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I'm Ryan Holiday. I'm a New York Times best selling author, which basically means I'm a professional reader. That's what authors do. They read a lot. So I've read thousands of books over the course of my life and here are five or six of my absolute favorites. This book here, Plutarch's Lives, is a favorite of Napoleon, is a favorite of Alexander Hamilton's, Abraham Lincoln, Elon Musk. Many of the most famous and interesting people in the world were inspired by the pages of Plutarch. Because Plutarch is probably the greatest biographer who ever lived. He wasn't obsessed with facts and figures, getting everything exactly right. He wanted to get to the essence of what made the great Greeks and Romans great. Julius Caesar, Demosthenes, Cicero, Cato, Lysander, Themistocles. The greatest people who ever lived were profiled by Plutarch. And Plutarch knew power himself. He wasn't just a writer, he was a governor, he was a priest. He was an active politician and advisor to to emperors and kings. He knew what he was talking about. If you haven't read Plutarch's Lives, you are missing out. This is a book by my mentors. I was actually a research assistant. I said I was a professional reader. I was a research assistant on this book by the great Robert Greene. This is Mastery, one of my favorite Robert Greene books. What does it take to be truly great at something? What does it mean to find your life's task? And what does it mean to become Truly great at that thing, to realize that, that potential. And Robert Greene is someone who has achieved mastery at what he does. He's one of the great writers of our time. If you haven't read the 48 laws of power, you absolutely should. Again, another favorite with powerful and important people. But this to me is one of the most thoughtful and inspiring of Robert Greene's books. He says, you know, each of us has the potential to be a master. Each of us has a life's task. The problem is most of us ignore that call. Most of us don't put in the work we don't find the master to apprentice under. I was lucky enough to do that under Robert Greene. This is one of my all time favorite books. If you haven't read it, you will not be as great as you are capable of being. This book here is a historical anomaly. It should not exist. We are lucky that it exists. It is a freak of nature and history that it survives to us, private thoughts of the most powerful man in the world sitting down every night and writing to himself. Not about how to be more successful, not about how to conquer armies in distant lands, how to achieve fame and influence, although he did all those things. No, in this book, Marcus Aurelius says he is fighting to be the person that philosophy tried to make him. He's trying to keep his temper in check, trying to manage his fear and his anxiety, trying to come to terms with his mortality, with his limitations, and trying to be decent, trying to be kind, trying not to despair, trying not to give up hope, even though he faced disaster after disaster, Floods and famines and plagues and betrayals. Marcus Aurelius has a hard life. And yet you see in the pages of Meditations him trying to be a good man, trying not to be stained purple by the robe of the emperor. This is my favorite passage from it. I have it inscribed here in the back. It says, concentrate on what you have to do. Fix your eyes on it. Remind yourself that your task is to be a good human being. Remind yourself of what nature demands of people. Then do it, he says without hesitation. He says, speak the truth as you see it, but with kindness, with humility and without hypocrisy. If you haven't read Marcus Aurelius Meditations, you are missing out. It is incredible. And this is the leather bound edition that we make at Daily Stoic. I wrote the foreword to it and it is my favorite translation. By the way, do you know who brings this book with them on one of the most incredible journeys of their life? Theodore Roosevelt explores the river of Doubt in the Amazon, one of the longest rivers, then unnavigable. And he does it. And he brings a copy of Meditations and Epictetus with him. He nearly dies. This is an unbelievable and gripping narrative nonfiction book. It's one of my all time favorites. When I walk people around my bookstore, the Painted Porch, I almost always place this in their hand. The only time I don't give this book to people people is when I ask them if they've read river of Doubt. And I found out they already have. This is an incredible book, a gripping narrative that everyone should read. It's about the post presidential years of Theodore Roosevelt. He navigates this previously unexplored river down through Brazil in the Amazon. He nearly dies. It takes nearly everything out of him. It is an incredible, fascinating, haunting, exciting book. One of the greatest narrative nonfiction books ever written. And if you haven't read it, you should. This is one of the oldest stories we have. It is one of the most retold and remixed and reimagined stories in history. It is unto itself, and it has been like the Bible, the means through which generation after generation has taught its people its most valuable lessons. It's both a gripping story of adventure. It is a tragic, deeply sad story. It is inspiring, it is exciting. It is filled with moral wisdom. I am talking, of course, about the Odyssey. I've read this many times, as you must. It is not a story you read once, it's a story you must read many times. Every adaptation, every retelling adds a new wrinkle to it. The story of the Odyssey stays the same, but we bring different things to it. I've read this to my children. I've traveled to Greece and Ithaca to see the places where some of this may or may not have actually happened. And if you haven't read the Odyssey, you not only do not understand what Homer is actually doing in the Odyssey, but you don't understand most of the literature that follows after it. Because the metaphors and images and ideas in the Odyssey resound through almost any every work of literature and story that happens. Since this is the great story of the hero, but the tragic hero, Odysseus is both the hero and the cautionary tale of the Odyssey. And if you haven't read it, you're missing out. Imagine the darkest place that a human being can go. Imagine someone who loses their entire family, who has not just their loved ones ripped from them, but their professional work, the manuscript they have been working on their entire professional life. Is taken and they are subjected to torture, to deprivation, to forced labor, to unimaginable horrors and suffering. Imagine all that being subjected to a person. And they come out of it not only not bitter, not only not angry, not only not broken, but they produce from it one of the most inspiring and beautiful meditations on the purpose and meaning of life ever produced. I am talking, of course, about Viktor Frankl's Man's search for meaning. His definition of happiness, his definition of meaning. It's not all sunshine and kittens. Someone who survived three Nazi death camps is not going to think that way. No, for Viktor Frankl, meaning comes from suffering. It comes from pain. It comes from accepting that we are not in in control in life, but we are in control, he says, as the Stoics do, how we respond to what life deals us. We have the ability to derive meaning, to derive purpose, to rise above our circumstances and our conditions. This is one of the most beautiful and inspiring books you will ever read. There's a reason it has sold millions and millions of copies. Why it has inspired people in all sorts of trying and difficult situations, of various levels of privilege and position. It doesn't matter who you are, it doesn't matter what you're going through. Man's Search for Meaning is a book that will help you and guide you and inspire you. You will leave this book feeling better about yourself and better about the world. Even if the world and your world and you are falling to pieces. Read this. You must the Tiger this is one of my all time favorite narrative nonfiction books too. I've recommended this to thousands of people over the years. It's one of those books where truth is stranger than fiction. Where if you had made this up, you would say, let's dial it back a little bit. I almost don't believe it happened. But it did happen. John is one of the great writers of our time. I interviewed him on the Daily Stoke podcast. Read this book, you must.
