100 Life Lessons From Marcus Aurelius

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2:37Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

3:28Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. It was the fall of 2006. Package came to my apartment in Riverside, California. I was actually living in Grand Mark on Iowa Avenue. And in fact, I actually had posted about this recently on Instagram and someone posted that they were probably working the front desk when that book came in because they also went to UCR, which is just an incredible full circle moment. That was all the more full circle because I was downstairs at the painted porch yesterday signing a copy of the leather edition of Meditations to give to Professor Gregory Hayes, the translator of that book that had arrived from Amazon.

4:13I don't know why I picked that one. I typed in Marcus Aurelius Meditations on Amazon. That's the one that popped up. It was Marcus on a horse pardoning the Germanic tribes, the famous equestrian statue photo. Now that edition in paperback has a bird on it. That's the one we sell at the painted porch. And then the leather edition that we do in Daily Stoic is Marcus's face. But that moment changed my life. And that's what I wrote to Professor Hayes. I said, Professor Hayes, you changed my life. Thank you. Because I think it's the most beautiful translation of meditations. I've read all the other ones.

4:51You heard my interview with Robin Waterfield, where we talk about his annotated edition. I've read the Penguin Classics edition. I've read the really old editions. It's one of the most incredible books ever written. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. It's a long one. I know. It's 100 lessons from Marcus Aurelius' meditations. This is a solo episode with me. It's a hundred lessons from meditations from my more than 100 readings of that book. We're going to do a deep dive into one of the greatest books ever written. The book that changed my life, that set in motion all the events that brought us together today to even be recording this podcast, to have you listening to my voice.

5:29It's a beautiful little moment. I feel very blessed. The Stokes would say it was faded. Marcus's life was changed by Ruskis giving him Epictetus. My life was changed much more, much more mundanely by Amazon suggesting algorithmically this edition for Gregory Hayes doing this beautiful job translating it. And I want to give you a hundred lessons, some deep dives from me into what makes meditation such a powerful book, what it can teach us. And I think you're really going to like it. If you want to check out this new edition, it's incredible. It's what I now have next to my bedside. And I've been going back through it.

6:04It's actually been nice to have a fresh copy because I've put so many miles on my old one. If you want that edition, it makes a great gift. You can check that out at dailystoic.com slash meditations or just check it out in the Daily Stoke store. And of course, we have them at the Painted Porch. I'll thank Professor Hayes again for his beautiful, lyrical, magisterial translation of Marcus, which I think brings it to life the way that no other translator has before or since. I would love to have him on the podcast, but he's shy and has not consented to, despite many requests. I hope one day to have him on.

6:40In the meantime, here's 100 lessons that I learned from his translation and all the translations from Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. And grab your edition of the new one, dailystilk.com slash meditations.

6:57You can't be satisfied just getting the gist of something. You had to read and study deeply to return to the same books over and over again. And actually, Marcus, quoting the philosopher Heraclitus, would say that we never step in the same river twice.

7:17I'm Ryan Holiday. I've written a number of books about stoic philosophy. I've spoken to the NBA, the NFL, sitting senators and special forces leaders. Almost 15 years now, I have been reading and rereading one of the greatest books of all time, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. Actually, this is my new leather edition that I had made. I put so many miles on this one and my other copies that I wanted something to really stand the test of time. Marcus Aurelius didn't read a book once and think that he got it. He read it over and over and over again. I've probably read Meditations a hundred times. I was reading it just yesterday.

7:50And in today's video, I want to give you 100 lessons that I've gotten from my hundreds of reads of meditations over the last decade. And I hope they're of use to you. And I hope most of all that you will pick this book up and read it yourself. One of the most compelling and jaw-dropping parts of meditations comes at really the beginning, the opening of book two. But book one is Debts and Lessons. I'll talk more about that later. He says, today, the people you will meet will be jealous and stupid and annoying and frustrating. He lists all the things that people are going to be like today. And part of this is just a stoic idea of being prepared, right?

8:27The unexpected blow lands heaviest. If you think people are going to be amazing and kind and get out of your way and you're going to only hit green lights, you're going to be sorely disappointed. But he says the point is not to think about how shitty and awful people are. Not at all. You have to realize why they are like this. He says it's because they don't know good from bad. They don't have the same training as you, but they are still like you. He said, you cannot allow them to implicate you in their ugliness. He says, we were meant to work together. We are brothers and sisters. And so what meditations begins with this seemingly depressive note.

8:58But if you stick with it, and I think that's such an important lesson that you get from reading Marcus over and over again. If you stick with him, you realize that beneath this honesty, this bluntness, this matter of factness is a huge caring heart. a heart that will not allow itself to harden or be turned against other people. In one passage in Meditations, Mark Surrealist writes down what he calls epithets for the self. He talks about being honest, talks about being upright. These are words he says that he can live by. A couple different times in my life I've tried to do that, but part of one of the Daily Stoic challenges a few years ago, I wrote down seven of them.

9:34I wrote honest, calm, fair, father, brave, generous, and still. These are words that I try to live by. I want to make decisions, take actions that will demonstrate that idea, which will show that those are the watchwords or the epithets that I live by, that I could be described by. And so I think of all the exercises in meditation, that's one that we can all practice is just come up with the epithets for the self, the rules, the descriptors for your character that you want to live and model day in and day out. But really the true opening of meditations is the debts and lessons section. Almost a full 10 % of the book is Marcus Aurelius writing what he learned from and what he was grateful for in the people who trained him, the people who raised him.

10:18The fact that 10 % of the book is gratitude to me is so important. It's a statement of priorities and the role that gratitude must play in our life. Nothing is so inspiring as remembering the values and virtues and seeing them embodied in the people around you. He never knew meditations would be published. This wasn't for the other people to see that he was grateful to them. It was actually the act of expressing the gratitude that was a gift to him. And we have to have an active gratitude practice in our own lives. One of my favorite stories about Marcus Aurelius is not in Meditations, but at the depth of the Antonine Plague, he sells off the palace furnishings to pay down Rome's debt, which actually does connect to something in Meditations.

10:58He talks about how lucky he feels that he's never had to ask anyone else for financial help. And whenever anyone else came to him asking for financial help, he was always in a position to say yes. He was a generous, a kind person. Yes, he was privileged and wealthy and powerful. He tried to use those things for good. He tried to absorb the blows or the pain or the difficulties before other people. This is a print I have from one of my favorite passages from Mark's Realist. I have it on the wall. It's a sell in the David Stokes store. It says, waste no more time arguing what a good man should be.

11:32Be one. And I think arguably, Marcus Aurelius' greatest contributions to philosophy are not what he wrote in this book, right? What Marcus' greatest contributions to philosophy is how he lived. That even if he had never written a philosophical work, that he'd still be seen as a kind of philosopher king. Because he embodied the ideas. He lived them. He demonstrated that a king, an emperor, a person of power or influence or wealth could be good and decent. could do the right thing, could be everything that people expected of him. And that's just, to me, the most important thing we can take from Marcus Aurelius.

12:09Marcus Aurelius says that no matter what's happening in the world, no matter what other people are doing to us, we always have this superpower. We always have the power to have no opinion. We don't have to decide that it's good or bad. We don't have to decide that it's urgent or not. We don't have to decide anything about it all. We don't have to think anything about it at all. You can just let it go. You can let it pass by. You don't have to figure it out. You don't have to have a hot take on it. Just let the weather be the weather. This political situation be that political situation. It doesn't have to be good or bad.

12:36We don't have to have an opinion about everything. One of my first reads of meditations, I noted that Marcus says, can only ruin your life if it ruins your character. The idea that success wasn't whether you made money, whether you got what you wanted, it's whether you protected your character. Jesus says, what good is gaining the whole world if you lose your soul? And we can imagine Marcus struggling with this as the emperor of Rome. It doesn't matter how many buildings he builds or what lands he conquers. To him, it matters if he is a good person or not. I remember shortly after I read Meditations for the first time, I had to get on a flight.

13:09I was in a middle seat on this long cross-country flight, and I was next to someone who was jostling for the armrest. The person in front of me reclined back. It was just one of those unpleasant experiences in modern travel. But I thought back to one of my favorite passages in Meditations, where Marcus talks about being next to a smelly person. He says, yeah, it's awful. You can say something to them if you want. But if you're not going to say something, then you just have to bear it. No amount of gritting your teeth or silently resenting them is going to change this. Stewing doesn't help them or you.

