40 Hidden Lessons From Marcus Aurelius' Meditations

You think you’ve read Meditations, but the deeper truths in Marcus Aurelius’ private writings often reveal themselves only after years of revisiting them. 🎥 WATCH THIS EPISODE| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJGtygqtAbU✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 📢 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?

  You think you've read this book. A lot of people think they've read this book. I thought I'd read this book. This is Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, The Private Thoughts of the Most Powerful Man in the World. But there are secrets, there are lessons inside this book that went way over my head, things that I missed, not just the first time I read it, but the second time I read it, and the third time, and the fourth time. There are things that I didn't understand in Marcus Aurelius's Meditations until decades after I read it for the first time. And there will be things that I will get out of it when I open it tonight on my bedside table. I've done lots of videos. I've done talks all over the world about it, but I'm still getting new things and taking new lessons out of it. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode, the hidden lessons in Marcus Aurelius's Meditations,

• 0:59Ryan Holiday?

  the things that might not strike you the first time, but when you really study them and you really think about them, as I have for the last two decades, you'll understand at a deeper level.

• 1:13Ryan Holiday?

  One of the things that Gregory Hayes notes at the beginning of his translation of Meditations, which I missed on my first few readings, I missed not only his observation, but I missed what was so obviously not there, sort of like the dog that didn't bark, is that Marcus Aurelius never says he is a Stoic. We don't have any definitive proof that Marcus Aurelius was a Stoic philosopher. All we really have is his thinking, which aligns with Stoic philosophy, and of course, his way of living, which is very, very Stoic. So there's a Stoic lesson in that, too. As Epictetus says, "We don't talk about our philosophy, we embody it." That's what makes Marcus Aurelius a Stoic. Meditations is not why Marcus Aurelius is considered a Stoic philosopher. His life is why he's considered a Stoic philosopher.

• 1:58Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius wasn't dogmatic. He wasn't saying, "This is the Stoic orthodoxy." When Seneca talks about how he would quote a bad author, even if the line is good, that he reads from all the schools of philosophy. Marcus does this too. What Hayes speculates is that if you were to ask Marcus Aurelius what he was, he doubts that he would say, oh, I am a stoic. He would say, I am a philosopher. Or I would say, actually, I think it's a better guess that he would say, I am studying philosophy. He's not interested in labels. He's not interested in giving himself honors. He's just interested in exploring these ideas and being better for them. It is striking when you think about it that we can relate to meditations at all. I mean, here's a book written 2,000 years ago, not for publication,

• 2:42Ryan Holiday?

  in Greek by an emperor god-king who owns slaves, who has an arranged marriage, who heads this enormous, bloodthirsty empire. In so many ways, we should be like, what is this guy talking about? What does this have to do with me? What's going on? His life, his inner thoughts should be incomprehensible to us. And yet, it is precisely because of the specificity of that that Marcus Aurelius is so universal and relatable. And I think that's the achievement of meditations, which is that somehow, because of the earnestness, because of the vulnerability, because of the struggle of it, the inner life of this unfathomable man

• 3:24Ryan Holiday?

  becomes comprehensible and relatable and inspiring and accessible to us. It's like how the most specific comedy somehow becomes the most accessible and in some ways, the most timeless. There's something remarkable about what Marcus is doing. He's writing for an audience of one and yet manages to write in the end for an audience, not just cumulatively of the millions, to all of us all this time later. Sometime around the year 170 AD, the most powerful man in the world sat down to write. He had no idea that you and I would ever see what he was writing. And miraculously, these writings survived. And within them are some of the greatest and wisest insights ever put down.

• 4:08Ryan Holiday?

  Sometimes these insights are really obvious. They jump out off the page at you. But other ones, you have to understand the deeper context. You have to understand what he meant, where he was coming from. Why he would have been saying this to fully understand them, which is why, over the last couple of years, we developed this deep dive into Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, a guide, a course, a challenge, a companion for understanding one of the most important works ever put down in any language, in any era, by any person. How do you take the insights from 2,000 years ago, from one of the most impressive people to ever live, and apply them to your daily life? Calling it Marcus Aurelius Month here at Daily Stoic, and we'd love to have you, and you can join us.

• 4:53Ryan Holiday?

