100 (Stoic) Lessons From Marcus Aurelius

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1:34Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

2:13Marcus 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 or more. I was reading it just yesterday and 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 go pick this book up and read it yourself and hey look if you want another 100 pieces of advice from marcus realist that i have compiled that's not in this video but i think maybe is even better just go to dailystoic.com marcus 100 i'll link to that below marcus 100 and i'll give you 100 more pieces of life-changing advice from someone i've been studying and thinking about for the last 20 years people don't seem to understand this one really important thing it's that you have a superpower you have the power marcus really says to have no opinion he says remember events things are not asking to be judged by you you don't have to have an opinion about this He says, you can just see it as it is.

3:18You can think nothing of it. You don't have to label it. You don't have to put it in categories. You don't have to say it's fair or unfair, positive or negative, smart or dumb. Just accept it as it is. The Stoics try to see the world as objective. Try not to insert opinions or judgments on top of things because this is the path to peace. It's the path to wisdom. And of course, being agnostic in this way allows you to get to work doing what you need to do rather than wasting your time labeling, judging, and having opinions about stuff that is not up to you. It would be a mistake to see Marcus Aurelius as perfect.

3:54He wasn't perfect because no one is perfect. He's a human being. Marcus instead was trying to get better always. And that's what meditations was. Meditations was Marcus Aurelius writing notes to himself. So 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 is needing to work on, he's not lecturing you, he's lecturing him. Probably 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.

4:31Even though he's very famous and very important, Marcus Aurelius makes a lot of effort in his writings to remind himself how worthless fame is. He lists a lot of names in meditations, emperors who came before him, famous poets and playwrights and power brokers. He's saying how unfamiliar these names, which were so important not very long ago, already are. It's like what Taylor Swift was talking about when she says the who's who of who's that. Mark Sreelis is saying that's what we'll become. It doesn't matter how important we are, how powerful we are, how much money we make. We all slip into oblivion very, very quickly.

5:08He says, words once common now sound archaic and the names of the famous dead as well. Everything fades quickly, he says, and is forgotten. What is eternal fame? He says, it's emptiness, it's worthless. So what do we prize instead? Being a good person now, doing good now, being virtuous now. Some people say that Marcus Aurelius' meditations is depressing, but you know what? Marcus Aurelius' life is depressing. This is a guy who lives through a historic flood, a plague, endless wars. There's a coup. They say no parent should have to bury a child. Marcus Aurelius buries half of his children. He has to attend six funerals for his children.

5:43He lost his father at an early age. Later, he loses his wife. It's one thing after another for this guy. One heartbreak after another. So Marcus Aurelius' meditations isn't depressing. The fact that he got out of bed every morning was a profound statement of hope and perseverance and resilience and optimism. That he cared about anything. That he strove to be better. That he strove to be a good person. That he didn't let it wear him down, turn him into a nihilist. That it didn't deprive him of meaning and purpose. This is the hopefulness. This is the optimism. This is the cheerfulness in stoicism that despite the blows of fate, the unfairness of life, we keep going.

6:17We keep striving to be good. We keep striving to be and do our best. So the famous passage from Marcus Aurelius where he's talking about how the obstacle is the way. Do you know what kind of obstacles he's talking about? He's not talking about natural disasters. He's not talking about losing your arm. He's not talking about any of that. He's talking about people. He's talking about assholes. He's talking about jerks. He's saying that people are our proper occupation. So they actually can't impede us. They can't get in our way. They can't actually cause us trouble because all the things they do are opportunities for us, opportunities for us to practice virtue, courage, and discipline, and justice, and wisdom.

6:53We can have intentions and people can cause problems and disruptions. They can get in the way of what we are trying to do, but they present us new opportunities to try new things. Let's try to see these frustrating, annoying, obnoxious people in our lives not as problems or frustrations or even obnoxious at all, but actually as opportunities. Opportunities for us to be kind. Opportunities for us to be patient. Opportunities for us to be creative. Opportunities for us to teach and opportunities for us to learn. That's what Marcus Aurelius means when he says the obstacle is the way. The key to a good life, Marcus Aurelius said, was a strong mind.

7:30Fortune was unpredictable, but mental toughness was something you could depend on. He said, we want to be like the rock that the waves crash over and eventually the sea falls still around. That's what cultivating a mental resilience, emotional fortitude is all about. And if you can do that, then nothing can throw you off and you are unbreakable. I remember once I was having a conversation with the great Robert Greene and he showed me his copy of Mark Cirelius' Meditations and he would write in the margins a little AF. AF 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.

8:14He said not just to bear what is necessary or accept it, he says you must love it. Amor Fati, a love of one's faith. It was Robert who made this explicit connection between Stoicism and Amor Fati, which I've popularized in Daily Stoic, in our videos, my books, I have a chapter about it in The Obstacles of the Way. Robert and I even made this coin, which I carry with me everywhere. It says Amor Fati has that picture of a fire. Marx really, again, remember saying that what you throw on top of a fire becomes fuel for the fire. The fire loves what you're throwing in there. So I just love that idea.

8:45And 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. We could imagine that that's what Mark Cirillos is doing in Meditations, right? Like this is what's weird about Meditations is that it's not a book for the reader. It's a book for the writer. Right. Like he was writing it. He was getting his thoughts out on paper. Yeah. And we know for a fact that he wrote significant chunks of it while leading the Roman army. So he's, you know, maybe it's the morning before battle. Maybe it's the evening afterwards.

9:16And he's just sort of sitting in this tent writing things down. I think journaling is a big part. Like if you can take, you've got these thoughts that are just kind of pinging around in your head. The act of writing them down creates even just a few feet of distance, which is really powerful. I think journaling would be a way the Stoics would do that. There's this image that I can't get out of my head. And it's Marcus Aurelius in the depths of the Antonine Plague. This devastating global pandemic that wrecks and ravages Rome in every way you can imagine. And the image I have is of Marcus Aurelius holding a two-week sale on the lawn of the Imperial Palace.

