Discipline is Destiny

The Choice at the Crossroads

Hercules stood at a fork in the road. One path was offered by a goddess in soft clothes who promised pleasure, ease, and no pain. The other came from a goddess in a plain white robe who promised sacrifice, sweat, and a life fit for a god. Hercules chose the harder road. That choice, according to the Stoics, is the one every human being has to make every morning, in every meeting, at every refrigerator door at midnight.

Ryan Holiday's *Discipline Is Destiny* is the second installment in his series on the four cardinal virtues — courage, temperance, justice, wisdom — and it argues something almost embarrassingly old-fashioned. Self-control, he says, is the most underrated force on earth. It is both predictive and deterministic. It predicts whether you will succeed, and it determines that whatever you do, you will do well. Without it, freedom rots into license, talent rots into waste, and every other virtue collapses for lack of a spine to hang on. Marcus Aurelius called the four virtues the touchstones of goodness. Holiday spends the whole book showing why discipline is the touchstone of the touchstones.

What follows is a portrait gallery — Lou Gehrig and Queen Elizabeth, Beethoven and Eisenhower, Toni Morrison and Marcus Aurelius — woven into a single argument: the most important thing you will ever rule is yourself.

The Iron Horse and the Body You Inherit

The book begins in the body, because the body is where every other discipline either takes root or rots. Holiday plants the section with Lou Gehrig, the Yankees first baseman who played two thousand one hundred and thirty consecutive games. The streak stood for more than fifty years. Gehrig played through at least seventeen healed fractures in his hands, broke nearly every finger, and never mentioned any of it. He hit .340 career, .361 in the postseason, won the Triple Crown in 1934, and finished with one thousand nine hundred and ninety-five runs batted in. He was hit in the head by a pitch and back on the field the next day, where he hit three triples. "A thing like that," he said, "can't stop us Dutchmen."