“It’s possible, Marcus Aurelius said, to not have an opinion. You don’t have to turn this into something, he reminds himself. You don’t have to let this upset you. You don’t have to think something about everything. Do you need to have an opinion about the scandal of the moment–is it changing anything? Do you need to have an opinion about the way your kid does their hair? So what if this person likes music that sounds weird to you? So what if that person is a vegetarian? ‘These things are not asking to be judged by you,’ Marcus writes. ‘Leave them alone.’ Especially because these opinions often make us miserable! ‘It’s not things that upset us,’ Epictetus says, ‘it’s our opinions about things.’ The fewer opinions you have, especially about other people and things outside your control, the happier you will be. The nicer you’ll be to be around, too. Of course, this is not to say that we shouldn’t have any opinions at all, but that we should save our judgments for what matters—right and wrong, justice and injustice, what is moral and what is not. If we spend our energy forming opinions about every trivial annoyance, we’ll have none left for the things that actually matter.”
Ryan Holiday
“‘Always remember,’ Churchill once reassured his wife, ‘that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.’ This is a critical test. Don’t just think about what a certain pleasure will give, think about what it will take out of you. Think about how what you’re chasing is going to age. Think about how you’ll think about it after—during the refractory period, during your hangover, when your pants are too tight, when you catch yourself in the mirror months from now and wonder how this happened.”
Ryan Holiday, Discipline Is Destiny (Page 152)
“We don’t refrain from excess because it’s a sin. We are self-disciplined because we want to avoid a hellish existence right here while we’re alive—a hell of our own making.”
Ryan Holiday, Discipline Is Destiny (Page 150)
“We’re all going to mess up. We’ll show up to a life-changing opportunity unprepared. We’ll fall off our diet or our sobriety. We’ll lose our temper and embarrass ourselves. We’ll make mistakes. We’ll be beaten. That’s the thing about discipline: It never fails us, but sometimes we fail it. But will that be the end of it? Is that who we are now? Or can we get back up? Losing is not always up to us… but being a loser is. Being a quitter is. Saying, ‘Ah, what the hell, does it even matter?’ That’s on us. Throwing in the towel on a fight we’ve clearly lost is one thing, throwing in the towel on fighting, on your standards, from that point forward? Now you’ve been more than beaten, you’ve been defeated.”
Ryan Holiday, Discipline Is Destiny (Page 140)
“Nothing stays still. Relative to the rest of the world, even something that’s not moving is changing. It’s tempting to talk about not making fast enough progress. But it’s far more useful to ask which direction we’re progressing. Often, people will point to the velocity of the change they’re making without pausing to consider the direction of that change. Strategy is the hard work we do before we do the rest of the hard work. Where to?”
Seth Godin
“Another way to spell ‘perfectionism’ is p-a-r-a-l-y-s-i-s. An obsession with getting it perfect misses the forest for the trees, because ultimately the biggest miss of all is failing to get your shot off. What you don’t ship, what you’re too afraid or strict to release, to try, is, by definition, a failure. It doesn’t matter the cause, whether it was from procrastination or perfectionism, the result is the same. You didn’t do it.”
Ryan Holiday, Discipline Is Destiny (Page 132)
“The Bible says that through our patience we come to possess nothing less than our souls.”
Ryan Holiday, Discipline Is Destiny (Page 129)
