All right, we got some follow-up to get through here. You've got a bunch of action items, so I'm actually going to let you go first, Corey. How did you do on these?
okay i do but i have to disclaimer this for a minute and i have to give myself a get out of jail free card i'm listening to mike on focused interview stephen hackett and we're talking about Steven's sabbatical and I and Mike was like oh well you know I'm gonna have family coming in and they're coming in from is it Hawaii Mike did I remember that right yep
yeah okay and he's and he's like i don't want to do i'm going to try to do as little as i can and all this stuff and i'm pretty and i'm thinking to myself i'm pretty sure we're going to record like around the time when his family's coming in. And we shouldn't do that. And it bothered me. I'm listening to this and I'm like, we should not do that. We should not do this. We should not do this. And then I'm thinking...
Like in the other side of my brain, I'm thinking, can I get... meditations done in time to where like if we changed it like do i actually have the time because it's finals right now right so so it's crazy crazy time so all of that we pushed up the recording the recording is you know what five days earlier than it normally would be so therefore
I give myself a get out of jail free card on these. And if you don't, I don't really care because I had finals and I got the book done. So, you know, I hit the priority stuff. All right. So here we go. What will I do to take action? So my first one was, what do I do to take action on one of my creative ideas and explore alternative publishing formats? I am happy and proud to say that I developed a prototype and I shared it with Mike.
Right. And it is by no means great. It is by no means anything I would share more publicly or more broadly at this point in my life. But it is something that explores a different format. And then what I'm pumped about with that. is I saw, oh, Mike, help me with her name. Anne, she's the Tiny Experiments. Anne-Laure LeCoumphe. Yeah, Anne-Laure LeCoumphe, right? She shared a thing called WriteBook.
which I had never heard of. And WriteBook is a, essentially like it's like a very specific website format for publishing books as a website. And it's really, really clean looking. Now, the thing I'm holding up on for starting this thing is I don't think I want to run my own web server.
I don't think I want the responsibility of running my own web server, but I told Mike via text, I kind of want to like a reason to buy a Mac mini. So like that's a reason to buy a Mac mini. And then I have a web server. But at the same time, I don't know what I don't know, and I haven't been able to learn about it for finals. But the minimum version of that, and the one Mike kind of pushed me towards and suggested for me, is to just go to like...
um blue ocean or go to you know or digital ocean or wherever and just buy you know virtual space on some server and run it run it off of there so that would be the next step right like the next step with this of this would be for me to explore publishing this via something like right book um and if you're looking for it right book is by 37 signals and i think it's like once is like their their product division it's called once or something like that
So it's pretty interesting looking. Okay, that's number one. All right, I did not think about the next one. What's your thing not as a professor? Didn't think about it. So I'm trying to figure out what's the thing, not as a professor, have no idea. What's the thing that excites me and what does that mean? I think I've talked about this one before, but this one stayed true. It's learning. I just love to learn.
And then the extension of that is I love to learn new cool things and then help other people learn new cool things. So that's definitely one that I think is the thing that excites me. And then I didn't even remotely start this next one. Every day for 30 days straight, write down what you want and how you want to be. Commit to taking no longer than two minutes for this exercise. This will not happen unless...
something gets thrown into my face every day at a certain time. And if I don't have that thing thrown into my face, I will forget to do this every time. So I didn't even get to start this one. So Mike, those are my follow-up items. I'm really happy that I...
hit the big one and then have like a plan for over break for what I want to do with the big one. And then I'm okay with the fact that I didn't hit the other ones because the book is read. So how about you? What are your follow-up items? All right. Well, first of all, I did not know that. When you were asking me to move the date, you were going to use that as an excuse for not doing your action items. Yep. But I'll allow it. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
First, actually, I should follow up from a previous action item because I mentioned in the last episode that I was working with a fractional video editor. This was something that you really pushed me to do when we were reading. Which one was that? Anti-time management, I think? Yeah. It was either that one or free time with Jenny Blake. It was one of those two, but I don't remember which one it was.
So I committed to doing it. And last time I had mentioned that I had started working with the company, but it was basically going through a trial and hadn't done anything with it yet.
i got the first result back and i shared it with you prior to the the call and i think this is going better than i could have possibly imagined it would which makes me feel stupid for taking so long to do it but this that one is going really well and i'm excited about getting help in other areas as well so uh the other action items from the previous episode
create a short list of people whose opinion of you really matters. I sort of forgot about this one. I didn't do this yet. Have an answer for the question, what's your thing? I feel like this one...
I made progress on. I don't know exactly what this is yet, but I will say that I'm getting ready to do the next Practical PKM cohort. And as a result... of that coming up I've actually been working with a designer developer to create a new sales page for that as part of that process I actually did a bunch of video calls with people
who have gone through the cohort previously i put out a call said i want to put together some case studies anyone willing to hop on a call with me and answer some some questions basically so i did that with three or four different people
And that was really enlightening to see like what they got out of the cohorts. Sharing all of the stuff with the designer developer, they had me fill out this big long form. It took me probably three or four hours to do. And it was all stuff that I knew, but just like. explain it a million different ways so having to go through that and then seeing what they got out of that and putting the copy together because i actually the copy is is approved so now they're they're designing it but seeing
Basically, somebody who is new to the Mike Schmitz universe kind of restate what I do was really helpful as well. So I think the thing that I do is I... Demystify obsidian and show people how to use it in practical, tangible ways. Um, I think we should, I think we talked on the last episode about the high ticket offer and I do want to.
experiment working closely with people to develop these different systems in terms of getting attention building an audience and then ultimately building and selling something That really gets me excited when I think about helping people go from, I have these ideas, I want to get more out of them, and I want to ultimately sell something online.
That kind of goes in alignment with all of the stuff that we talked about in a lot of the books that we've read lately. Never Play It Safe, for example, Good Work, stuff like that. where I want to help people along that path, which now I've gone through. Not that I'm going to tell them, quit your job, but give them... you know some success and then they can decide is there enough signal here for me to want to completely pivot but you really don't know until you've tried some of that stuff so
I think that's the hardest part for a lot of people is going from zero to one. You know, once you have something, then you can figure out how to scale it. But do me a favor. The signal to noise thing that you say, say it again for me. Yeah. Make noise. Listen for signal. Okay. Make noise. Listen for signal. Okay. And what that means to me is like when I would share things online, when I was going through like the ship 30 for 30 cohort.
I found that when I'm talking about productivity, I'm talking about creativity. I get people who will like things and retweet things, whatever. But then the minute that I started sharing how I do that sort of stuff inside of Obsidian. i would get 10 times the amount of engagement so the numbers are sort of irrelevant it's more the trends when i do this i see or i receive more signal
That's basically what you do. And you don't really know what the thing is until you share all this stuff online. And then you can start to build these flywheels. And that's what I think I'm kind of uniquely positioned to do. I just went through a training today.
which was kind of along the lines of newsletter growth and finding your niche. And one of the questions they ask is what is the thing that you can do better than anybody else in the world? And I don't have the evidence of this yet, but I kind of think this is it. You know, the PKM systems that will help you get valuable assets from the things, the notes and the ideas that you collect. And then...
How do you push that across the finish line in terms of creating something valuable that the marketplace actually wants? Nice. All right. And then the last one, what do I do for fun? I've talked about this on Focus. I'm thinking about this. I still don't have an answer to this. Okay. What do you not do for fun then? Maybe the negative side of this will help you. So here's the thing that makes this tricky is there are a lot of things.
that I do for work that are fun. But I enjoy reading books. I enjoy, not for work, but I enjoy going for long runs. But I am classifying those as something that's something I do for my health. Reading books is something that I do for work. Like there has to be when I my my vision for this is what is the thing that I do purely for the activity itself?
I get nothing else of value from it other than I really enjoy the thing. And that I don't know. Okay. All right. Not even guitar? Well, I mean, I play. base currently, uh, and I play it for the worship team. So, so you're saying it's for the church, right? So it's got a, it's got another purpose. There's always some sort of justification for the things that I do. And, uh, that doesn't necessarily.
invalidate those things, but it does in my mind because that's the mindset I'm trying to break free from. If that makes any sense to anybody else, it's very clear in my own mind. if I see that there's value in something I can kind of put together like a sales pitch for you should establish this habit. And then once I understand that the motivation is there, like I have no trouble doing that sort of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
But, you know, I just do this because it's fun. I don't know what that is. Okay. All right. We got to have a longer. We got to, like, maybe that's a whole, like. pre-show one day us us digging in and trying to figure out what mike likes to do for fun yeah i guess man not looking forward to that one board games Possibly. I do those not all the time, probably several times a week, but also like the justification for those.
