One of the pleasures of re-reading a book, re-watching a film, re-visiting a place, is that you always discover something new. The Stoics were fond of the idea—which comes from Heraclitus—that we never step in the same river twice. I have found this to be true when it comes to Marcus Aurelius, a man I have written about and studied now for nearly a decade and a half. Each time I read his writing, each time I talk about him, each time I visit a museum or place he lived, I understand him a little differently. I think about him differently. He speaks to me a little differently. 

He teaches me something new. 

It is amazing Meditations, year after year and read after read, feels both incredibly timely and incredibly timeless (there’s a reason the book has endured now for almost twenty centuries). It’s amazing that a person so famous—known to millions in his own lifetime and subject to countless books and articles and movies—could still be giving off new secrets, but indeed that’s what he’s doing. 

In today’s post, I thought I would share some of the ones I have discovered, things you probably don’t know about one of the greatest thinkers, philosophers, and leaders who ever lived. 

-He lived through a pandemic. Not just through a pandemic, but they named it after him! The Antonine Plague of 165 CE, a global pandemic with a mortality rate of between 2-3%, began with flu-like symptoms until it escalated and became gruesome and painfully fatal. Millions were infected. Between 10 and 18 million people eventually died. The fact that Marcus Aurelius was writing during a plague, that he may well have died of a plague created a different way for me to see and understand what Marcus was writing about. When he says “you could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think”—he was talking about that in a time when you really could leave life right now. When he talks about how there’s 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. He was writing about a fracturing Rome, a contentious Rome when people were at each other’s throats, when things looked uncertain, when an empire looked like it was in decline.

-He was a crier. We know that Marcus Aurelius cried when he was told that his favorite tutor passed away. We know that he cried that day in court, when he was overseeing a case and the attorney mentioned the countless souls who perished in the plague. We can imagine Marcus cried many other times. Marcus didn’t weep because he was weak. He didn’t weep because he was un-Stoic. He cried because he was human. Because he lived through very painful experiences (as we will see below). Antoninus, Marcus’s stepfather, seemed to be a bit more in touch with his emotions than his young stepson. He seemed to understand how hard Marcus worked to master his temper and his ambitions and his temptations and that this occasionally made him feel bottled up. So when his stepson’s tutor died and he watched the boy sob uncontrollably, he wouldn’t allow anyone to try to calm him down or remind him of the need for a prince to maintain his composure. “Neither philosophy nor empire,” Antoninus said, “takes away natural feeling.”

-His nickname was “Verissimus.” The emperor Hadrian, who would have known young Marcus through his early academic accomplishments, sensed Marcus’ potential at a very early age. His nickname for Marcus, whom he liked to go hunting with, was “Verissimus”—the truest one. I love that. Even as a boy he was showing the earnestness and honesty which would define his time in power. 

-He had insomnia. Which makes the fact that he woke up early all the more impressive. As the most powerful man in the world, he didn’t have to do anything. But he was strict on himself about sticking to a schedule. “At dawn,” he reminded himself, “when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself, ‘As a human being I have to go to work…I’m going to do what I was born to do.”

–He had a 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 jokes in Meditations, including one about a guy who was “so rich that he had no place to shit.” 

-His most trusted general attempted a coup. In 175 CE Marcus Aurelius was betrayed by his most trusted general, Avidius Cassius, in an attempted coup. Marcus could have been angry. He could have demanded all the sadistic revenge possible to a man of his unlimited power. Yet we know from the historians that he handled even this moment with grace and understanding. In fact, he wept when he was deprived of the chance to grant clemency to his former enemy. “The best revenge,” Marcus would write in Meditations, “is to not be like that.”

-He spent 12 years at war. “Life is warfare and a journey far from home,” Marcus writes in Meditations. It was literally true. Some twelve years of his life would be spent at the empire’s northern border along the Danube River, fighting long, brutal wars. Dio Cassius describes the scene of Marcus returning to Rome after one long absence. 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 in the 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.

