You Ain’t Got Time | 10 Habits That Made Marcus Aurelius Great

0:00My family owns a 2023 Toyota 4Runner and honestly it's my favorite vehicle 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. I'm picking my kids up from school today and then doing our weekly routine, which is I take them over to Whole Foods.

1:02We get all our groceries for the week. Then we have dinner. It's one of their favorite things to do. It's one of my favorite things to do. And then my wife loves it because she doesn't have to take care of it. This holiday season, whether you're a guest or hosting the big dinner Whole Foods Market, has what you need to delight everyone at your table. They even have heat and eat sides from the prepared foods department. You can make Whole Foods your one-stop shop. Everything follows Whole Foods Market's strict ingredients standards so you know it'll be delicious and good for you. You can also order online for pickup and even delivery in select zip codes to skip the crowds.

1:36Shop everything you need at Whole Foods Market, your holiday headquarters.

1:42Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these stoic ideas and how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

2:04You ain't got time. The things people do are inexplicable, even insane. The things they manage to be offended about, the positions they stake out, the confrontations they seek out, the choices they make. People are out of their minds and always have been. You get the sense in Seneca's writings that Rome drove him crazy. You see the same in Epictetus's writings, perhaps more so. Both men looked at what was happening in Nero's court and were baffled. People were currying favor with Nero's cobbler trying to get ahead in the world. People were bankrupting themselves to impress people they didn't even like.

2:41And things were no different by Marcus Aurelius's time, that's for sure. But as long as there have been these whack jobs out there, the stoic response has been the same, tuning it out. It's saying to yourself, I ain't got time for that. I ain't got time to argue. I ain't got time to change you. I ain't even got time to try to understand. That's what Mark Sebelius is effectively opening meditations with. He's saying, look, today people are going to be remarkably dumb and I can't let them implicate me in their ugliness. I can't get bogged down in it. I can't try to reform them. I just need to do my job.

3:14Things are not asking to be judged by you, Mark Srela says later in meditations. Leave them alone. Life is very short. Too short for silly arguments. Too short for beating your head against the wall. Too short to try to understand things that don't matter, that are not asking to be understood by you. Leave them alone. Focus on what you have to do. Don't get implicated in ugliness.

3:42He wasn't just naturally wise, naturally courageous, naturally disciplined. It was an effort for him as it is for all of us. Fight to be the person philosophy tried to make you.

3:56This guy, Marcus Aurelius, was the emperor of Rome, the most powerful man in the world. You might think that his life was easy, but he had it made. In fact, Mark Surrealis experiences incredible difficulty and adversity from the get-go. Power and responsibility is foist upon him. It's not something that he expected or wanted. And then he finds himself in this job that he knows tends to corrupt. And he probably also had some inclination of how difficult the job would be. He experiences historic floods, a devastating plague, many years of warfare. He's betrayed by one of his generals in an attempted coup.

4:31He buries multiple children. I mean, this guy did not have an easy life, despite the privileges that he was lucky enough to enjoy. Marcus Aurelius knew that he had a lot of power, but he still faced the fundamental human reality that many things were outside of his control that were not in his power. And that's why he so took to stoic philosophy, because ultimately, just like you or I, trying to navigate a difficult, unpredictable world populated by difficult, uncontrollable other people. And that's what he's doing in his meditations, writing advice to himself, trying to uphold these Stoic principles in the difficult crucible that he found himself in.

5:07I'm Ryan Holiday. I've written a number of books about Stoic philosophy. I've spoken about it to everyone from the NBA to the NFL, sitting senators and special forces leaders. So in today's episode, I want to give you some rules for life from the great Marcus Aurelius.

5:24we do ourselves a disservice when we make historical figures into more than what they are when we forget that they were human beings doing the absolute best that they could they weren't made that way they became that way one of the passages in meditations mark's really says fight to be the person philosophy tried to make you it's important we realize that he was doing precisely that fighting to be marcus aurelius he wasn't just naturally this guy wasn't naturally wise, naturally courageous, naturally just, naturally disciplined. It was an effort for him as it is for all of us. It was a daily struggle.

5:55In fact, that's what meditations was. It's the log, the historical record of Marcus Aurelius fighting to be what he wanted to be, inevitably, invariably, like all of us, not actually getting there the vast majority of the time. That's what we're trying to do. We're all trying to fight to be what we're capable of being. We're fighting who we know we want to be. We fight to be the person that philosophy tries to make us.

6:23What journaling is fundamentally is putting your thoughts up for review. Meditation is a form of that. I think going for walks is a way to do it where you're having to sit with those thoughts a little bit. The Socratic method is this. And as you play that out, you realize it's not on as sound of footing as your emotional sense would have you believe. You think about how important it would be for someone like Marcus to realize to be doing that in meditations. Whatever he wants, he can do. Like there's a moment where Hadrian, his predecessor, gets angry and he just grabs a pen and just stabs it in the eye of a secretary.

6:56No consequences. You can't get impeached. You can do whatever you want. And so Marcus trying to not be like that, but knowing that he could be Tiberius or Nero or Hadrian can do whatever he wants. I think the journaling practice of meditations and notes to himself is the process by which he filters out the intrusive thoughts or the destructive urges. And we all need that. Yeah.

