The Stoic Code General Mattis Lives By

When General James Mattis showed up at the Naval Academy to speak, he discovered Ryan Holiday had been there the week before. "I'm not gonna look too good this week," Mattis thought, "because he's a lot better at this stuff than I am." That self-deprecating remark from a four-star Marine general who carried Marcus Aurelius's Meditations through forty years of deployments captures something essential about the Stoic tradition: it is not about being perfect, but about the work of trying.

Philosophy as a Crisis Discipline

Mattis did not discover philosophy in a classroom. He stumbled into it because military life meant "careening from one crisis to another." When people are looking to their officers for direction in moments where no one is in control, you need something to fall back on. "What you do in a crisis as a human being," Mattis explained, "you fall back on something." For him, that something became a set of values that kept him "calm enough to take purposeful action."