-He had a co-emperor. The first thing the first Roman emperor Augustus did upon seizing power was eliminate Julius Caesar’s illegitimate son, Caesarion. Claudius eliminated senators who threatened his reign. Nero, even with the moderating influence of Seneca, violently dispatched his mother and stepbrother. That’s basically the entire history of emperors and kings—an endless parade of heirs getting rid of other potential heirs. Marcus too had a rival, at least on paper: his stepbrother, Lucius Verus. Yet what did Marcus do? What was the first thing he did with the absolute power that we all know corrupts absolutely? He named his brother co-emperor. He willingly ceded half his power and wealth to someone else. Imagine that. 

-He lost EIGHT children. 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. 

-He liked the simple life. From the late Roman collection biographies known as the Historia Augusta, we learn that as a boy, Marcus slept on the floor then “at his mother’s solicitation, however, he reluctantly consented to sleep on a couch strewn with skins.” Brand Blanshard adds that he never developed much of an interest in money or the luxuries money could have afforded him. Instead, he likes to spend time on his farm, in a simple woolen tunic. When he visited the philosophers in Alexandria, he dressed like an ordinary citizen. When money was given to him, he signed it away to those who needed it. 

-He never claimed to be a Stoic. Gregory Hays, one of Marcus Aurelius’s best translators, writes, “If he had to be identified with a particular school, [Stoicism] is surely the one he would have chosen. Yet I suspect that if asked what it was that he studied, his answer would not have been ‘Stoicism’ but simply ‘philosophy.’” He then notes that in the ancient world, “philosophy” was not perceived the way it is today. It played a much different role. “It was not merely a subject to write or argue about,” Hays writes, “but one that was expected to provide a ‘design for living’—a set of rules to live one’s life by.”

-He 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.’”

-He had his life changed by a book. There was a man who changed Marcus’ life. His name was Quintus Junius Rusticus, a teacher who Marcus thanks in book 1 of Meditations “for introducing me to Epictetus’s lectures—and loaning me his own copy.”

-He had Imposter Syndrome. 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.

-He ran for office. Continuing a tradition set by Antoninus, when Marcus Aurelius was a candidate for any office (even the emperor was expected to serve a term as Consul), he approached it as a private citizen, deferring to the Senate and campaigning, in a sign of respect for free elections free elections. Even when his soldiers would proclaim him imperator—an honorific title to salute battlefield performance—Marcus “was not wont to accept any such honor before the senate voted it,” Dio Cassius writes. Even though he was entitled to whatever he wanted, he respected norms and humbled himself. 

-He once held a garage sale. 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.”

-He wrote in Greek. Latin was Marcus’ native tongue, but Greek was “the language of philosophy,” Gregory Hays tells us in the introduction of his translation of Meditations. 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. It’s like Steve Jobs learning from his father… 

-He was a nerd and a jock. “With his love of learning and his distinguished panel of flattering teachers,” Brand Blanshard writes, “Marcus was probably something of a prig, but he had a lean athletic body, liked to box, swim, fish, and hunt, and as he grew became a handsome man of gracious speech and manners.” 

-He spent his last moments consoling others. We’re told that Marcus was quite sick toward the end, far away from home on the Germanic battlefields, near modern-day Vienna. Worried about spreading whatever he had to his son, and also to avoid any complications about succession, Marcus bade him a tearful goodbye and sent him away to prepare to rule. Then with his own end moments away, he was still teaching, still trying to be a philosopher, particularly to his friends, who were bereft with grief. “Why do you weep for me,” Marcus asked them, “instead of thinking about the pestilence and about death which is the common lot of us all?”

-He never stopped learning. Late in his reign, a friend stopped Marcus as he was leaving his home one morning. Where are you going? To handle business? No, Marcus was on his way to attend a philosophy lecture. “Learning is a good thing, even for one who is growing old,” Marcus told the stunned man. “From Sextus the philosopher I shall learn what I do not yet know.”

***

This week’s article is sponsored by InsideTracker. Founded in 2009 by top scientists from acclaimed universities in the fields of aging, genetics, and biology, InsideTracker is a truly personalized nutrition and performance system. To live your longest and healthiest life possible, your body needs to be periodically tested and recalibrated. Blood biomarkers—objective measures of health status—change over time. And certain blood biomarkers are more closely associated with aging than others. InsideTracker has identified five main blood biomarkers related to healthy aging. All five of these biomarkers are measured as part of their Ultimate Plan. 

