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RyanHoliday.net - Meditations on strategy and life
Blog

This Is Why Our Leaders Should Be Stoic

It was a dark time for the Republic. 

Institutions had stopped working. Interminable foreign wars dragged on. Norms—the old way of doing things—seemed to have broken down. There had been election fixing and the passage of preposterous legislation. Corruption was endemic. 

So when a certain popular politician reached out to a senator on the other side of the political aisle to dangle an offer that might make both of them more powerful, it might have seemed like more of the same. 

Not to Cato, a philosopher-cum-politician. He wanted nothing to do with the powerful general Pompey’s attempt at an alliance via marriage—perhaps to Cato’s daughter or niece. Although the ladies of Cato’s household were excited at the prospect, Cato was decisively not. 

“Go and tell Pompey,” he instructed the go-between, that “Cato is not to be captured by way of the women’s apartments.” 

It’s one of those moments that seems admirable through its purity, and high-handedness. Politics shouldn’t be done that way; good for him for staying above it. Yet on closer inspection, it’s one that leaves the historian with considerable doubt. It was principled, but was it politically wise? Was it effective?

Humiliated and angry, Pompey turned to Julius Caesar, who received him with open arms. United and unstoppable, conjoined through marriage to Caesar’s daughter Julia, the two men would soon overturn centuries of constitutional precedent. Civil war soon came. 

“None of these things perhaps would have happened,” Plutarch reminds us, “had not Cato been so afraid of the slight transgressions of Pompey as to allow him to commit the greatest of all, and add his power to that of another.” 

Rome during this storm is an increasingly cliché reference point these days, but we turn to it because the parallels are there. Thousands of years have passed, and people are still people. Politics is still the same business. Cato remains, as he was then, a complicated figure who should both inspire and caution us. 

Cato was a pioneer of the filibuster, blocking any legislation he believed contrary to the country’s interests—blocking even discussion of it. He condemned his enemies loudly and widely. He refused even the slightest political expediency. Cicero observed that Cato refused to accept that he lived amongst the “dregs of Romulus.” 

His overweening purity became a vice unbecoming of a philosopher. 

It also backed Caesar into a corner. It gave him the very evidence he needed to make his argument: The system isn’t working. I alone can fix it. 

Politics can sometimes seem, especially from a distance, like a Manichean struggle between good and evil. In truth, there is always gray—and the good, even the Catos, are not always blameless. Cato’s inflexibility did not always well serve the public good. 

At the same time, Cicero, a peer of Cato, provides an equally cautionary example. He was a believer in the republic, but he was also ambitious. He struggled to balance his personal ambitions with his love of Rome’s institutions. In politics, he said, it’s better to stand aside while others battle it out and then side with the winner. Yet he abhorred violence and corruption. After one brave citizen, an artist, stood up to Caesar’s face during a performance, Cicero offered to make room for him in the good seats. “I marvel, Cicero,” the man retorted, “you should be crowded, who usually sit on two stools.” Cicero tried to play it both ways and in the end, accomplished less than Cato—and still died just as tragically. 

Does that mean it’s hopeless? That the path for politicians or disgusted citizens is either martyrdom or Vichy-like collaboration?

No, and although we tend to see philosophers as abstract or theoretically thinkers, in fact the Stoics who would come to lead Rome in the years to come learned much from this turbulent period. 

Marcus Aurelius, who would step into Caesar’s shoes several generations later, wrote to remind himself that one could not “go around expecting Plato’s Republic.” He knew that it was essential to compromise and collaborate. For example, he historian Cassius Dio compliments Marcus Aurelius for his ability to get the best out of flawed advisors and reach across the so-called aisle to get things done. 

Arius Didymus was the Stoic entrusted with advising Caesar’s heir, Octavian. A key element of his instruction was in the virtue of moderation. Although we tend to see “moderate” as a political slur today—just as Cato sometimes did—in truth, it is the key to successful leadership. Moderates are the grease that the wheels of government depend on, and their ability to compromise and accomplish things prevents the ascendency of fringe groups from seizing power for their own ends. 

Seneca took this balancing act to even higher levels, managing to hold his nose well enough to get five productive and peaceful years out of the Nero regime. Nothing about that situation pleased him, yet it’s hard to argue that the period of Quinquennium Neronis, those first five years of Nero’s reign, wasn’t the best possible outcome of a bad situation. 

