“There is a term—energy vampires—meant to describe the kind of people who, because of their lack of boundaries, suck others dry with their neediness, their selfishness, their dysfunction, and their drama. Not only must you not be an energy vampire yourself, but you must be aware that these type of people exist. You must be strong enough to keep them at arm’s distance—even if they’re beautiful, even if they’re talented, even if they’re family or old friends from childhood, even if their helplessness calls to the most empathetic part of yourself. A country without borders, it has been said, is not really a country at all. So it goes with people. Without boundaries, we are overwhelmed. We are stretched too thin. So thin that those features that previously defined us start to disappear until there’s no telling where we start and the energy vampires around us end.”
Ryan Holiday, Discipline Is Destiny (Page 206)
“Love does not fix everything, and it does not arrive with perfection. Love is simply a sign of how important someone is to you, but what comes after that is learning how to care for them. Care is not immediate; it requires gradual and intentional learning so that you can better understand the shape of your partner’s mind. Trying to understand where your partner is strong and where they are tender sets the groundwork to truly support their happiness. The same emotional skills that you develop as you take a good look at yourself during your inward journey are the same skills that help you with learning how to care for your partner.”
Yung Pueblo
“In Meditations, Marcus [Aurelius] talks about how he had a good day because he escaped anxiety. Then, he actually corrects himself, he goes ‘Actually, no, I didn’t escape it, I discarded it because it was within me.’ He’s realizing that he is the common variable in all the situations that cause him anxiety, just as you are. Anxiety is within us. We want to work on [controlling] it and thinking about it so it doesn’t rule our lives — or ruin our lives.”
Ryan Holiday
“John D. Rockefeller would take regular breaks from his notoriously demanding schedule to mill about in his garden—it was his personal escape. Find your “garden” and go there often. Practice stillness, flex the solitude muscle. Be bored for at least 15 minutes per day. It’s an unlock for creativity and mindfulness.”
Sahil Bloom
“It takes discipline not to insist on doing everything yourself. Especially when you know how to do many of those things well. Especially when you have high standards about how they should be done. Even if you enjoy doing them—whether that’s mowing your own lawn, writing your speeches, making your own schedule, or answering your own phone. Often, the best way to manage the load is to share the load. Woe is the person who wears themselves out on trivial matters and then, when the big moments come, is out of energy. Woe is the person (and the people around them) who is so mentally exhausted and strung out because they’ve taken everything upon themselves that now, when things go wrong, there’s no slack or cushion to absorb the additional stress.”
Ryan Holiday, Discipline Is Destiny (Page 193)
“Is it a little discouraging that we never seem to ‘arrive’? That our standards rise just out of reach of our abilities? Absolutely not! We move the goalposts so the game doesn’t get boring and, more important, so it never ends. Ultimately, this brings us more pleasure and more satisfaction. We reach heights we’d never have been able to see otherwise. Do you want to be rotting or ripening? Are you getting better? Because if you’re not… then you’re probably getting worse.”
Ryan Holiday, Discipline Is Destiny (Page 189)
“Socrates didn’t know much. There wasn’t much he held for certain. But he was sure, he said, that ‘we cannot remain as we are.’ It doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. Nobody is as good as they could be. Nobody is perfect. Everybody can improve. There are few self-fulfilling prophecies more important or more dangerous than this. If you think you have room to grow, you do and you will. If you think you’re as good as you can be… you’re right. You won’t get any better.”
Ryan Holiday, Discipline Is Destiny (Page 187)
“Ambition, which overthrows governments and private fortunes, which feeds on blood and crimes, ambition… is, like all inordinate passions, a violent and unthinking fever that ceases only when life ceases—like a conflagration which, fanned by a pitiless wind, ends only after all has been consumed.”
Napoleon, via Discipline Is Destiny (Page 175)
“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)
“Epictetus reminds us that when you say, I’ll get serious about this tomorrow or, I’ll focus on it later, ‘what you’re really saying is, ‘Today I’ll be shameless, immature, and base; others will have the power to distress me.””
Ryan Holiday, Discipline Is Destiny (Page 125)
“These days, I try to treat my attention like the precious resource that it is. I keep my phone on Do Not Disturb, 24/7/365. Only my wife and mother can get through. And everything else can wait. I schedule one hour of ‘thinking time’ every week. Just me, a pencil, and a notebook. No devices. I use an auto-responder on most social channels. This helps set clear expectations, and I’ve found people usually respect boundaries when you lay them out. I say no to 100% of ‘brain-pick’ requests. My mental space is non-negotiable. I’ve shared almost everything I know through social media, podcast interviews, and my digital products. My auto-responders redirect people to my content when they want advice. I protect my sleep religiously. I’m in bed by 9:30 pm most nights. And I’ve started leaving my phone in the kitchen. One of the surprising parts about all this is that my business hasn’t suffered. Because clear thinking leads to better decisions, and better decisions lead to better outcomes.”
Justin Welsh