Discipline Is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control (The Stoic Virtues Series)

by Ryan Holiday

You have to do your best while you still have a chance. Life is short. You never know when the game, when your body, will be taken away from you. Don’t waste it!

Remember: No one is having less fun than an overextended, overcommitted person with debtors at their door . . . or a high-paying job they can’t afford to lose. No one is less free than the person trapped on the treadmill moving faster and faster and faster but going nowhere.

Another is how much your interest is motivated by keeping up or a fear of missing out.

The less you desire, the richer you are, the freer you are, the more powerful you are. It’s that simple.

If we want to think well and work well, it doesn’t start with the mind. It starts with walking around and cleaning up.

Clean up your desk. Make your bed. Get your things in order. Now get after it.

we need one final push of discipline: picking ourselves up and walking to the bedroom and passing out.

To procrastinate is to be entitled. It is arrogant. It assumes there will be a later. It assumes you’ll have the discipline to get to it later (despite not having the discipline

When your choices turn you into someone who has to worry about money, then you are not rich . . . no matter how much you make.

It’s a beautiful irony: You’re never content with your progress and yet, you’re always content . . . because you’re making progress.

the poet W. H. Auden said that “The modern stoic knows that the surest way to discipline passion is to discipline time: decide what you want or ought to do during the day, then always do it exactly the same moment every day, and passion will give you no trouble.” Now, one doesn’t have to follow this advice literally to still see the deeper message: Routine is an essential tool in the management of time and the suppression of those negative forces of distraction, procrastination, and laziness.

Now is the time. Because now is the only time you have.

Understand: Most of the people doing important work are people you’ve never heard of—they want it that way. Most happy people don’t need you to know how happy they are—they aren’t thinking about you at all. Everyone is going through something, but some people choose not to vomit their issues on everyone else. The strongest people are self-contained.

Amid plenty, amid intrigue, Marcus kept and was kept by, this beautiful motto: “Unrestrained moderation.”

Although Marcus was of good character, he knew that character was something that needs to be constantly worked on, constantly improved. He understood the second we stop trying to get better is the moment we start gradually getting worse.

Of course, all things in life require some form of endurance. Patience. Toughness. Delayed gratification. All that. But what about life itself? “Sometimes,” as Seneca would write from the perspective of his own crippling illnesses and then exile, “even to live is an act of courage.” And discipline too.

Best is the person who adds shine to their accomplishments with their discipline, not the other way around.

In the end, it’s not about what we do, it’s about how we do it and, by extension, who we are. Too often, we find people choosing to be great at their profession over being a great human being, believing that success or art or fame or power must be pursued to the exclusion of all else.