George Washington, who took Cato as a personal hero, worked hard to manage his temper better than his idol. The job of a leader, he said, was not simply to follow rigid ideology, but to look at all events, all opportunities, all people through the “calm light of mild philosophy.” This phrase, despite being a phrase from a play about Cato, was quite difficult for the real Cato to follow. It was key to Washington’s greatness, however. His moderation and his self-restraint were what guided America through the revolution and its first constitutional crisis. In a single, tumultuous two-week period in 1797, historians have pointed out, Washington quoted that same line in three different letters. And later, in Washington’s greatest but probably least known moment, when he talked down the mutinous troops who were plotting to overthrow the U.S government at Newburgh, he quoted the same line again, as he urged them away from acting on their anger and frustration.

Unfortunately, we have lost our ability to speak to and study this kind of wisdom. The last time Stoic philosophy was brought to the public political stage, by the brave Admiral James Stockdale, it was all but laughed off for not playing well on television. Today, leaders and the social media mob have absorbed Cato’s stridency without his principles, not realizing what fodder this is for the Caesar’s and would-be Caesar’s of our own time. 

It has been exciting to me to hear that a number of high ranking political leaders have been exploring Stoicism again. Former Secretary of Defense Mattis is said to travel with a copy of Meditations. I’ve been fortunate to discuss Stoicism with a number of senators in the Senate dining room and in the halls of Congress. But clearly, we remain amongst the dregs of Romulus, without a Washington or a Marcus Aurelius to lead us. 

Philosophy in the ancient world was not something distinct from politics, nor should it be today. Philosophy, properly seen, is a framework to help guide politicians and leaders through the trying, difficult profession upon which so much depended. Stoics advised kings and held public office. They led armies and argued cases in front of high courts. 

But who advises our politicians today? What code do they consult?

The Stoics in Rome and Greece experienced all the civil strife and difficulties that we are experiencing now (including, in Marcus Aurelius’s case, a decade and a half of a global pandemic). They didn’t always succeed, but they tried and they tried to learn from history—they studied history so they could better practice their philosophy with the lessons learned from the actions of others. 

“It shapes and builds up the soul,” Seneca writes of philosophy, “it gives order to life, guides action, shows what should and shouldn’t be done—it sits at the rudder steering our course as we vacillate in uncertainties… Countless things happen every hour that require advice, and such advice is to be sought out in philosophy.” 

Now, more than ever, what Stoicism can teach us is that art of moderation. 

We can seek progress without being perfectionists and we can be pragmatic without being unprincipled. 

It’s not an easy task, but lest we go the way of Rome, we’ll need the calm, mild light of philosophy to guide us.

My new book, Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius, is a debut #1 best seller at The Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Check it out if you want to learn not only why we should not cancel the Stoics, but how urgent their lessons are to us in modern times.

If you do, I’ll still send over these pre-order bonuses which include three extra chapters I couldn’t fit in the book.

Thank you!

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November 17, 2020by Ryan Holiday
Blog

It’s Not About Intention, It’s About Action

It’d be wonderful if it were true. 

If we could, by the power of our thoughts, shape the world around us. 

If we could manifest the reality we wanted, if “like attracted like” in our lives, just as opposites attract in magnets. 

Needless to say, this is not true.

Actually, not “needless to say,” because the “Law of Attraction” is something that millions of people do believe in, despite that fact that it is, to put it mildly, complete horseshit. And it needs to be said.

My favorite example: In 2014, Rhonda Byrne, the author of The Secret—the famous book about the Law of Attraction—listed her Santa Barbara mansion for sale for some $23.5 million. A year later, she reduced it to $18.8. Then again to $14.9. Finally, after languishing for over five years, it sold for $13.6. 5 million less than she paid for it. 10 million less than she wanted for it. 

Byrne still walked away with a lot of money, to be sure; but she also, as it happens, walked away with unfortunate proof that reality—in this case “manifesting” as the market—doesn’t care what you think. No amount of manifesting changes what something is worth. In fact, a reporter at The Wall Street Journal asked Rhonda Byrne why she didn’t just wish for her home to get the full asking price. It wasn’t a priority, she said, so she hadn’t “put in the time and energy.” 

I guess that answer is a bit more palatable than admitting you’re a con artist. 

Dave Chappelle’s joke was that Rhonda Byrne should fly to Africa and tell those starving children her secret. That all they need to do is just visualize some roast beef, some mashed potatoes, and some gravy. They’d beg her to stop filling their minds with delicious impossibilities. “No, no, no,” Chappelle says, pretending to be Byrnes, “the problem is you have a bad attitude about starving to death.”

There’s no science that says your thoughts can will reality into behaving how you wish it to. Or that thinking negative thoughts will invite negative outcomes. In fact, literally all of science contradicts this. 

BUT…

Here’s the tricky part: Our thoughts are extremely powerful. Our worldview does influence what we see. Telling yourself that something is possible or impossible can function as a kind of effective truth. 

