Here’s How You Take Back Your Time | Become Dangerously Persuasive With These Books

Welcome to the first. The Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. As winter fades and spring emerges, as we adjust our clock to the For daylight savings, it's a good time to pause and reflect. Where did that time go? It seems like only yesterday that we were bundled up against the cold, watching the last leaves fall from the trees.

Now the days are getting longer and the air feels warmer. We talked recently about Philip Larkin's beautiful poem about the changing of the seasons, how their circular renewal contains within them a kind of finality. The winter you just had is over forever. Those cold winter afternoons where you didn't want to go outside, where you didn't do anything, where instead you waited for the temperature to go up, a break in the snow, you weren't just killing time. That time was killing you.

Seneca reminded himself that death is not this thing in the future, but something that is happening now. It's always happening. It is the ticking hand of the clock. It is the spring flowers. It is the fall harvest. It is the summer rains. It is the first snow of the year. This idea is a reminder that each moment is precious. It tells us to wake up and really live, not just watch the time go by, to embrace the longer days and make the most of it.

And if that's speaking to you, if you're feeling like that's something you want to do, well, I would love to have you join us in the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge. This time of the year we're supposed to be thinking about spring cleaning, but how many of us get our whole houses in order? Not just our physical spaces, but our minds, our routines, our assumptions? Think about how you spent the last week.

How many of those days were as efficient and productive as they could be? Where did you waste time? Where did you make things more complicated than necessary? Where have you fallen back on old habits? Where are you, like so many people, still stuck in the doldrums of winter? Well, the Daily Stoics Spring Forward Challenge, which we've been doing for many years now.

is set to push you to examine those parts of your life, to examine your choices, to examine your relationships and move you forward to living your best life to help you seize this new season that is upon us.

We'd love to have you join us. It's gonna be ten challenges delivered every single day. It's not a long challenge. It's a short to the point challenge that packs some punch. There's a gonna be a QA session with me. If you remember what Marcus really said that look, we could be good today, but instead we choose tomorrow. So it's up to you whether you're gonna let those New Year's resolutions dissolve into missed opportunities.

Or whether you're gonna keep doing those things that you've always done, or or you're gonna give yourself a ten day sprint of improvement and some runway for true sustainable change. Challenge yourself to be the person that can spring forward this year. Spring forward to be that person. And you can head over right now to dailystoic.com slash spring and join us. I'd love to see you in there. We've got a special offer for podcast listeners.

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It's not just how good your ideas are. It's not just that they're right. It's not just that they're important. But it's how good you are at communicating those ideas. convincing people that they should care about them. So here are some book recommendations that will help you with that. You have to read the 48 Laws of Power. All you want if if you want to know why powerless people should read the 48 Laws of Power, just know that there's a reason that this book is banned in the federal prisons.

prison system. Power can be a little gross, it can be uh unsettling. Uh the things you have to do to achieve, acquire, or leverage power, it can make you a bit uncomfortable, but that's again sort of the point. The people who want power, who have power, they know the ideas inside this book. You need to have the ideas in this book if you wanna beat those people.

Or if you just want to defend yourself against these people. So read the 48 Laws of Power. I would also read, again to go to the idea in waging a good war, this is Robert Green's book, uh The 33 Strategies of War. This is basically Sun Sue and von Clauswitz and all the great military historians, strategists, generals, all uh in one book. Uh you need to read this book if you're trying to achieve anything.

And I would also pair that with, I might pair that even, again, another Robert Green, The Art of Seduction. How do you seduce people not romantically, but how do you how do you poetically? Disarm them through strategic weakness, stir up the transgressive and the taboo, master the art of the bold move.

Uh lots of great lessons here. This one might not seem like it would help, but I think it will help. This is Austin Cleon's Keep Going, Ten Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times or Bad. I was just talking to someone, uh a writer I know and she was like, all the stuff I I can't focus on my writing.

I just can't do what I'm supposed to be doing and and I was saying like that that's that's letting them win. Uh I think this book is actually really helpful. It's been really helpful to me too. This is Frank Lunt's book. Uh he he's a Republican strategist. Again you wanna Uh Seneca says you want to read like a spy in the enemy's camp. About how the word choices we use determine how people perceive and understand an issue, right? Illegal immigrant versus.

undocumented worker or illegal alien versus homeless versus unhoused. These aren't just it's not just about political correctness, it's about how you frame an issue and whether you pick a winning frame or a losing frame is a really important book because what you're trying to do is get

people's attention and sympathy in the words and the messages that you're using. And and so from a marketing perspective, there's a couple other ones I would very much recommend. This is the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. uh violate them at your own risk. You have to sell and persuade your ideas. It doesn't just matter that you're morally right. It matters whether you can convince people that your cause is one that they ought to care about.

This is Seth Godin's purple cow. Gotta make something that stands out. You gotta make something that's different, that's worth stopping and looking at. This is something I talk a little bit about in growth hacker marketing. Too many people are just they're just like, oh we'll just advertise or oh we'll just hire a publicist.

