Self-Discipline Part 1

Today I am writing specifically about self-discipline and I want to make sure that there is no confusion between what I mean by self-discipline and what others mean by self-control. Self-discipline and self-control are closely related subjects and it is quite easy to confuse the two.

"Discipline is freedom" touts one pundit. This smacks of government doublespeak from 1984. It sounds like a doctrine set up to enslave you but very accurately states one of the main benefits of self-discipline.

There are two sources of discipline, external and internal. External discipline is imposed upon us by others, i.e. by another person (your boss) or entity (the company you work for) or organization (the army), then your freedom is severely limited. Now if read the quote “discipline is freedom” again, and think of external discipline, it really is a doublespeak dogma designed to yoke your thoughts.

Internal discipline, self-discipline, we develop and nurture within us through exercises, practice and experience. Stephen Covey wrote, "The undisciplined are slaves to moods, appetites and passion."

Self-discipline is not about control, it is about choice. Self-control is about placing your choices in context of a socially acceptable fabric.

It is important to distinguish what I mean by self-discipline and self-control. You most likely have an average amount of self-control. You may not actually follow through with the ramming and running off the road of the jerk you just cut you off at the lights, because that act, whilst it may be an immense amount of fun, would be socially unacceptable and so you exert your self-control. You will just bad mouth the other driver in the privacy of your own head.

Alternatively, failing that, at the least the privacy of your own car. Or even, failing that, the privacy of your own blog post on LiveJournal and MySpace pages that are marked as friends only so only you, your immediate family that you entrust to look at the mostly naked pictures of you getting plastered, and six and a half thousand of your very closest internet friends will ever get to read. Each one is a differing level of self-control, a reduction in what we know to be acceptable and what we are allowing ourselves to do.

Self-discipline is about having the diligence to undertake a number of advanced driving courses, including the "highway patrol pit manoeuvre" used by the police to push vehicles from the road in a high-speed pursuit that would allow you to carry out the act. Moreover, for those who have the opportunity to take an advanced driving course with a bodyguard school or police academy, I highly recommend it. It is your self-control preventing you from using those skills.

The undisciplined lack the freedom that comes from possessing particular skills and abilities, e.g. to play a musical instrument or speak a foreign language. Self-discipline drives you to act consistently and according to what you think and believe, a belief structure built on your own moral principles and your intellect, instead of how you feel at that time, instead of how others want you to feel. It can mean sacrificing the pleasure and thrill of living in the moment for what matters most in life but can open up completely new opportunities and vistas that are unavailable to you otherwise.

What can self-discipline do for you? It will get you through the rest of a project once the rush of enthusiasm has worn off. It will get you to the gym when all you want to do is play World of Warcraft (though I heartily recommend you attempt to do both at the same time). It will let you climb the highest mountain in the world and see the greatest sights.

Without self-discipline, you will never reach the base of the mountain; you will achieve very little, trapped in a small world, barely providing for your most basic needs.

Here is what self-discipline provides me:

• To write every day of my life on whatever topic interests me and be rewarded for doing so.
• To create video games for the largest brands in the industry (Star Wars, Shrek, Civilization, Pitfall, etc)
• To appear at conferences, institutions, workshops and universities to talk on a variety of subjects.
• To stand up in front of an audience of over 1,200 people and give a 20-minute commencement address to a graduating class as the featured speaker.
• Has brought me more than $2M worth of work by running regular technology and video game developer meetings.
• To be published in major industry and technology journals.
• To travel the world whenever I feel like it.
• To wake up at 3PM in the afternoon, after going to bed at 7AM, and sit around in sweatpants on a workday and still get all of my work done.
• To eat whatever I desire, whenever I want.
• To work on whatever I choose to work on, and make money at it.

When the love of an activity has gone, when the initial enthusiasm has worn off, when the zeal and zest for a new endeavour takes a back seat to the daily grind of seeing it through to the end, self-discipline is what gets you through.

