12 Stoic Rules For A Better Life

The most powerful man in the world still needed rules to live by. In this episode, Ryan looks at the rules Marcus Aurelius seemed to return to again and again, especially when life was difficult, people were disappointing, and the responsibilities kept piling up. 🎥 VIDEO EPISODE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HYYwg_sgCk | Watch this episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HYYwg_sgCk 🎟️DAILY STOIC LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/| Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you https://www.dailystoiclive.com/! Grab tickets here https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ 🎙️AD-FREE https://dailystoic.supercast.com/| Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing toThe Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content:https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ ✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email athttps://dailystoic.com/dailyemail See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

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

• 0:15Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius never claimed to be a Stoic. If you look in his famous Meditations, one of the greatest books ever written, nowhere in here does Marcus Aurelius claim to be a Stoic philosopher. And Gregory Hayes, who is perhaps Marcus Aurelius's greatest translator, says that Marcus identifies more as a philosopher than as a Stoic. And Hayes says that for Marcus Aurelius, philosophy was not merely a subject to write or argue about, but one that was expected to provide a design for living. He says it was a set of rules to live one's life by. So what were those rules? What did philosophy do for Marcus Aurelius? That's what I want to talk about in today's Daily Stoic video. Some rules, some lessons from Marcus Aurelius, from the Stoics, from philosophy that can

• 0:59Ryan Holiday?

  help us live a better life.

• 1:06Ryan Holiday?

  One of my favorite stories about Marcus Aurelius comes in the depths of the Antonine Plague, which is a horrible time in Roman history. It's this pandemic that overwhelms Rome. It kills millions and millions of people. It lasts years and years and years. It devastates the economy. The streets are filled with bodies. And Marcus Aurelius holds a sail on the lawn of the Imperial Palace, where he sells off his most valuable possessions. He sells jewels and goblets. He even sells, we're told, some of his wife's fineries. He's doing this to send a message that, first off, my needs don't come before the people. Like, I don't need these fancy things when people are suffering, when people are struggling. And I'm going to take the hit first, which is what great leaders do, right?

• 1:51Ryan Holiday?

  The CEO takes a pay cut during a dip in the economy, doesn't lay people off, right? A great athlete renegotiates their contracts so the team can bring on new players. A leader has to be willing to sacrifice and signal commitment. It has to put other people ahead of themselves, right? In the Marines, they talk about how leaders eat last. That's what greatness is. Rank has some privileges, but it also has obligations and responsibilities.

• 2:23Ryan Holiday?

  One of the things we know is that Marcus Aurelius didn't particularly enjoy being emperor. It's not a job he would have chosen. It's not a job that he did choose. But once he was in it, he chose not to complain. This is something he says in Meditations. He says, "Don't be overheard complaining at court, not even to yourself." None of our situations are ideal. We don't like everything about them. There are things we're frustrated about that we wish were better. And we can seek to change them. We can have very real reasons for being dissatisfied by them. But complaining, and whining, and throwing ourselves a pity party, who and what does that serve? So Marcus Aurelius was saying, like, "Look, this is the role you were assigned in life. This is what you have to put up with. So put up with it. Make the best of it. Get to work. Don't waste time complaining."

• 3:13Ryan Holiday?

  My absolute favorite question in Meditations is where Marcus Aurelius says, "Ask yourself, is what you're doing essential?" And he says, "'Cause so much of what we do and say is not essential." And his point wasn't just elimination, right? He's saying that when we eliminate these inessential things, what we get is the double benefit of doing those essential things better. So this is about putting more wood behind fewer arrows, as the expression goes. This is about eliminating the extraneous, the irrelevant, the inefficient, all of that, so you can do the important things that actually do matter even better. This decision to double down on the things that really are moving the needle, that are important, that are worth doing, that are in your control, this is one of the fundamental

• 3:57Ryan Holiday?

  lessons from Marcus Aurelius.

• 4:03Ryan Holiday?

  I said that I had a favorite question in Meditations, but I actually have a close second. Marcus Aurelius says, "Ask yourself, am I afraid of death because I won't be able to do this anymore?" And that "this," that's the operative thing, right? It's a litmus test for activities we should and shouldn't be doing, right? Remember that idea about, is this essential? Is it not essential? Is this one of the things that you want to live a long time to be able to keep doing? If it is, then you should do it. If it isn't, you should ask yourself, why are you spending the limited time that you do have, this present moment that you do have for certain? Why are you spending it on this thing? People in the abstract want to live a long time, and then you look at how they spend their days, and it's on some of the dumbest shit imaginable, right?

• 4:48Ryan Holiday?

