You Must Question | A Garden Is Not For Show

Marcus Aurelius was a man who did not partake in the base pleasures of his time. While other Romans saw the death and the carnage of the colosseum as entertainment, Marcus did not. While other Romans–particularly rich, male Romans–saw their slaves not just as property but as walking pleasure machines, Marcus Aurelius did not.📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, then some analysis from me, and then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

• 0:49Ryan Holiday?

  You must question.

• 0:52Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius was a man who did not partake in the base pleasures of his time, while other Romans saw the death and carnage of the Colosseum as entertainment. Marcus did not. While other Romans, particularly the rich male Romans, saw their slaves not just as property but as walking pleasure machines, Marcus Aurelius did not. Good for him. It was a remarkable thing to be above the passions and sins of your age. But as Gregory Hayes points out in his wonderful preface to Meditations, which we sell at the Paint and Forge Bookshop, Marcus was not quite as impressive as you might think. Marcus finds the gladiatorial combat and brutal executions of the arena a source of tedium, Hayes writes. That they might be morally wrong never seems to have

• 1:35Ryan Holiday?

  occurred to him. He prides himself on not having taken sexual advantage of his slaves, not because it would have been harmful or unjust to them, but because such self-indulgence would have been damaging to his own character. There is no sign that he ever questions slavery as an institution. It's possible to do the right thing for the wrong reasons, and in this case, that's what Marcus was doing. It wasn't justice that was motivating him to turn away from slavery. It wasn't a belief in the human dignity and rights that was keeping his hands off of his slaves. It was self-discipline. He was in control of himself, which is good and impressive, but he was failing to see the fuller picture, failing to live up to the belief he writes in meditations about a society of equal laws governed by equality

• 2:20Ryan Holiday?

  of status and of rulers who respect the liberty of their subjects above all else. It was good that he resisted the excesses of his time, but he should have. He could have done more to question them, as all of us should. Our self-discipline is a virtue, but it cannot be the only virtue. We cannot forget our duties to each other. We cannot ignore or take for granted various injustices. We must question them. We must challenge them. And if we ever find ourselves in a position of leadership and power, as Marcus did, we must do something about them.

• 2:58Ryan Holiday?

  A garden is not for show. This is today's entry, September 15th, in The Daily Stoic. And the 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."

• 3:42Ryan 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 smarter, 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.

• 4:21Ryan Holiday?

  The idea is not that we get credit for working on a book, 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, 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. I talk about this, actually, in Ego is the Enemy. There was a great Twitter account or Tumblr account, I forget exactly, a couple of years ago called, "I'm working on my novel." And it's just people telling other people how they're working on their thing.

• 5:07Ryan Holiday?

  Are they? Are they really? No, by definition, they are not. They wouldn't have posted this. Right? So, part of this idea is cultivating, you know, Seneca, 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.

• 5:51Ryan Holiday?

  That's not what's motivating you. 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.

• 6:12Ryan Holiday?

  It's not that life is short, Seneca says. It's that we waste a lot of it. The practice of Memento Mori, the meditation on death, is one of the most powerful and eye-opening things that there is. We built this Memento Mori calendar for Daily Stoic to illustrate that. Exact idea that your life in the best case scenario is 4,000 weeks. Are you going to let those weeks slip by? Or are you going to seize them? The act of unrolling this calendar, putting it on your wall. And every single week, that bubble is filled in. That black mark is marking it off forever. Have something to show, not just for your years, but for every single dot that you filled in,

• 6:56Ryan Holiday?

  that you really lived that week, that you made something of it. You can check it out at dailystoic.com/mmcalendar.