Transcription
best ever.
The best lessons are taught through stories. That's how humans have learned for thousands and thousands of years. There's a reason Jesus spoke in parables. There's a reason that the ancient Greeks had a whole genre of stories called *kerygma*. What the translator of Marcus Aurelius, Gregory Hayes, would say, exemplary stories followed by a memorable utterance.
My name's Ryan Holiday. I've written a number of bestselling books that basically follow this formula. And for years on social media, we've been telling these stories on Daily Stoic and Daily Dad. They've reached millions and millions of people. And what we're going to highlight today are some of our best, most viral stories that can teach you or your kids or anyone watching some of the most powerful and important lessons you can learn in life.
My all-time favorite Marcus Aurelius story comes at the depth of the Antonine plague. It's ravaged Rome. That's not even the only crisis that happens in his reign. There's a flood. There's a coup. There's an invasion. He's just like besieged on all sides. Rome's treasury is depleted. Things look very bleak. It's not clear even that the empire can continue. And so what does Marcus Aurelius do? He leads a two-month sale of the palace furnishings. He sells his robes and his jewels. His wife sells their furniture. They sell down the palace furnishings to raise money. The idea being that the leader takes the hit first, that the leader eats last, as the expression goes. Like Marcus could have made this somebody else's problem. He could have denied that there was a problem. He could have kicked the can down the road. Instead, he stepped up and he did the hard thing. And he did the hard thing as a bit of demonstrative leadership. And to me, that's what I love about Stoicism. It's an interior philosophy, but it's designed to shape your actions in the real world where the stakes are really high. Marcus Aurelius wasn't a philosopher. He was a leader who happened to be a philosopher.
There's a great story about Thomas Edison. He's America's most successful inventor. He's towards the end of his life. He's a millionaire many times over and he's having dinner with his family and a man rushes in and he says, "The factory is on fire. You have to come quick." Edison gets there and it is his life's work is up in flames and there's no chance this fire is going out. But he finds his son. The son is standing there shell-shocked and Edison grabs him and he says, "Go get your mother and all her friends. They'll never see a fire like this again." And I just I love that story so much because instead of crying, instead of weeping, instead of blaming, he's just taking this brief moment to enjoy the surreal, almost terribleness of his fate. He's finding something good in it. The Stoics have this idea of *amor fati*, which Nietzsche perfectly encapsulates when he says, "You don't just bear what is necessary, you love it." That's what *amor fati* means. It's a love of fate. And that's what Edison does. He tells a reporter, "Look, I've been through stuff like this before. It prevents a man from being bored." And he throws his life into rebuilding after this. He takes a loan from Henry Ford and he's back up and running within six weeks and then within six months. So the idea is, stuff is going to happen and it can break your heart. It can break your spirit. Or you can say, "Go get your mother and all her friends. We'll never see a fire like this again." And you can love it and embrace it and turn it into the greatest thing that ever happened to you.
2,000 years ago, a young man named Zeno visits the Oracle at Delphi. He asks for advice. "What should I do? What's the secret to life?" And the oracle tells him, "You will become wise when you begin to have conversations with the dead." And it's not until many years later when Zeno is in a bookstore and he hears the bookseller reading aloud a passage from Socrates that it hits him. Reading is having conversations with the dead. Even now, we call reading the classic texts, including the ideas of Zeno and all the other Stoics. We call this the great conversation because we're talking with people who are no longer with us. Socrates was dead when Zeno heard that bookseller bringing his ideas to life. Zeno is long dead and I'm talking to you about him right now. We will become wise when we begin to have conversations with the dead. When we read and listen to the voices of the past.