13:39Being miserable doesn't help them or you're just going to carry this nastiness with you when you go. And so I think Marcus would have dealt with the same kinds of inconveniences and annoyances as all of us, even if his life was more sheltered than most of ours. But he reminded himself that this is what life entails. You either say something about it, or you've got to get comfortable putting up with it. One of Marcus Aurelius' most brilliant rhetorical questions is this. He says, is a world without shameless people possible? The answer is, of course, no. And he says, okay, so you've met one of them, right?

14:11This person that you meet, they're one of those people. You know that it's impossible for the world to exist without them. You know inevitably, statistically, you will run into one of them. That's it. He says, reminding yourself that this person is one of a certain number helps you not get so upset about it, not be so surprised by it. And most of all, not despair by it. Most people are the opposite of that person. And I think for the word shameless, we can plug in all sorts of things. People who lie, people who steal, people who cheat, people who do all the things that we don't like. A certain percentage of them are always going to exist and always have existed.

14:45and better yet, when we remind ourselves still that they are the minority, we can find a way to categorize them, accept them, and then move on. A couple of years ago, I wrote this book, Conspiracy. Peter Thiel was outed as gay by this sort of Silicon Valley gossip rag that treated him very cruelly and he spent millions of dollars and years of his life plotting and scheming to destroy it, which he successfully did. And there's a lot that was really interesting in it, a lot that was really innovative in doing that. and I think even some things to be impressed by it, as I was talking about in the book.

15:17Every day as I was writing, I couldn't help but think of one of my favorite lines from meditations. Marcus Aurelius says, the best revenge is to not be like your enemy. The point is that getting even often makes you like or worse than the person who supposedly did this grievous, heinous thing to you. We see this in Marcus Aurelius' life. He's betrayed by one of his most trusted generals and he tries not to be angry about it. He has to deal with it, yes, but he tries to actually use it as an opportunity to show the Roman people how one deals with being betrayed, how one deals with civil strife.

15:50You can't let the person who wronged you turn you into something just like that. Gregory Hayes in his translation of Meditations, he makes a great point and I missed it the first couple times. He says that nowhere does Marcus identify as a stoic. And he says actually if you asked Marcus, he probably wouldn't have identified with any school at all, even though meditation is, of course, filled with all sorts of Stoic observations and principles. He says that Marcus would have identified as a philosopher. Paul Graham in one of his famous essays says, keep your identity small. Don't identify as a singular thing or with a singular ideology.

16:25You want to be a free agent. This is why Seneca quotes so much from Epicurus. He read widely. He understood widely. The point is not to be a Stoic philosopher. The point is to be a philosopher, a lover of wisdom. There's a beautiful line in Joseph Brodsky's essay about the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome. It dates back to Marcus's time, but the base of which was redesigned by Michelangelo. Brodsky says something like, if Marcus Aurelius is antiquity, it is we who are the ruins. I don't know what that means exactly. There's something beautiful and haunting about it. Maybe it's this idea that when you read meditations, you can't help but be struck by classical beauty and perfection, in some ways, the highest expression of human greatness.

17:06And then you look at us, you look at the way we talk to each other, you look at the things we say, you look at how we live and act and think, and you go, yeah, we're the old worn out, beaten down, falling apart things. The ancient world feels fresh and modern and new and perfect in so many ways. And I just love that idea. If Marcus Aurelius is antiquity, it is we who are the ruins. It's actually in book six that I found the meditation that I would build my own first book of Stoic philosophy around the impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. He says, look, stuff can get in the way.

17:40You can be impeded. He says, but nothing can impede your intentions or your dispositions. He says, the mind can convert to its own purposes, the obstacle to our acting. That's the power of Stoicism, that we always have the opportunity to practice a virtue. We don't choose where we are. We don't choose what's happening. But if you accept the obstacle and work with what you're given, Mark Sreo says in meditations, an alternative will present itself. Another piece of what you're trying to assemble, action by action. Acceptance can seem like this weakness that it's stopping you from moving forward.

18:14In fact, acceptance means this door is closed. Now I can go try this other door. You first have to accept that the obstacle exists, that it is real, that it has constraints or impediments or difficulties to then decide what you're going to do about it. You're going to go around, you're going to go over, you're going to use the weight of it against itself. It's an opportunity to do this other thing you couldn't have done under ordinary circumstances. Acceptance is not passive resignation. It's the first step in taking an active approach. And Marcus returns to this theme over and over and over again in meditations.

18:47In one passage, he says, a strong stomach digests what it eats. A fire turns what you throw on top of it into flame and brightness and heat. His point is we can use our obstacles as fuel. The things that happen to us in life are opportunities. This is the essence of stoicism. This is our chance, whatever it is. It might not be the virtue we wanted to practice. It might not be the virtue we're most comfortable practicing, but it's nevertheless an opportunity to be great. I remember I was once talking to the great Robert Greene, and I asked him what one of his favorite passages from Mark Scurius' meditations was.

19:20He said it was the one where Marcus Aurelius is talking about. He's looking at this big feast and he says, oh, that's a dead bird. He said, oh, that's dead pig. Oh, this wine is rotted grapes. I said, Robert, why did you like that? And he said, that's what I try to do in my writing. I try to deconstruct things, to take away the preconceived notions. It's actually what Marcus says. He says it's about stripping things of the legend that encrusts them, about seeing them as they actually are. I think that's not only what a philosopher has to do, but I think that's what a great writer like Robert Greene does.

19:52I call this contemptuous expressions. These things kind of loom over us. We go, oh, Harvard is so important. Look at the fancy people that go there. Look how hard it is. Look how expensive it is. But also you could look at the idiots who've graduated from Harvard. The monsters that have come out of there, right? You could be like, oh, the president's the most prestigious, important job in the world. But look at some of the people who have been president. Look how incompetent they were. You're supposed to see things for what they are. Strip them of the legend that encrusted them. see them as they are.

20:21The same goes for like some fancy car or, you know, some important position. It's not what people think it is. You have to strip it bare. You have to see it for what it is. And Marcus Aurelius was doing this, even with his own purple cloak, the thing that signified he was the emperor. He said, this is just a regular cloak dyed with shellfish blood. I'm seeing it as it actually was, which is such a critical practice. The famous dictum from Lord Actum is that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. What's remarkable about Marcus Aurelius is that he's perhaps the only exception to this rule that we know.

20:55He's given absolute power. What is the first thing he does with it? He gives half of it away to his stepbrother. He isn't corrupted by it. It's a remarkable testament to the power of this philosophy, the idea of what stoicism can make a person. And that's not an accident. In meditations, Marcus Aurelius warns himself against being Caesarified, of being dyed purple, of being changed by the power and fame and money that the position has given him. And we all have to be worried about being Caesarified or dyed purple. We have to be worried about being changed by the number of followers that we have, by the promotion that we just got, by the famous name that we inherited.

21:38You're not special. The rules do apply to you. You're not better than anyone else. Power doesn't have to corrupt. What it can do is reveal who you actually are. In one point in meditations, Marcus Rios tells himself to take Plato's view, to zoom out, to see things from above. And he does that. He talks about how enormous armies fighting over a border, a whole country could be not that dissimilar from a far enough view to ants fighting over a piece of food on the ground. It's beautiful and quite impressive that he could come to this point of view because in Marcus's time, the highest he could have gotten off the ground was like a couple story building or maybe the top of a mountain.

22:15He didn't have the access to an airplane like all of us do. He would have never seen the blue marble photo which showed Earth from space. But when you get to Plato's view, you're just reminded how inconsequential most of the things we get upset about are. And then you are also reminded of how interconnected and interdependent, and together we all are. Marcus says this too, that the borders don't matter, that vast oceans don't matter. We're all in this same thing together, that we are tied together more than we'd like to think that we are. Pierre Hadeau, one of the great scholars of Marcus Riles, talks about the oceanic feeling.

22:52Marcus Riles talks about the view from above, talks about immensity, how all of the experience gave before us. Marcus is trying to meditate on the vastness and the connectedness of everything in the world. He talks about looking at the stars and watching yourself alongside them. I think he's seeking out these kind of humbling experiences. And you could think about why that would be so important to someone who was literally the center of the universe. He wanted to remind himself that that wasn't strictly true. One of the things Marcus really does say in meditations about the people who would have always been flattering him and telling him he's amazing, or people who would have been criticizing him or attacking him, He says, think about what they just submitted to a few minutes ago.