In my mind is relationship building. A lot of times I'm playing those with my family. So that's family time. That's not just Mike wants to do this time. That's where my head went too. I was like, oh, that's family time. Yeah. It's hard. We'll work on it. We'll work on it, Mike. We'll work on it. We'll figure it out. All right. Well, you ready to talk about today's book? Yep. I guess. Sort of. Kind of. Yeah.
Okay, so today's book is Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Corey is really excited about this one. I've never been more excited in my life. Well, I was... nervous about this one as well. I shared this in the last episode, but one of the things that makes me nervous about this is that this is sort of... held up as this book of ancient wisdom and there's so much incredibly great stuff here and you hear so many people talk about this it's sort of like
Once you read this, you're going to achieve enlightenment and your world will never be the same. And I kind of expected that that was not going to happen for me. And so I was nervous about talking about this book. I have no doubt there are people who looked at the title and they're like, oh boy, this is going to be a good one. And they may be disappointed. Maybe. I don't know. Maybe.
It's a weird book because Marcus Aurelius never really intended for this to be published. It was sort of like his journal or his diary. That's not exactly it. but they're private writings and so it's organized into these well there's an introduction because the one that we read is the the gregory hayes translation
And so there's kind of an introduction by Gregory Hayes about Marcus Aurelius. That was the hardest part of the whole book for me to read, honestly. And then it gets into the 12 different books. Some of them have titles, some of them don't. For the sake of the outline, I did not actually put them in. Book two and three have the name of the place that Marcus Aurelius was in when he was capturing these deep thoughts.
Book one is sort of debts and lessons. And in the introduction, it talks about how that was sort of the time that he was growing up and going through school. But other than that, it's just sort of all these little random bits of information. So I put in the outline the 12 different books. I have my mind map here and I have a couple different things from each one of these. My thought is that we'll just kind of go through this and...
share one or two things from each one of these that we want to talk about. Yeah. I had no idea. Like we're reading this book and I'm like, I have no idea how we're going to talk about this book because here's what it reads like. It reads like somebody's fleeting notes in Zettelkasten. Yep, exactly. That like somebody randomly lumped together, but they didn't, like I can't.
I couldn't wrap my head around like why they lumped it together the way they did or how they lumped it together the way they did. And then Mike mentioned it. The intro is 60 pages long. So the content of the book, if you take the notes out of the back and then a couple other things, it's like 280 pages or something like that. I don't know what it is. It's like something.
Well, 60 of that is just the intro. It's explaining about Marcus Aurelius. It's explaining about stoicism. It's explaining all these things. And I agree with you completely. I'm reading through this thinking, okay, when are we going to get to the meditations? Like I want to get to the meditations. When are we going to get to the meditations? And so it's like, this is a, how do I say this? It's a very strange book, partially because what Mike said.
I don't think it was ever meant to be a book. It was just meant to be a guy like basically grabbing note cards and writing things down. And then he would throw the note card away or maybe he would like. Keep it around. And then somebody was like, oh, look at all these cool note cards. Like, let's take these note cards and let's package them into into something. I learned a decent amount, though, about like, you know, like the early.
roman or not even the early roman empire but the roman empire like and like people and stoicism like i learned a bunch about that from the intro so that was good yeah so actually um i guess we should formally talk about the the introduction here. This is the long section by the translator, Gregory Hayes. A little bit of this is about the life of Marcus Aurelius, which gives context.
There's a little bit about stoicism. There's a little bit about some of the key concepts that pop up throughout the meditations. Yeah, I've got a couple things jotted down and I'll just share kind of the important things, I think, as we get into the book. So one of the things that pops up over and over and over again is. the description or the mention of the logos, which I have a Bible college degree. I know what that means in a biblical context, but in terms of Stoic philosophy,
Gregory Hayes kind of mentions that it's rational connected thought. That's kind of what Marcus Aurelius defines as the difference between man and the animals. Yeah, so that's what that means. I want to double down on this because if you didn't read the introduction well, like you skimmed through the introduction or something like that, I mean, the meditations will use the word logos.
over and over and over again and i had to keep reminding myself like what do they mean by logos like what what does he mean by logos what does he mean by logos so it's like that's a big important one if you're if you're thinking about reading this book make sure you pay attention to that to that setting the way Gregory Hayes describes that word, that word logo. So I could not agree with you more.
There were two things I wanted to talk about in the introduction. This was one of them. And let's see if you hit my other one, because this was a major one that if you if you if you don't wrap your head around this, it makes a lot of the other basically makes a lot of the rest of the book very confusing.
Yeah, so, well, I actually have a little bit of issue with that because it was hard for me to disconnect my understanding of... logos from how it's used in biblical texts and going through bible college where it's basically the written word and then there's the rhema which is like the revelation um revealed meaning behind it so that's what i kept thinking of every time i read the word logos and i had to catch myself every single time be like oh that's not actually what he uh
what he means and so that kind of hits at something that uh i think is inherently going to mean that i don't get as much out of this as a lot of other people is like this key concept that he's talking about right at the beginning, we kind of have a difference of opinion on what that actually means.
Yeah, yeah. Let me describe it a little bit more just in case it helps anybody. So there's a really interesting connection here that you would say stoicism, in stoicism, the logos, it ties directly to this idea of like... uh free will and like can i do a thing and like how does the logos play into me directing it and and this is a quote uh so according to this theory man is like a dog tied to a moving wagon If the dog refuses to run along with the wagon, he will be dragged by it.
Yet the choice remains his to run or be dragged in the same way humans are responsible for their choices and actions, even though these have been anticipated by the logos and form part of its plan. So it's essentially like there's this logos, there's this driving force. our will is are we going to go along with that or are we going to be pulled along along by that right and it's like that was a really good
image in my head about what stoicism and Marcus Aurelius think of as the logos. The logos is this driving force, this driving force. And that helped me process a lot of the meditations really, really well. Or at least get his perspective on them as we went through. Yeah, basically, life is going to happen and you can either not be bothered by it or fight against it.
The dog being dragged is an interesting visual, but very much in alignment with... You can see that philosophy throughout the rest of the meditations. You mentioned stoicism. That's the other thing I think that really is communicated in the beginning part here. They talk about the four stoic virtues, which...
The explanation of them in this introduction really doesn't do anything for me because I think Ryan Holiday actually describes them better in a couple of the books that we read for Bookworm. There's four virtues, courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom.
ryan holiday is in the process of writing a book for each one of those stoic virtues so i like ryan holiday's books about stoicism a lot more than i liked uh meditations by marcus aurelius um the reason i think that this one maybe gets held up or put on a pedestal is that Marcus Aurelius is an interesting person. And you kind of have to understand the historical context. That's the other thing that's in here, I think, is kind of his story. So he was born in 121 AD.
His father died when he was really young. And paraphrasing here because the names, they kind of lost meaning to me. I'd never heard of these people before, but he became heir to... the Roman emperor at the time because they didn't have an heir. And when he took power, he also kind of shared it with his cousin or whatever, this other guy, because it was the right thing.
to do and um he basically as the the emperor maybe i'm getting the details wrong and i apologize if i am but basically he was a big public figure and he was doing his best to live a good life And I think from that perspective, it's kind of interesting because I like the idea of writing down all of these different things that you've figured out about how to live a good life. And I could see presenting this.
to your heirs like having a historical record it's kind of like these are all my journals you know yes uh after you pass away but the fact that you know somebody took these and printed them and uh i kind of can't believe how much popularity they've they've gotten
He actually, Marcus Aurelius, speaks about other philosophers and probably a lot of the things that he mentions in here are not completely original. I've heard that from other people who are deeper down the stoic rabbit hole than... than i am and um yeah so there's probably a lot of stuff that if you just look at what is written in meditations gets improperly credited towards uh to marcus aurelius but
That is basically the backdrop here. One other thing about Stoicism is that this, I guess, was really popular amongst the wealthy Roman senators. Gregory Hayes makes a point in the introduction to call out that it wasn't just the wealthy Roman senators who believe this this stuff but I don't know like there's just something about
stoicism that kind of rubs me the wrong way. On the surface, the whole idea of don't get upset about things, just remain even keel no matter what happens, that makes sense. And I agree with a lot of the talk of how the virtues get lived out, the emphasis on you've got a place inside of this larger community and we've got to work towards the common good. But it just feels weird. Okay, so the one piece of flavor I'll add to, you know, Marcus Aurelius' background, he was very military.
kind of a person right so he was out fighting wars and he was he became you know pretty successful at fighting wars but i think that plays into his um these meditations right like so i think that is a that's a component piece that If you remember that,
going through going while you're reading these you're like oh yeah like this would make sense in the context of somebody who's constantly fighting wars and and that's their job and they're getting famous for for winning these battles and and doing those things but at the same time they're off on the battle field you know on the battlefront like and they're not really at home all the time and you know in you know in Rome or whatever so listener the goal here is not to
you know, make this a Christian podcast, right? Like that is not the thing we're trying to do. But my worldview has to come into this because I'm going to analyze the things we read through a worldview, just like... anybody's going to analyze the things they read through a worldview. So the other thing that stood out to me actually wasn't Stoicism. I kind of knew we were going to get into Stoicism. So the first one I had mentioned was...