  Sign up right now at dailystoic.com/meditations. And actually, it wasn't until I was walking the streets of Aquincum, which is the Roman camp outside Budapest, where Marcus spent some time with the Second Legion, and they suspect that he wrote some chunks of Meditations there. That it hit me, like, this is a guy, he walked down this street. So yeah, he's a king, yeah, he believes things that are so different and distinct from us. His reality was so different from us, his language was different from us. And yet, he was a guy who was walking from this building to this building. He was walking over here to this bath. He was using the bathroom over here. At the end of the day, people are people. And when we strip those people away of the legend that encrust them,

• 5:37Ryan Holiday?

  as Marcus Aurelius talks about in Meditations, as we de-Cesarefy them, we find how much we have in common with them, how fundamentally human and related we all are. What also hit me, walking those streets of Aquincum, is just how far it is from Rome. In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius says, "Life is warfare and a journey far from home." And I guess I sort of thought he was being metaphorical, but then, in Hungary, you're in Budapest, and you go, "I'm nowhere near Italy. The emperor of Rome was here? How long would it have taken him to get there?" I mean, Marcus Aurelius dies in Vienna. Budapest is 800 miles from Rome. Like, the size and the scope of the Roman Empire

• 6:20Ryan Holiday?

  is unfathomable. It is enormous. And you realize that Marcus does have to spend enormous amounts of time away from home. So he would have been lonely. He would have been exhausted. He would have been in totally unfamiliar territory. But that comes with the territory. And it certainly, it shapes some of the writing and the observations. When he talks about being a citizen of the world, when he talks about our mutual affinity for each other, when he talks about how we have more similarities than differences. When he talks about taking the bird's eye view. This is shaped by the wide swaths of the globe, the known globe, that he was personally able to experience. And I think it hearkens to the idea of the overview effect, you know, that astronauts see from a distance.

• 7:04Ryan Holiday?

  Marcusius would have seen so much more of Rome than your average Roman. And that shapes him. And it also took its toll on him. David Hernandez de la Fuente, he's this Spanish classicist. And I was reading this article where he was interviewed about the popularity of meditations. He's translated it in Spanish, from Latin to Spanish. What he said strikes him about meditations, and it strikes me now too, is that you have two voices in Marcus Aurelius, two voices in this guy's head. There's one that doubted and suffered, he says. While the other was the teacher, right, offering comfort and certainties. It made me think of what Steven Pressfield talks about in The War of Art, that we kind of have the higher self and the lower self. And you can kind of see that what meditations is, is Marcus Aurelius occupying where we

• 7:46Ryan Holiday?

  all are, the lower self, when we're not what we want to be, when we fall short, when we have problems, when we're flawed. And then who we want to be and who we know we can be, and he's trying to get from here to there. And there's even a quote in Meditations where he talks about this. He says, you know, you want to fight to be the person that philosophy tried to make you. And the idea is that meditations is the minutes of that fight. We're seeing Marcus Aurelius battle with these two voices, these two selves, trying to get from here to there. And that's what makes it such a beautiful piece of art. Why do I like the Gregory Hayes translation of Meditations so much? Well, I'll tell you why I don't like most of the other translations. They're stilted, they're inaccessible. I mean, some of them are products of their time. If you read one of the free ones on the internet, like the George Long translation, you're reading a product of the 1800s.

• 8:31Ryan Holiday?

  You're reading how the 1800s interpreted the year 180 AD. You are looking at it through the Refraction. Marcus Aurelius was writing to himself, so he would have been accessible. But he was also brilliant and poetic. And he loved language. He was tutored by the greatest minds in antiquity. So it shouldn't surprise us that there are beautiful turns of phrases in there, beautiful observations. He's writing in Greek, the language of philosophy. I think Gregory Hayes captures that the most. It's lyrical, it's poetic, it's exciting. Takes your breath away in some passages, but it's also deeply personal and real and earnest. And that's what Meditations is supposed to be.

• 9:15Ryan Holiday?

  It's our imagination of what the most powerful man in the world, who'd been trained in philosophy and rhetoric, sitting down and trying to admonish himself on how to get from the lower self to the higher self, how to be the person that philosophy wanted him to be. And if Meditations isn't moving you, it's missing something. Because Marcus Aurelius was trying to move himself. He was trying to remind himself of the values and the ideas and the language that had inspired him as a young man. And more importantly, he's trying to escape the darkness of Rome at this time, the German front with the Roman army. He's writing it in his tent. He's writing it at the Colosseum. He's trying to escape from the nastiness, the darkness, the awfulness of life.

• 9:58Ryan Holiday?

  He's trying to create peace, trying to wash himself off, trying to retreat into his own soul. In his edition of Meditations, that's what obviously I tried to do.

• 10:10Ryan Holiday?

