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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.
Pope John Paul II was right to remind us that part of temperance is about avoiding the impulse to deprive ourselves of “consciousness by the use of drugs.”
“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.
As wrong as they are, as annoying as it is, it takes two for a real conflict to happen.
“It helps to be a little deaf,” was the advice that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was given by her mother-in-law, and it helped guide her through not just fifty-six years of marriage, but also a twenty-seven-year career on the Supreme Court with colleagues she adored but surely disagreed with on a regular basis, not least of whom was Antonin Scalia, her best friend and ideological opposite.
People who are doing less important things than you can get away with not being in control. You can’t.
You can get angry . . . the important thing is not to do anything out of anger.
Not only does the ego want to talk, want to say what it thinks, but now we have technology that exploits ego and explicitly tempts you to share, to speak, to get in pointless arguments, to burst out with hot takes.
While each of us needs to cultivate the courage to speak up and speak the truth, we also need to develop the self-discipline to know when to stay focused and when to shut up (and how to measure what we do say with the utmost economy).
Better to be thought foolish or simple than to make a fool of yourself—to prove that you don’t actually have anything to say. Regret what you didn’t say, not the other way around.
Free speech is a right, not an obligation. Two ears, one mouth, Zeno would remind his students. Respect that ratio properly. 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.” You can ignore the insult. You can decline the invitation. You can decide not to explain your reasons. You can allow for a pause. You can put it down in your journal instead. You can listen. You can sit with the silence. You can let your actions do the talking. You can listen more than you talk. You can speak only when you’re certain it’s not better left unsaid. Of course, you can. But will you?
Yet success—as most strategy does—depended on judicious restraint.
Beware the fury of the patient man.
In life, in war, in business, we often only get one moment, one opportunity. Nobody is going to give you a do-over. You never get to go back and try it differently—to make up for deficiencies in preparation, to time things better, to get more leverage.
Just as we do with our relationship to drugs or devices, we have to ask ourselves: Who is in charge? Our mind? Or our slavish need to be the biggest, the winningest, the richest, the most powerful, the most famous? The need to do more, to get more, to achieve again and again? We have to ask: What is this really bringing me? What am I actually getting out of it?
Ambition is good, it just must be tempered. Like all elements of self-discipline, it’s about balance.
“Fuck-you money” is a chimera. You never get it. Nobody does. Poor people have poor-people problems and rich people have rich-people problems because people always have problems. You’re always going to be subject to the necessity of self-discipline. Or at least, you’ll never be immune from the consequence of ignoring it.
And is “fuck-you money” really such an admirable goal anyway? To have so much money you don’t have to care about anyone or anything? That’s not virtue, it’s childishness. 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.
It has been said that Tom Brady, the greatest quarterback in history—the youngest and the oldest to win a Super Bowl—isn’t obsessed with winning. That’s not what he focuses on. He’s obsessed with improving the accuracy of his touchdown passes in the fourth quarter. He’s obsessed with getting a little bit faster at releasing the football. He’s not willing to stay the same, even though that “same” is very consistently the best in the league.
Focus on getting better, not winning
Think about it: Most people don’t even show up. Of the people who do, most don’t really push themselves. So to show up and be disciplined about daily improvement? You are the rarest of the rare. And if improvement sounds difficult, how about just making fewer mistakes?
It’s the journey of a lifetime. In fact, that’s the way to think about all of this: How much progress could you make if you made just a little each day over the course of an entire life? What might this journey look like, where might it lead, if each bit of progress you made presented both the opportunity and the obligation to make a little more progress, and you seized those opportunities, you lived up to those obligations, each and every time?
It’s a beautiful irony: You’re never content with your progress and yet, you’re always content . . . because you’re making progress.
law of comparative advantage.
“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.
Keeping the main thing the main thing is impossible if you’re not capable of saying no or pushing back when others put too much on your plate. You can’t keep your head about you in stressful situations if you have no idea who you are or what you stand for. You can’t be a strong parent if you’re a mess or if you’re still letting your parents walk all over you. How will you get anything done if the temptations of social media rule your life? How can you get back up after a failure if you are overly concerned with what other people think of you?
