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

by Ryan Holiday

For Hercules, the choice was between vice and virtue, the easy way and the hard way, the well-trod path and the road less traveled. We all face this choice. Hesitating only for a second, Hercules chose the one that made all the difference. He chose virtue. “Virtue” can seem old-fashioned. Yet virtue—arete—translates to something very simple and very timeless: Excellence. Moral. Physical. Mental. In the ancient world, virtue was comprised of four key components. Courage. Temperance. Justice. Wisdom.

Would you have a great empire? Rule over yourself. Publilius Syrus

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

From Aristotle to Heraclitus, St. Thomas Aquinas to the Stoics, from The Iliad to the Bible, in Buddhism, in Confucianism, in Islam—the ancients had many words and many symbols for what amounts to a timeless law of the universe: We must keep ourselves in check or risk ruin. Or imbalance. Or dysfunction. Or dependency.

Self-discipline is giving everything you have . . . and knowing what to hold back. Is there some contradiction in this? No, only balance.

As a young man, 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.”

Freedom requires discipline. Discipline gives us freedom. Freedom and greatness. Your destiny is there. Will you grab the reins?

That was the deal: 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.

Real wealth, he understood, was autonomy.

The less you desire, the richer you are, the freer you are, the more powerful you are.

A reporter once inquired why Merkel was so often seen in the same pantsuit—don’t you have anything else? “I am a civil servant,” Merkel replied, “not a model.”

You think you’re getting ahead by taking on a bit more, by pushing a little further. You think it’s impressive to push through the little warning signs of pain. No, no, you’re missing the point. John Steinbeck referred to this as the “indiscipline of overwork,” reminding himself that it was “the falsest of economies.”

Early to bed. Early to rise. Under the blankets is no way to fame, Dante said of the morning . . . and yet paradoxically, getting under the blankets consistently, reasonably, without delay is the way to fame. Or at least, to solid performance once one has leapt from bed and out the door. 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.

How did he do it? How did he not only survive but emerge unbroken, undaunted, from this experience? His family motto tells us: Fortitudine vincimus. By endurance we conquer. Fittingly, this was the name of his ship as well: the Endurance.

The fact is, the body keeps score.

In addiction circles, they use the acronym HALT—Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired—as a helpful warning rubric for the signs and triggers for a relapse. We have to be careful, we have to be in control, or we risk losing it all.

Begged, prodded, bothered, and then criticized by administration officials for not helping them get messages out, he finally called the media office and very calmly reiterated his “No.” “I’ve killed people for a living,” he explained. “If you call me again, I’m going to fucking send you to Afghanistan. Are we clear?”

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.’

As they say, another way to spell “perfectionism” is p-a-r-a-l-y-s-i-s.

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. A more applicable interpretation of this idea was expressed by the poet and pacifist William Stafford’s daily rule: “Do the hard things first.”

Dr. Feelgoods (as one of Kennedy’s doctors was called) are like Sirens of Greek myth: Their song is sweet . . . but often deadly.

Few people in third century bc Athens were sure, so they assumed the worst. Here, thousands of years later, we perpetuate their suspicions, loosely defining an “Epicurean” as a person who indulges every sensual urge.

The Stoics said that this was a perfect metaphor for everything we do. “Remember to conduct yourself in life as if at a banquet,” Epictetus said. “As something being passed around comes to you, reach out your hand and take a moderate helping. Does it pass you by? Don’t stop it. It hasn’t yet come? Don’t burn in desire for it, but wait until it arrives in front of you. Act this way with children, a spouse, toward position, with wealth—one day it will make you worthy of a banquet with the gods.”

Seek yourself, not distraction. Be happy, not hedonistic. Let the mind rule, not the body. Conquer pleasure, make yourself superior to pain.

James Peck, one of the only white Freedom Riders, would note several times how his refusal to retaliate would stun his attackers into a momentary lull and, one might imagine, a terrifying moment of self-reflection. Why isn’t this person consumed with hatred like I am? Why aren’t they out of control like me? Are they actually better than me?

It’s the easiest thing in the world to respond to intemperance with intemperance. We have to remember: Someone else’s lack of self-control is not a justification for abandoning our own. Nor is it a good look or a recipe for success and achievement.

Told that Xerxes’s arrows would blot out the sun, Leonidas replied, “Then we shall fight in the shade.” Told by another conqueror that if his army breached their walls, he’d slaughter every single soldier, the Spartans replied with one word, “If . . .”

Remember: Free speech is a right, not an obligation. Two ears, one mouth, Zeno would remind his students. Respect that ratio properly.

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

Seneca, a man whose ambition got him into trouble like Napoleon, would say of a ruthless general named Marius (the Napoleon of his time) that while “Marius commanded armies, ambition commanded Marius.”

We don’t need accomplishments to feel good or to be good enough. What do we need? The truth: not much!

“Fuck-you money” is a chimera. You never get it. Nobody does. Poor people have poor-people problems and rich people have rich-people problems because people always have problems. You’re always going to be subject to the necessity of self-discipline. Or at least, you’ll never be immune from the consequence of ignoring it.

Socrates didn’t know much. There wasn’t much he held for certain. But he was sure, he said, that “we cannot remain as we are.”

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 doesn’t make sense to try to do everything yourself. You have to delegate. You have to find people who are good at things and empower them to help you. You have to be strong enough to hand over the keys, to relinquish control, to develop a system—an organization—that is bigger than just us. If you want to keep the main thing the main thing, maybe you need to hire someone who can be a buffer for you—someone who says “No” for you.

Stop procrastinating. Delegate! This will not be cheap, and it would be ignorant and arrogant to insist otherwise, but the value is virtually incalculable, because it affords you the most expensive thing in the world: time.

“The modern stoic knows that the surest way to discipline passion is to discipline time: decide what you want or ought to do during the day, then always do it exactly the same moment every day, and passion will give you no trouble.” Now, one doesn’t have to follow this advice literally to still see the deeper message: Routine is an essential tool in the management of time and the suppression of those negative forces of distraction, procrastination, and laziness.

Queen Elizabeth’s mother was once rushed along at a public event by an aide who claimed they were out of time. “Time is not my dictator,” the Queen Mother said as she stopped and shook hands with each person who had waited to see her. “I dictate to time.”

The people we ought to admire are quiet. Dignified. Reserved. Serious. Professional. Respectful of themselves and others.

Set your boundaries. Enforce them—gently but firmly. Treat everyone else’s with as much respect as you’d want for your own. Be the adult in a world of emotional children.

Self-discipline is not just our destiny, it is our obligation. To our potential. To our country. To our cause. To our families. To our fellow human beings. To those who look up to us. To those who come after us.

“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 fruit of temperance should not be loneliness and isolation. That would be a bitter fruit, indeed. Superiority is not a weapon you wield on other people. In fact, we have a word for that kind of intemperance: egotism.

The self-disciplined don’t berate. They don’t ask for anything. They just do their job. They don’t shame either . . . except perhaps subtly by their own actions. In their presence we feel called to step up, to step forward, to reach deeper because they have shown that is possible.

Hemingway was once asked for his definition of courage. He didn’t say rushing into battle. Or slaying wild beasts. It wasn’t staring down powerful interests, though his definition didn’t preclude these things. Grace under pressure.

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

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

Plato said that the best leaders didn’t want power. In truth, it’s that they didn’t need it.

That’s what they meant when they said Return with your shield or on it.

Retreats, we must remember, are only temporary. They are buying us time until we can take the offensive and courageously attack again in pursuit of our victory.