The idea of logos. But the second one is the use of the word God in gods. Because when I'm used to reading that word, especially the word God, it means a certain thing in Christianity. Every time I read that, I'm referencing the thing that my Christian worldview... calls upon. Well, it's meant completely differently when Marcus Aurelius uses it. You know, so Hayes describes it from the Stoic perspective, of course, God or gods, right? And they use the term interchangeably, Hayes says.
are merely conventional terms for what we might call nature or the logos or providence or how things are so it's like i had a hard time because every time he used the word god or gods it wasn't the christian god that i'm thinking of you know it was this idea of nature or you know the logos or this force you know whatever whatever it might be so it's like that was a really challenging one for me to remember
Think about it, like interpret it the way it was written. Don't interpret it the way you would interpret that. Interpret it the way it was written. And there were a couple of times when I would read something and I'd go, oh yeah, I completely agree with that. And then I'd be like, oh wait, he's using God in a different way. that i would use god in that situation and it's like so i had to i had to check
I guess, check myself on that a couple of different times. And we could get into a much more, like a much deeper philosophical and worldview conversation, but that's not the nature of, of bookworm. So, so we're not gonna, we're not gonna do that. So at this point, Mike, I'm, I'm ready to, I can roll into.
book one well on the the topic of the the god and gods that they use throughout there um i guess i i actually didn't have too much trouble with that I just sort of assumed that they were going to be referring to something different than what I was going to be familiar with. He does mention Zeus, for example, at different points. And so I didn't really think about the specific definition that you had there.
But sort of in my mind, I was kind of lumping this together. Oh, they mean this and that means, you know, this other thing. And I know nothing about Roman mythology other than there were lots of gods that they worshipped or lots of different things. Yes. And then I remember, I don't remember the specific passage in the Bible where Paul's arguing with people in Rome is like.
you worship all of these gods i'm really talking about all of these these ones that you don't understand it's this one you know so that i don't know that that translated pretty easy for for me but the the whole every time they mentioned the word stoicism i don't know why i cringe a little bit okay okay i i don't have that i don't have that same guttural reaction so yeah i don't i don't feel that way i i'm trying to figure out
Why that is. And I really don't know. I think maybe it's just the thinking out loud, you know, not fully processed this, but. Maybe it's just the blind acceptance of whatever happens. And maybe you could make the argument that this is me just trying to grasp at having some agency. Like I want to be able to feel like I have power over my situation, which is definitely a Western worldview. But I don't know. I feel like at least a little bit of that.
is healthy yeah yeah well okay so so see if i'm gonna say something that's different than what you're thinking and actually i made this comment in my notes right after book two like It's a very nihilistic book. There's a whole lot of like, listen, it doesn't matter. None of this matters. Look at all these famous people that came before you. Look at all these people that everybody loved before you. They all died too.
Right. Like you're going to die. It doesn't really matter. Like stoicism, in my mind, has a lot of that built into it. Right. Like, so what are we trying to do? We're going to try to live the best life we can. You know, like you said, wisdom, courage, justice. temperance rate like those type of things but then there's this whole big umbrella that sits over top of it that's like
But it doesn't really matter. So, you know, like do it because it's the right thing to do for the community and for, you know, all this other stuff. But it doesn't really matter. And that I don't. I don't resonate with that. Like that's not my, I think it does matter. I really do think it does matter. Exactly. So the way that you described that, I didn't connect those dots before, but that is the prevailing message is it doesn't really matter. Now.
I'm speaking as a fan of Oliver Berkman's 4,000 weeks and cosmic insignificance theory, which is sort of like it doesn't really matter. But even that feels like it does matter. Just don't get bent out of shape if it doesn't go the way you want. Yep, yep, yep, yep. So, yeah, I think you're kind of hitting the nail on the head there. Well, let's get into the books here.
Book one is Debts and Lessons, and this is basically a list of all of the different lessons that he's learned from the different people in his life. And I jotted down a couple of them here. i didn't catch this in the introduction but i did at the end i should have and i will at some point for all of the the things that i jotted down in my notes i captured the quotes but i did not
use the numbered coding system, which I should have done because there's basically all of these numbers for the individual thoughts in the books. And so if they're referring to the 12th bullet in the first book, they'll do 1.12. I didn't do that when I captured these. So I just have like Rusticus, Alexander, the Platonist, Maximus, you know. Remind me, Mike, does Hayes in the introduction tell us how things got grouped the way they did?
Sort of. So he mentions the kind of the story behind book one, which is his schooling and book two and three, which were specific places. And then the rest of them. No, not so much. at least not that i caught i got into like book six and seven and i was like this feels or this i can't tell a dramatic theme difference between book six and book nine like i don't know and that felt very
Unsettling is too strong of a word, but I didn't have an anchor. I didn't know what we were doing. I just felt like I was reading a bunch of random quips from a really famous Roman guy. Yeah, which is, I don't know, I guess a little bit unfortunate. But again, they were never really meant to be published. My guess is that they kind of grouped these together. Because they found these pieces together and they were probably representative of a specific point in his life. But...
If you were going to package them as a book, obviously you would want to do it by subject or something like that, which Ryan Holiday has basically done with the Storm of Virtue series. Okay. Hold on one second. I want to look for something real quick. I'm looking for, I bet you there's a dissertation, Mike, on this. Somebody's written a dissertation on how this got produced.
Yeah, there's a bunch of research on this, right? And it's interpretation with things. Okay, cool. So yes, somebody has done a bunch of nerd science on this to figure out why. So that's fun. Nice. All right. If you find something useful, we'll put it in the show notes. Yeah, I'll look for that. All right. So just some things that I jotted down here.
The first one from Rusticus to read attentively, not to be satisfied with just getting the gist of it. I mean, that's basically bookworm in a nutshell right there. It's sort of frustrating actually later on because he... kind of contradicts that a couple different times in the other books where it's like, ah, you don't really need to read. Like, yes, you do. But I like the, I like that one.
And not just getting the gist of it, what does that actually look like? I think for me, that means if you're going to read a book, read a book and get what you can out of it. Don't, you know. force yourself to, well, I got to get at least this, this much out of it. If you get even one thing out of wrestling with, with a book that's, that's worth it.
For most people who don't have a podcast to talk about these things, they don't have to finish the books. If you're not enjoying it, just put it down. Go read something else that you're actually going to get something out of. Life is too short to read bad books, but... If you're going to go through the effort, don't just settle for the Blinkist version. There's different levels of knowledge. There's information, so you can go find it when you need to dig it up again.
Then there's where you actually know it and you can spit it back. But the highest level of this is where it actually changes things for you and you really start to apply it. It changes what you actually do. So that's the big takeaway, I think, from that one for me. And I would argue that that is relevant for anyone in any stage of life. I had no notes from book one.
like i read book one got to the end of it and was just like um i don't know what just happened right like like because it was just a list of people's names and then it was like a crm of their like characteristics that yeah that's true marcus aurelius liked you know that he that he thought was that he thought were good um and in my example of that would be like his father right and the only thing under there so this is number two my father right integrity and manliness.
done right and then we move on yeah well keep in mind he did die when he was really young so that's probably all he could remember but but yeah again i'm not like a i'm just saying like this was a hard book for me to like really grasp so it's like i have these ideas But I can't say anything was monumental or stood out to me from this first section.
Sure. I don't have much to help you here, Mike. Yeah, no, that's fair. There were two other ones that I jotted down. So I'll just share these quick. Alexander, the Platonist I mentioned, which the quote here is not to be constantly telling people or writing them that I'm too busy unless I really am. I feel like that's a trap that people fall into. Like, hey, how's it going? Oh, so busy.
And then Maximus, the sense he gave of staying on the path rather than being kept on it. So to me, this means you're choosing to walk the right path as opposed to being forced to walk the right path. And that's a maybe minor distinction. there but it kind of changes everything i think in terms of how you engage with your day-to-day so
There's not a whole lot more to dig into with that. That's just what I wrote down. I'm glad you said that because I'm calling things out as we get into the later books after book one. And I'm like, I just don't know what I'm going to say about this. Like, I don't know how I'm going to talk about it. I don't know what I'm going to say about it. So I'm glad you called that out because we'll see how the rest of this goes. We will see how the rest of this goes. So I guess on to book two then.
Okay, I'll start. Would you like me to start since I had nothing to say on book one? Yeah, go for it. Okay, so basically like...
