The Only Revenge Worth Getting | 25 Essential Rules For Life From Marcus Aurelius

Unfortunately, it’s been happening for a long time: People doing horrible things to each other. Marcus Aurelius was betrayed. Seneca was exiled on trumped-up charges. There were Stoics who were cheated on. There were Stoics who were persecuted. Stoics who were tortured. How did they get over it? Did they get even? Get justice? The great Dr. Edith Eger (whose books we highly recommend and has been on The Daily Stoic Podcast twice) endured the Holocaust at Auschwitz. She was a victim of one of the most heinous crimes in human history. How did she get over it? Did she get even? Get justice?✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:28Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us, dailystoic.com.

• 0:52Ryan Holiday?

  The only revenge worth getting. Unfortunately, it's been happening for a long time. People doing horrible things to each other. Marcus Aurelius was betrayed. Seneca was exiled on trumped-up charges. There were Stoics who were cheated on. There were Stoics who were persecuted. There were Stoics who were tortured. How did they get over it? How did they get even, get justice? The great Dr. Edith Eager, whose books I've raved about here, and she's been on the Daily Stoic Podcast twice, you absolutely should listen, she endured the Holocaust at Auschwitz. She was a victim of one of the most heinous crimes in human history. How did she get over it? How did she get even, get justice? As she recently said, "My ultimate revenge against Hitler is kissing my great-grandchildren

• 1:37Ryan Holiday?

  at the age of 95. I took back my power and decided not just to live, but to thrive." Marcus Aurelius reminded himself in his meditations, perhaps after his betrayal, that the best revenge is not to be like that. He was saying that he had no choice about what was done to him, but he could choose not to be consumed by anger or a need to punish. He could choose not to be bitter. He could choose to be happy and to do good, to hug his kids and live his life. Whatever has been done to us, minor or major, we have this choice too. We can take back our power and decide not just to live, but to thrive. We can decide not to be like the people who did us wrong. We can choose to be better, to be happy, to do good.

• 2:21Ryan Holiday?

  And seriously, if you haven't read Dr. Eger's book, The Choice, you absolutely should. I'll link to it in today's show notes. You can grab it at the Painted Porch. Incredible book, life-changing book. And it's up there. It's up there right alongside Man's Search for Meaning, which everyone should also read.

• 2:47Ryan Holiday?

  It's the end of your life and you still haven't gotten this right. I just love the intensity with which he's addressing himself and he's repeating to himself who he wants to be, how he should be. And this is the important part. He's also saying, it's not too late. It's never too late.

• 3:06Ryan Holiday?

  It's fascinating that Marcus Aurelius, the emperor of Rome, is writing this work for himself. He's never expecting it to be published. And yet, in this inherently private and personal pursuit, he manages to touch on things that are so universal that they manage to become rules for living. I'm Ryan Holiday. I've written a number of books about Stoic philosophy. I've spoken to the NBA, the NFL, sitting senators and special forces leaders. In today's episode, I want to give you 25 rules for living from the one and only Marcus Aurelius. In one passage in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius writes down what he calls epithets for the self. He talks about being honest, talks about being upright. These are words, he says, that he can live by. A couple of different times in my life, I've tried to do that.

• 3:49Ryan Holiday?

  But part of one of the Daily Stoic challenges a few years ago, I wrote down seven of them. I wrote honest, calm, fair, father, brave, generous, and still. These are words that I try to live by. I want to make decisions, take actions that will demonstrate that idea, which will show that those are the watchwords or the epithets that I live by, that I could be described by. And so I think of all the exercises in meditation, that's one that we can all practice is just come up with the epithets for the self, the rules, the descriptors for your character that you want to live and model day in and day out. Marcus really tried to do good. He tried to help as many people, but he also understood that doing the right thing, doing good things, it wasn't always going to be recognized and it wasn't always going to be appreciated.

• 4:34Ryan Holiday?

