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

by Ryan Holiday

While the world is unpredictable, one thing we do control is how we take care of ourselves. Making our bed, tucking in our shirt, running a comb through our hair, these are little things we can always do, practices that instill order and cleanliness in a messy situation.

Welcome to temperance. It’s a balance of opposites, by definition.

We dress well . . . but not too well. We take care to take care of ourselves . . . but never at the neglect of the people or things in our care.

Try to find some clothes that work for every situation and be very minimalistic. This could be fun to do and will be cheap because you won’t have to buy new clothes every so often.

We look sharp to stay sharp, to be sharp . . . because we are sharp.

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.

To last, to be great, you have to understand how to rest. Not just rest, but relax, too, have fun too. (After all, what kind of success is it if you can never lay it down?)

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.

It will solve so many of your problems. You’re tired, so you don’t want to work out. You’re tired, so you procrastinate. You’re tired, so you need that coffee, so you pop that pill. You’re tired, and you make bad decisions that eat up hours and hours of work that should be spent on the things that matter.

Instead of wanting things to be easy, you should be prepared for them to be hard. Because they will be!

This is a trait that far too many of us are lacking. We think we can make up for it with brilliance or creativity, but what we really need is commitment. What we need is a willingness to put our body where the problem is, throwing ourselves completely into solving it, to show that we are not for turning, that we will not be deterred.

(endurance)

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.

Does endurance always conquer? Of course not, but nobody wins by throwing in the towel. Nobody wins with weakness. We will taste pain on this journey, that’s a fact. We will be given a million opportunities to stop, and a million reasons why that’s okay.

We choose the hard way . . . because in the long run, it’s actually the only way.

But the greatness of the Queen was more than stoic endurance. The Queen was a lively, savvy woman who managed to thrive in a position that typically brings out the worst of the people who hold it. While few would refer to her as an intellectual—indeed many sneeringly referred to her as “a countryside woman with limited intelligence”—in fact, her quiet brilliance was itself an illustration of her self-discipline.

Smart? Discipline is a far rarer commodity at the top than brilliance. Temperament may be less charismatic, but it survives. It stabilizes.

“Where she’s been brilliant is in her quietness,” one press secretary would observe. “In a very noisy world where people constantly want to express themselves or overreact, what the Queen has done has been the opposite.” She was not empowered to have political opinions yet she was strong enough to do something most world leaders as well as ordinary people are powerless to do: refrain from expressing opinions about things we don’t control.

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.

“If things are going to stay the same, then things are going to have to change.”

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. Because what other choice do we have?

“Is it not much better to be self-controlled and temperate in all one’s actions than to be able to say what one ought to do?”

Greatness is not just what one does, but also what one refuses to do. It’s how one bears the constraints of their world or their profession, it’s what we’re able to do within limitations—creatively, consciously, calmly.

Life is going to throw so much at you, as it did to Washington, to Frankl, to Roosevelt, to every parent and person who ever lived. The question is: How are you going to look at all this? How in control are you of the light under which you must examine the events of life?

“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.

An interview request. A vibrant social media presence. A glamorous dinner party. An exotic trip. A lucrative side venture. An exciting new trend. No one is saying these things won’t be fun, that they don’t have potential benefits. It’s simply that they also carry with them opportunity costs, they require resources and energy that each person has only so much of.

The secret to success in almost all fields is large, uninterrupted blocks of focused time. And yet, how many people organize their days or lives to make this possible? And then they wonder why they are frazzled, unproductive, overwhelmed, always behind.

Every no can also be a yes, a yes to what really matters. To rebuff one opportunity means to cultivate another.

To try to do everything is to ensure you’ll achieve nothing.

Say no. Own it. Be polite when you can, but own it. Because it’s your life. And because it is your power. By seizing it, you become powerful. More powerful in fact, than some of the most powerful people in the world who happen to be slaves to their calendars and ambitions and appetites.

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.

They called this his raptus. His flow state. His place of deep work. The source of his musical greatness. He was being seized by the muses, but also seizing them in return, refusing to let go until he had gotten what he needed.

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.’

It’s that we must always doubt our first burst of excitement and indeed, anything that comes easily. Oates’s patience is about acquiring perspective, about giving all the tiny decisions that go into a book enough time to get them right.

Meanwhile, the patient person is not only easier to work with, but more protected and resilient. As da Vinci wrote, “Patience serves as protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind.”

Even though her dancers loved it, even though they had committed body and soul to it, all she could see was what needed to be changed. All she could see were the ways it wasn’t perfect. And it trapped her in a kind of creative prison.

An obsession with getting it perfect misses the forest for the trees, because ultimately the biggest miss of all is failing to get your shot off.

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.

without a first performance, we know, there’s never a chance of moving closer to that perfect asymptote we’re all striving to reach.

“A man must swallow a toad every morning if he wishes to be sure of finding nothing still more disgusting before the day is over.”

Remember, Toni Morrison didn’t get up before dawn for some “me time.” The mornings weren’t for catching up on the news or folding laundry. She had a short window and she used it to write—seizing the day while others weren’t yet stirring.

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.

The one thing all fools have in common, Seneca wrote, is that they’re always getting ready to live. They tell themselves they just need to get some things in place first, that they’re just not feeling it yet, that they’ll get to it after . . . . . . what, exactly? Exactly nothing. They never get to it. We never do. You’ll need to be smarter than that, more disciplined than that.

You could be good now. Instead you chose tomorrow.

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.

“because fear makes your mind sharper. When you have nothing to fear, your mind becomes dull.”

We’re all going to mess up. We’ll show up to a life-changing opportunity unprepared. We’ll fall off our diet or our sobriety. We’ll lose our temper and embarrass ourselves. We’ll make mistakes. We’ll be beaten. That’s the thing about discipline: It never fails us, but sometimes we fail it.

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.

We are going to lose. Nobody stays undefeated for long in this life. And then what? Can we gather ourselves back up? Can we regroup and try again?

for an athlete, losing just meant the opportunity to come back tomorrow and try to do better. The same was true for winning too.