One person, on doing well by others, immediately accounts the expected favor in return. Another is not so quick, but still considers the person a debtor and knows the favor. A third kind of person acts as if not conscious of the deed, rather like a vine producing a cluster of grapes without making further demands, like a horse after its race, or a dog after its walk, or a bee after making its honey. Such a person, having done a good deed, won’t go shouting from rooftops but simply moves on to the next deed just like the vine produces another bunch of grapes in the right season.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 5.6

Have you ever heard someone else repeat one of your ideas as though it were their own? Did you ever notice a younger sibling or relative mimic your behavior, perhaps the way you dress or the music you listen to? Maybe you moved to a new neighborhood and a bunch of hipsters followed. When we are young and inexperienced, we can react negatively to these situations. Stop copying me! I was here first!

As we mature, we start to see them in a different light. We understand that stepping up and helping is a service that leaders provide to the world. It’s our duty to do this—in big situations and small ones. If we expect to be leaders, we must see that thankless service comes with the job. We must do what leaders do, because it’s what leaders do—not for the credit, not for the thanks, not for the recognition. It’s our duty.

* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

In your actions, don’t procrastinate. In your conversations, don’t confuse. In your thoughts, don’t wander. In your soul, don’t be passive or aggressive. In your life, don’t be all about business.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 8.51

Simple is rarely easy. But now that you have these rules, make it your duty to put them into practice—with the first item on your to-do list, with the first conversation you have, with your soul, and, of course, with the life you make for yourself. Not just today, but every day.

Write that on the backboard and don’t forget it.

* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

But what does Socrates say? “Just as one person delights in improving his farm, and another his horse, so I delight in attending to my own improvement day by day.”
—Epictetus, Discourses, 3.5.14

The rage these days is to start your own company—to be an entrepreneur. There is no question, building a business from scratch can be an immensely rewarding pursuit. It’s why people put their whole lives into doing it, working countless hours and taking countless risks.

But shouldn’t we be just as invested in building ourselves as we would be to any company?

Like a start-up, we begin as just an idea: we’re incubated, put out into the world where we develop slowly, and then, over time, we accumulate partners, employees, customers, investors, and wealth. Is it really so strange to treat your own life as seriously as you might treat an idea for a business? Which one really is the matter of life and death?

* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

Love the humble art you have learned, and take rest in it. Pass through the remainder of your days as one who whole-heartedly entrusts all possessions to the gods, making yourself neither a tyrant nor a slave to any person.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4.31

Stop by a comedy club any weekend night in New York or Los Angeles and you’re likely to find some of the world’s biggest and most commercially successful comedians in there, workshopping their craft for just a handful of people. Though they make a fortune in movies or on the road, there they are, practicing the most basic form of their art.

If you ask any of them: “Why are you doing this? Why do you still perform?” The answer is usually: “Because I’m good at it. Because I love it. Because I want to get better. Because I thrive on connecting with an audience. Because I just can’t not do it.

It’s not work for them to get up on stage at Carolines or the Comedy Cellar at 1 a.m. It’s invigorating. They don’t have to do it. They’re free, and they choose this.

Whatever humble art you practice: Are you sure you’re making time for it? Are you loving what you do enough to make the time? Can you trust that if you put in the effort, the rest will take care of itself? Because it will. Love the craft, be a craftsman.

* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

For I believe a good king is from the outset and by necessity a philosopher, and the philosopher is from the outset a kingly person.
—Musonius Rufus, Lectures, 8.33.32-34

The Israeli general Herzl Halevi believes that philosophy is essential in his role as a leader and warrior. “People used to tell me that a business administration is for the practical life and philosophy is for the spirit,” he said. “Through the years I found it is exactly the opposite—I used philosophy much more practically.” War and leadership offer an unending series of ethical decisions that require priorities, balance, and clarity. That’s what philosophy helps with.

Plato knew this when he imagined a utopia ruled by a philosopher king. “Either philosophers should become kings,” he said in The Republic, “or those now called kings should truly and sufficiently undertake philosophy.” Marcus Aurelius was quite literally that philosopher king.

What does that have to do with you? There are fewer kings these days, but we’re all leaders in one way or another—of families, of companies, of a team, of an audience, of a group of friends, of ourselves. It’s the study of philosophy that cultivates our reason and ethics so that we can do our job well. We can’t just wing it—too many people are counting on us to do it right.

* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

Enough of this miserable, whining life. Stop monkeying around! Why are you troubled? What’s new here? What’s so confounding? The one responsible? Take a good look. Or just the matter itself? Then look at that. There’s nothing else to look at. And as far as the gods go, by now you could try being more straightforward and kind. It’s the same, whether you’ve examined these things for a hundred years, or only three.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 9.37

“Character,” Joan Didion would write in one of her best essays, “the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.”

Marcus is urging us not to waste time complaining about what we haven’t got or how things have worked out. We have to quit monkeying around and be the owners of our own lives. Character can be developed, and when it is, self-respect will ensue. But that means starting and getting serious about it. Not later, not after certain questions have been answered or distractions dealt with, but now. Right now. Taking responsibility is the first step.

To be without this character is the worst of all fates. As Didion put it in “On Self-Respect,” “To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness.”

You’re so much better than that.

* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

This is what you should teach me, how to be like Odysseus—how to love my country, wife and father, and how, even after suffering shipwreck, I might keep sailing on course to those honorable ends.
—Seneca, Moral Letters, 88.7b

Many schoolteachers teach The Odyssey all wrong. They teach the dates, they debate whether Homer was really the author or not, whether he was blind, they explain the oral tradition, they tell students what a Cyclops is or how the Trojan Horse worked.

Seneca‘s advice to someone studying the classics is to forget all that. The dates, the names, the places—they hardly matter. What matters is the moral. If you got everything else wrong from The Odyssey, but you left understanding the importance of perseverance, the dangers of hubris, the risks of temptation and distraction? Then you really learned something.

We’re not trying to ace tests or impress teachers. We are reading and studying to live, to be good human beings—always and forever.

* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman