Pod Insights The Daily Stoic Premium (🔓) This Is Where You Are | Marcus Aurelius' 12 Fundamentals Of Great Leadership About this episode It would be wonderful to live in a time where people got along. It’d be better if the economy was roaring. It’d be nice if the political landscape wasn’t dominated by grifters and demagogues. And of course, who doesn’t wish that our parents had taken better care of the environment, had protected our institutions better, and invested more for the future. But they didn’t. And here we are. People don’t get along. The world is scary. Stuff is falling apart…traditions are crumbling…The guidance of wisdom and virtue. That’s what separates Marcus from the majority of past and present world leaders. Just think of the diary that he left behind, which is now known as his Meditations: the private thoughts of the most powerful man in the world, admonishing himself on how to be more virtuous, more just, more immune to temptation, wiser. Those thoughts are now a landmark of Stoic philosophy that have guided some of history’s greatest men and women. For good reason.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 Ryan 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.
0:27 Ryan Holiday? This is where you are. It would be wonderful to live in a time where people got along. It'd be better if the economy was roaring. It'd be nice if the political landscape wasn't dominated by grifters and demagogues. And of course, who doesn't wish that our parents had taken better care of the environment, had protected our institutions better, had invested more for the future? But they didn't, and here we are. People don't get along. The world is scary. Some stuff is falling apart. Traditions are crumbling. Exactly as it was when Marcus Aurelius was alive, when Seneca was living, when Xeno walked the earth. These ancient Stoics didn't live in some golden age. They lived in the present. Their present, a flawed and frustrating and sometimes scary present. "We don't control when we were born
1:12 Ryan Holiday? or what's happened before our time," the Stoics would say. So complaining about it, lamenting it, calling it mean names, what does it do? It does nothing. All we can focus on is how we respond. All we can focus on is who we are in the moment we are in. The good news about these terrible times is that they present us quite the opportunity. They present us the chance to be decent and heroic. They give us a chance to be brave and to do better. They require us to endure and find the good in little things. They ask us to accept and forgive. It's not where we choose to be, but it is where we are. So let's deal with it. If you want to be great, you have to practice. You have to prepare. You have to go over it over and over and over again.
1:56 Ryan Holiday? You have to have extremely high standards. Only then does it look effortless.
2:04 Ryan Holiday? They say that leaders aren't born, they're made. And that's true, right? The Stoics were great leaders, not because they came out of the womb that way, but because of what they read, because of the principles they were taught, because of the apprenticeships they served, the mentors and models that they had. And nowhere is this embodied better than Marcus Aurelius. How does this young boy from a good family, but by no means extraordinary, how does he become the emperor of Rome? And that just becomes powerful and successful. Lots of people have done that, right? There's this rule that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Marcus Aurelius is the one exception to that rule. How does he do it? How does he pull that off? I'm Ryan Holiday. I've written a number of books about Stoic philosophy. Been lucky enough to talk about it with the NBA and the NFL, sitting senators and special forces leaders.
2:49 Ryan Holiday? And in today's episode, I want to do a deep dive, the leadership secrets, the leadership traits, the leadership lessons that we can derive from Marcus Aurelius's life.
3:02 Ryan Holiday? One of Lincoln's secretaries said that what was so great about Lincoln is that Lincoln did not expect perfection of anyone. In fact, he did not even hold other people to the same standards he held himself to. And this is a trait of Marcus Aurelius's leadership also. His dictum in Meditations is tolerant with others, strict with yourself. And nowhere does he exemplify this best than with his stepbrother Lucius Verus. First off, that his stepbrothers, even in the picture, is an interesting look into Marcus's greatness. Antoninus mentors Marcus for many, many years. Lucius Verus is kind of there hanging around, Marcus's stepbrother. Marcus takes the throne. The first thing he does is anoint his stepbrother co-emperor. He shares absolute power, which is incredible in and of itself.
