The Age of Catos is Gone (or Is It?) | Ryan Holiday Owes Everything To This One Book

Welcome to the daily stoic podcast designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. The age of katos is gone. Or is it? We're a long way from the old days when people held themselves to certain standards, when politicians believed in something, It felt It felt that way then when Walker Percy was writing in 1961, and it feels that way now. But the funny thing is it probably also felt that way even in Kato's time, that the age of his great great grandfather, Kato the Elder, had passed. And in fact, that was something that Cato the Elder was worried about in his time too. It always feels like traditional values are slipping away. Maybe they are. Maybe they aren't. It doesn't really matter though because we have a vote. We get to decide whether we are going to live up to those ideas and ideals. We can decide to be honorable and operate with integrity. We can decide to believe. We can decide to be good. We can decide to stand up for what's right. And when we do this, you know what? We are proving that the victory is not yet final. We are proving that the age of Kato's is not over. We are proving that someone still cares. We are keeping the flame alive. We are carrying the fire. As aunt Emily tells Binks in the movie goer, a man must live by his lights and do what little he can and do it as best he can. In this world, she says, goodness is destined to be defeated, but a man must go down fighting. That is victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man. So we must decide to do what we can and to keep going even when it feels like goodness is losing. I can trace everything good in my life. I can trace me being here right now in this moment all back to a single book. Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. It's a book that shaped me as a person, as a husband, as a father, as a writer, as a thinker, as a human being, and it is also the reason you are watching this video today. These 200 or so pages here, private thoughts written written down over 2,000 ago, never intended for publication, have the potential to be some of the most transformative words you will ever read in your life. And if you only read one book this year, I think it should be this one. It's a book I try to read myself every single year, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. And that's what we're gonna talk about in today's episode. I'm gonna give you some of the most powerful lessons from this incredibly powerful book and how they've shaped me as a person. You have to focus on what's essential. Marcus Aurelius believes that this is the key to a productive …