9:47He sells jewels and statues and robes and couches and furniture. All the finery that goes along with being an emperor, he puts up for sale. And he does this because he's trying to send a message. He's trying to say, I don't need this stuff. I'm going to put others before me. I'm not going to live in luxury while other people are suffering. It's the image of the CEO taking a pay cut in a bad economy. It's an athlete who renegotiates their contract so the team can add on extra players. it's a leader who eats last. That's the idea. It's a co-worker who covers your shift. It's about putting others before yourself.

10:28And that's what greatness is. That's what this idea of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom is supposed to allow us to do. To do the right thing even when it's hard. Even when it goes against our own immediate self-interest. It's what allows us to to show up for others, to sacrifice for the sake of others. It's what allows us to share what we have. And it's what allows us to be there when it really matters. Nobody likes getting up early, not even Mark Sreelius. In meditations, he talks about trying to get up early and he has this fantastic conversation with himself. He goes, but it's warmer under the covers.

11:01And he says, is that what you were put here to do, to huddle under the blankets and be warm? He says, we're all put here for a purpose. We have a nature, we have a duty, and we have to go and we have to do that. And the morning is the best time to do stuff to get stuff done. So that's why the Stoics tried to get up early. I say try because they didn't always do it. And it wasn't always easy. And they didn't always like it. They tried to do it anyway. I might have 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.

11:32He'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, which seems about taking the long view, seeing things big picture. Meditations 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. The stoic goal isn't to be, you know, not care about anyone.

12:11It's the opposite. It's kindness as a virtue in Stoicism, like Buddhist compassion, in a way. You know, at the beginning of Meditations, Mark Serious talks about one of his teachers taught him to be free of passion, but full of love. And I think that's lovely. 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. He never uses two words or one will do. He doesn't beat around the bush. He just comes out and says it, and the advice is so clear and so obvious, and yet as simple as it is, it's so incredibly difficult.

12:55You think you're a good person, but you're hurting people. Mark Sreus reminds himself in meditations, he says, remember you can commit an injustice by doing nothing also. There's the things that we turn away from, the things we don't want to think about, the things that we say are someone else's problems, the things we say we can't do anything about. And those are injustices that we are allowing to be perpetrated. We're complicit in that unless we try to do something about them. Mark Stavios 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 the Stoics talk about the logos or the way you think of the logos the kind of rhythm of the universe being the way 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 the obstacle is not the problem you're the problem your opinions about it are the problem your orientation towards it is the problem the Stoics say the obstacle is the way right the The impediment to action advances action.

13:58It stands in the way, becomes the way. What do they mean by that? Marcus Reyes is saying that there's something you get to do because of this. There's things that you can do now that you couldn't do before. There's an opportunity for you to act with courage or discipline or justice or wisdom. There's something you can do now that you couldn't ordinarily do. We can't let a crisis go to waste. We have to use this thing in front of us. Yeah, it seems like an obstacle, but now there's something we get to do because of it if we do it. You have the most powerful man in the world in an empire 2 ,000 years ago who believed preposterous things about where the universe came from, and even their sense of right and wrong, and the Romans were like us and then were utterly not like us.

14:39And no one was more removed from normal modern life than the emperor. You crack open this book, Meditations, to himself, and it's not just, oh, I get a sense of what he's talking about. But it sounds like he's speaking to you with what you are dealing with right now. What it is ultimately is the specificity, the total insulerness of it makes it utterly generalizable and relatable. He was authentically being himself and in that way manages to speak to millions for all time. In one passage in Meditations, Mark Cerullus writes down what he calls epithets for the self. He talks about being honest, talks about being upright.

15:25These are words he says that he can live by. 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. I wrote honest, calm, fair, father, brave, generous, and still. These are words that I try to live by. I wanna make decisions, take actions that will demonstrate that idea, which will show that those are the watch words or the epithets that I live by, that I could be described by. Concentrate like a Roman, Marcus Ruhl says. Concentrate on doing the thing in front of you as if it was the last thing you were doing in your life.

16:02I think about that pretty often. It's the idea of, it's not that you're gonna die tomorrow for sure, but 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 gonna be fully present? Am I gonna concentrate? Am I gonna do my job? am I going to meet the standards of my people, of my profession, of my family, whatever it is? Am I going to concentrate like a Roman? Am I going to do it like this thing matters? Like I might not get another opportunity to do it?

16:31To me that's the test, that's the standard to try to meet every day that you are lucky enough to be alive. In book 537 Mark Ceruleus says, I was a fortunate man but at some point fortune abandoned me. We can imagine Mark is 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 he says but true good fortune is what you make for yourself good fortune he says is good character good intentions and good actions i love that idea so much it wasn't what was happening to him in the outside fortune wasn't this external thing good fortune, feeling good, being good.

17:17This was something that was up to him, that was inside him and the choices that he made and the actions that he took.

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20:37The Meditations of Marcus Alvarez is the first thing to read, right? It's probably the easiest, most accessible work of philosophy ever written and the most universal. Because it was his diary. It was not intended to be read by anybody as far as we know. And it's the most empowering thing I ever read, especially for when I was young. It was incredibly important. There were other things too. You know, the meditations of Christ, which is incredibly important, but it's kind of like Christian stoicism. And you realize that the root of a lot of these thinking that we have that's most empowering to us, how could it be conceived of as depressing?

21:06On the contrary, this is basically bring it on. Yeah. Yeah. You know, this is life. This is life. There's a lot I don't choose. Bring it on. And this is one of the ways that I use stoicism to talk about the best way to understand happiness because I'm a happiness specialist. And so much of the, you know, the misguided work that we've had in happiness is just positivity. Yeah. You know, just positive thinking. That's the wrong way of thinking about it. You're being crazy letting them determine whether you did a good job or not, whether you're happy or not, whether you're a success or not. Mark Stewart says ambition is tying your happiness to what other people do and say and think.