3:47 Ryan Holiday? But what's even more incredible is how different Marcus and Lucius were. And yet Marcus loves his stepbrother. He finds work for him to do. He finds a job for him. He even says in Debts and Lessons of Meditations, how much his brother's character helped him improve and shape his own. Maybe even in that he didn't want to be like his stepbrother at all, but I think that he understood that different people have different strengths and weaknesses. We can learn from everyone and that our job- Is to get the best out of everyone. I don't think people saw a lot of potential in Lucius, but Marcus did. And he got good service out of him. He understood that this job was impossible and hard, and that the more he could share, the better the results would be for everyone. Marcus's strictness, one biographer says, is limited only to himself.
4:30 Ryan Holiday? To everyone else, he's collaborative, he's forgiving, right? He sees the best in them. He finds things that play to their strengths. He doesn't expect the impossible of them. He doesn't write them off. And this is a really important leadership lesson. How you can work with other people, how you can work with flawed people, how you can work with people who maybe you have very different aims or goals, but in this one area, you have a common goal or you have a mutual affinity and you want to get something out of that. Marcus is a great leader in that sense.
5:01 Ryan Holiday? A leader is by definition a doer, but that doesn't mean they're always doing. In fact, leaders have to take time to reflect and think. General James Mattis, four-star general in the Marines, Secretary of Defense. He would carry Marcus Aurelius's meditations with him on all of his deployments, precisely so that he had something to step back and think and reflect on. And he said that he thinks the biggest problem that leaders have in the information age is not enough space for reflection and solitude and silence. There's too much noise. They're reacting too instantaneously. They're not taking time to reflect and think. The Zen Buddhists said the same thing as the Stoics. They said, you have this cup of muddy water. You have to let it settle, right? Let the silt come to the bottom before you could see through it.
5:44 Ryan Holiday? What Marcus is doing in his meditations is also this reflecting on, taking some time to think about what he thinks before he expresses it, before he vomits it on someone else, before he takes action on it. That's literally what meditations is, right? It translates to to himself. He's writing notes to himself to reflect on what he thinks, what he's going through, what he needs to do, not what he immediately feels like doing. All leaders need to be doing this. They need to have the ability to zoom out, to zoom in, to reflect, to see things from a distance. And if you're not cultivating this time for this kind of stillness, you're not being the leader that you need to be.
6:24 Ryan Holiday? The joke about Winston Churchill was that he spent his whole life practicing his impromptu remarks. That what people thought was off the cuff, what people thought was just perfect timing, was in fact perfectly practiced and perfectly scripted. We want to think that it just happened. But great things don't usually just happen. They were practiced, they were prepared, they were meticulously done, they were boiled down to their very essence. And so you have to realize that you're not going to be great off the cuff. You have to practice, you have to prepare, you have to go over, you have to toss out all the things that were pretty good, but not good enough. When you read Meditations, it feels so perfectly done. It's almost inconceivable that this was a man's private diaries. This is what he settled on after crossing out 100 extra versions. This is the best of his insights over years, decades of his life.
7:10 Ryan Holiday? If you want to be great, you have to practice, you have to prepare, you have to go over it over and over and over again. You have to have extremely high standards. Only then does it look effortless.
7:23 Ryan Holiday? You can imagine, as emperor, Marcus Aurelius is getting a lot of bad news all the time. Nobody's bringing the good, exciting, fun stuff to the emperor, right? He's getting the hard decisions, he's getting the bad news, he's hearing of the crises, and they're his problem, they're his responsibility. And so I think it's important, when we see in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius is talking about how you want to be like the rock. He says, "Be like the rock that the waves crash over and eventually the sea falls still around." A leader has to keep that even keel. It's not that the Stoics were emotionless, but Marcus tried to be less emotional, right? Because so much was at stake. It didn't matter what he thought, it didn't matter what he felt, right? It didn't matter that he was frustrated or tired, it didn't matter that he was worried or anxious. He had to be cool and calm and collected.
8:04 Ryan Holiday? I think of Kennedy and the missile crisis as a great example of a leader being like the rock, not responding immediately, letting things settle, seeing it clearly, then making a clear, decisive, and courageous stand, but not reacting emotionally. And one of the things we can take from Marcus is that leaders can't be emotional in high stakes situations.
