"Commenting on the difference between the disciplined and the undisciplined way, he wrote, Nothing was ever achieved without discipline; and many an athlete and many a man has been ruined because he abandoned discipline and let himself grow slack.
Coleridge is the supreme tragedy of indiscipline. Never did so great a mind produce so little. He left Cambridge University to join the army; but he left the army; he returned to Oxford and left without a degree.
He began a paper called The Watchman which lived for ten numbers and then died. It has been said of him: "He lost himself in visions of work to be done, that always remained to be done. Coleridge had every poetic gift but one—the gift of sustained and concentrated effort."
In his head and in his mind he had all kinds of books. But the books were never composed outside Coleridge's mind, because he would not face the discipline of sitting down to write them out.
No one ever reached any eminence, and no one having reached it ever maintained it, without discipline."
from "Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life" by Donald S. Whitney
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