31 Life-Changing Lessons from Marcus Aurelius

For nearly 2,000 years, Meditations has guided presidents, generals, and leaders, from Theodore Roosevelt to Frederick the Great to Arnold Schwarzenegger. What makes it remarkable is that it was never meant to be read. It was Marcus Aurelius' private notes to himself. In this episode, Ryan breaks down 31 of the most powerful lessons from Meditations and how to apply them to your life. 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/pages/meditations-month-2026 📢 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.

• 0:14Ryan Holiday?

  This book, right here, has been the guide for presidents and generals and leaders for almost 20 centuries. Theodore Roosevelt carried it with him as he explored a South American jungle. Frederick the Great took it into battle. Arnold Schwarzenegger says it shaped how he thinks. But the fascinating thing about it is it was never meant to be read by anyone. It was one man writing to himself, and that man happened to be the Emperor of Rome, Marcus Aurelius, the most powerful person on the planet. And that's what we're going to talk about today—the best lessons from Marcus Aurelius's meditations, and, most importantly, how to actually use them.

• 1:00Ryan Holiday?

  I think one of the reasons we have trouble with motivation is that we know, deep down, that this thing we're doing, it doesn't really matter. It's not important. That's why Marcus Aurelius's question is so imperative. He says, "Ask yourself, is this essential?" He says, "Because most of what we do and say and think is not essential. It's getting us further from where we want to go. It's something that society made up for us. It's just what everyone else is doing. It's piddly busy work." You know, he says, "Are you really afraid of death because you won't be able to do this thing anymore?" Right? He's saying that we waste our time with frivolous, unimportant, meaningless things. So he says, "When you ask yourself, you end up eliminating the inessential." And then he says, "You get this double benefit of doing the essential things better."

• 1:43Ryan Holiday?

  But I would say that the real benefit is that if we only have a finite amount of motivation, if getting up the motivation, if maintaining motivation is this difficult task, well, then we want to save it for the precious few things that really matter, right? What's the main thing for you? You eliminate the things that are not the main thing, and then that marshals more resources, more energy, more motivation for the things that are the main thing. If everything is this battle— Between the higher self and the lower self, right? If you're exhausting that resource battling for things that don't matter, that that you don't actually care about, that you could say no to, right? You're going to have to have so much more motivation than someone who has winnowed down

• 2:26Ryan Holiday?

  their frame of reference, their to do list, only to the things that truly matter, that truly are essential. Marcus Aurelius had a lot to 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 it. 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."

• 3:09Ryan Holiday?

  There's a secret to not getting upset, to not getting angry, to not getting offended, to not being bothered, to focus and to concentration. And it's simple. It comes to us from Marcus Aurelius, the great Roman emperor. He said, "You always have the power to have no opinion." He says, "Things are not asking to be judged by you. Don't turn this into something." The fewer opinions you have, the fewer judgments you make, the more you're able to just leave things as they are, the happier you will be, the more productive you will be, the more focused you will be, and the easier you will be to get along with. This one is fitting here as the ocean crashes behind me.

• 3:52Ryan Holiday?

  He says, "To be like the rock that the waves keep crashing over. It stands unmoved and the raging of the sea falls still around it." Right? Stoicism is not the absence of emotion, but it is about that even keel, not getting too high and not getting too low. It's actually funny, you know, the Buddhists have a different image. They talk about if you grabbed a cup of water from the ocean or a river or a lake, it would be hard to see at first. But if you let it sit for a second, eventually It would settle down and that water would become clear. That's what Marcus Aurelius is talking about. The world is going to be noisy. The world is going to be loud. A lot of things are going to happen. But if you take a minute, if you pause and reflect, you give things a second to settle down. If you don't get lifted up by them or dragged down by them,

• 4:36Ryan Holiday?