For a limited time, InsideTracker is offering a FREE ebook: The Top 5 Biomarkers for Longevity plus 20% off the entire InsideTracker store! Head on over to insidetracker.com/RSS to get started!

Reading is a good thing. A good thing too many people don’t do enough of (or any of it all…) So obviously doing lots of it is good, right? This is why people try to figure out how to speed read (a scam, I say!). This is why they show off their huge libraries (guilty!). This is why they listen to audiobooks at 2x or 3x speed. 

“Less is more? Quality over quantity? Not with books!” 

But not all reading is created equal. As Epictetus said, “I cannot call somebody ‘hard-working’ knowing only that they read.” He said he needed to know what and how they read. Sure, reading is better than a lot of other activities, but you can still do it poorly or for poor reasons. “Far too many good brains,” Seneca said, “have been afflicted by the pointless enthusiasm for useless knowledge.”

To be a great reader, it is not enough that you read, it’s how you read. These 13 strategies by no means make a complete list, but if you implement even a couple of them, I’m comfortable guaranteeing you’ll not only be a better reader for it, but a better person too.

Stop Reading Books You Aren’t Enjoying 

If you find yourself wanting to speed up the reading process on a particular book, you may want to ask yourself, “Is this book any good?”

You turn off a TV show if it’s boring. You stop eating food that doesn’t taste good. You unfollow people when you realize their content is useless.

Life is too short to read books you don’t enjoy reading. My rule is one hundred pages minus your age. Say you’re 30 years old—if a book hasn’t captivated you by page 70, stop reading it. So as you age, you have to endure crappy books less and less.

Read Like A Spy

One of the most surprising parts of Seneca’s writing is how that avowed Stoic quotes Epicurus, the founder of Epicureanism. Even Seneca knew this was strange as each time he did so in his famous Letters, he felt obliged to preface or explain why he was so familiar with the teachings of a rival school.

His best answer appears in Letter II, On Discursiveness in Reading, and it works as a prompt for all of us in our own reading habits. The reason he was so familiar with Epicurus, Seneca wrote, was not because he was deserting the writings of the Stoics, but because he was reading like a spy in the enemy’s camp. That is, he was deliberately reading and immersing himself into the thinking and the strategies of those he disagreed with. To see if there was anything he could learn and, of course, to bolster his own defenses.

Keep A Commonplace Book

In his book, Old School, Tobias Wolf’s semi-autobiographical character takes the time to type out quotes and passages from great books to feel great writing come through him. I do this almost every weekend in what I call a “commonplace book”— a collection of quotes, ideas, stories and facts that I want to keep for later. It’s made me a much better writer and a wiser person. I am not alone. In 2010, when the Reagan Presidential Library was undergoing renovation, a box labeled “RR’s desk” was discovered. Inside the box were the personal belongings Ronald Reagan kept in his office desk, including a number of black boxes containing 4×6 note cards filled with handwritten quotes, thoughts, stories, political aphorisms, and one-liners. They were separated by themes like “On the Nation,” “On Liberty.” “On War,” “On the People,” “The World,” “Humor,” and “On Character”. This was Ronald Reagan’s version of a commonplace book. Lewis Carroll, Walt Whitman, Thomas Jefferson all kept their own version of a commonplace book. 

As Seneca advised, “We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application–not far far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech–and learn them so well that words become works.”

Re-Read The Masters

You were in high school when you read The Great Gatsby for the first time. You were just a kid when you read The Count of Monte Cristo or had someone tell you the story of Odysseus. 

The point is: You got it right? You read them. You’re done, right? Nope.

We cannot be content to simply pick up a book once and judge it by that experience. It’s why we have to read and re-read. As Seneca put it, “You must linger among a limited number of master-thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind.” Because the world is constantly changing, we are changing, and therefore what we get out of those books can change. It’s not enough to read the classics once, you have to read them at every age, every era of your life. We never step in the same river twice, Marcus Aurelius said, and that’s why we must return again and again to the great works of history.

Read Fiction

There’s an interesting thread running through in the writings and teachings of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus that can zip right past you if you aren’t reading closely. What is it? What did all these great men share? They heavily relied on plays, tragedies, satires, mythologies, and other works of fiction to clarify their thinking and their own writing.

