Marcus Aurelius's Rules for Living a Better Life
4/29/202611 min
To wrap up Meditations Month, today Ryan explores Marcus’s best rules for using the precious time in your life.
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsRyan Holiday· Host0:00
Welcome to The Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues: courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful man in the world, but he knew that even so, the vast majority of things were outside of his control. He couldn't control what other people did. He couldn't control what other people said. Certainly, even though some emperors tried, couldn't control what other people said about him. But even within these constraints, he tried to be the best person he was capable of being. You know, he's born in the year one twenty-one. He comes to power in the year one sixty-one AD. He rules for nearly two decades through all sorts of difficulty, things that we're unfortunately familiar with today: political unrest, floods, issues at the border, a plague, even the Antonine Plague. And so I find him just an endlessly fascinating model for life. And so in today's episode, I wanna give you some rules for life from Marcus Aurelius. Practices, strategies, things I've taken from Meditations, things I've taken from the biographical information we have about Marcus, things we can guess about Marcus, but real practices,