If life were a zero-sum game and I had no regard for others, I'd be glad about others not being self-disciplined, as that would mean more room for me to succeed by being disciplined myself. But it's not a zero-sum game. The more of us who work hard at important things in life, the better off we all will be.
So please do apply self-discipline in your life. Having no discipline is like having a car with an engine that stops running frequently and won't exceed 2000 RPM.
Hard work does get easier in time, like working a muscle. And just like working out, you need to pace yourself -- approach hard work wisely and don't overdo it, even if you're enjoying it immensely.
I'm so glad my mom forced me to practice the piano - I wouldn't be the musician I am today without it... and I have no regrets about working hard at front-end web development. I owe my career in large part to the many hours I spent poring over JavaScript: The Definitive Guide and writing SPA web apps while others at my workplace were still using ASP and WebForms.
I don't think you've understood the article or you do not have the problems the author is having.
Disciplining myself is in a way like dealing with a child. If I force my inner child to do something it will resist, shut down, burn me out. The problem is I can't be creative if I can't convince my inner child that the activity we're doing is fun so I have to frame whatever work I'm doing in a playful way otherwise my inner child will go ”boooooooriiiiing” and either make me waste time on social media or, if I catch myself, battle me for control which is very tiring
>The problem is I can't be creative if I can't convince my inner child that the activity we're doing is fun so I have to frame whatever work I'm doing in a playful way otherwise my inner child will go ”boooooooriiiiing”
Well, the key to life is that we also need to do things that we find "boring", and that no amount of sugar-coating would make them appear fun to us.
Not just in general as a society (e.g. menial hard jobs, etc) or for maintainance (e.g. brushing our teeth or doing the dishes), but also in our everyday personal life, and for personal development and relationship with others.
Doing only fun things, or only things we can convince ourselves are fun, is a recipe for failure...
Plus, even fun things, we often need to do beyond the fun amount, if we want to get good at them.
(For example, we might enjoy playing piano, and even practiving for a while each day, but we need to study beyond the enjoyable fun material and duration, if we want to became classical or jazz musicians).
"Well, the key to life is that we also need to do things that we find "boring", and that no amount of sugar-coating would make them appear fun to us."
Sounds like a mother that doesn't want to argue about clearing the dish washer.
The key thing is to learn that all boring things should and can have a playful funny side and if you can't find them than you must make yourself one.
So clearing the dishwasher can be playful with dancing and singing or as a game. That's why google gamified the boring crowd source activity of repairing the local search.
The key is to cheat yourself a little bit.
Hey, I have no arguments with people over making hard things fun - that's great! The point is that those hard things get done well, one way or another.
Your perspective is great as long as it takes into account the fact that getting good at something, or achieving a major accomplishment, requires a lot of hard work - and that hard work is worth doing, even when setbacks and difficulties are encountered.
Effective, long-term hard work is most often done successfully by people who are enjoying a lot of it. Don't try to achieve mastery in a field you dislike!
This doesn’t sound like a realistic way to live your life.
For me, I have realized that I need to do many things that are hard/boring, and the key to motivating this action is by focusing on the completed product (“looking forward to where I’m going”) as opposed to enjoying every second of the activity (“moment by moment satisfaction”).
Whatever way you choose to make it easy for you to do it ... if you like the satisfaction at the end it's evenly good like making the way to the end more joyful.
> Well, the key to life is that we also need to do things that we find "boring", and that no amount of sugar-coating would make them appear fun to us.
A lot of successful "discipline" is merely a combination of sugar-coating and the sheer force of habit. If something actively feels "boring" to you, this is a signal that you're now drawing on your limited willpower, which should always be a last resort.
> Disciplining myself is in a way like dealing with a child.
Exactly! And while the entire person appears "self-disciplined" from the outside, it does not mean that the inner conversation between the adult and the child amounts to scolding the latter.
But not all (inner) children are born rebellious and maybe for some of them daily scolding does not lead to burnout. Who knows?
Rebelliousness is a concept about lining up with societal expectations. Perhaps some of us do our best creative work outside of those expectations. Why should we suppress that?
There’s more than one way to skin a cat. And sometimes the method that worked on one cat will all come undone another time.
Having said that the method that makes, to overly extend this macabre analogy, things feel like fun - seems like a more sustainable and wholesome ‘skin’
I think they understand it, but maybe they believe that advice is misleading. If you are enjoying it and having fun, then you are in your comfort zone, and that means you are improving at a much lower rate than your potential. This is true for any activity, from physical fitness to academic pursuits.
If you are in zone dominated by System 1 thinking and System 2 is on pause, then you are not building skill. There is nothing wrong with having fun in life for things that are not critical to you, but your core areas are developed with effort and focus.
I have not met a single successful self-made person that found success without struggle and focus on their craft.
>If you are enjoying it and having fun, then you are in your comfort zone, and that means you are _improving_ at a much lower rate than your potential. [...]
If you are in zone dominated by System 1 thinking and System 2 is on pause, then you are not building _skill_.
[My emphasis on "improving" and "skill" to highlight a misinterpretation.]
I understand your point but you've still misinterpreted her essay. (This is mostly the author's fault because of her short title that tries to be contrarian and the long body of text that's not written forcefully enough to break the readers' preconceived about "discipline" that was shaped by hundreds of other essays about the same topic.)
Her particular essay is not about "doing work" or "improving skill". Yes, many other essays about "discipline" are intertwined with work+skill but that's not her essay's main idea.
An example of non-work non-skill activity she wrote about is the joy of being in bed. She's wondering if attaching the concept of "discipline" to "going to bed early" is sabotaging the brain from going to bed early. If she likes the sensation of being in bed, why doesn't she just go to bed?!? She then wonders if "discipline" brings out the inner rebellious child that makes pleasurable activities hard to start. That's the meta-analysis her essay is trying to convey.
> If you are enjoying it and having fun, then you are in your comfort zone, and that means you are improving at a much lower rate than your potential.
