Listen To Your Own Soul’s Warning | Cal Newport On Walking & Productivity

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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from The Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

• 0:45Ryan Holiday?

  Listen to your own soul's warning. Things seemed good at first. In fact, they seemed pretty good for quite a while. Historians have a name for the first decade, the Quinquinium Neronius. It means the five good years of Nero. But the next five years were not good, and there must have been signs before then about the direction he was going. Seneca was a student of history. He was a student of human nature. He might not have understood it from the outset, but he would have sensed pretty quickly that Nero was not up for the job. He would have been slowly and steadily horrified, especially as the bodies piled up. What did Seneca think when Nero tried to kill his own mother, not once, but four times before succeeding? Yet Seneca continued to ignore his own soul's warning, as the

• 1:27Ryan Holiday?

  song lyrics go. He added intellectual and moral heft to Nero's regime. For a man who wrote so eloquently about resisting the pull of ambition and success and money, he must have felt reservations about the enterprise from the beginning, even before Nero's descent into madness. Was this really the place for a philosopher at all? Should he have been cultivating power and political offices to begin with? Like most warnings, those pings of Seneca's conscience were there for a good reason. Yet he ignored them. Probably told himself it was his duty, that he was the adult in the room, and he may well have been. Still, it's also clear that Seneca's moral authority evaporated every day that he was in that room, probably exactly as Nero and all tyrants and gangsters know and exploit.

• 2:08Ryan Holiday?

  Nero was bringing Seneca down to his level, making him complicit in everything that he did. We are not so different from Seneca, though hopefully we have less blood on our hands. We all need to do a better job listening at our souls' warning. No one is saying we have to be perfect saints. That's not possible and probably not even worth trying. We do need to draw clearer lines, though, and be willing to walk away when people and events cross them. We become like the people we associate with, which is why we all must choose our bosses and our industries carefully. We only get one life. We only have one reputation. How will we spend it? What will we do with it? Let Seneca be a cautionary tale. And two recommendations here, if you want to dig in on Seneca's life. We have a

• 2:51Ryan Holiday?

  chapter about him in Lives of the Stoics. And then there's a great book by James Rahm that we carry at the Painted Porch Club, Dying Every Day. Actually, Emily Wilson, who's a translator of The Odyssey and a person I'd love to have on the podcast, she has a great biography of Seneca called, Oh, The Greatest Empire. Also great. Dig in on Seneca. His writings are great, but we should study his life, too.

• 3:20Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Today's entry in the Daily Stoic is one of my all-time favorites, Take a Walk. This is June 21 entry in the Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which of course you can grab as an ebook, audiobook, although I didn't read it. I'll be correcting that eventually, I think. And then we've got a cool leather-bound edition in the Daily Stoic store. I wrote this book with my dear friend and longtime agent, Stephen Hanselman. And I'll get into today's entry. This is a quote from Seneca's On Tranquility of the Mind, 17.8. "We should take wandering outdoor walks," he said, "so that the mind might

• 4:03Ryan Holiday?

  be nourished and refreshed by the open air and deep breathing." In a notoriously loud city like Rome, it was impossible to get much peace and quiet. The noises of wagons and the shouting of vendors, the hammering of a blacksmith, it all filled the streets with piercing violence, to say nothing of the putrid smells of a city with poor sewage and sanitation. So philosophers went on a lot of walks to get where they needed to go to clear their head, to get fresh air. Throughout the ages, philosophers, writers, and poets, and thinkers have found that walking offers an additional benefit: time and space for better work. As Nietzsche would say, "It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth."

• 4:47Ryan Holiday?

  Today, make sure you take a walk. And in the future, when you're stressed or overwhelmed, take a walk. When you have a tough problem to solve or a decision to make, take a walk. When you want to be creative, take a walk. When you need to get some air, take a walk. When you have a phone call to make, take a walk. When you need some exercise, take a long walk. When you have a meeting or a friend over, take a walk together. Nourish yourself and your mind and your problems along the way. And actually, I had Cal Newport on the podcast recently, and we were talking about his book, Slow Productivity, and I asked him specifically about the relationship between productivity and walking, what was so powerful about walks.

