Discipline Is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control

by Ryan Holiday

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.

Everyone, no matter how powerful, has some bad habit they’re wrestling with, but also that it’s never too late to come back and beat it.

A Spartan king was once asked what the Spartans got from their “spartan” habits. “Freedom is what we reap from this way of life,” he told 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.

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

In fact, 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.

True self-control means moderation not just in what we do, but also how we think, how we feel, how we comport ourselves in a world of chaos and confusion.

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.

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. When you talk, it should matter. When you say something, it should mean something.

There is a considerable amount of self-discipline required to quit bad habits, particularly the more gluttonous ones. But of all the addictions in the world, the most intoxicating and the hardest to control is ambition. Because unlike drinking, society rewards it. We look up to the successful. We don’t ask them what they are doing or why they are doing it, we only ask them how they do it. We conveniently ignore how little satisfaction their accomplishments bring them, how miserable most of them are, and how miserable they tend to make everyone around them in turn.

Ambition is good, it just must be tempered. Like all elements of self-discipline, it’s about balance.

We don’t need accomplishments to feel good or to be good enough. What do we need? The truth: not much! Some food and water. Work that we can challenge ourselves with. A calm mind in the midst of adversity. Sleep. A solid routine. A cause we are committed to. Something we’re getting better at. Everything else is extra. Or worse, as history has shown countless times, the source of our painful downfall.

When your choices turn you into someone who has to worry about money, then you are not rich … no matter how much you make.

If you have money, spend it … the problem is when people spend what they don’t have, to get things they don’t need, at a price nowhere near worth the cost.

What makes you think you can afford that risk? That you’re so talented the spigot will never turn off? That you can burn the candle at both ends? That you won’t be corrupted by your endless need for more, more, more?

To have so much money you don’t have to care about anyone or anything? That’s not virtue, it’s childishness. All you really need is enough money to be comfortable enough to politely say, “No, thanks. I’d rather not.” To never have to do anything for a buck that’s contrary to your values. To be able to stick with your main thing. No amount of money is ever going to truly free you. But being less dependent, caring less about money? That will free you right now.

the first step is just showing up, committing to doing something each day, then the next step is finding something to focus on getting better at each day. And in this, where cumulative improvement meets compounding returns we can harness one of the most powerful forces on Earth.

Come what may, success or failure, fame or misfortune, a focus on progress lets us look ourselves in the mirror with pride and ignore all the commotion in the background.

“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.

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.

This is the higher plane: When our self-discipline can be complemented by compassion, by kindness, understanding, love. 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.

Charging ahead is always inspiring … but sometimes it takes a bigger man—and another level of discipline—to be able to maintain your dignity when you have to go the other way. It would be wonderful if no battles were ever lost by the good guys, if fearlessness or hard work were always enough, but this is not reality. Sometimes you have to live to fight another day. The question is not when you will have to do this, but how you will respond to it when that day comes.

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.

Can you put your ego aside and accept defeat—or irreconcilable differences? Can you walk away when it’s time? Even when it’s so tempting not to? Can you keep it together even as everything is falling apart—when all eyes are watching, waiting, for you to fall apart alongside it? You must pay your debts, own your mistakes, communicate your intentions. You must have a plan for what you’re going to do after. Whether that’s a next project, a new chapter, another charge. 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.

Think of the Queen pushing through her annus horribilis. Anne Frank in her attic for twenty-five months, cheerfully writing in her journal. Stephen Hawking, forty years in a wheelchair from ALS. Marcus Aurelius, plagued by a lifelong stomach ailment, then wars and floods and an actual plague, reminding himself that nothing was unendurable (and that the only thing that wasn’t, our mortality, eventually solves that problem for us). Think of the mothers who pushed through postpartum. Think of the people who fought through cancer, through bankruptcy, through humiliating failure. Think of the addicts who battled withdrawals to bounce back from rock bottom. Think of the people who clawed their way out of generational poverty. Think of the slaves who survived the worst of what humans can do to one another. They kept going. They didn’t quit. Still, as Maya Angelou wrote, still they rose. And in so doing, they ennobled and dignified their struggle with endurance and quiet fortitude.

A colleague of Churchill once captured the balance perfectly when he observed that Churchill “venerated tradition but ridiculed convention.” The past was important, but it was not a prison. The old ways—what the Romans called the mos maiorum—were important but not to be mistaken as perfect. Think of Queen Elizabeth … a protector of a timeless institution who somehow never allowed herself to fall out of step with the times.

Flexibility doesn’t mean we throw out what’s important, but it does mean understanding how to live and let live, how to rest comfortably in our traditions while allowing new and improved ones to be created. It also means, as the world changes and our position within it changes, adjusting, finding a way to be true to our principles that doesn’t condemn us to bitterness or needless failure or being on the outside of things. Rigidity is fragility. Formlessness is unbreakable. We can choose one or the other.