Discipline Is More Important Than Motivation
If you want to get anything done, there are two ways to get yourself to do it. The first, more popular and wrong option is to try to motivate yourself. The second, somewhat unpopular and correct choice is to cultivate discipline. What’s the difference?
Motivation operates on the erroneous assumption that a particular mental or emotional state is necessary to complete a task. Discipline, by contrast, separates outwards functioning from moods and feelings and circumvents the problem by consistently improving them.
Put in simpler form, you don’t wait until you’re in olympic form to start training. You train to get into olympic form. If action is conditional on feelings, waiting for the right mood becomes a particularly insidious form of procrastination.
Productivity has no requisite mental states. For consistent, long-term results, discipline trumps motivation. Motivation is trying to feel like doing stuff; discipline is doing it even if you don’t feel like it. Discipline, in short, is a system, whereas motivation is analogous to goals. Discipline is more or less self-perpetuating and constant, whereas motivation is fleeting.
How do you cultivate discipline? By building habits – starting as small as you can manage, even microscopic, and gathering momentum, reinvesting it in progressively bigger changes to your routine, and building a positive feedback loop. Motivation is a counterproductive attitude to productivity. What counts is discipline.
BABY STEPS. If you motivate yourself to a titanic “Starting tomorrow, I’m a new person” effort, you’ll only burn out and revert. Big and sudden just doesn’t work, slow and steady does it. It’s the yo-yo effect of discipline. You want to surf the edge of your comfort zone, which is the only sustainable attitude. When you progress in baby steps, you will find yourself a new person a year hence, not knowing precisely when or how it happened.
GRADUAL DEVELOPMENT. You can make huge changes by slicing them into incremental, manageable steps. The trick is that the change-resistance troll (I have to draw that fucker) living in your head doesn’t notice anything big is going on. Resistance increases exponentially with the size of the change, rather than proportionally. Want to start exercising more? Take a walk. Want to fix your diet? Start by removing the one worst thing in it – probably sweets. Want to quit smoking? Take that one last cigarette of the day, break it in half and flush it down the toilet.
DELIBERATE CONTROL. The best way to manage your vices is to accept and schedule them. You can’t wish them out of existence, but you can take control of them and redirect their inertia by consciously including them in your plan. The key is to control the time and dosage. Dieting? Schedule cheat days (say, once a week). Wasting valuable hours of your life on Facebook? “OK, no more Facebook.” – wrong. “Facebook for 20 minutes in the evening to catch up with friends and that’s that” – right.
The underlying logic of discipline building is to establish a more constructive relationship and improve the balance of power between your higher executive functions – your rational adult mind – and your inner three year old who makes a depressing lot of your decisions. Human personality is like a tree – it grows outwards, adding layers, but the depths never really go away.
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