got the answers. He's just like, hey, I'm in this business just as you are and here are some notes.

so I was going to write about that a couple years ago and so I went I was like well let me get the date so I was like I knew about on an Amazon so I pulled up the Amazon really you know I type in the heart of the fall and it goes you bought this book in September of 2008 oh my god like a year after I started and that's what I've read it too so I read it and then so I would have thought all this stuff happened and then I read the passage and the light goes on I make all the connections in fact the exact opposite happens I read it at the beginning and then still all this stuff happens

There's another book and they're all...have you read Dr. Becky yet? Oh yeah, yeah, I follow her on Instagram. Yeah, she's like...it's called 'Emotional Vaccination.'