The Discipline Required To Create The Life You Want

You know, not everything has to be big. 

I realize that the impulse, especially when it comes to business, is to try to grow everything to the absolute biggest it can be.

This is not a new, but it’s certainly a defining trend of our age. After all, all this drama about data centers is being driven by hyperscalers—companies built around taking things that work and scaling them as far as they can possibly go.

But I hate that philosophy…or at least, it’s not what I practice in my life. 

In 2019, I could have started just about any kind of business. A bunch of my friends were starting tech companies. Others had been making a fortune investing, flipping real estate, trading crypto. 

I was the crazy one who decided to open a small bookstore in rural Texas. 

What’s crazier though is that the bookstore worked. And yet do you know what I get asked, probably once a week? “When are you going to open another location?” At least three struggling bookstores have reached out about us acquiring them. 

What strikes me isn’t that people ask—it’s how instinctively they ask. As if expansion were the only logical next step. As if the point of having one successful thing is to have two. Then four. Then forty.

On an episode of The Daily Stoic podcast a little while back, Nate Silver called it “the obsession with scale.” We were talking about how the venture capitalist mindset—where success is defined by scaling 1000x—has seeped into how ordinary people think about their work. About what it means to have a successful podcast. A successful newsletter. A successful creative career. A successful anything.

“In the content space,” Silver said, “VCs tend to analogize content creators or media startups to tech companies. When it’s actually more like running a restaurant. You can run one really nice restaurant. If you’re very lucky, you can even franchise that to a couple of locations and you can write a cookbook and you can get on Iron Chef or whatever. But it doesn’t have to scale beyond that. Unless you want to be a Chipotle or something, which is fine.”

It is fine if you want to be a Chipotle. There’s nothing wrong with building something large if that’s genuinely what you set out to do. But in my experience, most people actually don’t really think at all about what they’re setting out to do. They don’t sit down and consider what success would look like for them, what “enough” would feel like, what winning their particular game would mean. And because they’re not clear on what they actually want, they end up chasing growth indiscriminately. More followers. More subscribers. More platforms. More revenue. More locations. More, more, more—until eventually their thing collapses under its own weight. Or it succeeds and doesn’t fail…but it is an enormous, life-consuming burden. 

“Do Not Go Past The Mark You Aimed For” is one of the most important laws in ​The 48 Laws of Power​. It’s about knowing where you’re trying to go and when you’ve gotten there. It’s about knowing what game you’re playing and when you’ve won. It’s about having the discipline to choose the target and not blow past it. 

I think about this with myself. ​I write books about Stoicism​. If I wrote about something with more mass appeal or if I wrote romance novels or if I ghostwrote celebrity memoirs, maybe I would sell more books, make more money, or be known by more people.

But that wasn’t the mark I was aiming for. If it were, I certainly wouldn’t have chosen an obscure school of ancient philosophy as the means to try to get there.

Or, could The Daily Stoic make more money if we got into t-shirts and hats and supplements and energy drinks and cheap merch? Probably. Could we license the brand to some conglomerate and cash out? I bet we could find a buyer. But if the point of all this was to endlessly raise the ceiling on the amount of money coming in, I would have selected a different line of work a long time ago.

So many people think they have to live a life they don’t want for a long time so that eventually, off in the distant future, they can live a life they do want. They need to make millions or get famous or earn their big break. Then and only then can they…

I’ve always found it’s better to think about what my ideal ordinary day looks like. That, at least, is the mark I am aiming for: for that ideal ordinary day to be most of my days. When an opportunity comes along or I’m faced with a decision, I ask myself: Will this get me closer to that ideal or further away? Will it give me more of the days I actually want to have, or fewer of them?

A really cool job opportunity? I’ll consider it. But wait, it means moving my family to D.C., wearing a suit most days, being on someone else’s schedule—and I won’t be able to write much? Never mind. I could make a lot of money investing in startups? Sounds great. But I’d have to read pitch decks and go to meetings all day? You know what, I’ll pass.

You might ask: “But isn’t this a privileged way to live?” Yes, I do feel very privileged that for me happiness is relatively cheap. My ideal day doesn’t require me to be rich or powerful or important. It just requires that I be good enough at something to sell my services on the open market and strong enough to say no to things that are beyond my needs. That is a privilege, and it’s more accessible than we think. There are plenty of billionaires who don’t have it, plenty of ordinary people who have never lost it.

So it doesn’t take some enormous amount of money. Nor do you have to be famous or well-connected or wildly successful.

It takes discipline. 

The discipline to figure out what you actually want your life to look like.

The discipline to turn down cool, lucrative opportunities. =

The discipline to say no to the investors, the acquirers, the well-meaning people who have ideas for how you can really blow this thing up.

The discipline to not go past the mark you aimed for.

The discipline to not scale.