This is something I've noticed in myself and I'm glad there's research to back this, although this is an open secret to those who do master self-control. I've spent the last three to four years working on self-control and discipline after I hit rock bottom in my life and realized I had no self-agency. For me, having greater self-control led me to ensure I can focus on providing value where it matters in my life, and not getting caught up by the shiny object syndrome I was distracted by a lot when I was younger. Not every thought needs to be acted on, especially if the thoughts come from external sources. In regards to why it leads to power, as you make your way up the managerial chain, when you have greater self-control you are less prone to get "bullied" by other managers into doing work for them and you can stand up more for your team and you will be able to provide more value. For perspective, I would personally trust others who have self-control more than those who don't for time-sensitive and critical tasks because I can rely on them to regulate their emotions and give honest answers, as well as hold themselves accountable.
For someone, like me a few years ago, who is undisciplined and has not spent time cultivating self-control this is hard to hear. If you find yourself making excuses when you read this article for why the power hierarchy is against you, or that there is bias in the results of this study (as some of the comments here allude to), then you should consider reevaluating why you are making excuses. It's a sign that this post triggered you and your response was to make an excuse rather than accept a correlation that speaks to an underlying hard truth. Once you start digging into "why did I make an excuse" and chase that feeling over and over whenever you find yourself making excuses, you will start to realize that you can't think of a reason why you made an excuse, it's just what you've done and reinforced in the past. If you've read this comment this far and you have a spark of curiosity and relate to not knowing why you are making excuses, I suggest you take this moment to chase it down and gain agency over your own life. Some would say this is your red pill moment. 'The Daily Stoic' woke me up, I highly recommend it. Discipline equals freedom, my friend, and we sorely need you.
> less prone to get "bullied" by other managers into doing work for them and you can stand up more for your team
This is the real key. Management is about controlling others and not letting others control you without compensation.
> I would personally trust others who have self-control more than those who don't for time-sensitive and critical tasks because I can rely on them to regulate their emotions and give honest answers, as well as hold themselves accountable.
Of course you would, and if they wanted to be in your shoes they would do well to learn mastery over others as well as you have.
Learning the language of self-control may be a path to that, especially if you have not heard it before. However, it can also be a path to being controlled, as in your example. I grew up in a conservative environment, so that was my problem: I was heavily indoctrinated in the language of self-control, responsibility, and accountability, and these made me easy to exploit. My own "red pill" moment involved understanding these as tools of power rather than facts of the world, thereby freeing myself to better represent my own interests.
>I was heavily indoctrinated in the language of self-control, responsibility, and accountability, and these made me easy to exploit. My own "red pill" moment involved understanding these as tools of power rather than facts of the world, thereby freeing myself to better represent my own interests.
Can you give some clearer examples? I am curious how this is done in those circles.
Having self-control can give a false sense of self-righteousness, and if you're not careful, this will lead to you eventually caring about how you look and you will do whatever it takes to maintain the image of self-control/responsibility. If you carefully analyze this, you are now basing your self-worth on external appearances, therefore you are giving your control away to anyone who can see this projection. Anyone experienced with controlling others can sniff out this projection and then use it against you in this way: "We need to think about the importance of handling this (X) responsibly. What do you think we should do?". Now they are telling you they think you can make responsible decisions on an important decision, stroking your projected ego, and they've activated your want to act responsibly to do something for them.
Now, it doesn't always mean that this is a way someone is manipulating you. Self-control is realizing that this ego-stroke feeling of making you feel important does not mean to need to involve yourself or act. You need to separate the emotion from the decision-making process and realize that others can use your emotions to manipulate you. It's up to you to decide whether you can trust this person or not, you just need to be aware that the emotion could have been intentional or unintentional.
I grew up in central Pennsylvania farm country. This is a conservative area that has voted republican in every presidential election since Lincoln. The area is also rich in both Amish and Mennonite families. When a whole area is so packed with conservative ideas and individual it has a strong effect on what is "common sense". Common sense is not generally universal it is culturally based.
