Into The Flood Again | How Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations Transformed My Life

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

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  "In to the flood again." Just as things felt like they were calming down, just as you were just getting settled, just as things were getting back to normal, something happens, a world event. Your kids get sick, your company has a bad quarter, somebody stirs up chaos. It calls to mind my favorite little song lyrics.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  "This is how life goes, and it's always been thus." "Marcus Aurelius did not meet with the good fortune that he deserved," one ancient historian observed, "and his whole reign was involved in a series of troubles." This is putting it mildly, of course. There were plagues and floods and wars. There was a coup, there were funerals, there was stress and pain and disorder. In the midst of this, he tried to practice ataraxia. He knew that stillness was not only the key, but something that came from within. Calm isn't something we get by managing our external environment or hoping that we luck out. It's something we create, and we can do that while we're in the flood, in the chaos, despite what is happening around us. What the future holds is uncertain.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  In fact, the only certainty is more craziness. But we can be calm and poised and stoic inside that. Indeed, we must be.

• 1:59Ryan Holiday?

  It should be utterly unrelatable, incomprehensible to us. The most powerful man in the world 2,000 years ago, writing not even in his native language, but in a foreign language, writing in Greek, never intending it to be published, writing about his problems with foreign armies and incredible wealth and intrigue and sycophants. All the first world problems you can imagine for being the emperor of Rome. How could that work? How could a student of an obscure school of ancient philosophy have made something that lasts through the centuries? I'm talking, of course, about Marcus Aurelius's Meditations and Marcus Aurelius the man, and all the things that he could teach us. Again, it seems like he shouldn't be able to reach us, but he's so accessible and he has so much to teach us. That's what I want to talk about, what I learned from Marcus Aurelius.

• 2:48Ryan Holiday?

  I was maybe 19, 20 years old when this book came to me. This is the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. And again, it's an incredible historical document. The most powerful man in the world was writing notes to himself in the midnight dimness of his palace, in his tent, on the front lines, leading the Roman army in battle, or sometimes, as he was spotted to do, in the Colosseum as the gladiatorial games raged on below. Marcus Aurelius was sitting down and writing notes to himself about how to be better. Specifically, he was keeping meditations. This is one of the most valuable lessons from him. He was, he was taking care not to be Caesarified, not to be dyed purple, not to be changed by being the emperor of Rome. And all of us can be changed by the circumstances we're in.

• 3:32Ryan Holiday?

  Extreme success, extreme adversity, we can be changed by the circumstances we're in. But Marcus Aurelius wasn't changed because the fact that he had unlimited power didn't alter the fact that philosophy had power over himself. He said, "I'm fighting to be the person that philosophy tried to make me." And who was that person? What does Marcus Aurelius teach us? Marcus Aurelius teaches us to live with courage, self-discipline, justice and wisdom. Those are the four virtues of Stoicism that Marcus Aurelius talks about over and over and over again. I have them tattooed on my wrist here as a reminder. He says, "What an extraordinary..." Indeed, he said, if you ever find anything better than courage, discipline, justice and wisdom, it must be even more amazing, but there isn't. And, and he said this really powerful thing. He said,

• 4:14Ryan Holiday?

  so what if they lie about you, if they curse you, if they stab you with knives? He said, what could possibly happen to you in life that would prevent you from acting with courage and justice and discipline and wisdom? Nothing. So that's the core teaching from Marcus Aurelius, that everything is an opportunity to practice virtue. His famous quote that I wrote a book about, the obstacle is the way. What is he saying? He's saying that every situation we face in life is an opportunity to practice one of those virtues. That's the most valuable teaching for Marcus Aurelius. Every situation is an opportunity for excellence. You're suddenly made king, now you have to be excellent. You have to be restrained. You have to be disciplined. You have to be good. You have to be decent. Suddenly you're thrown in prison on trumped up charges.

• 4:58Ryan Holiday?

  There's a plague. There's a economic crisis. Also opportunities for virtue, for courage, for wisdom, for justice and self-discipline. That's the core teaching that Marcus Aurelius gives us, that, that so hit me when I was just a kid, that virtue is this thing that we're aspiring towards, that erit, excellence, this thing we all want and need to embody. Everything we face in life is an opportunity to practice that. When this hit me as a, as a teenager, as a person just entering my twenties, I just didn't know that that's what philosophy was about. I thought philosophy was abstract. I thought philosophy was theoretical. I thought it was these arcane questions. But the idea that philosophy is something we're fighting to live up to, that it's an ideal, it's a tradition. I think that's a really powerful thing that I've taken from Marcus

• 5:41Ryan Holiday?

  Aurelius. The personalness with which Marcus is writing, the way he's holding himself accountable. You know, he famously talks about, okay, you're waking up in the morning and you want to stay in bed. And he goes, yeah, but what is your duty demand? Why you want to huddle under the covers and stay warm? That's not what you were put here to do. You know, he says, love the discipline you know and let it support you. It's a beautiful book. There's never been anything like it. No one will ever talk to you as directly, as honestly and as vulnerably as Marcus Aurelius does in meditations, which is something I actually learned from him as a writer. I would say stylistically, Marcus Aurelius changed. My life. Here you have a guy who's being incredibly specific, who's saying that posthumous fame doesn't matter, that being remembered by history doesn't matter. And yet, here, he made something that's incredibly universal and timeless.

• 6:26Ryan Holiday?

  The timeliness of it makes it timeless. The personalness of it makes it universal. The not caring about impressing people, or trends, or fads, or sales, just making something that works, that's why it works. That's why it lasts and endures. But if Marcus Aurelius is such an amazing writer and thinker, why don't we have a bunch more books from him? Well, that's because meditation ends with Marcus Aurelius ending. It ends with his death. He dies of the plague in the year 180 AD, as he says in the final pages, and we can imagine him facing death courageously. Of course, we all want to live longer. He says, but I've only gotten through three acts, right? He's seen his life as a play. He says, yes, this will be a drama in three acts.

• 7:06Ryan Holiday?

  The length fixed by the power that directed your creation and now directs your dissolution, neither was yours to determine. And then he says, so make your exit with grace, the same grace shown to you. Marcus Aurelius wasn't a pen and ink philosopher. He wasn't on the sidelines. He didn't live in the ivory tower. He was a man of action. He was leading Rome through a plague. And eventually, he succumbed to that plague, and so too did the chance of him writing any other books. But meditations, it does survive still. This is my edition. You can see it's taped here. It's falling apart. It's got a million notes. There's probably notes on every single page of this book, because I've gone through it over and over and over and over again. And that's the wonderful thing about Marcus Aurelius is that you bring something to him, and you take something new out each time.

• 7:48Ryan Holiday?

  The poet Heraclitus talks about, we never step in the same river twice. You're never the same person going into this book or coming out of it, even though it remains the same, even though it hasn't been touched in 18-plus centuries. Marcus Aurelius is there. He's a resource. He's a leader. He's an inspiration. If you haven't let him change your life, you're missing out.

• 8:08Ryan Holiday?

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