366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living
Content
- Again, by Ryan Holiday.
- PAGES
- COPYRIGHT
- DISCOVERY OF THE BOOKLET
- INTRODUCTION
- PART I: LESSON TO BE LEARNED
- JANUARY: UNION
- GASHYANTARE: PASSIONS AND WORK
- MARCH: INFORMATION
- APRIL: EXTRAORDINARY THOUGHTS
- PART II: LESSONS IN ACTION
- APRIL: GOOD DEEDS
- JUNE: SOLVING THE PROBLEM
- JULY: EMPLOYEE
- AUGUST: Pragmatism
- CHAPTER III: LESSONS OF THE WILL
- RELATED: STRENGTH AND RESISTANCE
- RECEPTION: PILLAR AND THE LORD
- TOPIC: FAITH/FATITUDE OF LOVE
- DECAY: THINKING ABOUT ACTIONS
- HOLD
Preface
The days of solitude for one of Rome’s greatest emperors, the letters of one of Rome’s greatest playwrights and one of its smartest businessmen, and the teachings of a former slave and fugitive were powerfully moving.
teachers. Despite everything, these extraordinary archives have been preserved for more than two thousand years.
What do they say? Could these old and obscure articles contain anything relevant to modern life? The answer is, of course, yes. It contains some of the greatest wisdom in world history.
Together, these writings form the basis of Stoicism, an ancient philosophy that was once popular in the West and sought to promote good among both the rich and the poor, the powerful and the warriors. Good. To live. However, as the centuries passed, knowledge of this way of thinking, which became important to many, gradually disappeared.
Stoicism is neither known nor understood except by the most intelligent people. In fact, it is difficult to find a more misused word in the English language than the word “stoic.” For ordinary people, this lifestyle has become the epitome of the action-oriented, life-changing paradigm of “sentimentality.” Since the mere mention of philosophy is frightening and boring, the above “Stoic philosophy” seems like the last thing anyone wants to learn, let alone be urgent in daily life.
What a sad tragedy for philosophy, which Arthur Schopenhauer, one of its occasional critics, defined as “the highest point a man can reach only by using his intellectual powers.
”Our aim with this book is to restore Stoicism to its rightful place as a tool for self-confidence, perseverance, and wisdom: something you use to live a meaningful life rather than a kind of discovery.
Many of history’s greatest thinkers not only understood Stoicism for what it was; they studied it: George Washington, Walt Whitman, Frederick the Great, Eugène Delacroix, Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Jefferson, Matthew Arnold, Ambrose Bierce, Theodore Roosevelt, William Alexander Percy, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Everyone has read, studied, judged, or admired the Stoics.
The ancient Stoics were not fools themselves. The names you see in this book—Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca—belonged to a Roman emperor, a former slave who was the great teacher and friend of Emperor Hadrian, a famous writer and political advisor. There were Stoics such as Cato the Younger, an admirable politician; Zeno was a prosperous merchant (like many Stoics); Cleanthes was a former boxer and worked as a water carrier to go to school; Chrysopsis, whose writings are now completely lost but have more than seven hundred books, was trained as a long-distance runner; Posidonia became an ambassador; Musonius Rufus was a teacher; and many others.
Today, especially with the recent release of The Obstacle Is the Way, Stoicism has gained popularity and appealed to a wide range of individuals. In addition to professional athletes, CEOs, hedge fund managers, artists, executives, and general men and women, Stoicism has found a diverse audience.
What did all these outstanding men and women find in Stoicism that others did not? Party. While scholars often dismiss Stoicism as an age-old method for modest gain, practitioners around the world have discovered that it offers immense power and strength in their complex lives. When journalist and Civil War veteran Ambrose Bierce told a young writer that studying the Stoics would teach him “how to be a valued guest at God’s table,” or when painter Eugène Delacroix (famous for his painting Liberty Leading the People), they secretly called it “religious comfort.” Such was the courage of Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, commander of the first all-Black regiment in the United States. Q. The Civil War also constitutes one of Epictetus’ most memorable narratives. Southern entrepreneur and author William Alexander Percy, who spearheaded relief efforts during the Great Flood of 1927, had a point when talking about stoicism: “When all is lost, it is over quickly.“ Just as author and investor Tim Ferriss said, grit is a “high-performance system” (other major leaders, such as Jonathan Newhouse, CEO of Condé Nast International, agreed). However, the battlefield is where Stoicism excels. In 1965, Captain James Stockdale, a future Medal of Honor recipient, endured ten years of torture and imprisonment in Vietnam. Epictetus. Similar to Frederick the Great, General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, the Commander in Chief of the Marine Corps, embarked on war with the stoic deeds of Marcus Aurelius in his pocket. Mission to the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Again, they were practitioners, not teachers, and they found Stoicism to be a practical philosophy well suited to their purposes.
ISSUE FROM GREECE TO DAY Zeno of Citium founded the philosophical school of stoicism in Athens in the early 3rd century BC. Its name comes from the Greek word stoa, meaning veranda, because Zeno first taught his students here. Philosophy claims that virtue (basically meaning the four cardinal virtues of temperance, courage, justice, and wisdom) is happiness, and that it is our perception of things (not the things themselves) that causes most problems. Stoicism teaches that we cannot control or trust anything outside of what Epictetus called “our own choice”: our ability to use our own reason to choose how to categorize external events, how to respond to them, and how to relate to them.
Early Stoicism was as close to a complete philosophy as other ancient schools whose names may sound familiar: Epicureanism.
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