It’s interesting how infrequently money comes up in Meditations. Here was a guy who had incredible wealth, whose predecessors obsessed over it and found it to be a source of both pleasure and conflict, and yet in his private meditations, it hardly comes up at all.

In his actions, we see Marcus was conscious of money, but primarily as a means to an end not as an end to itself. He was more interested in what it could do for other people. He declined gifts and inheritances. He gave liberally to the poor. He sold off palace furnishings at Rome’s lowest point.

But perhaps these attitudes are related.

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And in today's excerpt reading from The Daily Stoic, Ryan discusses the vital importance of actually training yourself for something rather than simply knowing about it, especially with philosophical ideas.

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