How I Discovered It

• from Ryan Holiday

Who Should Read It?

• Anyone alive
• Anyone who thinks life is not fair
• Anyone who is in a quarrel with their life.

✍️ My Top 3 Quotes

• A man is like dog tied to a moving wagon. If the dog refuses to run along with it he’ll be dragged by it, yet the choice remains his: To run or be dragged.
• Doctors keep their scalpels and other instruments handy, for emergencies. Keep your philosophy ready too—ready to understand heaven and earth.
• Praise is extraneous. The object of praise remains unchanged—no better, or worse
• Know how to enjoy and abstain from things that most people find it hard to abstain from and all too easy to enjoy. Strength, perseverance, self-control in both areas is the mark of a soul in readiness and indomitable.

📒 Summary + Notes

Introduction

• Meaning comes from perception. Not objects or events are either good or bad. They are guileless
• Each moment of your life you have:
  • will: to accept this event with humility
  • action: to treat this person as they should be treated
  • perception: to approach this thought with rational and keep prejudice at bay.

Book 1: ==Be== a ==man==: Suck it up and get the job done.

• Duty: To put up with discomfort and not make demands. To do my own work, mind my own business, and have no time for slanderers
• To read attentively, to understand and extrapolate it to the real world, to not be satisfied with just scratching the surface or getting the gist of it
• Not to debate the phrasing or the person making it but the issue it self.
• Do your job without whining.
• Expect not. People have wills. There will is something even they themselves don’t understand.
• If you have it, use it without arrogance unapologetically. If you don’t, don’t bother and don’t miss them.
• Know how to enjoy and abstain from things that most people find it hard to abstain from and all too easy to enjoy. Strength, perseverance, self-control in both areas is the mark of a soul in readiness and indomitable.

Book 2: Master your soul; the mind and the body will be yours to command.

• People do what they know best. Feeling anger towards them is just unnatural.
• Stop being a slave, to be jerked about by selfish impulses, to kick against fate and the present, and to mistrust the future.
• Like a Roman: Concentrate on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice
• Don’t be pulled in all directions. Direct yourself and guard against external confusions.
• Sins committed out of desire are worse than the ones committed out of anger. The angry man is more or less a victim. The man mastered by pleasure rushes into wrongdoing of his own accord.
• You have neither the past nor the future. You can’t lose come something you don’t have. Don’t lose the present, it’s all you have.
• The Human Soul Degrades when
  • When it becomes a detached growth on the world
  • When it is angered and motivated to a state of malevolence
  • When it is overpowered by pleasure or pain
  • When it allows its action and impulse to be without purpose.

Book 3: Don’t let the pollution pollute you. Guide yourself then be guided.

• Keep your thoughts in order so much so that if you were asked “What are you thinking about?” you can respond at once truthfully. Get used to winnowing your thoughts, winnow away everything random, everything irrelevant and everything self-important and malicious.
• Stand up straight—not straightened.
• Never regard something as doing you good if it makes you
  • betray a trust,
  • lose your sense of shame,
  • makes you show hatred, suspicion, ill will or hypocrisy,
  • a desire for things best done behind closed doors.
• Doctors keep their scalpels and other instruments handy, for emergencies. Keep your philosophy ready too—ready to understand heaven and earth. In everything you do, even the smallest thing, remember the chain that links them. Nothing earthly succeeds by ignoring heaven, nothing heavenly by ignoring the earth

Book 4: It’s your perception that matters. Things don’t have any control over the soul. Listen to the angel.

• Nowhere is more peaceful—more free of interruptions—than your own soul. Go within.
• Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.
• Every event is the right one. If you look closely, if you pay attention you’ll see it.
• Death overshadows you, while you are alive do it—be good.
• Praise is extraneous. The object of praise remains unchanged—no better, or worse

Does anything beautiful need supplementing? Is an emerald suddenly flawed if no one admires it?

