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In the ancient world, virtue was comprised of four key components. Courage. Temperance. Justice. Wisdom. The “touchstones
Freedom, as Eisenhower famously said, is actually only the “opportunity for self-discipline.”
We must keep ourselves in check or risk ruin. Or imbalance. Or dysfunction. Or dependency.
Life is not fair. Gifts are not handed out evenly. And the reality of this inequity is that those of us coming from a disadvantage have to be even more disciplined to have a chance.
We must master ourselves unless we’d prefer to be mastered by someone or something else.
Self-discipline—the virtue of temperance—is even more important, the ability to keep your ass in line.
Self-discipline is giving everything you have . . . and knowing what to hold back. Is there some contradiction in this? No, only balance.
When you love the work, you don’t cheat it or the demands it asks of you. You respect even the most trivial aspects of the pursuit—he
Discipline isn’t deprivation . . . it brings rewards.
He found, miraculously, that the nerves, the overthinking, had disappeared with a few nips from a bottle between innings.
gun-shy at the plate.”
“When a man can control his life, his physical needs, his lower self,” Muhammad Ali would later say, “he elevates himself.”
To conquer our bodies before they conquer us.
This is more clamness than disciplinr
The pleasure of excess is always fleeting. Which is why self-discipline is not a rejection of pleasure but a way to embrace it.
Who can be free when they have lost, as one addiction specialist put it, “the freedom to abstain”?
In some ways, the habit itself is less important than what we’re really quitting, which is dependency.
When we desire more than we need, we make ourselves vulnerable.
By being a little hard on ourselves, it makes it harder for others to be hard on us. By being strict with ourselves, we take away others’ power over us.
“The more a man is,” the editor Maxwell Perkins had inscribed on his mantel, “the less he wants.” When you strip away the unnecessary and the excessive, what’s left is you. What’s left is what’s important.
Another is how much your interest is motivated by keeping up or a fear of missing out. Ask yourself: Haven’t I and humanity survived quite a long time without this? How did it go last time I got the thing I craved—how long did the feeling last (compared to the buyer’s remorse)?
The less you desire, the richer you are, the freer you are, the more powerful you are. It’s that simple.
They like to say in the military that slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
We don’t rise to the occasion, we fall to the level of our training.
When you are not practicing, refining, working—somewhere, someone else is . . . and when you meet them, they will beat you.
The bee dies if cut off from the hive. When you find what you’re meant to do, you do it.
Always and forever, the reward is the work. It is a joy itself. It is torture and also heaven—sweaty, wonderful salvation.
But on the other hand, those who value the superficial—sharp creases, brand names, or the fanciest new styles—over the substantive are equally off track.
We must practice temperance now, in times of plenty, because none of us know what the future holds—only that plenty never lasts.
While the ability to sleep quickly and rest well might not seem like a matter of discipline, it very much is. In fact, in the armed forces, they refer now to the idea of sleep discipline.
Our moments of peak performance rarely come when we are exhausted, when we are running on fumes, when we are bleary-eyed and dependent on caffeine.
They’ve been able to endure. That’s what it takes: sacrifices. Pushing through frustrations. Pushing through criticisms and loneliness. Pushing through pain.
Of course not, but nobody wins by throwing in the towel. Nobody wins with weakness.
Her poise and equanimity kept us from ever seeing how hard she worked.
Discipline is a far rarer commodity at the top than brilliance. Temperament may be less charismatic, but it survives. It stabilizes.
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.
'Several entertainment and social media are a cure for weak mind
Plenty of people are “masters” of their universe while lacking the most important power there is . . . power over their own minds, power over their own actions and choices.
“Most people have a job and then they go home,” the Queen once reflected, “and in this existence the job and the life go on together, because you can’t really divide it up.”
Slow is the higher self. Slow is the rational, philosophical, principled self. Really thinking about things, really thinking about who you want to be (understanding upon reflection, as Roosevelt did, that such hesitation needed to be overridden).
You’re vulnerable to every shiny, exciting thing that comes your way, every “I’ve got a potential opportunity for you,” every “It’ll only take a minute,” every “Thanks in advance,” every “I know you’re busy but. . . .”
If you don’t know where you’re sailing, the Stoics said, no wind is favorable.
No purpose
Here is the inescapable logic: Everything we say yes to means saying no to something else. No one can be two places at once. No one can give all their focus to more than one thing. But the power of this reality can also work for you: Every no can also be a yes, a yes to what really matters. To rebuff one opportunity means to cultivate another.
Trying to please everyone, they end up pleasing no one.
The rest of us are far too concerned with things that don’t matter to recognize that true mental discipline comes at a cost—and
“Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.”
When your instinct is to go, when you really want to get after it, waiting . . . well, the waiting is the hardest part.
To wait for the solution to come to you.
We will need not just day-to-day patience, but long patience. Shackleton level patience. To put the book in a drawer while it gestates, to go to sleep and come back to it tomorrow, to let the compounding interest do its work,
And without a first performance, we know, there’s never a chance of moving closer to that perfect asymptote we’re all striving to reach.
Shortened and often credited to Mark Twain,[*] the idea is that if we eat the frog at the beginning of the day, it will be next to impossible for the day to get any worse.
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 .
