100 (Stoic) Lessons From Marcus Aurelius

Marcus Aurelius didn't read a book once and think that he got it. He read it over and over and over again. In today's video, Ryan shares 100 lessons that he has gotten from reading Meditations hundreds of times over the last decade.💡How to Read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations (A Daily Stoic Guide) is designed to help you get the most wisdom and very best tools Stoicism has to offer and apply them to your life. Get How to Read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations (A Daily Stoic Guide) & all other Daily Stoic courses for FREE when you join Daily Stoic Life | dailystoic.com/life📕 Pick up your own Premium Leather Edition of Meditations - Marcus Aurelius (Gregory Hays Translation) at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and 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.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius didn't read a book once and think that he got it. He read it over and over and over again. I've probably read Meditations 100 times or more. I was reading it just yesterday. And in today's video, I want to give you 100 lessons that I've gotten from my hundreds of reads of Meditations over the last decade. And I hope they're of use to you. And I hope, most of all, that you go pick this book up and read it yourself.

• 1:10Ryan Holiday?

  And hey, look, if you want another 100 pieces of advice from Marcus Aurelius that I have compiled that's not in this video, but I think maybe is even better, just go to dailystoic.com/marcus100. I'll link to that below. Marcus100. And I'll give you 100 more pieces of life-changing advice from someone I've been studying and thinking about for the last 20 years. People don't seem to understand this one really important thing. It's that you have a superpower. You have the power, Marcus Aurelius says, to have no opinion. He says, remember events, things are not asking to be judged by you. You don't have to have an opinion about this, he says. You can just see it as it is. You can think nothing of it. You don't have to label it. You don't have to put it in categories. You don't have to say

• 1:53Ryan Holiday?

  it's fair or unfair, positive or negative, smart or dumb. Just accept it as it is. The Stoics try to see the world as objective. Try not to insert opinions or judgments on top of things, because this is the path to peace. It's the path to wisdom. And of course, being agnostic in this way allows you to get to work doing what you need to do, rather than wasting your time labeling, judging, and having opinions about stuff that is not up to you. 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. And that's what Meditations was. Meditations was Marcus Aurelius writing notes to himself.

• 2:37Ryan Holiday?

  So 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 is needing to work on, 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. Even though he's very famous and very important, Marcus Aurelius makes a lot of effort in his writings to remind himself how worthless fame is. He lists a lot of names in Meditations. Emperors who came before him, famous poets, and playwrights, and power brokers. He's saying how unfamiliar these names,

• 3:21Ryan Holiday?

  which were so important not very long ago, already are. It's like what Taylor Swift was talking about when she says the who's who of who's that. Marcus Aurelius is saying that's what we'll become. It doesn't matter how important we are, how powerful we are, how much money we make. We all slip into oblivion very, very quickly. He says, "Words once common now sound archaic." And the names of the famous dead as well. "Everything fades quickly," he says, "and is forgotten." What is eternal fame? He says, "It's emptiness. It's worthless." So what do we prize instead? Being a good person now, doing good now, being virtuous now. Some people say that Marcus Aurelius's Meditations is depressing. But you know what? Marcus Aurelius's life is depressing. This is a guy who lives through a historic flood, a plague, endless wars, there's a coup.

• 4:06Ryan Holiday?

  They say no parent should have to bury a child. Marcus Aurelius buries half of his children. He has to attend six funerals for his children. He lost his father at an early age. Later, he loses his wife. It's one thing after another for this guy, one heartbreak after another. So Marcus Aurelius's Meditations isn't depressing. The fact that he got out of bed every morning was a profound statement of hope, and perseverance, and resilience, and optimism. That he cared about anything, that he strove to be better, that he strove to be a good person, that he didn't let it wear him down, turn him into a nihilist, that it didn't deprive him of meaning and purpose. This is- The hopefulness, this is the optimism, this is the cheerfulness in Stoicism that despite the blows of fate, the unfairness of life, we keep going, we keep striving to be good, we keep striving to be and do our best.

• 4:51Ryan Holiday?

  So the famous passage from Marcus Aurelius where he's talking about how the obstacle is the way, do you know what kind of obstacles he's talking about? He's not talking about natural disasters, he's not talking about losing your arm, he's not talking about any of that, he's talking about people, he's talking about assholes, he's talking about jerks. He's saying that people are our proper occupation. So they actually can't impede us, they can't get in our way, they can't actually cause us trouble, because all the things they do are opportunities for us, opportunities for us to practice virtue, courage, and discipline, and justice, and wisdom. We can have intentions and people can cause problems and disruptions, they can get in the way of what we are trying to do, but they present us new opportunities to try new things.

• 5:32Ryan Holiday?

  Let's try to see these frustrating, annoying, obnoxious people in our lives not as problems or frustrations, or even obnoxious at all, but actually as opportunities, opportunities for us to be kind, opportunities for us to be patient, opportunities for us to be creative, opportunities for us to teach, and opportunities for us to learn. That's what Marcus Aurelius means when he says the obstacle is the way. The key to a good life, Marcus Aurelius said, was a strong mind. Fortune was unpredictable, but mental toughness was something you could depend on. He said, "We want to be like the rock that the waves crash over and eventually the sea falls still around."

• 6:13Ryan Holiday?

  That's what cultivating a mental resilience, emotional fortitude is all about. And if you can do that, then nothing can throw you off and you are unbreakable. I remember once I was having a conversation with the great Robert Greene and he showed me his copy of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. And he would write in the margins, little AF. AF stood for amor fati. Morfati actually comes to us from Nietzsche, who was not a particularly big fan of the Stoics, but expressed something, I think, at the core of Stoicism. He said, "Not just to bear what is necessary or accept it, sis, you must love it." Amor fati, a love of one's fate. It was Robert who made this explicit connection between Stoicism and amor fati,

• 6:56Ryan Holiday?

  which I've popularized in Daily Stoic and our videos, my books. I have a chapter about it in The Obstacle is the Way. Robert and I even made this coin, which I carry with me everywhere. It says amor fati. It has that picture of a fire. Marcus Aurelius, again, remember saying that what you throw on top of a fire becomes fuel for the fire. The fire loves what you're throwing in there. So I just love that idea. And I'm so indebted to Robert to helping me see this connection between two wildly different philosophical schools of thought, but finding this one area where they converge. We could imagine that that's what Marcus Aurelius is doing in Meditations, right? Like, this is, what's weird about Meditations is that it's not a book for the reader. It's a book for the writer. Right. Like, he was writing it. He was getting his thoughts out on paper. Yeah, and we know for a fact that he wrote significant chunks of it

• 7:40Ryan Holiday?

  while leading the Roman army. So he's, you know, maybe it's the morning before battle. Maybe it's the evening afterwards. And he's just sort of sitting in this tent, writing things down. I think journaling is a big part. Like, if you can take, you've got these thoughts that are just kind of pinging around in your head. The act of writing them down creates even just a few feet of distance, which is really powerful. I think journaling would be a way the Stoics would do that. There's this image that I can't get out of my head, and it's Marcus Aurelius in the depths of the Antonine Plague. This devastating global pandemic that wrecks and ravages Rome in every way you can imagine. And the image I have is of Marcus Aurelius holding a two-week sale on the lawn of the Imperial Palace. He sells jewels and statues and robes and couches and furniture, all the finery that goes along with being an emperor.

• 8:25Ryan Holiday?