• Do less but do it better. Do what’s essential. Ask yourself “Is this necessary?”
• Each questions is answered first by the angel on your shoulder and then the demon. Follow the former.
• Value of attention varies in proportion to its object. You’re better off not giving the small things more time than they deserver.

Why treat the one as a misfortune rather than the other as fortunate? Can you really call something a misfortune that doesn’t violate human nature?

• If some misfortune lead you to a greater fortune, can you call that misfortune, a misfortune?
• Thing that causes pain is no misfortune, to endure it and prevail is great good fortune.

Book 5: Not born to feel nice. The elixir always lies in the darkest parts of the forest.

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for—the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?” —But it’s nicer here.… So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands? —But we have to sleep sometime.… Agreed. But nature set a limit on that—as it did on eating and drinking. And you’re over the limit. You’ve had more than enough of that. But not of working. There you’re still below your quota. You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for the dance, the miser for money or the social climber for status? When they’re really possessed by what they do, they’d rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts.

• You’ve had enough of sleep but not enough of working. At dawn, remind yourself that you were born to work, to experience things not to huddle under blanket and feel nice?
• Be like a vine that produces grapes without looking for anything in return.
  • A horse at the end of the race….
  • A dog when the hunt is over….
  • A bee with its honey stored….
• The soul takes on the color of your thoughts, be careful about the things you think about.
• What stands in the way becomes the way.
  The impediment to action advances action. Because the mind adapts and converts trash into resource

Book 6: Listen and see things the way they are without the prejudice.

• See things the way they are, lay them bare, strip away the legends and convoluted ideas and see how pointless they are.
• It might be hard but it isn’t impossible
• People do what they know best, give them the opportunity to do what they think is best for then and if see a better path for them show it to them rather than losing your temper.

It is Disgraceful for a soul to give up when the body is still going strong

• If it’s the natural order how can it be bad or unmoral?
• Practice really hearing what people say, try best to get inside their minds.

What injures the hive injures the bee

Book 7: Object of priase remains unchanged.

No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be emerald, my color undiminished

• Pain is neither unbearable nor unending
• Perfection of character is to live your last day, every day, without frenzy, or sloth, or pretense.

Book 8: Do it. Do it right now. Don’t put your burdens on the future.

• You could be good today, but instead you choose tomorrow. Choose today.

Nature does not make us endure the unedurable.

Book 9: Pray to endure the unbearable and not for it to never come.

• Change your prayers in a way that you aim for strength to endure and battle, not for the battle to never arrive.
  • Not “some way to sleep with her” — but a way to stop wanting to.
  • Not “some way to get rid of him” — but a way to stop trying.
  • Not “some way to save my child” — but a way to lose your fear.

Book 10: What happens in nature can only be naturual.

• Be more, than having the want to be.
• Your mind should be ready digest all kinds of events and situation just like all other organs do. You don’t choose to smell only good fragrances, if you pass by a gutter you are bound to smell shit.

Book 11: Momento Mori

• Momento Mori
• 4 habits of thought to watch for,
  • This thought is unnecessary
  • This thought is destructive.
  • This thought is absurd and you are most definitely not thinking that
  • This thought is denigrating your soul as it originates from the mortal parts of you
• Consistent Goal → Consistent Life

At festivals the Spartans put their guests’ seats in the shade, but sat themselves down anywhere.

As you kiss your son good night, says Epictetus, whisper to yourself, “He may be dead in the morning.” Don’t tempt fate, you say. By talking about a natural event? Is fate tempted when we speak of grain being reaped? Or skys showering rain?

Socrates:
What do you want, rational minds or irrational ones? — Rational ones.
Healthy or sick? —Healthy.
Then work to obtain them. —We already have.
Then why all this squabbling?

Book 12: Expect the unexpected. Practice all you lack.

• Practice even what seems impossible. Th left hand is useless at almost everything, for lack of practice.
• To expect a bad person not to harm others is like expecting expecting the fig trees not to secrete juice.