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

by Ryan Holiday

Aristotle described virtue as a kind of craft, something to pursue just as one pursues the mastery of any profession or skill. “We become builders by building and we become harpists by playing the harp,” he wrote. “Similarly, then, we become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions.”

we mistake liberty for license. Freedom, as Eisenhower famously said, is actually only the “opportunity for self-discipline.”

Self-discipline is giving everything you have . . . and knowing what to hold back. Is there some contradiction in this? No, only balance. Some things we resist, some things we pursue; in all things, we proceed with moderation, intentionally, reasonably, without being consumed or carried away.

Temperance is not deprivation but command of oneself physically, mentally, spiritually—demanding the best of oneself, even when no one is looking, even when allowed less. It takes courage to live this way—not just because it’s hard, but because it sets you apart.

Eisenhower’s mother had quoted him a verse from the Book of Proverbs, “He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty,” she had told him, “and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.”

She taught him the same lesson that Seneca himself tried to instill in the rulers he advised, that “Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.”

Still, there is a part of us that celebrates, perhaps envies, those who let themselves get away with more, who hold themselves to lower standards—the rock stars, the famous, the wicked. It seems easier. It seems like more fun. It might even be the way to get ahead. Is that right? No, it is an illusion. Under closer inspection: No one has a harder time than the lazy. No one experiences more pain than the glutton. No success is shorter lived than the reckless or endlessly ambitious. Failing to realize your full potential is a terrible punishment. Greed moves the goalposts, preventing one from ever enjoying what one has. Even if the outside world celebrates them, on the inside there is only misery, self-loathing, and dependence.

Baseball was a profession that demanded control of, as well as care for, the body—since it was both the obstacle and the vehicle for success. Gehrig did both. He worked harder than anyone. “Fitness was almost a religion to him,” one teammate would say of him. “I am a slave to baseball,” Gehrig said. A willing slave, a slave who loved the job and remained forever grateful at just the opportunity to play.

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

To whom much is given, much is expected. The obligation of a champion is to act like a champion . . . while working as hard as somebody with something to prove.

“When a man can control his life, his physical needs, his lower self,” Muhammad Ali would later say, “he elevates himself.”

You have to do your best while you still have a chance. Life is short. You never know when the game, when your body, will be taken away from you. Don’t waste it!

“I think Christ has recommended rising early in the morning, by rising from his grave very early,” observed the theologian Jonathan Edwards in the 1720s. Is that why quiet mornings seem so holy? Perhaps it’s that we’re tapping into the traditions of our ancestors, who also rose early to pray, to farm, to fetch water from the river or the well, to travel across the desert before the sun got too hot.

In some ways, the habit itself is less important than what we’re really quitting, which is dependency. What the Buddhists call tanha. The thirst. The craving. Maybe with time you can go back to recreational usage—of whatever it is—yet even to do that, you’re first going to have to quit the habituation. It’s not the sex or the likes or the drink. It’s the need. And it’s this need that is the source of suffering.

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.

A person who lives below their means has far more latitude than a person who can’t. That’s why Michelangelo, the artist, didn’t live as austerely as Cato but he avoided the gifts dangled by his wealthy patrons. He didn’t want to owe anyone. Real wealth, he understood, was autonomy.

The less you desire, the richer you are, the freer you are, the more powerful you are. It’s that simple.

Imagine what you could get done if you had the discipline to proactively put everything in order first. If you committed to orderliness and enforced it on yourself. Don’t think of that as another obligation, another thing to worry about. Because in practice, it will free you. Once the systems are in place, once the order is established, then and only then are we able to truly let loose to turn ourselves over to the whims and furies of creativity, to pushing ourselves physically, to audacious invention or investment. As the novelist Gustave Flaubert commands: Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Clean up your desk. Make your bed. Get your things in order. Now get after it.

We want to really challenge ourselves, not waste time running through some checklist, stretching before a workout, reading the instructions instead of diving in. But that’s the point: We’re fit to tackle the big problems only if we do the little things right first. No strategy will succeed—however brilliant—if it ignores logistics.

“The devil is in the details,” the great admiral Hyman Rickover used to say, “but so is salvation.” And as the reckless and irresponsible Zelda Fitzgerald said with only some self-awareness, the opposite is also true. “It is the loose-ends,” she lamented, “with which men hang themselves.”

Because it was in accordance with his favorite saying, festina lente. That is, to make haste slowly.

“Slowly,” the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez would say, “you do everything correctly.” That’s true with leadership as well as lifting weights, running as well as writing. Hustle isn’t always about hurrying. It is about getting things done, properly.

Do we not understand that in the story of the tortoise and the hare, that it was actually the turtle who hustled? The hare was Manny Machado or George McClellan. Brilliant, fast even in bursts, but not consistently so.

Practice . . . Then Practice More

“Practice over a long time turns into second nature.” We don’t rise to the occasion, we fall to the level of our training.

Look, this is not a drill. There is no greatness without practice. Lots of practice. Repetitive practice. Exhausting, bone-crunching, soul-crushing practice. And yet what emerges from this practice is the opposite of those three feelings. Energy. Strength. Confidence.