  eventually you get to a level set, a kind of point of clarity. And in a way, that's what Marcus Aurelius is doing in Meditations itself. Whenever you're anxious, whenever you're worried, whenever you're stressed out, whenever you're doubting, you know what you're doing? You're extrapolating. And the ancient Stoics would say that extrapolation is the enemy. Marcus Aurelius tried to remind himself when his kids got sick. He said, "My kid is sick. I don't need to tell myself they're going to die from it." He says, "You can't let your life be crushed by your imagination as a whole. You can't picture every bad thing that could possibly happen. You have to stick with what's in front of you. You have to stick with what is in your control." "The anxiety is not being caused by the external thing," the Stoics would say. "The anxiety is within us.

• 5:20Ryan Holiday?

  We are the common variable between all the things that worry us, between all the things that upset us, between all the things that convince us the world is ending. We are the common variable. We are bringing ourselves, our opinions, we are projecting our feelings onto objective events." So stop doing that. Stop extrapolating. Focus on what's in front of you. Stick with idea and action and utterance, the Stoics say. That is plenty to keep you busy. Getting up early is no fun. It's hard every single time. I don't enjoy it while I am doing it, but I am almost always glad after that I did. One of the most famous passages in Marcus Aurelius's Meditations is him struggling to do precisely that. He says, "At dawn, when you awake and you have trouble getting out of bed,

• 6:03Ryan Holiday?

  he says, 'You have to tell yourself, I was meant to do things. I have to get after it.'" And then he says, "But it's so much warmer here under the covers." And indeed, it is. It's nicer there. But he says, "Is that what you were put here to do? To huddle under the covers? Is that what you were put here to do? To feel nice? You were meant for something more than that." And by the way, you know what's nicer than staying in bed? What you experience in the morning when it's quiet out, when the sun is coming out, when you're the only one on the trail, when you're the only... Anyone on the road, when you've got quiet time to focus and work, or read, or spend time with people you love, that's amazing. So getting up early is hard, sure, but you'll be glad that you did it. Trying hard things, focusing, getting after stuff, that's hard, but you'll be glad you did it after. Concentrate like a Roman, Marcus Aurelius says.

• 6:48Ryan Holiday?

  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. That's the standard to try to meet every day that you are lucky enough to be alive. You're being crazy letting them determine whether you did a good job or not,

• 7:32Ryan Holiday?

  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. 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.

• 8:17Ryan Holiday?

  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. In your life, don't be all about business." Don't be all about business. When Marcus Aurelius talks about taking Plato's view in Meditations, what view is he talking about? We don't know the tallest peak that Marcus Aurelius ever gets to, but he might have been talking- About something like this, I'm on the hill next to the Acropolis, which is right there. And you think about how unique that perspective of getting the bird's eye view would have been in the ancient world. But up here, you get up and you see how tiny everything is, right? Even the Acropolis looks small behind me. Here's a ancient tombstone, right?

• 8:59Ryan Holiday?

  From another hill, you see the insignificance of something like that, how it blends in with all the others. But you also see how on top of each other, everyone is, how interconnected human beings are. You could have looked out here to the GNC and thought about how small even Xerxes' fleet was as it amassed off the coast. Marcus Aurelius talks about taking Plato's view for the same reason that astronauts talk about the overview effect. When they see the earth as a blue marble, suddenly borders fall away and petty ambitions fall away. And what's left, the astronauts tell us, is a sense of global consciousness, of interconnection, of peace and stillness. We have to actively cultivate this.

• 9:41Ryan Holiday?

