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

Episode Date: July 10, 2023

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.

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. 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 push-ups 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 toward 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 Areleus' time, stretching everyone's ability to remain disciplined and focused. As a result, 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. And 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? One of the most popular quotes in the Daily Stoke 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. to stop. The idea is that good habits make success possible. Whether you're trying to get a promotion or meet new people or look and feel healthy, good habits is where it begins. And that's actually one of my favorite and earliest of the Daily Stoke 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 dailystoke.com slash habits

to check out, to sign up for it. And remember, actually, that if you sign up for dailystoke life at dailystokelife.com, you get this challenge, then we've got another couple of ones coming in the next few months. We get all the challenges for free. So sign up there at dailystokeLife or just grab the habits for success, habits for happiness challenge at dailystalk.com slash habits. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wonder East Podcast Business Wars. And in our new season, two of the world's leading hotel brands, Hilton and Marriott, stared down family drama and financial disasters.

Listen to business wars on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Don't look for the third thing. The Stoics teaches 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 really describes is 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 gonna do some accounting look at it from the other direction.

How many people have helped us? What do we owe them in return? Think about clearing some debts this week and consider forgetting any notion of others, owing you. Then 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 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 Mark's Relias' 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.

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 realizes meditations seven seven three 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. And he was disappointed that it either wasn't recognized or he was frustrated, that it was actually interpreted.

And correctly, or maybe he saw, like imagine your marks to realize you're trying not to be corrected by power, you've seen what your horrible predecessors have done and you're being attacked for it. 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 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 suckers 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 stokes want you to think, no, 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 my example, because I was just doing it this morning. We pick up trash on this walk that we go on in the mornings. And I remember 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 bag full of trash. And the next morning I go for a walk, and I somewhat expect people to throw some trash out of their car on 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 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 any animals, bellies. I'm doing that because I think it's the right thing to do.

I don't wanna 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 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 wanna 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 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. 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 now 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 good things for you in this world over the years. Hey, Prime Members! You can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad- free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. When we think of sports stories, we tend to think of tales of epic on the field glory. But the new podcast, Sports Explains the World, brings you some of the wildest and most surprising sports stories you've never heard, like the teenager who wrote a fake Wikipedia page for a young athlete and then watched as a real team fell for his prank. Diving into his wikipedia page we turned three career goals into eleven, added 20 new assists for good measure. Figures that nobody would, should, have believed.

And the mysterious secret of a US Olympic superstar killed at the peak of his career. Was it an accident? Did the police screw up the investigation? It was also nebulous. his career. Each week, Sports Explains the World goes beyond leagues and stats to share stories that will redefine your understanding of sports and their impact on the world. Listen to Sports Explains the World on the Wondering app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Sports Explains the World early and ad-free on Wondering Plus. podcasts. You can listen to sports explains the world early and add free on Wondery Plus.