In 2006, I bought my first copy of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. I was 19 years old. I didn’t know who Marcus Aurelius was (besides the old guy in Gladiator), and I certainly didn’t know whether it would be the right translation or not. I suppose it was luck that I got the Gregory Hays translation—though the Stoics would say it was fated—but what arrived would change my life.
Marcus was clearly fond of the philosopher Heraclitus (he quotes him a lot), who said that we never step in the same river twice. Because we are always changing. It’s equally true that we never read the same book twice—because while the contents don’t change, we do. Our circumstances change. The world changes.
I still have that first copy of Meditations. The cover is taped back on. Every page is marked or folded. Nearly every passage has something noted or underlined. I’m technically what Stephen Marche calls a “centireader”—reading Marcus Aurelius well over one hundred times—but actually, I’ve never read the same Meditations twice. Each time, I notice new things. A passage I highlighted before now strikes me for a different reason. A line that once seemed irrelevant to my life suddenly describes something I’m going through perfectly. Something I thought I understood turns out to seemingly mean something else entirely.
So I’m constantly re-reading Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. Most recently, I pulled out my original copy after I received a kind of mind-blowing request. Modern Library, publisher of the Gregory Hays translation, was getting ready to put out a new edition, and they asked if I would want to write a foreword for it. Write a foreword to the very translation that so changed my life? “Of course,” I said, “it would be beyond an honor.”
With the release of this new Modern Library edition (you can buy that here), I wanted to share 100 more (check out the first 100 lessons here, or watch the video on YouTube) things I’ve learned in nearly twenty years with what is, without a doubt, one of the most incredible books ever written.
But before we get into that…I’m answering all your questions about Meditations in a live Q&A on April 26th as a companion to How To Read Meditations: A Daily Stoic Guide. Get the guide before April 26th (Marcus Aurelius’ 1905th birthday) to receive your invite. Sign up here, or learn more in the P.S.
[*] One of the most interesting things you come to understand about Meditations is how unoriginal it is. Marcus is largely cycling through and recycling the insights of the some 500 years of Stoic philosophy that preceded him. On one page, we see him borrowing a metaphor from Panaetius. On others, he’s quoting Epictetus from memory or riffing on something he heard from Rusticus. This isn’t something bad. It’s actually quite beautiful. Meditations is not an individual work but a collective work—he is a product of all the Stoics that came before him. As we all are today.
[*] Of course, Stoicism feels old to us. Seneca lived 20 centuries ago, and Cato was born in 95 BC. As Marcus writes in Meditations, the names, dates, and places feel distant and unfamiliar with time’s passing. Who can even pronounce Chrysippus? Who remembers Athenodorus or Arius? From our perch in the 21st century, not many. And yet, as Marcus himself noted, Stoicism was already ancient in his time. Nearly 400 years separated him from Zeno. Ten emperors came and went between Nero and Marcus. Generations of Stoics read, discussed, translated, and preserved these ideas. ‘Ancient’ isn’t a fixed label—it’s a process, like entropy, acting on everything. We’re all becoming ancient. What’s new now will one day feel as distant as Marcus does to us.
[*] I seem to remember my copy arriving right away after I purchased it, but searching my email for the order number as I wrote the Foreword, I found an angry customer service ticket, where teenager me was angrily complaining about a few days’ shipping delay. How badly I needed the words I would find in Book 6 of Meditations! “You don’t have to turn this into something. It doesn’t have to upset you.”
[*] Marcus opens Meditations by reflecting on what he learned from influential individuals in his life. Titled “Debts and Lessons,” the 17 entries span nine pages and over 2,000 words—nearly 10% of the entire book! Marcus writes with the humility of someone in the final act of life, taking stock of how lucky he is. It’s beautiful, and it dispels the myth of the “self-made man.” Marcus knew he was the product of mentors, influencers, advisors, and teachers. “Debt” is the operative word—he owed them so much. The same is true for us: we are shaped by our influences, environments, families, and friends. Success (or failure) is always a collaborative effort.
[*] How could Marcus ever repay these people? He couldn’t. What people do for us when we are young, what they teach us, the doors they open for us–this is not something we can pay back. We can only pay it forward.
[*] In one of the first passages in Meditations, Marcus said one of the things he learned from his philosophy teacher Rusticus was “To read attentively—not to be satisfied with “just getting the gist of it.’” Rereading it as I was beginning to work on this article, it struck me that if I’d stopped at “just getting the gist” of Meditations—if I hadn’t reread it again and again, if I hadn’t carefully read Hays’s peerless introductory remarks or other books and reviews and articles and essays about Marcus—my entire life would have turned out differently. From his great-grandfather, Marcus said he learned to invest in learning “and to accept the resulting costs as money well-spent.”
[*] “And,” Marcus writes, adding another thing he learned from Rusticus, “not to fall for every smooth talker.” This is a core Stoic idea. You can’t trust appearances. Epictetus said we have to stop and put every impression to the test, like a money assayer tests if money is counterfeit. We have to be smart, alert to scammers, fraudsters, and con artists. We have to put every smooth talker to the test.
[*] From early Stoics like Thrasea, Helvidius, and Cato, Marcus said he learned to believe in a “society of equal laws, governed by equality of status and of speech, and of rulers who respect the liberty of their subjects above all else.” Nothing, he believed, was more important or just than that. And yet he ruled a Rome that, in many ways, stood in stark contrast to those ideals. Like Jefferson writing in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” while owning slaves, Marcus was expressing a powerful ideal. It’s the job of each generation to move closer to that vision, to not talk about what a just society looks like—we have that on record—but to help it become one.