Building self-discipline will not let you instantly quit smoking whenever you choose. It will not let you lose 50lbs by tomorrow. It will not turn you into a maestro overnight. The psychology of habit and the psychology of self-discipline are both subtle and polar opposites. We are all weak in certain areas of our lives but self-discipline can be developed just like any other skill.

Do not ever equate self-discipline with the idea of a muscle, it is neither a single muscle nor a group of muscles, that you pump up, metaphorically being able to lift greater and greater weight. You do not lift heavy weights, rest for a bit, then lift heavier weights immediately afterwards. Discipline is not a single, linear number ranging from 1 to 100 that you can measure easily. Discipline works in multiple planes, it is a multi-faceted artefact of the human psyche, anybody who has studied even a little human psychology can tell you this.

Most people who write about self-discipline and improving it as though you can take it to the gym and do a few hundred crunches so that your discipline muscle can lift more weight is spouting utter bullshit. Self-discipline is composed of several traits, some stronger than others, all working in conjunction to give you the determination to do what you should do and do what you need to. I liken it to levelling up in a role-playing game, which perfectly suits a geek like me. You do not improve in just one area, but in several areas simultaneously. Some traits increase at a greater rate than others, but all of them contribute to the whole, allowing you to take on greater challenges that at an earlier time were beyond you. It is just a fact of life that certain goals, tasks and ventures will require greater self-discipline that others that you will not be ready or able to tackle until you have levelled up.

Refraining from picking your nose in public, no matter how satisfying it may be, is one level of self-discipline. Not picking your nose in public is most likely one of the easiest things to do, or refrain from doing for most of the population. For others… Not so much.

Training for four hours a day, seven days a week, in preparation for not only running in a marathon, not just completing that marathon, but actually run, complete and come in with a respectable time, is a level of self-discipline worlds apart from the picking of the nose example. And it takes even greater discipline to keep training when your life gets busy, no matter what else is going on around you, no matter how persuasive your significant other, friends or family are when they say "just skip it, just this once".

It is possible to take the most undisciplined person imaginable, a 400lbs couch potato, and in a heartbeat make that person the most determined person on Earth. You can do it in a number of ways. You can find their particular weakness and exploit it. You can manipulate their desire. You can provoke their survival response, which is probably the easiest thing to do.

You ever see someone crave pizza or chocolate? Weakness.

You ever watch a fanboy at an Apple expo listening to Steve Jobs reveal the latest hardware? Desire.

You want to see discipline? Take lazy boy out to the Mojave Desert and drop them off in the middle of nowhere without food or water and then drive your truck really slow whilst shaking a bottle of water. If you have the will power to ignore cries of your inhumanity, that person dying of thirst has become a most disciplined individual with a single mindedness of purpose that will make Brian Tracy and Steven Covey look like amateur players attempting to strike out Babe Ruth. The only problem is, this discipline does not last, you have imposed it externally, and you have not changed the person one iota.

There is good news for those that struggle with poor self-discipline. There are techniques that can be taught universally, but I am not going to sugar coat this, not everyone can be self-disciplined, because they will not allow themselves to be. The only problem — and ignoring all of the politically correct, precious snowflake nonsense such as giving an award to someone just because they gave their best effort — is that not everyone is actually equally capable.

I am dyslexic and I suffer from asthma, these two flaws mean that I am a slow learner and I will never complete a marathon that I so desperately want to. No amount of discipline will ever overcome these two problems. As long as I realise this I can make provisions and work around them, but the very essence of self-discipline is pushing myself to achieve rather than using my flaws as an excuse.

Everybody falls down and fails at something. Self-discipline is getting back up and doing it again. It is trying harder than someone to whom it comes easier. It is wanting your goal more than the next guy. Self-discipline will get you through the most arduous of circumstances when sheer talent is insufficient. Raw talent makes you a good artist, but it is self-discipline that makes you a great artist.

