PNTV: How to Think Like a Roman Emperor by Donald Robertson (#396)

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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Another Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book, how to Think Like a Roman Emperor by Donald Robertson, how to Think like a Roman Emperor, subtitled the Stoic Philosophy of Marcus. So Donald Robertson is one of my favorite Stoic thinkers and practitioners who happens to be a really cool blend of therapist, Stoic practitioner and Stoic scholar. He's outstanding. We covered one of his prior books called the Philosophy of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in which he connects CBT cognitive behavioral therapy to Stoicism. It has roots in ancient Stoicism. In this book he gives us an amazing kind of part biography of Marcus Aurelius, the great Roman emperor and philosophy with a ton of practical tools, as you may recall from our conversation on the philosophy of cognitive behavioral therapy. And we're going to talk about this in a moment. In our first idea, Donald says that the ancient philosophers were a bit different than our modern day academic philosophers. We Whereas the modern day academic philosophers tend to be what he calls librarians of wisdom. They're kind of cataloging different ideas in theory and splitting hairs here and there, important to catalog. But there's a difference between being a librarian and being a warrior of wisdom, where you're truly going all in and loving wisdom. Which leads us to the first idea perfectly. What's the ultimate goal of life? When we step back and look at the Stoics and ask the question, hey guys, what's the ultimate goal of life? Their goal is very, very straightforward, the Stoic philosophers. And again, Marcus Aurelius is one of the best embodiments of the applied practical wisdom. As the emperor of the Roman Empire, arguably the most powerful and the wealthiest guy on the planet at the time, how did he exercise that power? He grounded himself in Stoic wisdom and he reminded himself that his ultimate goal was to, as the Stoics said, live in accordance with nature, right in general, and particularly with our nature as human beings. Now, the number one thing that makes humans different than other animals is reason. We have the ability to reason. Now, the Stoics took that a step further and said that means that to live in accordance with our nature and to have reason, we need to pursue wisdom. Which brings us to the etymology of the word philosopher. Philo Sophia, lover of wisdom, but again, not in an academic, theoretical sense, in an incredibly practical, embodied sense realized moment to moment to moment. So the idea and the ultimate goal is to live with that wisdom and then wisdom is kind of the ultimate virtue, right? And the other virtues that come out of that, the four cardinal virtues we'll talk about in a moment, are really just different facets and expressions of that core idea of let's love wisdom so much. And again, wisdom, to define it loosely is we say to know the game we're playing and how to play it well, but it's basically knowledge of how to live well. Wisdom, right? When you do that, you bring the other virtues to play. Which leads us back to that virtue compass I've been drawing, right? So we've got a little compass that we now draw which has the cardinal virtues that I'll walk through at the cardinal points. Self mastery. I'm sorry, wisdom, self mastery, courage, and love. Right? But the four cardinal virtues of Stoicism, as Donald walks us through, are these. One, we have wisdom. Two, we have what they call temperance, or Donald actually calls it moderation. And then we have what do we have? Courage. And then we have what they call justice. Now, those are obviously powerful, but I don't think that they quite capture the essence of what they're really getting at. Because if you read Marcus Aurelius, you read this book, and you read about all these teachers, Musonius, rufus, Epictetus, Seneca, etc. Justice is actually a weak word for what they really mean, which is love. Wisdom is wisdom. We all can kind of agree on that. And then temperance, you know, temperance feels like, oh, I don't want to drink too much or eat too much, which is an important part of the general idea they're getting at, but they're really talking about from my vantage point, and I think the more powerful way to articulate it is self mastery. We want to have self mastery. We want to know the game we're playing wisdom, and we want to have the self mastery to play the game well right now, the only moment it matters. And then courage, of course, translates perfectly as courage. So we take the four cardinal Stoic virtues, right? So Stoicism, and then with optimize, we break it down and say wisdom, self mastery, courage and love. That's the ultimate game in life. That's the ultimate goal, is to live with that wisdom, to be true philosophers. And then again, we're always talking about closing that gap, right? And