There are a number of notable technology startup communities across the U.S. There’s Boston, Austin, Los Angeles, San Diego, Boulder, Seattle, and Raleigh-Durham. Still, even today, the one that stands head and shoulders above all these areas and others is the Bay Area of Northern California. I liken it to being in the major leagues of technology, particularly when it comes to tech startups.

I’ve not been involved in a Bay Area startup, and at this point in my career, I doubt that I ever will be. But as someone who works in tech, it’s interesting to read stories about the Bay Area technology scene. From the outside it always seems so glamorous, but one knows that’s never the whole story. For every Facebook and Google, there are hundreds of forgettable companies, or ones that no one ever hears about.

Chaos Monkeys by Antonio Garcia Martinez is an autobiographical look at that other side of Silicon Valley. The subtitle, Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley, is a good indication of what to expect when you read it.

Our attitude towards the events that happen in our lives and around us has a huge impact on our outlook on life. It affects our mood. It determines our level of success (or failure). The choices we make determine if we are going to help make the world a better place or contribute to making it worse.

In Your Greatest Power, J. Martin Kohe examines the power of choice and how to use it to make a positive impact in your life, the lives of those around you, and the world in general.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve developed an interest in Stoicism. I’m not sure how it started, although I’d bet it had a lot to do with Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman’s book The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I read in 2018. What triggered me to dig further was the relevance of the passages in the book. They were written by philosophers over 2,000 years ago and are just as applicable today as they were then. It’s a testament to the constant of human nature. The times, the problems, and the technologies change, but the way we are wired is constant.

To develop a better understanding of Stoicism, I decided it was time to read the writings of the more notable Stoic philosophers from ancient Rome and Greece. I’ve read plenty of quotes from Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, Socrates, Zeno, Cato, and others, but I wanted to read the books and letters where the quotes originated since it’s not uncommon for quotes to be taken out of context.

For my first in depth reading, I choose On The Shortness of Life, which is a collection of three letter written by Seneca.