Stoic DPO links

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The Stoics

The best introduction to the Stoics is ‘The Daily Stoic‘ by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman, which gives you a quote from one of the big names every day as well as a quick analysis of how it applies to modern life. Holliday has also written a series of books about Stoic philosophy, including ‘The Obstacle is the Way‘, ‘Stillness is the Key‘ and ‘Ego is the Enemy‘

Also a good route in is ‘How To Be A Stoic: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Living‘ by Massimo Pigliucci

To read the Stoics themselves, I recommend starting with either Marcus Aurelius’ ‘Meditations‘ (multiple cheap editions are available) or ‘Discourses‘ by Epictetus. I think these two hold the key to getting to grips with the underlying ideas and are both humane and sometimes humourous writers.

Seneca is a bit more tricky for me, and Diogenes comes from an older school of thinkers who are more dedicated to asceticism (Diogenes self-consciously lived in a barrel), but both are deeper cuts if you want to go exploring.

Persuasion and logical fallacies

How to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie – it’s a bit old-timey and very much about the businesss of sales, but the vast majority of modern-day sales coaches and gurus are just repackaging Carnegie. The original is the best.

Pre-suaion + Influence by Robert Cialdini- both excellent books on the subject of persuasion. Dale Carnegie was a bit of a chancer; Caldini is a psychologist, so his books are more a bit more rigourous but very readable and, dare I say it, persuasive.

This website: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ will tell you everything you need to know about logical fallacies and contains the posters with all the fallacies and cognitive biases I talked about. 

To go deeper, you can try Mastering Logical Fallacies: The Definitive Guide to Flawless Rhetoric and Bulletproof Logic by Michael Withey, which goes into it all in more detail.