Donald walks us through this brilliantly. The ultimate game is to live with eudaimonia, being the best version of ourselves, which we'll talk about in a moment. And you do that by living with arete, which is the one word summary of our entire philosophy. Arete, I'll spell that for curious souls are te accent on the E, which translates as excellence or virtue. But it really means something closer to expressing that best version of yourself, moment to moment to moment. Not occasionally, but habitually. That's the goal of life. To high five that inner Daimon, as we say. Now, how do we achieve that? That's what this book is about. Looking at Marcus Aurelius, the various battles he waged and the challenges he faced, etc. And what were his practices that we can learn about in his meditations? Well, one of them was to imagine the ideal sage. Imagine the ideal sage. So you can do that as a practice. Think about whoever you most admire, a hero of yours, either living or dead, and what virtues do they embody? This is what Donald encourages us to do. Think about it. This is what Marcus Aurelius how to think like a Roman emperor. This is what a Roman emperor, one of the greatest and most wise leaders in history and did. He would reflect on in his journal the virtues of his heroes, and then he'd think about the ideal sage, which Donald makes the point. There are no gurus in Stoicism. None of them were perfect. And they knew they weren't perfect, yet they aspired to that level of perfection. You read Marcus Aurelius Meditations. It's almost poetic how he aspires to be an undisturbed, equanimous leader, responding to life's challenges as an ideal sage would be and would do. I say, and he says as well, imagine the best version of you. In fact, this is how we start translating all of the theory into practice in our work with the optimized mastery series and the coaches, etc. Who are you at your best in general? What's the best version of you look like? And then in particular, energy wise, who are you when you're showing up as the most radiantly alive exemplar version of you? What is that? The ideal you. And then what about work wise? What's your identity? How do you show up as that optimist, best version of you, work wise. And what about love wise in your relationships? That's our big three. Energy, work and love we come back to again and again and again. Think about that ideal version of you, and then think about what virtues that version of you embodies. Energy, work and love wise. And then actually engage in behaviors that are in integrity with those virtues and that identity. When today that's what we call our big three times too. Energy, work, love, identity, virtues, behaviors. I journal this Every single morning. And we actually require our coaches who want to get certified to journal this every single morning. Even just nine words. Capturing the essence of the ideal version of you. Energy, work and love wise. I do it by saying I'm an athlete. That's the Persona I live into. The ideal version of me is radiantly alive, energized. I'm an athlete. And I actually spelled that in the Greek way with our version of Greek with an E with a line over it. Athlete. The two E's have a line over it. Boom. I'm an athlete, which literally means one going after a prize. But I feel that best version of me coming through in that one word. Then the virtue I'm going to embody today. Discipline. I'm disciplined. I show up whether I feel like it or not. Boom. Run the algorithms. And then what am I going to do today? Identity, virtues, behaviors. Well, I've got my series of things that I do right, My one ten, one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand. I train for thirty minutes, the one sun salutation, ten pull ups, hundred burpees, thousand meters of road and ten thousand steps every single day. Boom. And then I eat by a certain time. I do certain recovery practices. Boom. Identity, virtues, behaviors. What is it for you? Energy wise? We want to imagine the ideal version of ourselves and look at those qualities within our heroes and ideal sages. We want to embody them. Go rock it and then work wise, just to finish it real quick. Work wise philosopher. I actually draw this, that symbol, that's a phi, which symbolizes philosopher. For me, I'm committed to being world class philosopher. Showing up deeply as a student, a practitioner and a teacher of this wisdom. That means something to me. That's my identity. That's the ideal version of me. The quality, the virtue I'm going to embody today. I'm prolific. It's my number one virtue. I show up, I demonstrate consistency again and again and again and again. Then what am I going to do today? Well, I'm going to do deep work hour after deep work after deep work hour. My target is seven hours a day of pure, uninterrupted, no inputs, deep work a day. Frankly, I rarely hit that. Getting six, six and a half, 6.85. Awesome. Boom. Identity, virtues, behaviors and love. Same thing for me. My identity, love wise, is soulmate