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

by Ryan Holiday

Would you have a great empire? Rule over yourself.

Because we mistake liberty for license. Freedom, as Eisenhower famously said, is actually only the “opportunity for self-discipline.” Unless we’d rather be adrift, vulnerable, disordered, disconnected, we are responsible for ourselves. Technology, access, success, power, privilege—this is only a blessing when accompanied by the second of the cardinal virtues: self-restraint.

If we don’t dominate ourselves physically, who and what does dominate? Outside forces. Laziness.

more sustainable coping mechanisms.

On an ordinary afternoon in 1949—the same year Eisenhower quit smoking—the physicist Richard Feynman was going about his business when he felt the pull to have a drink. Not an intense craving by any means, but it was a disconcerting desire for alcohol, completely divorced from the pleasure one earns as a reward for hard work. On the spot, Feynman gave up drinking right then and there. Nothing, he felt, should have that kind of power over him.

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.

But having the lead is, by definition, a little lonely.

No strategy will succeed—however brilliant—if it ignores logistics.

We say “I’m not a morning person,” but that is almost certainly because we have been an irresponsible or undisciplined evening person.

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.

It is impossible to be committed to anything—professionally or personally—without the discipline to say no to all those other superfluous things. 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.

Say no. Own it. Be polite when you can, but own it.

Ludwig van Beethoven would be in the middle of a conversation and then just disappear. Even if he was talking to a woman he was in love with, or some powerful prince or patron. When an important musical idea came to him, he would lock into it, be consumed by it, almost like he was in a trance. So instant and so deep was his focus.

Patience, as Edison illustrated, is a primary ingredient of genius. Even fits of inspiration or flashes of brilliance are worthless without the patience to polish, refine, and ultimately release.

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.

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).

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. This is another reason why that perfectionism—moral or professional—is so dangerous. When we fall short, when we are revealed as the fundamentally flawed, vulnerable, beatable, screwed-up people we are?

Anyone or anything that offers you an escape should be viewed with caution and anything that promises euphoria is liable to give you real pain.

It may also mean, no matter how unfair or unpleasant it is, finding a way to live with pain. The Stoics had a word for this, emmenetea—what must be tolerated.

We are self-disciplined because we want to avoid a hellish existence right here while we’re alive—a hell of our own making.

Nearly every regret, every mistake, every embarrassing moment—whether it be personal or professional or historical—have one thing in common: Somebody lost control of their emotions. Somebody got carried away.

Robert Greene puts it perfectly: “Powerful people impress and intimidate by saying less.”

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. Online or in person, we can’t just sit there. We jump in because we think we’re supposed to. We jump in because we don’t want to seem dumb (even though by speaking we risk removing all doubt). We jump in because we just can’t live with someone else being wrong and not knowing it.

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). You don’t have to verbalize every thought. You don’t have to always give your opinion—especially when it’s not solicited. Just because there is a pause doesn’t mean you have to fill it. Just because everyone else is talking doesn’t mean you have to jump in. You can sit with the awkwardness. You can use the silence to your advantage. You can wait and see. You can decide not to speak through words at all . . . and let your work speak for you.

To be imprecise with language, to fall prey to what they now call “semantic creep”—exaggerating and misusing important words until they have no meaning—this is the mark of not just a sloppy thinker but a bad temperament.

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.

Resist the temptation to interrupt your opponent as they hang themselves.

The poet Juvenal remarked that the whole world had not been big enough to contain Alexander . . . but in the end, a coffin was sufficient.

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.

You always control whether you give your best or not. No one can stop you from that. You don’t have to end up number one in your class. Or win everything, every time. In fact, not winning is not particularly important. What does matter is that you gave everything, because anything less is to cheat the gift.

“He had the ability both to refrain from and enjoy the things that most people are too weak to refrain from and too inclined to enjoy,” Marcus said of Antoninus, likening his capacity for maintaining this difficult balance to Socrates, who was notably frugal but notoriously fun. He had “strength of will,” Marcus wrote in Meditations, “the ability to persevere in the one situation and remain sober in the other.” Life handed Antoninus material comforts in abundance, which he accepted and utilized without arrogance or dependence. “If they were there,” Marcus noted, “he took advantage of them. If not, he didn’t miss them.”

It wasn’t bad that this stuff happened to him. It was an opportunity. “The impediment to action advances action,” he wrote to himself, “what stands in the way becomes the way.” All the adversity, all the difficulty—as well as the awful power and luxury—was an opportunity for him to prove himself. To show that he had really learned from Antoninus, that he didn’t just believe in temperance, but that he lived it.

It was said that the true majesty of Marcus Aurelius was that his exactingness was directed only at himself. He did not “go around expecting Plato’s Republic.” People were people, he understood they were not perfect. He found a way to work with flawed people, putting them to service for the good of the empire, searching them for virtues that he celebrated and accepting their vices, which he knew were not in his control.

Perhaps it was a rule articulated by Cato’s great-grandfather that helped Cato love and support his brother despite their different approaches to life. “I am prepared to forgive everybody’s mistakes,” Cato the Elder said, “except my own.” 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. 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 talked earlier about keeping your cool. It’s almost certain that the number one cause of angry outbursts from successful or talented people is the way that other people don’t measure up. 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!

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! The better we get at this, the kinder we should become, and the more willing to look the other way. 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.

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. Yet we slip, unconsciously, into these negative conversations all the time. You suck. You screwed up. You blew it. You think the Dalai Lama walks around treating himself like that? You blew it. So? You are not perfect. You are not superhuman. No one is.

For the Greeks, retreat wasn’t a shameful thing. It was how you retreated that mattered. The most grievous sin was rhipsaspia—losing your shield in the chaos of escaping—because that endangered the whole phalanx, placing your comrades in peril. A Spartan could return from a battle lost, but they dared not ever abandon anyone. That’s what they meant when they said Return with your shield or on it. When things look lost, some just give up—terrible things come from this collapse of will. Disorder and apathy compound the problem, prevent things from being salvaged, even inflict collateral damage on others. This is not the way, as Socrates and the heroes of Dunkirk both show us.

We keep on dumbly doing the same things we’ve always done . . . under the illusion it will someday bring about different results. We think it’s a sign of character that we won’t give in, when it may well be stupidity or weakness. Or we think that we can continue going forward forever, when in fact it is exactly this insatiability that often leads us right into the trap that the enemy laid for us.

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.

Plutarch tells us about a far less famous general and statesman in Greece, many generations before Pompey. Despite his brilliance on and off the battlefield, Epaminondas was appointed to an insulting minor office in Thebes. In fact, it was because of his brilliance that he was put in charge of the city’s sewers. Instead of being provoked or despairing at his irrelevance—a number of jealous and fearful rivals thought it would effectively end his career—Epaminondas took fully to his new job, declaring that it is not the office that brings distinction to the man, it is the man who brings distinction to the office. With hard work and earnestness, Plutarch wrote, “he proceeded to transform that insignificant office into a great and respected honor, even though previously it had involved nothing more than overseeing the clearing of dung and the diverting of water from the streets.”

This is what you find when you study the true masters of any profession. They don’t care much about winning, about money, about fame, about most of the things that have come their way as a result of their success. Their journey has always been toward something bigger. They aren’t running a race against the competition. They are in a battle with themselves.

In one of the best passages in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius, almost certainly in the depths of some personal crisis of faith, reminds himself to “Love the discipline you know, and let it support you.”

I’d love to be able to tell you that shortly after this the book just clicked. But that’s not how writing, or life, works. What actually happened was slower, more iterative, but also in the end, just as transformative.