The Ancient Secret to Getting Out of Bed Instantly

Sometime in the 170s, in a military camp on the frozen Danube, the most powerful man in the world lay in his tent before dawn and did not want to get up. So he argued with himself, in a notebook no one was meant to read: "In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present. I am rising to the work of a human being." This video is about that argument, and how to win it. Six rules for the first hour of the day, from men who mastered it: Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, the Roman legions, Benjamin Franklin, Charles Darwin and Saint Benedict. Topics covered: The emperor and the warm blanket | The Roman salutatio: giving your first hour to everyone else | 1. Rise without a trial | 2. Hear your own voice before the world's | 3. Ask one question: Franklin's "What good shall I do this day?" | 4. The body before the mind: Darwin's Sand-walk | 5. The hardest work first | 6. The morning begins the night before: the Rule of Saint Benedict | The trap: the morning as a stage | The speckled axe | Rise anyway SOURCES Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.1 and 5.1 (trans. George Long, 1862) · Cassius Dio, Roman History 72 · Flavius Josephus, The Jewish War 3.86 (trans. William Whiston, 1737) · Seneca, On the Shortness of Life 14 and Letters to Lucilius 1 (trans. Richard M. Gummere, 1917) · Martial, Epigrams 4.8 · Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, part II · Francis Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887), vol. 1, ch. III · The Rule of Saint Benedict, ch. 22 (trans. Ernest F. Henderson) ARTWORK & FOOTAGE Public-domain works by Pietro Santi Bartoli, Piero della Francesca, Cesare Maccari, Thomas Cole, Adolph Menzel, Caspar David Friedrich, Jean-François Millet, Eugène Delacroix, Georges de La Tour, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Francisco Goya, Carl Spitzweg, Rembrandt, Adriaen Brouwer, William Hogarth, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Thomas Couture, Edvard Munch, J. M. W. Turner, Hubert Robert, Washington Allston, Pieter de Hooch, Honoré Daumier, Frans van Mieris, David Roberts, Andrea Mantegna, Edward Poynter, Gerard ter Borch, Jacques-Louis David, Vincent van Gogh, Antonello da Messina, Arkhip Kuindzhi, Hieronymus Bosch, Godfried Schalcken, Camille Pissarro, Caravaggio, Georg Friedrich Kersting, Gabriel Metsu, John Trumbull, Johannes Vermeer, Claude Lorrain, Meindert Hobbema, Thomas Eakins, John Constable, Thomas Gainsborough, Gustave Courbet, Samuel van Hoogstraten, Albrecht Dürer, Rosa Bonheur, Aert van der Neer, François-Marius Granet, Il Sodoma, Francisco de Zurbarán, Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, Edgar Degas, Matthias Stom, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Peter Paul Rubens, Ferdinand Hodler, Joseph Wright of Derby, Claude Monet, Gerrit Dou, Joseph-Siffred Duplessis, George Richmond, Hans Memling, Angelica Kauffman, Jan Luyken, Jan Peter Tassaert after Rubens, Juan Andrés Rizi, Charles Boom, Jean-Jacques de Boissieu, Daniel Chodowiecki, Jacob Frey after Guido Reni, Reinier Vinkeles, Robert Feke, a Byzantine illuminator (Paris Gregory, 879–882), a Roman fresco from Pompeii and others, via Wikimedia Commons, the Rijksmuseum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Wellcome Collection. Rembrandt, Philosopher in Meditation (photo), and Il Sodoma, Stories of Saint Benedict (photo): Sailko, CC BY 3.0. Joseph-Marie Vien, Marcus Aurelius Distributing Bread and Medicine to the People: CC BY-SA 4.0. The house of Charles Darwin (Down House) in Kent, wood engraving by John Robert Brown, and The Study at Down: Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0. Night sky time-lapse: ESO (CC BY 4.0). MUSIC Original score by Flumera. #philosophy #stoicism #morningroutine