YOUTUBE 📚 THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE 📚 PATREON

*Anyone terrified of wasting their lives pursuing meaningless distractions, and who wants to find out exactly what they're capable of achieving.

*Students of philosophy, and especially Stoic philosophy, who love reading stories about the very best that humanity has to offer, and about how they can bring that same knowledge, wisdom, and power into their own lives as well.

*Athletes, entrepreneurs, and professionals in all fields who want to take their skills and careers to the next level, and activate that extra gear inside them that will separate themselves from their competition.

*Everyone who understands that in life, you get out what you put in, and who suspects that they actually have much more inside them left to give.

Self-discipline has traditionally been a hard sell. Self-indulgence, quick dopamine hits, and having a good time have been winning the marketing battle lately, similar to the "battle" between chocolate and asparagus. Or between reality television and educational documentaries. But what if the problem is simply that we've been thinking about self-discipline in entirely the wrong way?

Up until now, self-discipline may have been the equivalent of a Henry James novel in a TikTok world. But Ryan Holiday's book, Discipline is Destiny, will have you reimagining the whole concept in a much more liberating, fulfilling way.

His aim is to teach you how to harness the powers of self-discipline to fulfill your personal destiny. While everyone's destiny is fundamentally different, everyone's destiny is the product of self-discipline. Your habits shape your character, and your character shapes your destiny, and so Ryan's book goes right to the root and gives you the physical, mental, and emotional skillsets for success.

In Discipline is Destiny, he focuses on historical figures who exude the kind of self-discipline and internal strength so many of us wish to emulate - people like Lou Gehrig, Queen Elizabeth II, Marcus Aurelius, Toni Morrison, George Washington, Winston Churchill, Angela Merkel, and so many more.

He also dredges up some cautionary tales from history, using "bad" examples like Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and, strangely enough, Babe Ruth. The larger point is that there's something to learn from everyone, even if it's only what not to do.

History shows us what discipline can do, and we can follow along with these epic stories of those who have walked the path of self-mastery before us. In doing so, we uncover more of what's possible to achieve in our own lives. We see in their examples life as it could be, what it looks like to give everything for your dream, and how we can take a step forward ourselves.

Discipline is Destiny is divided into three parts, as follows:

Part I: The Exterior (The Body)

Part II: The Inner Domain (The Temperament)

Part III: The Magisterial (The Soul)

Much like Colin Wilson describes it in The Outsider, balancing the physical, mental, and emotional spheres is the work of a lifetime. It's only the rarest individual who has even been able to approach this level of self-mastery.

In many people, one "center" is much more fully developed than the others. In an even smaller subsection of humanity, individuals have been able to get a pretty good handle on two of them. But attaining perfection in all three?

Still, though, we have to try.

I don't know about you, but I don't want to leave this life knowing that I could have done more. That I could have tried harder, attempted greater things, and attained higher heights. Just like the bodybuilding champion Tom Platz said, I would hate to leave this life knowing that I had...5% left.

In the final analysis, self-discipline is prescriptive. It will show you your future. Your environment, actions, habits, and mindsets are constantly shaping your destiny, and this book will show you how to guide this process more intelligently.

This involves thinking of self-discipline in the "proper" way: not as a punishment, as self-deprivation, but as it really is: a pathway to even greater freedom.

If you think about it, which would rather have: an easy life? Or the strength to endure a difficult one?

The formula is simple: easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life. You put in the work now, to reap the massive benefits later. That's how every positive example profiled in this book has done it.

Through their stories, you'll see that a life of self-mastery, self-improvement, and constant, neverending progress is much more compelling and interesting than one where you're never challenged, never stretched, and never called upon to do anything great with your one and only life.

Some days will be hard. Actually, that's not true...many days will be hard. The hard days will outnumber the easy ones, but the meaningful days will also outnumber the meaningless ones. Living this way won't always be easy, but it will always be worth it.

#1: Discipline Equals Freedom

The entire concept of self-discipline is due for a total reframe. One of the biggest reasons why conquering laziness, apathy, and vice is so hard for so many people is because they're thinking about self-discipline in entirely the wrong way.

It's not a punishment; it's a gift. By reigning in your worst impulses, you're giving yourself the freedom to max out your life.

Being controlled by externals - whether they be addictions, compulsions, or faulty programming - is no way to go through life. I mean, what kind of life is it if you're able to be dragged about by every impulse, distraction, or temptation that presents itself to your consciousness?

How good does getting drunk really feel when you realize you don't have the power not to?

How fun is social media when the number of likes you get on a post can dictate whether you have a good day or a bad day?

