“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)
“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)
“‘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)
“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)
“The muses never bless the unfocused. And even if they did, how would they notice?”
Ryan Holiday, Discipline Is Destiny (Page 124)
“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)
“We know that between every stimulus and its response, every piece of information and our decision, there is space. It is a brief space, to be sure, but one with room enough to insert our philosophy. Will we us it? Use it to think, use it to examine, use it to wait for more information? Or will we give into first impressions, to harmful instincts, and old patterns? The pause is everything.”
Ryan Holiday, Discipline Is Destiny (Page 113)
“A weak mind must be constantly entertained and stimulated. A strong mind can occupy itself and, more importantly, be still and vigilant in moments that demand it.”
Ryan Holiday, Discipline Is Destiny (Page 104)
“No one who is a slave to their urges or to sloth, no one without strength or a good schedule, can create a great life. Certainly they will be too consumed with themselves to be of much good for anyone else. Those who tell themselves they are free to do anything will, inevitably, be chained to something.”
Ryan Holiday, Discipline Is Destiny (Page 92)