Chapter 1: What is the significance of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations?
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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. This book right here has been the guide for presidents and generals and leaders for almost 20 centuries. Theodore Roosevelt carried it with him as he explored a South American jungle. Frederick the Great took it into battle.
Arnold Schwarzenegger says it shaped how he thinks. But the fascinating thing about it is it was never meant to be read by anyone. It was one man writing to himself, and that man happened to be the emperor of Rome, Marcus Aurelius, the most powerful person on the planet.
And that's what we're gonna talk about today, the best lessons from Marcus Aurelius' meditations, and most importantly, how to actually use them. I think one of the reasons we have trouble with motivation is that we know deep down that this thing we're doing, it doesn't really matter. It's not important. That's why Marcus Aurelius' question is so imperative.
He says, ask yourself, is this essential? He says, because most of what we do and say and think is not essential. It's getting us further from where we want to go. It's something that society made up for us. It's just what everyone... else is doing. It's piddly busy work. You know, he says, are you really afraid of death because you won't be able to do this thing anymore? Right?
He's saying that we waste our time with frivolous, unimportant, meaningless things. So he says, when you ask yourself, you end up eliminating the inessential. And then he says, you get this double benefit of doing the essential things better.
But I would say that the real benefit is that if we only have a finite amount of motivation, if getting up the motivation, if maintaining motivation is this difficult task, Well, then we want to save it for the precious few things that really matter. What's the main thing for you?
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Chapter 2: How can we identify what is essential in our lives?
He says, at dawn, when you awake and you have trouble getting out of bed, he says, you have to tell yourself, I was meant to do things. I have to get after it. And then he says, but it's so much warmer here under the covers. And indeed, it is. It's nicer there. But he says, is that what you were put here to do, to huddle under the covers? Is that what you were put here to do, to feel nice?
You were meant for something more than that. And by the way, you know what's nicer than staying in bed? What you experience in the morning when it's quiet out, when the sun is coming out, when you're the only one on the trail, when you're the only one on the road, when you've got quiet time to focus and work or read or spend time with people you love, that's amazing.
So getting up early is hard, sure, but you'll be glad that you did it. Trying hard things, focusing, getting after stuff, that's hard. but you'll be glad you did it after. Concentrate like a Roman, Marcus Aurelius 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.
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 going to concentrate? Am I going to 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? To me, that's the test. That's the standard to try to meet every day that you are lucky enough to be alive.
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. Marx says ambition is tying your happiness to what other people do and say and think. Sanity, 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 best seller list, what people think about it, what the review's saying, that isn't up to me. So my definition of success is an internal one. I focus 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.
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 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. Don't be all about business.
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Chapter 3: What lessons can we learn from Marcus Aurelius about dealing with adversity?
And when we see other people falling short of our standards or their standards, we want to be forgiving. We want to be tolerant. We want to be helpful. We want to be encouraging. That's what self-discipline is about. A couple of years ago, I lost one of the most valuable things in the world to me. It was my copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations.
I was on a flight from London to Vancouver and I left it in the seat pocket of an Air Canada flight. The reason that my copy of Meditations is so valuable is that it has 20 years of notes, 20 years of highlights, 20 years of me coming back to the same ideas over and over again. Marcus Aurelius is clearly fond of the philosopher Heraclitus.
But one of the lines from Heraclitus is the idea that we never step in the same river twice. And so it goes with reading the same book, even though this book is the same as it was when it first arrived on my doorstep all those years ago. Every time I come to it, I'm a new person. The world is different. What I know is different. What I'm looking for is different.
And so I find something new out of it each time. So I've gotten so much out of this edition, which I've read, and thankfully, a lovely flight attendant returned it to Lost and Found and I was able to get it. And this book came back to me. But I have many other editions. My point is,
There are certain books that grow with you, that change with you, that aren't books that you have read, but they are books that you are reading. And Meditations, I think, is the ultimate book of that. And here, this month is the month of Marcus Aurelius' birth. If you haven't read Meditations yet, I don't know what you're waiting for.
There's a reason this book has endured over the last 20 centuries. There's a reason it's endured even in my own life over the last two decades. And if you haven't picked it up yet, you're missing out. It's unfortunate that this happened. You didn't want it to happen. You didn't choose for it to happen, but it did happen. Mark Sirius writes that to himself in meditations.
It's unfortunate that this happened, but then he catches himself and he goes, no, it's fortunate that it happened to me. He means that I think in part because it didn't happen to someone else. But what he really means is fortunate that it happened to me because he trained for stuff like this, right? Marcus Aurelius's reign is one difficult thing after another.
There's a plague, there's floods, there's a coup, there's economic problems, there's everything that could go wrong does. And he's talking of those. He says, it's unfortunate this happened. No, it's fortunate to me. And he says, I've remained unharmed by it. Because that's what stoic philosophy is about. This idea that we're not harmed by external things. We respond to those external things.