21:41Sanity, he says, is tying it to your own actions. Like when I work on my books, the writing of the book is up to me. how it does on the bestseller list, what people think about it, what the review saying, that isn't up to me. So my definition of success is an internal one. I'm focused on the parts of it I control. Do I want other people to like it and care about it? Sure, I guess it's nice to have, but it's extra. It's not why I do it, because to need it is to be insane and of course, incredibly vulnerable. Another one that I didn't get at first, Mark Sebelius is saying to avoid imperialization, he says, that indelible stain.

22:16And 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, it 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 why we have this edition it's why i've read the other translations it's why i like the robin waterfeld 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 gregory hayes's introduction of meditations he says there's an American president who rereads Marcus Aurelius every single year.

23:13Some research turned up he was talking then about President Bill Clinton. Obviously Bill Clinton did not get truly the message of meditations, but I think the point is how much better off would we be if every leader, if every person in a position of power was familiar with Marcus Aurelius in his writings, because he was there. He had that job. He had that job times a thousand, and he knew what you had to strived to do. He knew what you had to try your hardest not to do. He knew what you had to be to be great. And I think it's important that it's not just reading it once. Again, it's the idea of rereading it every year.

23:48I 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. 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. There's a passage in Marx's meditations where he goes, Vespasian, he goes, how How many people know who that is? And Vespasian was the emperor like five emperors before Marcus. So this is the most powerful, important person in the world, ruled as an emperor god in the biggest empire of the most famous empire in history, and nobody knows who he is.

24:21His point was not, okay, so you have to really conquer a lot of territory to be more famous than Vespasian. He was saying, this is a race you can't win. You're harming yourself. Marksrudis says it can only harm you if it harms your character. What he means is the thing happens to you, they stole from you, they lied to you, they did something to you. But then it's in how you respond, if that makes you worse, that makes you do something unethical, it makes you something other than what you should be, that's where the harm comes from. The harm comes in your reaction and how you're responding to the thing.

24:54What they did to you is nothing if it doesn't touch inside you, if it doesn't change who you are, what you do, how you treat people. Marcus Aurelius had a lot to complain about. A lot goes wrong. He doesn't meet with the good fortune that he deserved. 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. He doesn't complain about being abused.

25:29He doesn't complain about being put upon. He doesn't complain about the stress. He doesn't do any of it because as he says in meditations, we should never be overheard complaining, not even to ourselves. I lost this wife of 60 years and I'm so sorry. It's sort of devastating, but there was a Marcus Aurelius quote that really lifted me, which was, I don't know literally, but you'll know it. You lose a loved one, honor her, and in a sense, try to be more like her, and then she'll live in your actions. And so my wife was very good. And I just try to be like her. And when I try to be like her, I, you know, like she was very, if someone was alone or sick or something, she'd call them up and be comforting to them.

26:14And I'm not like that. So I started to do that. People that I know, some guys my age who have no grandchildren are just there. And call them up and say, how are you? And being like her. And they were so pleased. Oh, it's so kind. Yeah. So I keep my wife in my life with Marcus Aurelius' advice by trying to be more like her. I find that absolutely beautiful. Since you're a lover of Marcus Aurelius, I'll give you this quote. My favorite translation is the Hayes translation, which he did for the Modern Library. And this is what Marcus Aurelius says he learned from his brother Severus. He says,

26:59of speech and of rulers who respect the liberty of their subjects above all else. Yeah, and you don't think that our founders aren't imbibing Marcus Aurelius. It's all there. The catechism is just being rewritten. It had already been written. I remember I was once talking to the great Robert Greene and I asked him what one of his favorite passages from Marcus Aurelius' Meditations was. He 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. Oh, that's dead pig. Oh, this wine is rotted grapes. I said, Robert, why did you like that?

27:31And he said, that's what I try to do in my writing. I try to deconstruct things to take away the preconceived notions to strip them of the mythology that they have. That's actually what Marcus says. He says it's about stripping things of the legend that encrust 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. In book 12 of meditations, Mark Strulli 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.

28:05I had worked really hard on it. I knew what it deserved, and there it was, not on the bestseller list. It got skunked for some inexplicable reason, and I had to remind myself my judgment of the book is what counts, not whether I hit this arbitrary list. I can't think about that, but so often that's what we do. We like a shirt, or we like a show, or we like this, And then other people say, well, that's not cool, or that's strange, or that'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.

28:32And Marcus would say that this is crazy. In fact, he says that sanity is tying your success to what you say and do. Insanity is tying it to what other people say and do. 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 when everyone around you is thinking or saying something differently than you. I was lucky enough actually to interview Gregory Hayes, the translator of these two books, way back in 2007. I just had this little blog and I sent him a note and I asked him what his favorite passage in meditations was.

29:06So 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. And actually when we illustrated this edition of meditations, I've 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 in Aquincum. Water is clearly this repeated metaphor and analogy in the Stoics and most of all I think it can both humble and inspire us.

29:53Part of the reason your life sucks is because your thoughts suck. Marcus Aurelius says that our life is dyed by the color of our thoughts. So if we see only negative, if we only see the worst in people, if we only see what's impossible, if we only see how we screwed up, that's gonna color our perception of reality. Your life is dyed by the color of your thoughts. Several points in meditations, Marx really summarizes what are in effect the three disciplines of Stoicism that you need to know always. Perception, how we see things. Action, what we do about those things. What part of those things are outside our control.

30:28If the discipline of perception is 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 going to 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. Marcus says not only can you not expect Plato's Republic, but he says you have to deal with the place that you're in.

31:02You got to make practical decisions based on what you're in. He says if the cucumber is bitter at one point in meditations, throw it out. He says, if 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. There's no way that Marcus Aurelius does not have an anger problem. He talks about temper and losing your cool and your emotions too much for his private journal. If that's not something he's actively struggling with. My reading of it over and over again is like the reason he doesn't say like jokes are funny, you know, or sex feels good is he doesn't need a reminder of that.