• 5:29Ryan Holiday?

  I want to play a chunk of that for you now. So what's the relationship between productivity and walks? Because I feel like people who are truly productive, not people who sit at their desk and pound at things all day, but I feel like people who have big scientific breakthroughs, artists, people who have theories about the world, whatever, there seems to be an undeniable relationship with walks.

• 5:55Cal Newport?

  Yeah, well, they come up all the time, and there's a good neurological reason for it. But first, where walks become important is, once you realize what's important, is like we were talking about before, actually having the valuable idea, like figuring out something good. It's not just writing, which we can use with scarecrows, it's like just doing stuff, right? You actually have to think, right? Walks are really common. Historically for big thinkers, we think like this, it's not exactly nailed down, but we think what's going on is that the the motor neurons involved in walking actually act as a bit of a dampener on certain circuits in your brain, right? So part of your brain now gets into these autonomous motion loops,

• 6:36Cal Newport?

  which acts as a dampener on essentially neural noise. So more distracting thoughts or asides, you're thinking about this or that. So when you're sitting still, sometimes the problem is there's not enough dampening going on in your brain. And so it's hard to sustain your focus. When you're walking, it puts on some cognitive blinders. You have an easier time holding your focus on an interior abstract idea. So it's, you know, it's jerry rigging your brain to be better at this thing that's pretty artificial for humans to do, which is to hold abstract ideas in our minds eye. And, you know, this is not what we evolved to do. We're

• 7:11Ryan Holiday?

  We're certainly not evolved to just sit down for long periods of time either, but we are evolved to cover long distances and look for things and explore places.

• 7:21Cal Newport?

  And taking information while we're walking and process, right? Yeah. So all we're doing different now in the modern world is we're just turning the eye inward.

• 7:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:28Cal Newport?

  So instead of taking in information across the savanna and kind of processing all this information, instead we're walking on the river walk in Bostrop. We can just turn that eye inner and put it on internal things. But yeah, it's the same idea. So it's a walking. Yeah, super common. That's why. I mean, I do all of my best thinking, all of my best thinking, walking.

• 7:45Ryan Holiday?

  Me too.

• 7:46Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 7:46Ryan Holiday?

  And Nietzsche said only ideas have had while walking have any worth.

• 7:50Cal Newport?

  Nietzsche walked a lot.

• 7:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Kurt Kegard would walk just like hours a day. I mean, Aristotle's school is named after his movements, his walking, right? And so, yeah, there is, it's almost inseparable scientific discovery philosophical, philosophical discourse and walking. Even though the irony is when we think of the philosophers, we think of them standing in the lyceum or in the school or we see them stationary. But in fact, they were always in motion.

• 8:20Cal Newport?

  Yeah, you, yeah, you read, yeah, you read the the various dialogues, right? There was the Chilean dialogues and yeah, they're walking. It's Socrates. With Phaedraus and they're walking by the river as they're talking, right? That's the way it unfolds. You know who the champion walker in the arts right now is? David Sedaris.

• 8:38Ryan Holiday?

  Does he walk around and pick up trash?

• 8:40Cal Newport?

  He does. He will, but these walks he does are epic.

• 8:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:43Cal Newport?

  Like crazy walks. Like when he's in Manhattan, he'll like walk from the battery, like all the way up to like the Upper West. Like he'll just walk the whole island or whatever. He'll walk 10, 15 miles.

• 8:53Ryan Holiday?

  No, he, he, he got an award from the queen because he would just take these walks. And then he started picking up trash while he was on the walk, which I also do. Like I live on this dirt road and so I'll, I'll sort of walk it over and over again. And it's like, there's another nail, you know, or whatever. Sometimes it's, it's not, it's even worse than that. But, but yeah, there's something about you're doing this thing. So there's not really any expectations that you should be working.

• 9:18Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 9:18Ryan Holiday?

  Or that you should have the breakthrough. And perhaps that's where it comes from too. Like Archimedes in the bath or whatever. It's when you're, when you've turned, it's still operating in the background because you can't turn it off.

• 9:29Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 9:29Ryan Holiday?

  The, the thing that's working on the problem. But when you stop being so willful about it, something unlocks and it's very powerful.

