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I know someone that spends close to $20,000 a month on a publicist. I know an author who spends something like that out of their own pocket each month on what’s called co-op, or extra prominent placement at airport bookstores. I know many people who spend more than that on advertising. I myself have hired publicists. I have paid for co-op. I used to spend six figures a year on Facebook ads for Daily Stoic. But several years ago I made a decision that changed my business and radically transformed my career. I stopped spending money on all of that. It’s not that I wasn’t getting a return on my investment. But it struck me just how empty it all was. I was putting all this time and energy and money into something, which were I ever to stop, would leave barely a trace behind! I was thinking of a wonderful quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, while criticizing advertising and publicity, pointed out that a person, “cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.” So I took that money and did something very different with it: I used it to start making stuff. I hired a videographer. I hired a social media manager. I hired another researcher. I hired a bunch of people. I took the entire budget that I had been putting into advertising and built a content team. We built the Daily Stoic podcast. We started making YouTube videos. We started cutting clips from the talks I gave. We wrote explainers and SEO pieces about philosophy. We launched DailyDad.com. We started @DailyPhilosopher on Instagram. Some people might shrug and say, “Yeah that’s called content marketing,” but it’s actually a deeper philosophical shift. Over the years, Daily Stoic has created hundreds of videos, articles and emails. With the 500-word daily newsletter, that’s a little more than two books a year of free content delivered straight to email inboxes around the world every morning. We’ve essentially created the largest Stoic library in the world. Hundreds of hours of video on the great Stoic works, the rules the Stoics lived by, Stoic habits, Stoic don’ts, and Stoic questions for a better life. Hundreds of thousands of words across articles on the Big 3 (Marucs Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus), timeless Stoic strategies for happiness, dealing with stress, getting and staying motivated, overcoming procrastination, and handling rude people. A lot of people have seen that stuff as a result. We’ve done something like 63 million views on YouTube (4.4 million hours watched), and we just hit 1 million subscribers to the channel last week. The podcast does around 5 million downloads a month (well over 120M downloads). The email goes out to nearly 600,000 subscribers every morning…and has been sent something like 450 million times. You can add on top of that this bi-monthly email you’re reading here, plus my monthly Reading List Email too. Some of the people that have found this content have gone on to be customers, sure. Advertising and publicity are largely used as a means of attracting attention for someone’s business. Content marketing is also a way of doing that. But I’m not saying you should trade Strategy A for Strategy B, or that Strategy B is more cost effective. It probably isn’t–making all this content has been an enormous amount of work and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. What I am saying is that instead of using your energy and resources and effort to make stuff that converts, you should use your energy and resources and effort to make stuff that matters. Because it is valuable in and of itself. Someone gets shown an ad and buys something, that’s great. But the people who get shown an ad and do nothing? What a lost opportunity! What a waste of their time and yours. It’s nice for the ego to get profiled in some publication…but it is quickly forgotten. Deciding to make videos, write articles, produce thousands of hours of audio–what I decided to prioritize my work around was making work. Creating value for others that lasts. I have a little notecard on my wall next to my desk that says “Am I Being a Good Steward of Stoicism?” I found I couldn’t sleep with myself knowing I was spending a bunch of money on extractive ads. But I can swell with pride knowing I spent the profits that my books have earned making content that millions of people have consumed for free, that has helped spread the ideas in Stoicism to people who would have never heard them otherwise. One helps the world, one helps no one but the ad network. I could stop making new content today…I could die tomorrow and the stuff we have made would keep on keeping on, reaching people, helping people. And this is really the best part: I would die a better person for having made it too. It was fun. It was educational. It was rewarding. I must say I wouldn’t go as far as saying all advertising is worthless (we have ads at the bottom of our emails a few times a week, including this one). At American Apparel, nothing was more rewarding than using our advertising budget to support causes like legalizing gay marriage or immigration reform. We also deliberately sought out publications that we believed were doing important work, that we felt contributed to the scene or the community–we put our money there, knowing that in addition to reaching people about our products, we were also helping that publication survive or thrive. The other reason I want to make it clear that I’m not just talking about content marketing versus ads is that I have very much stretched the definition of ‘content.’ The decision to open a small town bookstore in rural Texas? That’s not the same as a blogpost but it is doing stuff, it is making something that matters. The Painted Porch as a [...]

