Models show that if 80% of people wear masks that are 60% effective—easily achievable with cloth—we can get to an effective Ro of less than 1. That's enough to halt the spread the disease [COVID-19].

As Tim Ferriss has said, 'I don't journal to be productive. I don't journal to find great ideas or put down prose I can publish later. The pages aren't intended for anyone but me. I'm just caging my monkey mind on paper so I can get on with my fucking day.'

We always lose when we lose our tempers. Something happened, and you got pissed. Now, two bad things have happened.

Getting angry rarely makes things better—even if it helps you get what you thought you wanted. It taxes your heart. It causes you to be mean to other people. To win, you had to lose your self-control.

You don't need more. You have enough. You can be happy right now.

According to a study conducted by the Harvard Business School, participants who journaled at the end of each day had a 25% increase in performance when compared to a control group that didn't.

There is, in many of us, a sense of lacking. Even though we have so much—our health, our families, our homes—we want more. Things are good, but it feels like, to be truly happy, they need to just be a little bit better. Indeed, this is the human condition, and it always has been.

The philosopher in us needs to always remember that the goal of life is not to do as much as possible but to do what matters.

Death is not some distant thing in the future ... Death is something happening to you right now. It's happening as you read this email. It's happening as you listen to this podcast.

If you have a journaling practice, you no doubt would agree that the contents of your journals are a fuller, more thorough reflection of you than you. It's truly a bizarre thing—you learn about yourself when you write in them or read old entries. You discover what you believe. You recognize patterns in your thinking. You gain clarity on things you care about.

'No matter what other people say or do,' Marcus Aurelius repeated to himself, 'my job is to be good.' And this is our job too, no matter what.

Imagine what it must have been like to be a gay person born in the 1950s when even an accusation was enough to wreck your career and carefully constructed life. Imagine how disorienting it would be if your gender was even a question you needed to consider for more than a second.

As Epictetus said, 'We are complicit in the offenses we take. Our temper is ours to lose. No one can take it from us, and certainly no one can make us lose it.

No one knows what the future holds. No one knows how much time we have left. So, do not delay. Do not wish. Do not wait. Do it now while you still have time, while there still is a chance.

Lying, denying, pretending, hoping that something, anything will save you besides yourself is a fool's errand; you must face it. You have to see the reality, and then, most importantly, you must get to work.

None of us own anything. Everything is constantly in flux. What we have today may be gone tomorrow. We ourselves may be gone tomorrow.

Journaling is not just a little thing you do to pass the time to write your memories down, although it can be. It's really a strategy that has helped brilliant and powerful and wise people become better at what they do.

Journaling before bed decreases cognitive stimulation, rumination, and worry, allowing you to fall asleep faster.

Most of us internalize the wrong lesson. We think success equals busy. We think that being busy is a sign of a good leader—of an important person. Of course, this is not true. A full calendar is the sign of someone who agrees to a lot of things—no more, no less.

The stoic has strict standards. We have strong opinions about what's right and what isn't. But—and this is big but—we have to be understanding and forgiving of those who have been, as Marcus Aurelius writes, cut off from truth.

Why are you borrowing unhappiness? Why would you be miserable now just because you might be in the future? ... What will happen will happen, so stop being anxious.

Seneca notes that money rarely makes us rich, because all it does is give us a craving to earn more.

We can, to borrow an old expression, hate the sin while we love the sinner, because what they do [and] how they act is not up to us. The good we choose to see in them, to get out of them, that is in our control.

Life is too short to be lived in fast forward. Slow down, breathe it in, enjoy it.

You look around and you see people rushing everywhere—rushing through traffic, rushing to get their kids down to bed. No time to talk. No time to sit. There's too much to do. There is somewhere to go. And the faster, the better.

We'd like to think that we are above being influenced by others, but of course, that's not true. We are shaped by the people we spend time with.

So it goes with our behavior... When we do something nice for someone, it ripples through their lives and into the world.

The point of premeditatio malorum, negative visualization, is not to make you worry; it's to eliminate worry. By being aware of all the possibilities that lay before us, we can now proceed with our preparations.

We must live as Marcus Aurelius said, as if death hangs over us—because it does.

You accept with complete honesty the perils of the obstacle in front of you, but you remain convinced that if it is possible to survive, not only will you, but you will also turn this into the best thing that ever happened to you.

You're not allowed to externalize your crap on to other people. You can't make the world worse because of your own inflexibility.

The beatings our books take in the process [of reading them]—it's a beautiful sight. It's a sign they are doing their job. It's evidence of accumulated hours and hopefully much wisdom, too. It's the highest praise you can give an author—to really engage with the material, to make it your own, to have a real two-sided conversation.

We don't control what happens to us. We don't control how hard life is for people we care about. But you know what we do control? We control whether or not we make things harder for others.

As Bonnie Raitt reminds us: 'I can't make you love me if you don't. You can't make your heart feel something; it won't.

Never wrestle with a pig. You just get dirty, and the pig enjoys it.

You cannot care what other people think. You have to do what's right and what's smart.

Don't seek for everything to happen as you wish it would but rather that everything happens as it actually will, and then your life will flow well.

Cato hated excess ... He hated luxury. He thought to indulge in such things was weakness and stupidity. And so what did Cato think of his brother who was far less strict about these things? He loved him.

One suspects Marcus Aurelius was referring to a particularly frustrating person, some opponent who just would not or could not get the message, when he wrote, 'You can hold your breath till they're blue in the face, and they'll just go on doing it.'

There are some folks on the extreme end of the spectrum who deep down are so afraid of what other people will think of them that they're trying to label the people who do wear masks as cowards.

You can't beat someone with nothing to lose, and it's impossible to reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into the first place.

Books are made to be broken in. They are mines to be dug, wells to be drawn from, sturdy posts to lean on, shoulders to cry on.