31:38Like he's got that covered. The book is him really trying to remind himself of what he keeps forgetting. Right. Marcus Aurelius is clearly very strict with himself. Meditations is one sort of rule, admonishment, high, 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. And this was a deliberate thing by Marcus Aurelius. He says, tolerant with others, strict with yourself. He was 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.

32:15And 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, but also more forgiving and tolerant of other people. You just got a mind-driven business. Marcus Aurelius reminds us we should stop trying to escape other people's faults. We should try to escape our own. One of my favorite little tidbits about Marcus is there's lines in there and they're like, this sounds more like a quote than a thing. And they've tracked it down. It's like, oh, this is a lost line from a play from Euripides or something.

32:45It's like, this is the only existing fragment from that thing. And he's almost certainly quoting it from memory, just to himself. Or there's little lines from the great poets. It's like, this is a person steeped in all the great forms of art, in addition to being a politician and a parent. Nobody's journal is that good. It's pretty incredible. Yeah, and I like Seneca because, like, when you read his letters, you're like, wait a minute, you said this other thing in another letter. You know, he's very human. He'll be like, you know, you shouldn't just quote people. You know, you should have some of your own ideas.

33:17And he's like, by the way, here's this quote from Epictetus. Here's my daily quote for you. Here's my daily quote from Epictetus or whatever. You know, so it's just like really human. How did Marcus Aurelius die? Of the plague. Marcus was writing in what we now call the Antonine Plague. Like they named it after him. But it's like a global pandemic. It starts in the East, overwhelms Rome. Five, 10 million people die. They have no way of stopping it. So Marcus leads through all of that. The suspicion is that he catches it at the end, realizes he has it, has to send his son away so he doesn't give it to his son, sets in motion like a series of advisors who should lead his son, and then his son promptly gets rid of all of them and goes bad.

34:00Your anger is impotent. Mark's really in meditations, he quotes a line from a lost play by the playwright Euripides, and the line says, and why should you feel anger at the world as if the world would notice? Nobody cares. It doesn't matter. It doesn't mean anything. Your anger, your resentment, your grievance, you are shouting into an enormous void. You are yelling at an inanimate object. You are mad at forces that are so enormous, that are utterly amoral, completely indifferent to you and your existence. So you might as well let it go. What good is posthumous fame, the Stoics say? It won't do you any good.

34:38You'll be dead. And more importantly, Mark Therilis reminds us that the people in the future aren't going to magically be better or smarter. They're going to be just as stupid and annoying and misinformed as they are now. So stop chasing posthumous fame, exist in the present, do what you can now, do what's 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. You should be a good character always and do good things for other people always. That was his motto.

35:09Good character, good deeds. It's hard to come up with a better summation for a good life than that. You care about yourself more than other people. You're self-interested, as all people are by definition. And yet, Mark Sturlitz points out, we care about other people's opinions more than our own. We care if they like what we wear, if they like what we say, if they think we're good or bad or whatever. It's insane. Trust your opinion. Develop your own internal compass, your own internal sense of whether you're doing a good job or a bad job, whether you were successful or not. You can't outsource it to the crowd.

35:42Remember, The crowd is the mob. The mob is irrational. You can't let them determine any of it. Philosophy can feel like this impractical, inaccessible thing. But Marx really writes in Meditations, he says, no role is so well suited to philosophy as the one you're in right now. He 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, to being a salesperson, to being an astronaut.

36:17Whatever it is that you do, whatever role life has you in in this moment, it stares you in the face. Nothing is so well suited to what you're doing as this philosophy. At his most vulnerable moment, Marcus Aurelius was betrayed. He was sick, he was struggling, people didn't know if he would survive or not. One of his trusted generals, Avidius Cassius, declares himself emperor. This not only is a betrayal of their relationship, it puts Marcus Aurelius and his family in grave danger. So Marcus had every reason to seek revenge, and he doesn't. In fact, he uses it as this opportunity, he says, to teach future Roman generations how to deal with civil strife.

36:56When Marcus Aurelius talks in meditations about revenge, he's not just talking about this theoretically or abstract, he knew it intimately. We know what it means when someone we trust takes from us or hurts us. But Marcus Aurelius says you can't let this break or change you. He says the best revenge is to not be like that. So we don't control what other people do, but we control who we are in a world where those things can happen. And that's Marcus Aurelius' advice on not getting revenge. The greatness of Marcus Aurelius is that he was always trying to get the bigger perspective. He was trying to get to the outside of things.

37:31Yeah, sure, he was the Emperor of Rome. He was the head of this enormous empire. But he tried to zoom out. He tried to look at it from the 10 ,000-foot view. And he said, look how puny this all looks. He tried to zoom out and get perspective so he could see what that actually was. He tried to strip it of the legend that encrusted it. And so must we. When we see these things up close, when we see how small they are from afar, that we strip them of their politics, we strip them of the loaded context they're in, and hopefully we can have a greater cosmic sense of what the Stoics call the common good, our relation to each other, the puniness of the things that we're willing to do so many terrible things for, and hopefully this can make us better and more connected to our fellow human beings.

38:17You 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. They thought he sucked. They thought he was amazing. He would have been bombarded with opinions from other people about him. He has to push this aside. 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 correct decisions, but he leaves office one of the least popular presidents in American history.

38:55That'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, you have to do the right thing because it's the right thing, not because it's gonna make you popular, or conversely, not concerned whether it might make you unpopular. One of the most important habits you can practice is patience. One of the things I learned with this bookstore is the truth of what they call Hofstetter's Law. It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstetter's Law into account. We want our progress now, we want our success now, we want our rewards now.

39:29But if you can practice delayed gratification, if you can understand that it takes a while, that it's part of a process, you're almost always going to be more successful. You think of Marcus Aurelius, he's told he's gonna be emperor, but Antoninus is gonna rule first. And they think it's gonna be one or two or three or four or five years. It's like 20 years. He has to wait 20 years before he can become the emperor of Rome. So if Marcus doesn't have patience, if life doesn't force him to practice the virtue of patience, he'd have gone crazy. He'd have lost his mind. And then he wouldn't have actually been as good as he was as emperor.

