In his letters, Seneca writes about the habit of finding one thing each day that makes you smarter, wiser, better. One nugget. One quote. One little prescription. One little piece of advice. And that’s how most of Seneca’s letters close: Here’s a lesson, he says. Here’s one thing.

Obviously that’s the logic behind the daily emails I write (Daily Stoic and Daily Dad) but it’s also the way I try to live. Every time I listen to a podcast or record one myself, I try to grab at least one little thing. That’s how wisdom is accumulated—piece by piece, day by day, book by book, podcast by podcast.

So today, coming now a few days after a quiet Father’s Day camping with my kids along the Llano River in Texas, I wanted to share some of the best pieces of parenting advice I’ve picked up from conversations with people on the Daily Dad podcast (which you can subscribe to here), reading, and interactions with other ordinary parents.

If you’re a parent or will be one day, these are 25 pieces of advice you will want to regularly return to:

–When your child offers you a hand to hold, take it. That’s a rule I picked up from the economist Russ Roberts. You might be tired, you might be busy, you might be on the other line—whenever they reach out, whenever they offer you a hand to hold, take the opportunity.

-There is no such thing as “quality” time. On my desk, I keep a medallion that says Tempus Fugit (”time flies”) on the front and “all time is quality time” on the back, so I think about Seinfeld’s concept of quality time vs. garbage time every day. 

-This solves most problems. When you’re grouchy and frustrated and anxious and short with your spouse and your kids—you might just be hangry. In 2014, Researchers from Ohio State University found that most fights between couples are because someone is hungry. Same goes with parents and kids and between kids, I imagine. 

-Just be. Before we had kids, I was in the pool with my wife. “Do you want to do laps?” I said. “Should we fill up the rafts?” “Here help me dump out the filter.” There was a bunch of that from me. “You know you can just be in the pool,” she said. Now when I’m with my kids, I remind myself, Just be here now. Just be here with them. 

-Do this over dinner. Some families watch TV at dinner. Some families eat separately. Some families talk idly about their day. Dinner at the philosopher Agnes Callard’s house is different. She told me that she, her husband, and her children have philosophical debates over dinner. The topics range from serious to silly, but it’s the activity itself that really matters. It’s that for an hour or two every night, she is not doing anything but connecting with the people she loves. My kids are younger, so our dinner discussions range from silly to sillier. But again, it’s the time together that really matters.

–Routine is EVERYTHING.

–You are constantly losing them. Every parent’s deepest fear is losing their child. And the terrible, beautiful tragedy of parenthood is that, indeed, we are constantly losing our children. Day, by day, by day. Not literally, of course, but in the sense that they are constantly growing, changing, becoming someone different. On a daily, if not an hourly, basis. On the podcast, Professor Scott Galloway told me about the profound grief he felt looking at a picture of his 11-year-old, who was now a great 14-year-old. The 11-year-old, Galloway realized, was gone for good. 

-A child’s life should be good, not easy. There is a famous Latin expression. Luctor et Emergo. It means “I struggle and emerge” or “wrestle with and overcome.” The gods, Seneca writes, “want us to be as good, as virtuous as possible, so assign to us a fortune that will make us struggle.” Without struggle, he says, “no one will know what you were capable of, not even yourself.”

–There’s a difference between having a kid and being a parent. In one of his Father’s Day messages as president, Barack Obama pointed out that the ability to have a kid isn’t what makes you a parent. It’s actually raising a child that makes someone a father – or a mother.

–Let them know your suitcase is packed. One of my favorite stories we’ve written about at Daily Dad is one about Jim Valvano’s dad. In high school, Valvano told his dad he was not only going to be a college basketball coach, but he was going to win a National Championship. A few days later, his dad pointed towards the corner of his bedroom, “See that suitcase?” “Yeah,” Jim said, “What’s that all about?” “I’m packed,” his dad explained. “When you play and win that National Championship I’m going to be there, my bags are already packed.” As Nils Parker pointed out on the Daily Dad podcast: The suitcase is a metaphor. It may have literally contained clothes, but it was really full of love and faith and limitless support. Valvano’s father was not making a statement about basketball. He wasn’t even telling his son that he expected him to be a great coach. What he was saying was much simpler, much more visceral. He was saying, I believe in you. He was saying, I support you. No matter what it is you want to do, or where life pulls you, I will be there for you.

-Be demanding and supportive. From Angela Duckworth: “The parenting style that is good for grit is also the parenting style good for most other things: Be really, really demanding, and be very, very supportive.”