  They spend it gossiping, they spend it complaining, they spend it working a job they don't like, they spend it putting up with people they don't like. And this is crazy. Is this the kind of thing that is worth being alive for? That is an incredibly powerful test. You do not want to live longer so you can spend more time on Twitter. You do not want to live longer so you can spend more time, I don't know, pricing out the best deal on some silly item at the grocery store. You don't want to spend more time on email. You don't want to spend more time nursing grievances or complaints, right? That's not what you're put here for. In the light of your own mortality, right? The Stoic idea of memento mori, the significance of those things would fall away, and the

• 5:32Ryan Holiday?

  starkness of the choice in front of you would become much clearer.

• 5:42Ryan Holiday?

  People did horrible things to Marcus Aurelius. They slandered him, they insulted him, they insulted his family. In other instances, they lied to him, they tried to steal from him, they even tried to kill him. But he said, you know, "When people injure you, when people hurt you," he says, "you should feel sympathy rather than outrage or anger." He says, "You should think about, when you have done that in their position," he says, "you should think about what they think about what they're doing, right? Do they think that what they're doing is wrong?" This would go back to an idea from Socrates, that very few people do evil on purpose. And in fact, most of the time, they think they're doing the right thing. And so Marcus Aurelius is saying, like, "Look, they're either doing this because they think it's the right thing, and they're right, or they're doing it because they think it's

• 6:26Ryan Holiday?

  the right thing, and they're misguided, in which case, we should be patient and try to teach them." And so this idea of being sympathetic, being empathetic, rather than righteously indignant or fighting back, this is, I think, the essence of how Marcus Aurelius tried to live. And he tried to live this way because he was powerful and important, and he understood that there was a fundamental mismatch between him and most people. So he tried to give them grace. He tried to practice that clemency that Seneca writes a famous essay about, because he thought that that redounded positively on him as a leader.

• 7:03Ryan Holiday?

  There's no question that Marcus Aurelius had a lot of discipline. But I think it's important to distinguish discipline from self-discipline. Marcus Aurelius was strict with himself, but as he says in Meditations, he tried to be tolerant with others. And this is really important. When you have high personal standards, it's easy to expect that from other people, to presume that other people have the same standards, that other people are capable of the same standards, that people are even aware that this is the standard. And that's not only not true, it is a recipe for bitterness and resentment and frustration, right? Again, Marcus tried to give people grace. He tried to be patient with them, tried to understand where they were coming from. He did not try to hold them to the standards that he held himself to, because they didn't sign up for that.

• 7:48Ryan Holiday?

  They weren't trained in philosophy the same way he was. They didn't have the advantages that he did. Maybe they didn't have the same expectations, or even the same training that he did. And so we have to think about this. We have to think about treating people with kindness and patience. One of Marcus Aurelius's biographers, the French Ernest Renan, says that "the consequence of all of Marcus Aurelius's austere philosophy, this could have made him stiff, and it could have made him severe." But instead, the true nature of Marcus is revealed in the fact that he said that his severity was confined only to himself. Lincoln had this kind of greatness. A lot of great athletes don't, right? Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, these are really bad teammates, for the most part, because

• 8:32Ryan Holiday?

  they expected the impossible from other people. And it's often led to them using and grinding other people down. It's just a great lesson that this really powerful, self-disciplined person was willing to be patient and tolerant, and get the best out of others, not through strictness, but with kindness and support.

• 8:55Ryan Holiday?

  Perhaps Marcus is capable of doing this because, for all his severity and strength, he understood that he had weaknesses and vulnerability, and he wasn't afraid to ask for help. That's one of my favorite passages in Meditations. He says, "We are like a soldier storming a wall." He says, "If we fall, and we have to reach and ask a comrade for help," he says, "so what?" I just love that. He's just, "So what if you have to ask for help? That doesn't make you weak. That doesn't make you pathetic. That doesn't make you dead weight." And in fact, a soldier who doesn't ask for help, right? Who would just lay there and not try to get back into the fight, to not draw on their comrade, is actually shirking their duty. I love this kid's book, The Boy, the Fox, the Horse, and the Mole.

• 9:38Ryan Holiday?

  And there's this great line in the book where it says, "Asking for help isn't giving up. Asking for help is refusing to give up." And that's what Marcus Aurelius is doing. We don't know what other people are going through. Also, a lot of times, they don't know what we're going through. And the decision to ask for help is actually courageous and brave, and requires no small amount of discipline and strength.

• 10:02Ryan Holiday?

  One of the problems with being creative, having a good imagination, sort of knowing how things work or how they can go, is that this skill can be used against you. All of a sudden, you're extrapolating, you're catastrophizing, you're torturing yourself with all these possibilities. There's a great line I heard once, that anxiety is a bad use of your creativity. And Marcus Aurelius actually talks about that in Meditations. He says, "You can't imagine everything bad that's going to happen." He said, "You can't let yourself be crushed by all the possibilities." He says, "You have to stick with the situation at hand." This is really important. Being present isn't just this kind of like woo-woo zen thing. It's also the decision, as Marcus Aurelius says, to concentrate on what's in front of you,

• 10:45Ryan Holiday?

  like a Roman, to do the task in front of you, to be content, to do your best there, and detach a little bit from results, not worry about whether people are going to like you, whether it's going to succeed, what the probability of success is, what mean things people could say about it, how catastrophic failure could be. No, no, no, I'm going to do what's in front of me. I'm going to just put one foot in front of the other. I'm going to focus on doing the next right thing, and that's where I'm going to leave it. That's how you get things done. That's also how you get through really tough times.