[*] Why do I like the Gregory Hays edition so much? Because it’s alive and accessible. Hays uses clear, modern, plain English—but still captures the power and beauty of Marcus’s writing. There are no “thous,” “shalls,” “thys,” or “thees”—nothing old-fashioned to slow you down. I didn’t realize how important that was until I picked up another translation—probably George Long or A. S. L. Farquharson—online for free. Suddenly, the lyrical book I loved felt dense, boring, unreadable, and hard to connect with. If I’d cheaped out and gone with the free version—again, my entire life would have turned out differently.
[*] Hays notes that Marcus never calls himself a Stoic anywhere in Meditations. If you asked him what he studied, Hays contends, Marcus would likely have answered “philosophy” rather than a specific school. Perhaps Marcus was doing what Epictetus said, don’t talk about your philosophy—don’t tell us your label—embody it. Or as Marcus put it, “Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.”
[*] On the one hand, every translation of Meditations should feel unreadable—or at least unrelatable. Marcus Aurelius lived nearly nineteen centuries ago, chosen by a dying tyrant to become a god-king, ruling over tens of millions with the power of life and death. He was a high priest of primitive cults, fought brutal wars, buried most of his thirteen children, and wrote in Greek on papyrus for no one but himself. Marcus was not like us at all—how could he have been? The past is a foreign country, it has been said, and that is very true. We like to think the Romans were just like us, but they were unfathomably different, as was every other era and civilization.
[*] On the other hand, we can tell from Meditations that Marcus was also just like us. David Hernández de la Fuente, a Spanish classist and translator of Marcus Aurelius, says that the man’s writings reveal a picture of a man with “two voices coexisting: one that doubted and suffered, while the other acted as a teacher, offering comfort and certainties.” Marcus Aurelius was a guy with the same inner dialogue as us, the same struggles as us, the same battles as us. This was a very different man from a very different time…and yet he was still essentially human, still essentially us.
[*] It wasn’t until I walked the streets of Acquincum, near Budapest, where Marcus visited the Second Legion and wrote parts of Meditations, that it hit me: This man was just a man, a guy who walked this same street that I am walking now.
[*] It hit me there, too, in Hungary, just how distant Rome was (some 800 miles). “Life is warfare and a journey far from home,” Marcus writes in Book 2. Indeed, for him it literally was. Some twelve years of his life would be spent at the empire’s northern border along the Danube River, fighting long, brutal wars.
[*] The fact that Marcus Aurelius was writing during the Antonine plague (a 15 year pandemic that killed between 10 and 18 million people) and that he may well have died of the plague created a different way for me to see and understand what Marcus was writing about. Early on, I was struck by the line, “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think,” but I didn’t fully appreciate that he was talking about that in a time when you really could leave life right now.
[*] Realizing that Marcus was writing during a plague also made me realize he doesn’t talk much in Meditations about said plague. Nowhere does he bemoan the disasters which happened with such frequency that one ancient historian described Marcus Aurelius’ reign as an unending series of troubles. Marcus skips over all this, but you know what he spends a full 10% of Meditations talking about in very clear detail? The gratitude he felt to the people who had helped him, who had inspired him, who had taught him. It’s a lesson: shrug off the negative and embrace the positive. “Convince yourself that everything is the gift of the gods,” he writes in Book 10, “that things are good and always will be.”
[*] Marcus and Nero had strikingly similar beginnings—both lost their fathers young, were told early that supreme power awaited them, and were tutored in Stoic philosophy. So why did Marcus turn out to be Marcus and Nero to be Nero? Why was one brilliant and just, the other vicious and unhinged? I’ve come to believe it was their mothers who made the difference. Nero’s mother was calculating and ambitious, uncaring and cruel. In Book 1, Marcus writes that he often thinks about his mother and when he does, he thinks about…“Her reverence for the divine, her generosity, her inability not only to do wrong but even to conceive of doing it. And the simple way she lived—not in the least like the rich.”
[*] Where did Marcus get his profound and lifelong commitment to doing the right thing? To kindness? To charity? To justice? It was from her. “Only one thing is important,” Marcus writes elsewhere in Meditations. “To behave throughout your life toward the liars and the crooks around you with kindness, honesty and justice.” That was him channeling his mother.
[*] When Jerry Seinfeld was out doing the interview circuit to promote his movie, Unfrosted, in just about every interview he talked about “my obsession now…I’m reading a lot of Marcus Aurelius.” He said something I hadn’t really thought of before and have since started imagining when I read Meditations: “I love to imagine him in his bedroom there—the leader of the entire world, an emperor, a Roman emperor—saying to himself, ‘Yes, you’re going to talk to a lot of annoying people today? That’s what every day is like. Why are you surprised? People are annoying.’”
[*] When Marcus received the news of Hadrian’s plans to have Antoninus Pius adopt him and place him next in line for the throne, he broke down in tears. There was no one he revered more than Antoninus. How could he possibly live up to the task of following in his footsteps? Today, you would say that Marcus was struggling with what we call “imposter syndrome.” As the story goes (which I tell in The Boy Who Would Be King), the night before he was to become emperor, Marcus Aurelius had a dream. In the dream, he found that his shoulders were made of ivory. It was a sign: He was not an imposter. He was not weak. He could do it. And then guess what? He did do it. He—like all of us—had stronger shoulders than he thought.
[*] In my first read of Meditations, I must have read, “It can ruin your life only if it ruins your character.” But COVID created a different way for me to see and understand what Marcus was writing about. When he talks about how there are two kinds of plagues: the plague that can take your life and the plague that can destroy your character — he was talking about the things that we’re seeing in the world, that we saw on a daily basis over the last two years.