40:06All things require patience, whether you're writing books, whether you're being a leader, whether you have kids. Learning how to practice patience is critical. And what I think when I'm stuck in traffic, when a flight is delayed, when my book's going slower than I thought, I go, this isn't frustrating. this isn't annoying although it is those things I say this is an opportunity to get reps with patience this is the opportunity to practice patience and I will be better for having gone through this I was talking earlier about how Marcus really said that like we're soldiers storming a wall you have to be able to ask for help I think this is really important especially again when we're lonely when we're struggling we feel like we can't do something you have to be able to ask for help a book i like to read my kids called the boy the fox the horse and the mole and he says something like asking for help isn't giving up it's refusing to give up it takes a lot of courage to ask for help and help doesn't mean hey i need you to do all this stuff for me it could be like hey i'm going to do this thing do you want to come with me asking for help reaching out putting yourselves out there courage isn't just like what you do in a military campaign courage isn't just betting your life on some big idea.

41:15Courage is also saying, I don't know how to do something, saying I need help to do something. It's a mistake if we conflate Stoicism with solitariness, with independence, with a lack of connection, with an inability to ask for help. In fact, the Stoics would tell you to be brave enough to do that very thing. It's not unfortunate that this happened to you. Mark Sreelis writes this to himself in meditations. He says, it's fortunate that this happened to you because I've remained unharmed by it. He was saying that his character hadn't been affected. But I think more importantly, he's saying, now I get to do something with it.

41:49That's what the obstacle is, the way it means. Now I get to do something with it. It's good that it happened to me instead of someone else because I'm the one that's uniquely suited, uniquely trained to do something with it. Like a lot of people, I have a tendency to overwork, to overdo, to overcommit, to take things too intensely. Mark Surrealist 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.

42:22Don't be all about business. Your problem is that you want the third thing. Marcus Tarillo says, okay, you did something good for someone. They received that benefit. That's awesome. Transaction concluded. You don't need the third thing. recognition, gratitude, appreciation. You don't need the world to throw you a parade. You don't need acknowledgement. And you didn't even do anything special. You did your job, which is to do good, to be good, to help people, to be kind. You did the right thing. That's enough. The people you meet are going to suck. This is the harsh truth that Mark Sturlus opens meditations with.

42:57He says they're going to be jealous and annoying and difficult. We know they're going to be these things. We have to go into the day with our eyes wide open. That's the harsh truth part of it. But The uplifting part, the happy part of it is the second part. He says, but they can't implicate you in ugliness. Remember that you're made to work together, that life is incomplete without those kinds of people. We can't be surprised by it. We can't let it suck us down and we can't let it change us for the negative. We still have to be good. We still have to do our job. We still have to play our part.

43:27Whenever you feel like criticizing someone, remember that they haven't had the advantages that you've had. That's the idea at the beginning of The Great Gatsby, but it's also a really important stoic idea. Marcus Aurelius says, tolerant with others, strict with yourself. It's common today to talk about privilege. Well, we're all privileged in some ways. We all have a certain amount of advantages. We've been lucky in certain ways. And if we presume that other people haven't been as lucky as we have, then we can be more tolerant and accepting and kind and understanding of them and what they're going for.

44:02and that is a key stoic idea. You get this sense that Mark Cerellis was a homebody. And you know, he says in meditations, you don't need to go on vacation. You don't need to go anywhere. You don't need to go do anything. You can get peace by retreating inside yourself. That's something I remind myself when I feel, not just myself longing for stuff, but even when I go do stuff. Look, you don't need to go do something awesome. You don't need to go somewhere exotic. You don't need to go do something cool. You don't even need to go see other people to get excitement, to get fulfillment or nourishment.

44:29You can have that inside. You can have that by having a conversation with yourself. You can have that by reflection. You can have that by study. You don't have to go out and do it. You can call someone on the phone. I'm not saying this to say don't be social. What I'm saying is we tell ourselves that it's going and doing things that we'll find fulfillment and meaning in. But that's not true. We carry ourselves with us wherever we're going. And so if we want it, we can get it from ourselves. One of my favorite passages in meditations, Mark Sturlus, talks about washing off the dust of earthly life.

44:58I 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 writing, 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.

45:28and i think very practical about the reminder of washing off the dust of earthly life literally and metaphorically this is a print i have from one of my favorite passages from marcus realis i have it on the wall waste no more time arguing what a good man should be be one and i think arguably marcus realis's greatest contributions to philosophy are not what he wrote in this book right? What Marcus's 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.

46:07He demonstrated that a king, an emperor, a person of power, 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 Mark Stavilius. We think we solve our problems with some genius solution, with some creative out-of-the-box new idea, and maybe sometimes we do, but most of the time we solve problems, we get over obstacles step by step by step. In meditations, Mark Stavilius says, you assemble your life action by action, step by step. Benefit of doing it that way is that no one can stop you from doing that little individual piece, that small thing in front of you.

46:49And what But the Stoics realize that the small thing is not so small. Actually Zeno says just this, he says, well-being is realized by small steps, but it's no small thing. So yeah, you've got this big project you've got to finish, you've got this huge deficit to get yourself out of. How do you do it? It's not by some magical solution, it's not by some silver bullet. It's by doing the next right thing, and the next right thing, and the next right thing. It's by doing it step by step, action by action. and no one can stop you from that except for yourself. The grudge you're holding, it's meaningless.

47:23Mark Sreus says, look at the people who held these grudges, who raged about things, who held on to things. He says, where are they now? They're dead and gone. The grudge went nowhere. And the same is gonna happen to your thing. Whatever it is you're upset about, however significant it was for you, eventually it disappears along with you. So how can you work on letting it go? How can you move on? How can you process? How can you not carry it around? How can you not let it consume you? Bill Belichick, greatest football coach in history, tells his players, do your job. Marcus Sreelis asks himself that same question in meditation.