This is not obvious at all. Improvement is dependent on focused, deliberate practice, and being "in the zone" makes it easier to sustain such practice over time. Willpower is a scarce resource; it seems especially silly to waste it on things that can be successfully "gamified" or made enjoyable.
Play and exploration are not mutually exclusive, in fact they seem intertwined. Children discover by playing. Exploration and staying in your comfort zone do seem mutually exclusive however, I wouldn't think playing prevents you from learning or doing new stuff. Or that any kind of joy is actually detrimental to your personal development.
> This is true for any activity, from physical fitness to academic pursuits.
I don't think it's true for all activities. The author is a writer. I don't think you can grind story building or maybe you can but I doubt you will get anything actually good or creative out of it. Do you know of any painters that grind painting like you can grind exercise?
All this advice about discipline is good for stuff like keeping your house clean, going to the gym, sucking it up and doing your tasks that suck at big corp or any other task that sucks because it's boring or it physically hurts. It's boring because you already kind of know what needs to be done so there is no novelty to it, it doesn't need your creative input and if you are a creative person that sucks.
I care more about being satisfied with my life, getting pleasure out of it. That to me is being successful. I don't need a vacation home and a yacht or private jet so why would I grind and toil for extra money?
> Do you know of any painters that grind painting like you can grind exercise?
Do you think Leonardo got good enough to do the Sistine chapel by daubing a doodle or two when the mood took him?
You absolutely can and, to get good, must grind such things. Everyone knows this is true of musicianship; painting and writing are no different. (Maybe painters don't grind their technique as much nowadays as they once did, but the decline of technique in painting over time reflects that.)
As Picasso said: 'Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working'.
And maybe it's not either or, maybe when you're composing music or thinking about your new book or project you need to be in a creative state and that is very different from a grinding disciplined state that requires you to actually execute on your vision.
At that point, you no longer have to grind, because your brain has hardwired decision paths that are automatic and produce correct results for extremely complex problems like "is this character likeable and understandable by the reader", and you can effortlessly add a few high value paragraphs to their backstory. But it's foolhardy to think that level of "flow" can be achieved out of thin air, without writing hundreds of characters before them, re-reading them, getting feedback from other readers, studying other briliant authors with a eye for their technique etc.
I don't agree with the 10k hours bullshit popularized by Gladwell, google a bit about him and you will see he admitted that all his "non-fiction" books were actually insight porn more than teaching you anything useful. I liked his books too until I realized he just made up nice pop-culture stories and pretended to tell you the truth.
That said of course you have to have some level of practice and knowledge about whatever you want to create before you can be inspired to create something new. That doesn't mean you can be creative just because you've had practice. I remember Huberman and others talking about circadian rythms and how people are more creative at night, can't remember the exact reasons, might've been something about cortisol being lower then. I do believe cortisol levels are a hint as usually you are less creative on "uppers" like caffeine or adderall than you are without them because you always want to do things while on them and not actually think deeply about your problem.
You should really watch that video, it goes into great details, backed by scientific research, into how and when the 10,000 hours trope works and where it fails.
Creativity and skill are somewhat orthogonal, you can be an exceptionally well read and educated person yet never publish anything. But it's extremely unlikely you will create anything out of thin air without good technical skills. We like to to obsess about outliers like Beethoven, the deaf composer, but in reality the vast majority of famous musicians are recruited from accomplished instrumentalists.
Being too hard on yourself to the point where you're avoiding hard work because of the guilt is counter-productive.
It's productive to forgive yourself for messing up, then make realistic improvements. It's unproductive to just wallow in a lack of discipline, or to spend more time beating yourself up than actually making improvements, or to try to achieve impossible goals to make up for past mistakes.
I think a big problem with general advice is that a lot of people listen to the advice that isn't good for them, because that's the kind of advice they already follow (even though it's terrible for their situation). The partial solution is to think of yourself as a friend, and ask what you'd advise them - that cuts through a lot of the special pleading we make for ourselves.
That makes sense but in order for it to work like you say people should be applying self-discipline on things that are actually “good for humanity as a whole”.
It is quite challenging to know the full impact our actions. The best we can do is plan, hope, and adapt.
I think the best rule for life that I know of and that can apply to anyone is "love your neighbor as yourself": treat each person you run into as you'd like to be treated yourself, and when you're making decisions that will affect others (like users of your product) treat them like you'd want to be treated in your decisions.
Zooming out a bit, yes it is hard to know what's good for humanity as a whole. But I'd venture to say that the most valuable asset by far towards this end is the truth - get that at any cost.
This topic has been on my mind for a couple years now, and it's interesting how I came to a similar conclusion as the author.
There are a ton of things I really enjoy doing: running, boxing, playing music, writing, drawing... however, I always struggle to get started. It always feels like a chore and I'm baffled as to why. I should be excited about initiating any of those activities, but I'm not! The moment they enter a to-do list, I know they also enter the realm of procrastination and avoidance. It's weird.
As I grow older and more experience, I realize "it's all in the mind". If you have the right mindset towards the activity you want to do, you have 80%+ of the job done.
Using running as an example, I went from running a couple days per week to running every day. Why? Simply put, a mentality shift.
Before, I would think about it as "I should run at least 30 mins, 3 days per week". Now, I think about it as: "Let's move a bit, go to that nice canal by the river". In a nutshell... I moved my mindset from "I must be disciplined" to "let's play", pretty much as the author states.
How do you apply the mind-shift to projects where you have to finish something in order to advance? I have a couple of songs here that need mixing, but since they entered my to-do list, they are in procrastination realm ...
But sometimes the thing you like is mostly about doing the thing and leaves little room for playing.
There is a lot of wisdom in this. "Discipline" is quite often "punitive." You think "if I don't force myself, I won't do it."
The more you practice this, the less you trust yourself: "I'm bad, and if I'm not constantly on guard, I'll relapse into badness."
If you think you'll never clean the garage unless you force yourself, you foreclose any chance that some day, you'll think "You know what? I feel like cleaning the garage right now."
"That'll never happen!" you think? Such a low opinion you have of yourself.