  Now, of course, Meditations feels very old to us. It's 1900 or so years old. But what's interesting to think is that it was very old to Marcus Aurelius too. Zeno is creating what becomes Stoicism in the 4th century B.C., give or take. So it's hundreds of years old by the time Marcus Aurelius gets to it. It's as old to him as Shakespeare is to us. Like 10 emperors come and go between Nero and Marcus. That's just Seneca to Marcus. So when Marcus talks about how some of these names feel ancient to us, how easily they're forgotten, he's running through history the same way that we're like... Wait, how do you pronounce that name? Who was that?

• 10:53Ryan Holiday?

  What I take from this is that ancient isn't some fixed label. There's always an ancient to someone. Even the people who are ancient to us thought that they lived in the future. Right? Thought that they were looking backwards at what we now sort of compress into this single period. Marcus didn't live in ancient Rome. He lived in the cutting edge future. And that changes how we think about it. You know, I seem to remember my copy of Meditations just like arriving right away. You find something out on the internet, you click it and it comes. But looking at my receipt, I see that I had to buy two other books to get free shipping because Amazon Prime didn't exist. When the Modern Library asked me to write the foreword for it, I wanted to search the order number in my email just to see what came up. It was actually kind of mortifying.

• 11:35Ryan Holiday?

  I saw that I was going back and forth with Amazon customer service about the fact that it had been delayed in shipping. I'd had to wait an extra two days. I was like, what good is this two day shipping if it takes four days? And I look back at that sort of immature entitled person who's taking for granted the miracle of like, someone told me about this book and a couple of days later it's here and it's cheaper than I could have gotten it anywhere else. But I didn't yet know that I would need that advice in Meditations where Marcus really says, you don't have to turn this into something. It doesn't have to upset you. That entitled teenage part of us, it's always there. I see it when people email the Daily Stoic customer service. But even though what we do is about Stoicism, just the profound un-Stoicism of the people who write in.

• 12:18Ryan Holiday?

  And I don't judge them because I have been there myself. We're so greedy, we're so entitled. We turn them into these slights, into these grievances, into these wrongs that have been done to us. Really, we should just be grateful. We should chill out. We should just wait until the thing comes. It's important that we understand that a lot of what's in Meditations is not new. It's not even original. Marcus wouldn't have meant to imply otherwise. He's writing things that he's studied and thought about and been told so many times that it feels like he owns them. Just like sometimes I find myself quoting the Stoics that way. But when you really know your Stoicism, you go, oh, that was a line from Epictetus. Oh, that's him borrowing a metaphor that first appears.

• 13:00Ryan Holiday?

  In Panateus, here he is alluding to an idea from Plato or Socrates. And maybe if we even knew more about some of the original Stoics whose works were lost, we'd find Meditations to be even less original. The idea is that Stoicism, Marcus' meditation, this is a collective work. This is a collective project. It's about the writing and rewriting in the way that hip hop is building on the music that came before, sampling and remixing and making callouts and allusions and responding to and being inspired by. That's what Meditations is. It's a collection of all the philosophical influences and ideas that shaped Marcus, but that also that Marcus was drawing on in that moment.

• 13:43Ryan Holiday?

  One of the things Marcus is really grateful for in Meditations is that his teacher, Rosticus, taught him not to fall for every smooth talker. Right in the ancient world, these were sophists, but it was also demagogues, people who told you what you wanted to hear, people who tried to scapegoat, who focused on external enemies, people who lied. Think about the emperor, how many people would try to manipulate him, flatter him? Think about the cults that people fell prey to. Just then as now, people were susceptible to smooth talkers. And part of Stoicism, a core of Stoicism is, as Epictetus says, stopping and putting every impression to the test, really asking yourself, what is this person saying? Is this true? What assumptions are in it? What's their character like? What's their motivations? Cicero would say, cui bono, right?

• 14:28Ryan Holiday?

  Who benefits? So asking, why is this person doing it? What is their motivation? What's their supporting evidence? This is really key part of Stoicism, and it was important in the ancient world, but in a world of AI and misinformation and propaganda and influencers, myself included, you must put everything to the test and don't fall for every smooth talker. A couple of years ago, Jerry Seinfeld got really into Marcus Aurelius. And there was a video of him holding his copy of our edition of Marcus Aurelius, which I really loved. But in one of the interviews, someone asked him what struck him about Marcus Aurelius. And he said something that I hadn't thought of, that I thought was really interesting. He was like, I like imagining Marcus Aurelius in his bedroom.

• 15:09Ryan Holiday?

