A thousand times a thousand is a million men, which is a lot of battles to set beside one person getting a grip on himself. The verse puts them on the same scale anyway and says the one person wins. It's easy to read that as a pep talk about willpower, but look at why the million is the easier fight: every one of them is someone else. The hard ones are small and unwatched, like the argument you don't restart in the car, or the sharp thing you think of and don't say. Spot one of those this morning before it gets going, and leave it there.
If one man conquer in battle a thousand times thousand men, and if another conquer himself, he is the greatest of conquerors.
The Dhammapada, verse 103 (trans. F. Max Muller)