The Little Black Book of Decision Making

2 Rule Makers, Rule Breakers

“The history of life on this planet is a history of rule breakers. Life started … as single-cell organisms, swimming for millions of years in the ocean, until one of those creatures decided, ‘I'm going to do things differently today’. ”

—Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado

Between A.D. 96 and 180 the Roman Empire was at its height, ruled by a sequence of exceptional leaders who have become known as the “Five Good Emperors”. The last of them was Marcus Aurelius;¹ a man whose philosophy we know well because he left a record of his ideas in the form of a set of notes that he wrote to himself. The fact that these ideas are still in print with multiple publishers² is testament to the remarkable depth of his thinking. One of ...