>The more you practice this, the less you trust yourself: "I'm bad, and if I'm not constantly on guard, I'll relapse into badness."
This is learned helplessness. The solution I have found to that is to trust that if I try, for reasons unknown to my weak, finite self, things will be made possible for some degree of success and it will be enough. Then work backwards after a certain amount of time trying, look for something good. Embrace a happy memory or some tangible reward from the period of effort as enough for now, be grateful for it, and keep trying.
I did give it a try, the whole Jocko Willink "wake up at 4:30 in the morning" shpiel. It works at first, but it's not sustainable. Someone or something is going to keep me awake significantly beyond 9 PM and I'd need to spend weeks running a "waking time" deficit pulling back the sleep schedule, so for my purposes it's simply an antipattern.
Trust and gratitude are like a backdoor to acting as if I had discipline. I find it's easier to cultivate them being theist, but the approach should not be utterly anathema to anyone who disbelieves the "black pill" ideology. The people who do believe that spin what may well be real disadvantages into a convenient license to do basically nothing about anything important.
I think there's a lot of wisdom behind "Believe in the process".
I am not a theist, but it took me a while to understand that some processes take much longer to realise their potential and our abilities to detect the differences are limited to seeing differences on a certain scale.
What I mean by that is that if a process takes about a month to get a (visible) result, so if you only spend one day doing it and try to measure the differences after it you would see no difference.
Because the 4:30 thing is so jarring for effect, it's easy to get caught up on the exact time, but what Jocko really pushes is having that purpose that gets you out of bed. It's finding time where you can be alert and focused with zero distractions. For some that's night time, but personally I've never been productive at night. For me, I wake up around 6am every morning and haven't used an alarm in years. I workout, and have a couple hours of mostly uninterrupted time to work on projects, go surf, or just sit and think.
One final note, even Jocko breaks his own rule when he's out late from traveling or doing events. That is the part where freedom comes out of discipline.
The simple step of letting natural light into your bedroom makes it a lot easier to wake up near dawn, which generally gives you quite a bit of unstructured time to prepare for the day. Of course the flip side is that you'll be a bit more tired in the evening and at night, but that also makes for a nice self-sustaining pattern. It's a good example of replacing self-enforced "discipline" with natural adaptation.
But leaving curtains open lets in too much light at night. Especially cities and suburbs which are never truly dark, but even in the country when the moon is bright.
Now I want to build an "alarm" that silently opens curtains...
It's still a great tradeoff. Even comparatively strong LED lights are generally a small fraction of the intensity of true natural light. You get used to it.
Why negative reinforcement would be necessarily bad? If you only do what you feel like doing, at the moment you feel like doing it, that's the perfect recipe for disaster.
I am against the modern hedonistic zeitgeist and, on the contrary, think a lot of current social issues could be mitigated by more discipline and "hard work".
On a side note : am I the only one who is tired of the current (decade(s)-long...) trend in blogs/articles of "deconstructing" positive/common-sense behaviors? "The dangers of tidiness", "Embrace your bipolarity", "Why I stopped aiming for excellence" etc... (I am not denying the risks of being too extreme and I understand the "click-bait" need of those writers, but still, it is very telling...)
> I am against the modern hedonistic zeitgeist and, on the contrary, think a lot of current social issues could be mitigated by more discipline and "hard work"
While I sympathize totally with this, I'll also stand on what I said. F. Scott Fitzgerald's quote about "holding two opposite ideas in your mind at the same time, etc. etc."
If you don't have any work ethic at all ("the modern hedonistic zeitgeist") then maybe you won't ever exercise or keep your weight down. Or clean the garage.
If you really do, you don't have to keep beating yourself up about it.
Although you're right that, for some people, that might be a Good Thing.
> On a side note : am I the only one who is tired of the current (decade(s)-long...) trend in blogs/articles of "deconstructing" positive/common-sense behaviors? "The dangers of tidiness", "Embrace your bipolarity", "Why I stopped aiming for excellence" etc... (I am not denying the risks of being too extreme and I understand the "click-bait" need of those writers, but still, it is very telling...)
I think the you're seeing unconnected things as connected here, it's very much a problem with the internet in general, these blog posts and articles aren't aimed at everyone, they're talking to a specific subset of people who do have in fact have issues with toxic ideas about work, "The perfect is the enemy of the good" is important advice _for perfectionists_ like my sister desperately needed to hear that growing up, I most certainly did not.
The internet in all of it's design tells you that any advice that gets popular enough must be some universal wisdom even when the people who write these articles do prefix everything they say with constant reminders that their advice is only for specific people (and the ones that don't do that claim to have found the answer to everything and start cults).
This trend you're seeing isn't a cultural shift, it's just a collection of people with specific problems trying to help each other. I could say the same about the life-optimisation obsessed section of the self help market that does shout about hard work, discipline, and grindset.
tl;dr they're only "positive common sense behaviours" to you, but the article's are for the people for whom they are in fact toxic blockades to happiness. My sister really could've done with hearing that tidiness isn't more important than being able to actually use your space.
Well, I agree there is no planned things & that I am just connecting random dots.
But would you have found the same proportion of books or articles promoting what seems counter-intuitive behaviors/mindsets just for the contradiction itself?
I think the authors just need to find an easy way to say something new, and what is more easy than going against something "common"?
> I think the authors just need to find an easy way to say something new, and what is more easy than going against something "common"?
I'm sure some of them do, but having seen first hand the damage to productivity and happiness these "common behaviours" can do to people who don't have my personality type, the books deconstructing them and putting them back together for people you start to realise are just another kind of productivity guide but for atypical people.
There are lots of books deconstructing ordinary weight loss advice for people with eating disorders as well, the thing is that once you get cynical enough you start to realise that they really are just the other side of the same coin, the goal is the same "tell people how to get to a healthy weight" just with different perspective.
It took a whole hell of a lot of "deconstructing common behaviours" for people to settle on not beating children in schools, we didn't get rid of the concept of discipline and punishment, we just picked up a new, more universal framework that works better.
mmm, there is something to be said for perfection being the enemy of productive.
