You may not have a lot of money. Or powerful connections. Or even superior genetics. Does this mean you're at a disadvantage?
Yes.
Does it mean that you're screwed?
Nope. Because there is a great leveler out there.
The famous Princeton basketball coach Pete Carril would often tell his athletes about his father, who had emigrated from Spain and worked for nearly four decades in the open-hearth for the Bethlehem Steel Company. "Every day, before he left for work," Carril recounted, "he would remind my sister and me how important it was to be smart. 'In this life,' he would say, 'the big, strong guys are always taking from the smaller, weaker guys but ... the smart take from the strong.'"
It's simple advice but all too rare: use your brain. It's the secret weapon of underdogs everywhere, available to all and always free.
Think of David deciding to use his sling to defeat the brute strength of Goliath. Think of the Stoic Opposition, outmatched and outgunned by the many tyrants of their time, not just managing to get inside their heads, but triumphing over them in the battle of history. Think of the wealthiest and most powerful people of antiquity sitting at the feet of Epictetus, a former slave. Think of Stockdale in the Hanoi Hilton getting in long debates with his captors about Marxism…and winning.
Life is a thinking person's game. If you want to beat the strong, the rich, and the powerful…get smart. Better yet, get wise.
"The greatest educational fallacy," Stockdale would say, "is that you can get it without stress." The road to wisdom, to living the philosophical life is not easy. It takes work.
For the past six years I've been working on the Stoic Virtues Series (hey, it's Ryan here), and with Wisdom Takes Work coming out next month, I can't help but reflect on the journey. The questioning, the learning, the reading. The writing alone for this series has amounted to nearly 300,000 words—that's longer than War and Peace!
And this daily email that you're reading right now? I've written and sent it every single day since the summer of 2016. That's over 4,000 emails, more than 700,000 words, and approximately 80 million total sends.
Has all this made me wise? No, but definitely wiser than I might have been otherwise. That's the thing about wisdom—it accumulates gradually through consistent effort.
One of the coolest is the 5-book bundle where you'll receive an invite to an exclusive Q&A and a signed, numbered page from the actual manuscript with my handwritten notes. You'll literally be able to see and own the work that went into making this book.
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