The Moment Ryan Holiday's Life Changed Forever
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Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life.

Thank you for listening. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I was in Brazil a couple months ago. I was walking through the airport in Sao Paulo. I was flying to Belo Horizonte. And so Austin to Houston, Houston to Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo to Belo Horizonte, something like that. Flew back via Panama. So I was in, I think I was in the Sao Paulo airport. I'm pretty sure it's Sao Paulo. And I'm walking through

and I pass this airport bookstore. I got a little time before my flight and I see a copy of the Gregory Hayes translation of "Meditations." Like I recognize the cover and I go, "Oh, what is that? Why is that here?" I walk over to it and it's clearly the Portuguese edition. And I pick it up and international editions are always really cool.

It has this like little red sort of like extra flap around and I pick it up. It's published by Sextante. That's how I maybe pronounce it. And I see my name. It says Considerata por Ryan Holiday, Autor de O Ego y Si Inamigo. I'm not going to do any more of this, but there's some quote for me on this edition of meditations. Meditacos? I don't know.

Marco Aurelio. It blew my mind because here's the book that changed my life. When I read it for the first time, I thought people need to know about this. And, you know, almost 20 years later, I'm bumping into it in a bookstore in a Brazilian airport where I just talked about ancient philosophy to 4000 people.

My name is on the cover of that book, that very edition. And as it happens, not long after that, I got asked if I would want to write a forward to the American edition that Modern Library was putting out a new book.

edition of it. And they asked if I would want to write it. And I was blown away. I said, of course. I remember where I was when I read this book for the first time. I remember it. I was sitting in my college apartment in Riverside, California on Iowa Avenue, Grand Mark Apartments. And it came, my copy of Gregory Hayes' Translation of Meditations. I bought it from Amazon. Didn't know why I got that one. It's what the algorithm suggested. And it was one of the best

and most life-changing purchases of my life. I interviewed Professor Hayes for my blog, one of the first people I ever reached out to. I started writing about it. I wrote an article in a college newspaper about it. So this has been a book that I've had a 20...

odd year relationship with that I still have a relationship with. I have my leather edition. I'm flying to, where am I flying? Flying to New York tomorrow, the Nashville. And there's a passage I want to read aloud in my talk. So I was throwing the leather edition that we do here in Daily Stoke into my suitcase. So the relationship continues, but I got to write a forward to the book that changed my life. Like what a crazy honor, pinch me moment to get to do that.

And here is that foreword. I did the audio version of it as well. I wanted to play that. If you haven't read Meditations, you should definitely grab the Gregor Hayes translation. If you've read it, you've put some miles on it over the years, you want something to hold up better, check out our leather-bound edition. And if you want to just do a deep dive into Marcus, we are doing something cool here because we're calling it Marcus Ruelas Month because he was born 1905 years ago.

And on April 26th, Marcus's birthday, we're going to do a live Q&A about meditations. For people that take the How to Read Marcus Aurelius's Meditation Course Guide Book Club thing that we're doing, so you can grab all that at dailystoic.com slash meditations. We've got signed copies of all the different books and all of that. So let's just get into it. Go to dailystoic.com slash meditations, click it in the show notes, and I hope to see you all on April 26th for the live Q&A.

If you're a member of Daily Stoic Life, remember all that stuff is free. You can get that at dailystoiclife.com. You hold in your hands a beautiful translation of what is without a doubt one of the most incredible books ever written. It should not exist. It is a fluke of history, an exception that proves the rule.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and yet here we have the private diary of the most powerful man in the world, a man who lorded over an enormous army in most of the known world. And somehow, not only is every sentence exquisitely crafted, but every thought is inherently decent. On some level, every translation of meditations should be unreadable, or at least unrelatable. It was written by a man born some 19 centuries ago.

He was selected by a ruthless, dying, and childless tyrant to succeed him, a link in a chain of adoptions that would make him a god-king 23 years later. He wielded the power of life and death over millions of subjects, ruled over an empire of tens of millions of people.

He was a high priest in a time of primitive cults. He had an arranged marriage. He had at least 13 children and buried more than half of them. He owned slaves. He fought in horrendously violent wars. He wrote in Greek on papyrus scrolls or wax tablets, little philosophical exercises from some obscure and ancient tradition, primarily for his own personal benefit.

Marcus Aurelius was not like us at all. How could he have been? The past is a foreign country, they say, and Marcus Aurelius existed in a remote, exotic corner thousands of years ago. How could anything he said have any relevance to someone in an unfathomable future on a continent that the Romans didn't even know about?

For the same reason that meditations has helped prisoners and generals, athletes and activists, labor organizers and entrepreneurs, artists and seekers alike. Because its very specificity creates a kind of universality. Nearly every other book was written to be published.

Meditations is sometimes described as a diary or a journal, but the diaries and journals of other famous and powerful people often record more of what those people were doing or were written with some kind of affect in hope that they would be seen by later generations.

David Hernandez de la Fuente, a Spanish classicist and another translator of Marcus Aurelius, explains that Meditations was not conceived for us to read, but rather as the vehicle that this cultured man who had a contemplative attitude found to question himself. It was a book for the author, not for the reader. How did it survive? Who first found it? When was it first published? We don't really know, but we are very lucky.

I am holding in my hands my own copy, which I bought 18 years ago when I was 19 years old. I didn't know who Marcus Aurelius was besides the old guy in the movie Gladiator, and I certainly didn't know whether it would be the right translation or not.

I seem to remember my copy arriving right away after I purchased it, but searching my email for the order number as I write this, I see an angry customer service ticket where a teenager is angrily complaining about a few days shipping delay. How badly I needed the words that I would find in book six, five, two of meditations. You don't have to turn this into something. It doesn't have to upset you.