In October of 1962, John F. Kennedy wakes up in the White House and he's briefed by the CIA. The Russians have set up a series of ballistic nuclear missiles on the island of Cuba. And Kennedy has every reason to be upset, not just because this is dangerous. The world is now on the brink of nuclear war. But he had specifically talked to Khrushchev about this very plan and been assured that it was not going to happen. This was a provocation. Had it been taken as one, though, the world could have ended like that in a nuclear holocaust. Almost every single one of Kennedy's advisors told him the only option on the table was bombing Cuba. Those were the conservative ones. The aggressive ones said he had to bomb Cuba and East Berlin and Russia. This was a provocation and provocation must be met with response. And Kennedy has the discipline, the perspective to step back and say, "Hey, what are they going to do after we do that?" And he says, "I think you guys are wrong, but I'm worried you're so wrong that no one's going to be around to say, 'I told you so.'" And so, in what became known as the 13 days, Kennedy does what leaders are supposed to do. He's very firm. "This cannot be allowed to stand." But his eye is always on de-escalation. He is constantly finding ways to give his opponent a way out. The Romans called this the golden road. You want to pave a golden road behind your enemy to allow them to retreat. Eventually, Khrushchev partly comes to his senses. He backs out. Kennedy has back-channeled a plan to remove some American missiles from Turkey that he had already known to be obsolete. He gives them something to trade for. This is what diplomacy and compromise is about. And he backs the world off from the brink of catastrophe and disaster.
So my favorite thing about Epictetus is, he's born a slave and he finds himself a slave in the court of Nero. So here you have this guy, he has no power, no freedom, amidst incredible wealth, power, and opulence. But he comes to realize, watching how people act in Nero's court, that these supposedly free people aren't nearly as free as he thinks. He watches a man suck up to Nero's cobbler. Like, he's brown-nosing the guy who makes Nero's shoes because he wants to get in Nero's favor. One man comes to Nero and says, "I'm down to my last million dollars." And then Nero says, "Oh my god, how can you bear it?" Epictetus realizes although he's been deprived of his physical freedom, he's actually less of a slave than all of these people who are slaves to their ambition, slaves to power, slaves to impressing other people, slaves to appearances, slaves to urges or mistresses. And so, Epictetus realizes that freedom comes from the inside. Yes, people can bind us up in chains, he says, but they can't remove our power of choice. They can't change our ability to make our decisions, to set our own priorities. That's what Stoicism is actually about. And that's why the philosophy is popular not just with Epictetus the slave, but Marcus Aurelius, who's an emperor, later in that same court.
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People don't know this, but John F. Kennedy very nearly lost the 1960 presidential election. In fact, he won by only about a half a percentage point and in the end, it came down to about 30, 35,000 votes. So what happened? Martin Luther King was arrested right before the election on trumped-up charges and sentenced to four months on a prison chain gang. And his wife was actually very worried that he would be lynched or murdered in prison. And so she called both the Nixon campaign and the Kennedy campaign. Nixon, who was actually friends with Martin Luther King, decided not to get involved. He didn't want to piss off southern voters. John F. Kennedy called the judge, called Coretta Scott King, and his brother also worked to get Martin Luther King released. And Martin Luther King would say after that, he was stunned by this because Nixon had been his friend. And he said, "I always regarded Nixon as a moral coward after that." And it was the news of this that rallied the black community to vote for John F. Kennedy in the election and won. It's really just a few seconds of courage that win Kennedy the election and lose Nixon the election. And I talk about this in *Courage Is Calling*. You know, we think bravery is this big thing, but it's really a very small thing. It's an immediate thing. It was a call to Martin Luther King's wife. It was a call to a judge. It was the decision to get involved, to ignore the reservations.
Marcus says, "Just that you do the right thing, the rest doesn't matter." You do the right thing and you trust that doing the right thing will pay off. You also trust in your ability to survive even if people don't appreciate that you did the right thing. And courage is always better than cowardice.
There's a pretty amazing story about Marcus Aurelius. Pretty late in life, he's seen leaving his palace in Rome and he's carrying these tablets and a friend says, "Where are you going?" He says, "I'm off to see Sextus the philosopher to learn that which I do not yet know." The friend marvels. He says, "Here's the most powerful man in the world, even at an old age, picking up his books and going to school." I think that's in effect what Marcus is. He remains a student. It's his notebook. It's his exercise book. It's his workbook. He's doing work on himself even as an old man. And the fruits of that come down to us. It's just so wonderful to think of Marcus, even as an old man. Maybe some of the lines in here he learned from Sextus the philosopher. He thanks Sextus the philosopher in Book One, the "Debts and Lessons" chapter. So the idea for Marcus was that you always stay a student.