Epictetus draws on characters like Achilles and Agamemnon from the Iliad, Admetus from Euripides’ Alcestis, and a long list of others from Greek mythology. Marcus Aurelius quotes from the comedies of Aristophanes, the tragedies and plays of Euripides and Sophocles, and says we should read fiction “to remind us of what can happen, and that it happens inevitably—and if something gives you pleasure on that stage, it shouldn’t cause you anger on this one.” Seneca liked to quote the works of the great Roman poets Virgil and Lucius Accius, the legendary Homer, the playwright Plautus, and he wrote many brilliant plays himself. 

Yet, many people—even those with a voracious reading habit—make the same mistake: They hardly, if ever, read fiction. They even brag about it! They’re too busy. They don’t have time for “art.” There’s plenty of “real” stuff—the characters in fiction that bear little resemblance to the world we know? I don’t have time for it. But fiction, like all wonderful art, is filled with beautiful bits of insight about the human condition. It can change your life and teach you just as much as any non-fiction book. Actually, no, it can teach you more! It can shine a light on universal truths that non-fiction, bounded by the facts and figures of its specific world, often cannot (to say nothing of the research that connects literature with improved empathy, reduced stress, and hone social skills).

Read Before Bed

Speaking of reading fiction, the great William Osler (founder of John Hopkins University and a fan of the Stoics) told his medical students it was important that they turn to literature as a way to nourish and relax their minds. “When chemistry distresses your soul,” he said, “seek peace in the great pacifier, Shakespeare, ten minutes with Montaigne will lighten the burden.” He told his students to read to relax and to be at leisure. To keep their minds strong and clear.

Instead of turning to the TV or to Twitter, let us follow Osler’s advice:

“Start at once a bedside library and spend the last half-hour of the day in communion with the saints of humanity. There are great lessons to be learned from Job and from David, from Isaiah and St. Paul. Taught by Shakespeare you may take your intellectual and moral measure with singular precision. Learn to love Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Should you be so fortunate as to be born a Platonist, Jowett will introduce you to the great master through whom alone we can think in certain levels, and whose perpetual modernness startles and delights. Montaigne will teach you moderation in all things, and to be ‘sealed of his tribe’ is a special privilege.”

Ask People You Admire For Book Recommendations

Emerson’s line was, “If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.”

When I was a teenager, I got in the habit of doing this. Every time I would meet a successful or important person I admired, I would ask them: What’s a book that changed your life? And then I would read that book. (In college, for instance, I was lucky enough to meet Dr. Drew, who was the one who turned me on to Stoicism.)

If a book changed someone’s life — whatever the topic or style — it’s probably worth the investment. If it changed them, it will likely at least help you.

Look For Wisdom, Not Facts

We’re not reading to just find random pieces of information. What’s the point of that? We’re reading to accumulate a mass of true wisdom—that you can turn to and apply in your actual life.

You have to read and approach reading accordingly. Montaigne once teased the writer Erasmus, who was known for his dedication to reading scholarly works, by asking with heavy sarcasm, “Do you think he is searching in his books for a way to become better, happier, or wiser?” In Montaigne’s mind, if he wasn’t, it was all a waste.

Don’t Just Learn From Experience

“If you haven’t read hundreds of books,” the soldier-philosopher General James Mattis says, “you’re functionally illiterate.” Human beings have been fighting and dying and struggling and doing the same things for eons. To not avail yourself of that knowledge is profoundly arrogant and stupid. To paraphrase Mattis, it is unconscionable to fill up body bags while you get your education only by experience. It’s worse than arrogant. It’s unethical, even murderous. 

Well, the same is true for much less lethal professions. How dare you waste your investor’s money by not reading and learning from the mistakes of other entrepreneurs? How dare you so take your marriage or your children for granted that you think you can afford to figure this out by doing the wrong things first?

Too much depends on you for you to learn solely by experience—you have to also learn by the experiences of others. Drink deeply from history, from philosophy, from the books of journalists and the memoirs of geniuses. Study the cautionary tales and the screw ups, read about failures and successes. Read constantly—read as a practice.

Because if you don’t, it’s a dereliction of duty.