  He puts up for sale. And he does this because he's trying to send a message. He's trying to say, "I don't need this stuff. I'm gonna put others before me. I'm not gonna live in luxury while other people are suffering." It's the image of the CEO taking a pay cut in a bad economy. It's an athlete who renegotiates their contract so the team can add on extra players. It's a leader who eats last. That's the idea. It's a coworker who covers- Your shift. It's about putting others before yourself. And that's what greatness is. That's what this idea of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom is supposed to allow us to do, to do the right thing, even when it's hard,

• 9:08Ryan Holiday?

  even when it goes against our own immediate self-interest. It's what allows us to show up for others, to sacrifice for the sake of others. It's what allows us to share what we have. And it's what allows us to be there when it really matters. Nobody likes getting up early, not even Marcus Rilis. In Meditations, he talks about trying to get up early. And he has this fantastic conversation with himself. He goes, but it's warmer under the covers. And he says, is that what you were put here to do? To huddle under the blankets and be warm? He says, we're all put here for a purpose. We have a nature. We have a duty and we have to go and we have to do that. And the morning is the best time to do stuff, to get stuff done. So that's why the Stoics tried to get up early. I say tried because they didn't always do it and it wasn't always easy. And they didn't always like it. They tried to do it anyway.

• 9:53Ryan Holiday?

  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, which seems about taking the long view, 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 the most help with, or the things you're struggling the most with.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  The Stoic goal isn't to be, you know, not care about anyone. It's the opposite. It's kindness. It's a virtue in Stoicism, like Buddhist compassion, in a way.

• 10:48Ryan Holiday?

  At the beginning of Meditations, Marcus Rilis talks about one of his teachers taught him to be free of passion, but full of love. And I think that's lovely. The short lines in Meditations are the best. Discard your misperceptions. Stop being jerked around like a puppet. Limit yourself to the present. They're just a couple of words. They say so much and they cut through so much space and time. He never uses two words, or one will do. He doesn't beat around the bush. He just comes out and says it. And the advice is so clear and so obvious. And yet, as simple as it is, so incredibly difficult. You think you're a good person, but you're hurting people.

• 11:28Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Rios reminds himself in Meditations, he says, "Remember, you can commit an injustice by doing nothing also." There's the things that we turn away from, the things we don't want to think about, the things that we say are someone else's problems, the things we say we can't do anything about. And those are injustices that we are allowing to be perpetrated. We're complicit in that, unless we try to do something about them. Marcus Rios talks about being jarred by circumstances, messing up, failing. He talks about the idea of a rhythm, coming back to the rhythm. And I like this idea. I think Stoics talk about the logos or the way. You think of the logos, the kind of rhythm of the universe being the way, something you come back to. So even if you screw up, it's always there.

• 12:12Ryan Holiday?

  The metronome is always there, the rhythm of the music is always there, you want to come back to it. The obstacle is not the problem, you're the problem. Your opinions about it are the problem. Your orientation towards it is the problem. The Stoics say the obstacle is the way, right? The impediment to action advances action, what stands in the way becomes the way. What do they mean by that? Marcus Rios is saying that there's something you get to do because of this. There's things that you can do now that you couldn't do before. There's an opportunity for you to act with courage, or discipline, or justice, or wisdom. There's something you can do now that you couldn't ordinarily do. We can't let a crisis go to waste. We have to use this thing in front of us. Yeah, it seems like an obstacle, but now there's something we get to do because of it, if we do it.

• 12:55Ryan Holiday?

  You have the most powerful man in the world, in an empire 2,000 years ago, who believed preposterous things about where the universe came from, and even their sense of right and wrong. And the Romans were like us, and then were utterly not like us. And no one was more removed from normal, modern life than the emperor. You crack open this book, Meditations, to himself. And it's not just, "Oh, I get a sense of what he's talking about." But it sounds like he's speaking to you with what you are dealing with right now. What it is ultimately is the specificity. The total insularity of it makes it utterly generalizable and relatable.

• 13:38Ryan Holiday?

  He was authentically being himself and in that way manages to speak to millions for all time. 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. Couple of different times in my life, I've tried to do that. 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,

• 14:17Ryan Holiday?

  which will show that those are the watchwords or the epithets that I live by, that I could be described by. 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. It's the idea of, it's not that you're gonna die tomorrow for sure, but 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 gonna be fully present? Am I gonna concentrate? Am I gonna do my job? Am I gonna meet the standards of my people, of my profession, of my family, whatever it is? Am I gonna concentrate like a Roman? Am I gonna do it like this thing matters? Like I might not get another opportunity to do it. To me, that's the test.

• 15:02Ryan Holiday?

  That's the standard to try to meet every day that you are lucky enough to be alive. 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. He says, "But true good fortune is what you make for yourself." Good fortune, he says, is good character, good intentions, and good actions. I love that idea so much. It wasn't what was happening to him in the outside. Fortune wasn't this external thing. Good fortune, feeling good, being good.

• 15:47Ryan Holiday?

  This was something that was up to him, that was inside him, and the choices that he made and the actions that he took.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius is the first thing to read, right?

• 16:08Ryan Holiday?

  It's probably the easiest, most accessible work of philosophy ever written, and the most universal.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Because it was his diary. It was not intended to be read by anybody, as far as we know.

• 16:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  And it's the most empowering thing I ever read, especially for when I was young. It was incredibly important. There were other things, too. You know, the Meditations are prized, which is incredibly important, but it's kind of like Christian Stoicism. And you realize that the root of a lot of these thinking that we have that's most empowering to us, how could it be conceived of, is depressing. On the contrary. This is basically, "Bring it on."

• 16:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  You know, this is life. This is life. There's a lot I don't choose. Bring it on. And this is one of the ways that I use Stoicism to talk about, the best way to understand happiness, because I'm a happiness specialist. And so much of the misguided work that we've had in happiness is just positivity.

• 16:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  You know, just positive thinking. That's the wrong way of thinking about it.

• 16:56Ryan Holiday?

  You're being crazy, letting them determine whether you did a good job or not, whether you're happy or not, whether you're a success or not. Marcus Aurelius says ambition is tying your happiness to what other people do and say and think. Sanity, he says, is tying it to your own actions. Like, when I work on my books, the writing of the book is up to me. How it does on the bestseller list, what people think about it, what the reviews say, that isn't up to me. So my definition of success is an internal one. I'm focused on the parts of it I control. Do I want other people to like it and care about it? Sure, I guess. It's nice to have, but it's extra. It's not why I do it, because to need it is to be insane and, of course, incredibly vulnerable. Another one that I didn't get at first, Marcus Aurelius is saying,

• 17:40Ryan Holiday?

  "To avoid imperialization," he says, "that indelible stain." And I didn't really know what he meant by imperialization. And that's when I saw it in another translation, I realized what he's talking about is imperialization, like the imperial system of Rome. He means to not be Caesarified, to not be corrupted by his position. So I think sometimes it's just where you are. You don't know what a certain word means, or just the intonation that you're reading about it. It doesn't hit you in the right way. And this is why you have to come back to things, why you can't just be satisfied with getting the gist of something. You have to return to it over and over again, because you get it in a new way. It also is why, as much as I've loved the Hays translation, and why we have this edition... It's why I've read the other translations.

• 18:25Ryan Holiday?

  It's why I like the Robin Waterfield annotated version. Because he's bringing his perspective. He's breaking down what he sees in it. And each time you do that, you get something new. In Gregory Hays's introduction of Meditations, he says, "There's an American president who rereads Marcus Aurelius every single year." Some research turned up. He was talking then about President Bill Clinton. Obviously, Bill Clinton did not get truly the message of Meditations. But I think the point is, how much better off would we be if every leader, if every person in a position of power was familiar with Marcus Aurelius and his writings? Because he was there. He had that job. He had that job times 1,000. And he knew what you had to strive to do. He knew what you had to try your hardest not to do.