Only you know what it will look like to train in your art like a samurai, an Olympic athlete, a master in pursuit of excellence. Only you will know what you need to practice from morning until night, what to repeat ten thousand times. It won’t be easy, but in that burden is also freedom and confidence. The pleasure of the flow state. The rhythm of second nature. The quiet calmness of knowing that, from the practice, you’ll know exactly what to do when it counts . . . the pride and the dependability of doing it too.

She published. “I come from a part of the world where people did work rather than just talk about it,” she said. “And so if you feel that you just can’t write, or you’re too tired, or this, that, and the other, just stop thinking about it and go and work.” Which is what Oates has done, nearly every day thus far of her fifty-eight-year career. Grinding down pencils and pens as she wrote first drafts longhand, wearing through typewriters and then laptops as she polished her manuscripts.

Why shouldn’t life generally be comfortable? Still, we must understand that the modern world is conspiring against us, working to degrade our ability to endure even the slightest difficulty. It spoils us . . . and sets us up for failure or slavery.

A person who understands the value of discipline. A person who is comfortable being uncomfortable.

Sleep on the ground. Lift something heavy. Do the manual labor yourself. Jump in the cold lake. Success breeds softness. It also breeds fear: We become addicted to our creature comforts. And then we become afraid of losing them. Seneca was no Cato day to day, but he knew from his practice, that he could be if he had to.

We train ourselves in self-denial as a form of self-preservation. “Take the cold bath bravely,” W. E. B. Du Bois wrote to his daughter. “Make yourself do unpleasant things so as to gain the upper hand of your soul.”

Yes, our work is important. Yes, we hustle. Yes, our drive is how we became successful, our love of the game is what got us here. But without the ability to rein this in, we will not last. We don’t just want to be fast and strong now—we want to be fast and strong for a long time. We want to keep winning. But nothing left unchecked lasts for long. Nobody without the ability to self-govern is qualified to govern—that includes not just prodding yourself forward, but also resting yourself, finding balance, listening to your body when it tells you, “I’m about to break!”

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.

in the armed forces, they refer now to the idea of sleep discipline. It’s something you not only have to do, but something you have to enforce in yourself—in terms of both quantity and quality. The higher the stakes, the more driven you are, the more stressful the situation, the more discipline sleep requires.

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.

You want to think clearly tomorrow? You want to handle the small things right? You want to have the energy to hustle? Go to sleep. Not just because your health depends on it, but because it is an act of character from which all our other decisions and actions descend.

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. But we can’t. And it’s not. We keep going. We put our butt in the chair. We will not be deterred.

Temperance in the body affects the mind, and just as much, intemperance and excess physically prevent the mind from working as it should. The neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett has explained it in terms of a body budget: Our brain regulates our body, but if we are physically bankrupt, the brain cannot possibly do its job. If you wonder why people make bad decisions, why they are not resilient, why they are distracted, why they are afraid, why they are caught in the thrall of extreme emotions—if you wonder why you do these things—well, it starts with the body.

No one lasts very long if they are afraid of change, and few are able to change if they are afraid of feedback or making mistakes.

This is the key not just to professional success but also personal happiness. When someone takes “just a few minutes of your time,” they aren’t just robbing you (though they admit this when they ask to “pick your brain” and thus your pocket). They’re also robbing your family. They’re robbing the people who you serve. They are robbing the future. The same goes for when you agree to do unimportant things, or when you commit to too much at one time. Except this time, you are the thief.

Keeping the main thing the main thing is not enough. Once the plate is cleared, you must be able to put your whole mind into that main thing. It has to get all of you. The Stoics tell us that we must learn how to focus in every moment like a Roman, to seize this thought, this opportunity that is in front of us. We can’t waste it. We have to winnow our thoughts, we have to narrow our gaze to what matters and commit to it. In yogic tradition, this is called Ekāgratā—intense focus on a singular point. The ability to put your mind fully into or onto something, allowing you to understand both it . . . and yourself in a new way.

It’s just a fact. The muses never bless the unfocused. And even if they did, how would they notice?

Jony Ive, the top designer at Apple would explain that “focus is not this thing you aspire to . . . or something you do on Monday. It’s something you do every minute.” Steve Jobs, he recounted, would always be asking Ive and other Apple employees about what they were focused on and specifically, “How many things have you said no to?” because to focus on one thing requires not focusing on other, less important things.

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.’ ”

But as Aristotle reminds us, “Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.”

No matter what it is that we do, we will have to cultivate, beyond hustle and hard work, the discipline of patience. It may well be that this soft skill challenges us more than the hours in the chair or the years of grinding. When your instinct is to go, when you really want to get after it, waiting . . . well, the waiting is the hardest part.

It is impossible for an impatient person to work with others. It is impossible for them not to make errors of judgment and of timing. It is impossible for them to do important things, because almost everything that matters takes longer than it should, certainly longer than we would like.

If things went exactly the way we wanted, if it didn’t demand discomfort and sacrifice and patient endurance, then no discipline would be required, and everyone would do it. Then the fruit wouldn’t just be less sweet—someone would have already eaten it.