29. Count the Cost Before You Begin

Epictetus warns any beginner who has just fallen in love with philosophy. Count the cost first, or you will quit in shame. The athlete is his example.

In every matter, consider what comes first and what comes after, and then undertake it.

Otherwise, you will start off with spirit, careless of the cost, and when the cost begins to show, you will give up in shame.

"I want to win at the Olympic Games."

First consider what comes before and after, and then, if it is to your good, set to it.

You must follow the training rules.

You must eat what your trainer tells you to eat.

You must refuse fancy foods.

You must drill your body, whether you want to or not, at fixed hours, in heat and cold.

You must drink no cold water, and sometimes no wine.

In a word, you must give yourself up to your trainer as you would to a doctor.

Then, in the contest itself, you might be thrown into a ditch. You might dislocate your arm. You might turn your ankle. You might swallow a great deal of dust. You might be whipped.

After all of it, you might still lose.

When you have counted up all this, if you still want the contest, go into it.

Otherwise you will act like little children, who first play wrestlers, then gladiators, then trumpeters, then tragic actors, copying whatever they have just seen.

You too, in the same way, will first be an athlete, then a gladiator, then a philosopher, then a public speaker, and nothing whole-heartedly.

Like an ape, you will copy whatever you see. Each new thing pleases you until the newness wears off, and then it pleases you no more.

You have never taken up a thing with careful thought, or studied the whole of it. You approach at random, and you approach coldly.

In the same way, some people, after seeing a philosopher, or hearing a man like Euphrates speak, wish to be philosophers themselves.

Before you do that, consider first what sort of thing the business is. Then look honestly at your own nature. Ask whether you can carry it.

If you wish to be a wrestler, look at your arms, your thighs, your hips. Different people are made for different things.

Do you think you can go on acting as you act now and at the same time be a philosopher? Do you think you can eat, drink, be angry, and be annoyed just as you are now?

You must keep watch. You must labor. You must leave your own household. You must be looked down on by a slave boy, laughed at by those you meet, come off worse in everything, in honor, in office, in court, in every small affair.

Weigh these things.

If it still seems worth the price, then exchange what you must to get peace, freedom, and steadiness of mind.

Otherwise, do not come near. Do not, like the children, be now a philosopher and then a tax collector and then a public speaker and then a steward of Caesar. These things do not fit together.

You must be one person, either good or bad.

You must build up either the part within you or the outside things.

You must give your labor either to things inside or to things outside.

You must take the place either of a philosopher or a common man.

What this means. Before you commit to a hard road, look all the way down it. Only start what you are willing to finish. Half a life split four ways is worse than one small life lived whole.