| He's been doing it for decades. It's helped him make it to 88—88 years in a world that tried to break him, that discriminated against him, that made him an orphan, that threw every obstacle it could in his way. But here he is, every morning, putting his two feet on the ground next to the bed and saying: "Okay, George, you have two options today, and only two. You can be happy, or you can be very happy." As George Raveling elaborates in his awesome new book What You're Made For: Powerful Life Lessons from My Career in Sports, he "starts with this simple but powerful choice every morning" because "it's a reminder to myself that I have the power to set the tone for my day, to choose the attitude and mindset that I'll bring to whatever challenges come my way." It's a simple choice, but not easy. There's a very good chance you'll come across people who are impossibly frustrating—just as Marcus Aurelius warned us about 2,000 years ago. The people you'll deal with today, he reminds himself in Meditations, will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. You might face criticism, warranted or not, from people who just don't get it. There will be delays and disruptions, frustrating inconveniences. People will let you down. Situations will bother you. Life will be unfair. But even if everything that could possibly go wrong does, even if circumstances seem impossibly dark, you have to fight against the instinct to give up control over how these events affect your mood. "You can bind up my leg," Epictetus would say—indeed, his leg really had been bound and broken—"but not even Zeus has the power to break my freedom of choice." No one and nothing can steal away the control you have over your happiness and mood. We start the day with our most important decision—the choice to be in a good mood. The choice to be happy. George makes that decision every morning. So can you. P.S. George Raveling's book What You're Made For was co-written by Ryan Holiday and is more than a memoir from one of the most respected basketball coaches alive (how many books do you think Michael Jordan writes the foreword to?). No, What You're Made For is a manual for life that presents surprising methods for harnessing your potential from a man who shaped the careers of so many legends…and has done so many wonderful things for people. You can grab a copy over at the Painted Porch and check out our conversation with George about his life and career on the Daily Stoic Podcast—listen on Apple or Spotify today!
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