On the late American poet’s irrepressible confident weirdness

If someone asked me to give investing advice to a 30-year-old today who had just made their first million, I would first point them somewhere else. I’m not a financial advisor and don’t think I’m qualified to give anyone financial advice. The particulars matter too much. But if they insisted, I might say:

Read the full transcript of the speech "How to Guarantee a Life of Misery" by Charlie Munger.

Algorithms distort the world. They can trap us in local maxima, and restrict the kind of random serendipity that makes our personalities liquid. On Tuesday, I had lunch with a friend who invests in artificial intelligence startups. To my surprise, he doesn’t use any algorithms in his personal life. No Spotify Discover Weekly. No Netflix

The Steve Jobs Archive is building programs, fellowships, collections, and partnerships that reflect Steve’s values and carry his sense of possibility forward.

The original blog post from Adam Curry that gave birth to podcasting

The kindest thing you can do is get straight to the point. Make it clear what you want, what's next, and what you recommend.

A resource dedicated to establishing the field of formalised subjective effect documentation.

The integration of technique and intuition is a delicate process… but vital in the pursuit of excellence

See discussion on Hacker News (a) (610 points, 156 comments) I combed through several years of my private notes and through everything I published on productivity before and tried to summarize all of it in this post. If you’re unproductive right now Here’s what you should do if you’ve been procrastinating for an entire day: Accept that you won’t do anything today and try not to get angry at yourself Set the alarm for the time you will be preparing to go to bed today No, …

Your entire worldview changes when you realize you can *create luck*.

Today marks two years of not drinking. A few things I noticed: – our society revolves around drinking – not enough bars and restaurants offer non-alcoholic beers or mocktails – be…

Many people seem to think the 'good' state of being, the 'ground' state, is a relaxed state, a state with lots of rest and very little action. Because they think the ground state is the relaxed state, they act like maintaining any other state requires effort, requires suffering. This is

Family relationships are often unconsciously recreated at work

They apply to jobs, relationships, art projects and everything in between: The top right is the rare one–a car that goes fast but doesn’t feel like it’s on the edge. The hot rod i…

"Berkshire had a big task ahead. It solved that problem by avoiding bureaucracy and relying on one thoughtful leader as he kept improving and brought in more people like himself."

How to improve instead of atrophy

信息的高保真

When you’re burned out, in the 2pm slump, or not in the mood to “produce,” keep this in mind: 1. It’s OK to not be productive all the time. Humans were likely designed for a 15-hour work week. Go a little easier on yourself. 2. Know that you

An anthropologist explains the roots of our workaholism and offers a vision of a more leisurely future.

A reader recently pointed me toward an intriguing letter, reproduced a few weeks ago in the always-impressive Areopagus newsletter, that was originally sent from Pliny the Younger to his friend Minicius Fundanus around 100 AD. Among other topics, the letter touches on the difficulty of completing meaningful work in a distracted world. As Pliny writes:

Numerous studies have shown that people may decide if someone is trustworthy or not in less than 1 second of looking at them. Here are small things you can do to ensure you appear trustworthy to others.

It's simpler, more compact, and reusable from year-to-year in a way that no other calendar is. Here's both how it works and how to use it.

