We get it. You’re busy.
You have kids. You have a job—maybe two. You have these things you are trying to accomplish. You have to get to the gym. You have a long commute. You have all these projects around the house.
With all this, you say, I just don’t have time to read.
Which of course is ridiculous. It’s not true. It’s not even remotely true. Marcus Aurelius had all those same kinds of goals and responsibilities. Seneca did, too. You know what you don’t see in their writings? Complaints about not having time to read. In fact, if anything, they chide themselves for spending too much time with their books.
The fact is, people much busier than you have been prioritizing reading for centuries. They have been making wisdom part of their daily lives, no matter what’s going on in the world or in their jobs. As Andrew Roberts (listen to our discussion with him on the Daily Stoic podcast) writes in his epic biography of Napoleon, for his Egypt campaign, Napoleon
…took 125 books of history, geography, philosophy and Greek mythology in a specially constructed library, including Captain Cook’ three-volume Voyages, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, and books by Livy, Thucydides, Plutarch, Tacitus, and of course Julius Caesar. He also brought biographies of Turenne, Condé, Saxe, Marlborough, Eugène of Savoy, Charles XII of Sweden and Bertrand du Guesclin, the notable French commander in the Hundred Years War. Poetry and drama had their place too, in the works of Ossian, Tasso, Ariosto, Homer, Virgil, Racine and Molière.
If Napoleon, commanding an army of some 40,000 men, could find time to read on a march some 1,600 miles from home, you can find it. If Marcus could read while he was ruling the world, if Seneca could do it while studying the law, suffering from tuberculosis, while in exile, in the Senate, as consul, while he dealt with Nero’s insanity, you can.
Leaders must be readers. There is no good life without study and practice and wisdom. Don’t find the time. Make the time. You’re not too busy.
Nobody is.
P.S. This was originally sent on January 13, 2021. Sign up today for the Daily Stoic’s email and get our popular free 7-day course on Stoicism.