I had no idea that the money that I spent on that book and the couple of days of waiting would not just become the best time and money I ever spent, but would change the course of my life. I had no idea that I was just another link in a multi-century chain of people being turned on to or discovering stoicism, this secret weapon, this path to the good life.

Marcus Aurelius would probably understand my feelings here, for he himself notes in the opening pages of his gratitude to his philosophy teacher, Rusticus, for introducing me to Epictetus's lectures, he writes, and loaning me his own copy.

The life of a future king was changed by the wisdom of a Greek slave who had triumphed over torture and exile, whose lectures were fortuitously recorded by a student in the early second century AD and just as unpredictably survived to us to read today. There at the table in my college apartment in Riverside, California, vast differences in technology and culture disappeared.

Thanks to Professor Hayes' translation and peerless introductory remarks, the barriers that keep so many of us from ancient philosophy fell away. Here I was, invited to convene with a great mind, engaged not in logic chopping or philosophical paradoxes, but, as Bran Blanchard would observe of meditations, something of a far more permanent interest, the ideals and aspirations that a rare spirit lived by.

the right book at the right time is a powerful thing. I think when things are difficult or we know things are going to lead to hard conversations or changes we have to make in our life, we come up with reasons not to do them. When I think about therapy, I think, how can I make this as easy to do as possible? Whether that's like scheduling a bunch of appointments in a row, whether it's doing it remotely so I don't have to get in my car and drive somewhere. Like I want to eliminate the excuses that

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In one of my favorite passages in meditations, Marcus marvels at nature's inadvertence. A baker, he writes, makes the dough, kneads it, and then puts it in the oven. Then physics, then nature takes over. The way loaves of bread split open on top in the oven, Marcus writes, the ridges are just a byproduct of the baking, and yet pleasing somehow. They rouse our appetite without knowing why.

It's a beautiful observation about such a banal part of daily life, something that only a poet could see. In a sense, we ought to see meditations as the most wonderful example of the same process. Here, Marcus Aurelius is struggling to get out of bed early, writing to inspire himself to get over the impulse to huddle under the blankets and stay warm. Here he is preparing himself to deal with frustrating and annoying people.

Here he is trying to get over his jealousy. Here he is reigning in his temper. Here he is worried about death. Here he is trying not to despair. Here he is trying to be good at his job. Here he is trying to be a good person. When Marcus Aurelius says "you" as in "you have to assemble your life action by action" or "the things you think about determine the quality of your mind" or "choose not to be harmed and you won't feel harmed," he is speaking to himself.

And because this exercise in self-improvement is so sincere and earnest, at times painfully earnest, it has the unintended benefit of speaking directly to us, helping us with our common problems. As unrelatable as antiquity might seem, human beings remain ever the same. It's worth noting that Stoicism was already ancient philosophy by Marcus Aurelius' time, having endured for several centuries.

Since the time of Zeno, since the time of Vespasian, Marcus would write, but really for all time,

People have been doing, as he says, quote, the exact same things, marrying, raising children, getting sick, dying, waging war, throwing parties, doing business, farming, flattering, boasting, distrusting, plotting, hoping others will die, complaining about their own lives, falling in love, putting away money, seeking high office and power.

And so it will go in the future. So will meditations continue to endure. Both I and my copy of Meditations are, two decades later, a bit worse for wear. Years on the road. Years of spills and stains. The cover is taped back on. Every page is marked or folded. Nearly every passage has something noted or underlined.

I would become what Stephan Marsh has referred to as a center reader, reading Marcus Aurelius well over a hundred times. It sits by my bedside, beckoning me back to philosophy whenever I drift away. Marcus was clearly fond of the philosopher Heraclitus, who said that we never step in the same river twice.

It is equally true that no one ever reads the same meditations twice. You notice new things every time. I could not even begin to understand Marcus's passage about losing children till I became a parent. I shrugged off his mentions of the plague until 2020 for obvious reasons.

On early readings, I did not understand all the allusions that Marcus made to various Stoic metaphors or even direct mentions of various Stoic thinkers, which include Chrysippus, Epictetus, Thrasia, Arius Didymus, Helvidius Priscus, and Junius Rusticus. It wasn't until I walked the streets of Aquincum near Budapest, where Marcus visited the Second Legion and wrote parts of meditations that it hit me.

This man was just a man, a guy who walked the same street that I am walking now. It hit me there too in Hungary, just how distant Rome was. Life is warfare and a journey far from home, Marcus writes in book 217. Indeed, for him, it literally was. It is beyond an honor for me to be writing a foreword to the very translation that so changed my life.

I remember thinking as I read Meditations for the first time that everyone should know about this book. A few years ago, I even found my wife's copy with a receipt in it. She had bought the book after I'd spent far too much of our first date talking about it. In my own works, namely The Obstacle is the Way and The Daily Stoic, as well as my children's fable, The Boy Who Would Be King, I've had the opportunity to popularize Stoic philosophy and introduce it to a large audience.

I've even published my own leather-bound edition of this very translation. I'm proud to have played a small part in making this translation far and away the most popular. Marcus was cognizant of that which we owe to those who have taught and inspired us, to the people and ideas that have opened our eyes. That's why he opened meditations with a catalog of his debts and lessons. My debt to him and the modern library is great, and I gladly pay it forward.

I could not be more excited about the journey you are about to embark on. And if you think a stoic can't get excited, you're wrong. And so I will let you get on with it. Go to the rising sun, Marcus is said to have told the guard as he died. I am already setting. Marcus Aurelius has set and is with us no more, but he left behind a lovely light. However young or old you are today, let it guide you.

Don't just read this book. Read it again and again and again. Put its lessons into practice. Fight to be the person that philosophy wants you to be. Make Marcus Aurelius proud. Pass it on. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode.

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