Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues,

courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

Look, if you hated the taste, if it didn't feel good, if you weren't getting good results,

if it didn't guarantee a dopamine hit, it wouldn't

exactly require much discipline to steer clear. That's the whole point of the virtue, though,

isn't it? That it's requiring you to resist an impulse or forgo a pleasure. As we said recently,

discipline is about doing what's hard. Just as courage is the triumph over fear.

Discipline is the triumph over another lower part of our nature. A lot of times discipline is

pushing yourself to do something you don't want to do, but the other part of it, which we might

call the temperance part, is not doing the stuff you want to do. And in some ways, this takes the most strength.

Seneca said that we're all slaves to one thing or another sex or ambition or attention or chaos.

And by indulging in these passions often enough, eventually we lose the freedom to abstain from them.

We just can't not. We need discipline to push through that, to resist the urge to keep

going when it's not serving us, to step back when our ambition tempts us to overreach, to

recognize that rest and recovery and restraint are not signs of weakness, but also of strength

and wisdom. True discipline means knowing when to stop. It's having the courage to say no to the extra hour, the extra

project, the unsustainable pace so that we can sustain ourselves for the long haul. Discipline

in this way isn't just about action. It's also about control, control over our impulses,

our desires, even our most deeply ingrained habits. Without this, we are slaves. Only through temperance can we

ever be free. And I talk a lot about that and discipline is destiny. I didn't just want it to be a book

about do this, do this. There's a bunch of things we need to stop doing. And discipline is understanding

that. You can grab a sign copy at store.dailystoic.com. But if you are looking for some better overall habits,

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