Gregory J. Hayes

And this is where Stoic theory actually holds up really well, okay? And you'll get to see with some of these tools if it works in your own life or if it doesn't work.

So that question I want you to think about: how do we remain ourselves even when people are hooking us? All right, so there's a Marcus Aurelius quote from his Meditations, okay? Book two, chapter one, Gregory Hayes' translation.

He says, "When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly.

But I have seen the beauty of good and the ugliness of evil, and I have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own.

I mean, the quote we started this talk with, you know, comparing himself to other people as team members and all saying we share a piece of the divine.

Well, he said that when someone does you wrong and is not nice to you, the best revenge is to not be like them.

Those are his actual words translated by Gregory Hayes.

The best revenge is to not be like that.

He'd never read the Stoics before that.

A physician gave him the Gregory Hayes translation of the meditations during his recovery.

He describes reading it as recognizing something he'd half arrived at through necessity.

and now finally seeing the map for the territory he'd been stumbling through blind.

It isn't an aspirational text about what it would feel like to have mastered the philosophy.

It's a working document from inside the practice, which is messy, imperfect, repetitive, and entirely achievable for you.

The Gregory Hayes translation, published by Modern Library in 2002, is the most accessible modern rendering and the recommended starting point for you.

One or two entries a day, not cover to cover.

I'm just looking it up now in the hope that I've still got it here.

The Hayes translation.

There we go.

That's it.

Gregory Hayes.

I can't reach it from, without taking off my headphones, so I'm not gonna try 'cause I'll-

Yeah