23:32Think about what they do in private. Think about who they actually are. And when you know who they actually are, how weak they are, or how corrupted they are, petty they are, suddenly their approval, their opinion about you won't matter very much. Marcus Aurelius clearly hated all the flatterers and sycophants. But the thing he hated most was the people who would say things in passing like, I'm going to be honest with you. Let me be straight with you. Let me tell you what I really think. He said to say those things was actually a confession, a self-indictment. You're admitting that that's not the norm.

24:05That's not what you normally do. People should know you're going to be honest. He said an honest person should be like the smelly goat in the room. You should know they're there the second they walk in. And nobody had to think that about Marcus. In fact, from an early age, Marcus Aurelius was named Verismas, the truest one. And we think that's because he was so unflinchingly truthful with Hadrian, his adopted grandfather, in effect. the most powerful man in Rome, Marcus just told him what he thought, he didn't hold back and neither can you. It's clear that one of Marcus' realists' passions is the theater.

24:37He loves the theater. And we know this because he quotes so widely from plays, some of those plays didn't even survive. The only surviving remnants of them are his quotes in meditation. But he would talk about going to the theater, watching a tragedy and what this can teach us about life. He even talks about looking at your own life as a kind of play. He says if watching something in the theater would make you interested or make you laugh, make you think, it can't make you angry in life when it happens to you. You have to cultivate this same kind of philosophical approach. Today, people might think, oh, philosophy is this intellectual pursuit.

25:12It can't possibly jive with theater or watching television or following sports. Of course it can't. Marcus Aurelius was drawing from the popular art forms of his time and drawing philosophical lessons from them that he used to be better at his life, which is the purpose of all art. Speaking of the role that art can have in teaching us things, or popular culture can have in teaching us things, you consider probably the most popular, dramatical rendering of Marcus is in the movie Gladiator. He's the old guy at the beginning of the movie that Joaquin Phoenix's character killed. Now, this isn't a movie explicitly based on stoicism, and all the time you see on the internet quotes from the movie attributed to Marcus that are really only in the movie and not real.

25:52But the movie does capture, quite shockingly, the evil and the awfulness of Commodus. And that question has to hover over your readings of meditations. How can such a wise and decent and patient and philosophical person have raised such a terrible kid? It's a tricky question, and I don't have a good answer. We've talked about it before on Daily Stoic. I mean, almost all of Marcus Aurelius' children die. Commodus is his only remaining male heir. You know, maybe Commodus is just a psychopath and doesn't say anything about Marcus. Maybe Marcus was trapped by the traditions of his time. Antoninus, Hadrian, and the preceding emperors, they didn't have a male son.

26:28So there wasn't an issue. But it is a tricky question. And I think the overall lesson we take from this is just talking about these things, just thinking about these things, it doesn't mean you're going to be good at this really difficult thing that is raising children. That should humble us and also, I think, even make us question some of the things that we see Marcus really talk about in meditations. Steve Jobs learned from his father, who was a carpenter, the importance of caring about the craft, how something was done, even the parts that no one would see, like the back of a fence or the back of a drawer.

26:58That's why the inside of a MacBook computer is beautiful, even though the average user will never crack it open and see. Again, meditations being a book for the author, not for the reader is so fascinating. Marcus Aurelius is writing in Greek, not in Latin, because at that time, Greek was the language of philosophy. It was a harder, but a more beautiful language. He quotes from memory perfectly these obscure passages from philosophy. He makes these observations about the way that grain bends or the flex of foam on a boar's mouth. He was a beautiful writer. It was beautiful just for himself. I mean, that's one of the reasons I slaved over this edition.

27:37I just wanted it to be amazing and beautiful, to reflect the workmanship and the craftsmanship of meditations itself. And I just always think of that lesson from Marcus and from Steve Jobs that it doesn't matter whether other people will see it, whether it's in your journal or for publication, you have to care about what it is and how it's made. We never step in the same river twice. The river changes and we change, right? When you pick up a book for the first time, then a second time and a third time, maybe even the hundredth time, each time you get something different out of it. I think so often we get a book, we read it once, we go, I got it, right?

28:12but that's not how it works. Stoicism is this topic you're supposed to return to over and over and over again. I put a lot of miles on my copies of meditations over the years. Covers falling off, there's different highlighters and pens folded like almost every page at this point. As I've returned to these passages so many times, like now almost everything in it's marked up. So one of the things I've been doing recently is rereading it on a fresh copy. And I have a really special fresh copy. This is my leather bound edition that I actually had made, which you can buy at daily stoke.com slash meditations.

28:43I'm returning to meditations now with fresh eyes. You can see all the notes that I have in here. All these things have been hitting me in a new place in a new way because the book is same. It's the same translation, but the format's a little bit different. The font size is a little bit different. The moment in time is different. My experiences are different. The lessons are the same, but the lessons that I need are different. So meditations has to be a book that you return to over and over again. One you can't be satisfied just getting the gist of. It has to be a daily practice, an ongoing practice, something you return to over and over and over again.

29:18This new one, the leather bound edition, I think could last you your whole life. I'm really proud of this. It's so awesome. And on the back, it has, I think, a wonderful encapsulation of meditation. Mark Serena 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. Then do it without hesitation. Speak the truth as you see it, but with kindness, with humility, without hypocrisy. That's the journey I think meditations is trying to get us all towards. One that each time we pick up the book, we get a little bit closer towards.

29:54I'm really proud of this. You can check it out. It's got awesome new illustrations on each of the 12 books. It's got gilt-edge pages. It's high quality leather, Marcus's face on the front. I think you're really going to like this. And then at the back, I wrote a biography of Marcus that I think everyone should read. So check out the new book, dailystoic.com slash meditations or get it anywhere books are sold, including my bookstore, The Painted Porch. In my office, I have all sorts of reminders of Marcus. I have the print. I have this bust of him. This is a bust I have from Marcus Aurelius from the 1840s.

30:27I have a painting of Marcus that someone did for me. When Marcus says at the beginning of meditations that nothing is so inspiring as seeing the virtues embodied in the people around us. I think this is also true in how you decorate your space, your house, your office, whatever. Find philosophical embodiments of these ideas, things that remind you when I look at those things, it's just this little sort of subconscious reminder of who I want to be, how I want to live. I'm looking at the virtues being embodied around me and that keeps me on the straight and narrow. In writing the Daily Stoic, I got to parse the exact word choice of Marcus in ways that I probably ordinarily wouldn't have.

31:06One of the passages that really struck me the first time I read Meditations, he says, how trivial the things we want so passionately are. And I don't know, I guess I was struck by the idea that we want so passionately are. I thought that That was a beautiful expression. But it's actually in the midst of translating it and seeing it from a different perspective, I realized he's saying how trivial the things we want so badly are. I think there's something to be said about reading and rereading where, almost like a Talmudic scholar, you're debating, what does this word mean or that word mean, or what about this, or what about this meaning?

31:37There just is something about diving super deep. Sometimes the superficial, the first take you take is the one that hits you. And sometimes it's the 50th take where you finally get it or you get it on a level that you wouldn't have gotten before. I remember when you're translating Marcus Aurelius for Daily Stoic, there's a passage where Marcus Aurelius says, stop your whining, stop this miserable whining monkey life. I remember our editor said, a monkey? Is this an expression Marcus could have possibly used? Would Marcus Aurelius have even seen or known what a monkey was? And it turns out, yes.

32:06In fact, commonists probably killed one in the Coliseum. He's a psychopath. Just the more you play and dig into the language, the more you understand. And this is why reading and rereading is so important. You just never know. Behind every word, behind every word choice, it's like a whole other room to explore. It would have been my third or fourth reading of Marcus to realize that I caught this line. He says, you could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. It's the stoic idea of momentum or it's not that you will die tomorrow and you should try heroin or go to an orgy.