• 19:08Ryan Holiday?

  He knew what you had to be to be great. And I think it's important that it's not just reading it once. Again, it's the idea of rereading it every year. I know that I've taken something new out of it each time I've picked up this book, as I have now for almost 15 years. And that's why Bill Clinton was rereading it every year. And that's why every leader, every parent, every person should do the same. There's a passage in Marcus Aurelius's Meditations where he goes, "Vespasian." He goes, "How many people know who that is?" And Vespasian was the emperor, like, five emperors before Marcus? So this is the most powerful, important person in the world, ruled as an emperor god in the biggest empire of the most famous empire in history. And nobody knows who he is.

• 19:49Ryan Holiday?

  His point was not, "Okay, so you have to really conquer a lot of territory to be more famous than Vespasian." He was saying, "This is a race you can't win." You're harming yourself. Marcus Aurelius says, "It can only harm you if it harms your character." What he means is, the thing happens to you. They stole from you. They lied to you. They did something to you. But then it's in how you respond. If that makes you worse, that makes you do something unethical, it makes you something other than what you should be. That's where the harm comes from. The harm comes in your reaction and how you're responding to the thing. What they did to you is nothing if it doesn't touch inside you, if it doesn't change who you are, what you do, how you treat people. Marcus Aurelius had a lot to

• 20:32Ryan Holiday?

  Complain about. A lot goes wrong. He doesn't meet with the good fortune that he deserved. 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, doesn't complain about being abused. He doesn't complain about being put upon. He doesn't complain about the stress. He doesn't do any of it because, as he says in Meditations, we should never be overheard complaining, not even to ourselves.

• 21:08Speaker 03

  I lost this wife of 60 years and

• 21:11Ryan Holiday?

  I'm so sorry.

• 21:12Speaker 03

  It's sort of devastating, but there was a Marcus Aurelius quote that really lifted me, which was, I don't know it literally, but you'll know it. If you lose a loved one, honor her and in the sense, try to be more like her and then she'll live in your actions. And so my wife was very good and I, I just tried to be like her. And when I tried to be like her, I, you know, like she was very, if someone was alone or sick or something, she'd call them up and be comforting to them and I'm not like that. So I started to do that. People that I, I know, some guys my age who have no grandchildren are just there. And call them up and say, how are you and being like her. And they were so pleased. It's always so kind and

• 21:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 21:57Speaker 03

  So I keep my wife in my life with Marcus Aurelius advice by trying to be more like her.

• 22:03Ryan Holiday?

  I find that absolutely beautiful. Since you're a lover of Marcus Aurelius, I'll give you this quote. My favorite translation is the Hays translation, which he did for the Modern Library. This is what Marcus Aurelius says he learned from his brother Severus. He says, "To love my family, truth and justice. It was through him that I encountered Thrasse, Helvidius, Cato, Dion and Brutus, and conceived of a society of equal laws governed by equality of status and of speech and of rulers who respect the liberty of their subjects above all else." And you don't think that our founders aren't imbibing Marcus Aurelius? It's all there. The catechism is just being rewritten. It had already been written. I remember I was once talking to the great Robert Green and I asked him what one of his favorite passages from Marcus Aurelius's

• 22:46Ryan Holiday?

  Meditations was. He said it was the one where Marcus Aurelius is talking about. He's looking at this big feast and he says, "Oh, that's a dead bird. Oh, that's a dead pig. Oh, this wine is rotted grapes." I said, "Robert, why did you like that?" And he said, "That's what I try to do in my writing. I try to deconstruct things, to take away the preconceived notions, to strip them of the mythology that they have." It's actually what Marcus says. He says it's about stripping things of the legend that encrust them, about seeing them as they actually are. I think that's not only what a philosopher has to do, but I think that's what a great writer like Robert Green does. In Book 12 of Meditations, Marcus Aurelius says, "It never ceases to amaze me. We love ourselves more than other people, yet we care about their opinions more than our own."

• 23:31Ryan Holiday?

  I thought about this when my first book of Stoic philosophy came out. I had worked really hard on it. 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, not whether I hit this arbitrary list. I can't think about that." But so often, that's what we do. We like a shirt, or we like a show, or we like this, and then other people say, "Well, that's not cool," or "That's strange," or "That'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. And Marcus would say that this is crazy. In fact, he says that sanity is tying your success to what you say and do. Insanity is tying it to what other people say and do. This is one of the most powerful lessons of Marcus, that even the Emperor of Rome was struggling

• 24:13Ryan Holiday?

  with it, I think, shows how difficult it is to maintain that inner scorecard when everyone around you is thinking or saying something differently than you. I was lucky enough, actually, to interview Gregory Hays, the translator of these two books, way back in 2007. I just had this little blog and I sent him a note, and I asked him what his favorite passage in Meditations was. So I'll read it to you. He said, "Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone, those that are now and those to come. Existence flows past us like a river." The what is in constant flux. The why has a thousand variations. Nothing is stable, not even what's right here. The infinity of the past and future gapes before us.

• 24:58Ryan Holiday?

  A chasm whose depths we cannot see. And actually, when we illustrated this edition of Meditations, I've tried to capture that, that time flows like a river. And you just think of it rushing past. You think of Marcus Aurelius riding it near the Danube in A Quincum. Water is clearly this repeated metaphor and analogy in the Stoics. And most of all, I think it can both humble and inspire us. Part of the reason your life sucks is because your thoughts suck. Marcus Aurelius says that our life is dyed by the color of our thoughts. So if we see only negative, if we only see the worst in people, if we only see what's impossible, if we only see how we screwed up, that's gonna color our perception of reality. Your life is dyed by the color of your thoughts.

• 25:43Ryan Holiday?

  Several points in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius summarizes what are, in effect, the three disciplines of Stoicism that you need to know always. Perception, how we see things. Action, what we do about those things. What part of those things are outside our control? The discipline of perception is what part of this is in my control? What isn't? What is it actually? How do I see it as clearly as possible? Then the next step is what are you gonna do about it? What action can you take? And the third part is the will, the fortitude, the strength, the perseverance that you bring to bear on that problem obstacle situation. Perception, action, will. That's the essence of Stoic philosophy, which Marcus organizes meditations around and returns to repeatedly, over and over again. Marcus says, not only can you not expect Plato's Republic,

• 26:27Ryan Holiday?

  but he says you have to deal with the place that you're in. You gotta make practical decisions based on what you're in. He says, if the cucumber is bitter at one point in Meditations, throw it out. He says, if there's brambles in the path, go around. Don't despair, don't be mad, don't wish it was otherwise. Just get to work, start where you are with what you have and build from there. There's no way that Marcus Aurelius does not have an anger problem. He talks about temper. And losing your cool and your emotions too much for his private journal. If that's not something he's actively struggling with. My reading of it over and over again is like, the reason he doesn't say like jokes are funny, you know, or sex feels good is he doesn't need a reminder of that. Like he's got that covered. The book is him really trying to remind himself of what he keeps forgetting.

• 27:11Speaker 04

  Right.

• 27:12Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius is clearly very strict with himself. Meditations is one sort of rule admonishment, high, almost impossible standard that he's setting for himself after another. And yet, we're told by historians, the brilliance of Marcus is that his strictness was limited solely to himself. And this was a deliberate thing by Marcus Aurelius. He says tolerant with others, strict with yourself. He was conscious of the fact that it was called self-discipline for a reason. You control yourself, you control the standards you set for yourself, but you have to be tolerant and understanding of other people. And in other part in Meditations, he chastises himself for not being a better forgiver of faults. And that's what we have to cultivate. This practice should make us better, but also more forgiving and tolerant of other people. You just gotta mind your own business.

