The Daily Stoic

I went back and I read one of my favorite books which you would actually really like I think it's called The Harder They Fall by Bud Schuylberg it's about this this PR guy in the in the in the boxing world in the 50s and it's about this sort of he's he's gets sucked into this sort of mob underworld you might relate anyways it's a really interesting book but I read it when I was in marketing and in my mind looking back that was the book that shifted me leaving American apparel and changing my life doing all this stuff and so I reread the book like a year ago or something and and I found like exactly like I'd highlighted this page where I would it was like you know you cannot deal and fill without becoming the thing you touch this beautiful passage right and I was like this is this is it right even rereading I was like this is obviously what changed my life and then I was like when did I buy this book so I pulled up Amazon and I found like when I bought it and it was three years before I left you know so I I I went to work almost every day for three fucking years haven't had the epiphany before any change actually happened so you know it's never this overnight instantaneous thing that we want to think that it is it's about systems and communities and all the stuff we're talking about breaking and and whatever your current circumstance breaking you down breaking you down breaking you down till you get desperate

On Thursdays we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic, 366 meditations on wisdom, perseverance and the art of living which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman.

I was just talking to someone about that recently I read a book about uh um sort of American politics that was written by a British person. It was like about the founding of America from a from a British person and it was like it just like never occurred to me that like they would have a slightly different view on things.

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.

On Thursdays we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic's 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance and the Art of Living which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman.

I think because when you have like husband, wife whatever it is the dynamic one maybe soft the other one may be driven whatever it is right so yeah there's a balance there. Yeah so I see that when you're pushing these trials do explosively now their intentions right there's the book my little soul talks about intentions also but I see that in intentions some people are living like they're actually through their child. Yeah and then some people are like listen these are just life lessons you don't really have to play but you have to finish you have to go hard and you have to finish right so it's a very tricky it's a very tricky thing so I you know maybe in a single day or my son or my daughter comes over here to certain things that we have to do or whether it's reading or whether it's disillossed or whether it's you know let's get our shots up or you know it's like I can show you certain things in after a while you are who you are so can you start to choose who you want to become right yeah and then my job over here is that pushing in that world of who I think you want to become right

i definitely recommend john graves he has a book called Hard Scrabble which i really enjoyed

and another one called notes from a lives uh notes from a limestone ledge and he just talks about sort of philosophy and and his life sort of running this small little farm in texas he's also a brilliant writer so he was sort of doing the same thing i am but uh but yeah those are some recommendations

if you make him out to be a saint people might not know how hard he worked.

No one practiced being Fred Rogers more than Fred Rogers himself.

these things were in the painting but they don't destroy the canvas

there's no normal life that's free of pain

try to make goodness attractive that's the toughest assignment you'll ever be given

very Laura Philpont in her book Bomb Shelter you can't hold on to anything even your own face which makes it awfully insulting that you have to look at it all the time but maybe that's the job of our faces to help us get used to letting go and fact a lot of things in life can do this job

I'd written actually the last day of my book tour from my book The Ops School is the way I was I was still sort of a consultant at American apparel and I got a call from the CFO that had just been part of the decision to fire and I was asked to come back to sort of consult on the attempted turnaround.

And I thought it would be interesting, I thought it might take a couple weeks to make some quick decisions ended up getting there and watch this almost Greek drama of a person sort of destroying everything that they'd ever worked for.

At the end of it like 12,000 people lost their jobs is really horrible but it happened that I'd recently sold a book about humility.

I was trying to work on this book about humility and watching just I was going to write about humility and then when I watch ego on such a grand scale play out what I realized is that it's as important as humility is.