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This book has 5 recommendations

Mike Benkovich (Founder/Anatomonics)

Honourable Mentions: Four Hour Work Week, The Happiness Hypothesis, Meditations, Catch 22, A Guide To The Good Life.

Jason Fried (Co-Founder/Basecamp)

The book that had the biggest impact on me this year was “A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy”.

Scott Perry (Author, Stoic Guitarist)

The historic Stoic and Buddhist texts are very accessible, but William Irvine’s A Guide to the Good Life is a gentle introduction to Stoicism’s relevance to modern life and touches on its similarities to Buddhism.

Marc Andreessen (Co-Founder/Andreessen Horowitz)

Best (?) walk through the ancient/current philosophy of Stoicism. You can't control other people but you can control yourself, so do that.

Derek Sivers (Founder/CD Baby)

Almost too personal for me to give an objective review, because I found when reading it that the quirky philosophy I've been living my life by since 17 matches up exactly with a 2000-year-old philosophy called Stoicism. Mine was self-developed haphazardly, so it was fascinating to read the refined developed original. Really resonated.

Amazon description

One of the great fears many of us face is that despite all our effort and striving, we will discover at the end that we have wasted our life. In A Guide to the Good Life, William B. Irvine plumbs the wisdom of Stoic philosophy, one of the most popular and successful schools of thought in ancient Rome, and shows how its insight and advice are still remarkably applicable to modern lives.

In A Guide to the Good Life, Irvine offers a refreshing presentation of Stoicism, showing how this ancient philosophy can still direct us toward a better life. Using the psychological insights and the practical techniques of the Stoics, Irvine offers a roadmap for anyone seeking to avoid the feelings of chronic dissatisfaction that plague so many of us. Irvine looks at various Stoic techniques for attaining tranquility and shows how to put these techniques to work in our own life. As he does so, he describes his own experiences practicing Stoicism and offers valuable first-hand advice for anyone wishing to live better by following in the footsteps of these ancient philosophers. Readers learn how to minimize worry, how to let go of the past and focus our efforts on the things we can control, and how to deal with insults, grief, old age, and the distracting temptations of fame and fortune. We learn from Marcus Aurelius the importance of prizing only things of true value, and from Epictetus we learn how to be more content with what we have.

Finally, A Guide to the Good Life shows readers how to become thoughtful observers of their own lives. If we watch ourselves as we go about our daily business and later reflect on what we saw, we can better identify the sources of distress and eventually avoid that pain in our life. By doing this, the Stoics thought, we can hope to attain a truly joyful life.

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See more books recommended by

Mike Benkovich, Jason Fried, Scott Perry, Marc Andreessen, Derek Sivers

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William B. Irvine

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