You Must Learn to See | The Stoic Lesson of Marcus Aurelius' Crumbling Statue

0:00Ryan Holiday: Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. You must learn to see. It can be an ugly world. It can be a boring world. It can be a world of distraction. Which is why the artist and the philosopher must learn how to cultivate their eyes. In 1940, the writer James Baldwin was walking in New York City with the painter Buford Delaney, his friend and mentor. As they crossed the street, Buford stopped the young Baldwin. Look, he said as he pointed down into the gutter. What do you see? All Baldwin saw was a puddle.

0:48Ryan Holiday: Delaney told him to look again, and then he saw, as Nicholas Boggs recounts in Baldwin, a love story, a reflection of buildings moving like mercury in the gutter's black water, distorted and radiant. It's clear in meditations that someone did this for Mark Cerelius. How else can you explain his beautiful observations of seemingly ordinary or even unpleasant things, from the way an olive rots on the ground or the foam flecked on a boar's mouth. What else could explain not just his turns of phrase, but his ability to find philosophical truths in his own struggles as a human being? Perhaps it was Rusticus, his philosophy teacher, who taught him this, or Fronto, his rhetoric teacher, or some poet or writer he met.

1:37Ryan Holiday: But in any case, as Baldwin said of Delaney, the reality of his seeing caused me to begin to see. And so it goes for us. We must cultivate this ability to see beauty and poetry everywhere, because it is everywhere. We must look into the gutter. We must change our aperture and perspective so that amidst the muddle and puddles of life, we can see what the artist and the philosopher sees. And in fact, Marcus Aurelius is someone who helped me see. And my reading and rereading of this book has changed my life. And it's changed the lives of millions of people over the last 20 centuries. And it's also why we have Meditations Month here in April, Daily Stoic.

2:25Ryan Holiday: We've been putting together what I think is the perfect companion for reading and Understanding Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, Daily Stoic Meditations Guide. Like a book club or an annotated version of your favorite book, it's designed to be your personal roadmap through the nuances, subtleties, and complexities of Marcus Aurelius in meditations. It's not spark notes or a summary. There's no substitute for reading meditations. It's not a shortcut, but it's a guide that will help enhance your understanding, help you really get everything you should get out of it and hopefully guide you not just to read it once, but time after time after time.

3:00Ryan Holiday: I'm really excited for you to check it out. Go to dailystoic.com slash meditations, click it in the show notes. And also I would say, if you haven't read meditations, do grab our edition. We sell it in the Daily Stoic store, the Gregory Hayes edition. It's leather, so it'll hold the test of time well. And I'll link to that in today's show notes as well.

3:26Ryan Holiday: Usually when people are thinking about supplements or training, they're thinking about recovery, they're thinking about protein, they're thinking about creatine. One of the most overlooked pieces is gut health. If your gut is not dialed in, everything else struggles to work the way it should. And that's where Momentous Fiber Plus comes in. Momentous Fiber Plus addresses one of the most overlooked foundations of long-term performance, that is, gut health. because fiber is not just about digestion. It's the key driver of gut health, which directly impacts a bunch of things, nutrient absorption, energy stability, recovery, focus, mood, and overall performance.

4:04Ryan Holiday: Momentus Fiber Plus is a complete three-in-one formula with soluble fiber, insoluble fiber, and prebiotic resistant starch. Like everything Momentus makes, Fiber Plus is built with a science-first formulation, clean and minimal ingredients, and no artificial additives or artificial flavors. And right now, Momentus is offering our listeners up to 35 % off your first order with promo code DAILYSTOIC. Head over to livemomentus.com and use promo code DAILYSTOIC for up to 35 % off your first order. That's livemomentus.com, promo code DAILYSTOIC. If you're selling online or out of a storefront, it's a full-time gig for you or a side hustle.

4:43Ryan Holiday: You know the challenge. It's not easy. It's a lot of work. you're hoping that people find your listing you're waiting for them to walk in well whatnot flips that on whatnot you go live and sell directly to people in real time they see what you got they ask questions and they buy and they keep coming back whatnot is the largest dedicated live shopping platform beauty collectibles electronics luxury fashion even cookies sellers can build real thriving businesses whatnot buyers spend more than an hour a day in the app and they're not just browsing, they're bidding, they're buying, they're coming back, and you can go live and show off your products to those people and turn what you love into real income.