That's what we control. That's what we focus on. So whatever it is that you're going through, whatever just happened, it's not unfortunate that it happened to you. It's fortunate that it happened to you instead of someone else. And it's fortunate that you know how to deal with it. At his most vulnerable moment, Marcus Aurelius was betrayed. He was sick. He was struggling.
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Chapter 4: How does Marcus Aurelius suggest we handle complaints and frustrations?
But then he stops the pity party and he says, you know what? No, good fortune is up to me. He says, it's good intentions, good character, and good deeds. If you want to live in good times, do good things. That's where we find hope. That's where we find bright lights. That's where we find something to be inspired by in our own choices, in our own actions, because that's the one thing we control.
Marcus Aurelius clearly hated all the flatterers and sycophants and hangers-on that came with power. He talks about it repeatedly in meditations, but the thing he hated most was the people who would say things in passing like, I'm gonna be honest with you, let me be straight with you, let me tell you what I really think. He said to say those things was actually a confession, self-indictment.
People should know you're gonna be honest, he said, an honest person should be like the smelly goat in the room. You should know they're there the second they walk in. When you preface your thing with, let me tell you what I really think, or here's the truth, you're admitting that that's not the norm. That's not what you normally do. And nobody had to think that about Marcus.
In fact, from an early age, Marcus Aurelius was named Verismus, or the truest one. And we think that's because he was so unflinchingly truthful with Hadrian, his adopted grandfather, the most powerful man in Rome. Marcus just told them what he thought. He didn't hold back, and neither can you.
Marcus Aurelius, one of the great leaders of all time, what advice does he have for aspiring leaders, for leaders today? Number one, don't be changed by your position. He says, tries to escape being imperialized, being dyed purple by the emperor's cloak. He learns from Antoninus to listen to experts and when not to listen to experts.
He is convinced that the power he's been given has to be used for good. He says, we're here for each other. He says, know what is enough, right? To be craving more and more and more always brings about ruin. He says that you have to tie your success to your effort to tie your ambition to what other people say or do. He says, this is insanity and it will ruin you and break you.
And then finally, he says, you have to do the right thing. The rest doesn't matter. That's the job of a leader. You have to make the hard decisions. Sometimes you're going to piss people off. Sometimes you're going to have to hurt a few feelings, but the leader does the right thing because it's the right thing. End of story.
Bill Belichick, greatest football coach in history, tells his players, do your job. Marcus Aurelius asks himself that same question in meditation. He 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.
I was talking earlier about how Marcus Aurelius said that like we're soldiers storming a wall, you have to be able to ask for help. So what if you ask for help? I think this is really important, especially again when we're lonely, when we're struggling, when we feel like we can't do something, when we feel like we're out of our element or whatever. You have to be able to ask for help.
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Chapter 5: What practices can we adopt to cultivate inner peace?
and think about it so it doesn't rule our lives or ruin our lives. One of the things Mark Cerullis talks about in meditations over and over again is seeing what's really there. He says, not what your enemy sees and hopes that you'll see, but what's actually there. And I think we could take this to mean see the good and see the bad, right? See what's truly there, to see it as clearly as possible.
Not the thing that people want you to see and get depressed about and quit or afraid of, And at the same time, not to see it delusionally or in some exaggerated way, but to see what is actually there. That's what stoicism is about. And I think this is super relevant in this time of like terrible news, right?
To see what's actually in front of you, the good and the bad, to not inflate it and also not diminish it, but to see what's actually there. That is the task of our time. It's kind of crazy if you think about it. We all know ourselves better than other people. We all know what we're trying to do. We all know who we are. And yet for some reason, we're like a weather vane.
We let public opinion or trends decide what we like. We let the criticism or the potential criticism of others decide what direction we go with our life. It's so absurd that Cyril Connolly, trying to take it to its logical extreme, said, there are people who are afraid even to kill themselves for fear of what the neighbors might think. That's why I love this passage in book 12 of Meditations.
Marcus Aurelius, the most powerful man in the world, the person who really had no reason to care about what anyone else thought, and yet to do his job well needed to understand public opinion. He said, That's how much we value other people's opinions instead. of our own. It's not that we shouldn't care at all what other people think. We should just care a whole lot less.
I lived in this little apartment here in New Orleans with my now wife more than 10 years ago. And one of the things I think about when I think about when I lived here was how different a person I was, not just because like time has passed, but all the changes that I've undergone. Stoics talk about how everything has changed.
Marcus Aurelius quoting Heraclitus says, we never step in the same river twice. I'm a fundamentally different person standing here now. My relationship with my wife is fundamentally different. We're always changing just as the world is changing. Even though this building is like 200 plus years old, everything about it is different.
It's different me visiting today than when I visited five years ago. It was different than the day I moved in. And so if you try to hold on to your relationship If you try to make it the same as it always was, you're missing what it could become.
And I'm so much happier now than I was then, which is why I try to be fluid and flexible and adjust, even though you also try to be disciplined and principled and systematized in what you do. You have to embrace change. You have to grow because if you're not growing, you're dying. I don't think that's what you want. Marx really didn't like people. You can't read meditations and not see this.
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