[*] On early readings, I did not understand all the allusions Marcus made to various Stoic metaphors, or even direct mentions of various Stoic thinkers (which include Chrysippus, Epictetus, Thrasea, Arius Didymus, Helvidius Priscus, and Junius Rusticus). In Book 1, he thanks Rusticus “for introducing me to Epictetus’s lectures—and loaning me his own copy.” One person passing along great and brilliant writing to a friend or a pupil? It’s a beautiful tradition, one as old as time.
[*] Marcus quotes Epictetus who is himself riffing on Plato, to remind us that “against their will, [people’s] souls are cut off from truth.” He was talking about the people who frustrated and disappointed him, the people who supported bad policies, who did and said untrue things. They were not wrong on purpose! They thought they were correct…largely because someone had misinformed, even manipulated them. The same is true today.
[*] The original title of Meditations (Ta eis heauton) roughly translates as To Himself or Things to one’s self. That’s what Marcus was doing. He’s exploring his fears, his desires, his flaws, his virtues. He was trying to get to know “the backroads of the self,” as Marcus writes in Book 4.
[*] Because he was writing to himself, writing about the things he struggled with and needed to work on, it’s easy to miss it, but Marcus seems to have a great sense of humor. There is a letter from Marcus to his tutor Fronto about a prank he played on a shepherd. There are also a couple of jokes in Meditations, including one about a guy who was “so rich that he had no place to shit.”
[*] Again, Marcus wasn’t an unfeeling robot. He didn’t stuff things down. He was a husband and a father. He wrote beautifully, took principled stands, worked hard and sacrificed. He explains in Book 1 that he learned from his teacher Sextus, “not to display anger or other emotions. To be free of passion and yet full of love.” Beautiful.
[*] What’s so strange about this, about how often Stoicism is associated today with “has no emotions,” is that all the Stoics are explicit in how natural it is to have emotions, in deed and word. Like, how much more explicit do you need to get than the fact that of the maybe dozen or so surviving anecdotes about Marcus, THREE have him crying!
[*] I could not even begin to understand Marcus’s passage about losing children until I became a parent. Of Marcus’s children, five sons and three daughters died before he did. No parent should outlive their children. To lose eight of them? So young? It staggers the mind. “Unfair” does not even come close. It’s grotesque. What helped Marcus deal with loss after loss, Brand Blanshard points out, was that he held firmly that the universe was not only logical but good, so he saw it as his duty to not fight against the swings of Fortune. Yet it did stagger him, and multiple times he writes in Meditations about this loss, as it was unquestionably the hardest thing he ever went through.
[*] We can imagine, as he buried half of his children, there were times Marcus wanted to lash out, give in to anger, rage at fate, the gods, and the world. Yet, Meditations is replete with timeless warnings against this. In Book 7, he quotes a lost line from a play by Euripides: “Why should we be angry at the world? As if the world would notice.”
[*] Unlike most of the emperors, Marcus actually loved his wife. Despite (unproven) rumors of his wife Faustina’s adultery, Marcus loved her deeply for all their 35 years of marriage. He once wrote to his tutor Fronto, “I would rather live on Gyara [a desert island for criminals] with her than in this palace without her.’”
[*] But as they say, your calendar doesn’t lie. Marcus spent years away from Rome, fighting wars and visiting provinces, including time in Greece, as all students of philosophy considered a must. He had cases to adjudicate, dignitaries to receive, and things to write, undoubtedly spending much time reading, training, and serving the people of Rome. In many ways, he was like those of us who claim that family comes first, but then place many other things before them, whether essential or not. The irony is that Marcus never aspired to be emperor, and though he didn’t like the job, it consumed his life. Perhaps Faustina’s infidelity and the problems with Commodus were partly due to his absence—a cautionary tale for us all to not just talk about being a family man, but to truly be one.
[*] Not a lot of people understand this…but you actually don’t have to have an opinion about everything. You don’t have to decide if something is good or bad. Marcus says limiting the amount of opinions we have is one of the most powerful things we can do in life. Do you need to have an opinion about the scandal of the moment—is it changing anything? Do you need to have an opinion about the way your kid does their hair? So what if this person likes music that sounds weird to you? So what if that person is a vegetarian? “These things are not asking to be judged by you,” Marcus writes. “Leave them alone.”
[*] Or what about when someone thinks something we disagree with or says something stupid? Marcus’ answer: “We have the power to hold no opinion about a thing and to not let it upset our state of mind—for things have no natural power to shape our judgments.” Be indifferent to what makes no difference, as Marcus says, so you can focus your attention on the things that actually do.
[*] That’s not to say we should completely close ourselves off from those who think or say things we disagree with. In Book 6, Marcus writes, “If anyone can refute me—show me I’m making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective—I’ll gladly change. It’s the truth I’m after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.”
[*] It might be one of the hardest tasks in the world right now—to not let assholes turn you into an asshole. To not let cruelty harden you, to not let stupidity make you bitter, to not let outrage pull you down to its level. “The best revenge,” Marcus wrote in Book 6, “is to not be like that.”
[*] Later, in Book 7, writes to himself: “Take care that you don’t treat inhumanity as it treats human beings.” What does that mean? What exactly does Marcus mean by “inhumanity”? Hurricanes are inhuman. ChatGPT is inhuman. A hurricane is inhuman. Torture is inhuman. With a passage like this, I’ve come to find it helpful to look at various translations.
In his great annotated edition of Meditations, Robin Waterfield translated that same passage like this: “Be sure not to behave toward antisocial people as people behave toward other people.”
In the Hicks & Hicks translation, The Emperor’s Handbook, it’s, “Don’t feel for misanthropes what they feel for mankind.”
The 19th-century British translator George Long has it like this, “Take care not to feel towards the inhuman as they feel towards men.”
