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The rarest thing in the world is wisdom. The most expensive thing in the world is experience. How many truly wise people have you met? How many of them would take the time to download to you all that they know? And of the small amount of wisdom you have accumulated in your life, how much painful trial and error did it take to get it?
There is really only one shortcut or hack around this. It is the theme we have returned to here many times: reading. “By spending a few dollars for a book,” the great Admiral Rickover once said, “the thoughts and life’s work of a great man are available to us.” Or as Seneca put it, by reading and studying philosophy a person is able to “annex every age to their own. All the harvest of the past is added to their story.” (It’s this beautiful quote that serves as the epigraph to The Daily Stoic.)
Consider how many Marcus Aurelius’s there have ever been. How many Rickovers? How many Stockdales? Consider how much pain and struggle went into their becoming who they were. And now, for a few dollars, their thoughts and life’s work is available to you. Only an ingrate, Seneca said, would fail to see this as the incredible gift that this is. Only a fool would not take this amazing deal–and take it right now.
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