Some of these are kind of like reminders to himself. So it's called On the River Grand Among the Quadi, right? Which I... don't really know what that means i assume there's a river that's named grand and then i have no idea what quality means because i didn't go look it up do you know okay um so you know like he he's reminding himself you know like he's talking about intelligence um and i and Mike, you had talked about actually acknowledging which one of them you highlighted or you called out.
I didn't start doing that until like halfway through the book. And I was like, I should have been doing this the entire time. Like I should have been calling out which one I was hidden. So I don't have them for the first one. But intelligence. And he says, think of it this way. So it's almost like he's talking to himself as he writes these things down.
Stop allowing your mind to be a slave and be jerked around by selfish impulses to kick against fate in the present and mistrust the future. So again, there's this idea of like, there's this thing, there's fate that's going to happen and stop fighting it. Like stop fighting fate. Just that idea that is invested or invested, not the right word, that infiltrates this entire, entire book. One of the things that. resonates with me a lot and he hits it here in book two.
The angry man seems to turn his back on reason out of a kind of pain and inner convulsion. He must have had anger issues because he talks about anger quite a bit in this. anger is foolish anger is not wise anger um is a is an issue um and that resonates with me because it's like i tend to get frustrated by by things um so so that's one of the things that like resonated with me more is like can i see this as an example of
you know, ways that I could look at frustration and anger. Yeah. A couple of things that stood out to me from this were the discussion of sin. He said, sin derived out of... pleasure deserves a stronger rebuke than sin committed out of pain and then later on i think he talked about how you can commit injustice by doing nothing actually i think that was book nine or something like that but
That got me thinking, you know, what is the right thing to do? That's really what he's talking about here. So disconnect the religious association with the word sin, but basically that's error. That's not acting rightly. And the only other thing that I really wanted to chew on from this was a quote that said, concentrate every minute like a Roman and doing what's in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly with justice.
I mean, that sounds good, but essentially it's like, do the right thing. Stay in the moment. It's how you could, could sum this up. And that's actually probably how you could sum up the entire book. Yeah. Well, and I think. You know, I'm thinking about this kind of kind of live right now. Like I didn't have this thought before we came into this recording, but this is a good like quote book or you'd be able to pull a bunch of quotes from this that are relevant to you.
And then throw those into a quote book and have that and revisit that. And I think it would be very, very valuable to you. Like if you've pulled out the ones that are relevant to you and then maybe revisited that, you know, every couple of years or whatever and said, you know, have things changed. I think that would be a very valuable way to.
use this book or the content of this book. Yeah. Which is basically how I approach taking notes on it. I mean, it's impossible to grok the... key ideas if there was such a thing from these random writings and condense it down into an outline so yeah i think that's what you got to do is you just got to find the the things that
really stand out to you and that's probably why it got so much traction is like there's all these little quotes which are attributed to marcus to realize oh that's really good where did that come from oh meditations yep yep All right. I think I'm good for book two. You want to go to book three? I'm ready to go to book three. All right. So book three is in, I don't know how to say this, Camuntum? I've got Carnuntum.
Carnuntum? Okay. Maybe I mistyped that when I took the notes. Okay. Carnuntum. You are right. low resolution monitor here carnantum which i i just did a google search on which i should have done before but it's a roman legionary fortress and headquarters of a fleet so so i've got the idea for that one Gotcha. Well, some random notes here, I guess. Don't waste the rest of your time here worrying about other people unless it affects the common good.
I jotted that down, but he says it a lot better later on. So I'm not sure I have anything else to say about that. He does mention commonplace books in book three, which I thought was interesting. Are you familiar with the idea of the commonplace book? I've heard it before, but I don't. Remind me what it is. So commonplace book.
uh has been around for a really long time the most famous version of this is probably a series of leonardo da vinci's notebooks i think there are five of them that are bound into three notebooks called the codex forester If you want to jot a note down, I can grab the link and I can share that in the show notes because someone actually digitized these and you can look at them and it's basically...
all these random bits of things, sketches, you know, the basis of his inventions as he's thinking through things. Okay. So that probably is what... Marcus Aurelius was doing with these different books. It's like, this feels significant, so I'm going to write it down, and then maybe I'll come back to this later. It's essentially what it is. Okay, okay.
so the term commonplace book has kind of gotten a resurgence with all of the the pkm stuff because basically what an app like obsidian is is a digital commonplace book You capture the bits and pieces of things that seem significant and then you dump them in there. But now you've got bi-directional links and... local graphs and all of these tools that you can use to actually i think get a lot more out of those those bits and pieces you know when leonardo was doing this
he had to flip back through the pages and oh yeah you know that thing oh i see how that you know applies over here which interestingly that is a great kind of metaphor for like the digital second brain stuff i feel because And one of the things that stands out to me from the life of Leonardo is he's capturing all these things. He's thinking about all these things. And then he's trying to figure out how to make sense of all this stuff in his world. And he mentions how.
He gets this idea for the way that sound works as someone throws a pebble into a well and he sees the ripples emanate from the middle the moment that he hears a church bell ring in the distance. So then he's like connecting those dots. And so that's where I think these tools for thought can be useful in making these different connections. So I like the mention of the commonplace book, but that's the only...
thing he says about it. And then you need to get used to winnowing your thoughts so that if someone says, what are you thinking about? You can respond at once and truthfully that you are thinking this or thinking that. That kind of hit me because my brain tends to be pretty busy.
And if someone were to ask me, what are you thinking about right now? Like, I don't always have an answer. It's like 12 different things here. Pick a card, any card. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. It's that live in the moment kind of thing, which is a very... common theme of his um you know be in the moment be of of the moment do the right thing right now um kind of a kind of a thing a couple things i i pulled out of this one is he gets into this idea of uh you know um
every day we move closer to death right so you know this memento mori you know kind of concept so it's like a lot of these things we've heard other places and other people unpack um and then um Another one would be like, stop worrying about other people, which he talks about that a good bit, right? Like, all right, stop caring about what other people think. Stop worrying about what other people think. And then he'll usually qualify it.
So in this one, unless it affects the common good. So stop worrying about what other people think unless it actually matters to the common good and then you should worry about it. But otherwise, don't worry about it. You're wasting your time worrying about it. So it's like I just like I get these. These are good thoughts. These are, you know, things that I think are valuable to us, but they are just floating out there kind of in the ether.
And I'm not sure. I'm still not sure what to do with them. So. Sure. Want to go on to book four? Yeah. Yeah. So book four has no title. The first of the title is books. So now we'll just. Mention the random thoughts that we love. Let me catch us up on something for accuracy. I did a quick search in the quadi people. The quadi are a people. So when he says, on the River Grand, among the Quaddi, they're a people group. Okay, so now we know that. All right, we figured out that Carnuntum is a...
Roman fortress. Cool. We got that. And now we go to book four and we don't have any titles anymore. So we did it. We did it, Mike. We were complete. Nice work. Okay. There actually are, I think, some profound things for me to chew on here. Again, not completely attributed to Marcus Aurelius, but one of the things he mentioned is if you seek tranquility, do less.
I tend to do too much, so that's a reminder. But not an action item. I don't think I have any action items from this book. Spoiler alert. Yeah, I agree. I agree. Yeah. And then just a couple of admonitions, you know, like nothing that goes on in anyone else's mind can actually harm you. He's saying choose not to be harmed and you won't be harmed. Don't feel harmed and you haven't been.
Uh, things have no hold on the soul disturbance comes only from within, from our own perceptions. So a lot of this, I, the things that stand out to me anyways, can be summed up. as kind of don't care so much what other people think. And that's probably something that I needed to hear. And then the only other thing I jotted down from here is no random actions, none.
not based on underlying principles. That resonates with me because of the PKM stack model and the vision and values piece at the very top. I think I try to do this anyways. And I try to help people codify this. I don't know. I'd have to spend some thinking time on it to see if there's anything in my life that isn't in alignment with the vision and values piece.
strikes me as this is sort of the direct opposite of my action item from last time about just have fun with things yeah it's like no if it's not useful don't do it so i yeah Okay. Can I explain a frustration I have with not just the book, but philosophy in general, like the concept of philosophy in general? Okay. Again, I'm going to give you a quote.
