 Hey, what's up guys? So you might know obviously with a channel called Modern Health Monk. I take a lot of my personal influence and my personal inspiration from classical philosophers. Now, primarily for me, I'm influenced by a lot of Asian and Taoist type philosophy. But a lot of stoic philosophy like Marcus Aurelius and Seneca has made a big impact on my life as well. And it's also very trendy in the entrepreneurship space because entrepreneurship makes you feel like you're bipolar. You can have the best day of your life and the next day you want to kill yourself because it's so difficult. Now, in this video, I want to share six particular habits I learned from Marcus Aurelius' book, Meditations. What's up guys? Alex Hein here, author of the book, Master of the Day. Now, the very first quote that had a big impact on me was waste no more time arguing what a good man should be, be one. You know, it's funny in all of the hundreds of coaching clients I've had, the thousands of emails, my own life experience, and however many thousands of YouTube comments, when people sign up to do coaching with me, you know how many people actually do the work? When I've had, when I had my first 100 coaching clients, the number of people that could say, I want to eat right every day for a week and maybe produce one YouTube video because I kind of do holistic coaching. You know how many people have done that out of 100? One, one out of 100. So that's 1% right there. And if you figure the fact that that 1%, so those 100 people that have signed up for coaching are already a tiny minority of the world population that want to improve, that have invested and put money where their mouth is, you can tell that majority of people just do not do the work. And this idea of waste no more time arguing or debating, just friggin' do it, is so important to me because if you think of almost anything you want to do in life, if you remove all the thinking and just figure out what is the habit you have to do and you do it, you're going to get results. The second quote here is that the noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself, and a mean man by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration, the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires. So this quote makes me think a lot about something I realized when I began reading biographies of many of the most successful people in the world. And I don't mean financially successful, I'm more motivated and inspired by icons of their generation, the Da Vinci's, the Tesla's, the Einstein's, the artists, truly, people that want to innovate. And one thing that really struck me early on was that with pro-athletes and some of these great savants, savants of history, they all preferred negative feedback over positive feedback. And it took me a little while to realize it until I started having it happen in my own life. What if someone says to me, wow, that's so impressive what you did with that book, or that you wrote these two books, or that they performed so well and you live off the royalties? What does that do for me, though? I'm almost violently into self-growth and self-improvement. So the fact that they're telling me something which is praise, I appreciate, but it doesn't help me get to the next level. When someone says, you know what, you did that and it kind of sucked, or I don't like that, or that's kind of scammy, or that video was not good, it was way too long, too much rambling. That's more useful for me because that shows me, aspirationally, what do I have to work on to get to the next level of my own self-improvement? And so I think if we take the time to look at what is the next level to be open to negative criticism and to actually ask for negative feedback, basically to ask for feedback that's constructive but is negative in nature on how I can improve, that has made a big difference in my life. The third one here is that our life is what our thoughts make it. Obviously there have been dozens and dozens of books recently, in just the last few years, that have been exploding in popularity because of their emphasis on how your thoughts affect your life. And all of us have had this happen. You know, you get depressed over a breakup and you think over and over and over about what they did wrong, what you did wrong, what you should have said, what you could have done differently. And at the end of the day, you just feel like crap because you're repeating this negative playbook, this narrative over and over and over. But turning off your thoughts is easier said than done, right? Now in my own life, I think this is really important because I've had many experiences where I've been in a crappy mood and then I see someone in a way worse, objectively way worse life situation and that was like a god slap to the face. I mean just here around the corner in this little coffee shop, one day I walked down to get a coffee because I was on a work break, feeling a little bit bored and I was speaking to the girl behind the counter and I was like, yeah, I'm pretty tired today. I've got, you know, I've got two or three jobs and I'm going back to school so I have to do pre-rex. And she said to me, she's like, yeah, I feel you. I mean, I have two kids because I got pregnant at 16 and pregnant again at 20. She's like, I don't have a car so I have to take public transit. The coffee shop opens at 5am so I have to get up at 3am to get the bus. By the time I'm home for my second job and I go to my night classes, she's like, it's 2am. So she literally will sleep either from 12 to 4am or 2am to 5am, 3 to 5 hours of sleep per night for months. I don't know, years maybe. You better believe when I heard that, I shut my damn mouth real fast. And it's just this idea that sometimes it is objectively awful how life is going. Somebody dies. You break up or you get divorced or you screw up. You have a level 10 screw up in your life. That sucks. But a lot of the time, it's not that bad. Especially if you're watching this, you're probably living in the first world where you have an easier life compared to 99% of humanity that has ever lived. The fourth quote here. It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live. This is very reminiscent of that Henry David Thoreau quote about, you know, most men live lives of quiet desperation. They're sitting in jobs they hate doing lives that they don't want to be in living these lives that are unconscious and not pursuing the things that excite them the most. It's the lawyer who became a lawyer because mommy or daddy wanted them to, but they're a writer or an artist or a kung fu person at