47:57He says, what is my vocation? It says 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. You're never going to escape change. Life is change. Mark Surrealeus reminds us that being born was a change. Death is a change. Every good thing in your life came from a change. So did bad things, of course, but everything in life is change. You cannot escape it. You can only accept it. You can only embrace it. You're being too idealistic. In meditation, Mark Surrealeus writes to himself, he says, remember, you don't live in Plato's Republic.

48:35He says, don't go around expecting utopia. Don't expect people to be perfect, because they're not. That was actually the knock in Rome against the great stoic Cato. Cicero said, look, this guy's problem is that he thinks he lives in Plato's Republic instead of the dregs of Romulus. He was too high-minded, too idealistic, and he couldn't be pragmatic and practical enough to exist, work with other people to solve imperfect problems with imperfect solutions. But that's part of Stoicism too. He just got a mind-driven business. Mark Cerellus reminds us, we should stop trying to escape other people's faults.

49:05We should try to escape our own. There's a pretty amazing story about Mark Cerellus. Pretty late in life, he's seen leaving his palace in Rome. and 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. The 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. It's his workbook. He's doing work on himself, even as an old man.

49:40And 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 chapter. So the idea for Marcus was that you always stay a student. You're not going to be remembered. You're not that important. Marcus really says, run down the list of all the people that came before him. He says, what happened to all these famous names, these names that used to sound so familiar? We all disappear. We all recede into memory. We are all forgotten.

50:20We just took our kids to an outdoor performance of the Nutcracker. They had a snow cone, and then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that, but I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence.

50:55My wife introduced me to Dr. Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for good inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It Over the Holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr.

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52:33Pierre Hadeau, one of the great scholars of Marx Realis, talks about the oceanic feeling. Marx Realis talks about the view from above, talks about the immensity, how all of the experience escapes before us. Marx 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. You could think about why that would be so important to someone who was literally the center of the universe, the person on which so much depended on. He wanted to remind himself that that wasn't strictly true.

53:10Gregory Hayes, in his translation of meditations, he makes a great point. And I missed it the first couple of times. He says that nowhere does Marcus identify as a stoic. He never says, I am a stoic. I adhere to stoicism. 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.

53:44You 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. Most of what you do is totally inessential. Mark Stewart says that that's a question we have to ask ourselves. Is this essential? Because so much of it is trivial. So much of it is unnecessary. So much of it is inefficient. And he said, when you eliminate the inessential, what you get is the double benefit of doing the essential things better. So you want constantly be eliminating, constantly paring things down, constantly asking yourself, do I really need to be doing this?

54:24Is it important? Is it gonna move the needle? Why am I doing it? How could I do it better? You eliminate the inessential and you do the essential better. The key to a great life, Marcus Aurelius says, is to be free of passion but full of love. People think of the Stoics as emotionless. That's totally missing what they were. They tried to be free of the destructive emotions and they tried to replace that with love. love for other people, love for any and all situations in life. To love that and to use it as an opportunity to love and appreciate the people that you get to have to experience those things with.

55:02At one point in meditations, Marcus Aurelius says, avoid false friendship at all costs. He says, nothing is more painful, nothing is worse. And he knows this from experience. I tell 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 one thing Marcus doesn't talk a lot about in meditations is happiness or joy.

55:45But 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. He'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. 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.

56:17The Stoics were happy, the Stoics had joy, the Stoics loved, and we know Marcus did these things. The Stoics had emotions, the Stoics sought out cool experiences, the 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. In book 11 of meditations, Marcus Rios talks about something that must have been very common for him, which is that people didn't like him. People cursed him. They criticized him. They questioned his integrity, his commitment, all these things. So in book 11, 13, he says, someone despises me.

56:50That's their problem. Mine, he says, not to do or say anything despicable. He says, someone hates me. Their problem. Mine is to be patient and cheerful with everyone, including them, ready to show them their mistake, not spitefully or to show off my own self-control, but in an honest, upright way. That's what we should be like inside, he says, and never let the gods catch us feeling anger or resentment. If someone doesn't like you, that's their problem. And the important thing is you don't let it change you, you don't let it affect you, don't let it make you like them. You just lock on to what you have to do, and you try to be patient and kind, you try to think better and do better for other people that in fact they might ever even think of doing for you.

57:29One passage I marked down in meditations when I first read it, Mark's really 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. 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 gonna become what you're capable of becoming. You're not gonna become anything like Marcus Aurelius. You do notice that Marcus talks about the present moment over and over and over again in meditations.

58:00He's reminding yourself that it's the only thing you have. It'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. It's going to take a lot out of you. It's going to take more out of you than you think you have. Mark Sturilius is, in one passage in meditations, he's trying to amp himself to get out of bed in the morning. He goes, it's warmer under the covers here. I like being comfortable.

58:32He says, you weren't made to be comfortable. You weren't made to huddle under the covers and be warm. He said, no, people who love what they do, they wear themselves down doing it. He said, there's a limit on the eating and the sleeping and the fun side. You got to get out there. You got to do what your nature demands. And you got to understand it's going to be hard and it's going to take a lot out of you. In book five, Mark Sruis talks about the proper role of philosophy in life. He says, it's not as your instructor. He says it's a kind of medicine, an ointment. He describes this sort of ancient remedy for this eye illness where they would crack an egg on you or something like that.

59:07But that aside, 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. The 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 with.

59:37But that's the point. Philosophy is not supposed to be your instructor. It's supposed to be a kind of medicine. Even though Marcus really says we must avoid false friendship at all costs, even though he's betrayed by his trusted general, Avidius Cassius, what we know is 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. He constantly is putting himself back out there But he does learn from this and he's a little more guarded going forward He makes this analogy in meditations He says, you know, you're in the boxing ring and someone's cheating.