8:29 Ryan Holiday? There's an amazing story about the Emperor Hadrian. Obviously, busy guy, the weight of the world is on his shoulders. He's on this imperial tour through one of the provinces. He's making his way through this busy crowd and this woman stops him and she tries to ask him a question. She gets in his way, she blocks his path, he tries to keep going, she blocks his path again. And he says, "I don't have the time for this." And he walks on. And as he walks away, she turns and shouts, "Then stop being emperor then." And he does stop because she was right. It was his job, right? When you become a leader, when you take on responsibility, you are then responsible for other people, for problems, for solving these problems. And Hadrian does go back and he solves your problem, right? It can be easy when you're the boss to be like, "Don't bother me with this. I don't want to deal with this. You do it."
9:12 Ryan Holiday? But if that's your attitude, then you've got to hand over the reins to someone else, right? You took the job, you got to do the work. And I think it's important that we see the Stoics as leaders of this type. Marcus Aurelius doesn't particularly enjoy being emperor, but that's the job he got. And as long as he was going to get the privileges or the perks of this job, he was going to do them. And that's something he learns not just from Hadrian, but from his wonderful stepfather, Antoninus, who spends almost 20 years teaching Marcus Aurelius how to be a good leader.
9:42 Ryan Holiday? In Gregory Hayes's introduction of Meditations, he says, "There's an American president who rereads Marcus Aurelius every single year." Some research turned up, he was talking then about President Bill Clinton. Obviously, Bill Clinton did not get truly the message of Meditations. But I think the point is, how much better off would we be if every leader, if every person in a position of power was familiar with Marcus Aurelius and his writings? Because he was there, he had that job, he had that job times 1,000. And he knew what you had to strive to do, he knew what you had to try your hardest not to do, he knew what you had to be to be great. And I think it's important that it's not just reading it once. Again, the idea of rereading it every year. I know that I've taken something new out of it each time I've picked up this book,
10:27 Ryan Holiday? as I have now for almost 15 years. And that's why Bill Clinton was rereading it every year. And that's why every leader, every parent, every person should do the same.
10:40 Ryan Holiday? Marcus Aurelius builds his leadership philosophy around four key ideas, four Stoic virtues: courage, discipline, justice, wisdom. He says, "If you can find anything better than this, it must be an extraordinary thing indeed." Marcus tries always to live and lead by these four virtues. And in fact, when he says "the obstacle is the way," that's what he means. He doesn't mean necessarily that as a leader, you can use everything to make more money, or to win more games, or whatever your organization does. He's saying that everything you encounter as a leader is a chance to embody, to demonstrate, one of these ideas: courage, discipline, or temperance, justice, wisdom. I have them tattooed on my arm as a reminder. Again, the obstacle is the way, yes, right?
11:24 Ryan Holiday? Courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom.
11:31 Ryan Holiday? Marcus Aurelius's Meditations is itself, I think, an insight into why he was a great leader, right? He's not publishing this book the way that people might publish today, like a CEO is writing memoirs or a how-to book because they want to get some attention. Maybe it's good PR. Marcus Aurelius wasn't intending anyone to read Meditations. He was writing it to himself, right? Whether he's leading the Roman army, whether he's dealing with business in Rome, whether he's traveling, he's writing these notes to himself about how to be better. Meditations is a book for Marcus to be, as he says in Meditations, he says, "You have to fight to be the person that philosophy tried to make you." Well, that's what he's doing in these pages of his journal, talking to himself about where he fell short, talking about where he could do better, right?
12:15 Ryan Holiday? He's doing a kind of a daily interrogation, also a restatement of values and principles. And I think it's important that he's doing this on the pages of his private journal, not vomiting his stress, or his disagreements, or his grievances on other people. And I think journaling is a really powerful trait for leaders. I try to do mine in the morning, or in the evening before bed. But just taking a few minutes, it calms me down. It allows me to get a little distance from myself and my thoughts. And from this clarity, you can then go back to what you have to do, carry that With you. So Meditations as a philosophy book is also a leadership book in that there's good leadership ideas in it, but the doing it itself was Marcus trying to not lose his
12:58 Ryan Holiday? temper, not get overcome by ego, not get distracted, trying to remember the examples of people like Antoninus or his different teachers. And so Meditations is a really important book, and it reminds us of a really important habit for leaders to have, which is the art of journaling.
