The Daily StoicThe Daily Stoic

Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman built this book as a calendar. There are 366 entries, one for every day of the year including the leap day. Each one is a short quote from a Stoic, usually Marcus Aurelius, Seneca or Epictetus, followed by a page on what it means and how you might use it that day.

The months each have a theme, like clarity, duty, acceptance and death. Over a year the book walks through the whole of Stoic thinking without ever asking you to read more than a page at a time. That's the clever part. Nobody sits down and reads Epictetus cover to cover on a school night. Almost anyone can read one page.

The year is split into three parts, borrowed from Epictetus: how you see things, what you do, and what you accept. The first four months are about perception, the middle four about action, and the last four about will. By December the book is talking about death most days, which sounds grim and reads as calm.

It's a different kind of book from the others on this shelf. You don't read it once and move on. It's meant to sit near where you start the day, and to be opened on whatever the date is.

It's on the shelf because it's the easiest way into the older books. When Meditations feels too heavy, one page of this gets you the same idea in two minutes.