Go for a walk, often. The time spent outdoors, in motion, is medicine for the soul and mana for the soul.
Appreciation:
What a day it has been – for a variety of reasons. Great news to start the morning. A long walk with much time to think and be present. A day of great times and conversations with friends. Reminders of an epic evening last year, watching the northern lights with my family and then walking until late at night with Dominic watching the lights dancing overhead.
It also would have been Dad’s 70th birthday today, my heart has been full with memories of him throughout the day.
Presence:
Spending time on the deck outdoors with friends, talking, playing cards, watching birds, soaking in sun, enjoying the fresh air, reconnecting, relaxing, and rejuvenating.
How many of us suffer from similar challenges without knowing others do too? How often does ego cloud our judgement when we really should be open to sharing our challenges with others?
Appreciation:
My run this morning was a wonderful opportunity to carve out some time for myself, quiet time to let my brain decompress and think. Much of it was spent walking through how to handle stress, ways to grow through challenges, and reminders of blending purpose and values.
Presence:
So many laughs throughout the day my stomach aches from chuckling so hard! Great moments of presence in reconnecting with friends.
My heart breaks for Becky and all those who devote their lives to protecting our environment. They deserve so much better from our government than they are receiving from federal government leaders. They are all in my prayers and thoughts. I’m also praying for the leaders of our federal government to have the ability to see how negative of an impact they have when they lead with greed, hatred, and ignorance.
Difficult one today, no question. Much needed time with friends, both in moments of laughter as well as in cathartic conversation of difficulties.
Engaging dialogue on how to stay positive in times of extreme anger, on how to keep love in my hearts when my anger borders on hatred for those few who have caused great pain.
Conversations on how to work through extreme challenges in a way in which we can create some shard of positivity rather than succumb to anger and hatred.
Sharing the deep hurt we feel when a loved one is hurting terribly by something that I don’t have the ability to fix.
Talking about what is most important in life and the obstacles we put in our own way out of ego and fear.
I’m just going to wrap it up there. My heart hurts too much tonight.
Again, my heart goes out to Becky and all those impacted so negatively by a federal government currently led by hatred and greed. May those impacted have the courage and love to find a way forward, and may the leaders acting on hate and greed be moved to act on love and compassion instead.
Two quotes really caught my attention today, both for different but similar reasons…
Every man has a passion gnawing away at the bottom of his heart, just as every fruit has its worm.
Alexander Dumas
This one was a reminder to stay focused on what is truly important in life. Passion can be a great thing, but it’s so important to be cognizant of whether it is one that grows us towards our purpose and fits our values. If so, lean into and embrace it. If not, be wary of the impact it can have on the rest of our lives and don’t let it ruin the fruit of our lives.
Son, time is all the luck you need.
Seven Mary Three
What a concise reminder that so long as we are alive and breathing we have an opportunity to live. We don’t need luck, we just need time. If we have time we can learn and grow through anything.
As I’ve often thought, there’s only one thing in life that I will not be able to grow through… whatever kills me.
This little gem from Epictetus really hit me between the eyes today. Throughout the day my mind kept pulling back to this concept, it filtered my seemingly every one of my thoughts differently.
“If you wish to improve be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters.”
Epictetus
What really matters? The little bit of news that doesn’t make a true difference? The highlights of last night’s sporting events? The reels on Instagram? That stat about something that you don’t always need?
Focus on what truly matters… our purpose, our values, our actions, and this present moment.
Appreciation:
This morning I took Leia out for a very early morning hike, hitting the trails before 4:45am. As the world slept we wandered the woods and the bluff top ridges. We watched a barge slowly slide up the river in the dark as the birds began to sing. Dropping in the valley we had the sensation of being watched so I fired up my flashlight and there was a group of five deer jurors looking down at us from the hilltop, judging our intentions and actions. Leia jumped in terror at the most horrifying sound it seemed she had ever heard… the gobble of a turkey from across a valley. So many birds were talking to us, singing us their morning songs. The sky slowly glowed brighter and brighter. The smell of pollen and woods and fresh soil saturated my nose as my breathing increased going up hills with my pack on. All around us was a paradox of both total stillness and complete action.
What an invigorating start to the day!
Presence:
On my drive to work I had an awesome experience. As I drove past the pullout to view Brady’s Bluff in Perot State Park I saw a car pulled over. The driver was standing with his hands on his hips, looking at the bluffs glowing in the bright morning sun, a complete look of awe on his face as he took in the wondrous site across the Mississippi River.
I couldn’t help but smile and feel joy at seeing his state of awe and wonder, taking in the same view which has left me the same way so many times before.
I don’t know his beliefs, his politics, his history, his career, his class, or anything about him – but I know he is my brother as all humankind are, and that only added to my sense of joy.
