Most people have one rule for when someone offends them.
Get angry.
Marcus Aurelius had nine. He wrote them down in Meditation XI.18, which Jimmy considers one of the most practically useful passages in all of classical literature. Not because it’s philosophical. Because it works.
The Nine Rules
First: consider who these people are in relation to you — that we are made for one another; second, consider their character and the circumstances; third, consider that you yourself have often done similar things; fourth, you don’t even know for certain whether what they did is truly wrong; fifth, remember that life is short and will soon pass; sixth, it is not the acts of others that disturb us but our own opinion of those acts; seventh, how much more do we suffer from our anger than from the acts themselves.
He continues with eight and nine: mildness and gentleness are unconquerable when they are genuine; and that anger is ultimately more painful to the person who carries it than to the person it’s directed at.
Nine rules. Written to himself on a battlefield. Presumably after something happened that required him to consult them.
What Jimmy Notices
The rules build on each other. They’re not a list of unrelated instructions — they’re a sequence. You start with relationship: this person is connected to me. You move to circumstance: I don’t know the full picture. You arrive at self-examination: I’ve done similar things. You reach scale: life is short. You identify the real problem: it’s not their act, it’s my opinion of it. And you land on the cost: my anger hurts me more than it hurts them.
By the time you’ve worked through all nine, the original offense has been disassembled. Not dismissed. Disassembled. Examined piece by piece until what’s left is your own state, which is the only thing you ever actually controlled.
The Funeral
Jimmy stood in the president’s office a couple of days after a funeral and listened to a company president rage at the man (the VP of business development) they just put in the ground.
The man they’d buried was a genius. A generous man. A beautiful human being. And this president — sweating, red-faced, voice rising — was standing in his office telling Jimmy everything wrong that man had ever done. “He didn’t keep records…he never kept contracts…he did business on handshakes.” In fact, the dead man had earned millions of dollars for the company. The company was in his blood as they would say.
When the President finally finished, he was breathing heavily; he had exerted himself so much. Jimmy said three words: are you done? Then he calmly proceeded to correct him.
That’s Rule Seven. In practice. In real time. At an office.
How much more pain do you feel from your anger than from what someone actually did? The man in the ground wasn’t suffering anymore. The president was suffering enormously — from something the dead man could no longer participate in, remedy, or even acknowledge.
Rule Seven doesn’t require you to forgive anything. It just asks you to count the cost of your anger honestly.
Why Nine Rules and Not One
A single rule — don’t get angry — doesn’t work. Everyone knows they shouldn’t get angry. That knowledge doesn’t stop the anger.
Nine rules work because they give you somewhere to go in the moment. When the offense arrives — when someone says the wrong thing, does the wrong thing, fails you in the way you most didn’t want to be failed — you have a structure. Start with Rule One. Work through them. You probably won’t get to Nine before something shifts.
Marcus understood that reason doesn’t defeat emotion directly. You can’t think your way out of anger in the moment by deciding to stop being angry. But you can redirect attention. You can ask questions. You can move through a sequence that keeps your mind occupied with something other than the thing that’s driving the anger.
That’s what nine rules are for.
The One He Uses Most
Jimmy’s answer, if you ask him which rule he reaches for first, is Six: it’s not their acts that disturb me. It’s my opinion of their acts.
Because it’s immediately verifiable. You can test it on anything. Someone cuts you off in traffic. The act is: they moved in front of your car. Your opinion of that act is: they did it deliberately, they don’t respect you, you had the right of way, they represent everything wrong with how people drive. The opinion is doing almost all the work.
Strip the opinion and what’s left is: a car moved. Which is something that happens every day without disturbing you at all.
Read the Meditations with Jimmy at readingwithjimmy.com. Questions and reactions to [email protected].