“We have to show, not tell: first in line for danger, last in line for rewards. First in line for duty, last in line for recognition. To lead, you have to bleed. Figuratively speaking. But sometimes also literally. Is it really unfair? Or is it what you signed up for? And by the way, isn’t it also what you get paid the big bucks for? That’s the privilege of command.”
Ryan Holiday, Discipline Is Destiny (Page 256)
“Develop your taste. Take a good, long look at anyone creating meaningful work. You will see that it wasn’t their skill that came first but their taste. With time, they became so inspired by their taste, that they wanted to create something themselves that could live up to it. In other words, they honed their skills to make something worthy of their taste. You shouldn’t be a snob about many things in life. Your taste, however, is an exception. Watch great films. Read gorgeous books. Spin brilliant records. Eat delicious food. Study extraordinary people. Consume. Consume. Consume. Develop your taste. Refine your palate. Your skills will follow.”
Cole Schafer
“It’d be wonderful if power or success exempted us… from everything time-consuming, pedestrian, inconvenient, difficult. In practice, it obligates us to those things even more. It demands more of us. That’s just how it shakes out. Can you handle that? The leader shows up first and leaves last. The leader works hardest. The leader puts others before themselves. The leader takes the hit. Everything else is just semantics and titles.”
Ryan Holiday, Discipline Is Destiny (Page 255)
“The nearer a man is to a calm mind, the closer he is to strength.”
Marcus Aurelius, via Discipline Is Destiny (Page 249)
“There are two ways to live a longer life: 1) Biologically. Extend the timeline between your birth and your death. 2) Psychologically. Fit more lives into whatever time you are given. Make each decade rich with experiences and perhaps you can live a handful of lives before you are done.”
James Clear
“‘You don’t have to turn this into something,’ [Marcus Aurelius] reminded himself when someone did something wrong or said something untrue about him. When he lusted after something, he stopped himself, turning those desires to stone before they burned through him and he did something he’d regret. He tried to make beautiful choices, tried to look for the best in people, tried to put himself in their shoes, tried to lead by serving. It was the pride of Marcus’s life that he not only didn’t need to ask anyone for favors but that anytime anyone asked him for something—money, advice, a hand—he could be generous.”
Ryan Holiday, Discipline Is Destiny (Page 234)
“The opposite of self-awareness is unconscious reactions and impulsiveness, which leads to simply repeating the past endlessly. Self-awareness opens the door to new opportunities, where you can see more than just your impulsiveness. Being able to see yourself and the way you move through your emotional range helps you be mindful of what you are saying and why you are saying it. Through self-awareness comes better decisions because you know when your intentions are genuine, when you would benefit from pausing and slowing down, and when you need to take accountability.”
Yung Pueblo
“There are two modes of travel; retreat or engage. People often travel to escape the routines of work, to recharge, relax, reinvigorate, and replenish themselves— R&R. In this mode you travel to remove yourself from your routines, or to get the pampering and attention you don’t ordinarily get, and ideally to do fun things instead of work things. So you travel to where it is easy. This is called a vacation, or R&R. The other mode is engagement and experience, or E&E. In this mode you travel to discover new things, to have new experiences, to lean into an adventure whose outcome is not certain, to meet otherness. You move to find yourself by encountering pleasures and challenges you don’t encounter at home. “
Kevin Kelly
“Be reliable. You can get pretty damn far in life by just being someone that people can count on to show up and do the work. Reliability is one of the most underrated traits. In the short run, it is much harder to be exceptional than it is to be reliable, and in the long run, being consistently reliable makes you exceptional.”
Sahil Bloom
“It was said that the true majesty of Marcus Aurelius was that his exactingness was directed only at himself. He did not ‘go around expecting Plato’s republic.’ People were people, he understood they were not perfect. He found a way to work with flawed people, putting them to service for the good of the empire, searching them for virtues that he celebrated and accepting their vices, which he knew were not in his control.”
Ryan Holiday, Discipline Is Destiny (Page 232)
“Next time you’re struggling with something, try saying to yourself, I choose to live in easy world where everything is easy. How might that change your approach? Would it help you to let go of some of the stress and pressure? It’s worth caveating, of course, that your problems are unlikely to magically disappear by just asking yourself this question. But like me, I wonder if you might find that it helps you let go, just a little bit, of the unnecessary extra angst, stress and suffering, we add on top of whatever ‘problem’ we need to solve.”
Ali Abdaal
“You don’t have to end up number one in your class. Or win everything, every time. In fact, not winning is not particularly important. What does matter is that you gave everything, because anything less is to cheat the gift. The gift of your potential. The gift of the opportunity. The gift of the craft you’ve been introduced to. The gift of the responsibility entrusted to you. The gift of the instruction and time of others. The gift of life itself.”
Ryan Holiday, Discipline Is Destiny (Page 212)
“This is the wonderful thing about doing your best. It insulates you, ever so sightly, from outcomes as well as ego. It’s not that you don’t care about results. It’s that you have a kind of trump card. Your success doesn’t go to your head because you know you’re capable of more. Your failures don’t destroy you because you are sure there wasn’t anything more you could have done.”
Ryan Holiday, Discipline Is Destiny (Page 212)
“Understand: Most of the people doing important work are people you’ve never heard of—they want it that way. Most happy people don’t need you to know how happy they are—they aren’t thinking about you at all. Everyone is going through something, but some people choose not to vomit their issues on everyone else. The strongest people are self-contained. They keep themselves in check. They keep their business where it belongs… their business.”
Ryan Holiday, Discipline Is Destiny (Page 207)
“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)