-Spend money to teach values. Ron Lieber—the longtime “Your Money” columnist for The New York Times and author of The Opposite of Spoiled: Raising Kids Who Are Grounded, Generous, and Smart About Money (one of my all-time favorite titles)—told me a story about a time his three-year-old daughter asked, “Daddy, why don’t we have a summer house?” He said that she clearly had been pondering the question for some time, that she clearly had an interest in where her family stood in relation to other families, and that she clearly had a hunch that her family could have a summer house but made a decision to not have a summer house. It struck Lieber in that moment: how you spend money is a signal of what you value. “Our choices, not just our words, but our choices have meaning. They are modeling something. They model a certain form of trade-off.”

-Go the f*ck to sleep. That’s the advice of a book I love to read to my kids: Go the F*ck to Sleep! Morning routines are great but a bedtime routine is maybe more important. 

-Give power to get power. Randall Stutman, leadership coach to some of Wall Street’s biggest CEOs, told me his teenage kids taught him an important lesson about power. You gotta figure out how to get people to think it’s their idea to do what you want them to do. “You gotta give up power to keep power,” he said. “You gotta give up power to maintain power.” One of the interesting things about power is that the harder you try to hold on to power, the less of it you actually have. The harder you try to force your kids to do things, the less likely they are to do those things. Whatever it is you want them to do, you gotta figure out how to get them to think it’s their idea.

-Give what you didn’t get. Josh Peck never met his dad. Thoughts about his absent father haunted him throughout his life. When he died in his 80s, Josh was 26 and for six straight years, he was haunted by the thought of never getting amends. Then at 32, Josh and his wife had their first child. “When I had my son,” he told me, “I realized that I received the amends I’d always been looking for.” How? “By being the father to him that I never felt that I got. Correcting generational trauma can be as easy as just not giving it to the next generation.”

–Let them see you loving your work. Our instinct is to find “work-life balance.” Our instinct is to take the job that can afford the best life for our kids. But what if these instincts are wrong? Paul Graham has written about how these instincts can actually do more harm than good. “If you take a boring job to give your family a high standard of living, as so many people do, you risk infecting your kids with the idea that work is boring. Maybe it would be better for kids in this one case if parents were not so unselfish. A parent who set an example of loving their work might help their kids more than an expensive house.”

-Carve out sacred time for yourself. Speaking of not being so selfless, James Clear, author of the wonderful bestseller Atomic Habits, told me that when he became a father, he carved out “two sacred hours” in the morning to do his writing. Sometimes he gets more, but never less. This idea of sacred time is important. You have to carve it out. You have to stick to it like clockwork, protect it like you would a doctor’s appointment or a big meeting. You’ll marvel at what you can accomplish in that sacred time you’ve kept all to yourself.

-You can only pick two. I asked the prolific artist and father of two, Austin Kleon, how he makes time for it all. “I don’t,” he said. “The artist’s life is about tradeoffs.” And then he added a little rule that we should all keep with us always: Work, family, scene. Pick two.

-Hang their pictures on your wall. In 2019, Volodymyr Zelenskyy gave a twenty-minute presidential inaugural address to the people of Ukraine. Despite being one of his country’s greatest success stories, making a fortune in the entertainment business and then holding its highest office, Zelenskyy asked not to be celebrated or held up as a model. “I really do not want my pictures in your offices, for the President is not an icon, an idol or a portrait,” he said. “Hang your kids’ photos instead, and look at them each time you are making a decision.” 

-Everything you say “YES” is saying “NO” to something else. Related to the last two bullets, a few years ago, Dr. Jonathan Fader, an elite sports psychologist who spent nearly a decade with the New York Mets, gave me a picture of Oliver Sacks. Sacks is in his office speaking on the phone, and behind him is a large sign that just says, “NO!” I have that photo hanging on the wall in my office now. On either side of it, hang pictures of each of my sons. I can see them—all three photos—out of the corner of my eye even as I am writing this. It’s a sort of embodiment of the options Austin Kleon had laid out. I’m working. I have my two kids and my wife. I’m tapped out. 

-Your living is the teaching. Socrates’ students said of their teacher that for all the genius he possessed, Plato and Aristotle and all the other sages who learned from him “derived more benefit from [his] character than [his] words.” 

-Make fast transitions. Another from Randall Stutman: “​​Your job as a leader is to make really fast transitions…Your job is not to carry the last conversation…if that means you need to settle yourself and sit out in your car for a couple of minutes before you walk in the house so you can now be Dad, then that’s what you need to do. But your job is not to walk into that house and carry with you anything that came from before.”

