Book Ponder

• Discipline is Destiny by Ryan Holiday
• Published: September 27, 2022
• Pages: 312
• Read: 08/28/2022 – 10/15/2022 | 10/19/2023 – 10/29/2023
• Rating: 5/5 Stars

The Lessons Learned series is different than normal book reviews.  There are hundreds of great book reviews for Discipline is Destiny and I feel like I would be wasting your time creating another one.  Instead, I strive to give you the lessons I was able to extract from the book to improve my life and perhaps yours. 

Time Waits for No One

We tend to neglect “the thing” we want to accomplish until we have enough time, or when the time is right.  This could be finally getting around to getting in shape, writing the book we keep talking about or starting the business that you’ve always dreamed of, but that’s all it is…just a dream.  Don’t be an empty dreamer, if you truly want to accomplish all your goals, then you must make time for them, not wait for time to magically show up.   As Ryan Holiday says,

“You have to do your best while you still have the chance. Life is short. You never know when the game, when your body, will be taken away from you. Don’t waste it!”

Ryan Holiday

Even though telling you to slow down sounds counterproductive to the point I am making, it’s also important to find balance in whatever you are doing.  Reading the previous quote and getting motivated is good, but many people go full speed from there, end up getting burned out, and make less progress than before.

This is commonly seen in people trying to get in shape, they get a good workout plan from a friend, or they watch a motivational video that inspires them to hit the gym.  After two weeks when they see their progress slow, or their bodies break down, they stop going altogether which puts them even further behind than when they started. 

Every activity for every goal needs to be sustainable for long periods.  It feels good to get out there and go above and beyond when motivated, but long-term sustainability requires discipline.  The motivation won’t be there when you’re tired from lack of sleep, stressed out from work, or dealing with an illness.  These are the moments when we rely on our discipline to do what we are supposed to do regardless of how we feel. 

Once we acknowledge that life is short and we need to find a balance to achieve our goals, we run into the third dilemma of always “getting ready” to do the work.  There will always be one more thing you need to do before you can start, you need the weather to clear up a bit before you can start to work out, you need a better setup before you can start your writing, you need things to slow down at work so you can start your side hustle.  There will always be one more thing we can do before we start, but we can always start right now.  It doesn’t matter how unprepared you feel, it’s still better to just start.  The perfect circumstances won’t magically show up at your doorstep and if that perfect situation does present itself to you, you will end up chasing that moment forever and rely on it to do any work.  Start today, stop making excuses, every day that you wait is time that you will never get back.  As Ryan Holiday says, sometimes the work will feel like torture, but it will be worth it.

“Today, we’re more apt to talk about work than lose ourselves in it. We like to make a big show of it on social media. We spend a lot of money acquiring the right tools or setting up a fancy office. Getting down to it? Every day? That sounds like torture. Sometimes it is torture!”

Ryan Holiday

The Power of Simplicity

Today more than ever, the world is filled with distractions.  The perfect productivity app just came out, the perfect notebook is on its way, and the perfect course for my passion just became available.  Nothing will do the work for you.  Looking for the perfect system that will make the work not feel like work doesn’t exist, at best a good system will give you a small boost in productivity, but nothing beats putting in the time and doing the work.  Keep it simple, start the work, and then figure out tools to help you along the way.  Don’t do it in the opposite order or else you will be stuck on an endless quest to find the perfect system and never start. 

“The less you desire, the richer you are, the freer you are, the more powerful you are. It’s that simple.”

Ryan Holiday

Focus on What You Can Control

 Our lives can be unpredictable.  Everything can seem fine until our A/C breaks down in the middle of the summer and we can’t afford to fix it.  We get test results that tell us our health isn’t as great as we thought.  We find out our kids are struggling in school, and we aren’t sure how to fix it.  In these moments when chaos seems to be whirling around us, we must remember to only focus on the things we can control.

The easiest thing to make us feel in control in a chaotic situation is to take care of ourselves.  Like Ryan Holiday says,

“While the world is unpredictable, one thing we do control is how we take care of ourselves. Making our bed, tucking in our shirt, running a comb through our hair, these are little things we can always do, practices that instill order and cleanliness in a messy situation.”

Ryan Holiday

Next time life feels overwhelming, take a moment to tidy up yourself and your space to gain some control when facing the uncontrollable.

Never Lose Control of Your Emotions

Never lose control of your emotions and if you happen to, try your hardest to not make any decisions or be around others while feeling this way.  It’s not easy to master your emotions but when things are outside of your control, you can still control how you respond to those things.  The best way to respond is to distance yourself from everything until you can regain control of your emotions.  This is easier said than done and I understand that certain situations don’t allow you to get away.  If you don’t have control over your emotions the second-best option is to be self-aware enough to acknowledge when you are in these situations so you can make better decisions. 