Any day of the week I will take a mediocre engineer or artist that has completed a number of projects on their own, right the way through to the bitter end, with all of the details take care of and all of the loose ends wrapped up. I would rather that mediocre worker than an undisciplined, wilful, creative genius who can perform stunning miracles but never on demand, and the miracles they perform are never quite complete, never quite done, and they always leave an uncountable number of loose ends to tie up. The discipline to finish what you start is the difference between those that can, and those that cannot, those that have achieved and those that have not. Most people have enough discipline to just about get by.

To develop your discipline you have to work on several angles to build it up, to improve it and to become a fully rounded individual. Many people try to convince you that discipline is built by toughing it out, by doing one extra arm curl, by spending just a few more minutes at your desk working for an sociopathic corporation, consuming one less Twinkie. It is espoused by those who do not know and eschewed by those that do. This is a faux discipline.

Your self-discipline is not built by denying yourself dessert. Your self-discipline does not get stronger just because you forced yourself to go to the gym. Discipline is never built in this way. All you do is make yourself resentful of your denial or forced servitude. You become a slave to your ego.

I am not saying that you should not forgo the Twinkie, do one more arm curl or spend ten more minutes working at your desk before turning out the desk lamp for the evening. All of those things come from self-discipline. They are because of discipline. They are not discipline itself.

Think of the people in your immediate circle of friends and acquaintances. Pick the most useless deadbeat you know that you are fairly well acquainted with. They have difficulty holding down a job, they work mostly minimum wage, unskilled labour such as flipping burgers or serving macchiato caramel lattes. They spend all of their time in front of the TV, or worse, surfing social bookmarking websites and chatting with their "friends" who are in similar situations and commiserate with each other over their lack of success, poor financial situation, etc. There are millions of people just like that.

The average discipline of the population is underwhelmingly mediocre. The average person barely has enough to hold down a regular job whether it be in web development, office management, or flipping burgers. They might be reasonably good at their job, but should the job go south then that person is left high and dry until they gain new employment. Their discipline is driven by external forces and factors.

Their internal discipline is almost non-existent, there is just enough to drive there to get another job. A little internal self-discipline will make them send out a flurry of resumes or contact a few recruiters, in the initial enthusiasm of a new project, i.e. finding a job to pay the bills, which is just enough to carry them through the first hours of working on the problem. Those first few hours will be spent on day number one, the next day, a few minutes less, and the day after, less time. Then whole days will go by where nothing is done in the quest for gainful employment. The job hunt will proceed in spurts, starting and stopping, other parts of life will intrude.

Internal self-discipline breaks down and job seeking takes a back seat to just surviving. Now let us assume that the unemployed individual is reasonably skilled with a good education and good employment history. We can also assume that the economic situation in the geographic area is not too dire, the job seeker is flexible about what they will take in terms of work and compensation, and competition for jobs is not too fierce, they will get a job, usually in a month or two. As the months drag on and the imminent pain of not having food or the thought of not meeting the rent or mortgage looms, external discipline kicks in and keeps the person looking for work, but very slowly. Finally, after months, with a job offer in hand they give themselves a big hearty pat on the back for being really good. They might, if they are valuable as an asset to a company, may even have two or three competing job offers after a month or so, which they can choose between.

Remember, external discipline imposed on you from outside is not as motivational as internal self-discipline.

Now think about dozens of job offers? What about hundreds of job offers? If you were really seeking a job and truly trying to get work, and diligently sought out every opportunity for employment in your professional field, after five or six weeks, working 40 hours a week, just like you would have done at a regular office job, you will have twenty, thirty, fifty or even a hundred job offers.

You would have contacted every company in your vicinity that might have a potential lead, spoken to hundreds of people, sent out hundreds of resumes, spent countless hours drafting personal cover letters, preparing a portfolio of work, structuring your resume and tailoring your pitch to each individual audience. I know this to be true, and I know this works, because I have personally done this to get work and do this for my company when seeking clients. I know it works because I was able to find work in Los Angeles, California, whilst living in England, with nothing more than e-mail and a few phone calls.