  He says in Meditations that you can't expect the third thing, being recognized, being appreciated, being thanked for what happened. You already got the thanks, he said, by doing the right thing, by feeling, by knowing that it was the right thing. Everything else the Stoics would say is extra, nice to have, but it can't be why you do it. And I think often of this idea of doing the third thing. The third thing is wanting to hit the bestseller list. The third thing is wanting the thank you card. The third thing is, is the person coming to you and saying, I just want to let you know what that meant to me, how much it helped me. I want to pay you back. No, you do it because it was the right thing. If you get the third thing, if you get the extra, that's great. For the Stoics, that shouldn't be something you want, but most of all, it can't be something

• 5:18Ryan Holiday?

  you expect because you will be disappointed.

• 5:22Ryan Holiday?

  In Book 12 of Meditations, Marcus really says, "It never ceases to amaze me. We love ourselves more than other people, yet we care about their opinions more than our own." I thought about this when my first book of Stoic philosophy came out. I had worked really hard on it. I knew how many copies it sold. I knew what it deserved. And there it was, not on the bestseller list. It got skunked for some inexplicable reason. And I had to remind myself, my judgment of the book is what counts. My opinion is what matters here. So often, that's what we do. We like a shirt, or we like a show, or we like this, or we like where we live. And then other people say, well, that's not cool, or that's strange, or that's weird, or it's incorrect for the following reasons. And we give up our own internal sense of what we like or dislike, what's right or wrong, to do what everyone else is doing.

• 6:04Ryan Holiday?

  Sanity is tying your success to what you say and do. This is insanity is tying it to what other people say and do. So to me, this is one of the most powerful lessons of Marcus, that even the Emperor of Rome was struggling with it, I think, shows how difficult it is to maintain that inner scorecard, that inner compass. Everyone around you is thinking or saying something differently than you. One of the things Marcus really does say in Meditations about the people who would have always been flattering him and telling him he's amazing, or people who would have been criticizing him or attacking him, just think about what they just submitted to a few minutes ago. Think about what they do in private. Think about who they actually are. And when you know who they actually are, how weak they are, or how corrupted they

• 6:46Ryan Holiday?

  are, petty they are, suddenly their approval, their opinion about you won't matter very much. One of my favorite lines in Meditations, he says, "To accept it without arrogance, to let it go with indifference." Good things happen. We get awards. We succeed. We make money. Awesome. But that doesn't say anything about you as a person. We fail. We fall short. We get criticized. Great. That doesn't say anything about you as a person. Another translation, it says, "Receive without pride. Let go without attachment." Sort of even keel, not being affected, not getting too high or too low, not identifying with any of it, but identifying solely with your character. This is a print I have from one of my favorite passages from Marcus Aurelius. I have it on the wall, selling the day's dog services. "Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be, be one."

• 7:31Ryan Holiday?

  And I think arguably Marcus Aurelius's greatest contributions to philosophy are not what he wrote in this book, right? What Marcus's greatest contributions philosophy is how he lived. Even if he had never written a philosophical work, that he'd still be seen as a kind of philosopher king because he embodied the ideas. He lived them. He demonstrated that a king, an emperor, a person of power, influence, or wealth could be good and decent, could do the right thing, could be everything that people expected of him. And that's just, to me, the most important thing we can take from Marcus Aurelius. One of my first reads of Meditations, I noted that Marcus says, "Can only ruin your life if it ruins your character." The idea that success wasn't whether you made money,

• 8:14Ryan Holiday?

  whether you got what you wanted, it's whether you protected your character. Jesus says, "What good is gaining the whole world if you lose your soul?" And we can imagine Marcus struggling with this as the emperor of Rome. It doesn't matter how many buildings he builds or what lands he conquers. To him, it matters if he is a good person or not. A couple of years ago, I wrote this book, Conspiracy. Peter Thiel was outed as gay by this sort of Silicon Valley gossip rag. They treated him very cruelly and he spent millions of dollars and years of his life plotting and scheming to destroy it, which he successfully did. And there's a lot that was really interesting in it, a lot that was really innovative in doing that. I think even some things to be impressed by it, as I was talking about in the book.

• 8:57Ryan Holiday?

