What Are You Fueling? | Don't Look For The Third Thing

In the early days of the pandemic, many of us picked up new hobbies and habits. We started taking walks. We started cooking for ourselves. Some of us stopped drinking. Some of us started doing 50 pushups when we woke up. Some of us stopped watching the news or quit Twitter. As we talked about recently though, that time feels very far away. Some of those habits and practices, certainly the energy we had toward self-improvement, have slowed down. The last few years were also incredibly stressful and straining. What we thought would go on for a few months, dragged on, not unlike the plague of Marcus Aurelius’s times, stretching everyone’s ability to remain disciplined and focused.---And in today's discussion of the excerpt from The Daily Stoic Journal, Ryan explores the Stoic idea that the reward for doing anything is the doing itself, and the internal satisfaction with having done it, not praise or external accolades.💪 You can check out the Daily Stoic Habits For Success, Habits For Happiness Challenge at dailystoic.com/habits ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, 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.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

• 0:42Ryan Holiday?

  What are you fueling? In the early days of the pandemic, many of us picked up new hobbies and habits. We started taking walks. We started cooking for ourselves. Some of us stopped drinking. Some of us started doing 50 pushups when we woke up. Some of us stopped watching the news or quit Twitter. As we've talked about recently, though, that time feels very far away. Some of those habits and practices, certainly the energy we had towards self-improvement, has slowed down. The last few years were also incredibly stressful and straining. What we thought would go on for a few months dragged on, not unlike the plague of Marcus Aurelius's time, stretching everyone's ability to remain disciplined and focused. As a result,

• 1:24Ryan Holiday?

  many of us picked up new bad habits, fell back into old ways. Maybe we started drinking. Maybe that's when our Twitter usage really skyrocketed. We got used to delivery, fast food especially. We stopped going to the gym. And now, all these months later, we're not exactly where we'd like to be, not who we'd like to be. There's never a bad time to what they call a fearless moral inventory in recovery. An honest look at yourself, your habits, your practices. Then ask yourself, which of these are working for me and which aren't? What did I pick up over the last couple of years that I need to let go of? What did I start doing over the last couple of years that really seems to be working? And how can I recommit to that?

• 2:07Ryan Holiday?

  One of the most popular quotes in the Daily Stoic is from Epictetus about fueling the habit bonfire. "Every habit and capability is confirmed and grows in its corresponding actions," he says, "walking by walking, running by running. Therefore," he says, "if you want to do something, make a habit of it. If you don't want to do that, don't, but make a habit of something else instead. And so it must go for us." Look at who you are, look at what you're fueling, decide what you're going to continue, and get to work on what you're going to stop. The idea is that good habits make success possible. And whether you're trying to get a promotion, or meet new people, or look and feel healthy, good habits is where it begins.

• 2:51Ryan Holiday?

  And that's actually one of my favorite and earliest of the Daily Stoic challenges we built out, Habits for Success, Habits for Happiness. It's a six-week course, teach you a great slate of good habits to help you achieve success and happiness in your life. It's actually 50 bucks off right now, and you can head over to dailystoic.com/habits to check out, to sign up for it. And remember, actually, that if you sign up for Daily Stoic Life at dailystoiclife.com, you get this challenge, then we've got another couple ones coming in the next few months. You get all the challenges for free. So sign up there at Daily Stoic Life, or just grab the Habits for Success, Habits for Happiness challenge at dailystoic.com/habits.

• 3:40Ryan 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, 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. And we've got two quotes from Marcus to think about today.

• 4:24Ryan Holiday?

  "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 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' Meditations 5:6. That'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.

• 5:09Ryan Holiday?

  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 Marcus Aurelius' Meditations 7:7, 3. 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,

• 5:52Ryan Holiday?

  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? 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, third thing, you're going to be disappointed all the time. And you're going to question why you were doing the good thing. Cause if you're doing it in

• 6:33Ryan Holiday?

  this quid pro quo, one hand washes the other, you do a thing, they do a thing. You start to go, this is a, this is a sucker's payoff. Like I'm doing the right thing and I'm not getting anything for it. I'm going to stop doing the right thing. No, the Stoics want you to think, no, the, the right thing is your job. 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, we pick up trash on this, on this walk that

• 7:12Ryan Holiday?

  we, that we go on in the mornings. And, you know, I remember we, we, 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 pick 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, the next day or whatever. It's actually worse than that. 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. 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. Uh, because it gives me

• 7:56Ryan Holiday?

  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. 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, 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, they can't be hitting them with their cars because like, I mean, you would just leave it there.

• 8:39Ryan Holiday?

  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. 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. 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

• 9:23Ryan Holiday?

  good things for you in this world over the years.