In an homage to The Obstacle is the Way I found way to turn a frustrating construction induced traffic jam into an engaging use of the “bonus” time… Nothing like reconnecting with my little brother when our work and life schedules have kept us apart for a while! Rather than wasting energy on stressing over the delay I was able to spend time laughing hard, shooting the bull, and taking a moment to find much needed levity on a heavy day.
Appreciation:
We always have a choice to make, how we will respond to whatever hand we’ve been dealt. These choices aren’t always easy, we often have to choose between the difficult or more difficult decision.
In either case, we must first start with a sense of reality and acceptance of what is happening. We must pause, observe it for what it is – simply an action / issue / challenge – and withhold judgement on whether it is good or bad. The issue is simply what it is, we choose the perspective to attach to it (or choose not to). Once we see it clearly, as it is without our filter applied to it, we can then determine the action to take, the choice to be made.
Throughout this year I’ve been focusing on seeing with clarity. As a natural optimist it is so easy to get an unrealistically positive impression of something. I must focus more on seeing with reality first, and then applying the positivity to the decision. Adding positivity to the challenge itself doesn’t help, it actually hurts. See the issues with clarity and without judgement first, make a decision, and then maintain positivity in the potential outcome while still preparing for failure.
Today I lived into that and it made all the difference.
Presence:
The Black River was sublimely calm this morning as Becky and I struck out on our early morning run. The pre-sunrise painted sky was reflected perfectly in the mirror glass of the water. We were able to look out and see exactly where five fish had jumped almost at once, their ripples all emanating from the launching points. So chill, so calm, so perfect a start to the day.
I don’t have to be productive every moment of every day. Take time to just be, to relax, to not be working towards a goal, to try learning or observing something… just be, the rest will take care of itself.
Appreciation:
Whew! This weekend was a wild combination of productivity, relaxation, and time with family. Having Dominic home for part of yesterday and today was awesome, especially with our family walk with all four of us after lunch. Some chill time for Gavin, Becky, & I after Dominic hit the road followed by alternating times with Gavin and Becky. Now a moment of quiet introspection for myself before I hit the bed for the night and start all over again tomorrow.
A wonderful weekend mixed with so many of the things I love, a perfect set up for the next couple of weekends which will be going in completely different directions.
Presence:
Our entire church experience today was a lesson in presence. We arrived early and were the greeters for the mass, taking time to focus on each smiling face and welcoming them into our church. During the service there were a handful of healthy and exuberant kids who kept us all smiling at their antics. A brief moment of sharing gratitude for someone who’s made a positive impact in my life. So many smiles and greetings as everyone left the church. Throughout the service it was a presence born of love for our fellow humans, so full of hope for where we could grow to as an entire community of humans.
This book, one of the most influential I’ve ever read. Though I’ve read it more times than I can count I always walk away with a new insight and stronger resolve. Truly a work of art.
Appreciation & Presence:
Our hike in Beaver Creek Valley State Park was outstanding today! Several trips up and down the bluffs, it was exactly the workout I was hoping for. There were so many different types of birds throughout, in one stretch my bird sound app picked up over two dozen different types while the visuals we had of the birds were vibrant! Throw in more than a dozen trout chilling in the pools of the stream and it was pretty much nonstop wildlife beyond every corner. And I haven’t even started on the plants… so green and alive! We can’t begin to count how many different types of flowers there were, how many plants, they were nonstop!
I cannot think of any better way to spend a big chunk of a day than outside soaking in the sights like this, uncoupled from news and media, spending bonus time with Becky, and getting an invigorating workout in.
The best version of ourselves allows us to best help others. The more we work to close the gap between who we are and who we are called to be the better suited we are to brighten the lives of others.
Appreciation:
This year I’ve got a daily reminder that I am what I feed myself mentally each day. The more I take in a diet of the right type of stimuli the more likely I am to live into my dreams and to see so many opportunities all around. This evening I finished watching Project Iceman, the story of the first person to complete and Ironman distance triathlon on Antarctica. Earlier in the week I wrapped up The Lost City of Z, a book focused on an explorer of the Amazon in the early 1900’s. Last night I started reading Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot, the writings of Admiral James Stockdale. All poignant reminders of the importance of dreaming big and living towards those dreams.
Presence:
Enjoying a chapter of a book in more detail than I’ve read it before, taking time to savor and enjoy each sentence, seeing it more clearly with the benefit of more life experience… amazing!
This Is How Smart People Get Smart (And Fools Get More Foolish)
In the fall of 1961, Commander James Stockdale began a course at Stanford he had eagerly anticipated on Marxist theory. “We read no criticisms of Marxism,” he recounted later, “only primary sources. All year we read the works of Marx and Lenin.”