Eg for software, at some point you have to stop tweaking and just ship.
More generally, sometimes habits that are recommended in order to boost productivity and/or happiness can act in such a way as to reduce productivity and/or happiness.
Maybe that's not what you were talking about though?
Sure, am also all for efficiency and if something gives marginal improvement for a disproportionate amount of time or efforts,then most of the time it's not needed.
I was more against this current "let it be" mindset that leads to all those buggy and low-quality things. But even more about in daily life, with people embracing their "mediocre-self".
> You think "if I don't force myself, I won't do it."
Sometimes this is true, at least for any meaningful timescale.
For example, I figured that I'd finish a showcase of my past projects on my homepage, yet the task itself just looms over me - needing to go through years of notes, figure out what even can get disclosed and then actually finishing the functionality for displaying them in my site.
Since I haven't forced myself to do it, that task has now not been finished for about 8 months. The most progress I made was fixing some technical debt of the site itself, which still doesn't really solve the actual problem that I should have been solving, even when doing so is like pulling teeth.
Ergo, if you want results, sometimes you need discipline, instead of counting on fickle motivation.
Or you could try the strategy recommended in the article - trick yourself into wanting to do it.
Wouldn't going through years of notes be fun? Instead of dreading it, shouldn't you be eagerly anticipating the walk down memory lane that this showcase will entail?
> For example, I figured that I'd finish a showcase of my past projects on my homepage, yet the task itself just looms over me - needing to go through years of notes, figure out what even can get disclosed and then actually finishing the functionality for displaying them in my site.
A common solution to a "looming" task is to break it into subtasks. Figure out what's the smallest unit of this work that you can complete successfully, and just get at it. The goal is to attack the problem gradually and reduce the feeling of discomfort around it over time.
> A common solution to a "looming" task is to break it into subtasks.
Definitely, which is also why techniques like Pomodoro are so useful - also making you approach working in smaller increments, so its less intimidating.
Unless you end up taking pleasure in padding your backlog instead of actually solving problems, like what almost happened to me before I purged some of it and actually got around to doing things instead of planning.
Discipline is getting things done without relying on something as finicky as your motivation of the day. Some days you will be motivated and some days you won't be, but you want to try and have consistency in whatever goal you are trying to achieve. It helps you get there more reliably.
I've heard this explanation so many times but it feels like it has an enormous missing piece, like, maybe I just have fucking ADHD or something but never in my life has doing things and going places I don't want to ever gotten easier with repetition or consistency, it still needs motivation because ability to get up and do things is what motivation _is_.
Unless by discipline people mean literally disciplining myself when I fail I'm just gonna remain confused.
Sorry I wasn't clear about what I mean. I don't mean the ends, I mean the means. like exercising, or studying, or even brushing my fucking teeth have never in my life stopped being a manual decision. I want the ends obviously, like everyone else does, want them a lot in fact, but discipline just seems like an impossible thing for me because it _never_ seems to stop needing motivation to do things I need to do however long of a streak I do manage to build.
I think the author is confusing discipline with... something. Discipline is not simply doing things you don't like. It's a trained mentality that helps you do what needs doing (or not doing, such as procrastinating).
Making some activities more playful, and therefore pleasant, has it's own merits, but life isn't so kind as to make the whole of your existence a playground. At some point, you really do have to buckle down, whether or not it is fun. A disciplined attitude will definitely be a benefit.
Yes. Discipline is purposeful pain seeking. Procrastination is pain avoidance. Accepting that pain is inevitable is not easy, and it gets harder in an environment that caters to comfort.
Surprisingly, I have done my best work when depressed: I knew I would be in pain whether I was procrastinating or not, so I sought the fleeting euphoria one gets when a task is completed.
When I'm on antidepressants, I feel almost no emotional pain, and I avoid tasks that can be painful, which means I don't achieve much. I just want to continue feeling no pain.
I wish that had been the case for me. Anxiety and depression go hand in hand with me, so being apathetic and procrastinating via escapism (games and fiction books) were my only solace. As you can imagine, that spiraled out of control rather quickly.
It took finally accepting that I needed structure to start turning things around (along with medicine). I can hold the anxiety and depression at bay if I don't procrastinate, but I suspect it will forever be a temptation to take the easy way out when I get stressed about anything.
Short term pleasure is easy to come by, but discipline is thev only path to contentment, joy and peace for me.
> Yes. Discipline is purposeful pain seeking. Procrastination is pain avoidance.
? I'm not sure I can ever agree to that. Discipline is more about having commitment to a thing.
It's not about grasping nettles each day until you develop a callus, it's about doing something you have some interest in some way until you get better at it.
No professional sports player ends up professional in the field because they hate sports. No professional musician ends up that good and trained because they hate music. No scientist ends up good at their job because they hate it.
It's not about seeking pain, if you've convinced yourself it is you will likely burn out as you're not following something you actually enjoy or have an interest in. You may have found disciplin in that, but frankly it will just be 'disciplin to embrase pain' which may be another skill in and of itself.
Don't get me wrong, loving science doesn't prepare you for the hours you will spend getting your head around the maths that underpin it. No love of sports will prepare you for waking up with your muscles exhausted. No love of music will prepare you for freaking out when you can't get that the right notes or timing on a piece after days of effort.
These are not the things you're developing a disciplin in. And imo is dangerous to mistake the fact that tou are. You're developing a disciplin in the topics you enjoy and discovering the real world (unfortunately) isn't all about disney musicals. (Which if you assume it is, sorry buddy, you're not going to be randomly selected to join NASA to go to the moon tomorrow, you're not a trained test pilot/astronaught)
I havent thought about it much before. But the part about being your most productive and doing the best work when depressed is a bit too relatable. I can confidently say my productivity and quality of output just shined their brightest in the few lowest points i had.
Get comfortable being uncomfortable, and you'll never be uncomfortable.
Whenever someone starts to talk about their own problems and shortcomings, and then tries to get _you_ to agree that those shortcomings aren't really _their fault_, be careful; not only are you being lied to by them, but they are also being lied to by them.