Much more rigorous and less mystical thinkers than the Secret gurus have known this for centuries. Marcus Aurelius said, “The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes the color of your thoughts.” He also said, “Our life is what our thoughts make it.” 

To the Stoics, the discipline of perception was essential. If you saw the world as a negative, horrible place, if you saw other people as your enemies, if you believed that you were screwed, you were right. Marcus Aurelius didn’t believe you manifested the future through “energy,” but he did believe that you had the power right here and now to determine whether you’d be “harmed” by something. If you decided to see what happened as good, you could make it good. 

The Stoics would say that our thoughts determine the character of the reality we live in. If you see the awfulness in everything, your life will feel awful—even if you are surrounded by wealth and success. If you have a growth mindset, if you consider the very real chance of adversity, you won’t be easily discouraged when you fail. If you find something to be grateful for in every situation, you will feel blessed and happy where others feel aggrieved or deprived. 

The problem with the Law of Attraction is that it cuts both ways. By believing that thinking positively produces positive outcomes, it actually makes practitioners very vulnerable—because they will deliberately avoid thinking of potentially negative outcomes. And then guess what? When these outcomes do happen—because, well, life—they’re caught off guard. 

That’s why the exercise of premeditatio malorum (“the premeditation of evils”) is not dangerous, as many Secret manifesters might fear, but the epitome of safe. “Rehearse them in your mind,” Seneca said, “exile, torture, war, shipwreck. All the terms of our human lot should be before our eyes.” The unexpecting are crushed, he said, the prepared, resolute. 

Marcus Aurelius, via something he learned from Epictetus, would take a moment before he tucked his children in at night to linger briefly on their mortality. Writing in Meditations, he reveals that even two thousand years ago, some foolish people worried that this would be “tempting fate.” In fact, Marcus did tragically lose children, in line with the horrifying infant mortality rates of his time. But because he took the time to love his family, to be with them, while he had the chance, bottomless regret was not piled on top of unfathomable loss. In part because the loss was indeed fathomable, and Marcus had fathomed it on a nightly basis. 

That is actually the key: The discipline of perception is worthless on its own. What matters is what follows—the discipline of action. 

A Stoic is able to think positively because they know they can create positive outcomes with their actions. A Stoic isn’t afraid to think negatively either, because these thoughts help shape the actions they’re going to take (again, to create a positive outcome). They don’t wait for The Universe to line up perfectly with their vibrations and visualizations. They get moving. They assert agency. Action by action, Marcus said, no one can stop you from that. 

Which is the part that people who believe in positive visualization ironically seem to miss. I always laugh when I see authors I know in the self-help world point to the successes they have manifested… when I saw how it actually happened: Hustle. Creativity. Commitment. The publicist they hired… 

Russell Wilson is a big proponent of visualizing the outcome he wants to see. Is that what put a Super Bowl ring on his finger? No, it was the work. It was pass after pass after pass in practice. It was the hundreds of hours of film. It was pushing through injuries and doubters and losses. 

Which does the credit lie? In the thoughts? Or the action?

Positive thinking won’t magically give you more. It won’t magically make you famous or sell your house for 10% above asking. It won’t prevent pain or tragedy either. 

But it will help you appreciate your life. It will help you endure adversity that others can’t handle. It will put you in the right mindset to act. 

The best part of this is that it’s no secret either. It’s just common sense. 

So let’s practice that—the law of action.

To me, it’s all about habits. The actions you take every single day. I built Daily Stoic’s Habits for Success, Habits for Happiness Challenge to help people build better systems for a better life. It’s an awesome, six-week experience—inspired by the best habits from Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus and my own life—that will help you ditch your bad habits for good and get you great new ones to replace them. Join us here.

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October 27, 2020by Ryan Holiday
Blog

Should We Cancel the Stoics?

By most of what seems like the current criteria, the ancient Stoics are ripe targets for cancellation. 

They were white. They were rich. They wrote about being “manly.” They even referred to foreigners as barbarians! Inexcusably, the philosophy at times argues for the now-heretical idea of accepting that certain parts of life—like other people’s opinions—may in fact be, gasp, outside our control. 

But even allowing for this political incorrectness, it’s indisputable: The Stoics owned slaves. They fought in wars of aggression. They were implicated in the persecution of Christians. It’s hard to defend Seneca’s years inside Nero’s regime. 

So should we cancel them? Ban them from schools? Do the students at Brown know that the replica of Marcus Aurelius which sits on their campus was put there by a Gilded Age robber baron? Maybe the Twitter mob will demand action.