And, finally, The Daily Stoic translator Steve Hanselman has, “See to it that you don’t hold feelings toward misanthropes like they do for other people.”
What Marcus is really saying is that you can’t let the world, you can’t let other people get you down or change you. In fact, a more colloquial and modern way to translate the essence of his quote might be: “Don’t let the sonsofbitches turn you into a sonuvabitch.”
[*] On this idea of not letting inhumanity drive him away from humanity, Robert Greene once told me his favorite passage from Meditations is the one where Marcus uses the analogy of being in the ring with someone fighting dirty. “We don’t denounce them for it or get upset with them or regard them from then on as violent types,” Marcus writes. “We just keep an eye on them after that. Not out of hatred or suspicion. Just keeping a friendly distance. We need to do that in other areas. We need to excuse what our sparring partners do, and just keep our distance—without suspicion or hatred.”
[*] No matter what happens—good times or bad, fair or unfair, order or chaos—Marcus wrote, our job always remains the same. “No matter what anyone says or does,” he writes in Book 7, “my task is to be good. Like gold or emerald or purple repeating to itself, ‘No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be emerald, my color undiminished.’” What is your most important job? he emphasizes. “To be a good person.”
[*] A corollary to that…how many of us focus on getting better at our most important job? How many of us actually work on being good? “A better wrestler?” Marcus asks himself, rhetorically, referring to the time he spent improving at one of his hobbies. “But not a better citizen, a better person, a better resource in tight places, a better forgiver of faults?” (Here’s my piece about the habits that will make you better at your most important job—being a good person).
[*] And when you do your job, you don’t need “the third thing,” Marcus writes. “When you’ve done well and another has benefited by it, why like a fool do you look for a third thing on top—credit for the good deed or a favor in return?” You don’t need recognition, gratitude, appreciation, or acknowledgement for doing your job, which is to do good, to be good, to help people, to be kind.
[*] There’s a wonderful moment in Book 6 where Marcus Aurelius asks, what is it that we should prize as humans? “An audience clapping?” he writes. “No. No more than the clacking of their tongues. Which is all that public praise amounts to—a clacking of tongues.” In one of those interviews I referred to earlier, Jerry Seinfeld highlighted this quote. “How funny is it for me as a comedian to read that?” he said.
[*] When Marcus says an audience clapping is no more than a clacking of tongues, Seinfeld went on, he means, “Do not pursue other people’s recognition as an end goal in itself. What you pursue is the quality of the work that you’re doing, not the result of people liking it or hating it. The hell with that. Likes. What are likes? Other people liked it. If you’re pursuing that, your train is off the track!”
[*] In short: Focus on effort, not outcomes. It’s insane to tie your wellbeing to things outside of your control, Marcus says in Book 6. If you did your best, if you gave it your all, if you acted with your best judgment—that’s what matters…regardless of whether it’s a good or bad outcome.
[*] You want to talk about what’s really insane? Worrying about other people’s opinions of you when you’re dead! As Marcus Aurelius writes in Book 4, “People who are excited by posthumous fame forget that people who remember them will soon die too. And those after them in turn.” And suppose all those people you want to remember you were immortal, Marcus says, “What good would it do you?” You’ll still be dead!
[*] As for worrying about other people’s opinions of you while you’re alive? In Book 12, as Meditations is wrapping up, Marcus writes “It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.”
[*] Sometimes when I speak to military groups, I like to share one of my favorite lines from Meditations: “Don’t be ashamed to need help. Like a soldier storming a wall, you have a mission to accomplish. And if you’ve been wounded and you need a comrade to pull you up? So what?” I love how Marcus delivers that line—with a shrug. So what? There’s no shame in needing help. Whether it’s therapy, asking for advice, or hiring someone to support you, it’s not a weakness to seek help—it’s a strength. We’re all comrades on this mission, Marcus reminded himself. Don’t let pride hold you back from getting the support you need to succeed.
[*] This was a breakthrough I had during the pandemic. Suddenly, I had a lot less to worry about. I wasn’t doing the things that, in the past, I told myself were the causes of my anxiety. I wasn’t having to get to this plane. I wasn’t battling traffic to get somewhere on time. I wasn’t preparing for this talk or that one. So you’d think that my anxiety would have gone way down. But it didn’t. And what I realized is that anxiety has nothing to do with any of these things, as Marcus talks about in Book 9. “Today I escaped from anxiety,” he says. “Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions—not outside.” He writes this during a plague, no less.
[*] Related… I had an incredible conversation with Dr. Becky Kennedy that every parent—or really just any human—needs to listen to. (If you haven’t read her book, Good Inside, yet…what are you doing?!). In the episode, she defined anxiety as “some amount of uncertainty coupled with our underestimation of our ability to cope.” It reminded me of what Marcus writes in Book 5: “Consider all that you’ve gone through, all that you’ve survived.”
[*] One more on the topic of anxiety. “Don’t let your imagination be crushed by life as a whole,” Marcus reminded himself in Book 8. “Stick with the situation at hand.” Focus on the moment. Waste no time thinking about the monsters that may or may not be up ahead.
[*] Working on the 10th anniversary edition of The Obstacle Is the Way, I spent a lot of time with the now famous passage that inspired the book. But do you know what he was talking about specifically? He was talking about difficult people! “Our actions may be impeded by them,” goes the full passage, “but there can be no impeding our intentions or our dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
[*] In Book 1, Marcus talks about one of the difficult people in his own life, who made him a better person. He thanks “the gods” for blessing him with a troublesome stepbrother, “one,” he writes, “whose character challenged me to improve my own.” And Marcus didn’t just tolerate his stepbrother Lucius Verus, he found a way to work with him, even naming him co-emperor!