But when you have a small cause, when you're starting from nothing, when you're up against the really big guys, you can't afford any of that. So how have little guys, how have little companies, how tiny startups, how they effectively done that? It's about growth, it's about impact. It's not about

attention necessarily. It's not about band-aid metrics, but it's about things that really move the needle. So that's what I talk about here. Speaking of Frank Lent's book, I might also pair this with Super Communicators. How do you get really good at communicating, connecting with people? This book Makes sense.

some of this marketing stuff in trust me I'm lying as well. How do you not just understand how your opponents, the people you're up against, are manipulating media or getting their information out, but how are you effectively doing that for your cause? I talked a lot about that here. And then of course it's all got to be rooted in the stoic idea of justice. Uh which I talk about in Right Thing. Right now.

This is Thomas Ricks, he's a military historian, but he wrote a history of the civil rights movement as a military campaign. We don't uh a lot of people don't know that most of the civil rights leaders went to boot camp. They went to this place called the Highlander School where they trained in not being provoked.

provoked into violent action where they trained th their bodies to absorb physical pain. Uh and and they did uh like this was a finely tuned military operation. For for instance, like they they were not just protesting they were protesting to get arrested, to fill the jails, and then they were refusing bail

because they knew it would overload the system. The the point is they knew exactly what they were doing. If you want to make change, you gotta know what you're doing. This is a great book. For thousands and thousands of years, slavery was an unquestioned, inalterable institution. Cross-culturally all over the world. Uh, you can trace the abolition of slavery basically down to one man. His name is Thomas Clarkson. It was a

College student at Oxford. He writes this essay about how slavery is wrong. And then he he realizes, well, if I'm right, maybe someone should do something about it. And then he says, if someone should do something about it, maybe that person should be me. And thus begins the abolition movement, which changes the world. Uh Adam Hoschild wrote this book, Bury the Chains, all about that.

the first thing he does is build a coalition of people who collaborate and work effectively together. This is a super powerful, really important book. The abolitionist movement invents so many of the things we take for granted as part of the activists playbook, consumer boycotts. petitions, public relations. Uh all of that starts here. You gotta read this book. Here's two little ones from antiquity. This is Plutarch's How to Be a Leader.

uh which is some great leadership lessons from someone who is not just biographer of some of the great men and women of history but also a local elected leader, but given everything that's happening, Sallas, how to stop a conspiracy about stopping the Catalan conspiracy feels pretty relevant today. I was mentioning the civil rights movement. This is Halberstram's This is Halberstam's The Children, which is all about the Teenagers and college students.

that uh organized the Nashville sit in movements. Uh we tend to think of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement and all these to bigger, slightly older leaders, although Martin Luther King was not very old, the movement had kind of stalled out and it was these young kids that forced the movement Um there's just so many great lessons in this book about fighting back against unimaginable odds, against incredibly entrenched interests. Uh you have to read this. I would also recommend

Speaking of strategy, this is Saul Olinski's Rules for Radicals. This is this book has been a sort of boogeyman for conservatives for many years, which again is a reason you should read it. Uh but he's a community organizer and strategist. He had a great sense for what gets media attention, where the leverage is.

This is a book that everyone should read. Going with Robert Green, you should also read Machiavelli. People don't understand that Machiavelli, although he was writing to a prince, he was actually tortured by a prince for his. republican leanings, th that is to say, for his democratic sentiment. But uh Uh one must be a fox in order to recognize traps and a lion to frighten off the wolves. I think that's Machiavelli in a nutshell right there.

This is a book called Boyd. It's about a fighter pilot. You might think, well, I'm not a fighter pilot. What does that have to do with me? So he was a great fighter pilot, but he was also a bureaucratic warrior. He's the reason we have the F-15 and the F-16 fighter, which he brings in way under budget. but he was a notorious pain in the side of the people in the Pentagon. He hated waste, he hated efficiency, he hated people who had conflicts of interest. He was like

just a warrior who was able to to get a bureaucracy to work, which so often is is what people are fighting up against. Uh he he was uh a brilliant guy. There's so much here. This this is a biography, but it's called The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. It's also strategist there's some great stuff here so I would highly recommend this book as well we put it in the bookstore okay so this is uh

A biography of Roosevelt from a long time ago. This is Roosevelt the Lion and the Fox, that's an allusion to Machiavelli. But it's a political biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But the problem is we we sometimes we just think of these old leaders, whether it's Lincoln or Roosevelt is just like great human beings or or or just, you know, sort of like mythological figures. But they were effective politicians. They knew how to work coalitions. They knew how power worked.

They knew how to sell things to the public. They knew that the levers of power. And this is a book about. How does Roosevelt become a transformational president? How does he beat the sort of moneyed and financial interest. How does he get the levers of government to work? in the middle of the depression and how did he get to be in that position in the first place? This is a really powerful, important book that everyone should read. I would also recommend along those lines.

You want to talk about someone who battled incredible odds. This is Julian Jackson's biography of De Gaulle. Uh de Gaulle's like the last man in France. Everyone, uh so much of France um decides to to collaborate. This is the Vichy French. He had every reason to just escape. And get away and not fight. And he didn't. He stood and fight. He had this idea of France. refuse to see it as a middle tier power. This is an incredible epic biography. I took a ton of notes

I think it's a good reminder for anyone against incredible odds. You gotta read this book. Alright, here is BH Liddell Hart. He's one of the great World War I and World War II strategists. If you have read Robert Greene's 33 Strategies of War or the 48 Laws of Power, this is a great supplementary book that everyone should read. Gaddis's book on grand strategy, which I would also read if I was a little guy going against the big guy or trying to bring change into the world.