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

by Ryan Holiday

We’re convinced everyone cares so much about what we’re doing that we get stuck. We tell ourselves it’s self-discipline when in fact, it’s self-consciousness.

The Stoics remind us: 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.

Perfect is not just the enemy of the good, as they say, but it’s the enemy of everything that might come after. If you get stuck, your potential does too. This is why finishing is itself an achievement, an act of monumental discipline that must happen.

William Stafford’s daily rule: “Do the hard things first.”

Just as days are made of mornings, lives are made of days. To procrastinate at any time, day or night, young or old, to push it until later, is a loser’s game.

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).

Losing is not always up to us . . . but being a loser is.

If your standards are so high that you give up when you fall short of them, then actually you don’t have high standards. What you have are excuses.

That’s what being a pro is about: treating winning or losing as a chance to get right back to it. To come back to your groove and stay in it—because that’s where you’re happiest, most in control, most connected.

Doing the work? The work is getting through life sober. Go on a trip? Go to therapy! Struggle with it. Heal a little bit each day, get a little better each day.

“Doing the work” must actually mean thinking about things holistically. It must mean getting to the root causes. It should mean solving for the injury, not the symptoms.

It may also mean, no matter how unfair or unpleasant it is, finding a way to live with pain.

We don’t refrain from excess because it’s a sin. We are self-disciplined because we want to avoid a hellish existence right here while we’re alive—a hell of our own making. The body is stupid, you have to understand, and our temperament has to save it from itself.

Temperance, C. S. Lewis reminds us, is about “going to the right length and no further.”

Discipline is not a punishment, it’s a way to avoid punishment. We do it because we love ourselves, we value ourselves and what we do.

Remember always: As wrong as they are, as annoying as it is, it takes two for a real conflict to happen. As the Stoics said, when we are offended, when we fight, we are complicit. We have chosen to engage. We have traded self-control for self-indulgence.

We have to develop the ability to ignore, to endure, to forget. Not just cruel provocations from jerks, but also unintentional slights and mistakes from people we love or respect, lest we do more damage to ourselves than the sting of those slights ever could.

We can pretend to not see it. We can ignore what they said about us on the email chain to which we were cc’d. We don’t have to assume the worst. We don’t have to turn the buzzing gnat into a national referendum. We don’t have to let it rattle us.

Why should you have to, though? Because you have work to do. They want you to get upset. Because if you’re going to stop and reply to every attack, as Lincoln said, you might as well admit defeat right now. You’ll never get anything done. You’ll certainly never be happy. And they’ll have won.

We have to remember: Someone else’s lack of self-control is not a justification for abandoning our own.

People who are doing less important things than you can get away with not being in control. You can’t.

We can have passion, but no one can afford to be a slave to it.

Because we’re in charge. Our training. Our teaching. Our talent. Our (good!) temperament. They are our guide. They take the lead. Not our passions. Not the momentary mild (or not so mild) madness.

Robert Greene puts it perfectly: “Powerful people impress and intimidate by saying less.”

Online or in person, we can’t just sit there. We jump in because we think we’re supposed to. We jump in because we don’t want to seem dumb (even though by speaking we risk removing all doubt). We jump in because we just can’t live with someone else being wrong and not knowing it. Where does this get us? Usually into trouble. Rarely does it make any sort of positive difference. Never does it help us with our main thing. It’s almost always a distraction from that main thing!

You don’t have to verbalize every thought. You don’t have to always give your opinion—especially when it’s not solicited. Just because there is a pause doesn’t mean you have to fill it. Just because everyone else is talking doesn’t mean you have to jump in. You can sit with the awkwardness. You can use the silence to your advantage. You can wait and see.

To be imprecise with language, to fall prey to what they now call “semantic creep”—exaggerating and misusing important words until they have no meaning—this is the mark of not just a sloppy thinker but a bad temperament.

Let them wish you talked more. Let them wonder what you’re thinking. Let the words you speak carry extra weight precisely because they are rare. You can answer the question with, “I don’t know.”

We don’t need accomplishments to feel good or to be good enough. What do we need? The truth: not much! Some food and water. Work that we can challenge ourselves with. A calm mind in the midst of adversity. Sleep. A solid routine. A cause we are committed to. Something we’re getting better at. Everything else is extra. Or worse, as history has shown countless times, the source of our painful downfall.

So many “rich” people find themselves in this position. The point of success was supposed to be security and freedom and contentment. In reality, it brought them anxiety, envy, and instability.

All you really need is enough money to be comfortable enough to politely say, “No, thanks. I’d rather not.” To never have to do anything for a buck that’s contrary to your values. To be able to stick with your main thing.

The Japanese word for this is kaizen. Continual improvement. Always finding something to work on, to make a little progress on. Never being satisfied, always looking to grow.

Revolution? Transformation? That’s what amateurs chase. The pros are after evolution.

Is it a little discouraging that we never seem to “arrive”? That our standards rise just out of reach of our abilities? Absolutely not! We move the goalposts so the game doesn’t get boring and, more important, so it never ends. Ultimately, this brings us more pleasure and more satisfaction. We reach heights we’d never have been able to see otherwise.

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

It takes discipline not to insist on doing everything yourself. Especially when you know how to do many of those things well. Especially when you have high standards about how they should be done. Even if you enjoy doing them—whether that’s mowing your own lawn, writing your speeches, making your own schedule, or answering your own phone.

Woe is the person who wears themselves out on trivial matters and then, when the big moments come, is out of energy.

No matter how well-intentioned, the outcome is the same: We wear ourselves down. We harm ourselves, we harm the cause, we neglect the main thing. We end up depriving the world of progress—of the benefits of what economists call the law of comparative advantage.

If you want to keep the main thing the main thing, maybe you need to hire someone who can be a buffer for you—someone who says “No” for you.

But each of us must know what an hour of our time is worth. We must have the discipline to figure out how best to spend that time and how to invest the fruit it bears.

Everything in life is a team sport.

Because delegation doesn’t just provide time but also space—freedom. It allows us to brief, to think, to connect, to appreciate.

You’re in the game, always. You’ve got to know the time precisely because you will never know when it’s going to run out on you. That’s what the reminder memento mori means. No one can take time or life for granted . . . as it runs out for all of us.

Routine is an essential tool in the management of time and the suppression of those negative forces of distraction, procrastination, and laziness.

There is simply no escaping the fact that those moments are gone forever, that you will never get that time back. You missed opportunities to get better. You missed opportunities to make progress. You didn’t let patience work to your advantage. You disrespected other people (who you made wait). You disrespected your cause (which you deprived of your presence).

Look at our heroes: Reality TV stars. Influencers. Professional wrestlers. YouTubers. Demagogues. These are not heroes. These are cautionary tales. The people we ought to admire are quiet. Dignified. Reserved. Serious. Professional. Respectful of themselves and others.

There is a term—energy vampires—meant to describe the kind of people who, because of their lack of boundaries, suck others dry with their neediness, their selfishness, their dysfunction, and their drama.

A country without borders, it has been said, is not really a country at all. So it goes with people. Without boundaries, we are overwhelmed. We are stretched too thin. So thin that those features that previously defined us start to disappear until there’s no telling where we start and the energy vampires around us end.

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.

The strongest people are self-contained. They keep themselves in check. They keep their business where it belongs . . . their business.