And if they get _you_ to concur, then the defense against change has succeeded. The status quo remains untouched.
If this lady ever starts swimming more often, it won't be because a bunch of other people agreed with her idea that discipline is the enemy; it will be because she found some.
> not only are you being lied to by them, but they are also being lied to by them.
In a nutshell. Perfectly phrased.
> if they get _you_ to concur, then the defense against change has succeeded.
This is (unfortunately) a very common trap people fall into psychologically I'm convinced. And I can point to when in life I've done it, and continue to do it. It seems more related to 'feeling good' and then finding a way of (mentally) rewarding the fact that you didn't do something that you should have done.
Unfortunately, in large doses and in the long run, it's not very healthy and it's very close to how people get wrapped in conspiracy theories. E.g. it's not my fault everyone is against me. Why should I try when they're just going to reset the economy. Why should I have done differently, they still would have done X, Y, Z to me...
It's a comfort blanket pretending that there is some external barrier preventing you from doing things even if they are normally enjoyable.
> If this lady ever starts swimming more often, it won't be because a bunch of other people agreed with her idea that discipline is the enemy;
No, it will be because she tells herself "hey self! let's go swimming, it'll be fun", as opposed to "hey, we HAVE to go swimming". The whole point of the article is about managing one's 'inner child'/monkey mind via effective salesmanship.
Discipline has no value of it's own. It's a method, among others. There's no way to deduce from a perfectly orgamized garage weather it is because the oganizer had discipline or if he had fun.
That presupposes that any activity can be fun for any person[1]. I simply do not believe that to be true.
I might not be able to tell if your garage is clean because you find cleaning to be fun, but there's a fair bet the inverse will be apparent.
1: Perhaps I should rephrase this as every activity for any person. At some point, you'll need to do something you don't find fun, and can't be gamified.
Every activity is fun relative to worse activities. So when confronted about something you don't find fun, you can perhaps frame it in a way to make it still preferable to something else. Perhaps through boredom:
While I can relate to the author, I also agree with this.
As much as I'd like to remember in the moment that riding my bike or some creative project is fun, and get excited to get up and at it ... I don't.
In my better times, discipline has worked like a starter motor, getting me over that initial resistance in a way that no conscious thought really could.
> I think the author is confusing discipline with... something. Discipline is not simply doing things you don't like. It's a trained mentality that helps you do what needs doing (or not doing, such as procrastinating).
The article is about author saying that she can't even persuade herself to do the things she does like.
> The problem is that the person we’re actually rebelling against is ourselves.
Yes, you manage that feeling with decision-making that's outcome oriented. Willpower, discipline, self-control, whatever you want to call it, is of course in limited supply, but for many, it is also trainable and simply neglected.
Discipline is what you have to use when you don't have a habit. Once you have built the habit to do the thing, discipline doesn't enter the picture. It's the default. You don't buy candy because buying candy is not a thing you do. You go running because it's 9 am on a Monday and that's what you do every Monday at 9 am.
This always is made to sound easy but I can count on one hand the number of "habits" I successfully built around things I didn't want to do. Getting up in the morning to go to work vs skipping morning classes back in college is the main one. But it's still unpleasant and I still just do it because that's how I get paid, not because it's a "default." "Not eating as much junk food" was a slightly easier one - because you don't buy it once when doing groceries and then it's not available during the week - but exercise or other un-fun decisions you have to make every day? Nope.
I agree with both your sentiments actually. A lot of the times, I do not like going to the gym on certain days. Like Friday morning leg days - I do not like it to this day. But I go anyway - why? Because friday 7 am is leg training day and it's like a habit/ritual at this point. I guess that's the aspect of discipline I like.
Similar with moving away from my home office at 7pm. I have just trained myself to not go in there after 7pm, resisting the urge to check Slack or anything. I'll get a call if anything blows up, so it's become a habit at this point to not even glance over to my home office after 7pm
I started having more success with setting up habits after reading up on habit formation science.
The junk food example is one aspect on frequency and availability. There are other aspects to habit formation like understanding how habits are triggered (by system1) and creating or removing triggers, how location can play into habit triggers, how habits can be more easily bootstrapped on top of existing habits, etc
I liked the book Good Habits Bad Habits which is more science based than the pop stuff but I would guess that Atomic Habits covers similar stuff.
I guess somehow when I was a child my parents thought me something I cannot fully understand now. Nowadays I cannot enjoy entertaining myself if I haven't first finished my "homework" (as an adult, my homework is: work, chores,... the usual stuff).
So, I have this kind of "discipline" not because I enjoy doing "homework" but because I want to fully enjoy my free time without thinking "damn, when I'm done playing video games I have to wash the dishes".
As a kid I could never understood the other kids that on a Friday afternoon were going out to play knowing that they had homework to do in the weekend. I was like "I cannot enjoy playing basketball now knowing that later on or tomorrow I'll have to do the maths homework... so let's first finish the maths homework and then I'll have the entire day/weekend to do whatever the hell I want".
Not sure if this is a good or a bad thing. It's normal to me at my age, though.
I have this mindset but the problem with it is that in my current life situation (working from home with 5 kids), the amount of work I have is unbounded. I am bad at taking time for high quality rest when I feel burdened by the chores I could be doing (which are endless and recurring) so I end up wasting time in ways that's not actually fun or restful.
As a fairly "disciplined" person, it's easy for me to say "Yeah, but..." to this, but being open to serendipity has real benefits, when it comes to creativity and "big ideas."
But she is not just talking about that. She's also talking about letting go of discipline, as tool for self-improvement, and mental health.
I can see that. It would not work for me, but it is not a bad thing.
The issue that I always have, about people prescribing What Works For Me, to others, is that it often doesn't work, in other people. Not judging others, when something that we do/take pride in does not apply, can be difficult.
I enjoy living in a world of variety. People that are different from me, make my life richer. In order to have this richness, I need to accept those that differ from me. That can be a challenge.
Getting back to "discipline," I have heard a quote:
"Winners do what they have to do, and losers do what they want to do."
