You Don’t Get To Do This Anymore | Don’t Look For The Third Thing

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1:03Welcome 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.

1:43You don't get to do this anymore. Of course, Seneca must have thought Nero was insane. Marcus Aurelius probably thought the same about Hadrian. They knew the flaws of these men, yet their position and tradition forbade them from simply saying what they thought. Seneca had a delicate balance he had to walk. Marcus Aurelius could not impugn Hadrian without undermining his own authority to rule, without undermining future emperors. I don't think so, honey, the always amazing Tina Fey told current Saturday Night Live star Bowen Yang recently, giving your real opinions about movies on this podcast.

2:15She was saying, I regret to inform you that you are too famous now, sir. She was passing on a lesson that all professions eventually learn, that amateurs can afford to be flippant, professionals have to be much more disciplined. You're not an outsider anymore, she was saying. Your words have weight and impact, and they can also close and open doors that might be important. It becomes a thing, she was explaining, that, oh, do you want people to keep it real and have their podcasts forever, or do they want to be a movie star? She was saying that her trail of mistakes lives behind her like chains of shame.

2:50She wasn't telling her friends to be dishonest, but she was telling him to be considerate and circumspect when he opens his mouth. A random fan can trash a movie they don't like. An actor should not, nor can they, unless they want to needlessly hurt the feelings of everyone involved in that movie, people they may well want to work with in the future. A citizen can pop off on Twitter. A journalist has to keep their opinions to themselves. They want to retain their credibility. A grunt can complain and whine. A leader cannot. A regular person might be able to get away with being rude or catty. a public figure cannot.

3:24Marcus Aurelius wrote meditations to himself, yet he must have understood that at some level he was not totally in private. Never be overheard complaining at court, he wrote, as a reminder, not even to yourself. And that's why there's no gossip anywhere in meditations. Seneca must have understood that his letters to Lucilius might someday be seen by a public audience, so they could not disclose things that he had seen. Even Stockdale understood that his exchanges with his captors would have consequences for his fellow prisoners and his countrymen. They, like all leaders, like all well-connected people, had less freedom, not more, as a result of their position.

4:00This is the price of success of a platform of power, that is, responsibility. Honesty is still required, but discretion is too. Catharsis is something you've given up. Venting is for outsiders. Speaking off the cuff is off the table. You'll have to learn to keep some things to yourself now. You'll have to be disciplined, conscientious, deliberate. You're too visible now. Too much. Depends on you.

4:32Don'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? What do we owe them in return? Think about clearing some debts this week and consider forgetting any notion of others owing you.

5:13This 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 a dog after its walk, or a bee after making its honey.

6:00Such a person, having done a good deed, won't go shouting from rooftops, but simply moves on to the next deed, just like the The vine produces another bunch of grapes in the right season. It's Marcus Aurelius' meditations five, six. 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 it's the right thing. 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.

6:34That's Marcus Aurelius' Meditations 773. 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 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. 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?

7:28if 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 going to be disappointed all the time. And you're going to 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 going to stop doing the right thing. No, the Stoics want you to think, no, the right thing is your job. You do the right thing because it produces pleasure for you.

8:00You 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 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 you know i'm i somewhat expect okay people threw 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 have given myself this job of keeping this thing clean because it gives me pleasure knowing I took this trash out of the environment.

8:56It'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 going to do it. I have to remind myself, again, no one's on the same page as you. There's still going to 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 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 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 uh try to keep doing the right thing and not let the bastards bring us down.

9:54Don'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. I'm heading over to Australia in a couple weeks. I'm going to be in Sydney on July 31st. I'm going to be in Melbourne on August 1st. Then in November, I'm doing Vancouver and Toronto, London, Dublin, Rotterdam, all awesome cities I'm really excited to go to. If you want to come to those talks, they're open to the public and you can grab those tickets at ryanholiday.net slash tour.

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