  Again, in the ancient world, they didn't have the luxury of staring out of the window of an airplane or hitting the button in an elevator and getting way up there. No, they had to make a hike like this, they had to do a climb like this. But to get up there and imagine Marcus Aurelius is looking down on Athens, the city he admired his whole life, even though he's the emperor of Rome, all he wanted to do was come to Greece. He comes to Greece and he's looking down and suddenly this ancient civilization, this formerly huge empire would have looked very puny to him, very insignificant to him. He would have realized how many thousands of people had made the same trek up the same hill, how many tombs and crypts and memorials and monuments and statues there were up and down

• 10:21Ryan Holiday?

  and how they all blend together into a kind of insignificance when you get at it from the right angle. And what's left is just human beings, what's left is society, that's all you see from this angle. And that being the most important thing. Look, a person can change, but people, people don't change. You can change, but the world, the world abideth forever. It is undefeated, it is exactly the same as it ever was and ever will be. This is what we see in Marcus Aurelius's Meditations is his complaints about humanity are the exact same complaints we have today. People complain, people are dishonest, people are jealous, people are lazy, people are loud, people are people, right? We've been waiting on the world

• 11:06Ryan Holiday?

  to change for a very long time and it doesn't. This is why Marcus Aurelius reminds himself, "Don't go around expecting Plato's Republic. That's not where you live. That's not how things work." This isn't about being cynical, but in deciding not to be naive, we are setting ourselves up actually to be less cynical, right? The problem is our expectation, the problem is our false hope, the problem is our delusions, and when they get shattered, then we get bitter and resentful. This isn't to say that you shouldn't try, this isn't to say that we can't make a difference. This isn't to say that we ourselves can't be a bright light amidst the darkness. No, that's actually the whole point. The world is going to stay the same, but we can change,

• 11:48Ryan Holiday?

  we can improve, and still wisdom has to remind us that for the most part, this impact is going to be infinitesimal. Most of all, we can't take this personally. Most of all, we shouldn't set ourselves up for disappointment or disillusionment. Don't stay up waiting for the world to change. It's not going to. If you want to see change, you have to be changed. Strict with others, tolerant with yourself. That was Marcus Aurelius's rule. He didn't just write this in Meditations, he lived by it. One of his biographers wrote that what was so great about Marcus Aurelius is that his severity was limited solely to himself. One of Lincoln's aides said something similar. He said, you know, "Lincoln didn't expect perfection of anyone. He didn't even expect of them the same high standards he had for himself." We have to understand,

• 12:32Ryan Holiday?

  it's called self-discipline for a reason. It's our standards, it's our rules, it's our potential we're trying to live up to. It's not a weapon we bear against others, right? Our discipline should be limited to ourselves, our choices, our actions, our habits, our expectations. And when we see other people falling short of our standards or their standards, we want to be forgiving, we want to be tolerant, we want to be helpful, we want to be encouraging. That's what self-discipline is about.

• 13:02Ryan Holiday?

  Couple of years ago, I lost one of the most valuable things in the world to me. It was my copy of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. I was on a flight from London to Vancouver and I left it in the seat pocket of an Air Canada flight. The reason that my copy of Meditations is so valuable is that it has 20 years of notes, 20 years of highlights, 20 years of me coming back to the same ideas over and over again. Marcus Aurelius is clearly fond of the philosopher Heraclitus. But one of the lines from Heraclitus is the idea that we never step in the same river twice. And so it goes with reading the same book, even though this book is the same as it was when it first arrived on my doorstep all those years ago. Every time I come to it, I'm a new person.

• 13:47Ryan Holiday?

  The world is different. What I know is different. What I'm looking for is different. And so I find something new out of it each time. So I've gotten so much out of this edition, which I've read, and thankfully, a lovely flight attendant returned it to lost and found. And I was able to get it and this book came back to me. But I have many other editions. My point is, there are certain books that grow with you, that change with you, that aren't books that you have read, but they are books that you are reading. And Meditations, I think, is the ultimate book of that. And here, this month is the month of Marcus Aurelius's birth. If you haven't read Meditations yet, I don't know what you're waiting for. There's a reason this book has endured over the last 20 centuries. There's a reason it's endured even in my own life over the last two decades.

• 14:32Ryan Holiday?

