I stumbled across Tim Ferriss’s podcast a few years ago.

One of his first guests, Ryan Holiday, caught my attention, so I checked out some of his work.

Ryan often relates back to Stoic philosophers and cites Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations as a life-changing book, so I eventually bought a copy and checked it out.

Within Meditations, Aurelius often mentions Epictetus (another Stoic philosopher) as one of his inspirations, so I figured I would go straight to the source and study some of Epictetus’s work.

Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Seneca make up the big three Stoic philosophers, so eventually I decided I had to round out my study and look into Seneca.

Seneca was alive, in Rome, at the same time as Jesus, and I had been contemplating the relation between Stoicism and Christianity for quite some time, so this led me to the Bible.

A friend recommended C.S. Lewis’s work investigating Christianity, so I also checked this out.

Lewis’s work reminded me of much of what Epictetus taught, so I was drawn back to the works of the Stoics.

All of these writers lean on Plato and Socrates, so I wanted to go to the source to understand what they had taught.

And so on.

I don’t share this because I think it’s interesting (I imagine it isn’t) but because I believe this to be the most common and effective way to gain a deep understanding on a particular subject.

If someone came to me a few years ago and told me to read something from Plato, or nearly any of the authors mentioned above, I would’ve thought they were crazy. I had no interest in philosophy or in studying works from people who have been dead for thousands of years.

Yet after following my interests and taking incremental steps, here we are.

The added bonus is that there’s no stopping point. Each step along the way opens new pathways to supporting, contradicting, or source material.

-Brandon