32:39It's that you never know when life is going to end. And so you can't take it for granted. You cannot take it for granted. Another one that I didn't get at first, Mark Aurelius is saying to avoid imperialization, he says that indelible stain. And I didn't really know what he meant by imperialization. And that's when I saw it in another translation. I realized what he's talking about is imperialization, like the imperial system of Rome. He means to not be Caesar-ified, to not be corrupted by his position. So I think sometimes it's just where you are. You don't know what a certain word means or just the intonation that you're reading about it.

33:14It doesn't hit you in the right way. And this is why you have to come back to things, why you can't just be satisfied with getting the gist of something. You have to return to it over and over again because you get it in a new way. It also is why, as much as I've loved the Hayes translation and why we have this edition, it's why I've read the other translations. It's why I like the Robin Waterfield annotated version because he's bringing his perspective. He's breaking down what he sees in it. And each time you do that, you get something new. In meditations, Marcus really says we have to be more like a boxer or a wrestler than a dancer.

33:46He says we have to be dug in and ready for sudden attacks. You know, he saw life as a battle. He saw fate as being indifferent to us, but also dealing serious blows to us. And if you're not ready for it, if you think life is a dance, if you think life is fun, if you think everything's going to be all right, then man, fortune has some real surprises in store for you. And if you look at Marcus's life, that was true. One thing after another. He was ready for it. He was dug in. He was ready for those sudden attacks. And you and I have to be also. At one point in meditations, Marcus Aurelius says, avoid false friendship at all costs.

34:22He says, nothing is more painful. Nothing is worse. And he knows this from experience. I tell in Obstacle is the Way, the story of Marcus being betrayed by Avidius Cassius, his most trusted general, one of his best friends. He declares himself emperor. He essentially attempts to orchestrate a coup. Marcus Aurelius knew that although we wanted to be trusting of people, although we wanted to assume the best in people, we had to understand that people were not perfect. People could be led astray. People could have evil intentions in their heart. We have to be aware of this. We have to be prepared for it.

34:53One of my favorite lines in meditation is to accept it without arrogance, to let it go with indifference. Good things happen. We get awards. We succeed. We make money. Awesome. But that doesn't say anything about you as a person. We fail. We fall short. We get criticized. Great, that doesn't say anything about you as a person. Another translation, it says, receive without pride, let go without attachment. Sort of even keel, not being affected, not getting too high or too low, not identifying with any of it, but identifying solely with your character. Marcus really tried to do good. He tried to help as many people, but he also understood that doing the right thing, doing good things, it wasn't always gonna be recognized and it wasn't always gonna be appreciated.

35:32He says in meditations that you can't expect the third thing, being recognized, being appreciated, being thanked for what happened. You already got the thanks, he said, by doing the right thing, by feeling, by knowing that it was the right thing. Everything else the Stokes would say is extra, nice to have, but it can't be why you do it. And I think often of this idea of doing the third thing. Third thing is wanting to hit the bestseller list. The third thing is wanting the thank you card. The third thing is the person coming to you and saying, I just want to let you know what that meant to me, how much it helped me.

36:05I want to pay you back. No, you do it because it was the right thing. If you get the third thing, if you get the extra, that's great. For the Stoics, that shouldn't be something you want, but most of all, it can't be something you expect because you will be disappointed. In book 12 of Meditations, Mark Sturley says, it never ceases to amaze me. We love ourselves more than other people, yet we care about their opinions more than our own. I thought about this when my first book of Stoic Philosophy came out. I had worked really hard on it. I knew how many copies it sold. I knew what it deserved. And there it was, not on the bestseller list.

36:37It got skunked for some inexplicable reason. And I had to remind myself, my judgment of the book is what counts. My opinion is what matters here. So often that's what we do. We like a shirt or we like a show or we like this or we like where we live. And then other people say, well, that's not cool or that's strange or that's weird or it's incorrect for the following reasons. And we give up our own internal sense of what we like or dislike, what's right or wrong, to do what everyone else is doing. Sanity is tying your success to what you say and do. This is insanity is tying it to what other people say and do.

37:10So to me, this is one of the most powerful lessons of Marcus that even the emperor of Rome was struggling with it, I think shows how difficult it is to maintain that inner scorecard, that inner compass, when everyone around you is thinking or saying something differently than you. It would be a mistake to see Marcus Aurelius as perfect. He wasn't perfect, because no one is perfect. He's a human being. Marcus instead was trying to get better always. Meditations was Marcus Aurelius writing notes to himself. When Marcus Aurelius warns against having a temper or being afraid of death or being ambitious or any of the things that he talks about, he's not lecturing you, he's lecturing him.

37:45Probably because he just lost his temper. Probably because he struggled with that. So you don't want to see Marcus as perfect. You want to see Marcus as a fellow human being striving to be their best, just as you and I are striving to be our best. Bill Belichick, the greatest football coach in history, tells his players, do your job. For Marcus Aurelius, what is that? What is your job? Marcus Aurelius asks himself that same question in meditation. He says, what is my vocation? It's to be a good person. That's the job. At the end of the day, to be a good person, to do good things, to make a positive difference in the world for yourself and the people around you.

38:20In book 537, Marcus Aurelius says, I was a fortunate man, but at some point fortune abandoned me. And we can imagine Marcus saying this after the plague, after he's burying another child, maybe after he hears again that perhaps his wife is cheating on him, maybe his health has failed him again. Then he catches himself. Again, this is what he's doing in meditations. He's constantly catching himself. But true good fortune is what you make for yourself. Good fortune, he says, is good character, good intentions, and good actions. And I just, I love that idea so much, right? It wasn't what was happening to him in the outside.

38:53Fortune wasn't this external thing. good fortune, feeling good, being good. This was something that was up to him, that was inside him and the choices that he made and the actions that he took. I was saying before that one of the things Marcus does in meditations is he quotes from playwrights or bits of lines from the theater that particularly struck him. One of my favorites, this is a lost line from the poet Euripides. He says, and why should we be angry at the world as if the world would notice? We don't know what this play is from. We don't know the larger context, but it's such a great stoic line.

39:28Getting angry, being pissed off, being resentful, being bitter. The world doesn't care. It is indifferent to you and I. All we can try to do, the stoics say, is maintain that goodness, preserve our character, focus on how we respond. One thing Marcus doesn't talk a lot about in meditations is happiness or joy. But I think that goes back to the idea that he wasn't talking about things that he didn't need help with. He's not having to remind himself that jokes are funny, that sex feels good. In fact, he's reminding himself the opposite, that sex might feel good in the moment, but it can cause regrets, complications, or problems later on.

40:00He's reminding himself of the things that he needs the most help with. Nice fancy bed is better than a hard, uncomfortable one. He doesn't need a reminder of that, right? So meditations is Marcus Aurelius talking about the things that are important to him, but we should not take that omission as meaning anything more than that. The Stoics were happy, the Stoics had joy, the Stoics loved, and we know Marcus did these things. Stoics were just like us. Marcus had some sense of what human flourishing or happiness was. That's just not what he was talking the most about in meditations. I think the passage that hit me most from meditations is book five.

40:33Mark Spurius talks about struggling to get out of bed in the morning. He's just like you and I. And he's saying, but it's so nice here under the covers. And he says, but are you meant to feel nice? To huddle under the covers and be warm? No, he said you were meant to do the work of a human being. You gotta get up. You gotta get after it. When I read that in college for the first time, it hit me so much, I taped it up my wall. I've been thinking about it ever since. My friend Steven Pressfield talks about the resistance, the thing that gets in between us and what we want to do. He says, nobody says, I'm never going to write my symphony.

41:03He says, I'm going to do it tomorrow. Marx really struggles with the resistance too, like all of us. He says, you could be good today. Instead, you choose tomorrow. We put it off. And actually, Seneca says something similar. He says, the one thing fools all have in common is that they're always getting ready to begin. The point for Marx was that you do it now, not later. You do it now. The Stoics believed in this idea of sympathia, that there was this hole, this collective we're in. Mark Sourius talks about the common good dozens and dozens of times in meditation. He believed that, yeah, he...

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42:51But I know you will. Trust me, your body will thank you for this investment in better sleep, shipping to many countries worldwide. See details at 8sleep.com slash Daily Stoic. He was a Roman, and yes, he was the head of the Roman Empire. but all human beings were connected, that all human beings shared an affinity and a relationship and an obligation to each other. In book 654, he says, what injures the hive injures the bee. What's bad for the hive is bad for the bee. What's bad for the bee is bad for the hive. And this was a time of such immense cruelty and selfishness and indifference to what was happening elsewhere.