  And if you haven't picked it up yet, you're missing out. It's unfortunate that this happened. You didn't want it to happen. You didn't choose for it to happen, but it did happen. Marcus Aurelius writes that to himself in Meditations. It's unfortunate that this happened. But then he catches himself and he goes, no, it's fortunate that it happened to me. He means that, I think, in part because it didn't happen to someone else. But what he really means is fortunate that it happened to me because he trained for stuff like this, right? Marcus Aurelius's reign is one difficult thing after another. There's a plague, there's floods, there's a coup. There's economic problems, there's everything that could go wrong does. And he's talking of those, he says, "It's unfortunate this happened. No, it's fortunate to me." And he says, "And I've remained unharmed by it." Because that's what Stoic philosophy is about. This idea that we're not harmed by external things.

• 15:17Ryan Holiday?

  We respond to those external things. That's what we control, that's what we focus on. So whatever it is that you're going through, whatever just happened, it's not unfortunate that it happened to you. It's fortunate that it happened to you instead of someone else, and it's fortunate that you know how to deal with it. 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. And 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 be angry, to be scared, 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."

• 16:02Ryan Holiday?

  He demands there be no persecutions. He implores the Senate not to stain his reign with blood. It's a beautiful thing, but it's not really the point. When Marcus Aurelius talks in Meditations about revenge, about betrayal, he's not just talking about this theoretically or abstract. He knew it intimately, just as you might know it from being cheated on, or having a business partner who stole from you. 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 revenge is to not be like that." Elsewhere in Meditations, he riffs on how, like, if you're in the ring, if you're in the boxing ring with someone and they're cheating, they're gouging, or throwing low blows, you can't just quit boxing altogether.

• 16:46Ryan Holiday?

  You have to change your strategy around that person, but you can't let it make you quit, right? And so Marcus knew what it was to be betrayed, but he knew he didn't control what other people did. He knew how he controlled how he would respond, whether it would make him bitter, whether it would make him betray his values to get revenge, whether he would allow himself to be overwhelmed by his anger and rage, and do something That he would later regret. So we don't control what other people do. We don't control that they can be dishonest, or sneaky, or manipulative, or Machiavellian. But we control who we are in a world where those things can happen. The people you admire aren't perfect. They screw up. They get rattled. They make mistakes. They fall short of their values. What makes them great, though, is how quickly they're

• 17:31Ryan Holiday?

  able to get back to it. How quickly they're able to return to their principles. How quickly they're able to get back on track. Which is actually something Marcus Aurelius talks about in Meditations. This is one of my favorite passages. He said, and this is book 611, "When jarred unavoidably by circumstances, revert at once to yourself, and don't lose the rhythm more than you can help it. You'll have a better grasp of the harmony if you keep going back to it." The point is, it's okay that you screwed up. It's normal that you screwed up. It's human that you screwed up. But you don't have to keep screwing up. What matters is how quickly you get back to it. If you want to live in good times, you have to do good things. We don't control what's happening in the world around us. We don't control what other people are doing.

• 18:12Ryan Holiday?

  We don't control the economy. We don't control the government. We don't control the weather. We don't control the zeitgeist. But we control what we do. We control who we are. In Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, Marcus Aurelius is lamenting all the shitty things that are happening around him. And there was a lot. He's living through a plague. He's living through a famine. He's living through a civil war. He has health problems. His marriage is struggling. He says, you know, "I was once a fortunate man, but at some point, fortune abandoned me." But then he stops the pity party and he says, you know what? No. Good fortune is up to me. He says it's good intentions, good character, and good deeds. If you want to live in good times, do good things. That's where we find hope. That's where we find bright lights.

• 18:57Ryan Holiday?

  That's where we find something to be inspired by in our own choices, in our own actions. Because that's the one thing we control. Marcus Aurelius clearly hated all the flatterers and sycophants and hangers-on that came with power. He talks about it repeatedly in Meditations. But the thing he hated most was the people who would say things in passing, like, "I'm going to be honest with you. Let Let me be straight with you. Let me tell you what I really think. He said that saying those things was actually a confession, self indictment. People should know you're going to be honest. He said, "An honest person should be like the smelly goat in the room. You should know they're there the second they walk in." When you preface your thing with, "Let me tell you what I really think," or "Here's the truth," you're admitting that that's not the norm,

• 19:41Ryan Holiday?

  that's not what you normally do. And nobody had to think that about Marcus. In fact, from an early age, Marcus Aurelius was named "verisimus," or "the truest one," and we think that's because he was so unflinchingly truthful with Hadrian, his adopted grandfather, the most powerful man in Rome. Marcus just told him what he thought. He didn't hold back, and neither can you. Marcus Aurelius, one of the great leaders of all time. What advice does he have for aspiring leaders, for leaders today? Number one, don't be changed by your position. He says, "Tries to escape being imperialized, being dyed purple by the emperor's cloak." He learns from Antoninus to listen to experts and when not to listen to experts. He is convinced that the power he's been given has to be used for good. He says, "We're here for each

• 20:24Ryan Holiday?

  other." He says, "Know what is enough, right? To be craving more and more and more always brings about ruin." He says that you have to tie your success to your effort, to tie your ambition to what other people say or do. He says, "This is insanity, and it will ruin you and break you." And then finally, he says, "You have to do the right thing. The rest doesn't matter." That's the job of a leader. You have to make the hard decisions. Sometimes you're going to piss people off. Sometimes you're going to have to hurt a few feelings. But the leader does the right thing because it's the right thing. End of story. Bill Belichick, greatest football coach in history, tells his players, "Do your job." Marcus Aurelius asked himself that same question in meditation. He says, "What is my vocation?" It says, "To be a good person. That's the job. At the end of the day, to be a good

• 21:07Ryan Holiday?

  person, to do good things, to make a positive difference in the world for yourself and the people around you." 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. He says, "So what if you ask for help?" I think this is really important, especially, again, when we're lonely, when we're struggling, when we feel like we can't do something, when we feel like we're out of our element, or whatever. You have to be able... To ask for help. There's a book I like to read my kids called The Boy, the Fox, the Horse, and the Mole. And he says something like, asking for help isn't giving up, it's refusing to give up. Whether you just got out of the military, you just moved across the country, you were part of some group, you were part of a community, and now that's not there. Now you're struggling. You were in a marriage, that marriage fell apart,

• 21:51Ryan Holiday?

  gotten clean recently, and your old friends, your old habits, they don't work anymore. That's going to require adjustment and change. And it takes a lot of courage to ask for help, but you have to be able to do that. You have to be willing to put yourself out there. 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? I would appreciate it if you came 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 don't think I 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,

• 22:36Ryan Holiday?

  with an inability to ask for help. In fact, the Stoics would tell you to be brave enough to do that very thing. Marx, Lewis could have been talking about his ill health, could have been talking about bad weather, he could have been talking about the noisy streets in the city below. We just know that what he was trying to do is accept what wasn't in his control and focus on what was in his control, which is what he was going to do about it, what was going to come of it. And then, related to that, is something I've come to understand is basically the most key of the Stoic practices. Marx says, okay, convince yourself that this has been prescribed by a doctor. He says, now convince yourself that it was a gift of the gods, that this is good, that things are good now and they always will be. Easy

• 23:21Ryan Holiday?

  to be grateful when everything is going great. It's easy to be excited and happy about things when things are exciting and you are happy. The work is, can you do that even in the shit? Can you do that even when stuff sucks? Can you do it even when things are hard? That's what Stoicism is. If I was going to put a curse on someone, I think a curse I might Put on them is that you are going to have very strong opinions about everything you see and hear, about everything that people do, about everything that people say, right? This is a recipe for misery, for torture, for endless distraction, for missing the things that are actually important. This is why in meditations, Marcus really reminds himself that we always have the power to have no opinion, that we don't have to let certain things upset us,

