One of the most famous episodes of Seinfeld is “The Contest.” In this episode, Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer compete to see who can demonstrate self-control the longest. The one who wins will be known as “master of their domain.”

What are they refraining from? If you’ve never seen the episode, you’ll just have to watch the episode for yourself…

The concept of self-mastery is an important one for writers. We spend a lot of our time obsessing over external obstacles such as frustrations with technology, agents or publishers not giving us a shot, not having enough time to write, interruptions from people, and a million other things.

But those are all beside the point. If we don’t master ourselves, nothing else matters.

Writing success really just comes down to arranging your life to make writing and publishing a priority. At the end of the day, it’s nothing more and nothing less.

For thousands of years, the greatest minds from all religions, cultures, and walks of life have emphasized the need for self-mastery. The great artist Leonardo da Vinci said, “One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.”

You can spend all your time worrying about the forces that want to control you from the outside, but you’ll get much further if you focus on mastering what’s on the inside.

Today’s Challenge: On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your self-mastery?