So this is number 39 because I started. So book four, number 39. Or to put another way, it needs to be realized that what happens to everyone, bad and good alike, is neither good nor bad. Well, hold on, right? So what happens to everyone bad and good alike is neither good nor bad. But how do we call it bad and good if it was neither? Okay, anyhow. So then... that what happens in every life live naturally or not is neither natural nor unnatural and it's like i
Like my brain goes, I don't like this. I just don't like this. I don't like this. And I don't know if that's a limitation of me. Like if I am just not wired to be a philosophical.
thinker like like in the way these these folks are if i'm too like practical if i'm too i don't know the engineering in me uh which the irony of this is i have a doctor of philosophy in engineering education but i cannot stand philosophy like the the the philosophy like the way it's written and the way you know the way the ideas are bounced around but it's like that that's a frustration i have but if you read the introduction hazel tell you like he was
like philosophy was his thing like he was thinking about philosophy he was trying to be a philosopher You know what I mean? And that's why they called him. So let me let me just mention, though, you're right. But there is a specific phrase that he uses in the introduction that Marcus Aurelius. would would basically push back on the idea that he was a philosopher but that is who he's trying to be and they use the term for him of philosopher king yeah i was gonna bring that up okay
But he would push back and say he's not like the other philosophers. He would basically say, I'm not a philosopher. And I don't know if that's just like false humility or what, but that's what he would have said.
okay all right um so so that like i tried to wrestle around with that um and then in book four i i have a couple different sections here where you know he's talking about like this idea of um essentially it doesn't matter like it doesn't matter because you're going to die it doesn't matter because you're going to die people who are excited by posthumous fame
forget that people um people who remember them will soon die too right it's like okay so okay you're gonna become famous the people who are gonna remember you as being famous they're gonna die and then you're not gonna be famous anymore and like the crazy thing about it is That's actually true. Like, I mean, like what he's saying there is so true. Like, okay, a couple generations out, people go, who?
Right? Like, I mean, we're getting to the point, like I'll throw out like a big famous sports name, Joe Namath. But you're getting to the point where people are like, Joe Namath.
Who the heck's Joe Namath? And then all the old people were like, you don't know who Joe Namath is? I can't believe you don't know. But it's so true. It's just a matter of that was such a... uh core part of his philosophy on the way the world worked and like don't like don't think too highly of yourself you know so what would that be like you had wisdom courage
justice and would that be temperance is that like in the temperance side of stoicism maybe I don't know I don't think I know enough about it to be honest I definitely don't yeah I don't know why I struggle with this so much. It's sort of like the Stoics want to just unpack everything they possibly can about these four specific virtues. And I'm just kind of like.
Those are our four virtues. There are more, and I'm not going to bat a thousand anyways, so I'm just going to try to do what I think is right. Maybe that makes me a bad philosopher too. I don't know. It's just, I don't know what to do about it. And I think it's good. I'm actually, as crazy as it's going to sound, I'm happy that I read this. because everybody talks about it and it's such a popular book and all those things. But I will tell you, it wasn't enjoyable. I wasn't like...
sitting down thinking, yeah, I get to read more meditations tonight. It was a matter of like, okay, let's try to get something out of this. But just another one to show you the mindset that Marcus Aurelius had.
Survey the records of the other areas. See how many others gave their all and soon died and decomposed into elements that formed them. It's like... it's gonna happen it's coming for you right like just get ready for it and it was so ingrained in him um i'll stop i'll get off my soapbox but um we can move to book five but it's like it's just so ingrained in all of this
well i think part of it maybe is even though gregory hayes is translating this there's a certain part of this which just doesn't translate well Because you're kind of talking about there's these lives of these other famous people and I have the Ryan Holiday version of this, which is a Gregory Hayes translation. But then at the end of it, there's another thing on the life of Marcus Aurelius.
from one of Ryan Holiday's books, which is The Lives of the Stoics. Okay. So Ryan Holiday basically takes that sort of stuff from the historical manuscripts and tells a good story. about the events that happened in these people's lives okay and i just don't care enough to put in that much effort yeah understood so yeah book five again title this And a couple of things jotted down from here. First one was on practicing the virtues.
And again, like there's four stoic virtues, right? But then he says, focus on practicing the virtues that you can actually show honesty, gravity, endurance, austerity, resignation, abstinence, patience, sincerity, moderation, seriousness, and high mindedness. And reading through a list like that is very reminiscent for me of the fruit of the spirit in the Bible. And so that's kind of how I translated this is like.
There's these lists of things that you should try to do. And I don't know. There's some good questions to ask yourself. Like, what am I actually doing with my soul? And he mentions that the things that you think about determine the quality of your mind. I think that's actually pretty profound. Struggling to remember who it was that talked about this. But I read something recently about like the quality of the ideas that you have come from the quality of the things that you read, obviously.
And reading harder things results in better ideas, but that's a skill that you have to develop. And someone wrote this thing about... And they had a term for it, which is escaping my mind right now. But it's sort of like, again, you know, I try to justify everything and make, you know, the reason for doing the thing. But it was like, if you put in the effort to develop your mental abilities, kind of like if you go to the gym and you lift.
and you develop the muscle you can lift more it's like if you consistently read these non-fiction books and the things that are a little bit harder it improves the quality of your mind your mental acuity things like that you're able to do more
Because you've gone to the mental gym, essentially. They had a much more succinct and better articulated argument around that. But that's kind of what I thought of with that. He gets into another one of his... kind of fundamental threads here but um it would be this idea of like interacting with other people and how people interaction should take place um that
uh and and this could be because he was in management right whether it was in like leadership and management right that was his primary job um whether it was running you know rome or whether it was leading a an army or whatever but um you know our job is uh is to do other people good and to put up with them which i think is like i wonder how much of this is translational versus how much of it is like actually the way he was thinking where it's like listen
We want to help the people do good. And then there's going to be some people who are just annoying and are bothering and you just got to deal with them. And that's a big part of what we have to do as well. But it ties into this bigger stoic idea. found the definition of temperance, right? The quality of moderation or self-restraint. So it's this idea of self-restraint. Like you want to get frustrated with them. Don't. They're just people.
put up with them you want to you know whatever don't like you want to go do this thing that isn't um you know ethically or morally right because that's another thing that uh hazel talk about in the in the beginning is um Marcus Aurelius will do things from the ethical or moral rightness standpoint. What is right? What is wrong? What is moral? What is immoral? And he's trying to think through those things.
like again there's there's good things populated in here um i'm you had talked about not having action items i don't know what to do with them like i don't know other than like just to review them every so often i guess yeah That's about it. All right. Ready for book six. All right. So a couple of things from book six for me.
Let's see. When jarred, unavoidably by circumstances, revert at once to yourself and don't lose the rhythm more than you can help. I feel like this was written for knowledge workers. in the modern day. What's left for us to prize? I think it's this to do and not do what we were designed for. I really like that one.
I like the phrase not to assume it's impossible because you find it hard, but to recognize that if it's humanly possible, you can do it too. I'm interpreting that maybe a little bit differently than he intended it to. when he wrote it but um i it echoes to me of when we read uh the chase jarvis book kind of you have more ability you have more strength you have more time you have more in you than you realize
That's something that I tend to need to hear. And then the other thing that really stands out to me here is I do what is mine to do. The rest don't disturb me. That's a good reminder. To just focus on what you can control and then let the rest of the stuff go, which is easier said than done. But yeah, there were two that.
Two major ones to sit out for me on this one. Pride is a master of deception. When you think you're occupied in the weightiest business, that's when he has you in his spell. So it's like, oh. I'm doing something super important right now. And then the pride seeps in and like undermines, undermines the whole thing. Right. Another one would be ambition means tying your wellbeing to what other people say or do.
Self-indulgence is tying it to the things that happen to you. And then sanity is tying it to your own actions. And I just thought that was a really clever way to break those three things down. Ambition, self-indulgence, and then... actually staying sane i liked um i like those and then i've heard this one before i didn't know it derived somewhere from you know meditations or marcus realis but what injures the hive injures the bee
yeah right like i really like that idea of this like calming good like what injures calming good eventually will come down and injure injure all the other people as well and i think there's a i think there's a lot of wisdom in that in that saying as well Yeah, I had never read that before, but I had heard the flip version of that of what's good for the hive is good for the bee. And I'm kind of curious if that...
framing in that phrase is the reason behind the name beehive for like those social newsletters. Are you familiar with the beehive service? I am. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I just went through, uh, um, webinar by Matt McGarry, who is, uh, he knows what he's talking about when it comes to newsletters, but he's a like beehive certified, whatever. So there was a big emphasis on, on using beehive and, uh, yeah.
I'm a kick customer for life, I think, but it's interesting to me. All right, so let's go to the next one here, which I guess is book seven. This is where there's... I think a shift towards the theme that keeps popping up here to me is sort of like everything in moderation, focus on the present moment. So some of the things that stand out that I jotted down, you don't need much to live happily. He talks about how I can control my thoughts as necessary. Then how can I be troubled?
And no matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be good. And so kind of focusing on what you can control and and letting the the rest go there's another one here it's silly to try and escape other people's faults they are inescapable just try to escape your own good reminder i think not to nitpick all the things that people do wrong
It's easy to get upset when you notice that stuff, but really what you should be focusing on is all of your own faults and trying to address those, which I think kind of communicated. implicitly throughout all of the stoic discussion here is if you can master these virtues it's sort of like enlightenment and you'll not be bothered by all this stuff anymore but you're never going to get there so just continue to walk the path
I think that's kind of what, what he's after with a lot of this stuff. Perfection of character to live your last day every day without frenzy or sloth or pretense. I like that idea of like, think about the last day. think about how you would want to live that last day. And then can you put that on repeat? Can you live that last day every day? And I think that's just a really neat way to think about it. There's a couple of things in here, but like...