• 24:06Ryan Holiday?

  that we can ask ourselves, is this thing essential? Is this something that I should be focused on? Does it really matter? So this isn't apathy, this isn't, you know, sort of checking out, but it is saying, hey, is this thing important? Does this actually matter? Is this a distraction? Is this something they're trying to get in my head about, right? And the ability to put those aside and focus on what truly matters, on what's actually essential, that is a superpower. And that is the way out of the curse that we would wish on our enemy. We want our opponents to be endlessly bogged down in every single little trivial thing, while we focus on what's actually important and where we can actually make a difference. You might not want things to be this way. You wouldn't have chosen them to be this way, but they are this way.

• 24:50Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus really says, let us accept it as if a doctor prescribed it. The point is, this is the medicine you gotta take. This is the hand you've been dealt. This is the situation you are in. And when Marcus really says this, he could have been talking about the pandemic that he lived in, the stresses of his job, the children that he had buried. All of it was, wasn't fair, wasn't fun, but it was. That's what Stoicism is when it talks about acceptance. It doesn't mean you passively lay there and do nothing else, but it means you accept that this is what has happened. This is what the doctor has prescribed for you. And now the question is, what are you going to do next? One thing that's never changed about the world is how much of it's out of our control.

• 25:34Ryan Holiday?

  2,000 years ago, it was largely out of the control of all the Stoics. Even Marcus really is the most powerful man in the world. Most things are not in his control. And when things are out of our control, and we have a way we'd like things to go, we know they might not go that way. What does that create? That creates anxiety. Thousands of years, the Stoics have been dealing with this thing that you and I are still dealing with today. We get nervous, we worry, we have anxiety, we have fears and dread. Marcus Rilis in Meditations talks about how he had a good day because he escaped anxiety. And then he actually corrects himself, he goes, actually, no, I didn't escape it. I discarded it because it was within me. He's noticing, he's realizing that he is the common variable in all the situations that cause him anxiety, just as you are.

• 26:17Ryan Holiday?

  Anxiety is within us, so we want to work on it and think about it so it doesn't rule our lives or ruin our lives. One of the things Marcus Rilis talks about in Meditations over and over again is seeing what's really there. He says, "Not what your enemy sees and hopes that you'll see, but what's actually there." And I think we could take this to mean see the good and see the bad, right? See what's truly there, to see it as clearly as possible, not the thing that people want you to see and get depressed about and quit or afraid of. And at the same time, not to see it delusionally or in some exaggerated way, but to see what is actually there. That's what Stoicism is about, and I think this is super relevant in this time of like terrible news, right?

• 26:57Ryan Holiday?

  To see what's actually in front of you, the good and the bad, to not inflate it and also not diminish it, but to see what's actually there. That is the task of our time. It's kind of crazy if you think about it. We all know ourselves better than other people. We all know what we're trying to do, we all know who we are, and yet for some reason, we're like a weather vane. We let public opinion or trends decide what we like. We let the criticism or the potential criticism of others decide what direction we go with our life. It's so absurd that Sir O'Connell, trying to take it to its logical extreme, said, "There are people who are afraid even to kill themselves for fear of what the neighbors might think." That's why I love this passage in Book 12 of Meditations.

• 27:39Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Rilis, the most powerful man in the world, the person who really had no reason to care about what anyone else thought, and yet to do his job well, needed to understand public opinion. He said, "It never ceases to amaze me. We all love ourselves more than other people, but care about their opinion more than our own. If a god appeared to us," he said, "or a wise human being even, and prohibited us from concealing our thoughts or imagining anything without immediately shouting it, we wouldn't make it through a single day." That's how much we value other people's opinions instead. Of our own. It's not that we shouldn't care at all what other people think. We should just care a whole lot less. I lived in this little apartment here in New Orleans with my now-wife more than 10 years ago. And one of the things I think about when I think about when I lived here was how different a person I was.