• 11:19Ryan Holiday?

  Look, Marcus Aurelius could do whatever he wanted. He could retreat to his palace, he could keep weird hours, he could not work hard. And we know that that's what a lot of the emperors did. Tiberius retreats to this palace. A lot of the emperors were partiers and kooks and weirdos. But Marcus Aurelius, I think, taking from the example of Antoninus, works consistently. He works hard, and he does it within the confines of a normal day. He gets up early, does what he needs to do, gets after it. Right? One of the powerful passages in Meditations is him kind of struggling with this, though. He's like, "It's early, it's cold, do I want to get up?" And he says, "Look, you're not put here to huddle under the covers and stay warm. You have duties, you have responsibilities."

• 12:03Ryan Holiday?

  And this isn't busy work that he's talking about. He's talking about making a positive difference, right? Being a good leader, that people depend on him. And that's true for all of us. He sometimes had trouble sleeping, he may have been a bit of an insomniac. I know he had some health issues. But he had the discipline to get up and get after it every day, which we should do. And again, this is the self-discipline. Nobody's making you do it. You don't have to do it. But you do it because you know it's good for you and the world.

• 12:32Ryan Holiday?

  Perhaps one of the reasons that Marcus is able to be tolerant and sympathetic to other people is that although he was an idealist, he was also a realist, he was also a pragmatist. So often, people who have high standards, people who are idealistic, are also a bit naive. And sometimes that naivete works against them. Marcus Aurelius reminds himself, like, "Look, dude, you don't live in Plato's Republic. You live in Rome. You live in the real world, man, and it's filled with flawed people. It's filled with all the things that have happened historically that will happen for all time. You've got to understand that." This is a problem that Cato had. Cicero, who was friends with Cato, said, you know, Cicero believed that he lived in Plato's Republic. And he said, "He forgot that he lived in the dregs of Romulus." And Marcus was aware that he lived in the dregs of Romulus.

• 13:17Ryan Holiday?

  He knew that for all the power and glory that was Rome, it was a dark, dysfunctional, insane, even deranged place. And so he was willing to take what he could, to accept what he could, to find the good, but not necessarily expect it all the time. And I think this is really important, right? Marcus said, "You've got to be satisfied with the smallest bit of progress." He says, "If there's brambles in the path, go around. If the food is bitter, throw it out. Don't expect Plato's Republic. Lower your expectations, be pleasantly surprised when things are good, and you'll have a much better go of it."

• 13:56Ryan Holiday?

  For all his power, Marcus Aurelius was, like all of us, powerless. Powerless over the weather, powerless over the health of his children, powerless over many world events, powerless over what people said about him, powerless over gravity, powerless over more things than he had power over. And one of the things he struggled with as a result, as we all do, is anxiety. Is this going to happen? Is that going to happen? Is it going to be good? Is it going to be bad? Right? The things that stress us all out. And one of the things that Marcus Aurelius realizes is that all of the things that make him anxious have something in common, and that thing was him. And it's true for us. All the things that make us anxious have us in common. So when he talks on a good day about escaping his anxiety, he actually corrects himself in Meditations.

• 14:39Ryan Holiday?

  He says, "Wait, no, no, no, I discarded the anxiety because it wasn't from out there. It wasn't something people were doing to me. It's in here. I'm responsible for my anxiety. I'm the source of the stress, and therefore, I have the power to let it go." Now, of course, this is easy to say, hard to do, but it is an important distinction. The airport is not why you're anxious. Airport is just a place, like any other place. It's your desire to get your flight on time, it's your worry about this or that, it's the unfamiliarity with... It's all these things that you are bringing to the airport. And so to tell yourself, "I don't have to be anxious here. I don't have to worry about those things. These things are not making it any more likely that what I want to happen will happen or what I don't want to happen won't happen. That's why I'm going to discard it. I'm going to let it go." And if this strategy worked for the Emperor of Rome 2,000 years ago, I think it'll work for you too.

• 15:29Ryan Holiday?

  And I thought, one final thought from Marcus Aurelius, and it's actually on the back of the edition we make for Daily Stoic, is a sort of perfect lesson to end this video with. Marcus Aurelius says, "Concentrate on what you have to do. Fix your eyes on it. Remind yourself that your task is to be a good human being. Remind yourself what nature demands of people. And do it," he says, "without hesitation, and speak the truth as you see it, but with kindness, with humility, without hypocrisy."