“To the right of my computer monitor, between two photos of my boys, is a picture given to me by the sports psychologist Jonathan Fader. It’s the famed Dr. Oliver Sacks and behind him is a large sign he kept in his office that just said NO! By saying no—to interviews, to meetings, to ‘Can I pick your brain for a minute?’—I was saying yes to what matters: my family. My work. My sanity.”
Ryan Holiday, Discipline Is Destiny (Page 307)
“Spend a handful of hours a day going fast. Crush a gym session. Do deep work on a project you care about. Spend the rest of the day going slow. Take walks. Read books. Get a long dinner with friends. Either way, avoid the anxious middle where you never truly relax or truly move forward.”
Charles Miller
“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)
“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)
“Everything we say yes to means saying no to something else. No one can be two places at once. No one can give all their focus to more than one thing. But the power of this reality can also work for you: Every no can also be a yes, a yes to what really matters. To rebuff one opportunity means to cultivate another. This is the key not just to professional success but also personal happiness. When someone takes ‘just a few minutes of your time,’ they aren’t just robbing you. They’re robbing your family. They’re robbing the people who you serve. They are robbing the future. The same goes for when you agree to do unimportant things, or when you commit to too much at one time. Except this time, you are the thief.”
Ryan Holiday, Discipline Is Destiny (Page 118)
“The number of people who stand ready to consume one’s time to no purpose is almost countless.”
Booker T. Washington, via Discipline Is Destiny (Page 116)
“I would die without my [insert luxury item], we’ll say in jest. How can anybody live like this? we’ll ask not so rhetorically. The answer? They’re stronger than you. ‘The more a man is,’ the editor Maxwell Perkins had inscribed on his mantel, ‘the less he wants.’ When you strip away the unnecessary and the excessive, what’s left is you. What’s left is what’s important.”
Ryan Holiday, Discipline Is Destiny (Page 36)
“In a bad 1950s science fiction movie, you might see flying jetpacks, invisibility cloaks and ray guns. What we got instead is a device that fits in our pocket. It allows us to connect to more than a billion people. It knows where we are and where we’re going. It has all of our contacts, the sum total of all published knowledge, an artificially intelligent computer that can understand and speak in our language, one of the best cameras ever developed, a video camera with editor, a universal translator and a system that can measure our heart rate. We can look up real time pricing and inventory data, listen to trained actors read us audiobooks and identify any song, any plant or any bird. We can see the reviews from our community of nearby restaurants or even the reputation of a doctor or lawyer. It can track the location of our loved ones and call us a chauffeured vehicle at the touch of a button. And of course, we use it to have arguments. And to watch very short stupid videos.”
Seth Godin