• 27:57Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius reminds us, we should stop trying to escape other people's faults. We should try to escape our own. One of my favorite little tidbits about Marcus is there's lines in there and they're like, this isn't, this sounds like more like a quote than a thing. And they've tracked it down. It's like, oh, this is a lost line from a play from Euripides or something. It's like, this is the only existing fragment from that thing. And he's almost certainly quoting it from memory just to himself. Or there's little lines from the great poets. Like this is a person steeped in all the great forms of art. In addition to being a politician and a parent, nobody's journal is that good. It's pretty incredible.

• 28:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I like Seneca because like when you read his letters, you're like, wait a minute, you said this other thing in another letter. You know, he's very human. He'll be like, you know, you shouldn't just quote people. You know, you should have some of your own ideas. And he's like, by the way, here's this quote from.

• 28:48Ryan Holiday?

  Here's my daily quote for you.

• 28:49Speaker 04

  Here's my daily quote from.

• 28:53Speaker 04

  You know, so it's just like really human. How did Marcus Aurelius die?

• 28:56Ryan Holiday?

  Of the plague. Marcus was writing in what we now call the Antonine Plague. Like they named it after him, but. It's like a global pandemic. It starts in the East, overwhelms Rome. Five, 10 million people die. They have no way of stopping it. So Marcus leads through all of that. The suspicion is that he catches it at the end, realizes he has it, has to send his son away so he doesn't give it to his son, sets in motion like a series of advisors who should lead his son. And then his son promptly like gets rid of all of them and goes bad. Your anger is impotent. Marcus realist in Meditations, he quotes a line from a lost play by the playwright Euripides. And the line says, "And why should you feel anger at the world as if the world would notice?"

• 29:42Ryan Holiday?

  Nobody cares. It doesn't matter. It doesn't mean anything. Your anger, your resentment, your grievance, you are shouting into an enormous void. You are yelling at an inanimate object. You are mad at forces that are so enormous, that are utterly amoral, completely indifferent to you and your existence. So you might as well let it go. What good is posthumous fame? This Stoic say. It won't do you any good. You'll be dead. And more importantly, Marcus realist reminds us that the people in the future aren't going to magically be better or smarter. They're going to be just as stupid and annoying and misinformed as they are now. So stop chasing posthumous fame. Exist in the present. Do what you can now. Do what's right now. The fruit of this life, Marcus says at one point in Meditations, is good character and acts for the common good.

• 30:27Ryan Holiday?

  Elsewhere, he talks about those epithets for the self. Those are two pretty good ones. You should be a good character always and do good things for other people always. That was his motto. Good character, good deeds. It's hard to come up with a better summation for a good life than that. You care about yourself more than other people. You're self-interested, as all people are by definition. And yet, Marcus realist points out, we care about other people's opinions more than our own. We care if they like what we wear, if they like what we say, if they think we're good or bad or whatever. It's insane. Trust your opinion. Develop your own internal compass, your own internal sense of whether you're doing a good job or a bad job, whether you were successful or not. You can't outsource it to the crowd. Remember, the crowd is the mob.

• 31:12Ryan Holiday?

  The mob is irrational. You can't let them determine any of it. Philosophy can feel like this impractical, inaccessible thing. But Marcus realist writes in Meditations, he says, "No role is so well-suited to philosophy as the one you're in right now." He says, "It stares you in the face." And of course, he's talking to himself. Of course, he's talking about being emperor. But if it stares the emperor in the face, that no role is so well-suited to being philosophical as that, I think it's also true for being a janitor, for being a stay-at-home parent, to being a salesperson, to being an astronaut, whatever it is that you do, whatever role life has you in in this moment stares you in the face. Nothing is so well-suited to what you're doing as this philosophy.

• 31:56Ryan Holiday?

  At his most vulnerable moment, Marcus Aurelius was betrayed. He was sick, he was struggling, people didn't know if he would survive or not. One of his trusted generals, Avidius Cassius, declares himself emperor. This not only is a betrayal of their relationship, it puts Marcus Aurelius and his family in grave danger. So Marcus had every reason to seek revenge, and he doesn't. In fact, he uses it as this opportunity, he says, to teach future Roman generations how to deal with civil strife. When Marcus Aurelius talks in Meditations about revenge, he's not just talking about this theoretically or abstract, he knew it intimately. We know what it means when someone we trust takes from us or hurts us. But Marcus Aurelius says you can't let this break or change you. He says the best

• 32:40Ryan Holiday?

  revenge is to not be like that. So we don't control what other people do, but we control who we are in a world where those things can happen. And that's Marcus Aurelius's advice on not getting revenge. The greatness of Marcus Aurelius is that he was always trying to get the bigger perspective. He was trying to get to the outside of things. Yeah, sure, he was the emperor of Rome, he was the head of this enormous empire, but he tried to zoom out, he tried to look at it from the 10,000-foot view, and he said, "Look how puny this all looks." Tried to zoom out and get perspective, so he could see what that actually was. He tried to strip it of the legend that encrusted it, and so must we. When we see these things

• 33:21Ryan Holiday?

  up close, when we see how small they are from afar, right, that we strip them of their politics, we strip them of the loaded context they're in, and hopefully we can have a greater cosmic sense of what the Stoics call the common good, our relation to each other, the puniness of the things that we're willing to do so many terrible things for, and hopefully this can make us better and more connected to our fellow human beings. You can imagine that as the emperor of Rome, people had a lot of strong opinions about Marcus. They thought he was the best in the world. They thought he was the worst in the world. They thought he sucked. They thought he was amazing. He would have been bombarded with opinions from other people about him. He has to push this aside. He has to not think about it. He has to set his own standards. He has to keep his own inner scorecard.

• 34:06Ryan Holiday?

  He says at one point in Meditations that the perks of his job is that you can earn a bad reputation by doing good deeds. Think of someone like Harry Truman, who makes a bunch of momentous, critical, probably correct decisions. But he leaves office one of the least popular presidents in American history. That's what Marcus is talking about. People have strong opinions about what you do, but you have to set your own standards, your own scorecard. You have to do the right thing because it's the right thing, not because it's going to make you popular, or conversely, not concerned whether it might make you unpopular. One of the most important habits you can practice is patience. One of the things I learned with this bookstore is the truth of what they call Hofstadter's Law. It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account.

• 34:51Ryan Holiday?

  We want our progress now. We want our success now. We want our rewards now. But if you can practice delayed gratification, if you can understand that it takes a while, that it's part of a process, you're almost always going to be more successful. Right? You think of Marcus Aurelius. He's told he's going to be emperor, but Antoninus is going to rule first. And they think it's going to be one or two or three or four or five years. It's like 20 years. He has to wait 20 years before he can become the emperor of Rome. So if Marcus doesn't have patience, if life doesn't force him to practice the virtue of patience, he'd have gone crazy. He'd have lost his mind. And then he wouldn't have actually been as good as he was as emperor. All things require patience,

• 35:36Ryan Holiday?

  whether you're writing books, whether you're being a leader, whether you have kids. Learning how to practice patience is critical. And what I think when I'm stuck in traffic, when a flight is delayed, when my book's going slower than I thought, I go, this isn't frustrating. This isn't annoying. Although it is those things. I say, this is an opportunity to get reps with patience. This is the opportunity to practice patience, and I will be better for having gone through this. I was talking earlier about how Marcus Aurelius said that like we're soldiers storming a wall, you have to be able to ask for help. I think this is really important, especially again when we're lonely, when we're struggling, and we feel like we can't do something, you have to be able to ask for help. A book I like to read my kids called The Boy, the Fox, the Horse, and the Mole.

