Well, I’m now almost 40. Like officially almost 40. I woke up yesterday in Cle Elum, Washington, ran 20 miles and then turned 39. I did a little talk for Amazon and then flew home, getting in very late and very tired.  I have been doing some version of this post for basically twenty years.  (You can see my birthday posts for ​26​, ​27​, ​28​, ​29​, ​30​, ​31​, ​32, ​​33​, ​34​, ​35​, ​36​, 37, and 38​).  How much have I learned and changed? Quite a bit, I’m proud to say. Not enough, I’d have to add much more honestly. I still fall prey to the same patterns. I am still doing too many of the same things. And worse, I’m still too often not aware of it until it’s painfully obvious much later. Which brings me to my first lesson for this year’s list.  – At my talk in Seattle last week (I’m on tour this summer and fall if you want to come see me in the US and Australia), someone asked how I would describe myself in one word. I thought about it and I just said: “Trying.” I’m trying. Could I try a little harder? Would I like to make a little more progress? Yes. But I am trying.  – I’ve given hundreds of talks now, and I could give the same one every night, the same way, until I had it down cold. Instead, I try to change it each time—I add things, I cut things, I work out new material right there on stage. If I have the opportunity, because of the audience or whatever, to give a totally new one that I haven’t done before, I see that as a gift not an obligation. Because harder is what makes me better. It also keeps life interesting.  – One of the things that sneaks up on you as you get older are the blocks of time you can start measuring things in. For a while, four years—the length of high school or college—is a measuring stick of something that takes a while. Then you get comfortable with things being a decade long—“We’ve been friends of a decade” and “That was like ten years ago?”—and then suddenly, it’s twenty years, like I did in the intro above. I had my twenty year high school reunion last year. This gives you perspective. You start to get a sense of how long things take and how much capacity you have to endure or live through. – And yet even so, the passage of time can sneak up on you. I was looking at a baseball picture of my son the other day. It was him holding a bat, looking basically like the kid he is now, except it says 2025. How could he be old enough to at one point have been five years younger? I was trying to express to him how unbelievable that is to me. But it’s true. Tempus fugit the ancients said. Time flies. Be present. Be ready.  – I don’t believe in time travel…but I do believe the work—learning, research, exercise, etc—is a gift we give our future selves. Basically, you can’t make withdrawals from accounts you haven’t made deposits in.   – The purpose of any piece of writing at all is not the end product on the page. It’s the person YOU are on the other side of having done it. It’s the thinking long and hard about something. It’s the slow, tedious, difficult work of figuring out what you actually work. And the equally hard work of finding the words for what you think. AI can give you an essay, an article, a book, or a briefing. What it can’t give you is the person you can only become by doing the writing yourself. – “It is surprising,” Roosevelt said, “how much reading a man can do in time usually wasted.” That’s exactly right. Bring a book with you everywhere.  – I don’t think I have ever taken a walk without thinking, after, “I am so glad I did that.” We rescued a dog last year and that’s been the best part. It’s “forced” me to do something I love to do.  – For fifteen years (again those chunks of time!) I’d had this idea sitting in the back of my head, and last July I finally did it: I ran the 26 miles from Marathon to Athens. On the Daily Stoic podcast, Jesse Itzler told me about this concept of the Misogi. Borrowed from an ancient Japanese purification ritual, the modern Misogi is about committing to one epic, year-defining challenge—something so significant, so hard, so memorable, that decades later, when you think back, you’ll instantly remember: that was the year I ___________________. When I look back on 2025, I’m going to think, that was the year I ran the original marathon in Greece. In a couple weeks, I’m going to try to do my Misogi in Rome. I’ll let you know how it goes.  – We are flooded with more information than entire civilizations could have produced, let alone imagined. And yet, how much of this matters? Or even holds up? When I was talking at Amazon, I brought up one of their company values which is “focus on the things that don’t change.” But how much of our information diet adheres to that? How much of what we give our attention to day to day, supports us in our goal to be long term thinkers?  – Obviously I am biased as an author but I think most people should consume less news and read more books. Less news, more books. More history. More poetry. More literature. More philosophy. More myths. Because you know what those stories are about? They’re about what’s happening now! – Almost every lesson you need to learn to deal with what’s happening in the world, almost every skill you need to develop to succeed in modern times is the topic of old art. I [...]