A lack of freedom is horrifying, and the world is often just one great big giant distraction trying to pull your attention and your focus away from your destiny. Every chance the world gets, it will try to pull you away from what matters to you, and you can either make your dreams a reality or be recruited to work on someone else's.

Self-discipline offers us an escape from all that, a way out of the confusion and the pessimism and the hopelessness, and it's a gift that we can give ourselves. Not tomorrow or next week, but right here, today.

But most people don't think about self-discipline this way. They think of it as more like self-deprivation. In reality, discipline actually represents an incredible opportunity to make our time here on this earth every bit as magical as it could be.

There's a saying I love that goes: "Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life." Amazing! It means that if you keep taking the easy way in life, you're not going to like where you end up. However, if you make the hard choices - if you make some intelligent sacrifices and some tough decisions - you can open yourself up to receive something much greater in the end.

Constraints and limits make everything else possible. For example, the letters in the alphabet need to be arranged in such a way that they have meaning. You can't just type random strings of letters and create art. Grammar, style, and syntax are structures, and constraints that make great works of literature possible in the first place.

In exactly the same way, strict workout regimens create something much more beautiful later on.

Restricting your TV viewing now can give you the freedom to sell your business idea for millions later.

Not getting drunk every weekend can make it possible for you to have a deeper connection with the people you love and care about the most. You have to give up to get.

Another important reframe is that self-discipline is synonymous with self-love. You're not disciplining yourself because you hate yourself - exactly the opposite! You're setting limits because you love yourself, you want the best for yourself, and you're willing to do what it takes to show that you love and value your future self.

You're treating yourself like a really terrific friend, someone you're actually responsible for helping. Like someone you want to see succeed.

Thus, self-discipline is ultimately a positive force; it's certainly not the enemy that it's often made out to be. "Need" itself, addiction - entanglement as such - these are your real enemies.

I'll give the final word here to Ryan Holiday, who explains what it is that we're really quitting:

#2: Environment is Destiny

You've probably heard somewhere that you are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with, but the real-world application of this idea extends far beyond just the people you surround yourself with. It also includes the books you read, the podcasts you listen to, the foods you put into your body, and so much more.

Your environment is constantly influencing you - often beneath your conscious awareness - and the quality of your inputs matters. It matters a ton.

Now, I'm a fairly big proponent of personal integrity and the responsibility of individuals to make their own choices (and face their own consequences). Still, even I recognize the fact that we often don't choose our environments. We are born in specific places, to specific people, and exposed to specific ideas and customs. So the idea that you are completely responsible for everything that happens to you isn't exactly true.

And yet...

And yet it's extraordinarily important to understand that self-discipline isn't "either/or" when it comes to your environment.

"Control the controllable," as the Stoics say, but accept the fact that you take action within an environment, and that environment has a major impact on your ability to delay gratification and craft the kind of life you want for yourself.

One author who understands this extremely well is Johann Hari, who wrote the book, Stolen Focus, where he says:

Hari identifies 12 different causes of our fractured attention spans, including the collapse of sustained reading, the velocity of information coming at us all the time, the effect of toxic foods in our diets and in the air we breathe, not to mention the increased demands and stressors faced by all of us in our daily lives.

Who among us can successfully fight back against all that on our own and still find time to meditate every morning, journal for 10 minutes every evening, get to the gym 5 times a week, and not just snap at the person who forgot to hold the door open for you when he obviously saw you coming that one time? I mean, what was that guy even thinking?

Ahem.

Anyway, Hari goes on to write:

What all this means for the development of our self-discipline is that we need to pay attention to the effects of our environment on our self-control, and we need to devote significant time to figure out how we can make our environment support our goals, rather than distract us from them.

Who we spend time with matters. What we spend time thinking about and engaging with matters. The books we read and the information we take in matter. But sometimes? Sometimes it's all just too much. Sometimes we need to reduce the inputs, slow down, and only let in the very best, and what will serve us the most.

Read only the best books. Spend time with only the best people. Fuel yourself with the best foods. You deserve nothing less.

Drinking from the firehose of the modern world just confuses and scatters your attention. Hari likens it to hackers threatening a computer system:

#3: Consistency is a Superpower

It's so easy to set yourself apart from the crowd today. As they say, it's never crowded along the extra mile, and most people just won't do the work that you're willing to do in order to get ahead. Not even to get ahead - simply to give yourself the mental freedom to do what's best for you and to take your life back.

However, competition can be good for you. It's fun and exciting to match your best against others' bests and see how far you can go, and how much you can achieve.

Measuring yourself against others who are at least slightly ahead of you, in the context of pushing yourself to be as great as you can be, is something I'd recommend to pretty much everyone. You need that measuring stick in front of you to see what's possible.

The fact of the matter is that most people won't read past the first chapter of a book - if they even read at all.

