In 1956 Harry Belafonte placed a call to Coretta Scott King. With her husband arrested once again, he wanted to check in with her and see how she was doing and what the movement might need. Except they could barely carry on a conversation, because Coretta kept being pulled away from the phone to attend to one of the children, to check on dinner, to answer the door.

Sensing she was doing this—and far too much at that—all alone, Belafonte politely asked why the Kings did not have any help at home. Well, she told him, Martin simply would not permit it. Not only because it was financially prohibitive on a minister’s salary, but also because he was worried what others might think. That he was self-important, enriching himself at the expense of the cause, living the high life while millions of blacks suffered.

“That is absolutely ridiculous,” Belafonte replied. “He’s here in the middle of this movement doing all of these things, and he’s going to get caught up in what people are going to think if he has somebody helping you?” Then he informed Ms. King that from this moment forward, their life was changing. He was going to personally pay for staff—and that Martin had absolutely no say in the matter.

This wasn’t just a nice gesture to an overworked family. It was also a strategic move. What Belafonte was buying Martin and Coretta was time. It was peace of mind. He understood that with this help, they would have more energy, more focus for the cause. The last thing he wanted Martin to be thinking about as he marched for peace and justice was whether his kids had a ride home from school.

It takes discipline not to insist on doing everything yourself. Especially when you know how to do them well. Especially when you have high standards about how they should be done. Even if you enjoy doing them—whether that’s mowing your own lawn or answering your own phone.

A glutton isn’t just someone who eats or drinks too much. Some of us are also gluttons for punishment. Gluttons for attention. Gluttons for control. It can come from a good place, as it did for Martin Luther King Jr. We feel obligated. We feel bad spending money. We feel guilty asking for help. It doesn’t matter the source though, because the outcome is the same: We wear ourselves down.

You have to be able to pass the ball…especially when somebody is open and has a better shot.

I was fortunate to learn this early in my career. One of my first jobs as a writer was as a research assistant to Robert Greene, who not only trained and showed me how the writing process works, but taught me an even more important part in the process: That even someone great and talented and self-sufficient doesn’t do it all by himself (this is also in The 48 Laws of Power, expressed more ominously as “Let others do all the work, take all the credit”).

When I started having some success as a writer myself, one of the first things I did was hire a research assistant. I have been quite open and up front about this (my current researcher is Billy Oppenheimer—he has a great newsletter you can subscribe to) and yet still people ask how do you put out so much content? How do you juggle it all? How do you do it all?

The answer is, I don’t. I have a team. Just in the way that I don’t do the international edition of my books, I have people who help translate what I’ve done into different mediums. This article itself is an example. I tell the Belafonte story in Discipline is Destiny, I’ve written about hiring help in Daily Dad emails (which you can sign up for here), and I’ve talked about my team on podcasts. So my research assistant gathered all of those pieces, strung them together, which allowed me to spend my time polishing and tweaking it before I put it out in the world.

Yes, cumulatively, it has become quite expensive to pay for help (literally hundreds of thousands of dollars a year at this point). But the true cost would be the quality and quantity of content I couldn’t have created, the time I wouldn’t have had with my family, the energy I wouldn’t still have to do what I do.

While this all might sound a little privileged, I am not saying “Oh everyone should have an enormous team behind them”—though in a fair world that would be great. If you can’t afford to hire someone, the good news is there is a much cheaper option, something that successful and busy people also do. It’s called: Automation.

Some people hire an accountant or a financial advisor to handle their retirement and savings accounts. Just as easily, you can use the automation features in something like Wealthfront. Some people have a personal assistant manage tasks for their business or social media for them. Just as easily, you can use software like Buffer or IFTTT to automate routine tasks for you. Some people complain about what a pain their inbox is to manage. Just as easily they can set up filters and folders or use tools that block their spam or unsubscribe them from marketing emails. Some people spend hours a month opening mail, paying bills and doing administrative paperwork. Just as easily they can sign up for paperless billing, or auto-schedule payments.

Almost everything we do as responsible adults in the world is set up inefficiently. By improving our systems, we buy ourselves time and energy. And then with this time and energy, we are able to be better at what we do, to get more done, to be more present for the people who depend on us.

It doesn’t make sense to try to do everything yourself. You have to delegate and automate. You have to find people who are good at things and empower them to help you. You have to be strong enough to hand over the keys, to relinquish control, to develop a system—an organization—that is bigger than just us. Our willpower is not enough.We shouldn’t have to just gut it out. We need to share.

That is, if you’re trying to scale. Trying to build or do something that matters, something bigger than just us.

Going back to the cost of not delegating, King was once asked by an interviewer what he would do with an uninterrupted week of rest. After scoffing at the pure impossibility of such a thing, given the injustices of the world and the demands of the Civil Rights Movement at the time, King explained,

“If I had the luxury of an entire week, I would spend it meditating and reading, refreshing myself spiritually and intellectually…Amidst the struggle, amidst the frustrations, amidst the endless work, I often reflect that I am forever giving–never pausing to take in. I feel urgently the need for even an hour of time to get away, to withdraw, to refuel. I need more time to think through what is being done, to take time out from the mechanics of the movement, to reflect on the meaning of the movement.”

