The Only Revenge Worth Getting | 25 Essential Rules For Life From Marcus Aurelius

0:00My family owns a 2023 Toyota 4Runner and honestly it's my favorite vehicle that I've ever owned. Around town, it's smooth and reliable, but where it really shines is on our trips into the backcountry. We've taken it on backpacking adventures to Colorado and New Mexico, loaded it up with gear, and never had to think twice about whether it could handle the terrain. That's what Toyota Trucks are built for. Off-road confidence, rugged durability, and the freedom to explore. Toyota has a long history with the outdoor community, and they're committed to helping more people get out there and experience what nature has to offer.

0:29From remote trails to scenic byways, Toyota Trucks empowers you to take the detour, roam freely, and discover places that still feel wild and untouched. And they're not just making great trucks, they're working to expand access to adventure so more people can connect with the outdoors and pass that passion on to the next generation. Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. That's toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. You know, you don't have to let big wireless and your overpriced phone bill suck the joy out of the holidays this year.

1:02Because right now, all of Mint Mobile's unlimited plans are 50 % off. You can get 3, 6, and 12 months of unlimited premium wireless for$15 a month. It's their best deal of the year, and it makes it really easy for you to give your expensive wireless bill the Scrooge treatment. All Mint plans come with high-speed data and unlimited talk and text at the nation's largest 5G network. Plus, you can bring your current phone and number over to Mint. Actually, we just signed up for a Mint Mobile plan to use the social media phone here at the office. And we didn't notice any kind of change in the quality of service or network or any of that.

1:36Just a whole bunch of savings. Turn your expensive wireless present into a huge wireless savings feature by switching to Mint. Shop Mint Unlimited plans at mintmobile.com slash six. That's mintmobile.com slash six. Limited time offer upfront payment of$45 for three months,$90 for six months, or$180 for 12 months. Plans required,$12 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 35 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. Capable device required. Availability, speed, and coverage very easy at MintMobile.com. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life.

2:12On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

2:30Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2 ,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com.

2:53The only revenge worth getting. Unfortunately, it's been happening for a long time. People doing horrible things to each other. Marcus Aurelius was betrayed. Seneca was exiled on trumped up charges. There were Stoics who were cheated on. There were Stoics who were persecuted. There were Stoics who were tortured. How did they get over it? How did they get even, get justice? The great Dr. Edith Eager, whose books I've raved about here, and she's been on the Daily Stoic podcast twice. You absolutely should listen. she endured the Holocaust at Auschwitz. She was a victim of one of the most heinous crimes in human history.

3:30How did she get over it? How did she get even, get justice? As she recently said, my ultimate revenge against Hitler is kissing my great-grandchildren at the age of 95. I took back my power and decided not just to live, but to thrive. Marcus Aurelius reminded himself in his meditations, perhaps after his betrayal, that the best revenge is not to be like that. He was saying that he had no choice about what was done to him, but he could choose not to be consumed by anger or a need to punish. He could choose not to be bitter. He could choose to be happy and to do good, to hug his kids and live his life.

4:05Whatever has been done to us, minor or major, we have this choice too. We can take back our power and decide not just to live but to thrive. We can decide not to be like the people who did us wrong. we can choose to be better, to be happy, to do good. And seriously, if you haven't read Dr. Eager's book, The Choice, you absolutely should. I'll link to it in today's show notes. You can grab it at the Painted Porch. Incredible book, life-changing book. And it's up there. It's up there right alongside Man's Search for Meaning, which everyone should also read.

4:48It's the end of your life and you still haven't gotten this right. I just love the intensity with which he's addressing himself. And he's repeating to himself who he wants to be, how he should be. And this is the important part. He's also saying it's not too late. It's never too late.

5:07It's fascinating that Marcus Aurelius, the emperor of Rome, is writing this work for himself. He's never expecting it to be published. And yet in this inherently private and personal pursuit, he manages to touch on things that are so universal that they manage to become rules for living. I'm Ryan Holiday. I've written a number of books about stoic philosophy and spoken to the NBA, the NFL, sitting senators and special forces leaders. In today's episode, I want to give you 25 rules for living from the one and only Marcus Aurelius. In one passage in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius writes down what he calls epithets for the self.

5:41He 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 Stoke 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 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 meditations, 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.

6:26Marcus 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 going to be recognized and it wasn't always going to be appreciated. He 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.

6:57Third 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. I 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 Struella says, it never ceases to amaze me. We love ourselves more than other people, yet we care about their opinions more than our own.

7:33I 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. It 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.

8:06Sanity is tying your success to what you say and do. This is insanity is tying it to what other people say and do. So 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. Everyone around you is thinking or saying something differently than you. 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, is think about what they just submitted to a few minutes ago.

8:40Think 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. One of my favorite lines in meditations It says 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.

9:13Let 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. This is a print I have from one of my favorite passages from Marcus Aurelius. I have it on the wall. It's out in the David Stokes' story. It says, waste no more time arguing what a good man should be, be 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. 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.

9:50He lived them. He 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 Marcus Aurelius. 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.

10:27It doesn't matter how many buildings he built or what lands he conquers. To him, it matters if he is a good person or not. A couple of years ago, I wrote this book, Conspiracy. Peter Thiel was outed as gay by this sort of Silicon Valley gossip rag. They 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. I think even some things to be impressed by it, as I was talking about in the book. Every day as I was writing it, I couldn't help but think of one of my favorite lines from meditations.