  Every day as I was writing, I couldn't help but think of one of my favorite lines from Meditations. Marcus really says, "The best revenge is to not be like your enemy." The point is that getting even often makes you like or worse than the person who supposedly did this grievous, heinous thing to you. We see this in Marcus Aurelius's life. He's betrayed by one of his most trusted generals and he tries not to be angry about it. He has to deal with it, yes, but he tries to actually use it as an opportunity to show the Roman people how one deals with being betrayed, how one deals with civil strife. You can't let the person who wronged you turn you into something just like them. One passage I marked down in Meditations when I first read it. Marcus Aurelius says, "Go straight to the seat of intelligence.

• 9:42Ryan Holiday?

  Writing and reading require a master, so too does life." Mentors have been a huge guiding force in my life. Robert Greene, others. If you don't have a mentor, if you don't have a teacher, if you don't have the kinds of people that Marcus is thanking in the debts and lessons section of Meditations, you're not going to become what you're capable of becoming. You're not going to become anything like Marcus Aurelius. The remarkable thing about Meditations is that it's really a book for the writer, not for the reader. Marcus might even be mortified that we're here talking about him because he never intended to publish it. The point of Meditations was his own practice. He was writing to himself, writing notes to himself. The book accomplished what it was set out to accomplish before it was read by anyone else, let alone, you know, 2,000 years later that it's still helping people.

• 10:27Ryan Holiday?

  And you have to have that kind of journaling practice in your life, I think. How are you meditating on these things? How are you talking to yourself about them? What's the internal dialogue or debate or interrogation process that you have in your life helping you be what you're capable of being and who you're capable of being? Gregory Hayes in his translation of Meditations, he makes a great point, and I missed it the first couple of times. He says that nowhere does Marcus identify as a Stoic. And he says, "Actually, if you asked Marcus, he probably wouldn't have identified with any school at all, even though Meditations is of course filled with all sorts of Stoic observations and principles." He says that Marcus would have identified as a philosopher. Paul Graham in one of his famous essays says, "Keep your identity small.

• 11:10Ryan Holiday?

  Don't identify as a singular thing or with a singular ideology. You want to be a free agent." This is why Seneca quotes so much from Epicurus. He read widely, he understood widely. The point is not to be a Stoic philosopher. The point is to be a philosopher, a lover of wisdom. In book 537, Marcus Aurelius says, "I was a fortunate man, but at some point, fortune abandoned me." And we can imagine Marcus saying this after the plague, after he's burying another child, maybe after he hears again that perhaps his wife is cheating on him, maybe his health has failed him again. And he catches himself again. This is what he's doing in meditations. He's constantly catching himself. But true good fortune is what you make for yourself. Good fortune, he says, is good character, good intentions, and good actions.

• 11:55Ryan Holiday?

  And I just, I love that idea so much, right? It wasn't what was happening to him in the outside. Fortune wasn't this external thing. Good fortune, feeling good, being good, this was something that was up to him, that was inside him, and the choices that he made and the actions that he took. I think the passage that hit me most from Meditations, book 5, Marcus Aurelius talks about struggling to get out of bed in the morning. He's just like you and I, and he's saying, "Ah, but it's so nice here, under the covers." And he says, "But are you meant to feel nice, to huddle under the covers and be warm?" No, he said, "You are meant to do the work of a human being. You gotta get up, you gotta get after it." And when I read that in college for the first time, it hit me so much, I taped it up on my wall. And I've been thinking about it ever since.

• 12:39Ryan Holiday?

  My friend Stephen Pressfield talks about the resistance, the thing that gets in between us and what we want to do. He says, "Nobody says, 'I'm never gonna write my symphony.' He says, 'I'm gonna do it tomorrow.'" Marcus Aurelius struggles with the resistance too, like all of us. He says, "You could be good today, instead you choose tomorrow. We put it off." And actually, Seneca says something similar. He says, "The one thing fools all have in common is that they're always getting ready to begin." The point for Marcus was that you do it now, not later. You do it now. In my office, I have all sorts of reminders of Marcus. I have the prints, I have this bust of him from the 1840s, I have a painting of Marcus that someone did for me. When Marcus says at the beginning of Meditations that nothing is so inspiring as seeing the virtues embodied in the people around us.

• 13:21Ryan Holiday?

