Nick DiMaggio’s Reviews > Discipline Is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control > Status Update

“Forbearance is the sum total of our human virtue.”

To remain oneself in a world that pushes for conformity takes courage. It takes courage as well as temperance to be restrained in a world of excess, where we attack and mock those who don’t indulge in the pleasures we have rationalized and the passions we have excused in ourselves.

It’s a beautiful irony: You’re never content with your progress and yet, you’re always content… because you’re making progress.

It’s the easiest thing in the world to respond to intemperance with intemperance. We have to remember: Someone else’s lack of self-control is not a justification for abandoning our own. Nor is it a good look or a recipe for success and achievement.

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.

“Anyone who has not groomed his life in general towards some definite end cannot possibly arrange his individual actions properly.”

We have to understand: Greatness is not just what one does, but also what one refuses to do. It’s how one bears the constraints of their world or their profession, it’s what we’re able to do within limitations — creatively, consciously, calmly.

Always and forever, the reward is the work. It is a joy itself. It is torture and also heaven — sweaty, wonderful salvation. And that’s how you manage to do prodigious amounts of it — not grudgingly, but lovingly.

In fact, we might say that progress and practice are synonyms. You can’t have the former without the latter. And the latter is worthless without the former.

The more a man is, the less he wants.