Ryan Holiday tells us that most mistakes, regrets, and embarrassing moments can be credited to emotional decision-making.

“Nearly every regret, every mistake, every embarrassing moment—whether it be personal or professional or historical—have one thing in common: Somebody lost control of their emotions. Somebody got carried away. Somebody was scared, or defensive. Somebody wasn’t thinking beyond the next few seconds.”

Ryan Holiday

Make Some Kind of Progress Everyday

Just be better than you were yesterday, and if you failed today, get up and try again tomorrow.  Acknowledging that you failed is still progress.  Everyone gives young people advice to start saving for retirement early because compound interest will make you rich by the time you retire.  The same goes for self-improvement, small wins every day will equal major victories in the long term.  It’s hard to see the point in skipping dessert today when the scale doesn’t move the following morning, but what do you think the effects of skipping dessert for 3 months will be?  The scale probably moved a few pounds, your sugar levels are down, you’re sleeping better, and you generally feel better.  That’s a huge victory when many small victories are accomplished over a long period. 

“The Japanese word for this is kaizen. Continual improvement. Always finding something to work on, to make a little progress on. Never being satisfied, always looking to grow.”

Ryan Holiday

It’s common for baseball players to go through slumps during their careers.  It’s human nature to want to hit a home run every time you come up to bat and break the slump with one big act, but you find yourself continuing to fail.  Batting coaches use the same small progress every day analogy.  They tell the batters to narrow it down to individual at-bats and even individual pitches.  Take a ball, make contact, and have a good swing, even if you didn’t get a hit, it’s a small victory to get you making progress to getting hits again.  We need to take this strategy in our lives, if we make small progress every day in all facets of life, we will consistently be crushing our goals.

“It’s the journey of a lifetime. In fact, that’s the way to think about all of this: How much progress could you make if you made just a little each day over the course of an entire life? What might this journey look like, where might it lead, if each bit of progress you made presented both the opportunity and the obligation to make a little more progress, and you seized those opportunities, you lived up to those obligations, each and every time?”

When your goals feel overwhelming and unachievable narrow it down to a single action and gain small victories every day.  Just be better than the previous day, the previous hour, or the previous minute.

Keep yourself valuable by always having a purpose in your life.  It doesn’t have to be big, it can be small hobbies like learning about something new and reading some books about it.  Ryan Holiday talks about the most powerful man in the world Marcus Aurelius who could have had everything he wanted at his fingertips, still studying and learning because he knew that was the key to growing old.

“He understood the second we stop trying to get better is the moment we start gradually getting worse. After the passing of Antoninus, he maintained his lifelong study of philosophy, humbly gathering up his tablets and going to school even as an old man. He never wanted to stop learning, never wanted to stop getting better.”

Ryan Holiday

If one of the most powerful men in history never stopped trying to make progress every day, then so can you.

Strict With Yourself, Tolerant With Others

When you get to a place where you feel like you have your life in order physically, mentally, and spiritually it’s a great place that many times is short-lived and even fewer people ever attain.  When you are in that moment, doing things that don’t move you closer to your goals makes no sense, and it’s hard to fathom why others are doing them.  It’s human nature for us to judge others and give unsolicited advice.  We start to develop a God complex and think of ourselves as better than others.  This is one of the nastiest side effects of self-improvement and one we need to be wary of. 

This is when I learned the most valuable lesson from Discipline is Destiny, “Strict with yourself, tolerant with others.”

It’s hard to get others to get on board when you are making positive changes in your life, but each person’s life is their own.  Unless they ask, the most we should do is let others know we are there for them if they want help or advice and leave it at that.  We don’t know what phase of their journey they’re on.  Ryan Holiday reminds us that Marcus Aurelius, the most powerful man in the world, would be the one person who should be giving unsolicited advice, and yet he was tolerant of others and strict with himself.

“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

The most difficult part is watching people you care about make bad decisions, but Ryan Holiday reminds us that as hard as it is, it’s their life and not yours to control.  Not everyone signed up for the kind of life you live.

“The only person you get to be truly hard on is you. It will take every ounce of your self-control to enforce that—not because it’s hard to be hard on yourself, but because it’s so hard to let people get away with things you’d never allow in yourself. To let them do things you know are bad for them, to let them slack off when you see so much more in them. But you have to. Because their life is not in your control.” 

Ryan Holiday

It’s hard enough to get your own life in order, focus on doing what’s best for you, and be open to helping others when that help is warranted.

Final Thoughts

Discipline is Destiny is the best of Ryan Holiday’s books, which is an honor because most of Ryan’s books receive high praise.  Discipline is where it all starts, discipline is the first building block to creating a great life.  Discipline is doing what you’re supposed to do even when you don’t feel like it.  I hope this article and possibly this book help you discover the importance of discipline and help you implement it into your life.

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