heart. And I think for me, what so many people are afraid of day to day is a low level of anxiety. And it's not coming from any one thing. It's from this existential void called life, which is that we're a human with an 80 or 100 year lifespan and there's no instructions for what the hell to do with 80 or 100 years of life. That is a long ass time to do almost anything you want. You can become an icon of the generation in 10 industries in that amount of lifespan. It's nice. The idea that we're all going to die because it forces us to live, but the idea is that the irony rather is that we all intellectually know we're going to die, but we don't really know that because if we did, we would live life differently. Right. I mean, look at your last 24 hours. If you truly were dead tomorrow or let's say the doctor gave you a cancer diagnosis and said, Hey, you know what, Kelly, John, you have six months to live 99 out of 100 people with this kind of cancer will not make it to next year. So I suggest you get your arrangements in order. You do all the things you've always wanted and you live your life deliberately. Would you do what you just did today? Maybe you'd change everything in which case that's not a good sign. Now the fifth quote here is that the soul becomes died with the color of its thoughts. So I love this idea that he chose the word died. You take something white and pure and you dye it like a tie dye shirt. And I think that's because like in English, we use the word colored, like he colored the way I saw him. He affected or influenced the way I saw him. It colored my perception. It altered it. And I think obviously Marcus Aurelius' book meditations is a lot about how the mind affects the way we live. And I think for me, I've literally stressed myself into borderline panic attacks. When I was working these jobs I didn't like in my 20s. And all I wanted was to be an entrepreneur and live and do my own thing. I would literally get up some days and I was so pissed off that I couldn't make enough money to quit my job yet. Like my veins were bulging out of my neck. I had to go take a walk because I was frigging seeing auras. I mean, I was so stressing myself out, but it was all in my head. I mean, I was, I was resisting reality. The fact I didn't have enough money in my business to quit my job. If I were the sage, I would have just accepted that. Okay, Alex, this sucks. What do I have to do? And you know, just keep going until. Maybe it takes me five more years. That would suck. But what am I going to do? Stress myself into a nervous breakdown? Until then, I have to accept. And I think that acceptance is not always easy. It sucks when it's about a girl or a guy that you like. It sucks when you want to quit your job and you can't. It sucks when somebody dies and you're in denial because the last thing you said to them was not something positive. It was, I hate you or what the hell? It was something negative and then they ended up dying. And I think that moving towards acceptance is a very difficult thing for me. But at the end of the day, we have no choice because it inflicts self-harm otherwise. Now, the final quote here is that the art of living is more like wrestling than dancing. And I like the choice of words again because for me, wrestling, if you think about like high school wrestlers, they train really hard. It's rough. It's visceral. It's brutal. It almost has all those qualities of nature, right? True people surviving in nature, it wasn't all rainbows and unicorns. And life is not all rainbows and unicorns. It's brutal sometimes for some people. It's brutal forever for their whole life. Look at what immigrants have to do to get into the United States to make their future better for their families. I mean, the girl I dated for five years, her mom spent 10 years trying to get their family from the Philippines all the way to the US by herself. Trust me, she wasn't happy and inspired after that. She was bitter and unhappy, but she did it for her family. And I think sometimes when you think life is going to be rainbows and unicorns, you don't ever push yourself, right? Like, oh, when it's all easy and I'm following my intuition, life's a piece of cake. Well, I don't know. It certainly hasn't been like that for me. I don't know if there's ever going to be a day where I don't have to push a little bit. I mean, there are some days, but I think the philosophy is that if you think of life as a little bit more like wrestling, which has a little bit of a combative feel, you understand that sometimes you will have to push yourself for years to get to a better place. Sometimes you're gonna have to push yourself for a few months to get into that workout routine or to get out of your comfort zone and talk to that person you're into, but you're terrified of. And if you think of it, if you frame it as wrestling versus dancing, maybe a wrestling dance or a dance wrestle, I don't know. If you think of it like that, though, you can have a more accurate understanding of what it takes sometimes because it's not always pretty. So I hope that helps a little bit, guys. Those are some key lessons that have made a big difference in my life that I'm obviously I have a long way to go. That's for sure. But three of the big books that made an impact on me were Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, Letters from Astoic, and then finally on the Shortness of Life by Seneca. I've linked those all up in the description there below as well. So before you go, you're a tiny daily habit for today. I want you to think a lot about this kind of stoic philosophy in the sense of, how are the way your thoughts are affecting your body? How are they affecting your life? Especially in some of the key qualities and the key examples I brought up. To me, the most important one is number one. Stop arguing what a good or evolved or successful or happy or great in a relationship person should be. Be one. Because that to me is what I see myself and other people not embodying the most. And if you had to embody this quality more, what aspect of your life would that be in? I want you to share there below. What's up, guys? It's Alex. I hope you like this video. Best way to stay in touch is to always grab that guide on my site, five daily habits to help you lose your next 20 to 30 pounds right there, ending in description. Also, click the monk to subscribe and watch my last video that just came out. In addition, if you'd like my tiny daily habits success philosophy, both to get fitter and live an epic life, check out my book Master of the Day in the description there below or on Amazon.