Do You Have A Heart for Any Fate? | Don’t Look For The Third Thing

“Yesterday is done, so there’s no worry there. But today? What will it bring? No one can say. Certainly no one can honestly promise you that it will be easy. Would you even listen to them if they did?”Ryan explains why you must love everything that happens to you, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. Blinkist is the app that gets you fifteen-minute summaries of the best nonfiction books out there. Blinkist lets you get the topline information and the most important points from the most important nonfiction books out there, whether it’s Ryan’s own The Daily Stoic, Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, and more. Go to blinkist.com/stoic, try it free for 7 days, and save 25% off your new subscription, too. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee 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.

• 0:05Ryan 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.

• 0:41Ryan Holiday?

  Do you have a heart for any fate? Yesterday is done, so there's no worry there. But today, tomorrow, what will it bring? No one can say. Certainly, no one can honestly promise you that it will be easy. And would you even listen to them if they did? After a year that's brought a pandemic, a recession, and impeachment, hurricanes, and floods, and fires, and murder hornets, and so much else? The Stoics would say that there is no hope of taking the teeth out of this world. All we can do is toughen ourselves up. All we can do is be prepared. All we can do is our best. Let us then be up and doing,

• 1:22Ryan Holiday?

  Longfellow wrote, with a heart for any fate, still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor and to wait. This, this is the Stoic prescription. Seneca said that fortune behaves as she pleases. Marcus Aurelius said that they will come at us with knives and jeers. But whatever, we will face it boldly and bravely. We will be ready for anything. We will labor. We will wait months in quarantine if we have to. We will keep achieving. We will be up and doing. We will never stop pursuing. Because the world cannot break us. The world cannot deter us. It can alter our places. Sure, it can knock us down, but

• 2:03Ryan Holiday?

  we can get back up. We can be stronger in the broken places. We will keep being good, no matter what other people say and do. We will greet it all with a smile. We will love every second of it.

• 2:19Ryan Holiday?

  Don't look for the third thing. The Stoics teach us that doing well is its own reward. To do the right thing, to see someone helped by it, this is enough. To go around expecting thanks, what Marcus Aurelius describes as the third thing, that is to miss the point. It's being greedy. Keeping score not only misses the purposes of being good, it's foolish. It sets you up for disappointment. If you're going to do some accounting, look at it from the other direction. How many people have helped us? And what do we owe them in return? Think about clearing some debts this week and consider forgetting any notion of others owing you.

• 3:00Ryan Holiday?

  This is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living, together by myself and the wonderful Steve Hanselman. You can buy this anywhere books are sold. I sell a bunch of signed copies, personalize it, usually write "prepare and reflect" in the Daily Stoic store. You can buy that at store.dailystoic.com. And we've got two quotes from Marcus to think about today. "One person on doing well by others immediately accounts the expected favor in return. Another is not so quick, but still considers the person a debtor and knows the favor. A third kind of person acts as if not conscious of the deed, rather like a vine producing a cluster of grapes without making further demands, like a horse after its race, or

• 3:45Ryan Holiday?

  a dog after its walk, or a bee after making its honey. Such a person having done a good deed won't go shouting from rooftops, but simply moves on to the next deed, just like the vine produces another bunch of grapes in the right season." It's Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 5:6. It's such a beautiful image, like, plants produce fruit. They don't even reap the benefits of that fruit. They just do it because that's their nature, that's their job. And then we have one more. "When you've done well and another has benefited by it, why, like a fool, do you look for the third thing on top? Credit for the good deed or favor in return." That's Meditations, that's Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 7:7, 3.

• 4:26Ryan Holiday?

  Anytime Marcus is repeating himself in meditation, I think it's illustrative. And I think he is doing what we all do, right? He did something good, then he was disappointed that it either wasn't recognized, or he was frustrated that it was actually interpreted incorrectly, or maybe he saw, like, imagine you're Marcus Aurelius. You're trying not to be corrupted by power. You've seen what your horrible predecessors have done, and you're being attacked for it. You know, he says that to be a good king, he said, "The rewards of being a leader is to do good things and earn a bad reputation. You still get attacked." And then, not only that, you see, as we're seeing now politically, right?

• 5:10Ryan Holiday?

  You see one side attempting to be bipartisan, and the other side not being bipartisan. In fact, taking advantage of even the impulse to be bipartisan, right? So there's a, if you're going through life looking for this third thing, and I do this all the time myself. If you're going through life looking for that third thing, you're gonna be disappointed all the time. And you're gonna question why you were doing the good thing. Because if you're doing it in this quid pro quo, one hand washes the other, you do a thing, they do a thing, you start to go, "This is a sucker's payoff. Like, I'm doing the right thing, and I'm not getting anything for it. I'm gonna stop doing the right thing." No, the Stoics want you to think, no, the right thing is your job.

• 5:53Ryan Holiday?

  You do the right thing because it produces pleasure for you. You do the right thing because that's what you were put here on this planet to do. You do the right thing because it's the right thing. Everything else is extra. I've talked about this a bunch of times, but it's just sort of like a top-of-mind example, because I was just doing it this morning. We pick up trash on this walk that we go on in the mornings. And, you know, I remember, there was so much trash, I think I was telling you this, there's so much trash the other day that we had to get the ATV out and go out and pick it. We picked up this huge trash bin full of trash. And the next morning, I go for a walk. And, you know, I somewhat expect, okay, people threw some trash out of their car on the next day or whatever. It's actually worse than that.

• 6:38Ryan Holiday?

  Someone threw a fucking dead dog on the side of my road, right? So I can get upset by this, I can get disgusted by this.

• 6:49Ryan Holiday?

  Or I can just deal with it, right? I, I say my job is, I have given myself this job of keeping this thing clean. Because it gives me pleasure knowing I took this trash out of the environment. It's not clogging up river streams, it's not getting in, you know, any animals' bellies.

• 7:09Ryan Holiday?

  I'm doing that because I think it's the right thing to do. I don't want to be thanked, I don't want credit for it. I don't need everyone to follow suit, I'm just gonna do it. But I have to under, I have to remind myself, again, no one's on the same page as you. There's still gonna be some crazy person discarding dead animal car. I don't even want to know why this is happening. It's insane. It's actually been a thing that's happened like since I've lived out in the country. I don't know if people, it can't be hitting them with their cars because like, I mean, you would just leave it there. I don't know if there's a dog fighting ring out here, or if it's a cultural thing. I don't, I don't, it's crazy.

• 7:49Ryan Holiday?

  And so I just, I had, I called a different neighbor and I said, hey, can you get your tractor, scoop this thing up, dispose of it? And we'll move on, go about our days and try to keep doing the right thing and not let the bastards bring us down.

• 8:10Ryan Holiday?

  Don't look for the third thing, do the right thing because it's the right thing. That's this week's lesson. And as we said in the little meditations, forgive the debts that others owe you and be very diligent about paying your debts to all the people who have selflessly done good things for you in this world over the years.

• 8:31Ryan Holiday?

  You know, it's easy to talk about this idea of amor fati, but you know, obviously the last year and a half or so has been an immense challenge in that regard. But I have tried to wake up every day and say to myself, whatever it is, I'm gonna embrace it, I'm gonna make the most of it, amor fati, not merely to love what is necessary, as Nietzsche said, but love it. That's what amor fati is. I made this cool challenge coin with Robert Greene. It's got an image of a fire on the front because as Marcus Aurelius says, what you throw in front of a fire is fuel for the fire. That's what amor fati is about. You can check that out in the Daily Stoic store, there's a cool pendant version as well, store.dailystoic.com.