What brilliant ideas or breakthroughs might have come had King been sooner and better able to do that? At the end of King’s short life, who reflects back and is happy about the time he spent doing things he didn’t need to be doing? We are all the worse for it.

It’s time to ask yourself that question too: What would you manage to do with a week like that? An hour? A little help that would allow you to carve out the space?

And, what steps are you taking, who are you delegating to, what are you automating, to make that possible?

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Two years into writing my latest book, Discipline is Destiny, I hit a wall.

There is no word other than “despair” for what I was feeling. Doubt? One always has that. This was deeper. No, this was a fear that the book would not come together. That I had chosen the wrong topic. That I had used up all my material. That I did not have what I needed, that my momentum had run out. At my lowest moment, before I had really even begun, I was facing the necessity of calling my publisher and asking for a delay.

I was also tired. Just so tired.

Coming up with the idea for a book is a creative pursuit, actually creating the book is effectively a work of manual labor, sitting in a chair, grinding out each consecutive sentence—a process not measured in hours or days, but months and years. It’s a marathon of endurance, cognitive and physical.

For me, in the last decade, I have run not just a couple of these marathons, but 12 of them, back to back to back. That’s roughly 2.5 million words across titles I’ve published, articles I’ve written, and the daily emails that I produced in the same period.

To say I was burned out was an understatement…at a moment I could not afford it.

This tends to be exactly how it goes.

Which is why the best organizations and entrepreneurs and athletes solve for that problem before it happens.

In 2012 the San Antonio Spurs were coming off a six game road trip. It was their fourth game in five nights and this game was just 24 hours after their victory over the Magic and 72 hours after a double-overtime victory against the Raptors. More than that, two of their stars Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker had come off long summers playing internationally, while Tim Duncan was in his 16th season in the league. Collectively, the four players had played upwards of 3,000 professional games between them, consistently going deep into the playoffs, nearly every year.

So their coach Gregg Popovich decided to rest them, to not play his stars in a nationally televised game against their most hated rivals. “We’ve done this before in hopes of making a wiser decision, rather than a popular decision,” he told a reporter. “It’s pretty logical.”

Logical, yes. Easy? No. And definitely not popular.

In fact, the NBA would fine them $250,000 for daring to do it.

But the concept of ‘load management’ was there to stay.

As someone who is disciplined and driven, I have struggled with this myself. When we are committed, when we are driven, self-discipline isn’t always about getting up and getting to work. It’s easier to workout than to skip a workout, easier to write than relax.

The problem with that is that if you want to last, you have to be able to rest. I remember I had Olympic mountain biker Kate Courtney on the podcast while I was working on Discipline is Destiny and she told me a piece of advice she had gotten from her coach when she was pushing herself too hard in practice. “Do you want to be fast now,” they asked, “or later?” Meaning, do you want to win this workout or win the race?

“The indiscipline of overwork,” the writer John Steinbeck wrote, “the falsest of economies.”

When I say that self-discipline saves us, part of what it saves us from is ourselves.

Sometimes that’s from our laziness or our weakness. Just as often, it’s from our addictions, from our excesses, from our impulse to be too hard on others and ourselves. It makes us not just great at what we do, but best, in that fuller sense of the word. Aristotle, who wrote so much on virtue, reminded us that the point of virtue wasn’t power or fame or money or success. It was human flourishing.

What is more important than that?

As I struggled to write Discipline is Destiny, I tried my best to improve in another area of my life—how my work and self-discipline manifested itself at home. Several years ago, after I sold a project, my editor called my wife, in part to congratulate us but also to apologize. She knew what this meant for my wife—what it would do to me, who I became in the dark depths of a book.

However this book does, even if it makes a difference for a lot of people, what I am proudest of is who I was while I wrote it.

There weren’t any apologies necessary, even when it felt like it might not come together. Did my kids even notice? I’m not sure they did. Even that moment where I felt like I might need to delay the book, I remember thinking: And? So what? Sometimes things have to be delayed.

If that’s what it takes to do things right, so be it.

A less disciplined me, a younger me? I would have been wrecked by all this. I would have acted out. I would have been consumed. There was no ‘calm and mild light’ for me when it came to my work. There was little balance. I was all ambition and drive…and when something got in the way, I was indomitable and aggressive. It helped me accomplish things. It also made me unhappy.

It would not have served me well on this project. Worse than that, it would have made me a hypocrite.

So yes, as I finished the book, I was still tired. Every writer is tired when they get to the end of a book.

Yet, I also felt wonderful.

Life is for the living. We are meant to be up and doing.

If books came naturally, without effort? Everyone would write them.

And for [books], you can plug in whatever it is that you do. It’s good that it’s hard. It’s good that it can be discouraging. It’s good that it breaks your heart, kicks your ass, messes with your head.

Remember, scarcity creates value. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it.

That’s what separates the disciplined from the undisciplined, the weak from the strong, the amateurs from the pros.

Nobody ever said fulfilling our destiny was going to be easy.

It wouldn’t be worth anything if it was.