[*] During my conversation with Francis Ford Coppola, he shared that he had just recently lost his wife of 60 years. In coping with her loss, he came across a Marcus quote that lifted his spirits. If you lose a loved one, it said, honor them. “My wife was very good,” he explained. “If someone was alone or sick or something, she’d call them up and be comforting to them. And I’m not like that, you know? So I started to do that. People that I know, some guys my age who have no grandchildren, I call them up and say, Hey, how are you? And they are so pleased and so kind. And that’s how I keep my wife in my life.”
[*] After many years of using a slide deck when I give talks, for my 2024 speaking tour, I decided to try doing it without slides. Because it seemed harder and different. Because it seemed a little bit scary to stand in front of a few thousand people and not do what I’d done for so long, what I was used to, what I was comfortable with. In Book 12, Marcus writes about holding the reins in his non-dominant hand as both an exercise to practice and a metaphor for doing the difficult thing. He wanted to get good at doing things both ways, at developing the ability to thrive in any and all situations.
[*] Meditations itself is a wonderful example of Marcus’ commitment to holding the reins in his non-dominant hand. He wrote Meditations in Greek, his non-native tongue! Marcus spoke Latin, but Greek was “the language of philosophy,” Hays tells us in the introduction of his translation. There he is, in his private journal, challenging himself to write in a more difficult language and doing so so beautifully that he endures all these centuries later.
[*] At the end of 2022, as part of The Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge, my wife and I picked a word we were going to use as our lodestar for the year. We picked ‘Less,’ inspired by what Marcus writes in Book 4, “If you seek tranquillity, do less.” And then he follows the note to himself with some clarification. Not nothing, less. Do only what’s essential. “Which brings a double satisfaction,” he writes, “to do less, better.”
[*] One thing that makes it hard to do less is to think the opposite of work is laziness or lounging around. It’s not, it’s leisure. In the ancient world, leisure meant scholé. School. But not the get good grades and get ahead kind of school. No, in the ancient world, it meant learning and studying and pursuing higher things to enrich one’s soul and spirit. Marcus said it was a requirement to “Give yourself time to learn something new and good, and cease to be whirled around.”
[*] He had 14 children, a nagging stomach ailment, and was taking philosophy classes—during a pandemic. Oh, and he was emperor of Rome, responsible for 120 million people across 2.2 million square miles. He was the busiest man in the world, so how did he manage it all without falling behind or losing his mind? We know that one question played a huge role. “Most of what we say and do is not essential,” Marcus writes in Book 4. “If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time, and more tranquility. Ask yourself at every moment, ‘Is this necessary?’”
[*] Another great, clarifying question Marcus liked to ask himself, “Am I afraid of death because I won’t be able to do this anymore?” I actually think this is one of the funniest and the most cutting lines in Meditations. You think you deserve a long life, but look at how you spend it? You think your life is so great but you complain about all the stuff you hate doing?!
[*] I like the way Marcus talked about the cleansing effects of a walk in nature. On his evening walks, he liked to take a moment to look up at the stars to “wash off the mud of life below.”
[*] In the mud of life below, in the muck and mire of daily life, it’s easy to get frustrated with people. It’s easy to prioritize the wrong things, to lose perspective. It’s easy to get caught up in the moment or forget the actual magnitude of your problems. Which is why Marcus reminded himself to zoom out. At least twice in Meditations, he speaks of taking “Plato’s view” and by that he means getting up high and looking down on humanity. “To see them from above,” he writes, “the thousands of animal herds, the rituals, the voyages on calm or stormy seas, the different ways we come into the world, share it with one another and leave it.”
[*] In another passage, in Book 9, Marcus offers another way to get some perspective in order to declutter his mind:
You can discard most of the junk that clutters your mind—things that exist only there—and clear out space for yourself:
… by comprehending the scale of the world
… by contemplating infinite time
… by thinking of the speed with which things change—each part of every thing; the narrow space between our birth and death; the infinite time before; the equally unbounded time that follows.
[*] I’ve written about the importance of having a leadership philosophy, of establishing your principles and rules. Marcus called them “epithets for the self,” which he lays out in Book 10. Upright. Modest. Straightforward. Sane. Cooperative. Disinterested. Those were his non-negotiables. “If you maintain your claim to these epithets,” he wrote, “without caring if others apply them to you or not—you’ll become a new person, living a new life.”
[*] People are just doing their job. I don’t just mean at work. After bumping into a particularly frustrating person, Marcus asks himself in Book 9, “Is a world without shamelessness possible?” No, he answers. “There have to be shameless people in the world. This is one of them.” This is just someone fulfilling their role.
[*] People who are selfish. People who are obnoxious. People who are ignorant, egotistical, people who recline their seats on airplanes, and frustrate you to no end. When you come across these people, Marcus writes in Book 8, “You can hold your breath until you’re blue in the face, and they’ll just go on doing it.”
[*] Shortly after we purchased the rights to publish the leather-bound Meditations from Daily Stoic, Putin invaded Ukraine. We were working with a Texas-based company that had long printed Bibles in Belarus. I consulted experts, including two members of Congress. The message was clear: doing business with Belarus was, in effect, doing business with Russia. That wasn’t what I wanted to hear—and alternatives weren’t obvious. I liked the Belarusian team. Bids from the U.K. were up to 200% higher. Then it struck me that the very book I was printing included a relevant line: “Just that you do the right thing,” Marcus writes in Book 6. “The rest doesn’t matter.” I decided I didn’t want any part of contributing to a country aligned with Russia. I couldn’t change the world, but I could change this. Yes, it would cost more and take longer. And no one would have noticed if I hadn’t, but I would have.