I just don't understand how... How do I say this? I can't communicate how to explain these. So, frightened of change. What would exist without it? What's closer to nature's heart? Can you take a hot bath without the firewood burning, essentially? And it's like, the way he describes it, it's like so... it's like so top of the brain if that makes sense like it's so like unpolished and raw and it's like well come on like and maybe that's like tying back into the logic and the reasoning and the
you know like I don't I don't know but like I have a hard time describing what I get out of these things I kind of like that about it like I kind of like that it feels like somebody walking around with some note cards going Here's a thought. And he writes it down and he throws it on the table. And then there's somebody behind him walking up going, I'm going to pick that one up. I'm going to pick that one up. I'm going to pick that one up. I'm going to pick that one up. Yeah, like it just feels.
I guess like fleeting thoughts or fleeting notes. Another one that comes out of is this idea of simplicity, right? Like you talked about it a little bit where kind of some of the best things come from simplicity. And I really like this. this concept i i think if i had an action item not necessarily from this book but just in general if i had an action item one of them would be like how do i make life more simple
Right. Like right now is too crazy. There's too much chaos. How do I make it more simple? How do I how do I simplify everything? Like not just, you know, this thing. How do I simplify? everything. And I think that would be a fun experiment. Although I think it would be really, really, really hard to do if you did it for most areas of your life. Yeah. Less, less, but better is essentially what, what, uh,
we're after with, with some of that stuff. All right. Book eight, a couple of things again, you know, there's like 50 different bullets for each of these, but I just jotted down. A couple that stood out to me. The first step, don't be anxious. The second step, concentrate on what you have to do. Simple enough. Yep. Yep. You were talking about.
the the actions and how that's what builds our life he says in in this book you have to assemble your life yourself action by action and i like that it's sort of reminiscent of the Atomic Habits idea, if you ask me. Another thing he says is give yourself a gift, the present moment. Again, an admonition to stay in the now.
And then external things are not the problem. It's your assessment of them, which you can erase right now. Good reminder that you can change your perspective in a moment. The perspective you have towards the things that happen is... really powerful for either good or bad and so that which you can erase right now that's the the key part i think is you could be upset by this thing that happened
yesterday, last week, last year, you can just continue to hold onto that. And he's basically saying, you know, in a moment you could be free from that if you just let it go. And I think that is a, that's a powerful idea. I've heard this described as framing before, which I think I can't remember if it's in one of the books, but it's like how you frame that situation. Oh, I failed that exam. You know, it's like that is one framing or versus.
You know, I didn't perform as well as I could have. Like, I have opportunity to grow. I have room to grow. Like, those are two different framings. And I think that's... You know, something that he talks about here where he's talking about it from the perspective that you're looking at it or I forget the word that he actually uses.
The one thing I called out in book eight was these three relationships. So relationship with the body you inhabit, the divine or the cause of all things, and then the relationship with the people around you. And I thought this was a pretty. Clever way to summarize, you know, kind of these relationships that are that are core and essential. What's your relationship with yourself essentially?
What's your relationship with those around you? And then what's your relationship with some higher power, right? Like some, something that is the cause or, you know, kind of the definition of everything. So I like that from book eight. All right. Book nine, just keep moving along. A couple of things. I mentioned the one already, which is that you can commit injustice by doing nothing.
The way I would describe this, I think, is sins of commission and sins of omission. So things that are wrong because you did them, and then things that are wrong because you did nothing. So one of the things that a sin of commission, for example, actually taking a negative or evil action and then the sins of omission like.
you see something happening but it's in your power to stop it and you do nothing the example it stands out to me and this is kind of kind of graphic maybe so maybe people haven't seen this but As we record this, recently on the news, the UnitedHealthcare CEO was gunned down in New York, and I've seen the video of the guy who shot him.
And it strikes me because he's moving towards the CEO and there are people who, when he starts shooting, are walking the other way and they just run out of the picture. And I'm like, if you just turn to the right, take this guy out. The minute that you hear that go off, because you can see them in the video, you could have stopped the whole thing. And I would like to think that if I'm in that position, that's what I would do. But you really never know until you're in that situation.
but i feel like uh the sins of omission that's the one that sadly the the culture today is sort of like well it's not a big deal it seems like there's more and more people who's like i just don't want to get involved you know and i I think that's sad. Now, arguing about things online, that's not the place to get involved. But if you find yourself in a place and you're able to do the thing, like do the thing.
So that part, I guess, of the stoic, that part of the stoic message or stoic manifesto, I agree with. And then you can discard most of the junk that clutters your mind, things that exist only there and clear out space for yourself. Again, I tend to have a pretty busy mind, so guilty of that and recognizing that I do have the ability to flip that switch and just choose what I'm going to focus on.
which is the other thing that I jotted down. Concentrate on what you're doing and what you're doing it with. And that kind of sounds to me a lot like stewardship. So essentially... what is it that you're doing and then what are the tools that are at your disposal as you you do the the thing and not wishing you had more resources not wishing the circumstances were different but
what is the right thing for me to do right now? So you stole my big one. My big one was the discard the junk that clutters your mind because I think that's a really important one. There's another one in here, number two.
real good luck would be to abandon life right without ever encountering dishonesty hypocrisy self-indulgence or pride so it's basically like hey listen if you just died before you were dishonest or you know hypocrite or any of that stuff he goes but the next best scenario is the die when you've had enough of that and it was like it's like geez like holy cow it's so I don't know. I don't know the word to describe it, but it's just so defeatist or so...
This is just the way it would be better if you just had never lived or you were able to live without experiencing these things. And I don't know. I do not resonate with that way of thinking at all. I get where you're coming from. It's kind of like the everything is meaningless, but I don't think that's the way that he was saying it. Basically, my interpretation of that phrase.
If you are able to live your whole life and avoid all this stuff, that would be awesome. But it's never going to happen. Not, you know, end it before you walk before you encounter somebody who is.
gonna think ill of you yeah i i i did not mean to come across that way like that's what he's saying you should do yeah i'm saying like that's his mentality like that's his mindset for it is like it these things uh dishonesty hypocrisy self-indulgence they're so bad it's better off if you like wouldn't uh you die before you you know experience those things sure
I mean, later he describes it like a plague, a mental cancer, you know, worse than anything. Yeah, that's true. So, I mean, he's very, like, he doubles and triples and quadruples down on these ideas. That is fair. That is fair. All right. to the next book book 10 and a couple things that jump out to me here
The first one, and I jotted down this a little bit of a longer phrase, but it's important to catch the whole thing. He says, everything that happens is either endurable or not. If it's endurable, then endure it. Stop complaining. If it's unendurable, then stop complaining. He was a no-nonsense guy. That's for sure. At least in these meditations. Yeah. I don't know that I really struggle with this per se, but I can see how this is the seeds of there's a stoic concept of more fatigue.
which I've actually got one of those stoic, but it's not a stoic virtue, but it Ryan holiday has these coins and one of them is a more fatigue and basically it's celebrate whatever happens. It's part of the journey. And that meant something to me when I was going through the, the trying to get my business off the ground. It's like, well, this is just part of the part of the process.
Just keep going. And when you frame it that way, it's kind of like, well, this kind of sucks, but it's necessary as opposed to, oh, when is this ever going to end? And you just keep hoping that eventually you're going to get out of it and then nothing happens and it's just demoralizing. So that's sort of the picture that I have of that. But again, you know, his direct admonition here is just stop complaining about things.
He also says to stop talking about what the good man is like and just be one, which is kind of funny because we're spending hours here talking about what he said about. being a good man but uh it doesn't matter how good a life you've led there'll still be people standing around the bed who will welcome the sad event and um when i read that
I was sort of picturing in my head kind of don't read the comments as it pertains to like YouTube because that's funny. I mean, I have a YouTube channel. I need to.
get back to publishing regularly on YouTube. But I've noticed this. The majority of the comments can be positive and oh my gosh, this was amazing. Thank you for explaining this. And then there's the... one jerk who's like this is crap you know i experienced this in the webinar actually today there were like 1500 people on there and there were a handful of people who just kept saying
Stupid negative stuff because a webinar, you know, he's teaching you this stuff and then he's selling his course at the end. You know the drill, right? And they just, yeah, very, very negative. And like, eventually I just started thumbs downing everything that they would. they would say because i'm like just just stop this is this is course evals every semester right like you know 90 something percent of them are good and then you have that one it's like well you wore a funny shirt
on the third week of class, right? You know, it's like, okay, thanks. Like, thank you. Thanks for that. But no, like your, your points, your points well made. It's like, you know, there's always going to be that person. There's always going to be somebody who can find something wrong with whatever you do.