There's an amazing story about the actor George Clooney. He spends much of his early career struggling to get jobs. He goes into auditions and they never work out. Then he has this breakthrough. He realizes they are not the solution to his problem, but he is the solution to their problem. They are holding this audition because they need actors. They cannot start the movie or the play or the TV show without the right actor. So he flips his attitude about it and he starts to see himself as the solution to their problem as opposed to the desperate person hoping that they will do him a favor. And this is such a key Stoic exercise. Our perception is everything. Right? Seneca says, "We dye events with our own color." We decide how we're going to look at it. We decide the perspective we're going to bring to it. Are we going to bring desperation or are we going to bring confidence? Are we going to see ourselves as coming from a position of weakness or from a position of strength? That's on you. You decide that you control the attitude, the approach, the energy that you bring to a situation, and that will make you much more successful in those situations.
Love that. There's a story that I tell in one of my books about Joseph Heller, who wrote *Catch-22*, and Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote *Slaughterhouse-Five*. And they're at this party of this billionaire. Kurt Vonnegut is teasing Joseph Heller and he says, "You know, how does it feel to know that the guy whose house we're in, some billionaire or whatever, made more money this week than your book will make in its lifetime?" And he says, "Well, I have something that that guy doesn't have." And he says, "What could that possibly be?" And he says, "I know what enough is." Well, I love that story because it's not, you know, after Joseph Heller writes *Catch-22*, he doesn't stop writing books. That's not the end of it. I think it's a difference between doing something from a place of needing to prove something or needing to be something, and from a place of fullness where you're just like happy with who you are and you actually enjoy the work itself. Dude, I'm going to tell that story forever.
That book, *The Greek Way*. Robert F. Kennedy, when he's running for president, somebody gives him a copy of that book. It blows his mind. He hadn't been familiar with the Greek myths. When Martin Luther King Jr. is shot, he has to give this impromptu speech in Indianapolis. The crowd is just hearing the news at the same time he's hearing the news. And it's on the verge of this riot. And he gets up there and he gives this famous speech where he quotes Aeschylus from memory, which he had not read himself. He had gotten it from *The Greek Way* by Edith Hamilton. Basically, there are riots all over the country that night, but not in inner-city Indianapolis. Because in this moment, he draws on this line from Aeschylus about how our suffering teaches us and this is how we discover truth. And there's just something so beautiful about, you know, this terrible moment of history drawing on this multi-century-old bit of wisdom.
The first thing to understand about Marcus is that he lived through a plague. You know, people sort of vaguely understood that the Antonine plague happens in Marcus Aurelius's time. That's why it's called the Antonine plague. And Marcus Aurelius mentions it obliquely a few times in *Meditations*. But I think it's only going through the COVID-19 pandemic over the last couple of years that helps one understand the way that an event like that would have shaped Marcus. One of my favorite quotes from Marcus, he says, "There are two types of plagues. There's the one that destroys your life and the one that destroys your character." Understanding that Marcus would have seen all the kinds of extreme and callous and strange behavior that people, you know, and love may have exhibited over the last couple years during this pandemic. That helps us understand what he's talking about. And that the quote holds true. There are people who maybe they didn't get COVID, but they caught something much worse. Or they did get COVID and they lived through it, thank God, but they're carrying with them the effects of something much worse: conspiratorial thinking, cruelty, indifference to other people. But Marcus' life is shaped by the plague. It's also an opportunity, a crisis for him to respond to as a leader. Actually, one of the things he learns from his stepfather, Antoninus, was to listen to experts. And this is why Marcus puts Galen, the great medical mind of his time, in charge of the pandemic response. But also the exercise of *memento mori* for the Stoics, the idea that life is short, that you could go at any moment. This is something Marcus would have experienced firsthand. He witnessed death all around him constantly. Millions of Romans died in this horrendous plague. And ultimately, we think even Marcus Aurelius died of it. And his last words are a reminder to his friends who were crying over his deathbed not to think of him, this singular individual, but all of the people who died of the plague, and all of the people who would eventually die, including potentially his friends themselves.