• 28:23Ryan Holiday?

  Not just because like time has passed, but all the changes that I've undergone. The Stoics talk about how everything has changed. Marcus Aurelius quoting Heracles says, "We never step in the same river twice." I'm a fundamentally different person standing here now. My relationship with my wife is fundamentally different. We're always changing, just as the world is changing. Even though this building is like 200-plus years old, everything about it is different. It's different me visiting today than when I visited five years ago. It was different than the day I moved in. And so if you try to hold on to your relationship, you try to make it the same as it always was, you're missing what it could become. And I'm so much happier now than I was then, which is why I try to be fluid and flexible and adjust. Even though you also try to be disciplined and principled and systematized in what you do. You have to embrace change.

• 29:07Ryan Holiday?

  You have to grow, because if you're not growing, you're dying. I don't think that's what you want. Marcus Aurelius didn't like people. You can't read Meditations and not see this. He opens Meditations with a meditation on how frustrating and obnoxious other people are. And even this idea, this idea of the obstacle is the way. That quote is him talking about other people, about how people get in our way, how people present obstacles. But he says that in that obstacle, there's an opportunity to actually practice this philosophy that you say you believe, to be good in spite of other people, to be just in the face of injustice, to be temperate in the face of intemperance that's being rewarded, to be courageous when everyone else is being cowardly and being rewarded for it.

• 29:51Ryan Holiday?

  For the Stoics, people are frustrating. People are an obstacle, but like all obstacles, they're also the way. There's something, challenge, we can rise to meet. We can be better for wrestling with other people's difficulties. So don't resent people, use them to become better. One of the big Stoic shifts is realizing that posthumous fame is worthless. Right? Marcus Aurelius was incredibly famous in his own lifetime. They built statues of him. These statues were in People's houses, he was the head of an empire of millions and millions of people. He would have known that the deeds of other emperors and conquerors had lasted throughout history, but he also stops himself and goes, wait, they're not around to enjoy this. You know, what good is it to Alexander that Alexandria is still named after him?

• 30:34Ryan Holiday?

  Right? In fact, in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius says, Alexander the Great and his mule driver, they both died, both entered the earth in the same way. His point was that, how many people remember just a couple emperors before him? He says, who remembers now the name of Vespasian? And he lists not just the emperor, but influential advisors, the celebrities of that time. And he says, they're all forgotten. And his point is, is not just that most of us, even the famous people, even people like Marcus, are inevitably forgotten, right? We might be talking about him here in this video, but most people just know him as the old guy in the movie Gladiator, if anything at all. But he says, also, he says, the people in the future are not magically going to be smarter or better than the people are now. Right? So this idea that you're going to be vindicated by the future is also an empty

• 31:19Ryan Holiday?

  and a silly hope. And again, even if you are vindicated in the future, it won't do you any good because you won't be around to enjoy it. So do what's right now because it's right, because you want to do it. Don't do it because you're trying to build this legacy for the future. Don't defer your, the love of your family. Don't defer being present. Don't defer your health, right? Because you're striving to make this thing that's going to last for eternity. It won't, and even if it does, what good will that do? This is one of the most powerful passages in one of the most powerful books ever written. 2,000 years ago, the Emperor of Rome, a person that many believed was a god, that believed was immortal, that they believed had so much power that no one and nothing could touch

• 32:04Ryan Holiday?

  him. We have Marcus Aurelius writing in his famous Meditations in Book 221. He says, "You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think." He writes over and over again in Meditations, we see him doing this memento mori practice, remembering that he is mortal, remembering that life is ephemeral, that life is short. That we are not in control, that we don't get to decide. And so we can't take this present moment for granted. We can't take our health for granted. We can't take other people around us for granted. We can't take the future for granted. He says, "You could be good today. Instead, you choose tomorrow. Don't put it off. Do what you need to do now because you could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think."