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

by Ryan Holiday

He found a way to work with flawed people, putting them to service for the good of the empire,

300 of the 488 entries in Meditations are rules Marcus gave himself. He got up early. He journaled. He kept himself active. He was not blessed with good health, but he never complained, never used it as an excuse, never let it slow him down more than absolutely necessary. Despite his wealth and power, he lived humbly—maintaining that difficult balance of restraint within abundance, spending most of his reign not in glamorous palaces of marble but in the simple tent of a soldier at the front.

“Unrestrained moderation.”

Superiority is not a weapon you wield on other people. In fact, we have a word for that kind of intemperance: egotism.

“The nearer a man is to a calm mind,” he wrote of such moments of crisis, “the closer he is to strength.”

“Such a person has strength, courage and endurance,” he would say, “unlike the angry and complaining.”

“it’s taken me years to cultivate the self-control to prevent my emotions from betraying myself.” Napoleon

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.

“It doesn’t matter what you bear,” Seneca would say. “It matters how you bear it.”

“The privilege of command is command,” Mattis once told a lieutenant he’d caught shirking. “You don’t get a bigger tent.”

Too many leaders, Plutarch laments, think that the “greatest benefit in governing is the freedom from being governed themselves.” Nah, you’re the one who has to follow the rules to the letter.

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

Plenty of people have been buried in coffins of their own making. Before their time too.