Self-discipline makes you:

• Get up in the morning.
• Prepare for work.
• “Commute” to the office.
• Sit at your desk and focus on work.
• Daily spend 8 hours or more in a crunch project to find a new job.
• Only take a 45-minute lunch break.
• Work at the office nights and weekends.

Self-discipline gets you dozens or hundreds of job offers within the same time frame an average person takes to find one or two mediocre jobs.

Without a monkey on your back, i.e. your former boss, driving you forward, giving you direction, making you put in the hours, making you come back from lunch and walking by your desk to castigate and chastise every time you stop to browse Fark, Digg or Reddit. Because of a lack of self-discipline and without external discipline, you lose focus and drift aimlessly.

You instead spend 3 hours sorting out your MP3 collection, you squander your time staring vacantly at your web browser, laying in bed all day, pottering around the apartment or house, running a quick errand to the storage locker or grocery store that takes three hours out of your work day. Which you would rather have? Dozens upon heaped dozens of job offers, or a well-ordered MP3 collection?

Self-discipline is not about restricting what you can and cannot do, but about directing your life, it is about ensuring that when your work is done, you can walk away knowing that you have nothing else to worry about, it is about structure. Self-discipline is knowing that spending eight hours at your desk was eight hours of valuable work. Self-discipline is about getting out of bed when you want to, not when you feel like it.

There is a big difference between the restriction (self-control) and structure (self-discipline). It is as different as laughing with a comedian and laughing at a clown.

Self-discipline is knowing that when you watch popular cable or broadcast television, the ultimate waste of time as far as I am concerned, you do it consciously and have chosen to do it, not because you “just felt like it." The consumption of television was a conscious decision that you pursued, not something that just happened because you could not think of anything else to do or procrastinated on what you should do.

I play World of Warcraft and I confess I play World of Warcraft a lot, I engage in a lot of other video games too, I also, on occasion, though very rarely, watch an episode of popular culture television shows. But when I do this, I choose to do it. And when I am done watching or playing… I am done.

Self-discipline enables me to do this at any time I choose (unless there is a hectic deadline) because I know how my time is allotted, what elasticity I have in various tasks, where my time has gone that day and where my time will go in the coming hours. I am acutely aware of every moment of what I need to do next, of what my next action will be. I am deeply cognizant of how much time I can "waste" practicing empty endeavours for the sheer pleasure of pursuing them. And yes, that includes spending three hours sorting out my MP3 collection.

There are techniques to improving discipline and there are huge advantages to learning and using these techniques. Each of the techniques, paradoxically, requires discipline. Some of the techniques that can be learnt, cannot be taught until the student is ready to learn them. The old adage, when the student is ready to learn, the master will appear rings true.

If you have ever studied martial arts, you know that, when you start out, there are techniques beyond your capabilities no matter how you attempt them. No amount of desire, no amount of discipline in other areas of your life will make you capable of them. First, you start with the simple moves, the simple techniques, and you learn through rote memorization, through drilling, practice, study and long hours of pursuit of the disciplinary ideals. Only after study of the most basic techniques are you capable of progressing to the next stage of study. This is discipline. It can be enshrined in a circular reference of itself.

The most basic discipline technique — and it is a foundation skill, and one that most people teach because most people who talk about personal development and discipline never actually progress beyond this stage — is goal setting.

Did you ever draw up a shopping list of what you need at the local grocery store? That was goal setting, simple though it may be. Did you ever create a list of errands and chores that should be taken care of that day? That also is goal setting. Have you ever sketched out the floor plan of your living room or office to decide where all of the furniture will be placed? That also is goal setting.

Do you need to revise and review your goals every day? Absolutely not. It is advisable to always bear your goals in mind as you make your way through life, it is advisable to review your goals regularly, but every day? Every week? Only if you want to develop an abnormal form of obsessive-compulsive disorder for how your life should be.

Should you set goals for everything? No, don’t be silly. I do not need to set a goal of what I expect to achieve when I take a bathroom break.

Come back tomorrow for part two where I share with you techniques that you can use to improve your self-discipline.

Update: Part two of of the self-discipline article is available.