7:24Marcus Aurelius was a guy who met his fair share of jerks, but he said, you know what you're supposed to do when you meet a jerk? You say to yourself, is a world without shamelessness, without jerks possible? He says, no, then this is one of those people. They are playing that role. And when you can start to see people, even the frustrating, annoying, obnoxious people that you meet in your life as playing a role assigned to them, a role that someone has to do, that there is no version of the earth where there are not annoying, obnoxious, awful people, then you can accept them. You can tolerate them.

7:50You can also understand they are in a minority. It was inevitable that eventually you would bump up against one of these people, and now you have. And it's no more and no less than that.

8:01Don't be overheard complaining, Marcus Aurelius writes in meditation. This is not even to yourself. I love that distinction. It's not only not like whining publicly, but not whining to yourself, not pitying yourself. Because the point is, it never makes a difference. It's funny, when I've talked about this before, people go, oh, but what about protests? Taking an action is not a complaint. Complaining is when you think that emoting about, simply speaking about, simply letting your displeasure be known, when you confuse that with actually doing something about your problem.

8:35You have to ask yourself in every moment, in every instance, every inquiry, every opportunity, every thought, Marcus Aurelius says, you have to ask yourself, is this essential? Because most of what we do and say isn't essential. It's unnecessary, it's superfluous, it's silly, it's ridiculous, it's superficial. It's not something we need to do. And you have to eliminate. When you eliminate the inessential, you get the double benefit of doing essential things better. Do less to do more, do less better. And when we eliminate these things, when we say no to things, when we pair things out, it doesn't feel like much in and of itself because it isn't, but it adds up in a big way.

9:10It makes us leaner. It makes us more efficient. It gives us the double benefit of doing the things we are going to do that much better. The Stoics believe that we can dye events with our own color, that we can take what happens and turn it into our own benefit, that this idea of whether something is unfortunate or fortunate is a choice. We get to decide that. We decide what it means for us. That's the choice. And so Marcus in meditations, he says, our actions can be impeded, but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions because we can accommodate and adapt. The impediment to action advances action, stands in the way, and comes the way.

9:46The situation can be terrible. It can be not your choice at all. It can be the exact opposite of what you want. And yet it's still a chance to practice virtue. No one's saying it's going to be to the financial benefit of the company. No one's going to say, you're all going to look at and go, those were the golden years. But you do have the opportunity to practice virtue, to be your best self in every situation. All the external factors are not in your control, who you are in those situations that is in your control.

10:16There's a pretty amazing story about Mark Cirilli. It's pretty late in life. He's seen leaving his palace in Rome. He's carrying these tablets and a friend says, where are you going? He says, I'm off to see Sextus the philosopher to learn that which I do not yet know. 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. And the fruits of that come down to us.

10:51It's just so wonderful to think of Marcus even as an old man. Maybe some of the lines in here he learned from sexist philosopher. He thanks sexist philosopher in book one, the debts and lessons chapter. So the idea for Marcus was that you always stay a student.

11:09Famously is betrayed by his best friend. He thinks Marcus is sick and near death. And so this guy named Avidius Cassius goes, I'm the emperor now. But Marcus wasn't dead. And so it puts him in this horrible position. Obviously, you can't allow this, but he doesn't want to fight a war over. And he basically says, this is the final chapter in The Obstacle is the Way, the idea that even this is an opportunity. And he says, like, I want to show history how civil strife can be dealt with. He tries to give Cassius a chance to come to his senses. Eventually, he has to take the Roman army out in battle, deal with it.

11:37And then he weeps when someone kills Cassius because it deprives him of the opportunity of forgiving him. And he orders the Senate. He says, do not execute a single person for this. do not let my name be stained in blood, which is maybe impractical, maybe too philosophical, but there is a beauty to that. He talks about forgiveness in meditation, but then he has to actually apply it in his life.

12:01This is a print I have from one of my favorite passages from Mark Cirillus. I have it on the wall. It's selling the David Stokes store. He says, waste no more time arguing what a good man should be, be one. And I think arguably Mark Cirillus' greatest contributions to philosophy are not what he wrote in this book, right? What Marcus's greatest contributions to philosophy, it's how he lived. That even if he had never written a philosophical work, that he'd still be seen as a kind of philosopher king because he embodied the ideas. He lived them. He demonstrated that a king, an emperor, a person of power or influence or wealth could be good and decent, could do the right thing, could be everything that people expected of him.

12:44And that's just, to me, the most important thing we can take from Marcus Aurelius.

12:51And it is inevitable that we will fall short. Marcus did. I do. Everyone does. Antoninus Pius probably did too, which is why in meditations, Marcus Aurelius 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. We're going to be jarred by circumstances. We're going to be messed up. We're going to slip on our diet, on our New Year's resolution, on the progress we were making. 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.

13:31Every day, I send out one Stoic-inspired email, totally for free, almost a million people all over the world. If you want to take your Stoicism journey to the next level, I would love for you to subscribe. It's totally for free. You can unsubscribe at any time. There's no spam. Just go to dailystoic.com slash email. Love to see you there.

14:08The world is full of tours. But you don't choose a Toyota truck to follow the beaten path. You choose it to find the places in between. The detours, where each adventure pulls you toward the next. And wrong turns turn out right. So why would you ever take a tour when you could take a detour? Toyota Trucks. Look, 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.

15:06So if you want to support a show but not listen to ads, well, we have partnered with Supercast to bring you an 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. And 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.

15:48Well, 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.