Discipline Is Destiny

Author: Ryan Holiday

Highlights

• Walter suggests that we struggle with discipline due to four biological tendencies: resisting change that makes us uncomfortable, overestimating our abilities, procrastinating, and setting unrealistic expectations (View Highlight)
• First, discipline prevents you from taking the four cardinal virtues of Stoicism (courage, wisdom, justice, and temperance or discipline) to extremes and turning them into flaws. (View Highlight)
• Second, discipline leads to a good life. Holiday explains that when you’re disciplined, you make better choices with your time: You regularly work to fulfill your purpose (which we’ll discuss in detail later) rather than wasting time with less important endeavors, such as watching Netflix every evening. The more time you spend working on your purpose, the more likely you are to fulfill it—and thus reap the benefits of doing so. (View Highlight)
• (Shortform note: Unless you develop discipline, you may never achieve your best life. In The Power of Discipline, Walter argues that not making good choices with your time (by wasting it on unimportant endeavors) is not only undisciplined, but it can also reduce your levels of self-discipline and make you even less likely to spend time on and fulfill your purpose than you already were. He argues that self-discipline is a skill that takes practice to develop. So the more you procrastinate (a form of instant gratification that’s the opposite of self-discipline), the more habitual the procrastination becomes, and the weaker your ability to make productive choices becomes.) (View Highlight)
• Like Holiday, he acknowledges that these impressions can lead us to make poor choices that cause harmful consequences. But he believes it’s not feasible to always check them through our disciplined rational mind (“System 2”) because it’s too slow. He suggests a compromise: Be aware of situations where System 1 thinking might lead to errors, and avoid those errors when the stakes are high by using System 2.) (View Highlight)