Study The Past To Understand The Present

“I don’t have time to read books,” says the person who reads dozens of breaking news articles each week. “I don’t have time to read,” they say as they refresh their Twitter feed for the latest inane update. “I don’t have time to read fiction—that’s entertainment,” they say as they watch another panel of arguing talking heads on CNN, as if that’s actually giving them real information they will use. 

Being informed is important. It is the duty of every citizen. But we go about it the wrong way. We are distracted by breaking news when really we should be drinking deeply from the great texts of history. Because the truth is that most truths are very old. In fact, it’s these timeless truths that teach us more about the future and about our current times than most of our contemporary thinking. 

The actor Hugh Jackman said in an interview that he gets his news by keeping his eye on the big picture—going through the Ken Burns catalog and reading books like Meditations. “That’s the way you should understand events and humanity,” he said, “with that sort of 30,000-foot view.” If you want to be informed, study the past.

Aim For Quality, Not Quantity

The philosopher Mortimer Adler talked about how the phrase “well-read” has lost its original meaning. We hear someone referred to as “well-read” today and we think someone who has read lots of books. But the ancients would have thought someone who really knows their stuff, who has dived deep in a few classic texts to the point that they truly understand them. “A person who has read widely,” Mortimer says of the modern reader, “but not well deserves to be pitied rather than praised.” The early 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes joked similarly, “If I read as many books as most men do, I would be as dull-witted as they are.”

You don’t have to read hundreds and hundreds of books. In fact, most people who make it their goal to read a certain amount of books each year inevitably fall off pace, get discouraged, and stop reading altogether. You’ll both read more and get a better return on your investment if you do what the Stoics advised. As Marcus Aurelius would say, don’t be satisfied with just “getting the gist” of things you read. “Read attentively,” he said. Read deeply. Read repeatedly. Aim for quality, not quantity. 

Get Out Of A Dry Spell

The path to wisdom is not a straight one. The journey is long and circuitous. It’s a windy road with twists and turns, ups and downs, highs and lows. Maybe you’re in the middle of one of those lows yourself right now, at the bottom of the valley. This can be a scary place to be, because without the proper perspective it can feel like you’re going to be stuck there forever. You take a few steps in one direction, and it feels like you haven’t gotten anywhere. The top of the mountain is just as far away, if not more distant. 

There is a term for this phenomenon: being stuck in a slump. A reading slump always pops up for me, for instance, during a book launch when it’s nearly impossible to concentrate enough to read. I’m busy. I’m fried. For a variety of reasons, the result is always a reading dry spell. But I’ve found I’m able to get back into it by rereading something that has really spoken to me in the past. Instead of expecting a random book I pick up to really speak to me, I go back to something that has already spoken volumes…and find out how much more it has to say. I’ll grab a new translation of Marcus Aurelius and see him from a different view. I’ll go reread a favorite novel, such as A Man in Full or The Moviegoer or Memoirs of Hadrian. 

Join A Program

In 2018, we did our first Daily Stoic Challenge, full of different challenges and activities based on Stoic philosophy. It was an awesome experience. Even I, the person who created the challenge, got a lot out of it. Why? I think it was the process of joining a program. It’s the reason personal trainers are so effective. You just show up at the gym and they tell you what to do, and it’s never the same thing as the last time.  Deciding what we want to do, determining our own habits, and making the right choices is exhausting. Handing the wheel over to someone else is a way to narrow our focus and put everything into the commitment.

And if you are serious about becoming a great reader, the Stoics can help. We built out their best insights into our Read to Lead: A Daily Stoic Reading Challenge. Since it first launched in 2019, Read to Lead has been our most popular challenge, taken on by almost ten thousand participants. We recently announced that, for the first time ever, registration to join the 2022 live cohort is officially open.

The 2022 live course will take place across 5 weeks at a pace of 2 emails a week (~30,000 words of exclusive content). Additionally, there will be weekly live video sessions with me! It’s one of my favorite things to get the chance to interact with everyone in the course—I would love to have you join us. You can learn more here! But it closes May 16 at Midnight so don’t wait.

When I was 18 years old, I was a research assistant to Robert Greene. My job was to find stories he could use in his writing. Nearly seventeen years later, I still use so much of what Robert taught me about finding great stories in researching for my own writing. But the gift has been less in how it has helped me professionally, and more in how it has helped me personally. 