It might seem unusual that the Navy would send a 36-year-old fighter pilot to get a master’s degree in the humanities, but Stockdale knew why he was there. Writing home to his parents that year, he reminded them of a lesson they had instilled in him, “You really can’t do well competing against something you don’t understand as well as something you can.”
At the time, Marxism was not just an abstract academic subject, but the ideological foundation of America’s greatest geopolitical enemy. The stakes were high—the Soviets pushed a vision of global communism and the conflict in Vietnam was already flashing hot, the North Vietnamese fueled by a ruthless mix of dogma and revolutionary zeal. ‘Marxism’ was, like today, also a culture-war boogeyman used by politicians and demagogues.
Just a few short years after completing his studies—September 1965—Stockdale was shot down over Thanh Hóa in North Vietnam, and as he parachuted into what he knew would be imprisonment and possibly death, his mind turned to the philosophy of Epictetus, which he had been introduced to by a professor at Stanford.
The North Vietnamese had many prisons and prison camps, but the Hỏa Lò Prison was famously the worst. Hỏa Lò means “fiery furnace” or “Hell’s hole,” which is what it was—a dark dungeon where captives were physically and mentally tortured to the unimaginable extreme. Stockdale would spend the next seven years in Hỏa Lò—or the “Hanoi Hilton,” as his fellow inmates would come to call it—in various states of solitary confinement and brutal torture.
His captors—sensing perhaps that he held terrible secrets, including having flown in the Tonkin Gulf the night of the so-called “incident”—sought desperately to break him. Stockdale famously drew on the Stoicism of Epictetus, but he also leveraged his knowledge of the practices and the mindset of his oppressors.
“In Hanoi, I understood more about Marxist theory than my interrogator did,” Stockdale explained. “I was able to say to that interrogator, ‘That’s not what Lenin said; you’re a deviationist.’”
This was a story I intended to tell the midshipmen at the U.S Navy Academy a couple of weeks ago, where Stockdale, as a graduate of the class of 1947 and Medal of Honor winner, is revered. For the last four years, I’ve been delivering a series of lectures on the cardinal virtues of Stoicism and was scheduled to continue on April 14th with a talk to the entire sophomore class on the theme of wisdom.
But roughly an hour before my talk was to begin, in my hotel room getting ready, I received a call—Would I be willing to refrain from any mention in my remarks of the recent removal of 381 supposedly controversial books from the Nimitz library on campus? My slides had been sent up the chain of command at the school, who was now, as they explained, extremely worried about reprisals from the Secretary of Defense or appearing to openly flout Executive Order 14151 (an anti-DEI order.)
When I declined, my invitation—as well as a planned speech before the Navy Football team, with whom my books on Stoicism are popular—was revoked.
In his writings and speeches after his return from the Hanoi Hilton, Stockdale often referred to what he called “extortion environments” to describe his experience in prison. He and his fellow POWs were pressured to comply with demands—answering simple questions, performing seemingly innocuous tasks, appearing in propaganda videos, confessing to war crimes—under the threat that if they declined, there would be consequences.
No one at the Naval Academy intimated any consequences for me, of course, but it was extortionary all the same—I had to choose between my message (to say nothing of my rights as a private citizen) or my continued access and welcome at an institution that has been one of the honors of my life to be associated with.
But setting all of that aside, even if I had no previous connection to this issue, I had been invited to the Naval Academy to deliver an address on the virtue of wisdom. How could I not mention what had gone on just a few hundred yards away?
As I explained repeatedly to my hosts, I had no interest in embarrassing anyone or discussing politics directly (although they had had no issue with the talk I gave at this very lecture series entirely about Jimmy Carter, another Academy graduate, one year earlier). Nor did I want to cause trouble or put someone’s job at risk. I did, however, feel it was essential to make the point that the pursuit of wisdom is impossible without engaging with (and challenging) uncomfortable ideas.
Seneca, another Stoic philosopher, used a military metaphor to make this very argument. We ought to read critically and dangerously, he said, “like a spy in the enemy’s camp.” This is what Stockdale was doing when he studied Marxism on the Navy’s dime. It is what Seneca was doing when he read and liberally quoted from Epicurus, the head of a rival philosophical school.
The current administration is by no means unique in its desire to suppress ideas it doesn’t like or thinks dangerous. As I intended to explain to the midshipmen, there was considerable political pressure in the 1950s over what books were carried in the libraries of federal installations. When asked if he would ban communist books from American embassies, however, Eisenhower resisted.
“Generally speaking,” he told a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune at a press conference shortly after his inauguration, “my idea is that censorship and hiding solves nothing…” He explained that he wished more Americans had read Hitler and Stalin in the years previous because it might have helped anticipate the oncoming threats. “Now, gentlemen,” he concluded, “…let’s educate ourselves if we are going to run a free government.”
