Discipline Is Destiny

Discipline Is Destiny is a three-part manual to master and implement the Stoic virtue of temperance, aka discipline, in your life, thus improving your body, mind, and spirit.

The reason discipline is most easily built by starting with small, physical challenges is that you can feel your body’s responses to those challenges. When you work out, you feel the result the next day. When you sleep early, you feel more rested. That’s a great way of sending yourself the feedback that, yes, building discipline is working — and helping.

While Holiday suggests a variety of things, from eating lean to strenuous activities, like taking cold showers, working out, or walking the long route to work, to sleeping early, the most important is this: Show up. When it comes to physical discipline, doing a little every day will have a much bigger impact than trying to do a lot on rare occasions.

Holiday mentions Lou Gehrig as an example, a legendary baseball player who played over 2,000 games straight without missing a single one. Did he not feel well during some of them? For sure. But he showed up regardless, and, in the long run, that made all the difference.

Like Vice calling out to Hercules, our modern world is loaded with opportunities for instant gratification. It, too, seems to want to fulfill our every desire immediately. But if you’ve ever given in to those impulses, you know how empty and unrewarding that can ultimately feel.

When you order pizza every time you feel like it, you’ll get health problems. When you rage quit at work whenever your boss makes a snide comment, you’ll never build a meaningful career. And so on. Everything becomes meaningless when you do it all the time, so we need restraint to enjoy life’s pleasures to the fullest — and, therefore, moderating our minds is a lifelong job.

The Buddha was born in a palace, yet he still felt miserable. The poverty he later experienced outside wasn’t any better. It was only once he learned to practice patience, to sit with suffering, and to not lose it when things went awry that he found he could calmly manage — even enjoy — both life’s ups and downs.

Try to pause before you react, analyze your feelings, and learn to shut things out on purpose. Most of all, remember you’ll never be perfect. Mastering our brains is a job that will take forever — and that’s okay.

The highest level of discipline happens on the plane of the spirit, according to Holiday, who mentions ancient Roman charioteers — competitive horse carriage riders — as a prime example. Having to balance many activities and roles at once while…