All right, how much are you going to, and then this ties into some of these other ones, which I think there's, and there's probably works that are done around this, tying some of these together, right? Like if you tie this meditation together with this meditation, with this meditation, look at his train of thought. But then you're making it up because he didn't do that. So it's like you're kind of making up, you know, meditations. The one or one of the ones I called out in this in this.
chapter is basically like, Hey, you know, it's the saying that you're, you know, your mom or your grandma, your dad always said, well, when you point the finger, there's always three pointing back at you. Uh, so when faced with other people's bad behavior, turn around and ask when you have acted like that.
And it was like, oh, okay, shoot. Like, you're right. And then it's a, hey, stop it. Like, don't get angry at them because you do the same thing. Don't be a hypocrite. Like, that's the whole thing is don't be a hypocrite. Don't be a hypocrite. Um, but, but I mean, I think what I'm realizing as we have this conversation is like just how not fluffy he was in any of these meditations. Like it was more a matter of just like, here's the point. Here's the point.
here's the point kind of a thing. Yeah. So the, the don't be a hypocrite thing, um, that is kind of hitting on, I think. One of the important things that he mentions over and over again, just bringing the focus back to yourself. Ed Cole says it this way, that we judge others by their actions, but ourselves by our intentions, because...
On some level, you're always going to be hypocritical. People will always be able to look back at your life if they look close enough and point out the inconsistencies. And that used to bother me. I used to never want to publish anything online because I didn't want to be wrong. And I had to get over that. You have to get to the point.
where you're just doing the best that you can. Everybody's doing the best that they can. Nobody's perfect. And the real thing that I think makes that click is just not worrying about trying to fix anybody else but yourself. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right, Mike, let's wrap this thing up. Let's get to book 11. So book 11, again, I got a couple things I'll share here. Let's see.
it mentions that a branch cut away from the branch beside it is simultaneously cut away from the whole tree so to a human being being separated from another is to be cut loose from the whole community and This kind of resonated with me. I mean, I don't know that I agree 100% with the specifics of that. But I think the larger message here is that you can focus on, well...
I have an issue with this person. Or you get offended by something that somebody says. Then you start to try to avoid that person and pretty soon you've just removed yourself and isolated yourself from the... the community which was the the thing that was uh giving you life and you don't realize it right away it's kind of like you cut off a branch so that that metaphor is really powerful to me because um i get this picture of
there's uh someone in our neighborhood had a storm go through this big branch fell down it was laying in their their um front yard for like a week and a half and you drive by it the first three four days looks like it's healthy And then a week later, all of a sudden, the whole thing is just shriveled up. And it's like all of a sudden, overnight, things went from good to bad. And I feel like that's.
That's the sort of thing. If you remove yourself from the community, you live in isolation. It's not good, but you're not going to notice it in the moment. Just a reminder that you need other people. Then there was a quote here, which I thought applied to AI. Okay. Okay. Let's see this. The natural can never be inferior to the artificial. Art imitates nature, not the reverse.
I like that too. Yeah, I like that too. And I've been waiting actually till we recorded this episode. I wanted to hear what you thought of that because it kind of strikes me that AI keeps getting better, but the more I see it. improve the less I feel it's ever going to get to the point where it develops this super intelligence and it takes over the world because it can't differentiate.
The difference between, you know, a noun and a verb based on how I use this word in a sentence. You know, there are definite places where it just completely falls on its face because I think. It's an imitation of the real thing. And there will probably always be those holes. I'm not sure you'll ever get to the point where you can fix all of that.
Yeah. There's a guy named George Box and he has a saying that says all models are wrong. Some are useful. Yeah. And and I really like that. That connection to this idea is like if you look at the complexity of nature. And like how crazy it is and how different factors have to come together to, you know, make those systems and keep those systems operational.
when you get into like complex systems theory and you're thinking about how this ecosystem impacts this ecosystem and impacts this ecosystem like i i just can't see us you know, like art mimics nature, I would say design mimics nature, technology mimics nature, right? Like we're going to continue to make this more and more advanced and more and more advanced, but we're still not going to be able to.
I don't know. I guess I do want to say it. I don't want to go that strong. I don't know if we're ever going to be able to recreate actual, the complexity that actually exists in nature. And I think that's a comforting thing to me. Right. Like we're going to get better and better and better, but we're never going to be able to do it. Like our models will be wrong, but they will be useful and we will continue to make more and more useful models that are close, but not not perfect. Yep.
Well, that's all I got for book 11. Anything else you wanted to call out? Okay, so he hits on kindness a good bit in this one. So I just think that's an interesting one. I don't know if that's a theme that runs through it, but he hits on kindness. And then he talks about goals.
So I didn't know if you flagged that one and got cranky about it. Because he says, if you don't have a consistent goal in life, you can't live in a consistent way. And I was like, I wonder what Mike thinks about the goal. Marcus Aurelius' goal comment. I actually like that. I almost wrote that one down, but I didn't. I don't think goal means smart goal. I think it means having something that you're aiming at. A compass, not a map.
Yeah, I was poking the bear. I was intentionally poking the bear on that one. But no, I don't really have much else on this one. And then I got mixed up. I thought book 11 was the last book. We have another book, book 12. We do. So here, you can see where I'm going with this, Mike. Yeah. All right. So book 12. Let's see. Practice even what seems impossible. I like that. I think myself...
And personally, I tend to, you know, if I don't think it's realistic, it's kind of like, well, why even try? And I have to fight back against that because I do believe, as I mentioned a couple of different times, that we're capable of more than we realize.
And then the other thing, well, actually two other things. If it's not right, don't do it. If it's not true, don't say it. That's a good one-liner, good way to live your life. And then it never ceases to amaze me. We all love ourselves more than other people. but care more about their opinion than our own. That's really good. You called out some of the same ones I called out. So that's great. Yeah. I mean, I feel like Adam Grant talks about that in Hidden Potential.
And he, I don't think, says it any more eloquently than Marcus Aurelius did. Yeah, I like the number 24. Three things that are essential at all times. Your own actions. External events. And then he describes this last one. If you could. get to the 30,000 foot view and look down, you realize how pointless everything is. Right. And I'm like, ah, you had me like, we're like, here are the essential things, what you do, some of these external events that happened. And then.
everything in life is meaning cosmic insignificance theory. Yep. Yeah. Just, just stop caring about it. Um, so, you know, that's a, that's a recurring theme. Um, I had another one here that I wanted to, um, to call out. constantly run down the list of those who felt intense anger. We get back to this idea of anger, and I don't know if this is just hitting me with my frustration and my anger kind of thing. The most famous, the most unfortunate, the most hated, the most whatever.
ask, where is all that now? Essentially, your energy that you're putting into being frustrated and being angry, you're throwing that, what's the phrase? Good something to bad. You're putting good energy into bad ends or whatever it is. There's a phrase there. I can't remember what the phrase is. I don't know what it is. Yeah, but don't do that. Don't waste your time. Don't waste your time on putting good energy into bad things.
Agreed. Well, we made it. Oh, we made it. So, action items. I have none. I have none. Like, none. I like my action item. If I need an action item, I will put this book on the shelf. And I'm done. Yeah. All right. Well, let's go to style and rating then. Okay. And I have to go first, don't I? You do have to go first. And I'm strong on that one today. Dang it. All right. Well, I don't love the style. I will say that.
I think the concept is kind of cool and I'm glad that I have read it. If for nothing else, I no longer feel FOMO when people talk about meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Yep. It does strike me that there is some good wisdom to be gleaned here. The writings are very old. He lived 121 AD, you know. So... Maybe I have a different perspective simply because I already am reading historical wisdom literature.
if you want to define the bible that way and so that is probably unfair to measure this against but that's sort of how it reads to me at least the the modern translation here And I don't think Marcus Aurelius would like it to be put on that sort of pedestal. I think that's probably... Probably unfair. But the bottom line is if I'm going to read something like this, I've already got a good resource for me. So.
I went through this and I was able to map a couple of things where like, oh yeah, you know, I see this is a biblical principle here. And honestly, that's what got me into reading these nonfiction books. I was... So my whole journey into the productivity space started when I was teaching a personal management class for the Bible college that I graduated from.
and recognizing that there were a lot of biblical principles that were written, that best-selling books, productivity books were written about. And I was like, oh, they're basically talking about these things. but they've removed the scripture references. But the principles obviously still work. And honestly, I like that. I like reading the books that other people are written and trying to make those connections.
myself as i started doing that i was like i'm going to write my own book and i started writing and publishing every day that's when i got connected with asian efficiency and the rest as they say is history but that was
The thing that got me into doing everything that I do currently and all the creating that I do online, before that, it was never really a blip on my radar. So... i like doing that that kind of stuff but this one is just i don't know it's hard for me to to do that with because it was never really intended
to be written as a book that we would typically read for bookworm. I feel kind of bad having picked this for bookworm, to be honest. This is not the right medium to be discussing this sort of thing. I will say that I actually got way more out of the conversation that we had today than I thought we were going to.