Thankfully, there haven’t been too many calls to do this… yet. I suspect it will come soon enough. After all, The New York Times is already worried about the trend of wealthy entrepreneurs “determined to make themselves miserable” via Stoicism. A Quartz headline claimed that Silicon Valley is “using an ancient philosophy designed for Greek slaves as a life hack,” egged on by a Cambridge professor who seems intent to link Stoicism to Donald Trump. Even the Ayn Rand Institute has joined in, not just writing a piece titled The False Promise of Stoicism, but spending a sizable ad budget to promote the piece to any curious soul who dares google Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus. 

I hope we do not cancel the Stoics, and not only because this is the philosophy I have been lucky enough to write about and introduce to groups from NATO forces to NFL teams. I say this because the more I study Stoicism, the more I find that it possesses the exact formula for getting society out of this polarized, selfish, and deranged mess in which it’s currently submerged. 

First, we should stop with this “old white guys” stereotype, because it’s not even true. The Stoics, unique among the philosophers, hailed from the far-flung corners of the known world, from Cyprus, Turkey, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Spain, and Iraq. Some were rich, but many were poor. Epictetus was a slave. Cleanthes made his living as a manual laborer. He also wrote a book titled On the Thesis That Virtue Is the Same in a Man and a Woman, a tradition that modern female Stoics like Arianna Huffington, Michele Tayofa, and the musician Camila Cabello help prove today. 

But the primary knock against Stoicism—often propagated by academics who should know better—is that the philosophy is apathetic. Sure, Marcus Aurelius talked about the “art of acquiescence,” but that was to things—like the weather or the loss of a loved one—outside our control. But he also spoke of the importance of serving and protecting the common good more than eighty times in his brief Meditations. The idea that the Stoics were indifferent to current or political events is preposterous, not only because Cato held multiple public offices, Panaetius was a diplomat, Publius Rutilius Rufus was an anti-corruption crusader, and more recently Admiral James Stockdale ran for Vice President. 

Seneca and Thrasea and Helvidius all died defying Nero’s tyranny (and Porcia Cato, daughter of Cato the Younger, committed suicide rather than submit to the Second Triumvirate). In fact, it was their example, alongside the earlier example of Cato, that inspired the Founding Fathers to start the American Revolution. George Washington even put on a play about him in the bitter winter at Valley Forge. It was a translator of Epictetus, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who raised and led one of the first black regiments for the Union in the Civil War. 

The image of the resigned Stoic, indifferent to suffering and injustices of the world, is a preposterous strawman that modern critics of Stoicism have repeated enough times that it feels true… when really, all the evidence is to the contrary. (The third of Stoicism’s four main virtues is literally “justice.”) 

So if the Stoics were not just rich white guys dedicated to preserving the status quo, who were they? 

They were flesh-and-blood human beings—good ones, ones we should be trying to model ourselves on and inspiring our children to do the same. One of Seneca’s best quotes echoes down to us today: “Wherever there’s another human being, there is an opportunity for kindness.” This was a man born just four years before Jesus, who in the same empire as Christ, was saying things like “Nature bore us related to one another… She instilled in us a mutual love and made us compatible… Let us hold everything in common; we stem from a common source.” 

Epictetus’s lectures on mental freedom, developed while he himself was a slave, would go on to inspire James Stockdale while he was a POW as well as the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture. Marcus Aurelius remains one of history’s few exceptions to the idea that absolute power corrupts absolutely. This was a man who sold off the treasures of the imperial palace during the Antonine Plague in order to pay off Rome’s debts. This was a man who opens Meditations by thanking one of his Stoic teachers for helping him understand the importance of a “society of equal laws, governed by equality of status and of speech, and of rules who respect the liberty of their subjects above all else.” This leadership was also deeply instructive to General James Mattis, who carries a copy of Meditations with him always. As he told a group of cadets at the Virginia Military Institute, 

Marcus Aurelius had a very tough life… He’s the Emperor of Rome but he’s got everything going wrong in his home life. His wife and his son were not people that you’d want to spend much time with. He spends almost all of his time up on the fringes of the Empire trying to protect the thing and the one time he leaves the German forest seems to be to go kill one of his friends who’s revolted against him in another place. It was a tough life and yet the humility and the dignity with which he conducted his life—the commitment to his country, to his troops, really comes through as you read those pages.

In short, he did the best he could. Just like you and I are trying to do. 

The purpose of Stoicism was to help human beings become better, to rise above their circumstances. Did they always succeed? Were they perfect practitioners? Did they manage to meet our modern expectations and morals always? Of course not. 

But who has time to complain or judge that? Instead, we should remember Marcus Aurelius’s famous dictum—edited only to be slightly less gender-specific—that we must “waste no more time arguing what a good person should be. Be one.”

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October 20, 2020by Ryan Holiday
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