Do This (It’s Good For Your Sanity) | A Garden Is Not For Show

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

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:15Ryan Holiday?

  Do this, it's good for your sanity. Not many of the emperors fared well. Something about power, something about wealth, something about temptation that in the end seemed to get to all of them. What was it? Well, certainly, it's not good for anyone to be subjected to so much pressure, such sycophancy, such abnormality and isolation. And perhaps it was the latter that weighed on them the most. They lived behind palace walls and vacationed far away from average Romans. Their food was brought to them, tested for poison first. We talked recently about how the emperor would have rarely gotten to take walks like a normal person, with the exception of the emperor's shortcut,

• 0:58Ryan Holiday?

  a hidden 300-yard passageway of zigzagging ramps from the palace down to the forum, separated from the streets of Rome. Indeed, if Marcus wanted to take a walk safely, he would have had to do it around the emperor's private track on Palatine Hill, which, for all its luxury, was basically a prison yard for his personal use. Of course, they went crazy. Meanwhile, we subject ourselves to a version of this voluntarily. We spend all our time in our house or at the office, in between, in the safe cocoon of our car. We work out at the gym in our own little bubble. We get our food delivered. We order everything we need online. We work remotely, take meetings through screens, text instead of call, and increasingly arrange our lives

• 1:43Ryan Holiday?

  so that we never have to be inconvenienced or talk to anyone. What we need to do is get outside. We need to be amongst people. We need to go for a walk on a busy city street. We need to bump into our friends or maybe meet new ones. We need to be social and outside our comfort zone. We need to be human. We are social animals. We need to be moving and active and challenged. Comfort and convenient are nice, but too much insulation comes at a cost. We weren't meant to experience life this way. We were meant to be outside.

• 2:27Ryan Holiday?

  A garden is not for show. This is an entry from the Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, holding a cloth edition here, but quote today is from Epictetus's Discourses 4:8. He says, "First, practice not letting people know who you are. Keep your philosophy to yourself for a bit, in just the manner that fruit is produced, the seed buried for a season, hidden, growing gradually, so that it may come for full maturity. But if the grain sprouts before the stalk is fully developed, it will never ripen. That's the kind of plant you are, displaying fruit too soon, and the winter will kill you."

• 3:12Ryan Holiday?

  You know, after you listen to this podcast for a while or follow us on Instagram, it might be tempting to say, "Oh, this is great. I get it. I'm a Stoic. I've always been that way." But it's not that easy. Just because you agree with the philosophy doesn't mean the roots have fully taken hold. Fooling around with books so you can sound smart or have an intimidating library is like tending a garden to impress your neighbors. Growing one to feed someone, that's a pure and profitable use of your time. The seeds of Stoicism are long underground. Do the work required to nurture and tend to them so that they and you are prepared and sturdy for the hard winters of life. The idea is not that we get credit for working on a book,

• 3:56Ryan Holiday?

  that we get credit for doing this or that. It's that we are actually doing it, right? The doing is important. And I deeply believe this, that talking and doing fight for the same resources. And you have to cultivate a willingness to be misunderstood, to be not fully appreciated, to just be like, "I'm working on my stuff, man. I'm developing. I don't need your approval. I don't need your recognition." Nobody likes it when they're not appreciated, when they don't get a thank you, they don't get credit. But it's like that scene in Mad Men where Peggy's complaining that Dawn doesn't appreciate her. He never says, "Thank you." And he goes, "That's what the money is for." But the reality is sometimes the money's not there either.

• 4:40Ryan Holiday?

  And this is why the Stoics talk about not asking for the third thing. Mark Schule says, "You've done something good and someone has benefited from it." That's the whole exchange. He says, "Don't ask for the third thing on top, recognition, credit, the thank you, because it's not coming and it shouldn't have been while you did it in the first place." He says, "You've done well and someone else has benefited from it." He says, "Why, like a fool, do you expect the third thing, for someone to thank you for it or to do a favor for you in return? That's not why you did it." And look, the basis of Stoicism is let's focus on what we control. We control the act. We don't control the outcome of the act, the recognition of the act, the appreciation of the act.

• 5:23Ryan Holiday?

  And we're setting ourselves up for disappointment, frustration, and resentment. We don't control what other people do. We don't control the thank you. We don't control whether they appreciate it. We don't control whether they even notice it. Epictetus also says, you know, if you want to improve, be content to be misunderstood and unappreciated. Be content to be foolish. Say, "I don't know about that." You know, he means to not talk about being a Stoic, not to identify with being a Stoic, but to quietly work on being one, to quietly get to work on that project, to put in the hours, to put your butt where it should be, do the work, leave the recognition, the understanding, the appreciation to someone or something else. That's not why you're doing it. That's not what's motivating you.

• 6:07Ryan Holiday?

  That's not what is important. So I'm going to leave you here today, let you get after it, get to work, turn this off, go after it, make some progress.