  I think this is also true in how you decorate your space, your house, your office, whatever. Find philosophical embodiments of these ideas, things that remind you. When I look at those things, it's just this little sort of subconscious reminder of who I want to be, how I want to live. I'm looking at the virtues being embodied around me, and that keeps me on the straight and narrow. A cold plunge is something you do physically, but it's really about a mindset shift. It's about embracing discomfort. It's about getting comfortable with adversity. It's about pushing your boundaries. It's about challenging yourself. It's about being present in the moment. In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius talks about washing off the dust of earthly life. We know that Romans had bathhouses, they had cold plunges, they would alternate between

• 14:06Ryan Holiday?

  the hot and the cold. And it's hard to be anything but present when I'm sitting here in this cold plunge. This is a plunge, cold plunge. It's just one of the absolute best decisions I've made. And then getting in it every day, try to do about 11 or so minutes a week. That's one of the best decisions that I make every day. If you want to embrace all the benefits, mental, physical, spiritual of a cold plunge, you gotta check out Plunge. It's the one I have here at my house. And you can visit plunge.com to get 150 bucks off your first order if you use code HOLIDAY150 at checkout. That's plunge.com and use code HOLIDAY150 at checkout. Marcus Aurelius' hero of heroes is Antoninus, his adopted stepfather. As far as we know,

• 14:50Ryan Holiday?

  Antoninus Pius doesn't write anything down. He writes no works of Stoic philosophy. He probably wouldn't have even identified as a Stoic or as a philosopher. And yet, to Marcus, he was the embodiment of both Stoicism and philosophy. He was clearly naturally this way. And I suspect some people naturally are. I think we can deduce that because Marcus did have to write this book, Marcus wasn't naturally this way. He was struggling, like you and I are struggling. He was trying to get there. He needed the extra help. And it is inevitable that we will fall short, which is why in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius says, "to pick yourself back up when you fall." But he also says, "to celebrate the fact that you're a human being." What matters, he says, is that you come back to the rhythm

• 15:34Ryan Holiday?

  of it, right? We're gonna be jarred by circumstances. We're gonna be messed up. We're gonna slip on our diet, on our New Year's resolution, on the goal we have. That's okay. What matters is that you get back up. What matters is that more often than not, you stick to it, that you always come back home to it.

• 15:54Ryan Holiday?

  The famous dictum from Lord Acton is that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. What's remarkable about Marcus Aurelius is that he's perhaps the only exception to this rule that we know. He's given absolute power. What is the first thing he does with it? He gives half of it away to his stepbrother. He isn't corrupted by it. It's a remarkable testament to the power of this philosophy, the idea of what Stoicism can make a person. And that's not an accident. In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius warns himself against being Caesarified, of being dyed purple, of being changed by the power and fame and money that the position has given him. And we all have to be worried about being Caesarified or dyed purple. We have to be worried about being changed

• 16:38Ryan Holiday?

  by the number of followers that we have, by the promotion that we just got, by the famous name that we inherited. You're not special. The rules do apply to you. Power doesn't have to corrupt. What it can do is reveal who you actually are, whether you actually are good or bad. One thing Marcus doesn't talk a lot about in Meditations is happiness or joy. But I think that goes back to the idea that he wasn't talking about things that he didn't need help with. He's not having to remind himself that jokes are funny, that sex feels good. In fact, he's reminding himself the opposite, that sex might feel good in the moment, but it can cause regrets, complications, or problems later on. He's reminding himself of the things that he needs the most help with. A nice fancy bed is better than a hard, uncomfortable one. He doesn't need a reminder of that.

• 17:23Ryan Holiday?

