Daily Wisdom 37

#QuoteoftheDay

THE DAILY STOIC

By Ryan Holiday

DON’T SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF

“It is essential for you to remember that the attention you give to any action should be in due proportion to its worth, for then you won’t tire and give up, if you aren’t busying yourself with lesser things beyond what should be allowed.” —MARCUS AURELIUS

In 1997, a psychotherapist named Richard Carlson published a book called Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff.?.?. And It’s All Small Stuff. It quickly became one of the fastest-selling books of all time and spent years on the bestseller lists, ultimately selling millions of copies in many languages.

Whether you read the book or not, Carlson’s pithy articulation of this timeless idea is worth remembering. Even Cornelius Fronto, Marcus Aurelius’s rhetoric teacher, would have thought it is a superior way of expressing the wisdom his student attempted in the quote above. They both say the same thing: don’t spend your time (the most valuable and least renewable of all your resources) on things that don’t matter. What about the things that don’t matter, but you’re absolutely obligated to do? Well, spend as little time worrying about them as possible.

If you give things more time and energy than they deserve, they’re no longer lesser things. You’ve made them important by the life you’ve spent on them. And sadly, you’ve made the important things—your family, your health, your true commitments—less so as a result of what you’ve stolen from them.

THE DAILY LAWS

By Robert Greene

The Lure of the Unfamiliar

One of the perverse parts of human nature is that we always desire what we don’t have. We look on the other side of the fence—the grass is always greener, the neighbor has a better car, their children are better behaved. We’re always desiring what other people have. We think what we don’t have is better. That’s the nature of desire. When we actually attain something, it’s not such a great feeling. The importance of desire is to always be pursuing something, something outside of ourselves. We want what is unfamiliar, what is exotic, what we’ve never had in our lives before. We want what is transgressive, what is the taboo, what other people don’t have, what is new or fresh. You have to create that object of desire—in whatever you’re creating in life. You have to give people the feeling that there’s something a little bit taboo and transgressive about it, which was what I did with The 48 Laws of Power. When you pick up that book, you feel like you’re doing something a little bit dirty and nasty. You want to create the feeling that what you are offering is not something familiar.

Daily Law: When a person or an object is familiar, we have a bit of disdain. But when it’s distant and alluring and mysterious and something out there that we don’t have—that sparks our desire. That’s the key to any sort of marketing or soft sell.