13:17 Ryan Holiday? I think at the core of Marcus's leadership philosophy is this idea that the obstacle is the way, right? Marcus deals with unimaginable difficulties in the course of his reign. Floods, fires, war, devastating plague, betrayals, it's one thing after another. But Marcus says, you know, everything is an opportunity to practice virtue, the impediment to action advances action, what stands in the way becomes away. He's saying that everything is a chance to be great, to step up, to do what you're supposed to do. And he says, you know, great leaders take the obstacles that life throws at us, turns them into fuel. He's even talking that that passage in Meditations about the impediment to action, how it is the way. He's talking about difficult people, that difficult people are a chance to be good,
13:58 Ryan Holiday? patient, forgiving, tolerant, to communicate better, just as when he's betrayed by Avidius Cassius, there's this horrible coup attempt. Marcus sort of sits his generals down and says, this is a chance for us to show to history a better way to deal with civil strife. He doesn't want persecutions and prescriptions. He doesn't want violence and reprisals. Tells the Senate, I don't want my reign stained in blood. So there's going to be things that you want as a leader. There's a way, there's ways you want things to go. There's the easy way. And then what you're actually going to get is the hard or the frustrating or the difficult way. And if you have this philosophy of, well, there's opportunities in that, to be great, to try different things. Think about during COVID, there was all these things that companies didn't think they could do before, where they had five year plans or
14:41 Ryan Holiday? 10 year plans. And then the reality of the situation meant that those things got fast forwarded. It meant they had to try new things. It meant, because the whole company was on the line, they had to take risks that they ordinarily wouldn't take, right? And a lot of companies got better for this. I talked to companies quite a bit who like their five year plan became a five month Plan, right? Or, you know, the e-commerce business that they didn't think they could add on to their existing business became the main driver of their business, right? So when we think of the obstacle as the way, what we're really saying is that as a leader, it doesn't matter what the situation we're waking up and dealing with today. We've got to see that as an opportunity to move forward, to grow and to change. And I think it was the CEO of Intel, Andy Grove, he said, you know, "Bad companies are destroyed by crisis, good companies survive them, but great companies, great leaders,
15:25 Ryan Holiday? great individuals are transformed by them, improved by them." And Marcus is clearly a great example of this. He doesn't get the rain that he wants, but the rain that he gets, he turns into something that we're still talking about all these years later.
15:40 Ryan Holiday? We admire people who make good decisions under pressure, but that's not a stroke of good luck. That's something they train and practice for. The Stoics practice what they call premeditatio malorum, or a premeditation of evils. If you went in for an operation and it didn't go well and you died, they would do a postmortem. And they would learn from that. And that's great for everyone but you. You want them to do a pre-mortem. What are the things that could go wrong? And what do we do if that happens? That's what a pre-mortem is about. Why didn't the launch go well? What did the patients struggle with? What didn't we think about? So the Stoics try to actively meditate on and train for high-stress, difficult, emotionally valiant situations. Seneca says, "Rehearse them in your mind, exile, torture, war, shipwreck, all of it should be before your eyes."
16:23 Ryan Holiday? To the one excuse a leader cannot ever say is, "Wow, I didn't think that would happen." That's your job. Your job is to think about what you would do if that would happen.
16:35 Ryan Holiday? When I wrote The Daily Stoic eight years ago, I had this crazy idea that I would just keep it going. The book was 366 meditations, but I'd write one more every single day and I'd give it away for free as an email. I thought maybe a few people would sign up. Couldn't have even comprehended a future in which three-quarters of a million people would get this email every single day and would for almost a decade. If you want to get the email, if you want to be part of a community that is the largest group of Stoics ever assembled in human history, I'd love for you to join us. You can sign up and get the email totally for free. No spam. You can unsubscribe whenever you want at dailystoic.com/email.
Previous Which Limits Do You Respect? | The Real Power You Have Next Joy Even So (Part 1) Page updated September 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