The best example I can think of is that 85% of the kids in my High School had the same haircut and rarely left the area. Suddenly mTV arrived on cable and the kids and hairstyles went wild. I know of parents calling the cable company to get mTV removed from the home(unsuccessfully).
I read somewhere: "The first thought you have in reaction to something is a mirror of how you were brought up, the second thought is a mirror of who you are".
So the defining thing isn't reacting to a shiny thing, it is what you do after that initial thought and whether you can see yourself falling in the ever-same traps and do something against it.
> Not every thought needs to be acted on, especially if the thoughts come from external sources.
I've heard it said (I believe by Hormozi on Williamson's podcast) that at a certain level, success becomes mostly about saying no to increasingly great opportunities.
I can confirm this is relevant near the bottom too, at least if you have a high level of openness (personality dimension) and are presented with inspiration on a regular basis.
The 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration quote comes to mind.
The principle of sacrifice comes to mind. It seems to be a choice between sacrificing many small things, or a few great things.
Here's an analogy that I think about from time to time. Imagine your life as a garden. You have a finite amount of days, with a finite amount of resources per day to plant new things or caretake existing things. Your soul represents the breadth and depth of your reach on any given day, but it is a fixed size and you must choose how much breadth and depth it has through your choices. Consider each day as an opportunity for change in this ratio of breadth vs depth, and over time this will play out as a spectrum between the two following situations:
(1) You can spend each day traveling to a new area, planting a new seed wherever you go, but never watering the same area twice. You get to learn about many different seeds, but you never get to stick around somewhere long enough to watch them grow into fruit-bearing plants. Your soul will be full of different experiences, but you will not be able to relish in the details of any particular area (i.e. pluck the fruit from your garden when you are ready to relax and are thinking back on your life)
(2) You can choose to focus on one or a few areas to add depth, learn the fundamentals of how things grow in those areas, and learn to care for and nourish them over time. In the end, you will be left with a beautiful garden that you have perfected and know every detail about that is full of fruit-bearing plants. You can wander this garden and eat the fruit from any of your plants.
Your soul has a finite reach. By focusing on one thing, you are neglecting to focus on another, and there is nothing you can do to change that. It's up to you to choose how you want to live, and not making a choice is also a choice. If you don't make a choice (i.e. a sacrifice of not visiting some areas or not nourishing the area around you), you will be left with the worst of both worlds: a decaying garden and no knowledge of how to grow anything.
I have no affiliation with the author of the book and stand to gain nothing from helping others. I still stand by my choice of The Daily Stoic. I resented the thought of reading self help books because my pride led me to believe that if I read a self help book, I was admitting I was weak. That said, the reason for the book is simple: the book is intended to take a year to read, one page at a time. I wake up each day and the first thing I do is open the Books app on my iPhone, load up The Daily Stoic and read the days entry. It takes me 2-3 minutes and reminds me why I am chasing self-discipline. I have done this every day faithfully for three years. I hate to admit, but a page was as much as I was personally able to commit myself to, a full book was too much for my pride to handle at first. So if you’re like me and can’t make time for a full book, I ask you to make time for a single page per day.
In fact I will double down on this book so much, that I will personally buy a copy for anyone who sends me an email cory@linux.com. No one will know you asked for a copy and I ask for nothing in return.
Nice offer! I would also be very interested in how many people have taken you up on your generous offer. I myself would edit your offer to include the caveat: "emails within a week" to prevent all future orders for the book being funneled through you :).
Good call. The author of this book is a marketer and "media strategist," with an obvious focus on social media. He was great at plastering subtle ads all over relevant threads and subs over on reddit. Nice to know that he too has figure out reddit has gone to shit and is also looking for greener pastures..
