There is a certain irony in the fact that the most quoted strategist in the history of warfare wrote a book that is, at its core, about avoiding warfare altogether. Sun Tzu’s The Art of War sits on the bookshelves of CEOs, coaches, military generals, and that one guy at every dinner party who thinks […]
Stop Fighting Fire with Fire: The Counterintuitive Path to Conflict Resolution Read More »
There is a particular kind of advice that sounds wise until you actually try to follow it. “Be yourself.” “Follow your passion.” “Live your best life.” These phrases decorate coffee mugs and Instagram bios, and they cost nothing to repeat. But when a Roman Stoic philosopher who survived exile, political conspiracy, and the mood swings
Why Seneca Believed “The Good Life” Is Inherently Anti-Social Read More »
About 2,400 years ago, a retired Athenian general sat down to write about a war. His name was Thucydides. The war was between Athens and Sparta. And the book he produced was not really about that war at all. It was about you. That sounds like an exaggeration. It is not. Thucydides wrote The History
A man who died 2,300 years before the invention of the iPhone has more to say about your screen time than any wellness influencer on the internet. That is not a joke. It is barely even an exaggeration. Aristotle never saw a push notification. He never doomscrolled. He never felt the peculiar shame of picking
How Aristotle Can Fix Your Relationship with Technology Read More »
There is a particular kind of madness that strikes otherwise rational people when they walk into a car dealership. The floors are polished. The cars gleam under lights engineered to make sheet metal look like sculpture. A salesperson appears, friendly but not too eager, and begins a conversation that will eventually arrive at the only
The True Cost of a New Car (It Is Not the Monthly Payment) Read More »
You have been fooled by a bad argument today. Maybe twice. You probably did not notice, which is exactly how bad arguments work. They dress up in reasonable clothes, speak in a confident voice, and walk right past the part of your brain that is supposed to be standing guard. Aristotle noticed this problem about
The Logic Trap: How to Spot a Bad Argument in Seconds Read More »
You would think the greatest mind of ancient Greece would hand the crown to physics. Or maybe mathematics. Or at least astronomy, the science that literally studies the heavens. But no. Aristotle looked at every field of inquiry available to him and decided that politics sits above them all. Not beside them. Above them. This
Why Does Aristotle Call Politics the “Master Science”? Read More »
We have been told, for as long as most of us can remember, that anger is the enemy. Breathe through it. Count to ten. Let it go. Walk away. The entire self help industry runs on the quiet assumption that anger is a malfunction, a bug in the human operating system that needs patching. Meditation
The Virtue of “Right Anger”: When Aristotle Says You Should Get Mad Read More »
Most people remember Alexander the Great for conquering the known world by the age of thirty. Fewer people remember that before he conquered anything, he spent years sitting in a garden in Macedonia, listening to a middle aged philosopher talk about plants. That philosopher was Aristotle. And the lesson he taught Alexander was not about
The Most Important Lesson Aristotle Taught Alexander the Great Read More »
Marcus Tullius Cicero was, by almost every measure that mattered to him, the smartest person in the room. He could dismantle an argument the way a surgeon removes a tumor. He wrote philosophy that people still read two thousand years later. He saved the Roman Republic from a conspiracy and then made sure absolutely everyone
Cicero Trap: Why Intelligent People Often Have Zero Political Instinct Read More »