5:21Ryan Holiday: People selling on whatnot sell 10 times more than other major marketplaces because you're not just listing products, you're building real connections with your buyers. And for a limited time, whatnot will match your first$150 in the first month. Visit whatnot.com slash sell to start selling. W-H-A-T-N-O-T dot com slash sell. Whatnot.com slash sell.

5:45Ryan Holiday: Okay, so there's a story about how they're restoring the famous Marcus Aurelius column in Rome. If you don't know about the column, it's a masterpiece of sculpture and carving depicting the 14 years that Marcus Aurelius spends at war with the Marco Mani tribes. And they put up this 94-foot column in his honor that still stands to this day. There's actually a stoic lesson in this because yes, 19 centuries later, a monument to his accomplishments still stance. And even though it's a little worn down and needs some restoration, you might say that this disproves Marcus's reminders and meditations that posthumous fame doesn't last and no one will remember him.

6:24Ryan Holiday: But I actually think the fact that it's still there is precisely the point, because if you look at the top of this column, there's not a statue of Marcus Aurelius on top. It's actually St. Paul. In the 16th century, Pope Sixtus V decides to take the monument to Marcus Aurelius and reuse it for his own purposes. And in the end, that's what Marcus Aurelius' greatest accomplishment becomes, a pedestal for somebody else. And that is what Marcus is saying. That's what history does to all of us, even those of us famous enough to be remembered for one year or one century or 1 ,000 years. History takes us and it remixes and reuses us.

7:07Ryan Holiday: It perverts us and undermines our legacy. It contradicts us. It absorbs us and it uses us for our own purposes. On a long enough timeline, everyone's will and legacy is ignored. Their graves are lost and obscured. Their memory is written over. And we should remember this before it's too late. And let's say it didn't happen. Let's say it was still shiny and gleaming. Why would that matter? He says in meditations, people who are excited by posthumous fame forget that the people who remember them will die soon too and that those after them in turn until their memory pass from one to another like a candle flame gutters and goes out and then he says suppose that that actually wasn't true perhaps you are remembered forever he says what good would that do you and he says i don't just mean when you're dead but in your own lifetime what use is praise except to make your lifestyle a little more comfortable he's trying to remind himself that reputation fame impressing people that doesn't matter who you are as a person that's the only thing that counts who you are as a person to the people around you did you do good with the resources that you had it's like the shelley poem about ozymandias right the statue falling over in the desert two legs the the head there laying in the sand a colossal wreck he says boundless and bare even though this person was so powerful and important in life very little of it remains now this is not the state of marcus aurelius's monument you can go see it it's still standing there i've seen it myself and yet the same stoic lesson is actually there if you look for it okay so if if he's saying that being remembered is not important that posthumous fame is worthless what is he saying that does matter Well, he does address this in meditations too.

8:56Ryan Holiday: He says, forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and remember it. Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already or is impossible to see. The span we live is small, small as the corner of earth in which we live it, small as even the greatest renown passed from mouth to mouth by short-lived stick figures, ignorant alike of themselves and those long dead. He's saying that all you have is this moment. All you have is who you are in this moment, creating some enormous legacy that other people get to live in, focusing on impressing people who you will never meet.

9:34Ryan Holiday: What good will that do you? He's saying what matters is that you do good now, that you live a good life, that you live a good life as a good person. That's what Marcus Aurelius is striving to do in meditations. And the irony is in not caring about posthumism, in not caring about his accomplishments lasting, in just trying to be a good man, to concentrate on what he has to do as he writes in meditations, to fix his eyes on it, reminding himself that his task is just to be a good human being. And to do it, he says, without hesitation, to speak the truth as he sees it, with kindness and with humility and without hypocrisy.

10:10Ryan Holiday: In that, ironically, he does create a real legacy and we are still talking about him today.

10:49We'll see you next time. Ferguson Home, where it all comes together. Shop top brands like Kohler or find your local showroom at fergusonhome.com. I'm here on the job site with Dale, who's a framing contractor. Hey, good morning. Dale traded up to Geico Commercial Auto Insurance for all his business vehicles. We're here where he needs us most. Yep, they sure are. We make it easy for him to save on all his insurance needs, all in one place, with coverage that fits his business and bottom line. Oh, I shouldn't have looked down. It's all right. We're so far up here. Look at me. Take a deep breath.

11:20I'm good. So good.

11:22Ryan Holiday: Get a commercial auto insurance quote today at Geico.com and see how much you could save. It feels good to Geico.