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

by Ryan Holiday

For Hercules, the choice was between vice and virtue, the easy way and the hard way, the well-trod path and the road less traveled. We all face this choice. Hesitating only for a second, Hercules chose the one that made all the difference. He chose virtue. “Virtue” can seem old-fashioned. Yet virtue—arete—translates to something very simple and very timeless: Excellence. Moral. Physical. Mental. In the ancient world, virtue was comprised of four key components. Courage. Temperance. Justice. Wisdom.

The virtues are interrelated and inseparable, yet each is distinct from the others. Doing the right thing almost always takes courage, just as discipline is impossible without the wisdom to know what is worth choosing.

Freedom, as Eisenhower famously said, is actually only the “opportunity for self-discipline.”

We must keep ourselves in check or risk ruin. Or imbalance. Or dysfunction. Or dependency.

We must master ourselves unless we’d prefer to be mastered by someone or something else.

Self-discipline—the virtue of temperance—is even more important, the ability to keep your ass in line. The ability . . . . . . to work hard . . . to say no . . . to practice good habits and set boundaries . . . to train and to prepare . . . to ignore temptations and provocations . . . to keep your emotions in check . . . to endure painful difficulties.

Temperance is not deprivation but command of oneself physically, mentally, spiritually—demanding the best of oneself, even when no one is looking, even when allowed less. It takes courage to live this way—not just because it’s hard, but because it sets you apart.

“He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty,” she had told him, “and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.”

No one has a harder time than the lazy. No one experiences more pain than the glutton. No success is shorter lived than the reckless or endlessly ambitious. Failing to realize your full potential is a terrible punishment. Greed moves the goalposts, preventing one from ever enjoying what one has. Even if the outside world celebrates them, on the inside there is only misery, self-loathing, and dependence.

Freedom requires discipline. Discipline gives us freedom. Freedom and greatness. Your destiny is there. Will you grab the reins?

“When a man can control his life, his physical needs, his lower self,” Muhammad Ali would later say, “he elevates himself.”

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!

“Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact,” she’d later reflect, “where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transition. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense.”

Early, she was free. Early, she was confident and clearheaded and full of energy. Early, the obligations of life existed only in theory and not in fact. All that mattered, all that was there, was the story—the inspiration and the art.

When we desire more than we need, we make ourselves vulnerable. When we overextend ourselves, when we chase, we are not self-sufficient.

By being a little hard on ourselves, it makes it harder for others to be hard on us. By being strict with ourselves, we take away others’ power over us.

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

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Show up . . . . . . when you’re tired . . . when you don’t have to . . . even if you have an excuse . . . even if you’re busy . . . even if you won’t get recognized for it . . . even if it’s been kicking your ass lately. Once something is done, you can build on it. Once you get started, momentum can grow. When you show up, you can get lucky.

“There’s no excuse for a player not hustling,” Gehrig would say. “I believe every player owes it to himself, his club, and to the public to hustle every minute he is on the ball field.” If you’re not a person who hustles, who are you? Where does that leave the people counting on you?

Hustle isn’t always about hurrying. It is about getting things done, properly. It’s okay to move slowly . . . provided that you never stop.

“A thousand days of training to develop,” Musashi would write, “ten thousand days of training to polish.”

We take care to take care of ourselves . . . but never at the neglect of the people or things in our care. We take our appearance seriously . . . without taking ourselves seriously. As they say in fashion circles, we wear the suit, the suit doesn’t wear us. We look sharp to stay sharp, to be sharp . . . because we are sharp.

Success breeds softness. It also breeds fear: We become addicted to our creature comforts. And then we become afraid of losing them.

The person who has the upper hand of their soul, the person who can go without, the person who does not fear change or discomfort or a reversal of fortune? This person is harder to kill and harder to defeat. They are also happier, more well-balanced, and in better shape. We must practice temperance now, in times of plenty, because none of us know what the future holds—only that plenty never lasts.

When we are committed, when we are driven, when we want to win, self-discipline most often takes the form of getting up earlier and getting more work done. But sometimes, the harder choice, the greater exercise in restraint, is to rest. It’s to manage the load instead of throw it on your shoulders (or knees) without thinking. Although they come from very different places, the desire to skip a workout and the impulse to work out too much end up in the same place. It’s a short-term bargain with long-term consequences, just as the cost of the pleasure of the candy bar or the drug is paid for down the line . . . with interest.

Yes, our work is important. Yes, we hustle. Yes, our drive is how we became successful, our love of the game is what got us here. But without the ability to rein this in, we will not last. We don’t just want to be fast and strong now—we want to be fast and strong for a long time.

The most surefire way to make yourself more fragile, to cut your career short, is to be undisciplined about rest and recovery, to push yourself too hard, too fast, to overtrain and to pursue the false economy of overwork. Manage the load.

Almost all great leaders, great athletes, great philosophers, have been tough. They’ve been able to endure. That’s what it takes: sacrifices. Pushing through frustrations. Pushing through criticisms and loneliness. Pushing through pain.