-Don’t do everything for them. General H.R McMaster, a father of a millennial, told me about how he and his daughter jokingly refer to her peers as the “start-my-orange-for-me generation.” Meaning, they can’t even peel an orange without having their parents get it going first. And why is that? Because for as long as they’ve been conscious of it, their parents have been doing stuff like that, whether it was with science fair projects or arguing with teachers over their grades or funding the downpayment for a house. There are lots of reasons for this snowplow, helicopter parenting style: Narcissism, fear, insecurity, economic uncertainty and, of course, real love. But regardless of the emotion behind it, the effect is the same: It creates a kind of learned helplessness. It creates dependency. It creates resentment too—at the parents, at the world—as they face difficult problems without the necessary tools for solving them. I think Plutarch’s line about leaders applies to parents too: “A leader should do anything but not everything.”

-They do most of it. When the comedian Pete Holmes heard that Mitch Hurwitz, the creator of Arrested Development, had two daughters who were both in their twenties, he congratulated him. “You did it!,” he said, acknowledging that his friend had made it through the gauntlet, successfully raising two daughters to adulthood. But Hurwitz refused to take the compliment. “You know, they did most of it,” he joked. Which is true! While being a parent is incredibly important…we’re not nearly as important as we think we are. Our kids are doing the most of the work. 

-Every situation has two handles. And as Epictetus said, we always get to choose which handle we grab. The pandemic has been hard on our family, like all others, but instead of grabbing onto that, I grab onto one of the things I’m most grateful for: the time at home it gave me with my family—all the meals together, all the time in the pool with my kids, all the bathtime and bedtimes, and all the time working on… 

Last year, Daily Stoic put out The Boy Who Would Be King. I’m excited to share that we’re following it up with Epictetus’s story—from a slave to a symbol of the ability of human beings to find freedom in the darkest of circumstances—in another all-ages fable, The Girl Who Would Be Free.

I’ve probably read The Girl Who Would Be Free to my kids 50-60 times over the last year.It started out as rough notes on pieces of scrap paper, then coalesced into a narrative and then were laid out as the drawings came in from my awesome collaborator Victor Juhasz. They saw it not just evolve, but be trimmed and tightened and then ultimately made real, into this thing we can hold in our hands. I’m really proud of it and hope you check it out. It is available right now for pre-order over at dailystoic.com/girl where we are offering a bunch of exclusive bonuses and deals to everyone who orders The Girl Who Would Be Free through the Daily Stoic Store BEFORE July 8, 2022.

Anyway, I look forward to hearing what your family takes from this delightful story ​​filled with timeless lessons.

[Pre-order The Girl Who Would Be Free]

Today, I turn 35 years old. This feels incredibly weird to me because I vividly remember writing a version of this article on my 25th birthday, on the eve of the release of what would be my first book. But that is the nature of life, as you get older, long periods of time—like the famous Hemingway line—slowly and then all at once, feel like short periods of time. And so here I am, entering the second half of my thirties, reflecting on what I’ve learned. 

In those ten years, I wrote more than 10 books. I got married. I had two kids. Bought a house. Then a farm. Then a 140-year old building to open a bookstore in. I’ve traveled all over the world. I’ve read a lot. I’ve made a lot of mistakes (as I wrote about last year). I’ve seen some shit (a pandemic?!?). I’ve learned some stuff, although not nearly enough. 

As always, that is what I wanted to talk about in this annual article (you can check out my pieces from 33, 32, 31, 30, 29, 28, 27, and 26). Rules, lessons, insights, trivia that I’ve learned in the last year…as well as the last thirty five years. You may agree with some and find others to be incomprehensible or outright wrong (but that’s why it’s my article). 

So…enjoy. 

–Don’t compare yourself to other people. You never know who is taking steroids. You never know who is drowning in debt. You never know who is a liar. 

–There’s a sign by the track I run at in Austin, put there by Hollywood Henderson (who paid for the track). It says, “Leave This Place Better Than You Found It.” To me, that’s the meaning of life, in things big and small (but mostly small). 

–I’m continually surprised at how much even very famous, very rich, very powerful people appreciate a kind word about their latest TV appearance, accomplishment or project. The point of this isn’t that “celebrities are people too,” it’s that if praise from a friend/acquaintance still registers even at that level, what do you think it means to your kids or to your co-worker/employees or to your siblings and friends?

