Today's Leaders Can Learn A lot From A Roman Emperor

Marcus Aurelius was born into an established Roman family, but not the royal lineage. From these beginnings, it would seem a remote possibility that he would one day become emperor of the Roman Empire, let alone one of the most famous Roman emperors.

Today we are left with his journal, his Meditations. The work has guided both powerful and common men and women for thousands of years. While Meditations was never intended for publication, it remains in print to this day and is perhaps as popular as ever. The journal shows that the most powerful man on the planet was going through the same problems that we deal with today.

Through reading Meditations, we are left wanting to become a better person. Marcus reminds himself over and over to detach his emotions from the difficulties of the world, to maintain his composure during tough times, and to treat all fates as equal—prosperity and poverty, success and failure, life and death.

Here are a few of his quotes from the book.

• 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?
  
  
• Objective judgment, now at this very moment. Unselfish action, now at this very moment. Willing acceptance—now at this very moment—of all external events. That’s all you need.
  
  
• Yes, you can, if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable.
  
  
• Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, sea-shores, and mountains; and thou too art wont to desire such things very much. But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself.
  
  
• Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.
  
  
• Progress for a rational mind means not accepting falsehood or uncertainty in its perceptions, making unselfish actions its only aim, seeking and shunning only the things it has control over, embracing what nature demands of it.
  
  
• When the longest- and the shortest-lived of us come to die, their loss is precisely equal. For the sole thing of which any man can be deprived is the present; since this is all he owns, and nobody can lose what is not his.

Meditations: A New Translation