  He's like, the leader of the entire world and an emperor, the Roman emperor, talking to himself. He goes, what do you think this guy's bedroom is like? It's just sometimes a comedian's mind. Every person has a slightly different take on Marcus. He goes, what do you think this guy's bedroom is like? He was struck by one of the same things that I've always been struck by, that opening passage of Book Two, where Marcus is going, look, you're gonna meet annoying people today. You're gonna meet dishonest people today. And he's like, why is this surprising to you? This is what every day is like. People are annoying, which is true. And that's why Marcus Aurelius' meditations continues to resonate with people of all different walks of life. There's a famous story about Marcus Aurelius where he is quite intimidated by the idea of becoming emperor.

• 15:54Ryan Holiday?

  We're told he even breaks down in tears when he is told that this is his fate, because he knows how many bad kings there have been in history. But then we're told that shortly after, Marcus Aurelius has a dream. And in this dream, he dreams that he has shoulders made of ivory. This is the idea that he can bear the weight of imperial power. He can do this. He's stronger than he knew. And when I first heard that story, I didn't know what to make of it. And then it hit me one day, oh, he's talking about imposter syndrome. We all doubt whether we're qualified. We all doubt whether we're strong enough. But we do, we're stronger than we know. We have those shoulders of ivory. We can do this. There's something I think very special about the most powerful person in the world being unsure about whether they're up for it. And I think that's actually the mark of a good leader.

• 16:39Ryan Holiday?

  If you think the job is gonna be easy, if you think it's yours by divine right, if you're not a little bit scared about it, you're probably not taking it serious. You're probably being egotistical. I think it's good that he had a little bit of imposter syndrome. I think it's good that you have a little bit of imposter syndrome. I have it too. But then we do these exercises, we think about it, we go, okay. Actually, I do think I can do this. It's honestly impossible to comprehend the immensity of the tragedy that Marcus Rilis experiences in his life. Starts by losing his father as a young age. He loses tutors and teachers that he loves. He lives through the Antonine Plague. He sees floods and famines. He sees war. And he also buries half of his children.

• 17:23Ryan Holiday?

  You can't imagine how painful that would be. And it would have been totally reasonable for him to be angry, for him to despair, for him to give up, for him to quit. And it makes some of the lines in Meditations feel all the more heart wrenching. There's a line in Book Seven where he's quoting a play from Euripides where he says, "But why should we be angry at the world as if the world would notice?" Again, this is from a man who buried multiple children, who saw unfathomable devastation and destruction. But he's reminding himself that the universe is indifferent to each and every one of our happiness and our feelings. It is not personal at all. It is just doing what it does.

• 18:08Ryan Holiday?

  And we can't add anger and resentment on top of that. We just have to do our best to keep going. Given the immensity of the pain and tragedy and loss and unfairness of Marcus Rilis's life, I have zero tolerance for people who say that Meditations is depressing. His life was depressing. That he didn't kill himself, that he got out of bed every morning was an act of immense perseverance and courage. It is a profound statement against hopelessness. It is a message of hope. Marcus Rilis is a hopeful figure. Despite everything that life threw at him, despite all of it, he kept going. He tried to be good. He tried to be happy.

• 18:52Ryan Holiday?

  He showed up for work. He helped people. He was the best he was capable of being. He laughed and smiled and loved anyway. And to me, that is the example that we should all be aspiring to live up to.

• 19:08Ryan Holiday?

  Why do Marcus Aurelius and Nero end up so different? They're both not born to power, they're chosen for it. Both lose their fathers early, both introduced early to philosophy. Marcus through his philosophy teacher, Junius Rusticus, Nero through Seneca himself. And yet, Marcus is a great philosopher king and Nero is a monster. What is the distinguishing factor? I think on some level, Marcus believes in Stoic philosophy and Nero never does. Why is one of them vicious and unhinged, the other just and kind? I think the deciding factor is their mother. Nero's mother is ambitious and calculating, uncaring and cruel. And Nero becomes all these things. Marcus's mother is the opposite of these.

• 19:51Ryan Holiday?

  He writes at the beginning of Meditations about her reverence for the divine, her generosity. He says, "Her inability not only to do wrong, but her inability to even conceive of doing it." And he says, "Most of all, he was struck by the simple way that she lived, that she wasn't like so many other rich Romans." And so, when we want to think about multi-generational impact, it's the impact we have on our kids that matters so much. Marcus Aurelius is Marcus Aurelius because of his mother. So where does Marcus get his profound and lifelong commitment to doing the right thing, to kindness, to charity, to justice, to living within his means? It's from her, it's from his mother. He says in Meditations that the only thing that's important

• 20:34Ryan Holiday?

  is to behave in your life towards the liars and the crooks and those around you with kindness, with honesty, with justice. I think even there, so many of the beautiful lessons in Meditations are Marcus Aurelius channeling the example of his mother. It's easy to miss, but Marcus Aurelius is writing Meditations in the midst of what's known as the Antonine Plague, a plague that lasts for a decade and a half and kills millions and millions of people. And in fact, Marcus Aurelius may have himself died from it. But when you understand this context, it shapes what you see in the book. It shapes clearly Marcus's worldview in the way that all of our worldviews were shaped and informed by the pandemic that we lived in, just like 100 years ago. Years ago, it was shaped by the Spanish flu.