43:27Marcus Reuss is saying, no, your job as a human being is to care about other human beings, not just the ones immediately nearest to you or related to you, but ones you'll never know, ones you'll never meet, ones who have never even been born. Stoicism does not make you a sociopath. If anything, it makes you care more about more people. We don't know a lot about the policies that Marcus enacts. We know of a couple. One, he passes a law that makes life easier for slaves and protections for them. And then another, he demands that the gladiators be given wooden swords to practice and fight with, take a very dangerous, fatal sport and make it not so dangerous.

44:06I like this idea of Stoicism being, at least in part, about standing up for the little guy. One of the things he learns from the Stoics is this idea of a society of equals, of equal laws, of a ruler who protects the rights of their subjects. I just love the idea that Mark's talking about that in theory and then he is in a position to do something about it and he does. not enough, none of us do enough. There's a reminder there too. He reads Epictetus, he sees the brilliance of this slave who becomes a philosopher. And yeah, he makes the life easier for slaves, but he never questions the institution of slavery itself.

44:43But I do generally like the idea that Marcus did his best to practice what he preached. In book five, Marcus Lewis talks about the proper role of philosophy in life. He says it's not as your instructor. He says it's as a kind of medicine, an ointment. He describes a sort of ancient remedy for this eye illness where they would crack an egg on you or something like that. I think his general point he actually is taking from Epictetus who said, you shouldn't leave my philosophy class feeling good. You should feel like you just came out of the hospital. He says, because you weren't well when you entered.

45:13The point of philosophy is to challenge you. It's to make you uncomfortable. It's to fix the illnesses of the soul of the mind. Even though there are passages of meditations that are soothing and reassuring. A lot of them are jarring. A lot of them make you uncomfortable. A lot of them really make you think, or a lot of them maybe you instinctively disagree. That's the point. Philosophy is not supposed to be your instructor. It's supposed to be a kind of medicine. Philosophy can feel like this impractical, inaccessible thing, but Marx really writes in meditations, this is no role is so well suited to philosophy as the one you're in right now.

45:45He says, it stares you in the face. And of course he's talking to himself. Of course, he's talking about being emperor, but if it stares the emperor in the face, that no role is so well-suited to being philosophical as that, I think it's also true for being a janitor, for being a stay-at-home parent, and being an astronaut. Whatever it is that you do stares you in the face. Nothing is so well-suited to what you're doing as this philosophy. In book 613, Marcus says, pride is the master of deception. When you think you're occupied in the weightiest business, that's when he has you in his spell. There's a quote from the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who was not a fan of the Stokes, but he said, the first sign of an impending nervous collapse is the belief that your work is terribly, terribly important.

46:31It's again, a very humbling idea. Yes, Marcus Aurelius's work was important. Yes, he wanted to do a good job at whatever he was doing. But it was just a reminder of how insidious ego is, how self-important we often feel, and how easily we get distracted again with the inessential things, the things that validate us, that make us feel special, but the end don't matter at all. A few years ago, a friend sent me an email, came in in the afternoon or the early evening on a Friday, opened it, and then I was like, you know what? This is like, I got a lot to deal with here. And I marked it as unread, and I said, I'll get to it on Monday.

47:02And he dropped dead on a hike on Sunday. This is what the Stoics are talking about when they say, you know, memento mori, when they say you can leave life right now. And one of the most haunting passages of Marcus Aurelius, he talks about how as you tuck your child in at night, he says you should say to yourself, they will not make it to the morning. His point was meditating on the fact that this could be the last email that you get from this friend. This could be the last time you sit down to coffee. It could be the last family vacation that you ever go on for you or for them, right? And that we can't take people or places for granted.

47:34I don't think Marcus is doing this exercise, meditating on the loss of his child to disconnect, to detach from them. The opposite. It's to connect more deeply with them to remind himself what was truly important, which was the present moment. And his other brilliant meditation on the ephemerality of life, he says, you're afraid of death because you won't be able to do this anymore. You won't be able to wait in line at the DMV. You won't be on another stupid, pointless conference call. So much of what we spend our life doing is a complete waste. And then we say we're afraid of death. We say we feel like we don't have enough time.

48:09You do have enough time. You just have to stop wasting it. I was talking to someone recently who had this high-flying business. It was super successful out of nowhere, made all sorts of money, got all sorts of wonderful public attention. And then it turned, the business failed. And suddenly they weren't held up as this business success, but as an example of a business failure. And I told them one of my favorite passages from Marcus Reelius. Marcus Reelius says, we're like a rock tossed in the air. We gain nothing by going up and lose nothing by coming down. None of this says anything about us as people.

48:39He didn't gain anything by being made emperor. He wouldn't have lost by losing it. None of it, Marcus really says, means anything about us as people. Even though Marcus really says we must avoid false friendship at all costs, even though he's betrayed by his trusted general, Avidius Cassius, we know that Marcus doesn't harden his heart. He doesn't close himself off from the world. He's ready, as Michael Scott says he's ready to be heard again, right? He constantly is putting himself back out there, but he does learn from this. He's a little more guarded going forward. He makes this analogy in meditations.

49:11He says, you know, you're in the boxing ring and someone's cheating. Maybe they're gouging or fighting or scratching. He says, you don't quit altogether. You just change your fight plan accordingly. This is one passage that Robert Greene quotes from meditations quite often. You don't quit, you don't storm and go home, but you are aware of who you're dealing with and you adjust accordingly. The short lines in meditations are the best. Discard your misperceptions, stop being jerked around like a puppet, limit yourself to the present. They're just a couple of words, they say so much and they cut through so much space and time.

49:46He never uses two words where one will do. He doesn't beat around the bush, he just comes out and says it. And the advice is so clear, so obvious. Try to imagine the emperor of Rome, this man of enormous power and wealth and prestige, trying to tell himself not to be a person of too many words or too many deeds. Pretty remarkable that he's even at that level talking about simplification. He's talking about modesty, talking about restraint. It's a beautiful thing and a very rare thing to be sure. In meditations, Mark Aurelius is constantly pointing out how few people remember the emperors who came before him.

50:21Who remembers the name of Vespasian? who remembers this person from Hadrian's Court or that one. All these names are forgotten. But he's saying this to remind himself that one day the name Marcus Aurelius will sound unfamiliar. Indeed, for hundreds of years it was. I mean, how many people even watching this video know much more about Marcus Aurelius than he was the old guy in the movie Gladiator, right? Even the most famous person in the world, the person they carved statues out of stone whose name was emblazoned on buildings. So few people know of him today. And that should be a humbling reminder for all of us.

50:57In Gregory Hayes' 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. Now, 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, every person in a position of power was familiar with Marcus Aurelius because he was there. He had that job. He had that job times a thousand 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.

51:34And I think it's important that it's not just reading it once. Again, it's the idea of rereading it every year. So not just, wouldn't it be nice if every president, if every world leader read and reread meditations every year. We don't control that. If you reread it every year, what would you learn? What would you take out of it each and every time? I know that I've taken something new out of it each time I've picked up this book, as I have now for almost 15 years. Every time you dip into Marcus, you take something new out of it. 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.

52:09I have some really old copies of meditations too that people have given me. Some of the, so old the covers are falling off. I'm even scared to pull the pages apart. They're hundreds, hundreds of years old. And I think one stoic exercise, you can almost imagine Marcus doing it. And I think about it now, even when I hold my newish copies versus my oldish copies. Think about who the person was that held this book a hundred years ago, 200 years ago. Think about the translation that this translation is a translation of, is a translation of, is a translation of. And you start to get far back pretty fast.

52:40and you wonder where those people are. They're gone. They're gone forever, just as someday will be gone forever. And maybe someone will get your used copy at a library sale or a garage sale, or it'll be passed down. Your kids, their kids, their kids. None of us are here forever. And in a lot of different places in meditations, Marcus meditates on how these old familiar names are no longer so familiar. And these people who were once powerful and super well-known, nobody knows who they are. Think about all the famous people that have owned meditations, they're nowhere, as you and I will someday be.