They won't stick to a workout plan when it gets hard, and they won't take any extra classes to give themselves the skills that could enhance their value in the marketplace.

They just won't do it.

That's your competition. That is the average that you're competing against. There is so much low-hanging fruit just waiting for you to step up and take it. There is so much potential out there just waiting to be seized.

When most people are complacent and content with just skating by, it only takes a tiny bit of effort to stand out as someone committed and capable.

Is it going to be slow in the beginning? Of course it will. There's a compounding effect at work here, where the biggest returns lie on the other side of a sustained commitment. But virtually everyone who says yes to that commitment will tell you that it's the greatest decision they've ever made.

A lot of growth is exponential - damn near invisible in the beginning - and only becomes readily apparent with time. You'll gain 2 new YouTube subscribers a week for 3 months, and then you'll start to gain 10. After a year, you'll be adding dozens of new subscribers a day, and when you've been at it for years and years, you'll gain 10,000 subscribers from a single video and people will call you an overnight success.

Back in the real world, you can plainly see that going to the gym once, for 10 hours, isn't going to do it. One workout won't get you into shape. But 20 minutes a day, for 6 weeks? Now we're working! Now the results are showing up! Start today, and in 2 weeks, you'll start to feel it. In 4 weeks, you'll start to see it. And in 6 weeks, people will ask you how.

What's most important to remember here is that people tend to overestimate what they can do in a day, but greatly underestimate what they can accomplish in a year. What the most disciplined people in the world have realized is that you need to get to a point mentally where you are willing to keep going through the process, knowing that's working, without necessarily seeing the results of your actions.

The $100,000,000 CEO, Alex Hormozi, has what he calls the Rule of 100, which is basically when you commit to taking action 100 times, every single day, on the key activity that's going to move the needle for you. In his world, that's making sales calls. Or, at least, it was when he was just starting out.

The idea is that you're committing to doing something important, and doing it enough times, for long enough, such that it then becomes unreasonable to believe that you won't be successful. If you make 100 more sales calls every day, and you do this for the next 365 days, don't you think that you'd make a lot more money? What about writing online? Don't you think that, if you committed to writing just 3 articles per day on Medium, that you would be much further along in your career by the end of the 365 days? Of course you would!

Is it hard to do? It can be! Certainly! It's certainly a time commitment to pick up the phone 100 times a day and work to advance your business. Are barbell squats painful and uncomfortable and frankly, downright boring once you've done thousands of them? Absolutely! But a year of squatting - even once a week - will give you powerful legs and a completely different physique. People know this, but then they don't do it! Herein lies your competitive advantage.

#4: The Universal Secret to Success

#5: The Tragic Cost of Intemperance

There's something great in this world that only you can do, give, or perform. You're the only one who can do it exactly like you can; you must do it, and if you don't do it, the whole world will be deprived.

If there's something I believe is incontrovertibly true, it's that.

The real cost of ill discipline lies in the unrealized potential inside all of us - including you. You don't need to write a symphony, by the way. Just like you don't need to create the next Facebook, or whatever it is. That's just the outward manifestation of fully-realized potential. And the thing about potential is that we can never see the end of it.

We don't know how great we can be, how much we can give or create. We just don't know the limits of our own potential - not to mention humanity's in general - and so we need to advance.

To advance requires discipline, and it requires the willing assumption of responsibility. Not to meet the expectations of others, but rather to drain today of every last drop of potential. Think of each day as a wet towel, and you're just squeezing it with all your strength, trying to get the absolute most out of it. That's not a bad way to think about potential.

Personally, I feel so strongly about this that I've organized my entire life around the idea of giving my absolute best effort and leaving the results to the universe. Controlling the controllables. Yes, some people say that I get unreasonably upset when people waste my time, but time is what my life is made of. Don't waste my life! It's mine. And I'm not going to waste a single, ordinary, infinite moment if I can help it.

I could easily get carried away here, but for the moment, I'll just say this: For all we know, we'll never come this way again. We'll never be here, on Earth, active and alive and on fire with potential and vision. We have nothing - absolutely nothing - to lose by going all in. By thinking BIG.

If you knew you were going to get another chance, maybe you could sit this one out, or go half-strength, maybe "see how things go." But as it stands right now, you have nothing to lose. Nothing whatsoever. So why would you ever play small with your one and only life?

#6: Your One Definite Chief Aim

Think and Grow Rich has sold millions of copies, although readers are extremely divided about whether or not it's a good book.

There's some debate around whether the author Napoleon Hill, actually met Andrew Carnegie at all, but there's at least one idea in the book that makes the whole thing worth reading regardless. I'm talking about Hill's discussion of one's "definite chief aim' - the main, overarching goal of one's entire life - and the importance of routing every internal and external resource you have into its achievement.