• 9:37Cal Newport?

  And it comes to you. Yes. Do you also get, I get this in my town. People think you're eccentric. But you probably get it worse here. You know, like I live in a little town outside of DC, but I walk the same loops through my neighborhood and they're like, oh, there goes. I mean, they know it now because we're a small enough town.

• 9:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:54Cal Newport?

  But people are like, why do you walk so much? I was like, this is what I do for a living. I think.

• 9:58Ryan Holiday?

  The, the, the way that it has intersected with my life is, you know, it's like, okay, so you gotta get on the phone with someone for this thing. And I'll send you the invite and then I don't look at the invite until, you know, I'm about to get on. And it's like, oh, this is like a zoom call with 15 people. I'm already walking. So then now I have to make up this excuse for why it's loud where I am, or that I'm not at my computer. Like, oh, I'm out in the country. And so, you know,

• 10:25Cal Newport?

  Trying to get, so I'm trying to get reception. Yeah.

• 10:27Ryan Holiday?

  Exactly. But, but it's like, I can't, I already didn't want to do this call.

• 10:32Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 10:32Ryan Holiday?

  And if you told me that to do this call, I had to sit at my desk for 30 minutes and not. Move or be outside, I'd want to do it even less. Yeah. You know, and so, so yeah, I do almost all my phone calls walking. So sometimes that can be weird in a small town because people like, oh, hey, I want to talk. And I'm like, you know, uh, but, but yeah, I try, I try to, I try to move. Also, yeah, the, the only one that caused problems for me is like, if you're doing like therapy or whatever, if you do it over the phone. And it's like, I don't know if I should be talking about this, like out. Yeah. The thing, but I also, again, don't just want to sit there for no reason for an hour. And so, yeah, I think, I think being active and moving, it's, first off, it's just better than being sedentary. Yeah.

• 11:12Ryan Holiday?

  For you physically and then psychologically and mentally, there's just something very, very powerful about it. And then the other thing I think to look at when you're thinking about the relationship between creativity and walks. If you've read Mason Curry's book, Daily Rituals, like almost every page in the book, for every famous artist, philosopher, thinker, composer, whatever. I would say 50% of them have some kind of walking process. In fact, that was the name of Aristotle School. They were known as basically the walkers. So thinking about a walking process, how do you build it into your life? You just got to do it. I like to do it in the mornings with my kids. We try to do it before school.

• 11:56Ryan Holiday?

  Now that it's summer, we just, we've got more time. We just, we, we have a couple of different loops that we do. Get outside, we get moving. Yesterday we did our walk and I picked up three nails. My youngest picked up two and my oldest picked up two. So it's not just making us better mentally, but you know, this was something I talked about in the afterword of right thing right now. It's also like, how are you just making a positive difference? You pick up trash, you wave at your neighbor when they drive by. You're having a positive presence in your community. You're spending family time together. Maybe you're talking to a friend. I take a walk, sometimes when I take a walk, if I'm in New York City or something, I'll make a phone call. I just, who do I, who do I need to talk to? Who, who have I not checked in with for a while? There's just something wonderful about that. I get moving.

• 12:40Ryan Holiday?

  In fact, I try to do the other way around. When I have to do a phone call, something I haven't liked post pandemic. Everyone wants to do Zooms where we look at each other. I like to do my phone calls walking too. I like to just get moving. Why sit in the chair the whole time? Why pace aimlessly in my office? I want to get outside. I want to see nature. I want to wave at people. I want to get some sunlight. It's just a wonderful thing. And I just love that the Stoics talk about it. It's one of the few things that I wish the Stoics had talked a lot more about because it's so wonderful and it's so important. And if you take anything from today's message, I hope it's that you build a walking practice into your life. It's harder during the summer. You get so sweaty, especially here

• 13:22Ryan Holiday?

  in Texas, but it's a good sweat. And as Seneca says, "We pay the taxes of life gladly." If being a little sweaty and stinky at the end of the day is the price I have to pay for the mental benefits of walking, to say nothing of the other physical benefits, I think that's a trade well worth making.

• 13:42Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out, dailystoic.com/email.