in the highest sense. You, Daimon, daimon is soul. Right? I want to be my soulmate for my wife, for my kids, for you. In this context, our Daimons, the best versions of ourselves, are hanging out right now. Boom. That's my identity. Ideal, me, virtue. I'm connected. I want to be connected with my wife and with my kids and with you in this virtual context. What am I going to do today? Behaviors. Well, I'm going to spend time. I write down dad, I'm, am and PM one on two times with my kids, giving Alexander some time. Boom. I show up. I repeatedly do that. And again, bringing back to Donald, he talks about exactly this exercise. Then at the end of the day, go back and review it. How did you do? All the great philosophers weren't librarians thinking about ideas. They were practitioners, warriors, trying to get a little bit better day in and day out. That's a very long number two. Number three, what happens when we do that? What happens when we fiercely pursue wisdom and operationalizing virtue? Well, the goal is wisdom, but the byproduct is joy. A deep stoic joy. And eudaimonia is what that would be called good soul. To flourish, to feel a sense of being on purpose and the calm, confidence and energized tranquility and the joy that comes when we know we're living in integrity, with our highest ideals and there is no gap between who we're capable of being and who we're actually being. When you consistently live with Arete and you close that gap, you feel great. And one of the myths that, that we'll talk about. I went on a stoic binge. I'm a stoic at heart. We'll be covering a lot of stoic books in the days and weeks ahead. We have dozens of them now that you can check out Notes on Great Books on Stoicism at Optimize Me Stoicism, along with the 101 class you can check out, et cetera. So the idea here is stoic joy, and it's the byproduct of our commitment to living with joy. And the point I was going to make there a moment ago is the fact that we think of Stoics and we think that they're unemotional. And that's actually not the case. These Stoics were known to be joyful. They were known to be truly lit up and happy in the deepest, joyful sense. What they didn't buy into was the idea that we should have negative emotions. They had no problem with positive emotions. Their thing was, as rational human beings practicing wisdom, there's no space. There's no need for anger and hostility and depression and regret. When you embrace reality and exercise your reason, you can let go of the negative emotions and plug into joy, higher emotions. But again, that's a byproduct of our commitment to something bigger than ourselves. Living with wisdom, in service to the world. And you can get in trouble if you go straight after the happiness and forget the wisdom. This is the juxtaposition of hedonic happiness, kind of sensory pleasure vis a vis eudaimonic happiness. You go after the hedonic, you get on a treadmill. You're running and running and running, accumulating more stuff and extrinsic markers of your awesomeness, but you're not getting anywhere. You don't feel any happier. It's called a hedonic treadmill. There is no such thing as a eudaimonic treadmill. The more you pursue virtue, perhaps the more you spiral up and the more joy you get in being the best version of yourselves. And you build some scaffolding so you don't have the big ups and downs emotionally anymore and you experience stoic joy. Here's another cool practice. And again, the book is packed with super practical practices. Again, Donald is a therapist in addition to being a practitioner and a stoic scholar. Time projection. He says a lot of times we catastrophize things. Something negative happens in our life and we catastrophize it. Well, one practice is. And imagine our life just completely blowing up, right? We do that all the time. And he says, look, one way to deal with that tendency to decatastrophize, if you want to decatastrophize, is to do what he calls time projection. Fast forward 10 to 20 years, right? Imagine that right now. Take your problem, whatever is stressing you out right now, and we all have them. There's no life that doesn't have challenges. And that's a good thing. Which we'll talk about in our next and final idea. A good life has challenges, period. So what is it that you're facing right now? Now, fast forward 10 or 20 years and look at this current problem from that vantage point. Does it look like a big deal from your 10 to 20 year vantage point, or does it look trivial? It's almost certainly going to be trivial. And even if it doesn't, it is what it is. We need to fast forward, see it in the bigger context, and then get what needs to get done done. Kind of our neutral thinking idea from. It takes what it takes. But that time projection can be a great way to alchemize rather than catastrophize. I love that idea. And all that brings us to the choice of Hercules, Donald tells this story brilliantly. I'm actually going to read. I think it's in here that we have this one.