• 21:19Ryan Holiday?

  And what came out in the roaring twenties was a reaction to what had happened in the late teens. So when Marcus really says, you could leave life right now, let that determine what you do and say and think. He was talking about a virus. He was talking about a plague. He was talking about the fact that all around him, perfectly healthy people perish like that. So Memento Mori wasn't this abstract philosophical exercise for Marcus. It was a response to the very real and capricious world that he lived in. And I didn't appreciate that the first time that I read it. And so when you understand that Marcus really was writing during a pandemic, during a devastating plague, you have to appreciate so many of the remarks that he's making in different contexts.

• 22:01Ryan Holiday?

  When he says, convince yourself that everything is a gift from the gods, that things are good and always will be. Again, he's writing this in the midst of a plague that's killing millions of people, that's devastating Rome's economy, that's devastating its civil society. He's actively having to work to convince himself that even the worst thing that could have possibly happened still has a silver lining in it, that it's still an opportunity. And that is the work of Meditations, that despite the incredibly terrible hand that Marcus has dealt, 20 years of peace and prosperity disappear like that. They disappear into a plague, which is preceded by a famine and floods. And then an endless series of wars comes after all this.

• 22:43Ryan Holiday?

  It's one thing after another, as this ancient historian Cassius Dio would write. But Marcus convinces himself that this is a gift from the gods, that things actually are good and that they always will be, and that they can be good if he acts with good character, if he has good thoughts, if he does good actions, if he performs good deeds. He finds the good, even in the terrible situation that he's in, and he finds the good in himself. And he tries to bring that into the world, which is the fundamental task of Stoic philosophy. One of my favorite passages in Meditations is this passage right at the beginning. And one of the things that Marcus writes is that he says he feels gratitude that he encountered Thrasse, Helvidius, Cato, Dion, and Brutus, and conceived of a society of

• 23:27Ryan Holiday?

  equal laws governed by equality of status and of speech, and of rulers who would respect the liberty of their subjects above all else. Now, I think this is interesting because now, while that is a beautiful sentiment... Nothing was further from that than Rome, and certainly, nothing is further than that than Rome, ruled by an emperor, a god-king with absolute power over everyone and everything, and only a essentially symbolic senate, rubber stamping these ideas. So, how should we see this? Is Marcus a hypocrite? Is he just paying lip service to it? No, I think what Marcus is laying out there, we should see similar to how we read the opening lines in the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson writes that all men are created equal,

• 24:12Ryan Holiday?

  while he is attended by slaves. Again, does that mean the idea is hollow and empty? No, it means he is expressing an idea, an ideal, that every subsequent generation has tried to get closer to realizing. The Rome of Cato and Cicero was not perfect. Certainly, the Rome of Seneca was not perfect. The Rome of Marcus Aurelius was not perfect. America, or wherever you live today, is not perfect. But the idea is in the striving and trying to get closer. We certainly have gotten closer to it than perhaps Marcus Aurelius would have ever even actually imagined is possible. In 1963, the March on Washington, Martin Luther King gets up there and he says, "I'm here to collect a promissory note." He was coming to make good on the Declaration of Independence. He was there to make good on the Emancipation Proclamation.

• 24:56Ryan Holiday?

  So, we could say that Lincoln was a hypocrite, that Jefferson was a hypocrite, that they didn't actually mean this. Maybe they didn't actually mean it, but they put it down. And so, doing gave a standard, a goal, a benchmark for us to aspire to. And if every generation does its work, if we get a little bit closer, we are passing a baton forward, we are keeping a torch lit. That's, to me, what it's about. So, Marcus doesn't come close to realizing the dream of the Stoics, but the founders got a little bit closer, inspired, in fact, by Cato and many other great Stoics. And then, we've gotten a little closer still, and hopefully, the next generation and the next generation. That's the idea, that it's something we are striving towards together, but never fully, ever actually realizing.

• 25:39Ryan Holiday?

  One of the things Marcus Aurelius 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? 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.

• 26:24Ryan Holiday?

