Reading
The Reading List.
The books behind the notes. The ones that actually shaped how I think.
These are not recommendations in the self-help sense. They are mostly the originals. A lot of what gets sold as new thinking is a repackaging of what these people already wrote. When you can, go to the source.
The Stoics
Meditations
The private notebook of a Roman emperor, written to himself, never meant for publication. Not a treatise, not advice for anyone else. A man reminding himself, on hard days, how to meet them. The most personal book in philosophy, and the one I return to most.
Shows up in: Watch Your Thoughts, One Day at a Time
The Enchiridion and the Discourses
Epictetus was born a slave and became one of the most influential teachers of the ancient world. His core idea is the single most useful thing I have read: some things are up to us, most things are not, and almost all our suffering comes from confusing the two. The Enchiridion is short enough to read in an hour and takes a lifetime to actually apply.
Shows up in: Don't Death Grip the Outcome, Playing Not to Lose, The Art of Assent
Letters from a Stoic and On the Shortness of Life
Seneca was, at points, among the wealthiest and most powerful men in Rome, and he wrote about how to live while inside all of it. The letters are direct and practical and read like they were written last week. On the Shortness of Life is the best thing ever written on why we waste the one resource we cannot get back.
Shows up in: Negative Visualization
Eastern wisdom
Tao Te Ching
Twenty-five hundred years old and still the clearest thing written on not forcing, on working with reality instead of against it. Every translation reads differently, which is part of the point. I read the Chad Hansen translation, which is more philological and less mystical than most.
Shows up in: The Way That Doesn't Force
The Bhagavad Gita
A conversation about duty, action, and detachment, set on a battlefield. The core teaching, do the work and release the result, is the same idea the Stoics arrived at independently on the other side of the world. The Eknath Easwaran translation is the one I found most readable.
Shows up in: Don't Death Grip the Outcome
The others
Walden
A man goes to live alone in the woods to find out what life is actually about once you strip away everything you have been told you need. The line about most people living lives of quiet desperation is worth the whole book.
Shows up in: The Script We Were Handed
As a Man Thinketh
A short book with one idea: you slowly become what you think about most. Dated in places, but the central claim has held up across every tradition before and after it.
Shows up in: Watch Your Thoughts
The modern doors
Two modern entries. Hill's Think and Grow Rich is older self-help, uneven, but with a few ideas that stuck. Holiday repackaged the Stoics for the contemporary reader more effectively than anyone. Neither is the source. Both are useful doors into it.
Hill shows up in: Playing Not to Lose
The notes these books shaped are collected in one place. Download the Off-Curriculum PDF.