[*] In some cases, sure, it’s hard to know what it means to do the right thing. But here is a pretty simple test we can apply most of the time—try not to do anything that, as Marcus Aurelius said, “requires walls or curtains.” If we’re inclined to hide it, we probably shouldn’t do it. If we dread the publicity, maybe we’re not living or doing right.
[*] Marcus noticed how often he found himself praying to get something. Wouldn’t it be better, he thought, to make yourself strong enough not to need whatever you were hoping the gods would grace you with? Epictetus calls this blowing your own nose. Don’t wait around hoping for someone to save you. Instead, listen to Marcus’ empowering call to, “get active in your own rescue—if you care for yourself at all—and do it while you can.”
[*] “Good fortune,” Marcus writes in Book 5, “is what you make for yourself.” But he didn’t mean that as some business people and gurus claim—that we make our own luck and destiny. He was referring to “good character, good intentions and good actions.”
[*] When Marcus talked about his own luck and good fortune, it wasn’t that he was chosen out of 50 million Romans to be emperor. It wasn’t that he was born strong and tall. It wasn’t that he was born a free man instead of a slave. It wasn’t any of the other things he could have counted as blessings. Instead, it was this: “That whenever I felt like helping someone who was short of money, or otherwise in need, I never had to be told that I had no resources to do it with. And that I was never put in that position myself—of having to take something from someone else.” What a wonderful and kind way to look at life.
[*] And sometimes, he had to make some sacrifices to help to come up with the resources to help those in need. When the Antonine plague wiped out much of the Roman army, the people couldn’t afford to pay taxes for new troops. “So Marcus held a vast auction of contents of the imperial palace, Brand Blanshard writes in Four Reasonable Men, “and sold gold, crystal and myrrhine drinking vessels, even royal vases, his wife’s silk and gold-embroidered clothing, even certain jewels in fact, which he had discovered in some quantity in an inner sanctum of Hadrian’s.”
[*] Dio Cassius describes the scene of Marcus returning to Rome after being gone, on the battlefields, for a long time. As he addressed the people, he made a reference to how long he’d been forced to be away. “Eight!” the people cried lovingly. “Eight!” as they held up four fingers on each hand. He had been gone for eight years. The weight of this hit him at that moment, and so too must have the adoration of the crowd, even though Marcus often told himself how worthless this was. As a token of his gratitude and beneficence, he would distribute to them eight hundred sesterces apiece, the largest gift from the emperor to the people ever given.
[*] It’s always revealing to look closely at those who, in contrast to Marcus, seem to prize and protect their financial success above all else. The writer Anne Lamott jokes in Bird by Bird, “Ever wonder what God thinks of money? Just look at the people he gives it to.” Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations, “Robbers, perverts, killers, and tyrants—gather for your inspection their so-called pleasures!”
[*] In the first 100 lessons piece, I talked about the line from Book 9, “Don’t go expecting the perfection of Plato’s Republic.” But I left off what he says to do instead: “Be satisfied with even the smallest progress.” You’re never going to be perfect—there is no such thing. You’re human. So instead, aim for progress, even the smallest amount.
[*] Two years into writing Discipline is Destiny, I hit a wall. One morning, I was going through my research, boxes that contained thousands of note cards. As a whole, they overwhelmed me—what they contained, how they might fit together into a book. It seemed impossible to comprehend. I grabbed one. Just two dozen words in red Sharpie. When had I written it? Why? What prompted it? All I know is what it said: “Trust the process. Keep doing my cards. When I check them in June—if I have done my work—there will be a book there.” It saved me. Not from the work, of course, but from myself. From giving up. From abandoning the system and process that has served me so well. In one of the best passages in Meditations, Marcus, almost certainly in the depths of some personal crisis of faith, reminds himself to “Love the discipline you know, and let it support you.”
[*] Along the lines of not going around expecting Plato’s Republic, Marcus reminds us that we must not argue with reality. We have to see “Not what your enemy sees and hopes that you will,” he wrote, “but what’s really there.” We have to strip things of “the legend that encrusts them,” remove the magical thinking that distorts our picture of the world.
[*] “Let us accept it,” Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself in his journal, “as we accept what the doctor prescribes. It may not always be pleasant, but we embrace it—because we want to get well.” He could have been talking about the pandemic of his times, the stresses of his job or the children he had buried. He could have been talking of his own ill health, the bad weather, or the noise of the city’s streets. We don’t know, we just know that whatever it was, he was trying to find a way to be grateful for it. “Convince yourself that everything is the gift of the gods,” Marcus said, “that things are good and always will be.”
[*] Speaking of gifts, Marcus writes in Book 8, “give yourself a gift: the present moment.” Remind yourself, he says, that the past and the future are not in our power, only the present is. The less energy we waste regretting the past or worrying about the future, the more energy we will have for what’s in front of us.
[*] I’ve written about some of the craziness and obstacles we ran into opening a small-town bookstore. I often found myself thinking about a passage in Book 4, where Marcus is lamenting all that had happened to him. It’s unfortunate that this happened. Then he catches himself and decides, “No. It’s fortunate that this has happened to me.” Because this is what he trained for. Because this is a challenge he could rise to.
[*] For all the darkness that Marcus Aurelius observed and lamented, he also knew there was an inexhaustible supply of goodness out there. Actually, he knew it wasn’t out there at all—it was within himself. “Dig deep,” he writes, “the water—goodness is down there. And as long as you keep digging, it will keep bubbling up.”
