Saturday, December 27, 2014

Will Power and Discipline

Chiffons parisiens à la ville et à la scène.

I haven't vetted the whole site, but what I have read of Remez Sasson's self improvement blog is very good. He seems to be very honest. He has an openness of mind and a scholarly bent that I don't often find in the self help genre.

His article Will Power and Self Discipline could have been written by a Stoic. I'll let you read it yourself for the particulars, but the gist of it is that we build our willpower by practice. We practice doing things that we don't want to do.

Don't put the dishes off until later; do them now. Don't pay the bills later; pay them now.

He also mixes in some Stoic practice suffering. If you like sugar with your coffee, don't use sugar for a week, for example. This is familiar to us, but maybe the doing of unpleasant chores is less familiar.
We Stoics put ourselves into uncomfortable situations, but I don't know that we emphasize doing uncomfortable things. I don't, anyway.

Mr. Sasson does seem to be looking for at least a token worldly result... maybe I am mistaken about that. Wikipedia tells us that he quit a lucrative bank job to follow his dreams, so maybe not.

It's worth a look.


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Public domain image courtesy of the New York Public Library

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