  That is the task of our time. You might not want things to be this way. You wouldn't have chosen them to be this way, but they are this way. Marx 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 Marx 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,

• 27:09Ryan Holiday?

  what are you going to do next? Marx really 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 as 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 to be grateful when everything is going great.

• 27:53Ryan Holiday?

  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. But when things have happened to me, when things have been challenging or difficult, like when we were Opening this bookstore in the middle of the pandemic, or you know, you get another flat tire, or you have to deal with some other crisis or problem at work. You know, there's some part of you that goes, why me? Why did this happen to me? And I think often about this passage in book four of Meditations, where Marcus really starts to say, hey, this is unfortunate that this happened. And it's true, a lot of unfortunate things happened to him. And you only have to study his life to really see

• 28:36Ryan Holiday?

  how long the list of unfortunate things that he could have been referring to were. But then he says, no, it's fortunate that it happened to me. Right? He says, and that I've remained unharmed by it. Because that's not true for everyone, right? Not everyone has the advantages you have. Not everyone has the resilience that you have. Not everyone has the perspective that you have. Not everyone can do this work that we're talking about. They can go, hey, actually, I'm able to think about this differently. I'm able to see this differently. I'm able to find something to be grateful for in it. I'm able to find something to be excited about in it. I'm able to turn this into something. Not everyone is capable of that, but leaders are. Leaders have to be careful. Leaders have to be able to do that. That's what leadership is. That's what philosophy is. That's what being a stoic is.

• 29:21Ryan Holiday?

  To go, look at this thing and go, no, it's actually not unfortunate. It's fortunate that it happened to me.

• 29:29Ryan Holiday?

  Look, people are selfish. People are obnoxious. People are ignorant and egotistical. They are, they are all the things that Marcus really lists at the beginning of book two of Meditations, right? They recline their seats on airplanes. They drive too slowly. They say stupid, mean things on the internet. All the things back then and then all the new things now. This is just what humans do and who they are. And that's why I think the passage in book eight has stayed with me. And I think about it more and more. He says, you can hold your breath till they're blue in the face. They'll just go on doing it. We're not going to be able to make them not that way. We have to make it less triggering for us that they are that way. We have to be prepared for it,

• 30:12Ryan Holiday?

  which is what he's saying at the beginning of book two of Meditations. And then we have to remember that we are punishing ourselves by expecting it to be otherwise by. Holding our breath by being miserable that it is this way. We have to get better at not being rattled by it, not being thrown off by it, not being triggered and upset and disappointed and made cynical about it. We all have jobs. You do what you do. I do what I do. But one of the points that Mark Schreel is making in Meditations is that people have different jobs and roles in the spectrum of human beings. There are heroic, inspiring people. There are dishonest people. There are frustrating people. There are weird people. Everyone is playing a role in the tapestry that is human beings.

• 30:57Ryan Holiday?

  You know, he says, is a world without shameless people possible? No, there have always been shameless people. So when you meet a shameless person, he's saying, that's who they are. They are doing their job. I think the question then is, what is your job? Are you the kind of person who gets upset with shameless people? Or are you the kind of person who is wise enough, in command of yourself enough to go, this is who they are. They're doing my job. I'm going to do my job, which is not be like that. I'm going to be grateful that that's not who I am and that's not what I have to do and who I have to be. A few years ago, I bought the rights to publish the Gregory Hayes translation of Meditations in a leather edition. Like, my, my book had been falling apart. My paperback, I'd had it for 15 years. It, it was showing its age, right?

• 31:41Ryan Holiday?

  It was showing the many miles that I'd put on it. And it was worse for wear, to be sure. The cover was taped back on. The pages are starting to fall apart. They were getting brittle. So I, I bought the rights to do this leather edition, right? For many years, I've been working with this company. They're based in Texas, but they have a, a bindery in Belarus, which is where they manufactured it. Shortly after we began printing the edition, that, the horrendous invasion of Ukraine happened. And Belarus has been complicit in that invasion from day one. It's one of Russia's closest allies. In fact, it was one of Russia's only allies at this point. And so I, I was sort of sitting and wrestling with the ethical decision of, should I continue to do business there? Now, some companies were forbidden from doing business there because of various sanctions.

• 32:26Ryan Holiday?

  And it turned out, we were not sanctioned. We were not legally prohibited from doing business. In Belarus, but I just didn't feel good about it. It didn't feel right, so I decided to make a change. And I had thought about Marcus Aurelius's line in Meditations. He says, "Just that you do the right thing, the rest doesn't matter." Right? He's saying it doesn't matter that it might cost more. It doesn't matter that some people might criticize you. It doesn't matter that we might run out of stock for a while. Right? It didn't feel right, so I had to make that decision. And that's what Meditations is about. It's about reminding yourself of these principles over and over and over again. So then, when you encounter real world scenarios, suddenly you understand what it means and you have to apply it. We don't just talk about the philosophy, we have to embody it.

