September 2025

Welcome to the twentieth edition of the Better qDay monthly newsletter! This month I will discuss a popular book about modern day living utilizing concepts from Stoicism and modern day psychology, share a story about a modern day hero who saved thousands of lives, and tie everything together with a short read combining the story of a heroic man who applied Stoicism to survive years of torture. As always, my hope is that you will find value in the words below.

1. The first book this month is called the Let Them Theory, written by Mel Robbins. She stumbled upon these realizations after years of trying to control everyone and everything around her before eventually realizing she was making a huge mistake. She describes this idea she has dubbed the ‘Let Them Theory’ as heavily influenced from Stoicism and backed up by research after discussions with expert Psychiatrists and Psychologists. She breaks down the book explaining this concept into primarily two parts:

   1. Part 1 - Let Them - Let them aka other people do what they’re going to do. Don’t let things other people do stress you out. Stop wasting time and energy on things you can’t control.

   2. Part 2 - Let Me - Instead, regardless of what someone else is doing or what situation you are in think about what you can do. Take responsibility for everything in your life. This part of the book also focuses heavily on relationships between family, friends, and even significant others.

   3. Some quotes you can read to help decide if this is something you may enjoy reading yourself:

      1. Your silence can never be misquoted.

      2. There’s enough happiness, success, love, and friendship to go around for everyone.

      3. No one else’s wins are your losses.

      4. “It’s not what happens to you, it’s how you react to it. - Epictetus”

Link: The Let Them Theory: A Life-Changing Tool That Millions of People Can’t Stop Talking About by Mel Robbins

2. Every so often I stumble upon something and find myself thinking ‘why doesn’t everyone know about this?’ I could not believe I’d never heard of Chiune Sugihara. He was a Japanese diplomat who saved an estimated 6,000 Jews from certain death during the Holocaust. Many people have heard of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who is memorialized by the movie Schindler’s List. That movie celebrates Schindler’s actions during World War 2 where he saved about 1,200 Jews from the Holocaust by hiring them to work in his factories.

   Sugihara was a Japanese diplomat stationed in Lithuania who saved an estimated 6,000 Jews from certain death by hand writing thousands of travel visas for individuals and families to help them escape the country and the reaches of the Nazis. He did this despite his government and bosses at the Japanese Foreign Ministry threatening him multiple times to stop or else. As if that wasn’t enough, the Russian government who occupied Lithuania during part of WW2 sent him threatening letters insisting he stop as well.
   He nevertheless persisted and his actions saved thousands of innocent lives. Unfortunately, he did suffer tremendous personal loss as a result: he lost his job and career, his wife went missing for 8 days and was nearly killed during the war, and he and his family were placed into prison camps by the Russians for nearly two years.

   Chiune Sugihara now has multiple memorials in his honor both in Japan and Israel. He should be remembered as a modern day hero who did what he knew was right despite knowing he would suffer harsh consequences.

Link: A Special Fate: Chiune Sugihara: Hero of the Holocaust

3. The third learning item for this month is unique - it is a short essay written by James Stockdale, a fighter pilot who served in the US Navy from 1947-1979 and received a Congressional Medal of Honor. He spent two years as a graduate student at Stanford when he was 38 years old (after he had already been a naval pilot for 20 years).

   While there he bumped into another man who served in the Navy, the Dean of Humanities and Sciences. He convinced Stockdale to join his class - Philosophy 6 - mid-semester and join him for private tutoring sessions. This is how he discovered Stoicism.
   On September 9th, 1965, while on his second tour of duty in Vietnam, Stockdale’s plane was hit by flak which caused his plane to crash in north Vietnam. He would be held as a prisoner of war for 8 years including 4 years worth of solitary confinement.
   Hopefully none of us will ever find ourselves in such an unenviable position as James Stockdale did in 1965. He credits his surviving years of torture to his study of Stoicism in the years before his capture.

   After this he was able to write about his harrowing experience in this brief essay. I would encourage everyone to take a few minutes to read this powerful masterpiece.

Link: Courage Under Fire: Testing Epictetus’s Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior

Thank you for taking your valuable time to read some of what I have learned last month! Every day there are more and more distractions fighting for our attention so I truly appreciate you joining me here. Let me know if you learned something, found anything helpful, and what I can do better in the future to provide you with value!

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