53:14The one prophecy that never fails, as they say. And Marcus knows that for all his power, for all his fame, for all his brilliance, he's not an exception to that rule. His memory might live on forever, but he knows posthumous fame isn't really worth anything. He says, you know, focus on what you can now, be present, you're not exempt from anything, you're a regular person, eventually you'll find yourself on your deathbed, and it may well be sooner than you would like it to be, but such is life. One of my favorite passages in meditations, Marcus Rullis talks about washing off the dust of earthly life.

53:43I think studying philosophy is a way to do that. Going for a walk is a way to do that. The Romans would have done that in the bathhouse. We can imagine Marcus after a day of hearing cases or meetings, he would have been dirty, literally and figuratively. And he would have walked to a bathhouse, a gymnasium, and he would have cleaned himself there. He would have gotten in a cold plunge or a thermal pool. In fact, at a quincum where Marcus writes a chunk of meditations, you can step in one of those pools. It's still running today. There's something beautiful and timeless about that. And I think very practical about the reminder of washing off the dust of earthly life, literally and metaphorically.

54:20It was funny. I was going through my copy of Meditations many years ago and I found inside a receipt. It was for Borders in Riverside, California. It still doesn't exist anymore. And then I realized it wasn't my name, my credit card on the receipt. It was my wife's. And I realized that shortly after my wife and I had met, I'd just read Meditations and she went and bought that copy. That was something we shared and talked about. And this copy is still there with us. I'll show you a picture of it. But Marcus Aurelius himself is changed by a book recommendation. His philosophy teacher, Rusticus, gives him a copy of Epictetus and they bond over it.

54:52Books can change our lives. They can connect us with other people. They can be with us for years, decades. I think there's something to be said in Meditations, but then also in my copy of Meditations. about the singular power of a book to bring people together. There's an immense amount of control or influence that the translator has over how they choose to use this word or that word, and that can mean a world of difference. But also, when you just get the crappy translation that's in the public domain or the cheapest one on Amazon, you're selling yourself short. I feel so lucky I got the Hayes translation early.

55:27The point is, books are an investment. You shouldn't cheap out. You shouldn't get the cheapest one. You should get the one that's right, that's best. And there's a reason these things cost money. is that they're worth money. My life would have been totally different had I gotten a crappier translation, a cheaper translation, or if I'd said, I'll just get it from the library, I'll skim through it and I'll give it back. No, reading is an investment. Books are an investment and you have to invest accordingly. I was once having a conversation with the great Robert Greene about the Stoics and he showed me his copy of Mark Aurelius' Meditations and he would write in the margins, look, A-F.

56:00A-F stood for Amor Fati. Amor Fati actually comes to us from Nietzsche, who was not a particularly big fan of the Stoics, but expressed something, I think, at the core of Stoicism. He said, not just to bear what is necessary or accept it, he says you must love it. Amor fati, a love of one's fame. And it was Robert who made this explicit connection between Stoicism and Amor fati, which I've popularized in Daily Stoic, in our videos, my book. Robert and I even made this coin, which I carry with me everywhere. It has that picture of a fire. Mark Sturulus, again, remember, is saying that what you throw on top of fire becomes fuel for the fire.

56:35The fire loves what you're throwing in there. So I just love that idea. And I'm so indebted to Robert to helping me see this connection between two wildly different philosophical schools of thought, but finding this one area where they converge. One passage I marked down in meditations when I first read it, Mark Sturlus says, go straight to the seat of intelligence. Writing and reading require a master, so too does life. Mentors have been a huge guiding force in my life. Robert Greene, others. if you don't have a mentor, if you don't have a teacher, if you don't have the kinds of people that Marcus is thanking in the debts and lessons section of meditations, you're not going to become what you're capable of becoming.

57:11You're not going to become anything like Marcus Aurelius. The remarkable thing about meditations is that it's really a book for the writer, not for the reader. It's not for you and I. Marcus might even be mortified that we're here talking about him because he never intended to publish it. The point of meditations was his own practice. He was writing to himself, writing notes to himself. The book accomplished what it was set out to accomplish before it was read by anyone else, let alone, you know, 2000 years later that it's still helping people. And you have to have that kind of journaling practice in your life, I think.

57:42How are you meditating on these things? How are you talking to yourself about them? What's the internal dialogue or debate or interrogation process that you have in your life that's helping you be what you're capable of being and who you're capable of being? Marcus Aurelius had a lot to complain about. He's betrayed. He's misled. People lie to him. People try to take things from him. He has a job that he doesn't even want. And yet nowhere in meditations, what he thinks is his private diary that no one is going to read, we never once see him complain about any of this. He doesn't complain about being unappreciated.

58:15He doesn't complain about being abused. He doesn't complain about being put upon. He doesn't complain about the stress. Because as he says in meditations, we should never be overheard complaining, not even to ourselves. Concentrate like a Roman, Marcus Reus says, concentrate on doing the thing in front of you as if it was the last thing you were doing in your life. I think about that pretty often, that it could be the last time you send this email. It could be the last time you have this conversation. It could be the last time that I sit down to write or that I sit down to make a video. So am I going to be fully present?

58:46Am I going to concentrate? Am I going to do my job? Am I going to meet the standards of my people, of my profession, my history. I'm going to concentrate like a Roman. I'm going to do it like this thing matters. Like I might not get another opportunity to do it. To me, that's the test. That's the standard to try to meet every day that you are lucky enough to be alive. Marcus Aurelius is clearly very strict with himself. Meditations is one rule, admonishment, almost impossible standard that he's setting for himself after another. And yet we're told by historians, the brilliance of Marcus is that his strictness was limited solely to himself.

59:19tolerant with others, strict with yourself, conscious of the fact that it was called self-discipline for a reason. You control yourself, you control the standards you set for yourself, but you have to be tolerant and understanding of other people. In another part, in meditation, he chastises himself for not being a better forgiver of faults. And that's what we have to cultivate. This practice should make us better. Also, we're forgiving and tolerant of other people. Marcus Aurelius' hero of heroes is Antoninus, his adopted stepfather. As far as we know Antoninus Pius doesn't write anything down.

59:48He writes no works of Stoic philosophy. He probably wouldn't have even identified as a Stoic or as a philosopher. And yet to Marcus, he was the embodiment of both Stoicism and philosophy. He was clearly naturally this way. And I suspect some people naturally are. I think we can deduce that because Marcus did have to write this book, Marcus wasn't naturally this way. He was struggling like you and I are struggling. He was trying to get there, he needed the extra help. And it is inevitable that we will fall short, which is why in meditations, Mark Sebelius says to pick yourself back up when you fall.

1:00:24But he also says to celebrate the fact that you're a human being. What matters, he says, is that you come back to the rhythm of it, right? We're going to be jarred by circumstances. We're going to be messed up. We're going to slip on our diet, on our New Year's resolution, on the goal we have. That's okay. what matters is that you get back up. What matters is that more often than not you stick to it that you always come back home to it. In one passage he goes it's unfortunate that this happened. Then he catches himself and goes no it's fortunate that it happened to you. And we think about all the things that happened to Marcus Aurelius in his life.

1:01:00Plagues, war, flooding, he loses children, he has a troublesome son, people think his wife is cheating on him. It's one thing after another. But he doesn't run from any of this. He doesn't hide from it. He doesn't throw himself a pity party. Even though he felt sorry for himself in that minute, he always saw it as an opportunity. He rose to the occasion. One ancient historian would say that Marcus doesn't meet with the good fortune that he deserved. But then he says, but I admired him all the more for that because he preserved himself and the empire despite these extraordinary circumstances. That's what greatness is.

1:01:33That's what the obstacle is the way is really about. Several points in meditations, Mark's really summarizes what are in effect the three disciplines of stoicism that you need to know always. Perception, how we see things, what part of this is in my control, what isn't, what is it actually, how do I see it as clearly as possible. Then the next step is what are you gonna do about it, what action can you take? And the third part is the will, the fortitude, the strength, the perseverance that you bring to bear on that problem, obstacle situation. Perception, action, will. That's the essence of stoic philosophy, which Marcus organizes meditations around and returns to repeatedly over and over again.

1:02:14Marcus Realist would have been cheered everywhere he went. There would have been parades. He's given a Roman triumph. They built statues of him. They flatter him. In every room, he's the most important person there. He has this remarkable way of describing all of that. The clapping is the smacking of hands. He He says that shearing is the clacking of tongues. Doing that contemptuous expression that we talked about, the idea that this stuff doesn't matter. Let's see it as it actually is. Don't just take it for granted that at a standing ovation says something special about you, that obviously being all these people talking about you is important.