• 33:10Ryan Holiday?

  Now, you might think that, oh, everyone appreciated that or that it was easy. Yeah, sure, it probably costs a little bit of money to switch from one facility to another, but you find, you know, a good price, a good deal, and then everything's fine. And maybe I thought that a little bit myself. Like, I thought, hey, maybe it'll cost 10% more, 20% more. In fact, it costs like 100% more. It obliterated the margins on the book. But again, it's either the right thing to do or it's not. It's not, it's the right thing to do if it's cheap enough, if it still protects your margins. No, it's either the right thing to do or not. And again, Marcus embodies this. In The Depths of the Antonine Play, what does he do?

• 33:51Ryan Holiday?

  He sells off the palace furnishings to pay down Rome's debts. Now, this wouldn't have been fun. This wouldn't have been easy. It would have been nice if there was some easier solution. But again, it's either the right thing to do or it's not. If it wasn't illegal for us to make our books in Belarus, just like it's not illegal for me to manufacture stuff in China or in sweatshops in Guatemala. These things are not just legal, but standard business practices for many of the things that we all purchase and use. I've always thought about this with the manufacturing practices that I use with Daily Stoic and with my businesses. I think about a line in Meditations where Marcus Aurelius says

• 34:34Ryan Holiday?

  that we shouldn't do anything that requires walls or curtains. Now, look, if you actually knew how your shoes were made, if you actually saw videos of that slaughterhouse or whatever, you would be appalled, you would be disgusted. But that's the point. We create the walls or curtains to hide what we would be disgusted by or our customers would be disgusted by. And I try my best to not have that practice. I try to make decisions. I try to run my business. I try to run my life in a way that if someone were to pore over the books, if someone were to look behind the curtain, if someone were to see the supply chain, they'd say, hey, they were trying their best. They were doing a good job. They were, their principles were evident. And that's how I think about it. And I take that from meditations. When Marcus Aurelius talked about his own good luck and his own good fortune,

• 35:19Ryan Holiday?

  it wasn't that, he didn't feel grateful that he was selected out of 50 million people to be the emperor. He didn't talk about how nice his house was or all the nice things people said about him. For Marcus Aurelius, being rich, being powerful, being lucky, it wasn't to do with any of these things. He said that the great grace of his life, the good fortune that he had, was that whenever he saw someone that was in need of help, he always had the money to help them. And he said, I was luckier still that no one had to return that favor to me. I think that's such a great definition of a rich life, of a good life, of a blessed life, that you are blessed enough to be a blessing to others and to not need to be a burden to others. And if that's where you are,

• 36:03Ryan Holiday?

  you should count yourself as lucky and as fortunate as the Emperor of Rome.

• 36:11Ryan Holiday?

  Obviously, one of the paradoxes of meditations is Marcus Aurelius is talking over and over again about how no one's going to remember him. Eternal fame is impossible and worthless. And yet, here we are, 2,000 years later, still talking about him. And there's a really interesting interview I saw with Jerry Seinfeld, where he was saying-

• 36:29Speaker 01

  And that's my obsession now, is Marcus Aurelius. He had this fantastic philosophical observations on life. And you've learned what from that? That everything that you're worried about is going to be gone like that. The people that you, that are criticizing you, they're gonna be gone, you're gonna be gone. All this hand wringing worry and concern over, how are people viewing me? And someone said something bad about me, and you get so upset about it, is wasted time and energy. Marcus Aurelius says your only focus should be on getting better at what you're doing.

• 37:09Ryan Holiday?

  So to me, the lesson you take from that is that fame, recognition, even legacy, is okay, provided that it's the byproduct. If you're doing the right things for the right reasons, you're doing great work, you're working hard, you're focusing on what you control, and then outside your control, you're remembered thousands of years later. That's great. And that's what happened to Marcus Aurelius. He wasn't writing meditations for us, he was writing meditations for him. And then in writing it for him, it ends up surviving for 2,000 years. That's the way to do it. But I do think, one of the things Marcus Aurelius points out quite eloquently in meditations, is the insanity of caring about what people think about you after you're dead. He says, people who long for posthumous fame,

• 37:54Ryan Holiday?