[*] I said before that I read a few biographies, essays, and articles of Marcus. In Ernest Renan’s 1882 biography of Marcus, he writes the true majesty of Marcus was that his exactingness was directed only at himself. He found a way to work with flawed people, putting them to service for the good of the empire, searching them for virtues that he celebrated, accepting their vices, which he knew were not in his control. “Be tolerant with others and strict with yourself,” Marcus reminded himself in Book 5.
[*] Marcus said when things happen that we would have preferred didn’t happen, there are basically two kinds of people: people who see an obstacle and people who see an opportunity. He loved the metaphor of fire—he wanted to be like the “blazing fire [that] takes whatever you throw on it and consumes it, and rises higher” because of it.
[*] I’ve lived for years on a quiet, unpaved country road—lined with trees, crossed more often by deer than people, and increasingly, littered with trash. At first, the dumping—tires, bottles, dead animals—just made me furious and hopeless. But one morning, walking with my kids, a line from Book 9 hit me: “And you can also commit injustice by doing nothing.” How many times can I walk past this mess before I become complicit in it? I thought. So I started cleaning it up.
[*] In the struggle against injustice, it’s easy to let bitterness and hatred harden your heart. As Marcus wrote in Book 8: “What doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness.” In my favorite novel, The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (who loved Stoicism and wrote about it often), the wisest character in the book Aunt Emily says there’s “one thing I believe and I believe it with every fibre of my being. A man must live by his lights and do what little he can and do it as best he can. In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.” That captures Stoicism to me.
[*] From the mentor who most shaped his life, his adopted step-father Antoninus, Marcus said he admired the way Antoninus worked hard but also made sure “to take adequate care of himself…With the result that he hardly ever needed medical attention, or drugs or any sort of salve or ointment.” Marcus said that life is short and if we practice bad habits, if we don’t take care of ourselves, if we aren’t willing to change, we will surely shorten that time.
[*] Another important lesson Marcus learned from Antoninus? “This in particular,” Marcus said, “his willingness to yield the floor to experts—in oratory, law, psychology, whatever—and to support them energetically, so that each of them could fulfill his potential.” We live in a time where anti-intellectualism is a real problem. Not reading is often seen as a badge of honor. Leaders surrounded by yes men and sycophants. An administration suppressing ideas it doesn’t like or thinks dangerous. It’s a dangerous and destructive trend, one we must reject in favor of taking Marcus as our model. He filled his court with brilliant public servants. Though he did not particularly like him, he hired his childhood tutor Fronto because he was unquestionably the greatest rhetorician of the time. Though Junius Rusticus was famously hard on his pupil (Marcus relates he was “often upset with Rusticus”), Marcus immediately elevated him to major roles within his court. Marcus later wrote that of all the good fortune the gods gave him, having Rusticus in his life was the greatest. And, though his ego could be frustrating at times, Marcus hired Galen, the most famous physician and polymath of antiquity because he wanted to raise “the intellectual tone” of his court.
[*] It was Epictetus who said that every situation has two handles—one that will bear weight and one that won’t. We get to choose how we look at things. We get to look for the best handle to grab. As Marcus would put it in Book 5, we get to choose the thoughts we dye the world with.
[*] There’s that great Japanese proverb: fall down seven times, get up eight. Think of how life knocked this guy down. Wars. Palace intrigue. Floods and famines. A Pandemic. As I said, he lost eight of his children. He lost his co-emperor, most of the Praetorian Guard, his top commander, his most trusted colleague Furius Victorinus—all to the plague. The Roman historian Cassius Dio mused that Marcus “did not meet with the good fortune that he deserved…and was involved in a multitude of troubles throughout practically his entire reign.” But he got up every time fate knocked him down. “When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstances,” he wrote, “revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help. You’ll have a better grasp of the harmony if you keep on going back to it.”
[*] He also reminded himself and all of us not to “feel exasperated, or defeated, or despondent because your days aren’t packed with wise and moral actions. But to get back up when you fail, to celebrate behaving like a human—however imperfectly—and fully embrace the pursuit that you’ve embarked on.” Failure is inevitable. Mistakes are bound to happen.
[*] Throughout the Antonine Plague, Marcus liked to remind himself that the future is the past repeated. “Look at the past,” he says in Meditations, “and from that, extrapolate the future: the same thing. No escape from the rhythm of events.”
[*] Courage. Justice. Temperance. Wisdom. They are the most essential virtues in Stoicism, what Marcus called the “touchstones of goodness.” “If, at some point in your life,” Marcus Aurelius wrote, “you should come across anything better than justice, truth, self-control, courage — it must be an extraordinary thing indeed.”
[*] D.H. Lawrence once wrote sneeringly that Benjamin Franklin’s view of virtue was that of a horse in a paddock, fenced in on all sides. That’s precisely what Marcus loved about those four virtues. Instead of chafing at these constraints, he saw them for what they were: Boundaries. Protections. They were protections against himself, protections against being “caesarified” and “stained purple” by his corrupting position. They kept him good in a job and a world that had created so many bad people.
[*] “What injures the hive injures the bee,” Marcus writes in Book 6. When other people suffer, we suffer. When the world suffers, we suffer. When we take actions, we have to always think: What would happen if everyone did this? What are the costs of my decisions for other people?
[*] Earlier in Book 6, Marcus gives himself (and us) a command to keep an important idea in mind. “Meditate often,” he writes, “on the interconnectedness and mutual interdependence of all things in the universe. All things are implicated in one another and in sympathy with each other.” He is talking about the Stoic concept of Sympatheia, the idea that, as Seneca wrote, “All that you behold, that which comprises both god and man, is one—we are the parts of one great body.”
[*] Stillness Is The Key to that which we all seek. “People try to get away from it all,” Marcus said, “to the country, to the beach, to the mountains. You always wish that you could too. Which is idiotic: you can get away from it anytime you like. By going within. Nowhere you can go is more peaceful—more free of interruptions—than your own soul.”