Discipline is how we free ourselves. It is the key that unlocks the chains. It is how we save ourselves. We choose the hard way . . . because in the long run, it’s actually the only way.

Queen Elizabeth worked every day for nearly seven decades! For her, every day was game day, some twenty-five thousand in a row. She visited more than 126 nations. In 1953, on a single royal tour, she traveled forty thousand miles, many of which were by boat. She shook thirteen thousand hands and received tens of thousands of bows and curtsies. She gave and listened to over four hundred speeches. And this was just one of more than a hundred of these royal tours during her reign. In all, she traveled more than one million nautical miles by sea, and many times that by air. She met more than four million people (personally had more than two million over for tea) and gave more than one hundred thousand awards. Perhaps most impressive, out of hundreds of thousands of engagements, events, appearances, and meals, which were often preceded by long-distance travel and time zone changes, she fell asleep in public only a single time . . . at a lecture about the use of magnets in biology and medicine in 2004.[*]

Discipline isn’t just endurance and strength. It’s also finding the best, most economical way of doing something. It’s the commitment to evolving and improving so that the tasks get more efficient as you go. A true master isn’t just dominating their profession, they’re also doing it with ease . . . while everyone else is still huffing and puffing.

A weak mind must be constantly entertained and stimulated. A strong mind can occupy itself and, more important, be still and vigilant in moments that demand it.

Self-discipline is not keeping things exactly as they are with an iron grip. It’s not resistance to any and everything. Nor would much discipline be required in a world that always stayed the same. Temperance is also the ability to adjust, to make good of any situation, to find the opportunity to grow and improve in any situation. And to be able to do this with equanimity and poise, even initiative and joy.

Don’t let fear or anxiety or prejudice decide. Don’t let your temper decide. Let your temperament take over. Or rather, let the temperament you’re striving to have, that you know your position demands you have, do its work. A leader can’t make decisions on impulse. They must lead from somewhere more rational, more controlled than that. That’s not to say they won’t ever be tempted, that they won’t have impulses. It’s that they are disciplined enough not to act on them. Not until they’ve been put up to the test, put under or in front of the light.

“Anyone who has not groomed his life in general towards some definite end cannot possibly arrange his individual actions properly,” the writer Michel de Montaigne reminded himself. If you don’t know where you’re sailing, the Stoics said, no wind is favorable.

This means first, the discipline to step away and think: What am I doing? What are my priorities? What is the most important contribution I make—to my work, to my family, to the world? Then comes the discipline to ignore just about everything else.

No one can say yes to their destiny without saying no to what is clearly someone else’s. No one can achieve their main thing without the discipline to make it the main thing.

Epictetus reminds us that when you say, I’ll get serious about this tomorrow or, I’ll focus on it later, “what you’re really saying is, ‘Today I’ll be shameless, immature, and base; others will have the power to distress me.’ ”

We can’t abandon a pursuit because we despair of perfecting it. Not trying because you’re not sure you can win, you’re not sure whether everyone will love it, there’s a word for that too: cowardice.

Don’t wait. Don’t tell yourself you’ll warm up to it. Don’t tell yourself you’ll get this other stuff out of the way and then . . . No. Do it now. Do it first. That’s called prioritization. Get it over with. That’s called self-care.

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 now). The graveyard of lost potential, we might say, is filled with people who just needed to do something else first. The time to do it is now. The time to get started is now.

Of course, abstinence and restraint are not the same thing. One is about avoidance, the other is about responsibility. It’s understanding how to do these things appropriately—for your body, for your genetics, for your lifestyle.

“by the standard of pleasure, nothing is more pleasant than self-control and . . . nothing is more painful than lack of self-control.” Nobody who has given themselves over to excess is having a good time. No one enslaved to their appetites is free.

Seek yourself, not distraction. Be happy, not hedonistic. Let the mind rule, not the body. Conquer pleasure, make yourself superior to pain.

Resist the bait your competitor is putting in front of you, luring them into a trap of your own. Resist the temptation to interrupt your opponent as they hang themselves. Put the time in on something classic or transgressive or shatteringly bold, even as you miss out on capitalizing on present trends that everyone insists are the future. Rest early in the season as the Spurs did, so you can peak at the exact right moment. Wait, wait, wait for your reserves . . . so you can mount an attack that will actually succeed.

Ambition, which overthrows governments and private fortunes, which feeds on blood and crimes, ambition . . . is, like all inordinate passions, a violent and unthinking fever that ceases only when life ceases—like a conflagration which, fanned by a pitiless wind, ends only after all has been consumed.

time is ultimately the dictator of our presence here on this earth, we do dictate how we spend it. As long as we are aware of it, aware of its value and the importance of managing it well. As long as we are putting it to work for us, even as it is working against us in the mortal sense.

Boundaries are about drawing some lines around yourself—healthy borders between what you’ll share and what you won’t, what you’ll accept and what you won’t, how you treat others and how you expect to be treated, what is your responsibility and what isn’t.

Set your boundaries. Enforce them—gently but firmly. Treat everyone else’s with as much respect as you’d want for your own. Be the adult in a world of emotional children.