In his Consolation to Helvia, Seneca The Younger posits the following: “Is it not madness and the wildest lunacy to desire so much when you can hold so little?” He goes on to say how unwise it is “to think that it is the amount of money and not the…
Shaun Attwood is a former stock-market millionaire and Ecstasy supplier turned public speaker, author and activist, who is banned from America for life. While incarcerated in Arizona from 2002–2007 for drug crimes, he developed a close relationship with a man known as Two Tonys. On his prison blog, Attwood described…
Recently I heard a song that I hadn’t listened to in years. I make the distinction between heard and listened because this time the song moved me in a way it never did before. It’s easy to listen to something without really processing it, it’s more difficult to hear it…
When Chinese author Zhang Wei paid £7,600 to drink the world’s most expensive dram of whisky, he said, “In a nutshell, it tasted good. I was drinking not so much the whisky but a lot of history.” 139 years of history to be exact. Or so he thought. It was…
I’ve never been one for New Year’s resolutions. The first day, the first month, the year incrementing by one - none of these things have ever held any weight for me. I’ve always thought Epictetus’s forcefully direct question to be apt: “How long are you going to wait before you…
When the book A Million Little Pieces was published in 2003, it was a huge milestone of vindication for author James Frey. He had spent the previous twelve years in France trying to become a writer. He could now finally say he was one. But it wasn’t getting published that…
You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.11 This Stoic reflection on the impermanence of life is known as Memento Mori, which is Latin for “remember you will die.” It’s a constant reminder not to take your time…
If you’ve ever heard the name Leonardo da Vinci, the first thing you’ll probably associate with the famous Italian is painting. His masterpieces are some of the most well-known works of art in history. The Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, and Salvator Mundi (the most expensive painting ever sold) were…
The following is a conservative estimate. Every day, 500 million tweets are sent on Twitter, 95 million photos are uploaded to Instagram, and 55 million status updates are posted on Facebook. Add in shares, likes, comments and time spent watching video, and the numbers are dizzying. That’s a lot of…
The Stoics were avid writers, often for no other purpose than collecting and reviewing their own thoughts. In fact, Marcus Aurelius' best-known work, Meditations, was a series of his own notes and never intended to be read by anyone else. Epictetus and Seneca also recommended regular journaling to their students…