As I would learn much later, Robert was teaching me how to find what the ancient Greeks called a chreia: “an exemplary story about a famous person, often culminating in a memorable utterance,” as Gregory Hays has defined it. “Learning by precepts is the long way around,” Seneca wrote. “The quick and effective way is to learn by example.” In this article, I thought I would share a handful of my favorite stories I have found over the years—ones that have stuck with me and that I think will have a lasting impact on your life.

Enough.

The writers Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five) and Joseph Heller (Catch-22) were at a glamorous party outside New York City. Standing in the palatial second home of the billionaire host, Vonnegut began to needle his friend. “Joe,” he said, “how does it feel that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel has earned in its entire history?”

“I’ve got something he can never have,” Heller replied.

“The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”

How you do anything is how you do everything.

On the campaign trail, a heckler once tried to embarrass President Andrew Johnson by shouting about his working-class credentials. Johnson replied without breaking stride: “That does not disconcert me in the least; for when I used to be a tailor I had the reputation of being a good one, and making close fits, always punctual with my customers, and always did good work.”

Anything you do well is noble, no matter how humble.

Just work.

The dancer Martha Graham tells a story about her vaudeville days, when she was followed by a bird act. When the music went on the white cockatoos, trained by years of reinforcement and ritual, would become almost hysterical with excitement, clawing and beating at the cage until they go on stage and perform. “Birds, damnit, birds!,” she would yell at students who didn’t give their full commitment. The birds can’t want it more than you can. 

As they say in the Army, “You don’t have to like it. You just have to do it.” 

Always stay a student.

Late in his reign, a friend stopped Marcus Aurelius as he was leaving the palace, carrying a stack of books. Finding this to be a surprising sight, the man asked where Marcus was going. He was off to attend a lecture on Stoicism, he said, for “learning is a good thing, even for one who is growing old. From Sextus the philosopher I shall learn what I do not yet know.”

That’s right, even as the most powerful man in the world, Marcus was still taking up his books and heading to class.

It’s harder to be kind than clever. 

When he was a young boy, Jeff Bezos was with his grandparents, both of whom were smokers. Bezos had recently heard an anti-smoking PSA on the radio that explained how many minutes each cigarette takes off a person’s lifespan. And so, sitting there in the backseat, like a typical precocious kid, he put his math skills and this new knowledge to work and proudly explained to his grandmother, as she puffed away, “You’ve lost nine years of your life, Grandma!”

The typical response to this kind of innocent cheekiness is to pat the child on the head and tell them how smart they are. Bezos’ grandmother didn’t do that. Instead, she quite understandably burst into tears. It was after this exchange that Bezos’ grandfather took his grandson aside and taught him a lesson that he says has stuck with him for the rest of his life. “Jeff,” his grandfather said, “one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”

Your work is the only thing that matters.

A young comedian approached Jerry Seinfeld in a club one night and asked him for advice about marketing and getting exposure.

Exposure? Marketing? Seinfeld asks. Seinfeld, a pure stand-up, a comedian’s comedian, is appalled by the question. It’s offensive to his legendary heads-down work ethic. But to the kid, this was a surprise. Isn’t that the kind of question you’re supposed to ask? Isn’t that how you get ahead?

Just work on your act, Seinfeld said.

Get moving.

As a young woman, Amelia Earhart aspired to be a great aviator. But it was the 1920s, and people still thought women were frail and weak and didn’t have the stuff. Woman suffrage wasn’t even a decade old. She couldn’t make her living as a pilot, so she was working as a social worker. 

Then one day the phone rang. A donor had been willing to fund the first female transatlantic flight. But there was a catch: Amelia wouldn’t get to actually fly the plane. She’d have to sit in the back like “a sack of potatoes,” as she put it. And not only that—the two male pilots were going to get paid, but she wouldn’t get paid anything.

Guess what she said to the offer? She said yes. Because that’s what people who defy the odds do. That’s how people who become great at things—whether it’s flying or blowing through gender stereotypes—do. They start. Anywhere. Anyhow. They don’t care if the conditions are perfect or if they’re being slighted. They swallow their pride. They do whatever it takes. Because they know that once they get started, if they can just get some momentum, they can make it work. And they can prove the people who doubted them wrong, as Earhart certainly did.