The men and women at the Naval Academy will go on to lead combat missions, to command aircraft carriers, to pilot nuclear-armed submarines, and run enormous organizations. We will soon entrust them with incredible responsibilities and power. But we fear they’ll be hoodwinked or brainwashed by certain books?
It is good that Mein Kampf was not one of the books removed from the Naval Academy library…but this makes the fact that Maya Angelou was, all the more inexplicable. Whatever one thinks of DEI, we are not talking about the writings of external enemies here, but in many cases, art, serious scholarship and legitimate criticism of America’s past. One of the books is about black soldiers in WWII, another is about the memorialization of the Holocaust. Another was written by a person I had interviewed on the Daily Stoic podcast, and had been interviewed by a week earlier! No one at any public institution should have to fear losing their job for pushing back on such an obvious over-reach, let alone veterans who have served this country in combat, yet here we are.
Indeed, the decision not to protest the original order—which I believe flies in the face of basic academic freedoms and independence—is what put the current leadership in the academy in the now even stickier position of trying to suppress criticism of that decision. “Compromises pile up when you’re in a pressure situation in the hands of a skilled extortionist,” Stockdale reminds us. “You can be had if you make that first compromise, offer to make that ‘deal,’ or ‘meet them halfway.’”
Of course, I write about many of these topics—holding the line, developing competence, having integrity, not compromising—in Right Thing, Right Now. I have not always managed to do this in my own life and career (as I confess to my regret and shame in the Afterword to Courage is Calling). These decisions are not easy nor are they always clear. I very much sympathize with the leadership (in uniform and otherwise) who have been put in this impossible situation. I also know firsthand, it is very difficult to go along with policies that compromise your values without becoming compromised.
As I say in the preface to each book in the series, the virtues are interrelated and inseparable. Yet, there’s a reason that wisdom is considered the mother of the virtues. It is wisdom that helps us find what Aristotle called the “golden mean” between two vices. It is wisdom that tells us when to apply courage, the midpoint between cowardice and recklessness. It is wisdom that teaches us how to stand firm and persist when we know we are doing right. And it is wisdom that finds the line between good and evil, right and wrong, fair and unfair, ethical and unethical.
I felt I could not, in good conscience, lecture these future leaders and warriors on the virtues of courage and doing the right thing—as I did in 2023 and 2024—and then fold when asked not to mention such an egregious and fundamentally anti-wisdom course of action. I could not give a talk on the subject of wisdom and not address a very timeless and unfortunately, very prevalent tendency to get rid of books that we disagree with or think controversial. What good is it to speak about leadership and character in the abstract and avoid the very real challenges in front of us? As our constitutional order and our very laws are being placed under incredible strain—to say nothing of our basic morals and decency.
In many moments, many understandable moments, Commander Stockdale had an opportunity to do the expedient thing as a POW. He could have compromised. He could have obeyed. It would have saved him considerable pain, preventing the injuries that deprived him of full use of his leg for the rest of his life, perhaps even returning him home sooner to his family. He chose not to do that. He rejected the extortionary choice and stood on principle.
For me, with slightly less on the line, to do the expedient thing, it would have been a betrayal not just of Stoicism, the philosophy I have tried to apply in my life, but also a betrayal of Stockdale in whose name I was giving the lecture and whose story I was telling in the talk that I was going to give.
After finishing the draft and turning the slides I had prepared over in my mind, I thought, they can prevent me from going on stage but they can’t prevent me from delivering the talk. So in my studio in Texas where we record The Daily Stoic Podcast, I gave the talk that I was going to give at the Naval Academy. It was obviously a slightly different environment—no stage, no slides on a projection screen behind me, no live audience—but it is more or less the talk that I would have given to those midshipmen.
“The greatest educational fallacy,” Stockdale would write, “is that you can get it without stress.” The road to wisdom, to living the philosophical life, living by those four virtues, leads through a long path of stress and toil and struggle.
It takes work, as I put in the title of the new book.
It is the work of our life.
Stockdale’s example—forged by his liberal education at two of America’s best institutes of higher learning—stands there for all of us to follow in matters big and small.My new book is officially available for preorder.
For the last six years, I’ve been working on The Stoic Virtues Series. And now, the fourth and final book—Wisdom Takes Work—is complete.
I wrote this book because wisdom—true wisdom—is the commitment of a lifetime. It is a battle to be won over ego, over ignorance, over the self. It takes study, it takes reflection, it takes experience. Most of all, it takes work. I hope you’ll do that work with me. The book comes out in the fall, but you can preorder it today.
Thankful for Forty 