–You don’t have to explain yourself. I read one of Sandra Day O’Connor’s clerks say that what she most admired about the Supreme Court Justice was that she never said “sorry” before she said no. She just said “no” if she couldn’t or didn’t want to. So it goes for your boundaries or interests or choices. You can just say no. You can explain to your relatives they need to get a hotel instead of staying at your house. You can just live how you feel most comfortable. You don’t have to justify. You don’t have to explain. You definitely don’t need to apologize.

–You don’t have to be anywhere. You don’t have to do anything. All that pressure is in your head. It’s all made up.

–On your deathbed, you would do anything, pay anything for one more ordinary evening. For one more car ride to school with your children. For one more juicy peach. For one more hour on a park bench. Yet here you are, experiencing any number of those things, and rushing through it. Or brushing it off. Or complaining about it because it’s hot or there is traffic or because of some alert that just popped up on your phone. Or planning some special thing in the future as if that’s what will make you happy. You can’t add more at the end of your life…but you can not waste what’s in front of you right now. 

–The older you get, the harder it is to see how subpar—or outright crazy—the things you accepted as totally normal once were. You notice this trend when you have kids and people proudly (see: judgmentally) explain to you the insanely dangerous or cruel things they used to do to their kids. We used to let our kids…You see this with some of the COVID analogies people make (pointing out all the other dangers we accept as if it’s totally reasonable for so many people to die of heart disease or car accidents). It’s important to push back against this—to not let cognitive dissonance prevent you from enjoying a better, safer, different present/future. 

–Speaking of a process that happens when you get older, I absolutely hate that expression that says, “if you’re not liberal when you’re young, you have no heart, and if you’re not conservative when you’re older, you have no brain.” Put the dubious politics of that aside, the implication there is that you should stop listening to your heart as you get older. That’s the opposite of what you want. The goal should be to get kinder, more compassionate, more empathetic as you go. 

–Just drink more water. It’s very unlikely you’re drinking enough and a veritable certainty that you’re not drinking too much. Trust me, you’ll feel better. 

–Same goes with walking. Walks improve almost everything.

–One of my all-time favorite novels is What Makes Sammy Run? After spending the whole novel hoping that the main character “gets what’s coming to him,” the narrator finally realizes that the real punishment for Sammy is that he has to be Sammy. His life, having to live inside that head—even with all the trappings—that is the justice he was hoping would fall upon him. I have found that this observation held true with many of the people who have tried to hurt me or screw me over in my life. Comeuppance did not come in the form of some sudden event, but like Schulberg said, it was a subtle, insidious daily thing. 

–This backlash against “elites” is so preposterously dumb…and I say that as a proud college dropout. Everyone and everything I admire is elite. The way Steph Curry shoots. The way Robert Caro writes. What a Navy SEAL can do. This idea that we should celebrate average people and their average opinions about things is well…how you make everything worse than average. 

–Lengthen your timeline. Opening my bookstore, The Painted Porch (delayed a year by COVID) taught me that it always takes longer than you think it’s going to take. That’s Hofstadter’s law. And even when you take the law into account, you’re still surprised. 

–I have come to believe that inside the human species there is a kind of dark energy—some combination of fear, evil, ignorance, cruelty, mob-ness. This dark energy has always been with us. It was there when they burned witches. It was there when they sicced dogs on protestors who wanted their right to vote. It was there screaming slurs at gay people or telling women to go back to the kitchen. This energy can be blocked but never defeated—it’s like water, it just pools and then seeks a new outlet. The question always, in every political and social issue, is to ask whether you’ve been corrupted by or given yourself over to that dark energy.

–If you can’t walk away from the deal, it’s probably not a deal in the first place. 

–Seneca said, “I pay the taxes of life gladly.” He doesn’t just mean from the government. Annoying people are a tax on being outside of your house. Delays are a tax on travel. Negative comments and haters are a tax on having a YouTube channel. If you become a famous person, they’ll make up rumors about you. If you do charitable work, people will question your intentions or your motivations. If you have kids, you will lose sleep. There’s a tax on everything in life. You can whine about it. Or you can pay the taxes of life gladly, as Seneca said, and then move on.

–My kids often nap in the car, usually for an hour or so. It’s strange, sometimes as I drive around while they sleep, I’ll look down at the speedometer and think, why am I going so fast? I have nowhere to go, I have nowhere to be…literally the whole point of the drive is waiting…yet here I am trying to hurry while I do it? 

