Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self Control is Ryan Holiday’s second book in a series on the cardinal virtues (Courage is Calling was the first). Holiday’s writing is a call to action, and it eliminates excuses. I get fired up reading his books.

He separates the book into three sections, The Body, The Temperament, and The Soul.  I connected most with The Body section and his focus on creating some friction in life. In my white collar, suburban life, I worry about being soft and raising kids who are soft. This book was a reminder to lean into effort, intentionally grind through physical work, and get to bed early–”the body always keeps score.”

I appreciated his commentary on individuals chasing ambition in an unchecked way. Society rewards success, even if it is a vice.  Winning counts even if those same professional accomplishments leave a life in ruins (cc: Tom Brady). 

I found the second half of the book to wander a little more than I’d like, and I skimmed the sections heavy on stoic philosophers. The section on The Body more than made up for it, and I’ll be looking forward to his next book in the series. For the record, I’m on team  “dress for the weather” with Shaka Smart. 

Quotes

“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.”

“By being a little hard on ourselves, it makes it harder for others to be hard on us.”

“Success breeds softness. It also breeds fear: We become addicted to our creature comforts. And then we become afraid of losing them.”

“We say “I’m not a morning person,” but that is almost certainly because we have been an irresponsible or undisciplined evening person.”

“The decisions we make today and always are being recorded, daily, silently and not so silently, in who we are, what we look like, how we feel.”

“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.”

“And is “fuck-you money” really such an admirable goal anyway? To have so much money you don’t have to care about anyone or anything.”

“The college basketball coach Shaka Smart, upon moving from coaching at Texas to Marquette, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was asked if he was a cold-weather or warm-weather guy. “I’m a dress-for-the-weather guy,” he said.”