  So Meditations is Marcus Aurelius talking about the things that are important to him. But we should not take that omission as meaning anything more than that. The Stoics were happy, the Stoics had joy, the Stoics loved. And we know Marcus did these things. The Stoics were just like us. Marcus had some sense of what human flourishing or happiness was. That's just not what he was talking the most about in Meditations. Marcus Aurelius had a lot to complain about. He's betrayed, he's misled, people lie to him, people try to take things from him. He has a job that he doesn't even want. And yet, nowhere in Meditations, what he thinks is his private diary that no one is going to read, we never once see him complain about any of this. He doesn't complain about being unappreciated, he doesn't complain about being abused, he doesn't complain about being put upon,

• 18:08Ryan Holiday?

  he doesn't complain about the stress. Because, as he says in Meditations, we should never be overheard complaining, not even to ourselves. Concentrate like a Roman, Marcus Aurelius says. Concentrate on doing the thing in front of you as if it was the last thing you were doing in your life. I think about that pretty often. That it could be the last time you send this email. It could be the last time you have this conversation. It could be the last time that I sit down to write or that I sit down to make a video. So am I going to be fully present? Am I going to concentrate? Am I going to do my job? Am I going to meet the standards of my people, of my profession, my history? Am I going to concentrate like a Roman? Am I going to do it like this thing matters? Like I might not get another opportunity to do it. To me, that's the test. That's the standard to try to meet every day that you are lucky enough to be alive.

• 18:55Ryan Holiday?

  It would be a mistake to see Marcus Aurelius as perfect. He wasn't perfect because no one is perfect. He's a human being. Marcus instead was trying to get better, always. Meditations was Marcus Aurelius writing notes to himself. When Marcus Aurelius warns against having a temper or being afraid of death or being ambitious or any of the things that he talks about, he's not lecturing you, he's lecturing him. Probably because he just lost his temper. Probably because he struggled with that. So you don't want to see Marcus as perfect. You want to see Marcus as a fellow human being striving to be their best, just as you and I are striving to be our best. In Book Four of Meditations, this is 437, he says, "On the verge of dying and you're still weighed down, still turbulent, still convinced that external things can harm you, still rude to other people,

• 19:41Ryan Holiday?

  still not acknowledging the truth that wisdom is justice." I just love the intensity with which he's addressing himself. Marcus, again, isn't perfect. He's still struggling with it. He's saying, "It's the end of your life and you still haven't gotten this right." And he's repeating to himself who he wants to be, how he should be. And I think, and this is the important part, he's also saying, "It's not too late. It's never too late." "The fruit of this life," Marcus says at one point in Meditations, "is good character and acts for the common good." Elsewhere, he talks about those epithets for the self. Those are two pretty good ones, right? That you should be good character always and do good things for other people always. And to Marcus, that's what he was striving to do always. Good character, good deeds. It's hard to come up with a better summation for a good life than that.

• 20:27Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca talks about how the greatest empire is self-command, being in charge of yourself. If you can see Marcus realist, this guy who controls literally an enormous empire, struggling with that same idea, realizing that, yeah, I can make the army do this. Yeah, I can purchase that. Yeah, I can make the Senate do this. But that the real power, the real thing to focus on is, am I in command or control of myself? There's a story about Hadrian getting mad, losing his temper, and stabbing a secretary in the eye with a pen. He could get away with that. Nobody cared. Marcus doesn't do anything like that. There's no stories like that about Marcus. Marcus realized that, yeah, there was only a few people were ever powerful enough to be emperor. But fewer among the emperors was a man who was in command of himself. And as Seneca said, no one is fit to rule who is not first in control of themselves.

• 21:12Ryan Holiday?

  That's what Marcus strove to be. And in many ways, that's what Meditations was him trying to get a little bit better at. I might have repeated myself in a few of these, but then again, Marcus repeats himself a lot through Meditations. Because he's not writing a prescription about all of the philosophy. He's not trying to tackle every situation or problem or facet of Stoicism. He's trying to talk about what he needs, which seems to be reminders of his mortality, which seems to be why he shouldn't lose his temper, which seems to be about controlling his ambition, seems about taking the long view or the big, seeing things, big picture. Meditations is not complete or comprehensive. It's a book about the things Marcus needs the most. Just as your journal should be repeatedly coming back to the themes that you need

• 21:56Ryan Holiday?

  the most help with, or the things you're struggling the most with. But what I really want you to subscribe to is our Daily Stoic email. One bit of Stoic wisdom, totally for free, to the largest community of Stoics ever in existence. You can sign up at dailystoic.com/email. There's no spam. You can unsubscribe at any time. I love sending it. I've sent it every day for the last six years, and I hope to see you there at dailystoic.com/email.