Quick note: I’m hitting the road for a Stoicism speaking tour throughout the rest of the year. So far, dates are set for Portland, SF, Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Australia, and New Zealand, with more to come. Get tickets (and updates when new dates are added) here!
Sitting on my desk as I write this is a book I paid $8.25 for nearly twenty years ago.
The cover is taped back on. Nearly every page is marked or folded. They have yellowed with age, in some cases becoming almost translucent. Nearly every passage has something noted or underlined. There are spills and stains everywhere.
I bought it when I was 19 years old. I had been invited to a small, private summit of college journalists that Dr. Drew, then the host of Loveline, was hosting. After it ended, he was standing in the corner and I cautiously made my way over to nervously ask if he had any book recommendations. He said he’d been studying a Stoic philosopher named Epictetus and that I should check it out.
I went back to my hotel room, and I can’t remember why, but I didn’t order the Epictetus book. Maybe I did a quick search about Stoic philosophy and learned that Marcus Aurelius was also a Stoic, and since I knew him from Gladiator, I decided to start there? I don’t know. But I ended up ordering Marcus’ Meditations, along with a couple other books I’d had my eye on to qualify for free shipping (Amazon Prime didn’t exist back then).
I seem to remember my copy arriving right away after I purchased it, but recently searching my email for the order number, I found an angry customer service ticket, where teenage-me is 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,” Marcus writes. “It doesn’t have to upset you.”
I had no idea that the money I spent on that book—and the couple days of waiting—would become the single best time and money I ever spent. I had no idea that it would change the course of my life. And I had no idea that I was just another link in a multi-century chain of people discovering that the right book at the right time is a powerful thing.
In fact, it can change the whole course of your life.
Marcus Aurelius himself would probably understand my feelings here, for he himself notes in the opening pages his gratitude to his philosophy teacher, Rusticus, “for introducing me to Epictetus’s lectures—and loaning me his own copy.” The life of a future king was changed by the wisdom of a Greek slave who had triumphed over torture and exile, whose lectures were fortuitously recorded by a student in the early second century A.D. (and, just as unpredictably, survive to be read by us today).
Epictetus himself found freedom from slavery, long before he was legally free. How? In the writings of the Stoics, in the words of Musonius Rufus. He read his way to freedom, literally and figuratively, as Frederick Douglass would do in America two thousand years later.
The late basketball coach George Raveling tells the story in his book What You’re Made For about his grandmother, who raised him. One night, as they were cooking dinner, she told him that back in the days of slavery, plantation owners would hide their money in the books on the shelves of their libraries.
“Why did the slave masters hide their money in books, George?” she asked him.
“I don’t know Grandma,” George replied, “why did they do that?”
“Because they knew the slaves couldn’t read,” she said, “so they would never take the books down.”
It’s a dark subject to bring up with a young boy. But George—who would go on to become the first African American basketball coach in what’s now the Pac-12, win 2 Olympic medals, and earn a Hall of Fame induction—said it was this early lesson that began his lifelong “love affair with books.”
To me, the moral of that story is not just that there is power in the written word (that’s why they made it illegal to teach slaves to read), but also that what’s inside them is very valuable. And the truth is that books still have money between the pages, though not because someone put it there in order to keep it from you.
Think about how many people want to get better—at something, anything, everything. Look at how many people are desperate to be successful, or to extricate themselves from this cycle of mediocrity that has trapped so many of our generation. These people look everywhere for the solution to their problems. They seek out secret formulas, shortcuts, gurus. They will turn their entire world upside down before they stop and look at the one place where you can always be sure to find answers—the book shelf.
Warren Buffett is one of the richest men in the world, today worth $140 billion. Do you know what he traces his fortune back to? His single best investment decision? A book! The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham, which he first read at the age of 19. We don’t know exactly what he paid for it, but in the late 1940s, a hardcover typically went for $1.30. “Of all the investments I ever made,” he said, “[it] was the best.” In the late 1940s, books would have cost perhaps a dollar but even if Buffett had paid millions for it, it’d have still been a pretty good ROI.
I myself wouldn’t be writing this to you today if I hadn’t spent that $8.25 back in 2006. That book didn’t just teach me about life. It taught me how to write. It schooled me in the art of working with and managing people. It gave me the subject that I’ve now spent nearly two decades writing my own books about—books that have somehow sold millions of copies and helped bring this two-thousand-year-old philosophy back into the world.
Again, not a bad ROI!
And of course, the real investment wasn’t the money I spent on the book. It’s the time I’ve spent and continue to spend on it. The time spent reading it. The time spent rereading it. The time spent reading Gregory Hays’s peerless introductory remarks that preface his translation. The time spent reading other editions (e.g. Robin Waterfield’s fully annotated edition). The time spent reading other books (e.g. Pierre Hadot’s Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius) and essays (e.g. Matthew Arnold’s Marcus Aurelius) about the book. The time spent reading biographies about Marcus (e.g. Donald Robertson’s Marcus Aurelius: The Stoic Emperor). The time spent tracking down and interviewing people like Hays, Waterfield, and Robertson. The time spent traveling to Rome to immerse myself in the world he lived in (see the picture at the top of this article).
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.’” If I’d stopped at “just getting the gist” of Meditations, my entire life would have turned out differently.
Buffett didn’t just stop at “the gist” either. He didn’t just read The Intelligent Investor. He read it and reread it and reread it. And a few years later, he decided to apply to Columbia Business School where Graham was a teacher. He went “straight to the seat of intelligence,” as Marcus wrote of his own development as a leader, and struck up a friendship with Graham, who later hired Buffett.
It’s not enough to read—you have to go down rabbit holes, look up words you don’t know, reach out to experts, share interesting ideas with others, earmark pages, and make notes in the margins.
FYI: This is the idea behind the Daily Stoic How to Read Meditations Guide we put together—a digital guide that distills all of my reading, rereading, and rabbit-holing of Meditations into a kind of roadmap designed to help you get out of the book in a few weeks what took me twenty years. As part of Meditations Month, as we refer to April over at Daily Stoic, get the guide before April 26th—Marcus’s birthday—to join us in the live Q&A I’m hosting on the 27th!
Some people might recoil at all this talk categorizing books as investments, as things that owe us a return of some kind. But that’s exactly what books are. That’s exactly what makes them unique. In Book 1 of Meditations, Marcus himself writes that it was one of the great lessons he learned from his great-grandfather—to invest in learning “and to accept the resulting costs as money well-spent.”
It’s why one of my reading rules is, if you see a book you want, just buy it. Don’t worry about the price. Reading is not a luxury. It’s not something you splurge on. It’s a necessity. Even if all you get is one life-changing idea from a book, that’s still a pretty good investment.
Have I applied this rule and bought books that turned out to be duds? Hundreds of times. Maybe thousands. But that’s how any investment strategy works. The winners pay for the losers, and then some.
So never forget that it’s in your self-interest to read. There’s incredible power and money hidden in books.
But only if you spend the time.
Only if you go way beyond the “gist.”
P.S. As I mentioned briefly above, April has been Meditations Month over at Daily Stoic, where I’m rereading Meditations alongside our Daily Stoic Community as part of our How to Read Meditations Digital Guide.
In addition to the 11 in-depth modules of the guide, we’re having discussions on our private platform and I’m hosting a live Q&A on April 27th, where I’ll take your questions.
Just get the guide before April 26th (Marcus Aurelius’ birthday) to receive your invite to the Q&A.
This month only, you can also purchase the leatherbound edition of Meditations to get the digital guide and access to the Meditations Month exclusives FREE. Just head to dailystoic.com/meditations.
I hope to see you on the 27th!