• 36:20Ryan Holiday?

  And he says something like, "Asking for help isn't giving up, it's refusing to give up." It takes a lot of courage to ask for help, and help doesn't mean, "Hey, I need you to do all this stuff for me." It could be like, "Hey, I'm going to do this thing, do you want to come with me?" Asking for help, reaching out, putting yourselves out there. Courage isn't just like what you do in a military campaign. Courage isn't just betting your life on some big idea. Courage is also saying, "I don't know how to do something," saying, "I need help to do something." It's a mistake if we conflate Stoicism with solitariness, with independence, with a lack of connection, with an inability to ask for help. In fact, the Stoics would tell you to be brave enough to do that very thing. It's not unfortunate that this happened to you.

• 37:04Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius writes this to himself in Meditations. He says, "It's fortunate that this happened to you, because I've remained unharmed by it." He was saying that, you know, his character hadn't been affected. But I think more importantly, he's saying, "Now I get to do something with it." That's what the obstacle is, the way of being. "Now I get to do something with it. It's good that it happened to me instead of someone else, because I'm the one that's uniquely suited, uniquely trained, to do something with it." Like a lot of people, I have a tendency to overwork, to overdo, to overcommit, to take things too intensely. Marcus Aurelius warns himself against this in Meditations, and it's stuck with me always. He says, "In your actions, don't procrastinate. In your conversations, don't confuse. In your thoughts, don't wander. In your soul, don't be passive or aggressive.

• 37:48Ryan Holiday?

  In your life, don't be all about business. Don't be all about business." Your problem is that you want the third thing. Marcus Aurelius says, "Okay, you did something good for someone. They received that benefit. That's awesome." Transaction concluded. You don't need the third thing. Recognition, gratitude, appreciation. You don't need the world to throw you a parade. You don't need acknowledgement. And you didn't even do anything special. You did your job, which is to do good, to be good, to help people, to be kind. You did the right thing. That's enough. The people you meet are gonna suck. This is the harsh truth that Marcus Aurelius opens Meditations with. Says they're gonna be jealous and annoying and difficult. We know they're gonna be these things.

• 38:30Ryan Holiday?

  We have to go into the day with our eyes wide open. That's the harsh truth part of it. But the uplifting part, the happy part of it, is the second part. He says, "But they can't implicate you in ugliness." Remember that you're made to work together, that life is incomplete without those kinds of people. We can't be surprised by it. We can't let it suck us down. And we can't let it change us for the negative. We still have to be good. We still have to do our job. We still have to play our part. Whenever you feel like criticizing someone, remember that they haven't had the advantages that you've had. That's the idea at the beginning of The Great Gatsby, but it's also a really important Stoic idea. Marcus Aurelius says, "Tolerant with others, strict with yourself."

• 39:11Ryan Holiday?

  It's common today to talk about privilege. Well, we're all privileged in some ways. We all have a certain amount of advantages. We've been lucky in certain ways. And if we presume that other people haven't been as lucky as we have, then we can be more tolerant and accepting and kind and understanding of them and what they're going for. And that is a key Stoic idea. You get this sense that Marcus Aurelius was a homebody. And, you know, he says in Meditations, "You don't need to go on vacation. You don't need to go anywhere. You don't need to go do anything. You can get peace by retreating inside yourself." That's something I remind myself when I feel, not just myself longing for stuff, but even when I go do stuff. Look, you don't need to go do something awesome. You don't need to go somewhere exotic. You don't need to go do something cool.

• 39:53Ryan Holiday?

  You don't even need to go see other people to get excitement, to get fulfillment or nourishment. You can have that inside. You can have that by having a conversation with yourself. You can have that by reflection. You can have that by study. You don't have to go out and do it. You can call someone on the phone. I'm not saying this to say, "Don't be social." What I'm saying is, we tell ourselves that it's going and doing things that will find fulfillment and meaning in, but that's not true. We carry ourselves with us wherever we're going. And so if we want it, we can get it from ourselves. One of my favorite passages in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius talks about washing off the dust of earthly life. I think studying philosophy is a way to do that, going for a walk is a way to do that. The Romans would have done that in the bathhouse. We can imagine

• 40:33Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus after a day of writing, a day of hearing cases or meetings, he would have been dirty, literally and figuratively, and he would have walked to a bathhouse, a gymnasium, and he would have cleaned himself there. He would have gotten in a cold plunge or a thermal pool. In fact, at a quinceañera where Marcus writes a chunk of Meditations, you can step in one of those pools, it's still running today. There's something beautiful and timeless about that, and I think very practical about the reminder of washing off the dust of earthly life, literally and metaphorically. This is a print I have from one of my favorite passages from Marcus Aurelius. I have it on the wall. Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be, be one. And I think

• 41:13Ryan Holiday?

  arguably Marcus Aurelius'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. And that's just, to me, the most important thing we can take from Marcus Aurelius. We think we solve our problems with some genius solution, with some creative, out-of-the-box

• 41:56Ryan Holiday?

  new idea, and maybe sometimes we do, but most of the time, we solve problems, we get over obstacles, step by step by step. In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius says, "You assemble your life, action by action, step by step." Benefit of doing it that way is that no one can stop you from doing that little individual piece, that small thing in front of you. And what the Stoics realize is that the small thing is not so small. Actually, Zeno says just this, he says, "Well-being is realized by small steps, but it's no small thing." So yeah, you've got this big project you've got to finish, you've got this huge deficit to get yourself out of. How do you do it? Right? It's not by some magical solution. It's not by some silver bullet. It's by doing the next right thing and the next right thing and the next right thing.

• 42:41Ryan Holiday?

  It's by doing it step by step, action by action. No one can stop you from that, except for yourself. The grudge you're holding, it's meaningless. Marcus Sereless says, "Look at the people who held these grudges, who raged about things, who held on to things." He says, "Where are they now?" "They're dead and gone." "The grudge went nowhere." And the same is gonna happen to your thing. Whatever it is you're upset about, however significant it was for you, eventually it disappears along with you. So how can you work on letting it go? How can you move on? How can you process? How can you not carry it around? How can you not let it consume you? Bill Belichick, greatest football coach in history, tells his players, "Do your job." Marcus Sereless asks himself that same question in meditation.

• 43:25Ryan Holiday?

  He says, "What is my vocation?" And he says, "To be a good person. That's the job. At the end of the day, to be a good person, to do good things, to make a positive difference in the world for yourself and the people around you." You're never gonna escape change. Life is change. Marcus Sereless reminds us that being born was a change, death is a change. Every good thing in your life came from a change. So did bad things, of course, but everything in life has changed. You cannot escape it. You can only accept it. You can only embrace it. You're being too idealistic. In meditation, Marcus Sereless writes to himself. He says, "Remember, you don't live in Plato's Republic." He says, "Don't go around expecting utopia. Don't expect people to be perfect, because they're not."

• 44:08Ryan Holiday?

  That was actually the knock in Rome against the great Stoic Cato. Cicero said, "Look, this guy's problem is that he thinks he lives in Plato's Republic instead of the dregs of Romulus." He was too high-minded, too idealistic, and he couldn't be pragmatic and practical enough to exist, work with other people, to solve imperfect problems with imperfect solutions. But that's part of Stoicism, too. You've just got to mind your own business. Marcus Sereless reminds us, "We should stop trying to escape other people's faults. We should try to escape our own." There's a pretty amazing story about Marcus Sereless. Pretty late in life, he's seen leaving his palace in Rome, and he's carrying these tablets. And a friend 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

• 44:52Ryan Holiday?