  first, I forget that they won't be around to enjoy it. But second, that the people in the future are not likely to magically be smarter and better than the people now. Why are you holding out for this validation, this appreciation, this recognition by future generations? Where are you basing this assumption that people are gonna be so much better in the future? You're gonna be dead, people are still gonna be people. Just focus on what you control now. Although, of course, the other insane thing is that we care a lot about people's opinions now, even though they're not that great either, right? A passage I've come to in meditations over and over again, especially when, you know, I've been criticized, or maybe something I wanted to do wasn't received the way I hoped it would,

• 38:38Ryan Holiday?

  or it didn't sell as well as I thought. He says, why is it that we all love ourselves more than other people, but for some crazy reason, we care about other people's opinions more than our own? Over the years, I've done a lot of different talks to military groups. And one of the Tragic things about the military community is it has a very high suicide rate. So when people are in the service and they're part of this group and they're all together, things tend to be great. And what happens is afterwards, after they get home, suddenly they don't have the support system, they don't have the structure, they don't have the close relationships and they wither, they get lonely, they spiral into depression and there's very high suicide rates in the military community, which is why I always tell them, not just one of my

• 39:22Ryan Holiday?

  favorite quotes from Marx's realist, but one of the most explicit military metaphors that he uses in meditations. He says, "We are like soldiers storming a wall." He says, "You have a mission to accomplish. If you've been wounded and you've fallen and you need to reach up to ask a comrade for help," he says, "so what?" I love like the shrug of it, the idea that it's not a big deal and it isn't a big deal. When people ask you for help, are you like judging them? Are you looking down on them? You're like, "What a loser, what a weakling." You're like, "Oh," you're like excited that they gave you the opportunity to help them and people are gonna feel the same way for you. And so I do think it's important, given this reputation that Stoicism has of being

• 40:04Ryan Holiday?

  vulnerable, being superhuman, being tough, suppressing emotions. That's not what we see in the pages or in the life of the Stoics. And I think it's really important and really powerful to have the most powerful man in the world normalize, make it no big deal to be like, "I needed help. I'm struggling. Can you help me?" Obviously, I think this is particularly relevant in communities where people are struggling with visible and invisible wounds, but it's true for all of us. If you need to ask someone for help, so what?

• 40:38Ryan Holiday?

  It must have been so depressing to live Marx's realist's time. Not only is there a famine and floods and a plague, but Rome is falling apart. Rome is decadent. Rome is hypocritical. Rome is cruel. Rome is dark. Being the emperor must have been depressing and frustrating and disillusioning in so many ways. And yet Marx's realist maintains a certain hopefulness. I know that's not What we think about when we think about the Stoics, but Marx realist reminds himself to dig deep. He says, there is an inexhaustible supply of goodness down there in yourself, in humanity. He says, it doesn't matter how much dung people fling on top of it. It doesn't matter

• 41:19Ryan Holiday?

  how dark it gets. It's there. And he says, you just have to keep digging and it will keep bubbling up. And when I think about our own depressing times, I think about our own dark times, I think of that beautiful image. It's there. We just have to keep digging for it. There's a line, I think it's actually attributed to that cartoon, The Family Circus, about how there's a reason they call it the present, because this present is a gift. And as it happens, Marx realist actually touches on this in meditations. He says, give yourself a gift, the present moment. And to think of it as a present, to think of it as a gift, it showed up here. You didn't have to get this

• 42:02Ryan Holiday?

  moment, as frustrating as it is, as dark as it is, as annoying as it is, as cold as you are right now, as hot as you are right now, as besieged or overwhelmed or annoyed as you are right now, you're alive. You don't have to be. None of this could exist. It could all go away tomorrow. It is a freak of freak accidents that the earth is here, that we're walking around, that you're alive. And here you have a fresh moment in front of you. You have 60 seconds in front of you, or however long you want to call a present moment. Are you going to show up for it? Are you going to appreciate it? Are you going to be grateful for it? And that's actually something Marx realist tries to force himself to do and see throughout meditations. He says that you

• 42:45Ryan Holiday?

  have to convince yourself that everything is a gift from the gods, that this is good, that things are good, and it always will be. And again, you think about what this guy went through in his life. This is a guy who attends a half a dozen funerals for his own children. This is a guy who lost his father at an early age. This is a guy who saw war and disasters and pandemics and corruption and betrayals, who had health

• 43:13Ryan Holiday?

  Issues who experienced one thing after another. And yet, what is he saying? He's saying this is a gift from the gods. This moment, right now, my life, my existence, your existence, the day to day-ness of life, as frustrating as it can be, it is a gift from the gods. It is good, it will always be good. That is, if we choose to see it that way.