I was really nervous as I was taking notes and a lot of these quotes is like, well, I got to have something that we can discuss. So I'll just pick the things that, you know, resonate with me. But yeah, this is, this book is not for me. I can see why it's for some people. And I think if you're big into stoicism, this is sort of like going to the source. I know some people would argue this isn't the source. You know, it's the writings of...
Seneca and other people that Marcus Aurelius references. I just don't care to go that deep. Yeah, I agree. I agree. Like I said, I'm glad that I read it. I think there's some good stuff in here. There's definitely some stuff to get you to think. From a bookworm perspective, I don't think it's a very good book for this format.
Other than, you know, we had a cool conversation about it. I'm going to rate it three stars. You could make the argument that I really dislike this book and I should rate it lower than that. But like I said, I think there's some good stuff in here. I don't think it's a difficult read, to be honest. The hardest part is the Gregory Hayes introduction. Yep. If you remove that and just read the content itself, I think that there's some stuff in here that'll...
get you to think. And ultimately that's a, that's a good thing. But yeah, I think if, unless you're, you know, wanting to go deeper down a stoic rabbit hole, Ryan holiday's resources are the ones that I would recommend to people. All right. Mike, you were way more generous than I'm going to be. I figured that might be the case. I'm going to completely remove the bookworm.
aspect of this right i'm thinking about this and i'm rating this book based on solely on do i like this book would i read this book again and what i recommend other people read this book and what i will tell you is no Did I like this book? No. Would I read this book again? Absolutely not. And would I recommend that anybody read this book? No, I would not. Now there may be, I shouldn't, I don't want to be a hypocrite, right? Because Marcus Aurelius has told me not to.
There might be a person that I find that I would point to this book and be like, you know, that one time I read this book and you might like actually like this book, but I don't think that's going to be very often. I am. I'm glad I read it. So don't read this, Mike. Remember, we just read about this. Don't read my opinion. Don't own that opinion, right? Because it's just my opinion. I'm glad I read it.
I'm glad I worked through it. I would not have been upset if we weren't recording a podcast on this and I could have stopped reading it at about book four. And I'd have just been like, you know, I know where this is going. I'm good. Everything's going to be okay. And then I would have probably been just as happy to go with like, what are the best pull quotes?
from Marcus Aurelius' Meditation, and I would have read those and gone, yeah, those are pretty good pull quotes. So it's purely based on me, what I like, what I didn't like. I think there is some... Good ideas in here. Right. I think it's really cool. Like you mentioned it a little bit, how I think wisdom transcends time. So therefore, you know, like I see. smart good ideas you know way back in you know 120 AD or whatever 160 AD whatever so I like that but Mike this book is a one star for me
This is a one star book for me. I have figured out where my one star book is. And this book is a one star book for me. all right um like i like you rated it a three and i like almost like when like i almost had like a like a like a breath like a surprised shock breath in there it's just i mean it i just
The one star is coming from the valuable stuff that's in there, but I know would, would never need to read this book again ever. I get it. That's fair. So I think the one star version of this for me. would be if it was like two or three times as long. Yeah, and written in Latin. Yeah, so I don't know. I mean, I guess I've cranked through enough books I didn't enjoy.
That this one wasn't too tough for me because of the length. It wasn't that long. How many books have been rated one star on Bookworm? Oh, that's a good question. Is it a lot? I don't know. There are two books specifically. that I remember absolutely hating. But even those, I'm not sure I ever rated them just one star because just talking through them and also reading them, I was able to find something. I'm like, oh, that's valuable.
So one star for me means like I got absolutely nothing out of this. This was a complete waste of time. But the two that I absolutely hated were Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and then The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer. And The Art of Asking, I actually couldn't finish that book. I had to, because it's kind of like her memoir. It's like a bunch of random thoughts that...
I mean, just her talking about her life experiences and things. And it's, oh man, I had to get the audio book and listen to it while I was out for a run. That's the only way that I could finish it. I'm like, this is, this is so bad. Well, my one star is there's some value in there, but not a crazy amount and not in a form. But here's one thing that we're learning, right? You're always learning something.
I'm learning that these books where there's lists of ideas, so like the 101 book that we read not too long ago. I didn't like that style of that book either. There's 101 essays that'll change the way you think. I didn't like that book either. I don't like this book where it was just basically like 50 something, 12 times 50 ideas. So I think I'm learning that that.
I'm going to avoid those books. No listicles for Corey. That's what we're learning. All right. Let's put meditations on the shelf. What's next? So I have the next book. The next book we are doing is called Simple Marketing for Smart People. The one question you need to win customers without gimmicks, hype, or hard selling. It's by Billy Broaz and with Tiago Forte. So that's how it's titled on the front cover. Billy Broaz with Tiago Forte. So I'm doing this one.
somewhat selfishly or maybe completely selfishly. I don't know how that works, but I want to learn more about marketing. And I'm by no means trying to say I'm a smart person, but I'm just saying I want to learn about marketing and I want to do it in a simple way. Like I don't want to read a textbook on marketing. I don't want to go listen to 75 hours of podcasts on marketing. I want to get a good gist of what marketing is all about and reading about this one.
Tiago Forte is a name, so I know of Tiago's work. So there's a methodology that they're going to pitch to us, and I'm looking forward to unpacking this one. It's a little bit of a shorter book. um for those of you it's 174 pages the print length version is 174 pages so it shouldn't be um too hard to knock out and hopefully we get some some good stuff out of it around marketing yeah mike you have the book after that
Well, real quickly, it's a pretty easy read. I will say the discussion for this will probably be best if you come to it with some sort of application. Like this is how I could see this being applied. I know that's the direction I'm going to take as I go through it again because I've read it previously. Working on the cohort stuff and thinking through, like, how can I actually apply this stuff as I finish up the sales page and things like that? So, yeah, it's a good one.
This is the one if you want to learn something about marketing, but you're put off by the Alex Hormozzi's and the Russell Brunson's. This is anti that. Good. All right. After that, we have a long book. So I'm evening it out. But. We're going to read Port Charlie's Almanac by Charlie Munger and Peter Kaufman. I think that's the version that we're going to read. So I'll put the link in the show notes for people if they are interested in reading this with me.
Port Charlie's Almanac has been around in some way, shape or form for a while. And it's one of those books that I just keeps popping up on the list is like, this is really something you need to read before you die. And, uh, Yeah, it's so it's like 350 pages. It's a bit longer. But since we're going through simple marketing for smart people prior to this, it's kind of good timing. And I think this is going to be.
a good conversation it'll be interesting to see you know that book because charlie munger is you know the guy who works with warren buffett right so essentially a wisdom type of book But modern as opposed to the ancient one that we just went through. So maybe Corey will love it. Maybe he'll hate it. Shane Parrish says, there's a billion dollar education inside this book. yeah those are big words right there that is big words yep all right got any gap books um no
I don't think I have any gap books right now. If I have gap books, I'm not committing to them because finals is ending and I'm grading finals right now. And then the holiday is here. So I don't know if I'm going to do any gap books right now. How about you? I do have a gap book. So yesterday I was sitting in a chair upstairs. Toby walks into the living room.
With this look in his eye and I'm like, oh boy, what's going to happen? He's like, I have a challenge for you. And I was like, oh boy, what's that? He hands me a book and he's like, read this over Christmas break. And it's a fiction book. Tale of Two Cities. So I said that I would read it. Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.
And I think, Mike, your holiday break is going to be the best of times or the worst of times. We'll figure that out. Nice. Yeah, I've never read that book. So I think I'll have the bandwidth to pull that off. All right. Well, I'll just put out a quick plug here for the Bookworm Club membership. If you want to support the podcast directly... That would be great. We would very much appreciate it. You can do so by going to patreon.com slash bookwormfm.
there will be some additional perks coming to that membership shortly right now what you get is a pro version of the show so it has an extra segment where today we did a brief 2024 retrospective there's also bootleg feed which is the recording as soon as we get done I upload that and it has all of the the flubs and it's unedited but you get it a couple weeks in advance
There's a 4K bookworm wallpaper. And a couple other things are going to be coming to that in 2025. So stay tuned. It costs $7 a month. But if you want to support the podcast directly, we would really appreciate that. You could do so by going to patreon.com slash bookwormfm. And if you're reading along with us, pick up Simple Marketing for Smart People and we'll talk to you next time.