They still hide money in books.

As a young boy, the famed basketball coach George Raveling learned an invaluable lesson from his grandmother, who raised him. As they were preparing dinner in the kitchen one evening she began to tell him about how in the days of slavery, the plantation owners would hide their money in 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.”

There’s a reason it was illegal to teach slaves to read. There is a reason that every totalitarian regime has burned and banned books. Knowledge is power. It sounds like a cliche, but cliches only sound that way because of the generally accepted truth at their core. 

How to create anything of consequence.

Plutarch tells the story of a rich Delian ship owner who was asked how he built his fortune. “The greater part came quite easily,” he said, “but the first, smaller part took time and effort.”

Creating anything of consequence or magnitude requires deliberate, incremental, and consistent work. “Well-being is realized by small steps,” Zeno would say, looking back on his life, “but is truly no small thing.”

Be the red.

In a famous exchange, the Stoic philosopher Agrippinus explained why he was spurning an invitation to attend some banquet being put on by Nero. Not only was he spurning it, he said, but he had not even considered associating with such a madman. 

A fellow philosopher, the one who had felt inclined to attend, asked for an explanation. Agrippinus responded with an interesting analogy. He said that most people see themselves like threads in a garment—they see it as their job to match the other threads in color and style. They want to blend in, so the fabric will match. But Agrippinus did not want to blend in. “I want to be the red,” he said, “that small and brilliant portion which causes the rest to appear comely and beautiful…’Be like the majority of people?’ And if I do that, how shall I any longer be the red?”

Use it all as fuel.

At age sixty-seven, Thomas Edison was eating dinner with his family when a man came rushing into his house with urgent news: A fire had broken out at Edison’s research and production campus a few miles away. Fire engines from eight nearby towns rushed to the scene, but they could not contain the blaze. Fueled by the strange chemicals in the various buildings, green and yellow flames shot up six and seven stories, threatening to destroy the empire Edison had spent his life building.

Edison calmly but quickly made his way to the fire, through the now hundreds of onlookers and devastated employees. Finding his son standing shellshocked at the scene, Edison would utter these famous words: “Go get your mother and all her friends. They’ll never see a fire like this again.”

The Stoics loved the metaphor of fire. Marcus Aurelius would write that “a blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.” That’s what Edison did. He did not despair. He did not weep. He did not rage. Instead, he got to work. He told a reporter the next day that he wasn’t too old to make a fresh start, “I’ve been through a lot of things like this. It prevents a man from being afflicted with ennui.” 

Do what you have to do. 

Before the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant experienced a long chain of setbacks and financial difficulties. He washed up in St. Louis, selling firewood for a living—a hard fall for a graduate of West Point. An army buddy found him and was aghast. “Great God, Grant, what are you doing?” he asked. Grant’s answer was simple: “I am solving the problem of poverty.”

Never question another man’s courage.

After he became premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev was onstage, speaking to the Politburo, denouncing the crimes of Stalin’s regime. Anonymously, some unnamed member passed a note to the front of the room. “Yes,” it said, “but where were you at the time?”

Without a beat, Khrushchev, with an intimidating tone, shouted and asked who wrote the note. Silence. “I was where you are now,” Khrushchev. Meaning, in the audience. Anonymous. Intimidated. Doing nothing. Just like everyone else. 

Alter your approach.

As a young working actor, George Clooney struggled with how to tackle his audition process. Clooney was always concerned about the problem that he faced: how to book an acting job and earn some much-needed income. How did he deal with this? 

Clooney turned the situation around and had a realization: the audition was also an obstacle for the producers, who needed to find someone to fill the role and do an amazing job. Clooney began to approach his auditions from a different angle. Instead of going into his auditions as someone trying to get a job, he approached them as someone who could help the producers do theirs better. As a result, he began landing roles and would eventually become one of Hollywood’s most celebrated leading men.

You only control the effort, not the results.

John Kennedy Toole’s great book A Confederacy of Dunces was universally turned down by publishers, news that so broke his heart that he later committed suicide in his car on an empty road in Biloxi, Mississippi. 

