How Can This Improve Your Life? | The Color of Your Thoughts

Why has Meditations by Marcus Aurelius endured and influenced across so many centuries? And what makes its ancient wisdom still relevant to the modern problems we face today? Reading Marcus Aurelius can change your life, but only if you know how to read his work 👉 Head here now to grab your Meditations book and guide bundle | https://store.dailystoic.com/collections/meditations 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:15Ryan Holiday?

  It was never meant to be seen by prime eyes. It certainly wasn't meant to be published as a book. It was written in an antiquated foreign language, full of ancient philosophy that until recently, few had ever even heard of. And the man doing the writing lived a life unimaginably different and distant from yours. Why would you bother reading a book like that? How could it possibly affect and improve your life? Yet, this is a book that Frederick the Great reportedly rode into battle with in his saddlebags, as did four-star General James Mattis, who carried it with him on deployments throughout the Middle East. It's a book that American presidents have read and raved about.

• 0:59Ryan Holiday?

  It is a book that Robert Louis Stevenson, the great novelist, described as unlike any other. It's a book that actresses and musicians and entrepreneurs are still reading to this day. So why has Meditations by Marcus Aurelius endured and influenced across so many centuries? And what makes its ancient wisdom still relevant to the modern problems we face today? It's because in Meditations, Marcus attempts to answer the questions we all end up asking ourselves at some point. What's the good life? How do I live it? How do I stop running from pain and misfortune and start dealing with my problems? How do I learn how to treat other people

• 1:44Ryan Holiday?

  when they can be so petty and miserable and annoying? How do I treat myself better, too? And Marcus Aurelius answers these questions with clarity and wisdom in Meditations. In fact, he gives us a kind of... Guidebook for Living, a set of rules to live our life by, practical exercises that made him a better person and can make you one too. That is why people have read Meditations for the last 2,000 years. That's why it's the favorite of presidents and prisoners, men and women, soldiers and activists, entrepreneurs and everyday people. But as Heraclitus said, you can't step in the same river twice because the river changes

• 2:25Ryan Holiday?

  and so have you. And Meditations in that way is a book you're supposed to read more than once. And while Meditations can be easy to read, it's also the work of a lifetime to explore its vast depths, which is what we've been working on over here at Daily Stoic for the last couple of years. We've been trying to create like a kind of a guide to Meditations, a companion to help you make your way through the book, not just once, but over and over and over again. And we've spent hundreds of thousands of hours, not just with the text itself, but also with experts and translators and biographers and students of Stoicism to help understand what each phrase and idea and concept in

• 3:09Ryan Holiday?

  it means. And we put that together. It's called How to Read Marcus Aurelius. It's a guide we've done and we're relaunching it. We're going to do a book club discussion and Q and A. So anyone who takes the course can participate in that. And if you haven't read Meditations, we've got a great edition. We've got a leather edition in the Daily Stoic store. I think that's really exciting. So you can grab that. I think you will enjoy it. It's really awesome. I'll link to all this in today's show notes, obviously, or you can just go over to dailystoic.com/meditations to check it out.

• 3:51Ryan Holiday?

  The Color of Your Thoughts. This is the Daily Stoic entry for April 1. "Your mind will take the shape of what you frequently hold in thought, for the human spirit is colored by such impressions." Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, 516.

• 4:11Ryan Holiday?

  If you bend your body into a sitting position every day for a long enough period of time, the curvature of your spine changes. A doctor can tell from a radiograph or an autopsy whether someone sat at a desk for a living. If you shove your feet into tiny, narrow dress shoes each day, your feet will begin to take on that form as well. And the same is true for our mind. If you hold a perpetually negative outlook, soon enough, everything you encounter will seem negative. Close it off and you will become closed minded. Color it with the wrong thoughts and your life will be dyed the same. I wanted to show Gregory Hayes's translation of that same quote. I think you guys will like it.

• 4:55Ryan Holiday?

  He says it interesting too. He says, "The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts. Color it with a run of thoughts like this." He says, "Anywhere you lead your life, you can lead a good one. But lives are led at court, then good ones can be. Things gravitate toward what they were intended for. What things gravitate towards is their goal. A thing's goal is what benefits it. It's good. A rational being's good is unselfishness. What were we born for? That's nothing new, remember? Lower things for the sake of higher ones and higher ones for one another. Things that have a consciousness are higher than things that don't, and those with the logos still higher."

• 5:39Ryan Holiday?

  Really, what meditation is, is an example of Marcus Aurelius trying to dye his soul with good thoughts. He's trying to write every day, these little mantras, these little reminders of what he believes, of who he wants to be, of what life should be. You know, people believe in the law of attraction, this idea of, you know, like attracts like. Of course, the law of attraction is bullshit. It was created by con artists to trick people. Not saying that, but I am saying, if you are a negative person, you are going to see things negatively. If you are a positive person, you're going to see things positively. Being positive doesn't attract positive things in your life.

• 6:21Ryan Holiday?

  It does allow you, however, to see positive in situations that other people see negative. Even the idea of the obstacle being the way. Marcus Aurelius is not saying life's going to be rosy and fun and awesome. Marcus is saying, life's going to roll obstacles in your path. But if you have this kind of stoic optimism, if you've dyed your soul with the right thoughts, you'll be able to find the good inside that. So what I try to do in this podcast, what I try to do in my own life, what I try to do with the tattoos on my arm, is dye my soul with the right thoughts, literally dye my skin with the right thoughts to be a reminder. It's why I made the daily stoic medallions, why I carry the four virtues one and the memento mori one in my pocket. I want these things to be a part of me.

• 7:06Ryan Holiday?

  I want them to be mantras. I want them to be reminders. I never want to lose track or sight of them. It's what I try to do in my journal. I know all this stuff intellectually, but it's taking the time to write them down on the page, to write it down for the thousandth time, for the fifth year in a row, whatever it is. It's the practice, it's the dying, it's the reminding, it's the going over. This is what shapes us. This is what makes us who we can be. I hope you can do that. I hope you're getting what the point of this practice is. Even if you've heard me say this stuff before, that's the point. It's supposed to come back through you. It's supposed to be the practice of it. So we're dying ourselves repeatedly with the right thoughts. We're not trying to magically make the world something different than it is, but we're

• 7:51Ryan Holiday?

  trying to make ourselves different inside that world because that's what we control. So I hope you dye your soul with some good thoughts today. I hope this meditation helps you do that a little bit. Our soul is dyed by the color of our thoughts. We are dyed by the impressions. Our life becomes what our mind makes it. Our life is what our thoughts make it. That's what stoicism is, and I hope you follow that today.

• 8:21Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please, spread the word. Tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.