  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 Sextus the philosopher. He thanks Sextus the philosopher in book one, the debts and lessons chapter. So the idea for Marcus was that you always stay a student. You're not going to be remembered. You're not that important. Marx's realist, he says, run down the list of all the people that came before him. He says, what happened to all these famous names? These names that used to sound so familiar?

• 45:37Ryan Holiday?

  We all disappear. We all recede into memory. We are all forgotten.

• 45:53Ryan Holiday?

  Pierre Hédel, one of the great scholars of Marx's realist, talks about the oceanic feeling. Marx's realist, you know, talks about the view from above. He talks about the immensity, how all of experience gapes before us. Marcus is trying to meditate on the vastness and the connectedness of everything in the world. He talks about looking at the stars and watching yourself alongside them. I think he's seeking out these kind of humbling experiences. You could think about why that would be so important to someone who was literally the center of the universe, the person on which so much depended on. He wanted to remind himself that that wasn't strictly true. Gregory Hays, 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.

• 46:39Ryan Holiday?

  He never says, I am a Stoic. I adhere to Stoicism. 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. 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. Most of what you do is totally inessential. Marcus Aurelius says that that's a question

• 47:22Ryan Holiday?

  we have to ask ourselves. Is this essential? Because so much of it is trivial, so much of it is unnecessary, so much of it is inefficient. And he said, "When you eliminate the inessential, what you get is the double benefit of doing the essential things better." So you want constantly be eliminating, constantly paring things down, constantly asking yourselves, "Do I really need to be doing this? Is it important? Is it going to move the needle? Why am I doing it? How could I do it better?" You eliminate the inessential and you do the essential better. "The key to a great life," Marcus Aurelius says, "is to be free of passion but full of love." People think of the Stoics as emotionless. That's totally missing what they were. They tried to be free of the destructive emotions, and they tried to replace that with

• 48:07Ryan Holiday?

  love. Love for other people, love for any and all situations in life. To love that and to use it as an opportunity to love and appreciate the people that you get to have to experience those things with. At one point in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius says, "Avoid false friendship at all costs." Says, "Nothing is more painful. Nothing is worse." And he knows this from experience. I tell, "An obstacle is the way." The story of Marcus being betrayed by Evidius Cassius, his most trusted general, one of his best friends, he declares himself emperor. He essentially attempts to orchestrate a coup. Marcus Aurelius knew that although we wanted to be trusting

• 48:49Ryan Holiday?

  of people, although we wanted to assume the best in people, we had to understand that people were not perfect, people could be led astray, people could have evil intentions in their heart. We have to be aware of this, and we have to be prepared for it. 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. Nice fancy bed is better than a hard uncomfortable one. He doesn't need a reminder of that. So Meditations is Marcus Aurelius talking about the things that are important in.

• 49:32Ryan Holiday?

  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. Stoics had emotions, Stoics sought out cool experiences. 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. In Book 11 of Meditations, Marcus Aurelius talks about something that must have been very common for him, which is that people didn't like him. People cursed him, they criticized him. They questioned his integrity, his commitment, all these things. So in Book 11, 13, he says, "Someone despises me, that's their problem. Mine, he says, not to do or say anything despicable. Says, "Someone hates me, their problem.

• 50:16Ryan Holiday?

  Mine is to be patient and cheerful with everyone, including them, ready to show them their mistake, not spitefully, or to show off my own self-control, but in an honest, upright way. That's what we should be like inside," he says, "and never let the gods catch us feeling anger or resentment." If someone doesn't like you, that's their problem. And the important thing is that you don't let it change you, you don't let it affect you, don't let it make you like them. You just lock on to what you have to do and you try to be patient and kind, you try to think better and do better for other people than in fact they might ever even think of doing for you. One passage I marked down in Meditations when I first read it, Marcus Aurelius says, "Go straight to the seat of intelligence. Writing and reading require a master, so too does life."

• 51:00Ryan Holiday?

  Mentors have been a huge guiding force in my life. 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. You do notice that Marcus talks about the present moment over and over and over again in meditations. He's reminding yourself that it's the only thing you have, it's the only thing you can lose. I think that's because he, like us, found it so easy to get distracted, to think about the past or the future, to worry about this, to regret that. And the consequence of that is you're losing the only thing you have, he's saying, which is right now. It's gonna take a lot out of you. It's gonna take more out of you than you think you have.

• 51:44Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius is, in one passage in Meditations, is trying to amp himself to get out of bed in the morning. He goes, "It's warmer under the covers here, I like being comfortable." He says, "You weren't made to be comfortable. You weren't made to huddle under the covers and be warm." He said, "No, people who love what they do, they wear themselves down doing it." He said, "There's a limit on the eating and the sleeping and the fun side. You gotta get out there, you gotta do what your nature demands, and you gotta understand it's gonna be hard and it's gonna take a lot out of you." In Book V, Marcus Aurelius talks about the proper role of philosophy in life. He says it's not as your instructor. He says it's as a kind of medicine, an ointment. He describes this sort of ancient remedy for this eye illness where they would crack an egg on you or something like that.

• 52:27Ryan Holiday?

  But that aside, what I think his general point he actually is taking from Epictetus, who said, "You shouldn't leave my philosophy class feeling good, you should feel like you just came out of the hospital." He says, "'Cause you weren't well when you entered." The point of philosophy is to challenge you, it's to make you uncomfortable, it's to fix the illnesses of the soul, of the mind. Even though there are passages in Meditations that are soothing and reassuring, a lot of them are jarring, a lot of them make you uncomfortable, a lot of them really make you think, or a lot of them maybe you instinctively disagree with. But that's the point. Philosophy's not supposed to be your instructor, it's supposed to be a kind of medicine. Even though Marcus Aurelius says we must avoid false friendship at all costs, even though he's betrayed by his trusted general, Avidius Cassius, what we know is that Marcus

• 53:11Ryan Holiday?

  doesn't harden his heart, he doesn't close himself off from the world. He's ready, as Michael Scott says, he's ready to be heard again. He constantly is putting himself back out there. But he does learn from this, and he's a little more guarded going forward. He makes this analogy in Meditations, he says- You know, you're in the boxing ring and someone's cheating. Maybe they're gouging or biting or scratching. He says, "You don't quit altogether. You just change your fight plan accordingly." This is the core of Robert Greene's book, one passage that Robert Greene quotes from meditations quite often. "You don't quit, you don't storm and go home, but you are aware of who you're dealing with and you adjust accordingly." Everyone's concerned about someone doing violence to them, doing something harmful to them.

• 53:53Ryan Holiday?

  But Marcus Aurelius reminds us that we do violence to our souls. When we give in to bad urges, when we give in to our temper, when we betray our standards. We do violence to ourselves, to our soul, when we're not the person that we're capable of being. We let those standards lapse. We let ourselves be overwhelmed by destructive emotions or urges when our ego comes into play. Of course, you have to protect yourself from other people, from outside things, from externals. But to a large degree, you don't control most of that. Most empires collapse from within. Most people's failures are self-inflicted. Most shame is heaped upon ourselves by our own choices and actions.

• 54:37Ryan Holiday?

  So protect yourself. That's what you control. Don't do violence to yourself, the Stoics say. And that's how you lead a good life.

• 54:44Speaker 05

  I think it's remarkable that Marcus continually talked about, more than anything, getting control of his anger.

• 54:49Ryan Holiday?

  And you know he had a problem with it because of how much he talked about it.

• 54:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 54:52Ryan Holiday?