It was long ago now that Hercules came to the crossroads.

At a quiet intersection in the hills of Greece, in the shade of knobby pine trees, the great hero of Greek myth first met his destiny.

Where exactly it was or when, no one knows. We hear of this moment in the stories of Socrates. We can see it captured in the most beautiful art of the Renaissance. We can feel his budding energy, his strapping muscles, and his anguish in the classic Bach cantata. If John Adams had had his way in 1776, Hercules at the crossroads would have been immortalized on the official seal of the newly founded United States.

Because there, before the man’s undying fame, before the twelve labors, before he changed the world, Hercules faced a crisis, one as life-changing and real as any of us have ever faced.

Where was he headed? Where was he trying to go? That’s the point of the story. Alone, unknown, unsure, Hercules, like so many, did not know.

Where the road diverged lay a beautiful goddess who offered him every temptation he could imagine. Adorned in finery, she promised him a life of ease. She swore he’d never taste want or unhappiness or fear or pain. Follow her, she said, and his every desire would be fulfilled.

On the other path stood a sterner goddess in a pure white robe. She made a quieter call. She promised no rewards except those that came as a result of hard work. It would be a long journey, she said. There would be sacrifice. There would be scary moments. But it was a journey fit for a god. It would make him the person his ancestors meant him to be.

Was this real? Did it really happen?

If it’s only a legend, does it matter?

Yes, because this is a story about us. It’s about you. About your dilemma. About your own crossroads. And about the choice you decide to make.

Like Hercules, it’s the choice between vice and virtue, temperance and intemperance, the easy way and the hard way, the well-trodden path and the road less traveled.

We all face this choice.

Hesitating only for a second, Hercules chose the one that made all the difference.

He chose virtue. “Virtue” can seem old-fashioned. Yet virtue—arete—translates to something very simple and very timeless: Excellence. Moral. Physical. Mental.

In the ancient world, virtue was comprised of four key components.

Courage

Temperance

Justice

Wisdom

The “touchstones of goodness,” the philosopher king Marcus Aurelius called them. To millions, they’re known as the cardinal virtues, four near-universal ideals adopted by Christianity and most of Western philosophy, but equally valued in Buddhism, Hinduism, and just about every other philosophy you can imagine. They’re called “cardinal,” C. S. Lewis pointed out, not because they come down from church authorities but because they originate from the Latin cardo, or hinge.

It’s pivotal stuff. It’s the stuff that the door to the good life hangs on.

They are also the topic of the series of books I am currently working on.

Four books. Four virtues. One aim: to help you choose . . .

Courage, bravery, fortitude, honor, sacrifice . . .

Temperance, self-control, moderation, composure, balance . . .

Justice, fairness, service, fellowship, goodness, kindness . . .

Wisdom, knowledge, education, truth, self-reflection, peace . . .

These are the key to a life of honor, of glory, of excellence in every sense. Character traits that John Steinbeck perfectly described as, “pleasant and desirable to [their] owner and makes him perform acts of which he can be proud and with which he can be pleased.” But the “he” must be taken to mean all of humankind. There was no feminine version of the word virtus in Rome. Virtue wasn’t male or female, it just was.

It still is. It doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman. It doesn’t matter if you’re physically strong or painfully shy, a genius or of average intelligence. Virtue is a universal imperative.

The virtues are interrelated and inseparable, yet each is distinct from the others. Doing the right thing almost always takes courage, just as discipline is impossible without the wisdom to know what is worth choosing. What good is courage if not applied to justice? What good is wisdom if it doesn’t make us more modest?

North, south, east, west—the four virtues are a kind of compass (there’s a reason that the four points on a compass are called the “cardinal directions”). They guide us. They show us where we are and what is true.

Aristotle described virtue as a kind of craft, something to pursue just as one pursues the mastery of any profession or skill. “We become builders by building and we become harpists by playing the harp,” he writes. “Similarly, then, we become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions.”

Virtue is something we do.

It’s something we choose.

Not once, for Hercules’s crossroads was not a singular event. It’s a daily challenge, one we face not once but constantly, repeatedly. Will we be selfish or selfless? Brave or afraid? Strong or weak? Wise or stupid? Will we cultivate a good habit or a bad one? Courage or cowardice? The bliss of ignorance or the challenge of a new idea?

Stay the same…or grow?

The easy way or the right way?

It is the most important decision of your life. Your destiny depends on it.

P.S. The aim of my newest book, Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control, is to teach you how to harness the powers of self-discipline.

The Stoics believed that we are all born to fulfill a great destiny. And while not everyone’s destiny is the same, everyone’s destiny is achieved with self-discipline and control. Discipline is Destiny is a book that will help you fulfill yours.

We are still honoring all the awesome pre-order bonuses (including an opportunity to have a long book-themed dinner with me or get an actual page from the manuscript drafts) over at dailystoic.com/discipline. And if you do order from that link, your order will be fulfilled by us here at The Painted Porch Bookshop in Bastrop, Texas!

If you order copies from anywhere other than the Daily Stoic or The Painted Porch, just send your receipts to [email protected], and we’ll make sure you get the bonuses!