You’re Going To Wish You Did This

Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. When he was young, the future general James Mattis hitched hype to San Francisco to meet Eric Hoffer, the philosopher most famous for his book, The True Believer, and there, talking with Hofer, James Mattis was told, Make sure you write down everything interesting that you find. And I have ever since, he said. It's wonderful advice.

We're lucky, for instance, that two thousand years ago a student named Arian decided to jot down the lectures of his teacher Epictetus. We're lucky that Marcus Aurelius wrote down his own thoughts, because that's how meditations survives to us. We're lucky that Seneca chose to write those letters to Lucilius, because without them not only would we be without his wisdom, but we'd be without many of the quotes from the early Stoics that were preserved only because Seneca wrote them down. General Mattis has followed Hoffer's advice his whole life.

To bring his speechwriters up to speed, Mattis gave them access to a closet in his office. As one of his former speechwriters described, There Mattis kept many years worth of meticulous notes in black notebooks from his time in uniform. Each page included a small printout of his daily schedule along with handwritten notes, and lined up on the shelf above them were three special journals in old worn three ring binders. These he referred to as his books of wisdom.

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