Edith Eger, your audience probably knows who she is. Edith, when she was 16 years old, growing up in Eastern Europe, she was going for a date with her boyfriend that night. She's trying to think about what dress she's going to wear, and her family get a knock on the door. Her sister, her, and her two parents get put on a train to Auschwitz. Within two hours of getting there, both of her parents are murdered. An hour or two later, she, as a 16-year-old girl, gets asked to dance for the senior prison guards. There's many things from that conversation that have never left me, Ryan. She said, "The final thing my mother said to me, Edith, nobody can ever take from you the contents that you put inside your own mind." And then she says, "When I was dancing in Auschwitz, I wasn't in Auschwitz. In my mind, I was in the Budapest Opera House. I had a beautiful dress on. The orchestra was playing. The crowd were cheering." Then she tells me, "I started to see the prison guards as the prisoners. They weren't free in their mind. I was." She said to me, "Ryan, I had lived in Auschwitz and I can tell you the greatest prison is the prison you create inside your own minds."
Well, there's a story about Epictetus. So, Epictetus has this little shrine in his house to the gods and he has this golden or silver lamp. He's in bed and he hears someone rustling. Someone has broken into his house. He makes his way down the hallway and a thief has broken in and is in the process of stealing the lamp. And he sees him running away with the lamp. And Epictetus says, "I'm a fool. You can only lose what you have. Tomorrow I will go and buy an earthenware lamp." And his point was that he had this thing that he didn't want stolen because it was valuable. The problem was him, not the thief. So he buys a cheaper lamp the next day. It's kind of a Diogenes the Cynic thing, like have fewer possessions and you're less vulnerable to fortune or misfortune.
A philosopher goes to the house of a Stoic named Arrian and says, "Hey, I've been asked to attend this party that Nero is throwing on. We all know Nero is awful and corrupt and evil. I'm wondering whether I should go or not. I'm thinking about it. You know, should I go?" And Arrian says, "Yes, you should go." And the guy says, "Why? You're not going?" And he says, "Yeah, but I didn't even think about going." His point is Arrian wasn't thinking, "Do I want to? Do I not?" He wouldn't even consider doing something like that that would be so compromising or corruptive. The sort of "hell yes or hell no" rule. He's saying this for effect, a tad. But the idea is we should be really clear about what we are willing to do and what we aren't willing to do. The things we accept and the things we don't accept. We should have a clear sense of our moral compass, also our priorities. So, we're not hemming and hawing. We're not having to ask for advice. We're not even thinking about it. It's a hard pass or it's an enthusiastic yes.
There's this amazing story about Ulysses S. Grant. He goes to West Point as a young man. He's this promising young military officer. He serves honorably in the Mexican-American War, but then something goes wrong. Maybe it's the drink. Maybe he hates the army. He basically ends up working for his dad selling firewood by the side of the road. This is a big fall from West Point to selling firewood by the side of the road. And one of his old friends from West Point comes by one day who's still in the army, moving his way up through the ranks, and he's ashamed to see his friend doing this and he says, "Good God, Grant, what are you doing?" And Ulysses S. Grant just looks at him and he says, "I'm solving the problem of poverty." Meaning that Grant doesn't care that he's doing a so-called menial job or that it's a humiliating occupation. All he cares about is that he's providing for his family. He's doing a good job. And he doesn't think that this says anything about him as a person. He knows that doesn't say anything about him as a person. It's crazy to think that just a few years later, Grant would be the head of an enormous army and a few years after that, he'd be the president of the United States. But for the Stoic, there's this idea that comes from Marcus. He says, "To accept it without arrogance, to let it go with indifference." Meaning, you don't let the lowly position change who you are. And you don't let the high position change who you are either. None of it goes to your head. You know, none of it says anything about you as a person, 'cause you know who you are as a person. And that's what really matters.
