"The Worst Leader of All Time" | Official Preview

He says, let the boy be human. If what you allow is the shittiness of what's happening around you to make you feel shitty, and worse, to be shitty, they're winning. The Stokes would say the greatest empire is like command of yourself. Here you have the private thoughts of the most powerful person in the world. He has a temper. He has anxiety. He has a shitty job with people he can't trust and an empire that's coming apart. And he has health problems. He has marital problems. He has a plague. There's floods. It's a series of endless wars. And what he's doing is sitting down and writing to himself, trying to get back to center. I'm Ryan Holiday, and you can watch my episode early on Vigilance Elite Patreon. Fight to be the person that philosophy tried to make you, or fight to be the person that philosophy wants you to be. None of this is new. So Seneca is one of the famous Stokes. You know who his boss was? It was Nero. Like, his boss is the worst leader maybe of all time. In a way, none of this is new, right? Corruption is not new. Hypocrisy is not new. Declining empire is not new. No one has lived in a perfect society, and that most of the people that you admired were looking around at the world and going, what the **** are we doing? This is insane, you know? Like, you can imagine the most powerful man in the world. If he wants to get revenge on someone, he can do some pretty heinous things to people. He tries to remind himself the best revenge is to not be like your enemy. But my main job as a person, philosophically, is to not be those things. What you allow is the shittiness of what's happening around you to make you feel shitty, and worse, to be shitty. Like, they're winning. Revenge used to be something that, I mean, I would waste an entire day planning all the things that I could do to somebody that took advantage of me or wronged me or, you know, and then I realized this is just a total ******* waste of energy. Yeah. And it just makes you look like an asshole. Somehow, I've developed enough discipline to never act on it. The greatest empire is, like, command of yourself. I did this, like, really intense therapy thing, and I was, you know, just vomiting all this anger and resentment I had at this group of people. And the therapist was like, you know they're not thinking about you at all, right? You're not the center of the universe, and almost certainly, you're not the center of whatever the situation that you're making all about you is. A lot of times, it's like, how do I take myself out of this equation? Okay. And that's what ego does, right? Ego makes it all about you. It makes you at the center of things. Events are objective. Our opinions about them are not. I'd be curious your opinion. I mean, when you experience how fragile life is, does it turn down the volume on stuff for you? In my personal experience, every time that I have been around death, thought I was gonna die, there's only one thing that goes through your mind, and that is, that's your family. You would give literally all of it back for five more minutes of time with them. The only thing that really matters is the example that you set for them. Yeah. So if you idolize your ----, you get pissed because they ******* scratch your car, break a window, whatever, break a vase, anything, you know? When you overreact and idolize the thing, that's gonna be passed on. Memento mori, like remember you are mortal. And suddenly you're like, oh, I forgot we're mortal. I think also apologize. Like there are things that 30 years later, my parents apologized for. Same with people. You know, they're gonna look to see how you treat people, all people. Yeah. People you look up to and people that you think that you're above all people. Hopefully the financial aspect, it doesn't have any relevance if you lead by example. Kids don't always listen, but they're always watching. Let's say you never gave them a single piece of advice. Like you never told your kids, do this, don't do that. This is important. That's not important. This is what we believe. These are our values. What do you think they would deduce about what you think about those things from the life that you lead?