I'm not a fan of the terms "winners" and "losers," but that's just me, and the approach I take. The quote does have a good message, if we don't get hung up on the terms used to describe people.
Interesting contrast between this thread and the hustle porn thread.
I suspect it depends on individual creativity. Some people have very little and don't miss it, and a hyper-managed & disciplined life makes them feel like they're achieving important things.
Others do and they're always going to find it harder to find a balance between getting useful boring shit done and inventing and creating cool original stuff - an inherently non-linear process, which needs fallow periods and down time and a certain amount of chaos, as well as work and practice.
I just want to stress one thing: starting some activity is hard. Once I started an activity it is usually not that unpleasurable at all, even things like doing taxes, cleaning, writing this email I tried avoiding for weeks, etc.
For me that means that reducing the barrier to start is the most important aspect to get things done, gamification (as suggested in the article) can help of course.
>What if the moment our better self suggests an early bedtime or a lap in the pool or writing a poem, it starts to sound like a scolding parent telling us what we ought to do. So we become a little like a stubborn child, asserting our independence by digging in and not moving.
It's Freudian psychology [1] that adults are the ones who have integrated their super-ego into their ego. If there is a separation between 'self' and 'better self', then the development doesn't seem to be finished.
Like the author, I don't like to do the stuff that the better self suggests. I can trick myself to follow the better self with discipline or by gamifying the task, but I don't know how to overcome the separation and make those tasks 'mine'.
> It's Freudian psychology [1] that adults are the ones who have integrated their super-ego into their ego.
It is impossible, if I understand Freud. Ego is defined as a place of a conflict between SuperEgo and Id. SuperEgo and Id are both play their essential roles, they are needed components, and the conflict between them stems from the fact that they are not the same. So the conflict is inevitable and Ego is the place to resolve it.
> Like the author, I don't like to do the stuff that the better self suggests.
What do you mean by a "better self"? Stuff like to make something nice to yourself, especially at the physical level is mostly about Id in a Freudian psychology. It is the work of Id to seek pleasant physical sensations. But SuperEgo says that you need to conform to social norms and to not allow yourself to force other people to have sex with you every time your Id feels that way. So Id and SuperEgo clash in Ego which finally makes a decision.
The idea to let yourself to take pleasure going to bed early instead of resisting it seems to me as an Id idea. Though the idea to read twitter a little more before going to bed is also essentially the seeking of an instant gratification. I don't know how psychoanalysis handle it: a conflict of Id vs Id?
That's difficult to define. I think I have used it in the same way the author uses it in the article. I took the liberty to equate the better self with the SuperEgo but that could be wrong.
The way I read your comment, the SuperEgo consists out of social norms that only exist because society exist. But there are things that we know are good for us, that are pleasant to us, but we still don't do them. Are they part of the SuperEgo?
> The way I read your comment, the SuperEgo consists out of social norms that only exist because society exist.
Not just like that. It is about ideas of Good and Evil absorbed in a childhood. It is mostly is a social things, but not quite. Though from other hand human is defined though a society, Homo Sapience cannot become a human without growing in a group of other humans. All the essential things, like a language are acquired through education. So in a broad sense yes, SuperEgo is a product of a society.
> But there are things that we know are good for us, that are pleasant to us, but we still don't do them. Are they part of the SuperEgo?
I do not know. Probably professional psychoanalytics are do not know either, and if asked would debate between themselves for days.
Freud said that Id is about primitive drives of a behavior, like food, water, sex. I think that any acquired conditional reflexes seeking instant gratification (like obsessive refreshing of a twitter for new tweets to consume) are also belong to Id. While any "high level" idea of what is good for you belongs to SuperEgo.
When thing is good for us and is pleasant to us, then it technically belongs to both, as to Id, so to SuperEgo. How psychoanalisys handle this I do not know. If it was up to me, I'd say that my knowledge that something is good for me is a part of SuperEgo, while an expectation of a pleasure is a part of Id, so they are different drives working from different parts of psyche. Why I choose not to do it is a tricky part, because SuperEgo and Id agree on this, but it doesn't happen. The author proposes an explanation of Inner Child resisting discipline, and I think that any explanation would need to bring something in addition to "good for me" and "pleasure to do". Something that triggers a conflict in Ego.
> then the development doesn't seem to be finished
It's never finished, that's the point, if you want to keep growing the a part of you must separate a bit and drag itself towards the better possible future, then later drag the other lump of you either gently or kicking and screaming. But this "non integration" seems to be the "engine for growth". Even our society as a whole embraces a similar mechanism to "force growth".
You can have integration and comfort, but... you'll need to oursource the growth and suffering that comes with it (think of the billionaines chillin' and vibin' while striving engineers and tormented artists do the real work towards the betterment of humanity). That's kind of the sad truth, some need to be non-integrated and under some amount of suffering for the wheels to keep turning.
The dutch word "prestatiemaatschappij" is fitting here, meaning "performance society".
It suggests that life is fast, nothing but duties, must-dos, which when fully internalized will also apply to leisure. Relaxing is a task as is keeping in touch with friends. As you engage in the task, your thoughts are with the next task. You're never in the moment, nothing is spontaneous, it's robotic.
You're juggling 10 balls and are doing an adequate job in not dropping any of them. You master a "full" life.
>I know, too, that slipping into bed is one of the most delicious sensations there is, so why do I postpone that feeling every night, as though determined to be miserable and tired the next day?
It's not clear to me what the author is suggesting. Yes, I agree we focus a bit too much on self improvement and perhaps should relax about certain things. But if I start to believe that, for medical reasons, or any other reason, I really should go to the gym, and I struggle doing it because I feel it's not my environment, how do I start without a bit of self-discipline?
I could choose another sport, one that is actually fun and I look forward to -- I've done that, but even in that case, sometimes I feel lazy. What is it that I should do?
It's weird to me because so many of the commenters seem to take the author's point to be "no discipline ever" when she was actually talking about a very specific set of circumstances in which she considers discipline to be counter-productive. But almost nobody is engaging with that idea!