[*] I’m a firm believer that how long we live is outside of our control. I don’t feel comfortable trading the present for an uncertain future. “You could be good today,” the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote. “But instead you choose tomorrow.” That quote haunts me as much as it inspires me. And it does a lot of each.
[*] Do the verb instead of trying to be the noun. “You must build up your life action by action,” Marcus said. Virtue is something you do not something you are.
[*] It can be easy to lose sight of this. Because we know how competitive the world is. Because things aren’t exactly going our way. Because we want to reach our full potential. But ultimately, we only need to care about our character. The rest is fated from it. “Life is short,” Marcus Aurelius said, and “the fruit of this life is a good character.” It’s true in reverse too: A good life is the fruit of good character.
[*] “The whole concept of writing the Meditations,” said Donald Robertson, Marcus’ greatest biographer, when I talked to him on the Daily Stoic Podcast, “is about following through on this thing he remembers his mother saying when he was younger—which is to work on his character, to improve his mind and not just his external behavior.”
[*] In the year 175, Marcus Aurelius was betrayed by his general Avidius Cassius in an attempted coup. As always, Marcus responded with poise, even as he and his family were in mortal danger. “The nearer a man is to a calm mind,” he wrote of such moments of crisis, “the closer he is to strength.” A real man doesn’t give way to rage or panic, he reminded himself, willing himself to be like Antoninus. “Such a person has strength, courage and endurance,” he would say, “unlike the angry and complaining.”
[*] So if we throw out all these motivations for our ambitions, what’s left to prize in ourselves? “I think it’s this: to do (and not do) what we were designed for,” Marcus writes. “That’s the goal of all trades, all arts, and what each of them aims at: that the thing they create should do what it was designed to do.”
[*] In one of my favorite passages of Meditations, Marcus marvels at “nature’s inadvertence.” A baker, he writes, makes the dough, kneads it, and then puts it in the oven. Then physics, then Nature takes over. “The way loaves of bread split open on top in the oven,” Marcus writes; “the ridges are just by-products of the baking, and yet pleasing, somehow: they rouse our appetite without our knowing why.” It’s a beautiful observation about such a banal part of daily life, something only a poet could see. In a sense, we ought to see Meditations as the most wonderful example of this same process, a bit of nature’s inadvertence. Marcus’ philosophy dictated that he sit down, think, keep the ideas in mind, read and reread about them, talk with others about them, and write about them. Not for us. Not for publication. Not to impress anyone or make money. And yet, what emerged from that—the accidental byproduct—is one of the greatest works ever written.
[*] The great Admiral James Stockdale, who spent seven years under heinous conditions enduring near-constant torture in a Vietnamese prison camp, liked to quote Epictetus: “A podium and a prison is each a place, one high and the other low, but in either place your freedom of choice can be maintained if you so wish.” Marcus put it this way in Book 5, “Anywhere a man can live, there he can also live well. But he must live in a palace—well then, he can also live well in a palace.” And he proved it, just as he lived well in a military camp, thanks to, he said, “your ability to control your thoughts.”
[*] Along those lines, Marcus writes, “Everything turns on your assumptions about it, and that’s on you. You can pluck out the hasty judgment at will, and like steering a ship around the point, you will find calm seas, fair weather and a safe port.”
[*] In one of the most haunting paintings you’ll ever see—an 11×8-foot oil painting by Eugene Delacroix (a student of the Stoics)—a dying Marcus Aurelius, weakened by life’s hardships, addresses his weeping friends gathered at his bedside. Marcus knew the sun was setting on his life, as he would say to his bodyguard. With his last breaths, he is said to have drawn the attention of his friends, shown weeping and gathered around him in Delacroix’s painting. “Why do you weep for me?” Marcus asked them. Instead, he said, think about the plague still ravaging Rome. Think about how to keep it from claiming more lives. And think about “death,” he said, “the common lot of us all” and getting your own affairs in order before the sun sets on your life too.
***
Like all of us, there was a part of Marcus Aurelius that wanted to be good and a part that inclined towards something worse.
He had ideals, he had a temper. He had ambitions—some of which were selfless and some of which were selfish. He made commitments—as a father, a spouse, a leader—and then he also had urges and drives as a human being. There was a part of him that was lazy and a part of him that was hardworking. He was a good person and then he was given absolute power…which we know has the incredible power to corrupt.
In Book 6, he captures the struggle perfectly. “Fight to be the person philosophy tried to make you,” he writes.
Lately, I’ve taken to signing books with my own spin on it and I have the same thing written on a notecard on my desk: “Fight to be the person philosophy wants you to be.”
That’s the lesson I’ll leave you with: this is a lifelong fight we are in. Marcus even talks about it towards the end of Meditations. He asks himself, How old are you? How much longer are you going to keep falling short? When are you going to get this together? It was the battle of his life. Up until the day he died, he was struggling with this. But he always kept fighting.
And that’s what we have to do. That’s why I keep reading and rereading Meditations. That’s why I’ve taken to signing it in books.
Fight for those four virtues, those “touchstones of goodness.”
Fight for that part of you that wants to be good, courageous, disciplined, and wise.
Fight to be the person philosophy wants you to be.
In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius shares roughly 500 rules of life—profound insights and guidelines for living well.
And if you’re ready to explore Meditations more deeply, our official How To Read Meditations guide will show you the way. Purchase the guide before April 26 to join an exclusive LIVE Q&A with me, where I’ll address all your questions about Marcus and his Meditations.
You can also bundle the guide with a copy of Meditations and save 20% this month! Head here to learn more and get your guide, book, or bundle today!