1:02:48Think about what it actually is. Think about what it actually represents. Break it down and see it in this skeptical, almost cynical light, and it loses its power over you. Obviously, Marcus is an idealist. Obviously, he's a perfectionist. Obviously, he wants to be good, and he wants other people to be good. Yet he's also pragmatic. He's also realistic. He says in meditations, don't go around expecting Plato's Republic. Cicero says of Cato that he acted as if he lived in Plato's Republic instead of the dregs of Romulus. Obviously, you want to be good despite what's happening in the outside world, but you can't also expect perfection or a utopia because we don't live there.

1:03:26You have to be pragmatic and realistic and practical, where you're just setting yourself up to be disappointed, you're setting yourself up to have your heart broken, which is what Marcus is preparing against at the beginning of meditation, like we talked about. He says, the people you are going to meet are annoying, jealous, frustrating, mean, all of that, right? Not the things in Plato's Republic. You gotta be ready, you gotta expect those things. Not only can you not expect Plato's Republic, you have to deal with the place that you're in, you gotta make practical decisions based on what you're in.

1:03:55He says, if the cucumber is bitter, throw it out. He says that there's brambles in the path, go around. Don't despair. Don't be mad. Don't wish it was otherwise. Just get to work. Start where you are with what you have and build from there. Almost every smart person that's ever lived has loved reading. They love books. They lose themselves in books. And yet why does he write at the beginning of meditations that he needs to stop reading to throw away his books? Well, it's because any virtue taken too far can be a vice, right? Marcus Aurelius probably loved going into his books because his books were simpler than the job that he had.

1:04:32His philosophy texts were cleaner and clearer than the complicated moral ambiguities of life. He was saying that a philosopher has to be a doer, not just a thinker. In fact, the Stoics, they didn't like what they called the pen and ink philosophers, the people who were just readers. They weren't doers. It's good advice. It's wonderful to read, and you should read as much as possible, but you can't live in there. You have to live in the real world. You can imagine that as the emperor of Rome, people had a lot of strong opinions about Marcus. They thought he was the best in the world. They thought he was the worst in the world.

1:05:04They thought he sucked. They thought he was amazing. He would have been bombarded with opinions about him. He has to not think about it. He has to set his own standards. He has to keep his own inner scorecard. He says at one point in meditations that the perks of his job is that you can earn a bad reputation by doing good deeds. Think of someone like Harry Truman, who makes a bunch of momentous, critical, probably the correct decisions, but he leaves office, one of the least popular presidents in American history. That's what Marcus is talking about. People have strong opinions about what you do, but you have to set your own standards, your own scorecard.

1:05:38You have to do the right thing because it's the right thing, not because it's going to make you popular, or conversely, not concerned whether it might make you unpopular. Objective judgment now at this very moment. Unselfish action now at this very moment. will and acceptance now at this very moment. He says, that's all that you need. That's the formula for turning an obstacle upside down. First, you have to see it clearly. Second, you have to focus on what's possible, what you can do for others here. And third, you have to accept the parts of it that are outside your control. You have to bring a kind of fortitude and a strength to it.

1:06:11Perception, action, will. That's all that you need. I was lucky enough actually to interview Gregory Hayes, the translator of these two books, way back in 2007. And I asked him what his favorite passage in meditations was. And he said this, I'll read it to you. He said, Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone. Those that are now and those to come. Existence flows past us like a river. The what is in constant flux. The why has a thousand variations. Nothing is stable, not even what's right here. The infinity of the past and future gapes before us. a chasm whose depths we cannot see. I probably missed the brilliance of that until I saw him read it, but it stuck with me ever since.

1:06:56And actually, when we illustrated this edition of Meditations, I tried to capture that. That time flows like a river, and you just think of it rushing past. You think of Marcus Aurelius riding it near the Danube. Water is clearly this repeated metaphor and analogy in the Stoics, and it can teach us so much. And most of all, I think it in both humble and inspirers. Mark Sreos talks about being jarred by circumstances, messing up, failing. He talks about the idea of a rhythm, coming back to the rhythm. And I like this idea. I think Stokes talk about the logos or the way. You think of the logos, the kind of rhythm of the universe being the way.

1:07:32It's something you come back to. So even if you screw up, it's always there. The metronome is always there. The rhythm of the music is always there. You want to come back to it. Like a lot of people, I have a tendency to overwork, to overdo, to overcommit, to take things too intensely. Mark Aurelius warns himself against this in meditations and it's stuck with me always. He says, in your actions, don't procrastinate. In your conversations, don't confuse. In your thoughts, don't wander. In your soul, don't be passive or aggressive. In your life, don't be all about business, right? Don't be all about business.

1:08:04If you want tranquility, you have to do less. It's about doing less. It's about saying no more. The question we have to ask ourselves constantly is, is this essential? Because most of what we do and say is not essential. And when you eliminate the inessential, he says that's good in and of itself. But secondarily, you get the benefit of doing the essential things better. You have to say no. You have to say no. Multiple times, Marcus used a word that I totally missed. Like for instance, to move from one unselfish action to another with God in mind, only their delight and stillness. Stillness is a very Eastern word, but it also has roots in Stoicism.

1:08:47Ataraxia, apatheia, this idea for the Stoics of not being disturbed by external circumstances, by internal circumstances, not caring what other people say, not caring what other people do, getting to a place of stillness. This is clearly what Marcus was studying philosophy for and where he wanted to get. Stillness, though, it is this idea that Marcus returns to over and over and over again, probably because he had so little stillness in his busy, chaotic, crazy life. He wants to be like the rock that the wave crashes over and eventually the sea falls still around. I think of that metaphor all the time.

1:09:23The world is going to be crazy. All these things are happening, but what you can have is a certain kind of strength and stillness and inner fortitude is the ability to be calm amid the turbulence, to be still even as the world is spinning around you everything lasts for a day the knower and the known this is a pretty interesting observation from a man who was the most famous man in the world in that time a man who's still so famous you can buy coins with his face on them on etsy they survive as historical documents worth hundreds if not thousands of dollars this is a guy whose book still pops on and off the bestseller list whose search engine show have an all-time spike in popularity.

1:10:04But Marcus Aurelius would also remind himself that posthumous fame isn't really worth anything. He's not around to enjoy it. What matters is, was he deserving of that in his own time? Was he good then? Is he famous for the right reasons, for doing good stuff, for being a good person? So we can imagine when Marcus comes to the end of life and realizes he's going to die, I wonder if he thought about the passage that he wrote in book 1036. He says, it doesn't matter how good a life you've led, there will still be people standing around the bed who will welcome the sad event. His point was, if you're doing this for validation, if you're doing this to be loved, if you're doing this to be remembered, the rewards for doing the right thing have to be the right thing.

1:10:46Can't be doing it to be liked. You can't care about what other people think. You can't try to please everyone all the time and be everyone's favorite, especially as a leader. Especially as a leader. So Marcus had to constantly be aware of this. And I wondered if when he actually came to the end of his life, if he thought about the fact that maybe secretly some of these people were glad he would be gone soon. And if he had to come to terms with those words that he'd written so long ago. In book four of Meditations, this is 437, he says, On the verge of dying and you're still weighed down, still turbulent, still convinced that external things can harm you, still rude to other people, still not acknowledging the truth that wisdom is justice.

1:11:26I just love the intensity with which he's addressing himself. Marcus, again, isn't perfect. He's still struggling with it. He's saying it's the end of your life and you still haven't gotten this right. And he's repeating to himself who he wants to be, how he should be. And I think, and this is the important part, he's also saying it's not too late. It's never too late. It's funny, Marcus is, I think, meditating on memento mori to root himself in the present moment. And you do notice that Marcus talks about the present moment over and over and over again in meditations. He's reminding yourself that it's the only thing you have.

1:12:00It's the only thing you can lose. I think that's because he, like us, found it so easy to get distracted, to think about the past or the future, to worry about this, to regret that. And the consequence of that is you're losing the only thing you have, he's saying, which is right now. The fruit of this life, Marcus says at one point in meditations, is good character and acts for the common good. Elsewhere, he talks about those epithets for the self. Those are two pretty good ones, right? that you should be good character always and do good things for other people always. And to Marcus, that's what he was striving to do always.

