Marcus Aurelius

From “The Greats” to you,

Happy Friday.

This week, I’m changing it up a bit. Telling the stories of the world’s greatest humans is well - great - but I’m coming to realize that a bit more of my own storytelling is in order.

Everyone can put their own spin on an existing story. Few can take lessons from those stories to build their own world.

That’s what being a creator is, right? Building your own world. Your own tribe. A community.

Before we begin, I’ll leave you with one question:

If money didn’t matter, if time wasn’t a factor, would you still be doing what you’re doing today?

Thank you and enjoy this weeks edition of “The Greats”.

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Coming from a small town, off a long stretch of country highways in North Carolina, the idea of being a creator felt foreign. Almost alien. Let alone making it as a creator.

If you wanted to succeed in life, the path was simple. Get good grades, work part-time, and go to college. Once you’re in college, work part-time, graduate school, and go get a job. Work hard in that job, save your money, and get promoted every 1-2 years. Get married. Buy a house. Vacation a couple of times a year. Vote Republican.

“Success” was spending the next 40 years minimizing downside risk and making sure that you had a healthy balance for retirement. You’re probably reading this right now and thinking “that sounds awful”.

I want to be clear, for 1,000,000s of Americans — and billions around the world — that is a fucking dream. There’s a saying, and I’m paraphrasing here, that "The man who has a bicycle wants a car. The man who has a car wants a boat. The man who has a boat wants a yacht”… you get the idea.

My point is that when your entire life tells you to think one way, breaking that world view is one of the most challenging tasks you will ever complete. Most never do. It’s these belief systems that keep people in and out of prison. Stuck in dead-end jobs where the front door reminds me of those old backroads where the sign says “No Outlet”.

It’s these same belief systems that stand between you and the life you want to live. How fucking crazy is that? That the only thing standing between you and your dreams is fucking made up. It’s not fucking real.

Yesterday, I challenged myself to write a Twitter thread, from scratch — in 1 hour. Every day prior, it would take me 2, 3, 4 hours to write a “quality” thread. I became so conditioned by my own limiting beliefs that the “path to success” required more and more input to one task.

The thread was on Marcus Aurelius and 8 lessons on creativity and purpose. If you have yet to read Aurelius’s “Meditations”, you can find your copy here.

As I was writing, two things became evident.

1) Reasonable time constraints are a healthy pressure to the creative process.

2) You can create quality content in ½ to ¼ the time you think you can.

As I write this, the thread sits at over 15,000 views. Nothing crazy, but for someone with 850 followers, it’s pretty damn good.

Something greater — distilling the lessons of one of history’s greats in less than 60 minutes felt like therapy. Anyone who’s experienced therapy knows, it’s not always the concepts underneath the conversation that matter… but how they are described that change the emotion attached.

Aurelius, for those who don’t know, is one of the greatest stoic philosophers and the former Emperor of Rome. His book “Meditations” is a series of letters to himself during the Marcomannic wars sometime around 171-175 AD.

The letters were never intended to be published, but through passage from one scholar to the next, was eventually printed at scale and continues to circulate the world today.

The greatest lesson I distilled from the book, which inspired the theme for today’s newsletter is a quote from Aurelius:

“Our life is what our thoughts make it.”

This is a man who was at the height of absolute power. The leader of the ancient world. Why would he, of all people, spend his time considering the impact of thoughts on one’s life?

More importantly, why would he spend his time, writing this down with the expectation that no one would read it?

His belief systems. He believed that his belief systems themselves would be what would determine the outcome of his life, and his legacy.

“Meditations” is nothing more than Aurelius’s belief systems. That’s what all great writing is - our own individual belief systems. The way we see the world.

To me, that’s the beauty of becoming a creator. You are dissecting, imposing, and reflecting your belief systems onto the world.

You are creating a world, within itself.

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If you did not, tell me what you think could be better.

Happy Friday — until next time.