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Work and failure

Chrysippus and the unglamorous work

After Zeno and Cleanthes came Chrysippus, and he is the least known of the three although the Stoa would probably not have survived without him. He wrote hundreds of books, ordered the logic, the physics and the ethics into one coherent system, and answered the objections of every opponent. It was tough, technical and unedifying work; not a single book of his survives complete. An ancient saying went around: if there had been no Chrysippus, there would have been no Stoa. Of the man who saved the teaching, we have mostly fragments and that one sentence about him.

The crossroads

The work that has to be done is not the work that gets seen. You can choose the visible, or what holds the whole thing up.

The sorting

Fame, remembrance and whether his books would survive: never his, and indeed they perished. The work itself was his, and he did it so thoroughly that the teaching made it to today. The odd result: the least known of the three is the one to whom we owe the other two.

The question for you

Which unglamorous work in your life holds the whole thing up? And are you doing it carefully enough, even now that nobody names it?

Practice this yourself

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