It wasn’t some freak of circumstances that allowed Marcus Aurelius to be great amidst disaster and unbelievable power. It wasn’t a coincidence that Cato was the last honest man in Rome, a brave and solitary figure standing against the tide. It wasn’t an accident that earned James Stockdale the Medal of Honor, that allowed him to ride out seven years in solitary confinement and torture in the Hanoi Hilton.
No, it wasn’t an accident. Greatness never is.
It was Epictetus who said that the whole point of philosophy was to be able to meet whatever life threw at you with, “This is what I trained for.” And that is precisely what these men had done. In fact, Marcus Aurelius thanks Rusticus at the beginning of Meditations(this month, when you buy the leatherbound edition, you’ll get our How to Read Meditations Digital Guide—including an invite to our live Q&A call—free) for teaching him that “I needed to train and discipline my character.” Cato, as we’ve said, trained his whole life—from how he dressed to how he spoke and even what he ate—for some future moment when he would need to stand up and defend the Roman Republic.
And Stockdale? He liked to joke that his “plebe year” at the Naval Academy prepared him for torture and prison. Of course, his study of philosophy didn’t hurt. Neither did his time at the Navy’s Survival School in Warner Springs, California, where he got his first taste of interrogation and began to learn how to lead a resistance from the inside.
No one just magically steps up in the big moments. No, we revert to our level of training. Our true character comes out under pressure. So we must train that character, we must develop our bodies, we have to put in the work. Because when life’s true tests arrive—and they will—we need to be ready to respond with both competence and confidence. And that comes from preparation, not luck. Greatness is never an accident.
P.S. As I mentioned above, we’re in the final days of Meditations Month. If you’ve ever wanted to read Meditations, or if you’ve read it but want to know how to get the most you can out of it, now is the time to join me—and our Daily Stoic community—in our digital guide: How To Read Meditations.
Our guide distills all of my reading, rereading, and annotating of Meditations into a roadmap designed to help you get out of the book in just a few weeks what took me twenty years.
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