After his death, his mother discovered the book, advocated on its behalf until it was published, and it eventually won the Pulitzer Prize.

What changed between those submissions? Nothing. The book was the same. It was equally great when Toole had it in manuscript form and had fought with editors about it as it was when the book was published, sold copies, and won awards. If only he could have realized this, it would have saved him so much heartbreak. He couldn’t, but from his painful story we can at least see how arbitrary many of the breaks in life are.

Good things happen in bookstores.

On a merchant voyage in Athens in the 4th Century BC, a man named Zeno was shipwrecked. He lost everything. He washed up in Athens where he walked into a bookstore and listened to the bookseller reading dialogues from Socrates. After the reading, Zeno asked the question that would change his life: “Where can I find a man like that?” and in so doing, he began a philosophical journey that led to the founding of Stoicism and then, to the brilliant works of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius — which, not lost to history, are beginning to find a new life on bookshelves today. From those heirs to Zeno’s bookshop conversion, there is a straight line to many of the world’s greatest thinkers, and even to the Founding Fathers of America.

All from a chance encounter in a bookshop. According to the ancient biographer Diogenes Laertius, Zeno joked, “Now that I’ve suffered shipwreck, I’m on a good journey,” or according to another account, “You’ve done well, Fortune, driving me thus to philosophy,” he reportedly said. 

On the window of our shop, The Painted Porch—named after the Stoa Poikile (“Painted Porch”) where Zeno taught his classes—we have written in large letters: “Good things happen in bookstores.”

Big ones, small ones, corporate or independent ones. Where books are browsed, new ideas are introduced to older readers, while old ideas are introduced to newer readers. And perspectives shift just the same. Couples connect. Experiences are shared. Worlds are built—in the pages of the books being browsed, and in the lives of those doing the browsing.

Follow the process.

There’s a story of the great 19th-century pioneer of meteorology, James Pollard Espy, and a chance encounter as a young man. Unable to read and write until he was 18, Espy attended a rousing speech by the famous orator Henry Clay. After the talk, a spellbound Espy tried to make his way toward Clay, but he couldn’t form the words to speak to his idol. One of his friends shouted out for him: “He wants to be like you, even though he can’t read.”

Clay grabbed one of his posters, which had the word CLAY written in big letters. He looked at Espy and said, “You see that, boy?” pointing to a letter. “That’s an A. Now, you’ve only got 25 more letters to go.”

As Heraclitus observed, “under the comb, the tangle and the straight path are the same.” There is no task, however seemingly mammoth, that is not just a series of component parts.

Remember that you will die.

In late 1569, a French nobleman named Michel de Montaigne was given up as dead after being flung from a galloping horse. As his friends carried his limp and bloodied body home, Montaigne watched his own life slip away, like some dancing spirit on the “tip of his lips,” only to have it return at the last possible second. This sublime and unusual experience marked the moment Montaigne changed his life. Within a few years, he would be one of the most famous writers in Europe. After his accident, Montaigne went on to write volumes of popular essays, serve two terms as mayor, travel internationally as a dignitary, and serve as a confidante of the king.

It’s a story as old as time. Person nearly dies, takes stock, and emerges from the experience a completely different, and better, person. And this is the old philosophical idea of memento mori—”remember that you will die.” In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius wrote, “you could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” Never assume that you have a firm grasp on life because it could slip from your fingers at any moment.

***

This week’s email is sponsored by InsideTracker. Founded in 2009 by top scientists from acclaimed universities in the fields of aging, genetics, and biology, InsideTracker is a truly personalized nutrition and performance system. To live your longest and healthiest life possible, your body needs to be periodically tested and recalibrated. Blood biomarkers—objective measures of health status—change over time. And certain blood biomarkers are more closely associated with aging than others. InsideTracker has identified five main blood biomarkers related to healthy aging. All five of these biomarkers are measured as part of their Ultimate Plan. 

I worked out an exclusive deal with InsideTracker for you all. Go to insidetracker.com/RSS right now to get their FREE ebook: The Top 5 Biomarkers for Longevity plus 20% off the entire InsideTracker store! Head on over to insidetracker.com/RSS to get started!