Marcus Aurelius thought a lot about thinking. “Our life is dyed by the color of our thoughts,” he wrote. So naturally, he tried to be thoughtful about what he thought and how he thought. “Get used to winnowing your thoughts,” he said, “so that when someone asked you what you were thinking, you could answer straightforwardly.” This is a good test for us today as we run around busy and preoccupied by our thoughts. If someone asked us, “What are you doing? Why are you doing it? What are you thinking about?”—would we have a good answer? One of the things I am doing at the beginning of this year is meditating on a handful of ideas—most from the Stoics—that will hopefully make me better. Things that will hopefully dye my life a good color. Here are some of them… [1] Doing less, better. One of the challenges of the Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge was to pick a mantra. I picked, “do less,” an idea that comes from Marcus Aurelius. “If you seek tranquility,” he said, “do less.” And then he follows the note to himself with some clarification. Not nothing, less. Do only what’s essential. “Which brings a double satisfaction,” he writes, “to do less, better.” [2] Being fast now and later. I had Olympic mountain biker Kate Courtney on the podcast while I was working on Discipline is Destiny and she told me a piece of advice she had gotten from her coach when she was pushing herself too hard in practice. “Do you want to be fast now,” they asked, “or later?” Meaning, do you want to win this workout or win the race? [3] Being a good steward of Stoicism. Next to my desk, I have a notecard tapped to the wall that says, “Am I being a good steward of Stoicism?” Writing books is a business. My bookstore, The Painted Porch, is a business. Daily Stoic is a business. But I always try to ask myself not if I am making good business decisions, but if I am being a good steward of Stoicism, of the philosophy that’s given so much to me. Am I being honest and ethical and fair and reasonable and moderate—I try to think about all those things. [4] Not always having an opinion. It’s possible, Marcus Aurelius said, to not have an opinion. You don’t have to turn this into something, he reminds himself. You don’t have to let this upset you. You don’t have to think something about everything. [5] One small win per day is a lot. One of the best pieces of advice from Seneca was actually pretty simple. “Each day,” he told Lucilius, you should, “acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes, as well.” One gain per day. That’s it. [6] Paying my taxes. Not just from the government. Seneca wrote to Lucilius, “All the things which cause complaint or dread are like the taxes of life—things from which, my dear Lucilius, you should never hope for exemption or seek escape.” Annoying people are a tax on being outside your house. Delays are a tax on travel. Haters are a tax on having a YouTube channel. There’s a tax on money too–and the more successful I have been, the more I’ve had to pay. There’s a tax on everything in life. You can whine. Or you can pay them gladly. [7] The garbage time. There’s no such thing as ‘quality’ time. Time is time. In fact, as Jerry Seinfeld said, garbage time—eating cereal together late at night, laying around on the couch — is actually the best time. Forget chasing HUGE experiences. It can all be wonderful, if you so choose. [8] Having a crowded table. It’s helpful to sit and really think about what success looks like. When you flash way forward into the future, what is it? You’re not going to think about how much money you made, how great a business you built, how many books or albums or companies you sold…if you’re alone, if your kids won’t answer your call, if your friends won’t have anything to do with you. Success, at the end of your life, is a crowded table—family and friends that want to be around you. [9] The mundane is beautiful. In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius marvels at “nature’s inadvertence.” A baker, he writes, makes the dough, kneads it and then puts it in the oven. Then Nature takes over. “The way loaves of bread split open,” Marcus writes, “the ridges are just byproducts of the baking, and yet pleasing, somehow: they rouse our appetite without our knowing why.” It’s a beautiful observation about such a banal part of daily life, something only a poet could see. It’s also just a beautiful way to move through life. Notice the soft paw prints on the dusty trunk of a car. Marvel at the steam wafting from the vents on a New York City morning, the sound of a pen gliding across a notecard, and the floor filled with a child’s toys, arranged in the chaos of exhausted enjoyment. Find the beauty in the mundane. [10] Patience. Seneca wrote, “The greatest remedy for anger is delay.” And Robert Greene said, “practice patience. Wait a day before taking action on the pressing problem.” And Joyce Carol Oates had a simple rule, “I almost never publish immediately.” Every first draft is placed in a drawer where it sits, sometimes for a year or more. When three of my all-time favorite thinkers converge, I know I’ve found an important thing to think about. [11] Alive time of dead time? Speaking of Robert, a few years ago, Robert gave me a piece of advice I think about just about every day. At a time when I was stuck in a job I wanted out of, Robert told me there are two types of time: alive time and dead time. One is when you sit around, [...]

This is the second entry of three where I go over what I learned from the user research I’ve been doing for Colophon Cards. My oldest notebook The post where I outline my general theory of notetaking for all to disagree with At the end of my last post, I mentioned that I had switched to pen and paper notetaking in the early 2010s, after years of serious digital notetaking using plain text files.

Do you have what it takes to write a newsletter for an entire year without hitting 1,000 subscribers?

I’ve tried several times to articulate my feelings on Readwise Reader, but failed every time. Sometimes frustratingly so because I think a lot of my problems relate to things I feel when using it. Don’t get me wrong it works great, and some features are really well done, it just doesn’t feel like it wants me to enjoy reading. So, I’m stuck trying to pin down thoughts on sometimes ephemeral feelings provoked by an app.

Lesson of the Week: Minimum Viable Newsletter Consistency is the most important concept for your newsletter. All the good effects of writing online only occur if you consistently publish. Once you choose a cadence for your newsletter, you've got to stick to it. A consistent newsletter will give you room to improve your writing skills, create a feedback loop for your ideas, help you build relationships, open new doors, and build an audience.