Marcus Aurelius ruled the Roman Empire from 161 to 180 AD. His reign brought years of war on the northern frontier along with a devastating plague, and he spent long stretches of it living in military camps far from Rome. Through all of that, he kept a private journal. We know it today as Meditations, […]
5 Things Highly Successful Men Do Every Day, According to Marcus Aurelius Read More »
Charlie Munger died in November 2023, about a month shy of his 100th birthday. He spent decades as Warren Buffett’s partner at Berkshire Hathaway, and he stayed sharp, funny, and blunt right up to the end. People who expect a list of happiness tips from Munger usually walk away surprised. He had no morning routine
Marcus Aurelius ruled the Roman Empire for nearly two decades, and his most enduring work was a private notebook he never intended to publish. In Meditations, he kept coming back to one practical problem: how to deal with people who make life harder. He wasn’t paranoid about it. He treated a clear read on human
The 5 Types of People You Should Never Trust According to Marcus Aurelius Read More »
Most of us learned to think like employees long before we ever held a job. School rewarded showing up on time, following instructions, and waiting for someone else to hand out the grade. That training works fine if the goal is a steady paycheck. It works poorly if you want your time back, since an
5 Signs You’ve Moved Beyond The Employee Mindset and Are Serious About Financial Freedom Read More »
Financial failure looks different depending on where a person starts. The habits that keep a warehouse worker living paycheck to paycheck have almost nothing in common with the habits that slowly drain an inherited fortune. Each income level has blind spots. They feel normal from the inside, which is exactly why they’re so hard to
Emperor Marcus Aurelius ruled the Roman Empire while fighting long wars on the northern frontier and enduring a plague that swept across the provinces. In whatever quiet hours he could find, he wrote notes to himself in Greek. Those notes became Meditations. He never meant for anyone else to read them, which is part of
5 Habits of Mentally Weak People, According to Marcus Aurelius Read More »
Ask most people what would make them happier, and they’ll describe something they want to add. It might be a raise, a bigger house, or the long trip they keep pushing back to next year. Charlie Munger went the other way. He spent decades arguing that a decent life comes mostly from cutting out the
Charlie Munger Advice: The Art of Letting Go: 5 Simple Ways to Achieve Happiness Read More »
Most people learn about money from whoever raised them. If your parents worked hard for a paycheck, paid the bills, and tucked away whatever was left at the end of the month, that habit probably became your blueprint too. Wealthy families tend to pass down a different playbook. Schools rarely teach it, and plenty of
10 Upper-Class Lessons That Middle-Class and Working-Class People Learn Too Late in Life Read More »
Most people think financial freedom requires a big salary or a lucky stock pick. It doesn’t. The whole thing runs on a few equations you probably learned how to do in high school algebra and forgot about by graduation. Financial freedom simply means your passive income covers your living expenses. That income usually comes from
People Who Want Financial Freedom Must Understand This Math Read More »
Marcus Aurelius ran the Roman Empire for nearly two decades. He also kept a private notebook full of reminders to himself, which became Meditations. He never planned for anyone to read it. That’s part of why it still works so well as a personal checklist, because he was writing to correct his own habits. Here
Money is easy to measure. Social class is harder to pin down because it shows up in daily habits, like how a person spends a Saturday, talks to a waiter, or decides where to buy a house. Very few of these signals involve yachts or designer logos. The 10 habits below are the quieter patterns
“Generally speaking, envy, resentment, revenge, and self-pity are disastrous modes of thought.” – Charlie Munger Charlie Munger spent most of his 99 years watching smart people wreck their own lives. Bad luck was rarely the cause. He kept coming back to four mental habits he named again and again: envy, resentment, revenge, and self-pity. Munger
Marcus Aurelius ran the Roman Empire through years of war on the northern frontier and a plague that negatively affected enormous numbers of people. Somewhere in the middle of all that, he kept a private notebook written in Greek. We call it the Meditations today. He wrote it for himself, with no plan to publish
A lot of buyers start their home search by asking a lender for a preapproval number. That figure tells you what a bank is willing to risk on you, and it can be a lot higher than what your budget can comfortably afford. A better starting point is a pair of ratios that lenders have
Charlie Munger lived to 99 and spent most of those years studying why smart people wreck their own lives. He didn’t think the cause was usually a lack of brains. His view was blunter. Most ruin comes from a handful of bad habits that almost anyone can avoid, and he named them again and again
10 Self-Destructive Habits That Will Ruin Your Life, According to Charlie Munger Read More »
Two families can earn nearly the same salary and end up miles apart after twenty years. Income gets all the attention, while bad spending habits do most of the damage. Much of the gap comes from small purchases repeated so often that nobody questions them anymore. The upper class tends to skip these without making
Some people seem to wake up looking for a fight. You’ll run into them at work, and if you’re unlucky, at your own dinner table. Marcus Aurelius had more of them than most of us ever will. He was emperor of Rome, surrounded by ambitious generals and courtiers who told him what he wanted to
“Like Warren, I had a considerable passion to get rich, not because I wanted Ferraris—I wanted the independence. I desperately wanted it. I thought it was undignified to have to send invoices to other people. I don’t know where I got that notion from, but I had it.” “I didn’t intend to get rich. I
5 Skills People Need To Achieve Financial Freedom, According to Charlie Munger Read More »
Marcus Aurelius ruled Rome from 161 to 180 AD. Plague swept the empire during his reign, war kept him on the northern frontier for years, and one of his most trusted generals, Avidius Cassius, declared himself emperor in 175. Through it all, he kept a private notebook in Greek. We call it Meditations, though he
Most of us grew up hearing the same financial advice. Get a job, work hard, put a little in savings every month, and hope it adds up to something by retirement. That advice gets you partway there. It leaves out what the upper class actually does with money once it lands in their accounts: they