Discipline
Engineering Success
What is discipline?
Discipline is a term thrown around self-improvement circles by entrepreneurs and self-help gurus. Often intertwined with motivation, discipline is different.
I differentiate these using the framework below:
Motivation - The push to do something when you want to do it
Discipline - Doing something you should, even when you don’t want to
Why is discipline important?
Discipline is the foundation of any successful endeavour. Talent and motivation alone will lead to failure, without the discipline to put in the work. This means showing up. Even when it feels like nothing is going right. Discipline is a core of success and a skill to cultivate.
A great example on the importance of discipline is body recomposition. This is not only working out, which people are motivated to do. Without the discipline to alter and stick to your diet, you won’t make any significant gains. I can say that diet discipline has been the core of my continued fitness journey.
Gaining discipline
While that definition seems simple, implementing discipline is difficult. This is why I’ve found 4 strategies that helped to increase my discipline.
Controlling your breathing
Dopamine redirection
Non-negotiable timing
Accountability
Controlling your breathing
Have you ever seen someone disciplined in only a single aspect of their lives? If you have, that is not discipline, that is motivation. Discipline is all encompassing.
With this, what is the most integral part to staying alive? Breathing. By gaining control over your breathing, you gain control over the most core point of your life. This control and discipline will then spread to every facet of your life. As breathing permeates it all.
There are various ways to approach this, most follow the same principle. Make a conscious change in your breathing to improve it until it becomes unconscious. Some techniques include:
Swapping from mouth to nose breathing
Taking deeper and slower breaths into the diaphragm
Doing short breath holds
This works by calming you down and making you more alert (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6137615/). Through this, you are able to make more rational decisions which prove beneficial.
Dopamine redirection
Without altering the external situation, internal control will falter. One alteration is dopamine redirection and there’s a short analogy I use to explain it.
Imagine you’re on a train, that train can take two tracks to the same destination. A shorter track that scratches the train and a longer track that polishes it. Which track would you rather take?
This choice is analogous to how we get dopamine. The shorter, synthetic track or the longer, goal-focused track that leads to self-improvement.
Dopamine is the motivation molecule. As an endorphin, it makes us feel happier and satisfied but it is also prime for misuse. Synthetic sources of dopamine trigger a euphoria without any work towards a goal. This leads down a dark spiral where we are motivated for more. To be healthy, we remove synthetic dopamine and put our efforts towards our goals.
Some synthetic sources of dopamine include social media, YouTube and sugar. Completely removing these is difficult, which is why a compromise is important. These may include:
Hanging out with your friends more often
Watching movies in the cinema
Getting desert if you’re out for a meal
By making these changes, your dopamine level will decrease. At this point you will gain the urge to work and should rediscover that project you’ve been wanting to start and do it. By doing this you will release dopamine, encouraging you to continue working. This is a reason behind why some find working on projects fun, and others find it tedious.
One thing of note is that by removing all these sources you will become bored. Do not use that as an excuse to check your social media or something similar. In our hyper-stimulated world, boredom is a superpower and the source of a lot of creativity.
Non-negotiable timing
With the point above, you could have a very important goal to work to but then you start to burn out because that’s all you do. To maintain discipline, you need set times to do things and not do things.
This does not mean you need a calendar. I have a few commitments that I know I need to make, including time to relax and enjoy myself, and I work around these. Given, some people may find calendars more beneficial.
By doing this you are restricting the amount of time you are able to spend on a task. This increases its urgency and allows you to complete more effective work.
An example of how to do this is below.
Accountability
Even if you have these timings how would you guarantee that you would stick to it?
While there are many forms of accountability, the best I have found is to involve others in the activity. Yet, labelling an aspect of a relationship as accountability seems superficial. This is why a more organic approach has worked better for me.
An example of this is training partners who expect me to show up when I’m meant to every single time. Something as simple as that reinforces timings and helps to ensure continued discipline.
Applying Discipline
There is a field of philosophy which posits that desire is the driver for action. Based on this, even with these systems, what is there to stop us from doing what we want instead of what we should?
What’s to interrupt that ‘monkey brain’ circuit. That circuit that craves scrolling through social media?
A simple framework that I like to apply is asking myself: “What would I do?” More alike to ‘what would I want myself to do’, this helps in 3 major ways:
Resetting my active behaviour to align with my short-term goals
Aligning my short-term goals with my long-term desires
Checking whether my long-term desires my own or those of the people around me
I have asked myself this question often when scrolling through social media. Something will click and I’ll go “What would I do?”, often followed by “Not this”. When presented with new opportunities, I make sure to take a minute and ask myself “What would I do?” This ensures that my short-term goals align with my long-term desires. Finally, when thinking about the future, I find myself again asking “What would I do?” If I don’t seem excited by the path before me, my long-term desires often are not my own.
The very action of asking yourself this question is grounding. Thus, using this, you can gain a greater sense of self-awareness as well.
Final thoughts
While I have outlined some ways in which I gained discipline, this guide may not work for everyone. It is important to note that you will only be able to cultivate discipline if you want to, no one is able to force you to do so. So the real question is, how bad do you want it?
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