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

by Ryan Holiday

Ambition is good, it just must be tempered.

If you have money, spend it . . . the problem is when people spend what they don’t have, to get things they don’t need, at a price nowhere near worth the cost.

The problem is that many of us tell ourselves that someday we’ll be beyond this, that if we can just earn enough, be successful enough, we won’t have to consider any of it.

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.

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.

A glutton isn’t just someone who eats or drinks too much. Some of us are also gluttons for punishment. Gluttons for attention. Gluttons for control. Gluttons for work.

unseriousness, and excess. 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.

This is why we clean up our desk. This is why we ignore provocations that have nothing to do with us. This is why we don’t speak every thought that pops into our head, why we have to figure out how to be responsible with our finances and manage our time efficiently. Why we go to bed on time, every time, and wake up early every morning. Because we are trying to corral our lives, our emotions, our concerns in such a way that it’s possible to manage them all. That we are controlling them instead of the other way around.

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. Everyone is going through something, but some people choose not to vomit their issues on everyone else. The strongest people are self-contained. They keep themselves in check. They keep their business where it belongs . . . their business.

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.”

No leader, no matter how good they are, can hope to avoid criticism. Antoninus received plenty of it, much of it unfair and unwarranted, but he declined to return pettiness with pettiness.

“gravity without airs.”

Marcus took the hit instead. Because that’s what great leaders do: They do the right thing, even when—especially when—it costs them.

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

Why can’t they get such simple things right? Why can’t they just do it like we showed them the first time? Why can’t they just be like us? Because they are not us! And even if they were, is it fair to expect something of them that they never signed up for?

The journey we are on here is one of self-actualization. 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!

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. Maybe they’ll appreciate this now. Maybe they’ll hate us for it now. Maybe we’ll be celebrated, maybe we’ll be hated. We don’t control that. What’s up to us is that we are good. That we do right.

temperance is more than just being mild or calm in stressful situations. It’s more than just putting up with the occasional criticism or keeping some of your urges in check. 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.

For every CEO who gave up their salary during the pandemic, there were companies that took government bailouts and then laid people off . . . and then gave bonuses to their executives.

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.

You blew it. So? You are not perfect. You are not superhuman. No one is. The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates reminds us that “not all of us can always be Jackie Robinson—not even Jackie Robinson was always Jackie Robinson.” The same goes for Cato, for Martin Luther King Jr., for Toni Morrison, for Queen Elizabeth.

Failure is inevitable. Mistakes are bound to happen.

The person who cannot resist is a danger to themselves and to the organization. The person who needs this, who cannot bear to be anything but in charge, they are not great, even if they achieve great things. They are an addict! They do not have power, power has them.

What matters isn’t the title. It isn’t the power. It isn’t the wealth. It isn’t the control. That greatness isn’t what you have. It’s who you choose to become. Or who you choose to remain.

Responding, fighting back—this is expected. Rising above these understandable, even self-preserving instincts takes discipline. To be above it entirely is true self-mastery.

In the end, it’s not about what we do, it’s about how we do it and, by extension, who we are.

Whoever makes his journey to a tyrant’s court. Becomes his slave, although he went there a free man.

The college basketball coach Shaka Smart, upon moving from coaching at Texas to Marquette, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was asked if he was a cold-weather or warm-weather guy. “I’m a dress-for-the-weather guy,” he said.

Plenty of people have been buried in coffins of their own making. Before their time too. Because they couldn’t understand that “the way they’d always done things” wasn’t working anymore. Or that “the way they were raised” wasn’t acceptable anymore.

Rigidity is fragility. Formlessness is unbreakable.

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. Indeed, a people without self-control, Adams said, would break “the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.”

at some point the rubber meets the road. We contemplate truth and then we have to act on it.