–What if the most impressive thing was to be great at what you do and be a good parent, good spouse, good person? What if instead of trying to achieve one more thing or set some new record, you tried to prove it was possible to be elite and decent? Or better, elite and (relatively) normal? 

–A year or two ago, I made the decision to stop basically all the advertising that my business does. I decided to put that money into making content instead—videos, articles, etc. I did this because it occurred to me that the money I was spending on ads made basically no positive impact on the world (if any impact at all), but articles and videos could at least be enjoyed by people (for free no less), even if they didn’t drive the same amount of ROI. In the long run, this content will be around forever and have a bigger and more meaningful reach. This is a small-scale decision given the size of my business, but if people spend more time trying to maximize the positive externalities of what they did instead of optimizing for short term profits, I think they’d be happier…and ultimately do better. 

–I have a drawing on my desk that Hugh McLeod sent me. It just says, “Like an asshole, I took him/her/it for granted.” 

–The last few years are an important reminder that good leaders/correct ideas fail without good communication and bad leaders/abhorrent ideas can find serious traction with good communication. It’s not enough to be right. You have to be able to sell it. 

–Despair and cynicism only contribute to the problem. Hope, good faith, a belief in your own agency? These are the traits that drive the change that everyone else has declared to be impossible. 

–Modern life is hard. Just think of all the things people have to know how to do today—from technology to the unwritten rules of polite society. Think of all the information thrown at a person from the moment they wake up. Think of the emotional acuity required to operate in daily life today. When you understand this, and how incredibly unequipped many people (see: some whole generations) are for this, it should help you be a lot more patient. They just can’t handle it. That explains so much of their behavior. Doesn’t excuse but it exposes.

–When Seneca said that poverty wasn’t having too little, it was wanting more, he wasn’t talking about poor people. He was talking about rich people. Which brings me to something I have begun to understand: wealth is not having to think a lot about money very often. Sadly this means a lot of rich people choose to live very poorly.

–Bruce Springsteen has a lot of great lyrics but the one that I think about most is this:

We fought hard over nothing

We fought ’til nothing remained

I’ve carried that nothing for a long time

–The most important thing I’ve taken from the success of my books is an understanding that everything starts as an uncertain mess—one you often despair of ever coming together. At a low point during my last book, I found a note card that I’d written to myself that just said, “Do your notecards. The book will come together.” That’s how it goes with every project. The process will get you there…if you trust it. The more you’ve done it, the more trust you have. Because you know. 

–We tend to think of ego as a millionaires or billionaires disease—something that afflicts the successful. In fact, it does the most damage to promising people/teams/causes in the early phases. 

–I was reading a book recently and I could feel a part of my mind trying to find a way to blame the subjects of the book for their own problems. The reason I was doing this, I came to reflect, was that if it was their fault, then I wouldn’t really have to care. I wouldn’t have to do anything or change any of my beliefs. I think it is this impulse that explains so much of where we are in the world today. This headline here is one that I think about almost every single day for that reason. You have to fight that trick of the mind, the one that looks for reasons not to care. It’s the devil’s magic. 

–If you can afford to, delegate it. If you can’t yet afford to, automate it. Time is the most precious resource. 

–The best coaches and CEOs aren’t the ones who succeed just on the field or in the boardroom. The true greats are measured by their coaching tree—what the people who worked for them, who they mentored, who they inspired go on to do. 

–Most people would rather argue about reality than do something about reality. 

–When I get emails/comments from people who are mad that I said something political, I sometimes remind them that I didn’t build an audience by telling people what they want to hear. I built it by saying what I think needed to be said. And besides, how successful are you really if you censor yourself because you’re afraid it will cost you? 

–Peter Thiel, famously seen as a “contrarian,” once told me that being a contrarian is a bad way to go. You can’t just take what other people think/do and put a minus sign in front of it. The point is to think for yourself. So in fact, if you find yourself constantly in opposition to everyone and everything (or most consensuses) that’s probably a sign you’re not doing much thinking. You’re just being reactionary. 

–Everyone else has patterns. Has an ego. Follows trends. Is a product of their time. But not you, right?

I guess the final thought here, as it is in some form every year, is my favorite one from Seneca. It’s not that I am now one year closer to my death per some actuary table, it’s that I have now died one full year. Because Seneca is right, the time that passes is as good as dead. The question to ask yourself with every year, every month, every day, every minute is: Did I live it while I was in it?

***

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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.”

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