  Like, he's not talking about, "You gotta remember, Marcus, jokes are funny."

• 54:56Speaker 05

  Right.

• 54:56Ryan Holiday?

  You know?

• 54:57Speaker 05

  Come on, man, lighten up a little bit.

• 54:59Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 54:59Speaker 05

  Anger.

• 55:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. He clearly had a huge problem with it. I think it's probably one of the things he returns to most. Hadrian, the emperor who sets in motion Marcus eventually becoming emperor. There's a story. Hadrian gets mad at a secretary, messes something up, and he picks up a pen and he stabs it in the guy's eye. That's the level of power and indulgence that the Roman emperor could get away with. The story is that the, he obviously feels bad about it after and he goes like, "I'll give you anything. Like, I'm so sorry, I'll give you anything to make it better." And the guy just, "Can I have my eye back?"

• 55:30Speaker 05

  Eye back.

• 55:31Ryan Holiday?

  Which is, I think, a poignant reminder that, like, the things that we do out of anger cannot be undone.

• 55:36Speaker 06

  Where do you see grace with Stoicism?

• 55:39Ryan Holiday?

  One of the things Marcus Aurelius talks about a lot is this idea of revenge. You know, he says the best revenge is to not be like that. This an ultimate moment in his life. He's ill and near death. His most trusted general, he's sensing that the emperor was weak, names himself emperor. So he starts palace coup. Marcus is not as sick as they thought and he recovers. Now he's faced with this terrible dilemma. There can't be two emperors. This person has put everything into danger and turmoil. We know what his predecessors would have done in this situation. Hadrian comes to power and just liquidates. Marcus decides not to do that. He can't ignore it. He can't just let this happen. He says, this is an opportunity. We can teach future generations, there's a way to even deal with civil wars.

• 56:23Ryan Holiday?

  Everything lasts for a day. Marcus Aurelius says at one point in Meditations, the knower and the known. This is a pretty interesting observation from a man who was the most famous man in the world in that time. A man who's still so famous, you can buy coins with his face on them on Etsy. They survive as historical documents worth hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. This is a guy whose book still pops on and off the bestseller list, who we're talking about today in this video. But Marcus Aurelius would also remind himself that posthumous fame isn't really worth anything. He's not around to enjoy it. What matters is, was he deserving of that in his own time? Was he good then? Is he famous for the right reasons?

• 57:06Ryan Holiday?

  For doing good stuff, for being a good person? There's a beautiful line in Joseph Brodsky's essay about the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, which actually dates back to Marcus's time, but the base of which was redesigned by Michelangelo. But Brodsky says something like, "If Marcus Aurelius is antiquity, it is we who are the ruins." And I don't know what that means exactly. There's something beautiful and haunting about it. Maybe it's this idea that when you read Meditations, you can't help but be struck by the classical beauty and perfection, that this is like, in some ways, the highest expression of human greatness. And then you look at us, you look at the way we talk to each other, you look at the things we say, you look at how we live and act and think. And you go, yeah, we're the old, worn out, beaten down, falling apart things.

• 57:51Ryan Holiday?

  Not the ancient world. The ancient world feels fresh and modern and new and perfect in so many ways. And I just love that idea. If Marcus Aurelius is antiquity, it is we who are the ruins. Gains nothing by going up. It loses nothing by coming down. Marcus Aurelius said that we're like a rock, we're like a ball. Sometimes we go up, sometimes we come down. None of this says anything about us as people. He was saying that of himself. He suddenly ascends to the most powerful position in the world. But that didn't change who he was. That didn't change anything about him. That didn't make him better or worse than other people. It didn't change what his job was as a human being. This is why he writes in Meditations,

• 58:33Ryan Holiday?

  he warns himself against being Caesarified, against being stained purple by the robe of the emperor. He says he has to accept it without arrogance and let it go with indifference. And that's a great way to think about success, about money, about recognition, about fame, and also about difficulty, embarrassment, mistakes, right, being laughed at. We don't gain anything on the way up. We don't lose anything on the way down. These things have no purchase on our soul, on our identity, on our value, the Stoics would say. Because they are outside us, what matters is who we are. What matters is what our values are.

• 59:14Ryan Holiday?

  What matters is not being changed on the way up or the way down. Try to imagine the Emperor of Rome, this man of enormous power and wealth and prestige, trying to tell himself not to be a person of too many words or too many deeds. It's pretty remarkable, even at that level, talking about simplification. He's talking about modesty. He's talking about restraint. He's talking about self-control. It's a beautiful thing and a very rare thing, to be sure. There's a passage in Meditations where Marcus Aurelius says, when you tuck your child in at night, you should say to yourself, they will not survive till the morning. This is a man who buried six children. So I don't think he's saying this.

• 59:53Speaker 06

  Glibly.

• 59:53Ryan Holiday?

  Glibly. And I don't think he's trying to practice. This some kind of monkish philosophical detachment from his child. He's trying to say you only get so many of these. If you knew this was the last time you were going to do it, how would you do it? It would not be to skip some of the pages in the book. Yeah. It would not be to come on, you know? If you want more tranquility in your life, you have to do less. Marcus really says, and the magical thing, when you do less, when you eliminate the inessential, when you stop saying yes to things that don't matter, when you stop getting caught up in busy work and nonsense, you get the double benefit of doing the essential things better. Being with your kids, your creative work, getting outside, all the things that matter in life, you do better when you do less stuff.

• 1:00:36Ryan Holiday?

  He says, when you do less, you get the double satisfaction of doing the important things better. So much of what we do, it's because we think we have to, because other people are doing it, because we're afraid to say no, no, you have to do less. When you do less, you do more better. Marcus really builds his leadership philosophy around four key ideas. Four Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, wisdom. Marcus tries always to live and lead by these four virtues. When he says the obstacle is the way, that's what he means. He doesn't mean necessarily that as a leader, you can use everything to make more money or to win more games or whatever your organization does. He's saying that everything you encounter as a leader is a chance to embody, to demonstrate one of these ideas. I have them tattooed on my arm as a reminder, courage, discipline, justice, wisdom.

• 1:01:18Ryan Holiday?

  In one of my favorite passages in Meditations, Marcus really says, you know, try to be like the rock next to the ocean that the raging sea crashes around. He says crashes against it, stops it eventually falls still around. To me, this is a beautiful metaphor of what stillness is. It's about being at peace in a world that's not at peace, about slowing down in a world that's speeding up faster than ever. I love running next to the ocean because it's a reminder of this metaphor. The idea that we need pockets of stillness, even inside the craziness, that we don't control what's happening in the outside world, but we control how we are, our dispositions, our reaction, our strength against that as a bulwark against that craziness. And it's been a crazy month for sure, but I have had some moments of that stillness. I try to be like the rock.

• 1:02:00Ryan Holiday?

  I try to watch the sea crashing against it and I try to stop and always look for those embodiments of those Stoic metaphors so I can carry them back with me. Be like the rock that the waves crash against, be the cliff next to the ocean.

• 1:02:16Ryan Holiday?

  And so I think of all the exercises in meditation, that's one that we can all practice. 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. We know that Marcus Aurelius doesn't want to be emperor. In fact, he breaks down and cries when he is told he's going to be emperor because he knew how many bad emperors there were. And I also think he probably had a little bit of imposter syndrome. He wasn't someone who sought out power. And so when power came his way, he wondered if he could do it, if he had these skills, if he was strong enough, smart enough, firm enough, ruthless enough to cut it in this merciless profession. But before Marcus becomes emperor, he has a dream, we're told. He dreams that he has shoulders made of ivory. That was to him letting himself know that he was strong enough to bear the weight. He could do it.