1:00:08Maybe they're gouging or biting or scratching He says you don't quit altogether. You just change your fight plan accordingly This is the core of Robert Greene's books 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. Everyone's concerned about someone doing violence to them, doing something harmful to them. But Mark Surrealis reminds us that we do violence to our souls when we give in to bad urges, when we give in to our temper, when we betray our standards. We do violence to ourselves, to our soul, when we're not the person that we're capable of being.

1:00:50We let those standards lapse. We let ourselves be overwhelmed by destructive emotions or urges when our ego comes into play. Of course, you have to protect yourself from other people, from outside things, from externals. But to a large degree, you don't control most of that. Most empires collapse from within. Most people's failures are self-inflicted. Most shame is heaped upon ourselves by our own choices and actions. So protect yourself. that's what you control. Don't do violence to yourself, the Stoics say, and that's how you lead a good life. I think it's remarkable that Marcus continually talked about more than anything getting control of his anger.

1:01:28And you know he had a problem with it because of how much he talked about it. Yeah. Like he's not talking about, you got to remember Marcus, jokes are funny. Right. You know, come on man, lighten up a little bit. Right. Anger. Yeah. He clearly had a huge problem with it. I think it's probably one of the things he returns to most. Hadrian, the emperor who sets It's in motion. Marcus eventually becoming emperor. There's a story. Hadrian gets mad at a secretary, messes something up, and he picks up a pen and he stabs it in the guy's eye. That's the level of power and indulgence that the Roman emperor could get away with.

1:02:01The story is that he obviously feels bad about it after, and he goes, like, I'll give you anything. Like, I'm so sorry. I'll give you anything to make it better. And the guy just says, can I have my eye back? Can I have my eye back? Which is, I think, a poignant reminder that like the things that we do out of anger cannot be undone. Where do you see grace with stoicism? One of the things Mark Sturulus talks about a lot is this idea of revenge. You know, he says the best revenge is to not be like that. This penultimate moment in his life, he's ill and near death. His most trusted general, he's sensing that the emperor was weak, names himself emperor.

1:02:33So he starts palace coup. Marcus is not as sick as they thought and he recovers. Now he's faced with this terrible dilemma. There can't be two emperors. This person has put everything into danger and turmoil. We know what his predecessors would have done in this situation. Hadrian comes to power and just liquidates. Marcus decides not to do that. He can't ignore it. He can't just let this happen. He says, this is an opportunity. We can teach future generations there's a way to even deal with civil wars. Everything lasts for a day, Marcus Aurelius says at one point in meditations. The knower and the known.

1:03:10This 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, who we're talking about today in this video. But 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?

1:03:49There's a beautiful line in Joseph Brodsky's essay about the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, which actually dates back to Marcus's time, but the base of which was redesigned by Michelangelo. But Brodsky says something like, "'If Marcus Aurelius is antiquity, it is we who are the ruins.'" And 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 the classical beauty and perfection that this is like in some ways the highest expression of human greatness. And 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.

1:04:31Not the ancient world. 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. Gains nothing by going up. It loses nothing by coming down. Marcus Aurelius said that we're like a rock. We're like a ball. Sometimes we go up. Sometimes we come down. None of this says anything about us as people. He was saying that of himself. He suddenly ascends to the most powerful position in the world. But That didn't change who he was. That didn't change anything about him. That didn't make him better or worse than other people.

1:05:07It didn't change what his job was as a human being. This is why he writes in meditations. He warns himself against being Caesarified, against being stained purple by the robe of the emperor. He says he has to accept it without arrogance and let it go with indifference. And that's a great way to think about success, about money, about recognition, about fame. and also about difficulty, embarrassment, mistakes, right, being laughed at. We don't gain anything on the way up. We don't lose anything on the way down. These things have no purchase on our soul, on our identity, on our value, the Stoics would say, because they are outside us.

1:05:49What matters is who we are. What matters is what our values are. What matters is not being changed on the way up or the way down. 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. It's pretty remarkable. Even at that level, talking about simplification, he's talking about modesty. He's talking about restraint. He's talking about self-control. It's a beautiful thing and a very rare thing to be sure. There's a passage in Meditations where Mark Sroes says when you tuck your child in at night, you should say to yourself, they will not survive till the morning.

1:06:28This is a man who buried six children. So I don't think he's saying this glibly. And I don't think he's trying to practice some kind of monkish philosophical detachment from his child. He's trying to say, you only get so many of these. If you knew this was the last time you were going to do it, how would you do it? It would not be to skip some of the pages in the book. It would not to come on. You know? If you want more tranquility in your life, you have to do less, Marcus Aurelius says. And the magical thing when you do less, when you eliminate the inessential, when you stop saying yes to things that don't matter, when you stop getting caught up in busy work and nonsense, you get the double benefit of doing the essential things better.

1:07:09Being with your kids, your creative work, getting outside, all the things that matter in life, you do better when you do less stuff. He says when you do less, you get the double satisfaction of doing the important things better. So much of what we do, it's because we think we have to, because other people are doing it, because we're afraid to say no. No, you have to do less. When you do less, you do more better. Marcus really builds his leadership philosophy around four key ideas. Four stoic virtues. Courage, discipline, justice, wisdom. Marcus tries always to live and lead by these four virtues.

1:07:37When he says the obstacle is the way, that's what he means. He doesn't mean necessarily that as a leader, you can use everything to make more money or to win more games or whatever your organization does. He's saying that everything you encounter as a leader is a chance to embody, to demonstrate one of these ideas. I have them tattooed on my arm as a reminder of courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. In one of my favorite passages in meditations, Marcus Aurelius says, you know, try to be like the rock next to the ocean that the raging sea crashes around. He says crashes against, it stops, it eventually falls still around.

1:08:10To me, this is a beautiful metaphor of what stillness is. It's about being at peace in a world that's not at peace. about slowing down in a world that's speeding up faster than ever. I love running next to the ocean because it's a reminder of this metaphor. The idea that we need pockets of stillness even inside the craziness that we don't control what's happening in the outside world but we control how we are, our dispositions, our reactions, our strength against that as a bulwark against that craziness. And it's been a crazy month for sure but I have had some moments of that stillness. I try to be like the rock.

