Marcus Aurelius ruled Rome from 161 to 180 AD, and he wrote parts of his private journal while on a military campaign along the Danube frontier. He never meant for anyone else to read it. Nowhere in those pages does he say you owe anybody an explanation. His Stoic thinking leads there anyway, because he […]
5 Things You Don’t Owe Anyone an Explanation for, According to Marcus Aurelius Read More »
Money habits get passed down at the kitchen table long before anyone opens a brokerage account. Kids absorb how their parents talk about bills, jobs, and risk, and those lessons tend to stick for life. How you earn your income is part of class, and so is a whole set of beliefs about time, work,
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Marcus Aurelius ran the Roman Empire for nearly two decades. He also kept a private journal, writing reminders to himself in Greek. Those notes became the Meditations. Most scholars think he wrote them for himself alone and never intended for anyone else to read them. That tells you a lot about how the Stoics viewed
Marcus Aurelius ruled Rome from 161 to 180 AD and spent a good part of that reign on military campaigns along the Danube. Along the way, he wrote notes to himself in Greek. Those notes became the book we call the Meditations. He doesn’t seem to have written them for an audience, which is probably
5 Signs You’re a High-Value Person, According to Marcus Aurelius Read More »
Plenty of people wear exhaustion like a badge. They brag about 80-hour weeks and back-to-back calls, and an empty afternoon makes them nervous. Charlie Munger had no use for any of that. The longtime vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway spent most of his days reading in a chair, and he still became one of the
Why Charlie Munger Chose Slow Living Over Hustle Culture (His 5 Habits to Enjoy Life) Read More »
Talent helps. So does luck, and so does knowing the right people at the right time, but none of it lasts long without self-control. The ability to govern your impulses and your moods is what turns good intentions into results you can repeat. Most people know this already. Very few act on it when it
Self-Control is the Key to Success: 5 Lessons from 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
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
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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 »
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
“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
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
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
Charlie Munger spent decades studying why smart people make terrible decisions. He had a front-row seat to Warren Buffett’s decision-making as his partner at Berkshire Hathaway. His famous talk on the subject was called The Psychology of Human Misjudgment. Most people learn its lessons the hard way. 1. Incentive-Caused Bias: Follow the Paycheck “Show me
10 Psychology Lessons Charlie Munger Understood That Most People Learn Too Late in Life Read More »
Motivation is a feeling, and feelings are unreliable. It shows up after a good night’s sleep and disappears the moment a task gets boring. Self-discipline works on different terms. Marcus Aurelius, who ruled Rome from 161 to 180 AD, treated it as a commitment he renewed every day, whether he felt like it or not.
Charlie Munger spent close to a century watching smart people do dumb things. The longtime vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, and Warren Buffett’s business partner for decades, had a blunt theory about why it happens. He pinned most of it on predictable mental blind spots. Munger laid them out in his 1995 Harvard talk “The
Charlie Munger’s 5 Psychology Rules That Keep Smart People From Making Bad Decisions Read More »
Anger feels like strength while it’s happening. Then it fades, and you’re left cleaning up after a version of yourself you didn’t enjoy watching. Marcus Aurelius knew this problem well. He ruled Rome through years of war and plague, and he kept a private notebook of reminders to stay calm when people tested him. That