This is good.

Yep, this is good. All right. So this is Donald quoting Epictetus. I actually read this passage straight from Epictetus discourses that Donald references. On the Saturday morning of our optimized coach graduation, we had almost 600 of our first thousand optimized coaches flying from around the world to our graduation weekend. Friday, Saturday. Sunday, right? On Saturday, yes. Saturday morning we did a Spartan race. So I gave them. That was one of the requirements of graduation. You need to be at your best ideal you energy wise as an athlete, Spartan race or some other equivalent alternative to demonstrate you're in the best physical shape of your life. Because we want to go from theory to practice to mastery. We don't want to be hung up on being a librarian. We want to be warriors. Anyway, I gave a pep talk lecture right before we went and hit the buses and became the second largest team in Spartan history, which I mentioned recently. I read a version of this quote. What do you think Hercules would have amounted to, Epictetus asks his students, if there had not been monsters such as the Nemean lion, the Hydra and the stag of Artemis, the Erymentian boar, and all those unjust and bestial men for him to contend with? Why, if he had sat at home, wrapped up, asleep in bed sheets, Epictetus says, 2,000 years ago, living in luxury and ease, he would have been no Hercules at all. Epictetus tells his students that just as Hercules cleansed the earth of monsters without complaining, they should set about conquering themselves by purging the base desires and and emotions from their hearts. Then Donald continues and he shares the story of Hercules that Socrates and other classic philosophers like to share. So imagine Hercules, mythical hero, of course, but imagine him before he was Hercules. He's a young man, right? And he's out on a path and he's walking around kind of contemplating his life. And then two goddesses race up. One kind of bursts in front of the other ones and kind of knocks.

The other one and out of the.

Way and kind of comes up and she's sort of preening, Socrates says 2500 years ago. Preening. Overly made up, right? You can almost imagine someone with way too much makeup and all that stuff going on kind of preening for a selfie on Instagram is kind of what I imagine when I read Socrates words, right? And she says, hey, Hercules, my friends call me Eudaimonia, right? She lies her real name is Vice, right? But hey, I'm happiness, and if you follow me, your life's going to be easy. It's going to be awesome. Just, just, just follow me and it's going to be great, right? Vice dressed up as virtue. Now, the second goddess is radiantly beautiful, but in a more austere, simple, understated way. And she walks forward and she has a solemn look on her face and she says, hercules, I'm not going to promise you that life will be easy, because your life is, if you follow me, will not be easy. Her name, by the way, is Arete. She says, no, your life is not going to be easy. But if you want to be worthy of the gods, you need to be willing to face challenges. You need to be willing to struggle and overcome obstacles so we can see all that you're made of. Then, as a hero, you will be admired by gods and men alike. But it's not going to be easy. Of course, we know the choice that Hercules made. And of course, Socrates, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Donald Roberts and me, we're all telling you the same thing. Life is presenting us with a choice. Are we going to live with vice dressed up as happiness, which is the hedonic pleasure of get this fast, eat this food, pursue this goal, extrinsic, extrinsic, toxic, vicious. Vice pursued becomes vicious behavior. Or are you going to make the harder choice, particularly in our society? But again, this isn't a new challenge. 2,500 years ago, Socrates was talking about the choice of Hercules. Why would he do that? Because this is an eternal challenge between virtue, our daimon guiding us, and vice, our demon, guiding us. We all need to make a choice. The question is, what choice are you going to make today? Stepping forward, closing the gap, remembering the goal of life, remembering that it's ultimately to live with reason, to live with wisdom. Wisdom can be translated into these different virtues. Wisdom, self mastery, courage and love. That's the goal when you do that. The byproduct is stoic joy. Also, contemplate the ideal. You, the ideal sage, know the identity, the virtues and the behaviors across your energy, your work and your love. You do that consistently, day in and day out. You start more and more consistently. Never perfectly, but more and more consistently. Closing the gap and experiencing that joy. Project yourself forward if you find yourself catastrophizing and alchemize it and use it as an opportunity to practice your philosophy, which we're going to talk about in a couple PNTVs. William B. Irvine Another great stoic thinker wrote a book called the Stoic Challenge. We're going to have fun with that one. And then finally remember the choice of Hercules again, moment to moment to moment. We have a choice. Are we going to step forward into virtue or back into vice? Let's choose wisely today, then make today another awesome day. Think about one idea that you can move from theory to practice to mastery on. Donald, thanks for another great book everybody. Let's do this.

See you tomorrow.

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