I almost never see this book mentioned anywhere (in spite of the fact, recently discovered via TED, that Dan Millman is one of the few self-help-type coaches who's survived four decades of change intact, maintaining the same message and a moderate level of prominence, instead of vanishing into the night).

TLDR: Peaceful Warrior may indeed be a good stoic text, and a great guide for humans in general; on a strong tangent, I can't help comparing the PW author to another author I've known for a long time, who's had lesser success and specifically showed a little resentment or curiosity toward the Peaceful Warrior author.

Until you mentioned it here, I never considered the book stoic--though it may very well qualify. Particularly the part where (mild spoilers in the rest of this sentence) Joseph's cafe burns down, he grieves intensely and briefly but then is over it, and Socrates does not grieve--nor does he grieve to learn that Joseph died--and this lack of emotional indulgence and hanging-on is something Dan struggles with at first. And the comparison to babies.

I read it as a teen, and I think it would be very profound for nearly any teen. At this point well into adulthood, I still value it a lot (and am in the process of re-reading it for the first time in maybe ten years), but it's more of a refresher by now, not new information.

That sounds like I'm criticizing it, and let me clarify, absolutely not. The information--and maybe more importantly, the frame, the context, and the way it's all woven into a reasonably compelling storyline--is wonderful. I've never felt disappointed by it. But when the movie came out, I remember reading one IMDB user comment about it, from a name I recognized... the name was Lyle McDonald (if you don't recognize it, it's not important, but if you've ever been heavy into fitness and especially keto, you will).

I haven't re-read it since the movie came out, but from what I remember, his brief review (of the book, even though it was a forum for the movie) was basically, "this is all very prosaic information and I don't know why anybody thinks it's great". Though harsher than that.

Having known Lyle online since 1995, I had a lot of context for his comment, and it's super-relevant. In the world of popular-exercise-physiology-experts, people who have monthly columns about bodybuilding and/or diet and/or supplements, he was/is pretty unique, in that he never lied to support his product (his product being the ketogenic diet). I think his degree is exercise physiology, but most of his writing is on biochem, and he flat-out admitted that when he began research on "the ketogenic diet", he did believe that it had a metabolic advantage over other diets--that you'd lose fat faster, on the same number of calories, with keto vs. typical diets. By the time the book came out, he was open about having changed his view: you'd lose less muscle on a keto diet, but you wouldn't lose fat noticeably faster. It pulled the foundation out of the "big book" of his whole career, but he was completely honest about it. And he's been honest about saying most supplements are scams, and explaining why, in technical terms, they're useless (and showing the statistical tricks companies use, to take the test data from their supplement, and make it look good when selling the product).

So he's very smart, very well educated, and has a very high level of integrity, rejecting the idea of lying or exaggerating to sell things. (Not to praise him too much, his personality is a wreck, his sexual preferences might be unsettling, and his personal life is a trail of flotsam, but in this one thing--being honest about biochem and nutrition as they relate to bodybuilding--he just doesn't lie, as far as I can tell after 21 years). And not coincidentally, he's never had a lot of financial success. Similarly to his mentor Dan Duchaine, he's revered by people who study this stuff, but his income is pretty poor compared to supplement experts who are willing to distort everything to sell their products. They make much more money.

So when he criticized the Peaceful Warrior, I understood his frustration, while also feeling sad that he was boxed-in to that perspective. There is a lot of insight in Peaceful Warrior, but it's not the result of years of strict academic research into something relatively objective like biochemistry. To Lyle it probably seemed like someone had packaged a bunch of generic woo into a book and was receiving praise for reasons he couldn't fathom, and resented on some level (especially since now it had the success of being made into a movie).

I wouldn't know how to talk to Lyle to try to nail down the issue. I would love it if his kind of integrity had more financial and social reward, and I'm not sure how to pin down why Peaceful Warrior resonated for so many people. But it did--and as a teen, a lot of what it said was relatively new to me. As an adult, capable of reading it and challenging pieces of it without feeling like I'm taking the whole thing apart--well, I actually still think I agree with nearly everything in it. Some of the writing style seems unsophisticated, now, but not enough to dampen my positive feelings toward the work as a whole.

The author, Dan, HAS written a fair share of other books on related topics (most of them tie in directly to the Peaceful Warrior, the others are at least tangentially connected), in which he elaborates on pretty much all of the Peaceful Warrior ideas, spells things out, answers Trekkie-like questions he's received over the years ("what was the combination of the safe in soc's back room?"--ok not exactly, but asking for specifics about the philosophical principles Socrates espouses). The books overlap in their info, but somewhere in them, he answers nearly every question you could ask, usually in more expansive detail than you anticipated.

It still never approaches the precision of Lyle's biochem work, and to be frank, while I'm very glad for all of Dan's books, I don't think the mystery of the first one hurt it at all. It's nice to have all the ambiguities cleared up, but there was a sense of mysticism about the original that the others don't share, and which I still value. At heart I'm completely a skeptic, but by choice I often compartmentalize that, because so much of life is so much more enjoyable if you're not looking for holes in everything. (Note: this is a terrible idea in business or finance settings--but it's a damn good idea for most movies, and in casual areas of relationships.)

I wish Lyle was better rewarded for his excellent and lengthy research, and I sympathize with his confusion and resentment that someone who wrote a book with such more forgiving boundaries received, eventually, such a greater reward. I don't really know how to explain that in a way that would make the world seem or feel fair.

I guess ultimately, while I agree that the book has stoic aspects (and maybe, god willing, it's completely in line with stoic principles), I still with I could find a way to reconcile Lyle and Dan, and their relative success: not necessarily by external standards; by their own standards in their own lives. Funnily, I think Dan might have been a lot more at-ease with never having much financial success, as long as he got his teaching and message out there, while I think Lyle, who seems to place a more typical (high) value on financial compensation as a measure of success, received less of it.

Either way, I feel like they've both contributed quite a lot to my life--I'm surprised, now that I think about it, to realize how much influence both of them had on my life, and changing basic beliefs and behavior.