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

by Ryan Holiday

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.

This is the wonderful thing about doing your best. It insulates you, ever so slightly, from outcomes as well as ego. It’s not that you don’t care about results. It’s that you have a kind of trump card. Your success doesn’t go to your head because you know you’re capable of more. Your failures don’t destroy you because you are sure there wasn’t anything more you could have done.

“Your best is good enough.” Not perfect. Your best. Leave the rest to the scoreboard, to the judges, to the gods, to fate, to the critics.

Self-discipline is not just our destiny, it is our obligation. To our potential. To our country. To our cause. To our families. To our fellow human beings. To those who look up to us. To those who come after us.

“You don’t have to turn this into something,” he reminded himself when someone did something wrong or said something untrue about him.

The kind of character that Marcus Aurelius cultivated was such that it brought distinction to his position, rather than the position bringing honor to his person.

It takes courage as well as temperance to be restrained in a world of excess, where we attack and mock those who don’t indulge in the pleasures we have rationalized and the passions we have excused in ourselves.

In a sense, that’s what temperance is: self-sufficiency. Purpose. Clarity. Power.

Through self-discipline we can find our destiny: access to a higher plane of consciousness and being and excellence.

While we hold ourselves to the highest standards—and hope that our good behavior is contagious—we cannot expect everyone else to be like us. It’s not fair, nor is it possible.

Ben Franklin, many generations later, would put forth an even better rule: “Search others for their virtues, thyself for thy vices.” Or as Marcus Aurelius put it, Tolerant with others, strict with yourself.

Because you’ll burn yourself out if you can’t get to a place where you live and let live. Credit them for trying. Credit them for context. Forgive. Forget. Help them get better, if they’re open to the help.

Let them have their fun. Let them live and work as they please. You’ve got enough to worry about when it comes to your own destiny. It’s not on you to try to change everyone else.

While good discipline is contagious, we can also be strong enough to accept that we are the only one who must live with such a severe case of it.

Superiority is not a weapon you wield on other people. In fact, we have a word for that kind of intemperance: egotism.

We leave other people’s mistakes to their makers, we don’t try to make everyone like us. Imagine if we were successful—not only would the world be boring, but there would be so many fewer people to learn from!

But we understand that others are on their own path, doing the best they can, making the most of what they have been given. It’s not our place to judge. It is our place to cheer them on and accept them.

That’s what great leaders do: They make people better. They help them become what they are. As it is written in the Bhagavad Gita, “The path that a great man follows becomes a guide to the world.”

But we can be a positive force in our community. We can show our children, our neighbors, our colleagues, our employees what good choices look like. We can show what commitment looks like by showing up each day. We can show what it means to resist provocation or temptation. We can show how to endure. We can show how to be patient.

It’s holding back the most natural and understandable and forgivable feelings in the world: taking it personally.

Success does not free you from self-control, as we have said. It does not free you from hard work or consequences either. Now you will have to help others carry their loads too. And you will do this gladly, because when you accepted the rewards you also accepted the responsibility.

We have to show, not tell: first in line for danger, last in line for rewards. First in line for duty, last in line for recognition. To lead, you have to bleed. Figuratively speaking. But sometimes also literally.

Stoicism is not about punishing yourself. It’s a firm school, for sure, but as Seneca wrote, “In fact no philosophical school is kindlier and gentler, nor more loving of humankind and more attentive to our common good to the degree that its very purpose is to be useful, bring assistance, and consider the interests not only of itself . . . but of all people.”

From Nero to Napoleon, Tiberius to Trump, power doesn’t just corrupt, it reveals. It places unimaginable stress on a person and subjects them to unbelievable temptations. It breaks even the strongest.

A person who doesn’t know how to disengage, to cut their losses, or to extricate themselves is a vulnerable person.

Hope is important but it is not a strategy. Denial is not the same thing as determination. Delusion is destruction. Greed will get you in the end.

The philosopher Sextus Empiricus defined endurance as “a virtue which makes us superior to the things which seem hard to bear.”

They kept going. They didn’t quit. Still, as Maya Angelou wrote, still they rose. And in so doing, they ennobled and dignified their struggle with endurance and quiet fortitude.

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

he was after “perfection of character: to live your last day, every day, without frenzy or sloth or pretense.”

Self-discipline has never been about punishment or deprivation. It is about becoming the best, the best that you are capable of becoming.

You know that expression, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”? That is a warning. It’s about rigidity. It’s about seeing yourself a certain way, seeing your job a certain way and the limitations inherent therein.

The past was important, but it was not a prison.

We must learn how to be flexible, to roll with the punches or the weather or the realities of the moment.

We must cultivate the capacity for change, for flexibility and adaptability. Continuously, constantly. Changing the little things day to day, as the Queen did, to preserve and protect the big things. It’s not always fun. It’s not always easy. But what’s the alternative? Dying? Self-control is not a life sentence. It is a way of living.

Rigidity is fragility. Formlessness is unbreakable.

Precisely when we think we’ve earned the right to relax our discipline is exactly when we need it most. The payoff for all our efforts? So much more temptation. So many more distractions. So many more opportunities. The only solution? Even more self-mastery!

Duty stiffened her spine. Discipline helped her through it.

The gift of his strictness, of his self-containment, was tranquility—amid both success and adversity.

It’s at the height of our powers that we need the clearest mind. We can’t be blinded by substances or a sense of superiority.

You will concentrate your mind on what counts. You will not be inflated by the changes in your fortune. You will show that success has not changed you. Except that it has made you better.

Nearly every single one of the American founders—from Washington to Franklin to Adams and Henry—made some version of the argument that their novel system of government was impossible without virtue in the people. Mainly they were talking about the virtue of temperance, the idea that freedom could not be sustained unless tempered by private restraint.

Self-discipline is the only way. It’s the moderating influence against the impulse of all other things.

Self-discipline is not something that just happens to you, it is something you cultivate.

There is only one way we can honor it. By adding to it our own deeds, by picking up their unfinished work. We must continue the tradition we are now a part of, whether we know it or not. It begins by polishing our own virtue. Not with virtue signaling, but with virtuous living.

We have a choice. We choose between self-control and ill-discipline, virtue and vice.

“Love the discipline you know, and let it support you.”

Self-discipline is pointless without courage, and, of course, the defining characteristic of courage is self-discipline—steeling yourself for what must be done.

It’s the famed Dr. Oliver Sacks and behind him is a large sign he kept in his office that just said NO! By saying no—to interviews, to meetings, to “Can I pick your brain for a minute?”—I was saying yes to what matters: my family. My work. My sanity.

I avoid the steady drumbeat of the increasingly negative news media, trying to remain positive and to keep up the good fight in a broken world.