You Ain’t Got Time | 10 Habits That Made Marcus Aurelius Great

People are out of their minds and always have been. You get the sense in Seneca’s writings that Rome drove him crazy. You see the same in Epictetus’ writings, perhaps more so. Both men looked at what was happening in Nero’s court and were baffled. People were currying favor with Nero’s cobbler to try to get ahead in the world. People were bankrupting themselves to impress people they didn’t even like. And things were no different by Marcus Aurelius’ time, that’s for sure. But for as long as there have been these wack jobs out there, the Stoic response has been the same: Tuning it out. It’s saying to yourself: I ain’t got time for that, ain’t got time to argue, ain’t got time to change you, ain’t got time to even try to understand. That’s what Marcus is effectively opening Meditations with! He’s saying, look people today are going to be remarkably dumb but I can’t let them implicate me in their ugliness. I can’t get bogged down in it. I can’t try to reform them. I just need to do my job. Things are not asking to be judged by you, Marcus says later in Meditations, leave them alone. Life is very short. Too short for silly arguments, too short for beating your head against the wall, too short to try to understand things that don’t matter, that are not asking to be understood by you. Leave them alone. Focus on what you have to do. Don’t get implicated in ugliness.✉️ 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.

• 0:25Ryan Holiday?

  You ain't got time. The things people do are inexplicable, even insane. The things they manage to be offended about, the positions they stake out, the confrontations they seek out, the choices they make. People are out of their minds and always have been. You get the sense in Seneca's writings that Rome drove him crazy. You see the same in Epictetus's writings, perhaps more so. Both men looked at what was happening in Nero's court and were baffled. People were currying in favor with Nero's cobbler trying to get ahead in the world. People were bankrupting themselves to impress people they didn't even like. And things were no different by Marcus Aurelius's time, that's for sure. But as long as there have been these whack jobs out there,

• 1:08Ryan Holiday?

  the Stoic response has been the same, tuning it out. It's saying to yourself, "I ain't got time for that. I ain't got time to argue. Ain't got time to change you. I ain't even got time to try to understand." That's what Marcus Aurelius is effectively opening meditations with. He's saying, "Look, today, people are going to be remarkably dumb, and I can't let them implicate me in their ugliness. I can't get bogged down in it. I can't try to reform them. I just need to do my job." Things are not asking to be judged by you, Marcus Aurelius says later in Meditations. Leave them alone. Life is very short. Too short for silly arguments, too short for beating your head against the wall, too short to try to understand things that don't matter, that are not asking to be understood by you. Leave them alone.

• 1:53Ryan Holiday?

  Focus on what you have to do. Don't get implicated in ugliness.

• 2:03Ryan Holiday?

  He wasn't just naturally wise, naturally courageous, naturally disciplined. It was an effort for him, as it is for all of us, fight to be the person philosophy tried to make you.

• 2:16Ryan Holiday?

  This guy, Marcus Aurelius was the emperor of Rome, the most powerful man in the world. And you might think that his life was easy, that he had it made. In fact, Marcus Aurelius experiences incredible difficulty and adversity from the get-go. Power and responsibility is foist upon him. It's not something that he expected or wanted. And he finds himself in this job that he knows tends to corrupt. And he probably also had some inclination of how difficult the job would be. He experiences historic floods, a devastating plague, many years of warfare. He's betrayed by one of his generals in an attempted coup. He buries multiple children. I mean, this guy did not have an easy life, despite the privileges that he was lucky enough to enjoy. Marcus Aurelius knew that he had a lot of power.

• 3:01Ryan Holiday?

  But he still faced the fundamental human reality that many things were outside of his control that were not in his power. And that's why he so took to Stoic philosophy, is ultimately, just like you or I, trying to navigate a difficult, unpredictable world populated by difficult, uncontrollable other people. And that's what he's doing in his meditations, writing advice to himself, trying to uphold these Stoic principles in the difficult crucible that he found himself in. I'm Ryan Holiday. I've written a number of books about Stoic philosophy. I've spoken about it to everyone from the NBA to the NFL, sitting senators and special forces leaders. So in today's episode, I want to give you some rules for life from the great Marcus Aurelius.

• 3:44Ryan Holiday?

  We do ourselves a disservice when we make historical figures into more than what they are. When we forget that they were human beings doing the absolute best that they could. They weren't made that way. They became that way. One of the passages in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius says, "Fight to be the person philosophy tried to make you." It's important we realize that he was doing precisely that, fighting to be Marcus Aurelius. He wasn't just naturally this guy. He wasn't naturally wise, naturally courageous, naturally just, naturally disciplined. It was an effort for him, as it is for all of us. It was a daily struggle. In fact, that's what Meditations was. It's the log, the historical record of Marcus Aurelius fighting to be what he wanted to be, inevitably, invariably, like all of us, not actually getting there the vast majority of the time.

• 4:29Ryan Holiday?

  That's what we're trying to do. We're all trying to fight to be what we're capable of being. We're fighting who we know we want to be. We fight to be the person that philosophy tries to make us.

• 4:44Ryan Holiday?

  What journaling is fundamentally is putting your thoughts up for review. Meditation is a form of that. I think going for walks is a way to do where you're having to sit with those thoughts a little bit. The Socratic method is this, and as you play that out, you realize it's not on as sound a footing as your emotional sense would have you believe. You think about how important it would be for someone like Marcus Aurelius to be doing that in meditations. Whatever he wants, he can do. Like, there's a moment where Hadrian, his predecessor, gets angry and he just grabs a pen and just stabs it in the eye of a secretary. No consequences. You can't get impeached. You can do whatever you want. And so Marcus is trying to not be like that, but knowing that he could be Tiberius or Nero. Hadrian can do whatever he wants.