Well, discipline is nothing more really than a delayed gratification rule set. Kids refuse a bath usually not because they’re rebelling against themselves or the parents, but because they don’t get the concept of delayed gratification yet. You make little sacrifices in the present to ensure better future.
This is going to sound slightly harsh, and by no means it’s an invitation to stop thinking or pondering, I think it’s kind of good to be skeptical and think of possible major oversights in the way we live our life, but this kind of hairsplitting wordsmithing is useless, and possibly what is causing this person to neglect that discipline is just a helpful concept. Reading “an embarrassing amount” of self-help books is not a good sign either, but yes, the majority of that crap is just that; crap.
No one can teach you or force you to like exercise, until you do it and like it, then you understand, then you’ll probably fall off the wagon a couple of times, but at least you’ll know that you’re just being lazy, and that’s fine sometimes, but mostly you’ll have to gain experience in fighting laziness tendencies, and it’s probably harder for some people than others depending on many variables I can’t even list.
Biggest factor for people not having discipline (or not wanting to have it, not liking it, etc…) is that they want a quick solution that makes sense, where the answer is that it’s always difficult, you just have to learn to enjoy it and find ways to come to terms with it. Practice more and do it again.
The author is not rebelling against discipline, but really against the self help industry.
> Kids refuse a bath usually not because they’re rebelling against themselves or the parents, but because they don’t get the concept of delayed gratification yet
I'm confused by this thought because there _isn't_ any delayed gratification in kids taking a bath, as she said, kids love it once they're in there, and they're usually not even running their own bath if they're the age I think she's talking about, so where's the delay, walking to the bathroom? There's certainly less delay than going swimming, and kids love that too.
Getting kids into the bath, even though they like it once they're in there, and given, as she says in the article, that they've liked it before isn't a problem of delayed gratification. It's a problem of routine and requirement, of apathy and change. You have to stop whatever it is you're doing and go take a bath _every day_, my nephew absolutely loves going to the park, but if we did it every day there'd be so many days where he doesn't feel like it, even if he loves it every time he gets there.
This is exactly the point the author is making, discipline is about doing things that need doing, the question is whether it's still discipline if it's something you're doing only for your own enjoyment, and whether finding enjoyment out of things you need to do is enough.
> there _isn't_ any delayed gratification in kids taking a bath, as she said, kids love it once they're in there
Keyword here is "once", kids love it _once_ they're there. The point is that -at the time when the parent is asking the kid to stop what they're doing and shower- they (don't want to / don't understand why they should / etc...) stop what they're doing. Take a look at the Stanford marshmallow experiment[1].
I don't see why it discipline can't be about both though, delayed gratification _and_ routine and requirement as you said. I'd add that routine can help (mainly for kids) in establishing a pattern where the value of delayed gratification can be harnessed.
> discipline is about doing things that need doing,
There's nothing inherent in what the word discipline means that signifies anything regarding doing what needs to be done. It's more about doing what you understand to be good for you later, even if you don't fully (or irrationally) don't want to do now, specifically if it's a small sacrifice now for a greater reward later.
> Keyword here is "once", kids love it _once_ they're there. The point is that -at the time when the parent is asking the kid to stop what they're doing and shower- they (don't want to / don't understand why they should / etc...) stop what they're doing.
Yeah but that seems like a completely different concept from delaying though, they're not any _more_ gratified being in the bath than they would've been playing tag or whatever they were doing before. And again it doesn't apply if you make it not something regular they have to do, getting kids to change what they're doing like swapping games isn't anywhere near as hard as getting kids to swap games where one of them is a bath.
> Take a look at the Stanford marshmallow experiment[1].
I know all about the Stanford Marshmallow experiment, it's a miserable abortion of an experiment that everyone talks about like received wisdom when every attempt to repeat it's long term findings has like half the effect if you account for even the slightest confounding variables.
(Sorry I'm dunking on it so much, I had to write a paper on it during my degree, everything they found about the kids doing better in life because they could delay gratification completely disappears once you realise that the kids who could wait were just the kids who grew up with more money and never had to worry about food at all, and once you account for parental income and stability you find out the differences in life outcomes are entirely caused by familial wealth.)
Read the follow up studies section if you want to know what I'm talking about, some of the confounding variables they didn't account for include "early cognitive ability and behaviour, family background, and home environment" but also trust in the researcher, if the child had had a promise broken by an adult even _kind of_ recently they were far more likely to fail the test.
Also having read a lot of those studies for that paper, I can say that even the Wikipedia article feels a bit generous to it.
</rant>
> There's nothing inherent in what the word discipline means that signifies anything regarding doing what needs to be done. It's more about doing what you understand to be good for you later, even if you don't fully (or irrationally) don't want to do now, specifically if it's a small sacrifice now for a greater reward later.
Yeah that sounds right actually. I never thought of it like that, thank you.
The issues in the article seem quite complex to me. But every time I re-read the first three paragraphs, I cannot help but think, "Irina Dumitrescu is a sage."
Discipline is a multifaceted thing. The discipline required for success is not merely a "go put yourself in the chair and type it out", nor is making the task "fun" or "play" quite the same thing. Discipline is also for the mind itself. To be more successful, one must curate the thoughts that he/she has. If there is a thought that is particularly destructive it might be time to apply some CBT/meditation/therapy to figure out why that thought is there and how to make it stop. There is a difference between doing the things one must do and fighting oneself the entire time, and doing the things that one must do and not minding doing so. In one of these, you have imposed discipline, and in the other you have self-discipline.
I am still not as productive as many people I know, but if instead of comparing myself to others I compare to who I was vs who I am... I have made outrageous improvements.
EDIT: To me, the single most glorious thing about being a human is that I can choose to change my mind and then actually do so. It may be difficult, it may take time, but I can change my nature unlike the other creatures of this Earth who seem to be a bit more static.
If you don't mind doing the things you're doing, is "discipline" really a useful word for describing this? I'm not necessarily disagreeing; it just looks like an argument about definitions, and perhaps a bit pointless. Though I agree that CBT, meditation and introspection should be a part of your "making sure I don't find it painful to do some worthwhile things" toolkit, which is a very useful point.
