11 Stoic Rules For "The Good Life" - Ryan Holiday

I've collected some of my favorite quotes from you over the last year, and I wanna go through some of those-

Okay.

... and, and get your reflection. "Talking about the thing and doing the thing vie for the same resources. Allocate your energy appropriately."

Yeah, I don't talk about projects as I'm working on them. That's just a rule I've found. Um, there was this thing many, many years ago, it was this Twitter account that just collected tweets of people talking about the novel they were working on, which they were obviously not working on, otherwise they wouldn't have been tweeting about it. And... Look, I'm not saying you do the thing for validation. T-That's a bad reason to do things. But there is some sort of light at the end of the tunnel that keeps you going, right, when you're doing a thing. Like, "Hopefully people will like this, hopefully it will be received well. Hopefully they'll pat me on the back," whatever. You don't wanna take that on credit. You wanna earn it. And so, when I am working on a project, I wait until I am nearly done, or done, before I start to talk about it, because what it does is it starts to make this thing feel real that is not yet real, and that you are the only person that can make real. So, it's this sort of temptation, this ba- uh, Steven Pressfield called it the resistance. The resistance wants you to go, "Hey, I'm training for a marathon," and people to go, "That's so great, I'm so impressed," um, but they're impressed with the thing you haven't done yet, you know? Tell them after you run the marathon, you know? That, that's when, that's when you want, that's when you want to cash in on the work that you've been putting in. And I think about, I think about... The people that I really admire are people who work for years and y- years on things, and I just think about what it must be like to be in the wilderness that long, to just show up every single day and work on a thing and not get any recognition or appreciation for that thing, to not know if you're heading in the right direction or not. Um... The kind of character and determination that that takes. And so my, my projects are thankfully much shorter than that, usually (laughs) . But, you know, you just, you just do the thing, and then i- if people like it at the end, that's great.

I mentioned that quote to Andrew Huberman, and-

Oh.

... he told me that there is a, uh, neuroscientific basis for that too.

Huh.

That you actually get little sort of titrated drips of dopamine when you do talk about doing the thing-

Yeah.

... so your philosophical, artsy, wanky insight is also reflected quite nicely in the neuroscience.