11:04Marcus really 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. You can't let the person who wronged you turn you into something just like that. One passage I marked down in meditations when I first read it.

11:41Mark Aurelius 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. You'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. Marcus might even be mortified that we're here talking about him because he never intended to publish it.

12:15The 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, 2 ,000 years later that it's still helping people. And you have to have that kind of journaling practice in your life, I think. How 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, helping you be what you're capable of being and who you're capable of being. Gregory Hayes, in his translation of meditations, he makes a great point.

12:49And I missed it the first couple of 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 meditations 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. You want to be a free agent. This is why Seneca quotes so much from Epicurus. He read widely. He understood widely.

13:22The point is not to be a stoic philosopher. The point is to be a philosopher, a lover of wisdom. In book 537, Mark Scurie 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.

13:57And I just, I love that idea so much, right? It wasn't what was happening to him in the outside. Fortune 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 think the passage that hit me most from Meditations, book five, Mark Sibilius talks about struggling to get out of bed in the morning. He's just like you and I, and he's saying, oh, 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.

14:33You've got to get up. You've got to get after it. And 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. He 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 marcus was that you do it now not later you do it now in my office i have all sorts of reminders of marcus i have the print i have this bust of him from the 1840s i 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.

15:28Find 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. A cold plunge is something you do physically, but it's really about a mindset shift. It's about embracing discomfort. It's about getting comfortable with adversity. It's about pushing your boundaries. It's about challenging yourself. It's about being present in the moment. In meditations, Marcus Aurelius talks about washing off the dust of earthly life.

16:03We know the Romans had bathhouses. They had cold plunges. They would alternate between the hot and the cold. It's hard to be anything but present when I'm sitting here in this cold plunge. This is a plunge, cold plunge. It's just one of the absolute best decisions I've made. and then getting in it every day, try to do about 11 or so minutes a week. That's one of the best decisions that I make every day. If you want to embrace all the benefits, mental, physical, spiritual of a cold plunge, you got to check out Plunge. It's the one I have here at my house and you can visit plunge.com to get 150 bucks off your first order.

16:38If you use code HOLIDAY150 at checkout, that's plunge.com and use code HOLIDAY150 at checkout. Marcus Aurelius' hero of heroes is Antoninus, his adopted stepfather. As far as we know, Antoninus Pius doesn't write anything down. He 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.

17:17He 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. But 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 gonna be jarred by circumstances. We're gonna be messed up. We're gonna 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.

17:55The famous dictum from Lord Acton 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. He'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.

18:34And 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. You're not special. The rules do apply to you. Power doesn't have to corrupt. What it can do is reveal who you actually are, whether you actually are good or bad. 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.

19:10In 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. The Stoics were happy, the Stoics had joy, the Stoics loved, and we know Marcus did these things. The Stoics were just like us. Marcus had some sense of what human flourishing or happiness was.

19:41That's just not what he was talking the most about in meditation. 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. He 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.

20:18Concentrate 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 gonna be fully present? Am I gonna concentrate? Am I gonna do my job? Am I gonna meet the standards of my people, of my profession, my history? Am I gonna concentrate like a Roman? Am I gonna do it like this thing matters?

20:47Like 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. 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. Probably because he just lost his temper.

21:20Probably because he struggled with that. So you don't wanna see Marcus as perfect. You wanna see Marcus as a fellow human being striving to be their best, just as you and I are striving to be our best. 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 i just love the 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 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 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 good character good deeds it's hard to come up with a better summation for a good life than that.

22:28You 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. Yeah, 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.

22:59There's no stories like that about Marcus. Marcus realized that, yeah, there was only a few people who 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. That's what Marcus strove to be, and in many ways, that's what meditations was him trying to get a little bit better at. 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.

23:30He'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 or 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. But what I really want you to subscribe to is our daily Stoic email.

24:05One bit of Stoic wisdom, totally for free to the largest community of Stoics ever in existence. You can sign up at dailystoic.com slash email. There's no spam. You can unsubscribe at any time. I love sending it. I've sent it every day for the last six years. and hope to see you there at dailystoic.com slash email.

24:41Look, ads are annoying. They are to be avoided if at all possible. I understand as a content creator why they need to exist. That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to. But again, as a person who has to pay a podcast producer and has to pay for equipment and for the studio and the building that the studio is in, it's a lot to keep something like the Daily Stoic going. So if you want to support a show but not listen to ads, well, we have partnered with Super overcast to bring you a ad free version of Daily Stoic. We're calling it Daily Stoic Premium. And with Premium, you can listen to every episode of the Daily Stoic podcast completely ad free, no interruptions, just the ideas, just the messages, just the conversations you came here for.

25:35And you can also get early access to episodes before they're available to the public. And we're going to have a bunch of exclusive bonus content and extended interviews in there just for Daily Stoic Premium members as well. If you want to remove distractions, go deeper into stoicism and support the work we do here. Well, it takes less than a minute to sign up for Daily Stoic Premium, and we are offering a limited time discount of 20 % off your first year. Just go to dailystoic.com slash premium to sign up right now or click the link in the show descriptions to make those ads go away.