• 1:03:01Ryan Holiday?

  And in meditations, we catch him reminding himself of that lesson that he'd learned many years ago, early on, before he'd taken power. He says, "Remind yourself that if it's humanly possible, know that you can do it also." These people aren't better than you. They're not given some gift that you don't have. They became who they needed to be. They did the work they needed to do. They gave themselves the shoulders of ivory that Marcus Aurelius realized deep down he had all along. In meditations, Marcus Aurelius says, "People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it." He says, "They forget even to sleep and eat." So it's 6:00 a.m., I'm a little tired, I'm a little burned out, but this is what I love. I feel so grateful to be able to do it. And so I try to pause every morning. Part of my practice is a little

• 1:03:43Ryan Holiday?

  bit of gratitude. I write in a gratitude journal every day. The idea is taking a minute to really appreciate where you are and what you get to do. I try to remind myself how much I would have killed a few years ago to be able to do this, how I wouldn't have even been able to dream that I'd be able to do this. And so the idea of centering yourself with a little bit of gratitude practice, actually appreciating the absurdity, the absurd luck of your situation. I don't want it to be lost on me. I get to write about philosophy for a living. I get to travel all around the world to talk about philosophy. My work takes me to a beach in Florida. I try to appreciate that. I try to soak it in. I try to be here for it. And I never let that escape me. It can only ruin your life if it ruins your character. She's saying that other people can't actually harm you.

• 1:04:27Ryan Holiday?

  They can take away some of your stuff. They can insult you. They can bother you. They can mess up your plan. But they can't actually harm you unless your character is injured. What the Stoics would say, what we need to understand is that no one can harm our character but ourselves. The bastards can't get you. You can turn yourself into a bastard in response and then you lose. If you do something in response that harms your character, then yes, you have been harmed. But anything else, no matter how big or small, nothing can injure you. Nothing can ruin your life unless it affects your character, unless it affects who you are as a person and what kind of things you do and don't do. The source of conflict between parents and children so much of the time is about parents having opinions about things that they don't have to have opinions about. And if they didn't have an opinion about it, things would just be.

• 1:05:11Ryan Holiday?

  How much of the conflict I had even with my own parents that in retrospect seems silly, because like I don't care about it anymore, but why did they care about it at all? Which is a very Stoic idea in Meditations. And Marcus Sistros says something like, remember, things are not asking to be judged by you. Right. Or he says, you always have the power to have no opinion. One of the hardest things for humans to do is admit error. And that's why cutting our losses is so difficult. But Marcus really says like when someone points out that you've been wrong, when they show you the flaws in your reasoning, they're not insulting you. That doesn't make you an idiot. You're getting new information that allows you to make a new decision and thus improve. Like if you picked a stock or you started working for a company, you invested in something. You have to realize that what you knew then is different than what you know now.

• 1:05:57Ryan Holiday?

  And if what you know now changes the decision you would make then, or it sheds new light on the decision you would have made then, you have to be able to switch. You have to be willing to cut your losses. Don't think of admitting error as something to be ashamed of. It's something you should be proud of. It shows that you have the ability, as Cicero said, to remain a free agent, to not be wedded because of your identity, because of statements you've made, but to be able to embrace the current moment and the future by changing and adjusting, by selling, by disavowing something, by walking away, and stop throwing good money after bad, cut your losses and move on. The emperor of Rome would have had beautiful palaces. Marcus from a rich family would have had access. The country estates and beautiful houses and he could afford the finest resorts or retreats.

• 1:06:40Ryan Holiday?

  And he reminds himself, though, that people who try to get away from it all are chasing something that doesn't exist. He would have liked that Buddhist idea that wherever you go, there you are. He says, "You can retreat into yourself anytime you want." He says, "You can find replenishment and rest and relaxation inside your own soul." And I think that's what he's doing in meditations. That's what he's doing in books. That's what he's doing when he would go on walks, when he would look at the world poetically. He realized that he didn't have to flee to some exotic location. All the things he needed and wanted were right there. And they weren't external things at all. They were inside of him, just as they are inside all of us. So we can imagine when Marcus comes to the end of life and realizes he's gonna die.

• 1:07:25Ryan Holiday?

  I wonder if he thought about the passage that he wrote in Book 1036. He says, "It doesn't matter how good a life you've led. There will still be people standing around the bed who will welcome the sad event." His point was, if you're doing this for validation, if you're doing this to be loved, if you're doing this to be remembered, I mean, to be remembered, he says, is silly because you're not gonna be around. But the point is, the rewards for doing the right thing have to be the right thing. You can't be doing it to be liked. You can't care about what other people think. You can't try to please everyone all the time and be everyone's favorite, especially as a leader. So Marcus had to constantly be aware of this. I remember if, when he actually came to the end of his life, if he thought about the fact that maybe secretly some of these people didn't,

• 1:08:09Ryan Holiday?

  were glad he would be gone soon. And if he had to come to terms with those words that he'd written so long ago. In his other brilliant meditation on the ephemerality of life, he says, "You're afraid of death because you won't be able to do this anymore? You won't be able to wait in line at the DMV? You won't be on another stupid, pointless conference call? So much of what we spend our life doing is a complete waste. And then we say we're afraid of death. We say we feel like we don't have enough time. You do have enough time, you just have to stop wasting it." There's immense amount of... Control or influence that the translator has over how they choose to use this word or that word, and that can mean a world of difference.

• 1:08:50Ryan Holiday?

  But also, like, when you just get the crappy translation that's in the public domain, or the cheapest one on Amazon, you're selling yourself short. I feel so lucky I got the Hays translation early. The point is, books are an investment. You shouldn't cheap out. You shouldn't get the cheapest one. You should get the one that's right, that's best. And there's a reason these things cost money, is that they're worth money. My life would have been totally different had I gotten a crappier translation, a cheaper translation, or if I'd said, "I'll just get it from the library, I'll skim through it, and I'll give it back." No, reading is an investment. Books are an investment, and you have to invest accordingly. I don't know how to explain to you that you have to care about other people. That's like, one of my favorite article headlines of all time. I think it came out in 2017.

• 1:09:34Ryan Holiday?

  But oftentimes, people who study Stoicism sort of miss the point. Yes, it's an individualistic philosophy. Yes, it's about maximizing your personal resilience. It's about focusing on what you control. But Marcus Aurelius also talks about the common good like 40 or 50 times in Meditations. He says famously, "What's bad for the bee is bad for the hive," that we're all in this together. The Stoics believed that we were part of this enormous organism, that we all had a role, we all had a job, that we all individually mattered. So yes, Stoicism is an individualistic philosophy. Yes, it's about focusing on what you control. But you have to also care about other people. And if you think that Stoicism is a formula for being a better sociopath, being indifferent

• 1:10:16Ryan Holiday?

  to suffering or pain of other people, you're completely missing the point of what this philosophy is about. It would have been my third or fourth reading of Marcus Aurelius that I caught this line. It says, "You could leave life right now, let that determine what you do and say and think." It's the Stoic idea of memento mori. It's not that you will die tomorrow, and you should try heroin or go to an orgy. It's that you never know when life is going to end. And so you can't take it for granted. You cannot take it for granted. If you want more wisdom inspired from the Stoics, I send out one Stoic-themed email every single morning, totally for free. You can sign up at dailystoic.com/email. No spam, you can unsubscribe at any time. I think it's the best thing that I do.

• 1:11:00Ryan Holiday?

  It's a community of hundreds of thousands of Stoics all over the world. We'd love to have you at dailystoic.com/email.