• 5:26Ryan Holiday?

  I think the journaling practice of meditations, the notes to himself, is the process by which he filters out the intrusive thoughts or the destructive urges. And we all need that. Yeah.

• 5:44Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius was a guy who met his fair share of jerks. But he said, you know what you're supposed to do when you meet a jerk? You say to yourself, is a world without shamelessness, without jerks, possible? He says, no, then this is one of those people. They are playing that role. And when you can start to see people, even the frustrating, annoying, obnoxious people that you meet in your life as playing a role assigned to them, a role that someone has to do, that there is no version of the earth where there are not annoying, obnoxious, awful people, and you can accept them, you can tolerate them, you can also understand they are in a minority. It was inevitable that eventually you would bump up against one of these people. And now you have. It's no more and no less than that.

• 6:22Ryan Holiday?

  "Don't be overheard complaining," Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations. This is not even to yourself. I love that distinction. It's not only not like whining publicly, but not whining to yourself, not pitying yourself. Because the point is, it never makes a difference. It's funny, when I've talked about this before, people go, oh, but what about protests? Taking an action is not a complaint. Complaining is when you think that, emoting about, simply speaking about, simply letting your displeasure be known, when you confuse that with actually doing something about your problem.

• 6:55Ryan Holiday?

  You have to ask yourself in every moment, in every instance, every inquiry, every opportunity, every thought, Marcus really says, you have to ask yourself, is this essential? Because most of what we do and say isn't essential. It's unnecessary, it's superfluous, it's silly, it's ridiculous, it's superficial. It's not something we need to do, and you have to eliminate. When you eliminate the inessential, you get the double benefit of doing essential things better. Do less to do more, do less better. And when we eliminate these things, when we say no to things, when we pair things out, it doesn't feel like much in and of itself, because it isn't, but it adds up in a big way. It makes us leaner, it makes us more efficient, it gives us the double benefit of doing the things we are going to do that much better.

• 7:37Ryan Holiday?

  The Stoics believe that we can dye events with our own color, that we can take what happens and turn it into our own benefit, that this idea of whether something is unfortunate or fortunate is a choice. We get to decide that. We decide what it means for us. That's the choice. And so Marcus in Meditations, he says, our actions can be impeded, but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions, because we can accommodate and adapt. The impediment to action advances action. It stands in the way, it comes the way. The situation can be terrible, it can be not your choice at all, it can be the exact opposite of what you want, and yet, it's still a chance to practice virtue. No one's saying it's going to be to the financial benefit of the company, no one's going to

• 8:19Ryan Holiday?

  say, you're all going to look at it and go, those were the golden years. But you do have the opportunity to practice virtue, to be your best self in every situation. All the external factors are not in your control, who you are in those situations, that is in your control.

• 8:37Ryan Holiday?

  There's a pretty amazing story about Marcus really. It's pretty late in life, he's seen leaving his palace in Rome. He's carrying these tablets, and a friend says, where are you going? He says, I'm off to see Sextus the philosopher to learn that which I do not yet know. The friend marvels, he says, here's the most powerful man in the world, even as an old age, picking up his books and going to school. I think that's in effect what Marcus is. He remains a student. It's his notebook, it's his exercise book, it's his... Workbook, he's doing work on himself even as an old man. And the fruits of that come down to us. It's just so wonderful to think of Marcus even as an old man. Maybe some of the lines in here, he learned from sexist philosopher. He thanks sexist philosopher in book one, the debts and lessons chapter.

• 9:22Ryan Holiday?

  So the idea for Marcus was that you always stay a student.

• 9:29Ryan Holiday?

  Famously is betrayed by his best friend. He thinks Marcus is sick and near death. And so this guy named Evidius Cassius goes, I'm the emperor now. But Marcus wasn't dead. And so it puts him in this horrible position. Obviously you can't allow this, but he doesn't want to fight a war over. And he basically says, this is the final chapter in the obstacles of the way, the idea that even this is an opportunity. And he says, like, I'm going to show history how civil strife can be dealt with. He tries to give Cassius a chance to come to his senses. Eventually he has to take the Roman army out in battle, deal with it. And then he weeps when someone kills Cassius because it deprives him of the opportunity of forgiving him. And he orders the Senate, he says, do not execute a single person for this. Do not let my name be stained in blood, which is maybe impractical, maybe too philosophical, but there is a beauty to that.

• 10:13Ryan Holiday?

  He talks about forgiveness and meditation, but then he has to actually apply it in his life.

• 10:22Ryan Holiday?

  This is a print I have from one of my favorite passages from Marx's realist. I have it on the wall, selling the day in the store. He says, waste no more time arguing what a good man should be, be one. And I think arguably Marx's realist's greatest contributions to philosophy are not what he wrote in this book, right? What Marcus's greatest contributions to philosophy is how he lived, that 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.

• 11:04Ryan Holiday?

  And that's just, to me, the most important thing we can take from Marx's realist.

• 11:12Ryan Holiday?

  And it is inevitable that we will fall short. Marcus did, I do, everyone does. Antoninus Pius probably did too. 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 of it. "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 progress we were making. 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."

• 11:52Ryan Holiday?

  Every day, I send out one Stoic-inspired email, totally for free, almost a million people all over the world. If you want to take your Stoicism journey to the next level, I would love for you to subscribe. It's totally for free. You can unsubscribe at any time. There's no spam. Just go to dailystoic.com/email. Love to see you there.