Internet 'stoics' are ruining stoicism as they are ruining most other forms of philosophy by bastardising it and regurgitating it in the form of easily-consumable self-help pablum
A huge amount of which appears to be consumed and re-re-gurgitated by adolescent gamers
> you will start to realize that you can't think of a reason why you made an excuse
this may not always be true by the way. such constant observation of yourself, constantly asking yourself what such and such a thing means or came from - may eventually lead you to notice the cognitive jump you take - the experience you had all those years ago plus the new thought pattern you started to let yourself believe - which became compressed and hidden by the familiarity and comfort of having no problems due to the resulting dissociation. Before you let yourself believe there was no reason, consider deferring belief permanently until you remember what impression you had which caused 'what is'. Far along that path lies deep self-knowledge and therefore deep knowledge of the world. Most people aren't as interested in seeing the truth as they believe so they give up when they feel more comfortable. It's explained, then, that as a result of not being awakened to what is, their karma inside themselves can still conquer their destiny [1]. Whereas someone who actually respects the truth is going to think more seriously about controlling their karma, at the very least so as not to damage the truth more.
You're right. I never said it was an unbiased perspective, so let me make it clear. The post was intended to help those who were like me. When I wrote the post, I wrote it as if I was speaking to my past self in a style that would have motivated my younger self; nothing more, nothing less.
>when you have greater self-control you are less prone to get "bullied" by other managers into doing work for them and you can stand up more for your team
Umm... You are confusing self control with confidence and self esteem. They aren't the same thing. Though I can see how becoming more disciplined can lead to more confidence and self esteem.
It is really insightful about how we train ourselves for compliance, but how that training struggles to cope when we interact with violence escalaters (who are common in some parts of society).
I live near a port town and face and threat of violence is easily visible in men and many women.
I have lots of strong and compelling evidence that my self-control is unusually low. Doctors have said that since I was very young, so if anybody was making an excuse, it was the adults around me more than myself and I simply internalised those excuses later.
It's extremely humiliating, and I've gone a lot further than listening to the daily stoic, there's an entire body of scientific literature on how to improve self-control in general and for people like me who seem to have literal neurological abnormalities. I've spent the last few weeks miserable from medication side-effects for instance.
I wonder what do you think about the usage of such training. I have had such trainings for diet control and distraction control but I felt unless one manages to gain a long term control the whole time is kinda worthless.
For example I can lose 10 pounds in 2 months with diet control and a bit of discipline. But it comes back quickly once the self control goes away. What is the point? Practicing such self control does not give me better self control next time but only brings down self confidence a bit every time.
I guess the ultimate reason is that I do not really enjoy the targets I set. How can I enjoy something I do not but inherently good for me?
Part if it is that enjoying it is not the goal, losing the weight or passing the test or whatever is the goal. You're not trying to enjoy yourself, so if the pursuit of the goal is very painful for you, you're not going to enjoy it. But you had a reason to start. Sometimes we encounter very difficult obstacles in our lives and relationships, we get so far out into trouble and unhappiness that it seems impossible to get back. General advice in this case is to try to connect back to why you started. What does passing the test do for you, why did you want to lose weight, why did you originally fall in love with that person.
If you never had a grounding to start with then it's time to find one.
You do literally everything with your healthier body! Every moment of your life is lived inside a body which is more capable of physically influencing the world around you. A big physical change is like going from notepad to vim. It takes time and effort and attention but it's so damn _powerful_. Eating healthier and especially, _especially_ exercising is such a boon to generally feeling good throughout the day. I've never been more motivated, productive, and capable than when i was running every day. It was honestly astonishing.
For someone, like me a few years ago, who is undisciplined and has not spent time cultivating self-control this is hard to hear. If you find yourself making excuses when you read this article for why the power hierarchy is against you, or that there is bias in the results of this study (as some of the comments here allude to), then you should consider reevaluating why you are making excuses. It's a sign that this post triggered you and your response was to make an excuse rather than accept a correlation that speaks to an underlying hard truth. Once you start digging into "why did I make an excuse" and chase that feeling over and over whenever you find yourself making excuses, you will start to realize that you can't think of a reason why you made an excuse, it's just what you've done and reinforced in the past. If you've read this comment this far and you have a spark of curiosity and relate to not knowing why you are making excuses, I suggest you take this moment to chase it down and gain agency over your own life. Some would say this is your red pill moment. 'The Daily Stoic' woke me up, I highly recommend it. Discipline equals freedom, my friend, and we sorely need you.