Delayed gratification? That's one way to put it. Another way is "different gratification". Instead of eating chocolate you are eating a dream of future chocolate.
So becoming disciplined could be called developing a taste for dreams.
When the glow of accomplishing a step in your 12 step plan towards chocolate-accquirement is actually more satisfying than eating the chocolate, a shift in taste has occurred. And they call you "disciplined".
That's something totally different. Delay of gratification, the act of resisting an impulse to take an immediately available reward in the hope of obtaining a more-valued reward in the future. The ability to delay gratification is essential to self-regulation, or self-control, aka discipline.
>"few people really need advice about how to live their lives. They know how they ought to be living their lives. The trick is learning how to follow their own best instinct."
I don't think it's that simple. I think it's worth questioning whether the wants you have that you're battling so hard with are actually your wants rather than the desires of others. It's not so easy to figure out what your own instinct is.
I think what manifests as a need for discipline quite often is people trying to mold themselves into something that they simply aren't without recognizing that fact. The author mentions sleep hygiene and that is an example for me. I've struggled with proper 'sleep hygiene' a lot, and of course I thought i just need more discipline. During the pandemic doing remote work I figured out that I actually love having a really weird sleep schedule, it's just hard to square with an ordinary work day.
I think it's actually easy to declare oneself lazy and in need of discipline, rather than changing things up to do what you genuinely want to do.
There's this metaphor where you have a King (discipline) and a Queen (spontaneousness).
They have to "marry" in order for you to be the most productive person.
If your King tries to command your Queen and she refuses, it's not going to go well. As the author has already seen, it's quite hard to go to sleep or have fun by a decree.
Without discipline you get to nowhere.
At the start discipline is hard because we are a human which our brain wants to do the easiest task available to preserve energy. to prevent this situation we have to train our brain to obey us not otherwise. repeating this pattern lets your mind knows that you are the boss not itself.
The critical part here is *you have to separate yourself from your mind/brain*, in other words you are not your mind/emotions. You can control them or otherwise being over controlled by them.
I don't think "control" is the right term, maybe influence. Thoughts and emotions arise constantly, you can detach yourself from them, observe them and act accordingly. Trying to control a thought or emotion is a fool's errand.
Interesting read about overcoming resistance for creative work: The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. It kinda has the opposite view of this "Against Discipline" post :)
Sounds more like an issue of perspective. She repeatedly states that once she overcomes her resistence she's happy she did the thing. So she just needs to be able to be not-swimming yet able to see the fun of swimming.
Some kind of broadening of perspective is called for. To contain these disparate states simultaneously.
I think this would be the opposite of focus. Which could be the central problem. We love focus, or something.
This got me thinking. For regularly scheduled activities don't tell yourself or others "I have to go XXX today" but instead "I get to go XXX today". This changes an obligation into an opportunity. You may laugh, but I've found the way I phrase things - even to myself - can have an effect on how I feel about them.
Generalized too much. Discipline is nothing but execution on an optimization. It would be a mistake by shallow analysis to blame discipline for an optimization that is not taking you to the destiny and journey you want in your life.
She is totally right about Cross Fit, tho. That injury factory only benefits physiotherapists.
I think this article is a very narrow topic in how it once you can get yourself to enjoy that “tough task”, it excuses the need for discipline. It’s one of many ways to get yourself to do something, won’t work in a lot of tasks, or even very difficult. You’d need discipline just to try to make it like a game.
The thing about play is that it's not mandatory. When it's not fun, you are free to not do it. This is why it's a luxury, and most often it's not a thing you get paid to do.
"So we become a little like a stubborn child, asserting our independence by digging in and not moving."
Some people look outside at the pool and hear the play people call them racist terms. They get bullied into things they dont want. They try over and over, and they couldn't help the racist people be better.
And the adults they went to for help laughed and joked about them. Saucy unfunny jokes that are going to stick with them for life, jokes that minimize their own stories.
So they're exhausted. So exhausted. Some of them didn't even want to be authors, they said no to typewriters at garage sales, but still it didn't stop.
But they won't give up. Life is wonderful and goes on for several more years.
And the crappy part is people like that, who had a history of voting for progressive causes, lose a little empathy and trust. Because they said stop.
Discipline is really about greater long term gains versus lesser short term costs. Determining whether the long term gains are actually greater in any given situation is one of the challenges.
I suspect most of us have a serious imbalance in our lives between productive work, leisure, and recreation. See Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler's book "The Capitalist Manifesto" for a rich discussion of these topics. They define 'leisure' somewhat counter-intuitively as work, but the sort of work that elevates the mind or advances the common good -- as opposed to the productive work one is required to do in order to earn a living.
Leisure for them is very different from recreation, which is a kind of rest -- think board games, light reading, hiking, Netflix, etc. Everyone needs all three of these things in their lives (leisure, productive work, and recreation) but we often get them confused or end up overemphasizing one to the neglect of the others.
I wonder if OP is saying something similar or at least resonant with this -- basically that we shouldn't treat everything in our lives like productive work.
wow, astute observation. i'm sure the author never realized that life is painful, or that the capitalist mode of production requires productive labor in a free market in order to survive.
i'm sure they didn't bother to write this whole article because they have crushing anxiety about getting things done _in spite of_ the very astute facts you noted, and still found difficulty and failure.
bravo. you really just see the world the way things are, ignatius. welcome to the confederacy
So please do apply self-discipline in your life. Having no discipline is like having a car with an engine that stops running frequently and won't exceed 2000 RPM.
Hard work does get easier in time, like working a muscle. And just like working out, you need to pace yourself -- approach hard work wisely and don't overdo it, even if you're enjoying it immensely.
I'm so glad my mom forced me to practice the piano - I wouldn't be the musician I am today without it... and I have no regrets about working hard at front-end web development. I owe my career in large part to the many hours I spent poring over JavaScript: The Definitive Guide and writing SPA web apps while others at my workplace were still using ASP and WebForms.