There's more than one great idea in that book, but that's certainly one of them. Another is the idea of fueling your burning desire for the accomplishment of your Definite Chief Aim. It changed my life forever after I first read about it, and I'm not alone in having that experience.

As Montaigne says in the quote above, having some definite end is crucial when deciding what action to take in the present moment. It all comes down to whether you want to walk a mile in a thousand different directions, or a thousand miles in one direction. Your choice will direct your destiny.

Once you've settled (even temporarily) on a definite chief aim and pledged to pour everything of yourself into its accomplishment, if you add sickening consistency to that formula as well? In that case, it's unreasonable to believe that you won't be successful. You will have stacked a ton of the odds in your favor, and I wouldn't bet against you.

The simple truth is that what you pay attention to becomes your life, and if there's something you want to do, some great thing you want to achieve, or a destiny you wish to fulfill, then you owe it to yourself to get obsessed about your Definite Chief Aim. When the sun shines on the whole earth, it warms the landscape, but when the sun's rays are focused through a magnifying glass, they become incendiary.

And if you're wondering what Socrates thought of this same question (what, you mean you weren't wondering?), he was known to dole out similarly spectacular advice. Asked how one could get to Mount Olympus, he responded, "Make sure every step you take is in that direction."

#7: Possessing the World and Keeping Your Soul

#8: The Beautiful Irony

Discipline has to be repeated every day, but it also rewards you every day as well. Seeing progress is one of the most motivating forces in existence, and the more progress you make, the more progress you want to make.

The best part of all this is that it's all part of this one, utterly fascinating journey that none of us can ever see the end of from our current vantage point. We have to set off down the path before we're able to see what's possible for us.

This is also known as the adjacent possible, which means the very next possibility. If you think of it like a room in a mansion, it'll all start to make sense. If you start off not knowing anything about the layout, other than that you're in a room with, say, three doors, all you can be sure of is that you can enter through one of those doors, and you'll advance to the next room. That next room is the adjacent possible - but what lies beyond that? Your future and your potential work in exactly the same way.

Taking consistent, disciplined action toward your goal - with the ultimate goal of realizing your potential - is like crossing the threshold from that first room to the second. You may have some sense of what's in that next room, but once you get inside, you see that there are 3 more doors that you couldn't even see from the previous room. You had to advance in order to see more of the path; you had to make the path by walking.

It reminds me of the lame, but memorable line, "Doors will open for you along the hallway of opportunity, but you have to actually be moving down the hallway."

The beautiful irony here is that since progress is so motivating, it feels so good to keep discovering these extra rooms, but you still just want to keep going. As Ryan Holiday says, "You’re never content with your progress, and yet, you’re always content…because you’re making progress."

Arnold Schwarzenegger said the same thing when he pointed out that if you wanted to develop the perfect body, you'd have to keep going on forever. And in the wonderful book, Finite and Infinite Games, Professor James P. Carse points out that the whole "point" of the game of life is to keep the game going! The purpose is to play and to create, never simply to arrive.

So now we can start to see the problem that most people fall into: they're simply not thinking on long enough timescales, and they're too focused on the result to notice how pleasurable the process can be.

To address the first problem, we can adjust our timescales. For most people, a short-term goal could mean something they aim to achieve in the next 3-6 months. That's perfectly acceptable, but for infinite players, "short term" is more flexible. It could easily mean 10 years. If you're 30 years old now, and you expect to live into your eighties and beyond, it's not unreasonable to begin thinking about what a 100-year plan for your life might look like.

You smile, but I'm serious! The futuristic medical advances that are, even today, a present reality are nothing less than astonishing in their implications, and a lot can happen in the next 50+ years. If can eradicate smallpox, why not cancer? Penicillin was a miracle, but what other miracles are coming down the line?

The point is that you just don't know. And when you start to combine some of these key ideas - consistency, your Definite Chief Aim, the adjacent possible - it's suddenly not so crazy to start thinking big thoughts, and dreaming up massive adventures.

Achieving your Definite Chief Aim could take your entire life. But what else is worth doing? What do you have to lose, what do you think is so threatening, that it's not worth giving every single thing you have within you to achieve it? What's stopping you from climbing to the top of that hill, so that you can see all the new hills stretching out from behind it? That's what living is!

What you want are new adventures, new challenges, and new problems to solve that are worthy of your efforts and your struggles. And the important thing to remember in all this is that from where you are, you just don't know how far you can go. I will tell you, though, that discipline will be your most constant and valuable traveling companion. It'll help you get there.

But once you're "there," will you choose to keep going? Will you continue on even when you’ve reached further than you ever thought you could go? Or will you stop there?

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