What do you read in the first few hours of waking up each morning?
Emails, social media, news feeds, books, The Bible?

What you read to start your day will often become the glasses with which you see the world with for the rest of the day. This is why it’s vital to put something in front of your eyes that will help you foster a better mindset, view of the world, and vision for your life.

Before I discovered the YouVersion Bible app and reading scripture each morning, I used stoic philosophy as a compass in my life. It was actually stoicism that got me interested in The Bible. I thought, “wow, these ancient dudes have really wise things to say that are even more applicable today—I wonder what other ancient wisdom I can gather from books.”

I will also confess that I had a hard time believing The Bible. Which was in part due to having a hard time reading it because all I had was a King James Version. But when I realized how much I could relate to the words and stories of stoicism that predated Jesus’s time on earth by 500 years, it opened me up to what I could learn from God’s word.

There are a lot of similarities between Christianity and Stoicism. The Bible is hands-down, THE best personal growth book out there. But the lessons of stoicism that I’ve put to work in my life have not been far behind.

I want to encourage you in 2025 to start a morning reading habit of something that is going to transform the way you approach your day. I started reading “The Daily Stoic” by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman routinely as 2017 began and it changed my life.

There are hundreds of lessons you’ll latch onto when reading the wisdom of the stoics, but I narrowed it down to the five I use most in my life. I attempt to remind myself of all five every morning.

Here are 5 Life Lessons From Stoicism I Use Every Single Day:

1. Perception is everything. You decide what you see, how you see it, and how you react to it.

We have a quote on the walls at FitTown that reads, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t–you’re right.” by Henry Ford. Our minds decide what an event means to us. Stoicism teaches us that we can’t control the outside world, but we can control what we think about it and what we do. You decide what an event means to you. I love this story about a Chinese farmer that teaches us not to overthink (and overreact to) the events in our lives.

A farmer and his son had a beloved horse who helped the family earn a living. One day, the horse ran away and their neighbours exclaimed, “Your horse ran away, what terrible luck!” The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not.”

A few days later, the horse returned home, leading a few wild horses back to the farm as well. The neighbours shouted out, “Your horse has returned, and brought several horses home with him. What great luck!” The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not.”

Later that week, the farmer’s son was trying to break one of the horses and she threw him to the ground, breaking his leg. The neighbours cried, “Your son broke his leg, what terrible luck!” The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not.”

A few weeks later, soldiers from the national army marched through town, recruiting all boys for the army. They did not take the farmer’s son, because he had a broken leg. The neighbours shouted, “Your boy is spared, what tremendous luck!” To which the farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not. We’ll see.”

2. You can only control so much in this world. Focus on what you can control.

I get so inspired every morning knowing how much control I can have over my health. I get to decide to hop out of bed and move my body. It’s within my control to decide the 50# dumbbell isn’t going to stay put on the ground within the final, exhausting minutes of my workout. Nobody puts food in my mouth for me (well my wife Shannon takes it 99% of the way there). I choose my bed time. I have control over my weight, my strength, mobility, etc. because I control so many inputs to health. I’m grateful to have a body that works, and is most of the time, pain free.

When pain and stress, physical or otherwise arrives, I know I can only control certain things in the situation. I like to remember the Serenity Prayer that the recovery community recites. “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Knowing you can’t control others or their actions will make you look inward more. You’ll see what you can do to resolve a given situation, and realize you had more of a role to play than you thought.

3. Every obstacle you face is an opportunity to grow. Seek out failure.

As I was writing my first book “The Spectrum Mindset”, my writing coach helped me realize that the best messages arise from the biggest messes. The people who have gone through the most, have the best story to tell. No one wants to hear a story about a guy who has everything go right in his life.

We know that good stories, and meaningful lives, come from success over the struggles. We need adversity in our lives to grow us. This life is all about growing into the person God made us to be. It takes intentional action to seek out possible failures.

Marcus Aurelius, one of the most famous stoics and former Roman Emperor, wrote this in his book Meditations. “While it’s true that someone can impede our actions, they can’t impede our intentions and our attitudes, which have the power of being conditional and adaptable. For the mind adapts and converts any obstacle to its action into a means of achieving it. That which is an impediment to action is turned to advance action. The obstacle on the path becomes the way.” (This quote was the basis for Ryan Holiday’s book “The Obstacle is The Way.” Run to go read it if you haven’t yet.)

4. Remember how small you are in this world. Humble yourself, listen and learn from others and be open to serving them.

We weren’t meant to do life alone. God made us to be here for each other. Marcus Aurelius wrote, “That which isn’t good for the hive, isn’t good for the bee.”

Emotions like jealousy, greed, and envy are destructive to the hive, but most harmful to the user. The stoics remind us that we have control over our emotions. We make our emotions, our emotions don’t make us. Be someone who knows how to lift themselves up and lift others up too.

You also have control over your wants. You can choose to want nothing, then in turn, you have everything. “No person has the power to have everything they want, but it is in their power not to want what they don’t have, and to cheerfully put to good use what they do have,” wrote Seneca in Moral Letters.

Get in the habit of cheering for other people. Help others whenever you can. One day, you’ll be the one in need of support. The good you gave out will come back to you. (“The Ego is the Enemy” by Ryan Holiday is another great book for this particular lesson.)

5. Make every second of your life count. Don’t waste a day.

“Memento Mori” is not just the Haunted Mansion’s souvenir store in Magic Kingdom. It is a latin phrase that can be translated to, “remember you must die.” Yikes! Pretty morbid for a Disney store—but actually, the phrase is meant to inspire.

The Stoics used Memento Mori to invigorate life, and to create priority and meaning. The stoic Seneca said, “Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Postpone nothing. Balance life’s books each day.” Marcus Aurelius said, “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do, say, and think.”

All I know is that every day that I think about death, I value my life.
My brother Andrew gave me a calendar that sits in my office. It has thousands of boxes to represent the weeks of my life. Each week, I mark off another box. As I approach 41 years of age in just 10 weeks, it is CRAZY to see how many boxes are already checked off. My goal is to fill each checked box with as much life as possible and never waste a day.

Marcus Aurelius writes, “On those mornings you struggle with getting up, keep this thought in mind–I am awakening to the work of a human being. Why then am I annoyed that I am going to do what I’m made for, the very things for which I was put into this world? Or was I made for this, to snuggle under the covers and keep warm? It’s so pleasurable. Were you then made for pleasure? In short, to be coddled or to exert yourself?”

I love how Marcus is writing to one person, HIMSELF. He never meant for Meditations to be a famously published work. He simply wrote this wisdom down so he could remind himself of it.

I write very similarly in that my preachy posts are mostly meant for a past self. They are meant to remind me how to live. If someone else can benefit from them, beautiful. I would love to see someone skip the mistakes I made and move on to bigger and better failures.

Start a reading habit in 2025 that will feed your mind and cultivate your mindset. We say, “Move Every Day” at FitTown, why not “Read Every Day” as well?

Which of these 5 lessons resonates with you the most?

Are there other teachings from stoicism that you use?

-Coach Tony