There are few 20 year olds with the imagination to recognize "But a man who procrastinates in his CHOOSING will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance."
I learned this lesson before I was twenty, and I am far from the sharpest tool in the shed. It just so happened that I had the opportunity to learn it the hard way due to the circumstances I was in at the time. It's one of those concepts that are simple in and of themselves but require a painful experience to really sink into your brain and inform your future behavior.
The critical point here is he's saying it because he's read it in a book, and it rang true.
That means he had good upbringing or just good life intuition to recognize that to be a good idea.
Wisdom is knowing in your bones, that something's true. Thompson's merely trying to convey what others have conveyed to him, coupled with some intuition.
Which's my entire point - don't bother listening to people regurgitating something they read in a book, go find folks who've lived it. They tend to be older :)
So if a 50-year-old wiseman writes a book, a 20-year-old reads it and copies its ideas into a letter for a friend in need of some wisdown, and I read the letter 60 years later, what do I do? To help with the prescription: I'm in my mid-twenties and, as you now understand, quite a simpleton.
I'd like to throw in that Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is quite a famous staple of stoic reading, but it's mainly a compilation of lessons from other great stoic teachers that resonated with him.
