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June 3 - June 18, 2023
For whatever goal you want to achieve, there is discomfort along that path. Self-discipline drives you through this discomfort and allows you to achieve and attain. It’s an essential component of mastery, and nothing great was ever accomplished without it.
The three executive functions we are most concerned with when it comes to being disciplined are working memory, impulse control, and cognitive flexibility and adaptability. You can see why they are aptly named the executive functions—they institute the brain’s management system. Through the executive functions, you are able to set and pursue goals, prioritize activities, filter distractions, and control unhelpful impulses.
It’s important to understand that willpower and self-discipline are not static quantities you can always maintain at the same level in the face of constant temptation.
To ensure that your willpower and self-discipline aren’t exhausted, you’ll be well served by making sure that you aren’t challenging your willpower unnecessarily or too strongly. Exercising self-control can be beneficial, but ultimately the most effective way of maintaining discipline is by simply avoiding the situations that present the strongest temptations and thus the highest chances for failure.
The better time to exercise some self-discipline, therefore, is at the grocery store. You can skip the aisles that offer all those unhealthy options so that you don’t set yourself up for a failure of willpower later on. Rather than forcing yourself to avoid the temptation of going to your kitchen and grabbing an unhealthy snack, you avoid the temptation of buying that snack in the first place. Instead of having to exercise your willpower indefinitely at home, you just have to manage it for ten minutes at the store.
Knowing the exact outcome you want is an essential part of having self-discipline. You must be able to name it, describe it, and feel it. Otherwise, you’re just forcing yourself into discomfort with the vague idea that you should be doing something. It’s like marching in an army and not being sure what you’re fighting for or even why you’re there.
An in-depth analysis of more than 12,000 employee diary entries showed that the top motivator for workplace productivity wasn’t financially or status driven. People were most incentivized to work by the feeling of making consistent progress toward a meaningful goal
In addition to feelings of progress and investment, they have since come up with three main categories of motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
The 40% Rule is straightforward. It says that when an individual’s mind begins telling them that they are physically or emotionally maxed out, in reality they have only pushed themselves to 40 percent of their full capacity.
We are usually ready to give up around the time that we begin to feel pain or are barely pressing our boundaries. But that point is actually just the beginning of what we are all capable of, and the key to unlocking more potential is to push through the initial discomfort and the self-doubt that surfaces along with it. By maintaining a belief in yourself, you show yourself that you can do more, and that evidence builds your confidence and mental toughness.
Now it is mostly the people who seek out intense challenges that subsequently learn discipline and achieve heights of mental strength, while the rest go about their comfortable lives without any idea of their full capabilities.
To put it another way, setting challenging but realistic goals increases our performance in the pursuit of those achievements.
Modest goals don’t inspire us in the same way as more difficult ones, which results in an insufficient effort to achieve them.
That’s where the 10-Minute Rule comes in—if you want something, wait at least ten minutes before getting it. It’s simple and leaves no room for debate or excuses. When you feel an urge, force yourself to wait for ten minutes before giving in to whatever the urge is. If you’re still craving it after ten minutes, then have it. Or wait ten more minutes because you’ve already done it and survived just fine. Simply by choosing to wait you remove the “immediate” from immediate gratification—building discipline and improving decision-making.
Another beneficial application of this thought process is the purposeful escalation of good habits. If you’re doing something productive you might keep doing it for five minutes longer after you first feel the urge to quit. Then the following time you go for an extra six or seven minutes, and so on. Every time you feel distracted, just exercise discipline for a few minutes longer, and you’ll steadily build better self-discipline with each escalation.
Stop waiting to “be ready” or for everything to feel “just right” before you begin pursuing your goals or changing your habits.
When everything feels comfortable and just right, it’s already too late and you’ve waited too long.
An experiment at the University of Chicago further illustrated our tendency to self-rationalize lapses in discipline.
hunger is as temporary as any other urge.
You can create your own fishbowl to reinforce good habits and decisions. It might mean pairing an activity that you need to do but don’t enjoy with some sort of reward,
Countless experiments and observational studies have shown that making an option the default will increase the likelihood of it being chosen, which is known as the default effect.
Fill your network with people that you admire and whom you look up to—not those whom you look down upon and have to prop up.
Aside from creating better relationships all around you, you can focus on one person whom you might essentially report to. They keep you accountable and try to make sure you keep your commitments and are on track to hit your goals.
Yet in fact, telling people of your goals makes them less likely to be achieved!
If you do happen to tell anyone, make sure you do not do so in a way that elicits praise. Quite the opposite. Tell them of your dissatisfaction with your current state and that they should kick your butt if they see you straying from your plan.
Keeping yourself monitored in whatever way possible can make it so you aren’t depending on self-discipline per se, but social pressure and shame.
Choosing long-term benefits over short-term pleasure is at the heart of a self-disciplined lifestyle.
order to improve ourselves, we have to be willing to purposefully delay positive events and rewards until after we’ve completed some objectives or achieved some goals.
If you make the effort to ask yourself these four questions and to be honest in your answers, you’ll become more aware of your tendencies to rationalize and make excuses, and you’ll be prepared to create better habits for leading a disciplined life.
Do I want to be a disciplined person or not?
Am I doing the right thing or simply what’s easy?
These are the vegetables, so what am I getting for dessert?
Am I being self-aware?
progress effect, which states that you should think in terms of what you already have.
The general idea is that people will work harder to achieve something if they are aware of all the ways that they are not starting from zero and are closer to completion.
Think about how you can quantify the progress you’ve already made, even if you haven’t actually started yet. You have certain traits, capacities, and advantages that put you farther along than many others. They count!
the closer we get to a goal, the more effort we make to reach it.
you should always keep track of your progress and make sure to note each accomplishment, no matter how small. Emphasize how far away from starting from 0 percent you are, and how close to 100 percent you’ve become. This is why making a checklist of the tasks you need to do for the day or the steps toward a goal works great as a motivational strategy—crossing
Outcomes, despite how much effort we might put toward them, are 100 percent up to external influences.
Instead of shooting for the outcome itself, which is impossible to control, your goal should be to put in your best effort at the present moment. You can control that and feel good about it.
But motivation is a temporary state of mind, while habits become ingrained behaviors.
In the words of Aristotle, “Good habits formed at youth make all the difference.” Building habits is thought to be easier in childhood because our minds are more malleable, but altering habits is possible regardless of age.