1:08:40I try to watch the sea crashing against it and I try to stop and always look for those embodiments of those stoic metaphors so I can carry them back with me. Be like the rock that the waves crash against. Be the cliff next to the ocean. And so I think of all the exercises and meditations, that's one that we can all practice. 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. We know that Marcus Reyes 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.

1:09:17I also think he probably had a little bit of imposter syndrome. He 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 to cut it in this merciless profession. But before Marcus becomes emperor he has a dream we're told. 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 taken power he says remind yourself that if it's humanly possible know that you can do it also these people aren't better than you they're not given some gift that you don't have they became who they needed to be they did the work they needed to do they gave themselves the shoulders of ivory that mark cirelius realized deep down he had all along in meditations mark cirelius says people who love what they do wear themselves down doing it he says they forget even to sleep and eat so it's 6 a.m i'm a little tired i'm a little burned out but this is what i love i feel so grateful to be able to do it and so i try to pause every morning part of my practice is a little bit of gratitude i write in a gratitude journal every day the the idea is taking a minute to really appreciate where you are and what you get to do i try to remind myself how much i would have killed a few years ago to be able to do this, how I wouldn't have even been able to dream that I'd be able to do this.

1:10:37And so the idea of centering yourself with a little bit of gratitude practice, actually appreciating the absurdity, the absurd luck of your situation. I don't want it to be lost on me. I get to write about philosophy for a living. I get to travel all around the world to talk about philosophy. My work takes me to a beach in Florida. I try to appreciate that. I try to soak it in. I try to be here for it and uh i never let that escape me it can only ruin your life if it ruins your character mark is really he's saying that other people can't actually harm you they can take away some of your stuff they can insult you they can bother you they can mess up your plans but they can't actually harm you unless your character is injured what the stoics would say what we need to understand is that no one can harm our character but ourselves the bastards can't get you you can turn yourself into a bastard in response and then you lose if you do something in response that harms your character then yes you have been harmed but anything else no matter how big or small nothing can injure you nothing can ruin your life unless it affects your character unless it affects who you are as a person and what kind of things you do and don't do the source of conflict between parents and children so much of the time is about parents having opinions about things that they don't have to have opinions about and if they didn't have an opinion about it things would just be how much of the conflict i had even with my own parents that in retrospect seems silly because like I don't care about it anymore, but why did they care about it at all?

1:11:58Which is a very stoic idea. In meditations, Mark Sturlis says something like, remember things are not asking to be judged by you. Or he says, you always have the power to have no opinion. One of the hardest things for humans to do is admit error. And that's why cutting our loss is so difficult. But Mark Sturlis says like when someone points out that you've been wrong, when they show you the flaws in your reasoning, they're not insulting you. That doesn't make you an idiot. You're getting new information that allows you to make a new decision and thus improve. Like if you picked a stock or you started working for a company, you invested in something, you have to realize that what you knew then is different than what you know now.

1:12:36And if what you know now changes the decision you would make then, or it sheds new light on the decision you would have made then, you have to be able to switch. You have to be willing to cut your losses. Don't think of admitting error as something to be ashamed of. It's something you should be proud of. It shows that you have the ability, as Cicero said, to remain a free agent, to not be wedded because of your identity, because of statements you've made, but to be able to embrace the current moment in the future by changing and adjusting, by selling, by disavowing something, by walking away, and stop throwing good money after bad, cut your losses, and move on.

1:13:09The emperor of Rome would have had beautiful palaces. Marcus from a rich family would have had access to country estates and beautiful houses, 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. He would have liked that Buddhist idea that wherever you go, there you are. He says you can retreat into yourself anytime you want. He says you can find replenishment and rest and relaxation inside your own soul. And I think that's what he's doing in meditations. That's what he's doing in books.

1:13:43That'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 were right there and they weren't external things at all. They were inside of him just as they are inside all of us. 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.

1:14:16His 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, I mean, to be remembered, he says is silly because you're not going to be around. But the point is the rewards for doing the right thing have to be the right thing. You can'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. So Marcus had to constantly be aware of this. I remember if when he actually came to the end of his life, if he thought about the fact that maybe secretly some of these people didn't, were glad he would be gone soon.

1:14:51And if he had to come to terms with those words that he'd written so long ago. This 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 you do have enough time you just have to stop wasting it there's 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 like when you just get the crappy translation that's in the public domain or the cheapest one on amazon you're selling yourself short.

1:15:37I feel so lucky I got the Hayes translation early. The 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 don't know how to explain to you that you have to care about other people.

1:16:09That's like one of my favorite article headlines of all time. I think it came out in 2017. But oftentimes people who study stoicism sort of miss the point. Yes, it's an individualistic philosophy. Yes, it's about maximizing your personal resilience. It's about focusing on what you control. But Marcus Aurelius also talks about the common good like 40 or 50 times in meditations. He says famously, what's bad for the bee is bad for the hive, that we're all in this together. The Stoics believe that we are part of this enormous organism, that we all had a role, we all had a job, that we all individually matter.

1:16:42So yes, Stoicism is an individualistic philosophy. Yes, it's about focusing on what you control. But you have to also care about other people. And if you think that Stoicism is a formula for being a better sociopath, being indifferent to suffering or pain of other people, you're completely missing the point of what this philosophy is about. It would have been my third or fourth reading of Marcus Realist that I caught this line. It says you could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. It's the stoic idea of memento mori. It's not that you will die tomorrow and you should try heroin or go to an orgy.

1:17:16It'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. if you want more wisdom inspired from the stoics i send out one stoic themed email every single morning totally for free you can sign up at dailystoic.com slash email no spam you can unsubscribe at any time i think it's the best thing that i do it's a community of hundreds of thousands of stoics all over the world we'd love to have you at dailystoic.com slash email Look, ads are annoying. They are to be avoided, if at all possible. I understand as a content creator why they need to exist.

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