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.
“It took about four hundred years for the Lord Jesus Christ to have his message accepted. Up to that time he would be considered a ‘failure.’ As long as a man is trying as hard as he can to do what he thinks to be right, he is a success, regardless of the outcome.”
soon enough you will be truly tested—beyond the ordinary ways in which you have had to persist and resist on this journey toward your best self. Life will demand something greater, something bordering on heroic.
When we rule ourselves, we have the responsibilities of sovereigns, not of subjects.
Can you achieve this stillness, this balance, in the chaos of real life? Surrounded by temptation? Whether the crowd cheers or jeers? Regardless of what would be tolerated, what you could get away with, what people even think is possible? We call this rare and transcendent plane the Magisterial—mastering yourself, mentally, physically, in command always, in all forms . . . and somehow finding a gear beyond that, finding more to give, more to draw from yourself. This is the greatness we seek, this is where the body, the mind, and the spirit come together in life’s most stressful situations,
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That’s the thing about discipline . . . like courage, it is contagious.
Because that’s what great leaders do: They do the right thing, even when—especially when—it costs them.
“Unrestrained moderation.”
To remain oneself in a world that pushes for conformity takes courage. 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.
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.
We do not have to add our names to the list of sad stories and cautionary tales that success so often writes. Through self-discipline we can find our destiny: access to a higher plane of consciousness and being and excellence.
“Search others for their virtues, thyself for thy vices.” Or as Marcus Aurelius put it, Tolerant with others, strict with yourself.
The only person you get to be truly hard on is you. It will take every ounce of your self-control to enforce that—not because it’s hard to be hard on yourself, but because it’s so hard to let people get away with things you’d never allow in yourself. To let them do things you know are bad for them, to let them slack off when you see so much more in them.
We’re on our own journey and, yes, it is a strict and difficult one. 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.
The self-disciplined don’t berate. They don’t ask for anything. They just do their job. They don’t shame either . . . except perhaps subtly by their own actions. In their presence we feel called to step up, to step forward, to reach deeper because they have shown that is possible.
The fire within us can burn bright enough to warm others. The light within us can illuminate the path for others. What we accomplish can make things possible for others. It starts with us, it starts within us. But it doesn’t stop there. Our discipline can be contagious . . . and if it isn’t, how strong is it, really?
Sometimes it’s having the strength to not do the thing you want to do more than anything else in the world. It’s holding back the most natural and understandable and forgivable feelings in the world: taking it personally. Running away. Breaking down. Locking up with fear. Celebrating with joy. Cursing in anger. Exacting retribution. To indulge these passions would be to give your opponents exactly what they want, or worse, to harm an innocent person.
“It doesn’t matter what you bear,” Seneca would say. “It matters how you bear it.” The truly great bear it with grace. Poise. Courage. Discipline.
Being the “boss” is a job. Being a “leader” is something you earn. You get elevated to that plane by your self-discipline. By moments of sacrifice like this, when you take the hit or the responsibility on behalf of someone else.
The leader shows up first and leaves last. The leader works hardest. The leader puts others before themselves. The leader takes the hit.
Is it really unfair? Or is it what you signed up for? And by the way, isn’t it also what you get paid the big bucks for? That’s the privilege of command.
Of course, the entire point of self-discipline is that we are strict. We hold ourselves to high standards. We don’t accept excuses. We push ourselves always to be better. But does that mean that we whip ourselves? That we hate ourselves? That we treat ourselves or talk to ourselves like a bad person? Absolutely not.
And for Marcus Aurelius, too, who reminded himself and all of us not to “feel exasperated, or defeated, or despondent because your days aren’t packed with wise and moral actions. But to get back up when you fail, to celebrate behaving like a human—however imperfectly—and fully embrace the pursuit that you’ve embarked on.”