1:12:34Good character, good deeds. It's hard to come up with a better summation for a good life than that. There's a pretty amazing story about Marcus Aurelius. Pretty late in life, he's seen leaving his palace in Rome. He's carrying these tablets. And a friend says, where are you going? He says, I'm off to see Sextus, the philosopher, to learn that which I do not yet know. A friend marvels, he says, here's the most powerful man in the world, even as an old age, picking up his books and going to school. I think that's in effect what Marcus is. He remains a student. It's his notebook. It's his exercise book.

1:13:07It's his workbook. He's doing work on himself, even as an old man. And the fruits of that come down to us. It's just so wonderful to think of Marcus, even as an old man. Maybe some of the lines in here, he learned from Sexus the Philosopher. He thanks Sexus the Philosopher in book one, the debts and lessons Shepherd. So the idea for Marcus was that you always stay a student. We know that Marcus really doesn't want to be emperor. In fact, he breaks down and cries when he is told he's going to be emperor because he knew how many bad emperors there were. I also think he probably had a little bit of imposter syndrome.

1:13:41He wasn't someone who sought out power and so when power came his way, he wondered if he could do it. If he had the skills, if he was strong enough, smart enough, firm enough, ruthless enough. But before Marcus becomes emperor, he has a dream, we're told. And in that dream, he dreams that he has shoulders made of ivory. That was to him letting himself know that he was strong enough to bear the weight. He could do it. And in meditations, we catch him reminding himself of that lesson that he learned many years ago, early on, before he'd taken power. He says, remind yourself that if it's humanly possible, know that you can do it also.

1:14:12These people aren't better than you. They're not given some gift that you don't have. They became who they needed to be. that gave themselves the shoulders of ivory that Marcus Aurelius realized deep down he had all along. The Stoics speak of this idea of the inner citadel, this sort of part inside yourself that can't be touched by externals, good news, bad news, good fortune, misfortune. Marcus Aurelius writes that stuff cannot touch the soul. And I think that's what we see despite all the things that we know happened to Marcus in his life, all the good fortune that he did not meet with, all the misfortune that he did not deserve.

1:14:47Nothing touches the inner goodness inside him. That's what meditation shows. It shows that despite the filth, the dust, the stress of life, what remains is the goodness. He keeps that pure bubbling up always. There's just no one that Marcus speaks more highly of in meditation than Antoninus or more consistently. Antoninus takes up a bigger chunk in meditation than Marcus's mother, than Marcus's family, and he comes back to it later in the book. Antoninus is a gift from the gods in Marcus's view. He's older than Marcus. They have no blood relation, but they have this long apprenticeship with each other.

1:15:22Marcus seizes this for all that it could be. He studies Antoninus. He was the model, Ernest Renan says, of the perfect life for Marcus. And so that's why repeatedly in meditations, you see Marcus talking about what he learned from Antoninus, what he learns from his adopted stepfather. And I think having a hero like that is just so important. And it's why Antoninus takes up such a big chunk of Debts and Lessons. Sometimes when I sign copies of The Daily Stoic or when people want me to sign their copies of Marcus Aurelius, which is a weird thing I could have never imagined 15 years ago, I write one of my favorite quotes from Marcus Aurelius.

1:15:54He says, fight to be the person philosophy tried to make you. Or I shorten that, I do my version of it, I say, fight to be the person philosophy wants you to be. That to me is the struggle of Marcus Aurelius. He wants to be what Antoninus knows he could be, what Rome needs him to be, what philosophy, what stoicism thought he could be. And that was the ideal, the standard that he aspired to be like always. You know, meditations is filled with self-criticism, with pushing himself to be better, calling himself into account. Again, Marcus Relius is incredibly powerful. People told him how amazing he was.

1:16:25They worshiped him as a god. And the more successful, the more important, the more beloved you are, the more important it is to have this practice. No one could tell Marcus what he was doing wrong, what he needed to do better. He had to do that. And look, the same is true in this world that we live in, where we have wonderful freedom, where we don't live under a tyrant, where there is no authority monitoring everything we do and say and think. But that doesn't mean we should do whatever we want to say and think or do. We have to hold ourselves accountable. We have to follow that process ourselves.

1:16:53In the middle of meditations, and there's a couple others sprinkled around, you see Marcus Aurelius talk about loss, specifically the loss of children. And this is something he knows intimately well. tragically think about what it would be like to bury a child and how much that would affect a person. Marcus doesn't do this one time or two times, but six times. He loses all of his male heirs except for Commodus. Just brutal. In the most tragic and painful of circumstances, a medical procedure that goes wrong, the plague, childbirth, infancy. It's just one thing after another for Marcus. Yet not only does he continue to get out of bed every morning, he writes this book with such grace and love, purpose, like he could have been broken by this.

1:17:33He had every reason to be broken by this. No one would hold it against him if he had been, yet he wasn't. And to me, that's both a testament to the philosophy itself, but also a testament to his incredible and inspiring character. The emperor of Rome would have had beautiful palaces. Marcus from a rich family would have had access to country estates and he could afford the finest resorts or retreats. And he reminds himself though that people who try to get away from it all are chasing something that doesn't exist. Like that Buddhist idea that wherever you go, there you are. You can retreat into yourself anytime you want.

1:18:07He says you can find replenishment and rest and relaxation inside your own soul. And I think that's what he's doing in meditation. That's what he's doing in books. That's what he's doing when he would go on walks, when he would look at the world poetically. He realized that he didn't have to flee to some exotic location. all the things he needed and wanted right there. They weren't external things at all. They were inside of him, just as they are inside all of us. You know, Seneca talks about how the greatest empire is self-command, being in charge of yourself. If you can see Marcus Aurelius, this guy who controls literally an enormous empire, struggling with that same idea, realizing that, yeah, I can make the army do this.

1:18:47Yeah, I can purchase that. Yeah, I can make the Senate do this. But that the real power, the real thing to focus on is am I in command or control of myself? There's a story about Hadrian getting mad, losing his temper, and stabbing a secretary in the eye with a pen. He could get away with that. Nobody cared. Marcus doesn't do anything like that. There's no stories like that about Marcus. Marcus realized that, yeah, there was only a few people were ever powerful enough to be emperor, but fewer among the emperors was a man who was in command of himself. And as Seneca said, no one is fit to rule who is not first in control of themselves.

1:19:18That's what Marcus strove to be in. In many ways, that's what meditations was him trying to get a little bit better at it. I might've repeated myself in a few of these, but then again, Marcus repeats himself a lot through meditations because he's not writing a prescription about all of the philosophy. He's not trying to tackle every situation or problem or facet of stoicism. He's trying to talk about what he needs, which seems to be reminders of his mortality, which seems to be why he shouldn't lose his temper, which seems to be about controlling his ambition, seems about taking the long view or seeing things big picture.

1:19:53Meditations is not complete or comprehensive. It's a book about the things Marcus needs the most, just as your journal should be repeatedly coming back to the themes that you need the most help with or the things you're struggling the most with. That we can read Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, the private thoughts of the most powerful man in the world, is just an incredible fluke of history and good luck. He had no intention of publishing it. He'd probably be mortified that we're reading it. Just even think of how unlikely it is that a thing written on wax tablets or parchment 2 ,000 years ago manages to survive to us.

1:20:27How many good things had to happen? How many flukes of circumstances and good fortune had to happen for us to get there? It survives to us primarily because the Romans were good record keepers. Because someone decided not to toss this book of philosophy out. They probably ignored Marcus's final wishes. but also because a chain of monks, all nameless, all forgotten, recorded, wrote over and over again, translated Marcus's works, and eventually enough copies of it survived that it survives to us. So my final thought as we step back from these lessons of meditations, the final lesson I think we can take from the existence of the book itself should be a note of gratitude.

1:21:02We're so lucky. You run the same process again 100 times. 99 of those times, you're not going to get the book surviving. We are so lucky. It is a black swan of black swans, wonderful fluke of circumstances that works out to our benefit. And that should both humble us and make us feel really, really fortunate that we get to read and learn from this wise man in such a deeply personal and vulnerable and helpful way. That's why I wanted to bring this leather edition out, which I think you're really gonna like. You can check out how to get it below. I hope you like this video. I hope you subscribe.

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