One of the things that was really fascinating was the value that he placed on forgiveness. He famously is betrayed by his best friend. He thinks Marcus is sick and near death. And so this guy named Avidius Cassius goes, "I'm the emperor now." But Marcus wasn't dead. And so it puts him in this horrible position of like, obviously you can't allow this, but he doesn't want to fight a war over it. And he basically says this is the final chapter in *The Obstacle Is the Way*. The idea that like, even this is an opportunity. And he says, "I want to show history how civil strife can be dealt with." He tries to give Cassius a chance to come to his senses. Eventually, he has to take the Roman army out in battle. And then he weeps when someone kills Cassius because it deprives him of the opportunity of forgiving him, of like giving him clemency. And he orders the Senate. He says, "Do not execute a single person for this." He says, "Do not let my name be stained in blood."
Seneca was famous for practicing poverty. He would wear his worst clothes, eat simple foods, starve himself a little bit. He'd really like slum it for a day or two, supposedly as often as once a month. Now, why was he doing this? On one hand, it was to toughen himself up. But really, it was a psychological exercise. He wanted to, as a wealthy, successful person who had a lot, he wanted to familiarize himself with losing all of it. He wanted to be able to stare poverty in the face and say, "Is this what you were so afraid of?" Because that's what can happen in life. The things we possess become the new status quo and then we're worried and anxious that we're going to lose them. And so the thought exercise of going, "Okay, what would it actually be like to not have them?" There's a Zen story about a cup and the Zen master is saying to himself over and over again, "The cup is already broken. The cup is already broken." So he doesn't become so attached to it that he fears losing it and thus doesn't actually enjoy it while he has it, 'cause he's so petrified of something happening to it. And this is the sort of relentless anxiety that a lot of successful people have. You'd think they'd be comfortable and feel awesome and feel like they have enough, but in fact, they're just petrified of losing it. Seneca says, "Slavery lives beneath marble and gold inside the palace. It looks so wonderful and appealing on the outside, it's actually a lot of anxiety and stress." So, he's trying to familiarize himself with losing it so it would lose its power over him.
How does something like this, a shipwreck in the Mediterranean, turn out not just to be not a disaster, but the best thing that ever happened? Zeno, a Phoenician merchant, actually loses a ship like this 2,500 years ago. He washes up totally penniless in Athens. But instead of seeing it as a disaster, instead of seeing it as something ruinous, he sees it as the best thing that ever happened to him. He's walking through the Athenian Agora. He hears someone reading the works of Socrates. He decides to chase that lead down. He finds a philosophy teacher and he becomes a philosopher. He would say thank you to fate for driving him thus to philosophy. And he would joke that he made a great fortune when he suffered a shipwreck. In fact, all of humanity made a great fortune as a result of this disaster, because Zeno would go on to found the school of Stoicism, which is still in use more than 20 centuries later. And the fundamental tenet of Stoic philosophy is that it's not what happens to us that counts. It's how we respond to what happens. And so Zeno, in responding well to his shipwreck, to his disaster, he turns the worst thing that ever happened to him into the best thing that ever happened.
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There's this moment where Martin Luther King is on stage and this neo-Nazi like walks on stage and starts just like beating him. And so Martin Luther King... physically... physically punching him in the face. Like they, I think Rosa Parks would go, you could hear the flesh on... like it's dead silent in this auditorium and they're watching Martin Luther King get the [ __ ] kicked out of him. He goes like this, you know, to... he puts his fist up to the way like a human has evolved to protect themselves and also fight. Like the way that chimps fight. Like this is how we fight, right? And one of the observers is talking about how there was this moment where they watched Martin Luther King do that and then drop his hands. Training teaches you to do the things that you don't normally or naturally do. And in his case, he trained himself to do like the least human of all things, which was like... "Drop your guard." Yeah. Drop your guard. And then so the guy keeps hitting him. Eventually, people separate them. They both are taken backstage as they wait for the authorities. And then Martin Luther King just like talks to this guy for like 10 minutes. And he, the first words out of his mouth are, "Don't hurt him. Don't hurt him." And so, like beyond whatever spiritual plane a person has to get to do that, I was struck by that. That's like the training of a boxer, but the opposite, right? You know, like you're trained to do the thing and then in this moment when you would have every understandable reason to abandon the training for your own basic preservation and dislike of being punched in the face, he passes the test. Like what a statement against nonviolence it would have been had a fight broken out on this stage purely just to detangle.
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