IMO this makes the most important point at the very end. “Being disciplined” itself is a consequence of motivation, or is effectively that. Building habits however, requires very little discipline or motivation so long as you build them strategically - I.e. start so small it’d be ridiculous not to do it regardless of how motivated or disciplined you are.
And by “start small” I mean “floss one tooth per night for 3 months to build a flossing habit” small. Let your good habits progressively and slowly consume more time, similar to what bad habits do.
For all intents and purposes you should just assume both discipline and motivation are completely mythical and you should construct a system of high-leverage habits to obviate the need for them. You don’t rise to the level of your talents/motivation/discipline, you fall to the level of your habits.
Individual experiences of ADHD remain varied - it sounds like you have some significant executive dysfunction (I do as well), and it responded well to your medication. I'm really happy for you!
I get so tired of popular wisdom that assumes that all people experience life in essentially the same way, and that the 'recipe for success' should be universal. "Discipline" is a nonsense word to the folks with executive dysfunction, you might as well tell us that the key to personal success is learning how to fly. Everyone else is doing it, so it must be easy - you just need to try harder!
Exactly! I didn't start getting anywhere with anything until I realized that I should ignore what other people told me about getting stuff done. For whatever reason, I don't respond to normal motivators. There are a few giant labels that get slapped onto people to try to make sense of how different peoples' brains work but for a lot of people just fall somewhere in between. I'm not ADHD, but I'm...something. And I think that situation is a lot more common than is commonly acknowledged.
That has been written about quite a bit. Can't remember any of the terms placed on it, but I've seen many Hacker News entries about maximizing that phenomenon.
The phrase coming to mind is productive procrastination.
This isn't easy, but sometimes it works for me. One of the tricks is making sure it really is productive. For example, I work from home so picking up around the house or doing dishes can actually be very productive/helpful for me, but I've definitely found myself bogged down in mindless tasks that didn't really move the needle.
Good luck figuring out the real cause in our modern medical system. I agree though, I think a more holistic approach would benefit most.
Psychiatry and psychology, in my experience, are both just a game of pin the tail on the condition -- simple, vague heuristics are used to diagnose conditions based on patient interviews.
I have ADHD, and during the diagnostic process, I never had a sleep study, any bloodwork drawn, scans, etc.. Could it have been something else? Not like I will ever know.
What's the old say that doctors commonly tote? "When you hear hoof beats, don't look for zebras when there are horses in the room."
It's so damaging because sometimes one needs to be looking for "zebras."
As some with ADHD as well, the medication has helped me concentrate, but doesn't do enough for my executive dysfunction on a larger scale -- I still have a lot difficult focusing, inertia required to start a task, planning, organizing, following through with things, etc..
The medication does wonders for my physical symptoms of hyperactivity, which is justification enough to take them in my opinion.
However, something I have started to learn about stimulant medications are what I consider its true dangers. It's not necessarily dangerous for one's health, at least at therapeutic dosages, but rather it's extremely easy to become overly reliant on these medications, and if/when you stop taking them, lose access to them, etc. then life tends to sucker punch you back into reality -- a life where you can no longer maintain everything you were able to do, but yet the expectations are still as if you are firing on all cylinders.
I feel like I am living out the plot of Flowers for Algernon, and honestly, it's somewhat bothersome to me.
I resonate with this a LOT. Been on and off stimulants over the last decade. Just recently gave up 30mg daily XR cold turkey after dealing with too many yo-yo accessibility issues and hating the way my life was being essentially dictated by my access to medication. It's been 2 months now and I am finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but a substantial amount of my cognitive energy every day is dedicated to just managing my attention and the work that I am doing. It sucks.
Are you talking about issues accessing medication? If so, I completely agree. The system is rather difficult and unforgiving to navigate -- that alone makes deters many from even attempting to get treatment, and I do not blame them one bit.
I take IR instead of XR, and I am about to be in a similar boat as you.
How bad is the process of going cold-turkey? How long does the Hell that I am in for last? I have serious concerns for keeping my current job without access to medication, but part of me wants to know if I am just being overly anxious and hyperbolic, or if I am actually am screwed.
I think it varies wildly from person to person. When I've quit stimulants in the past it was really just a week or two before I was close to what felt like my baseline. The hardest part for me was the daytime sleepiness.
do you mind sharing which medication? I'm on adderall and while it can help me stay on a specific task, and has changed my life drastically, It does nothing for me as far as forming habits.
The meds won't help you "show up" after the euphoria phase of the first week. But while you are now able to stay on task and complete it, you still have to pull yourself from the couch to the task that needs doing.
I have been medicated for a year now, and the common advice of "just do 5 minutes and nothing more" to get myself started now actually works. I still hate doing chores (I am procrastinating rn because my flat needs some cleaning), but if I start, you better believe they will get done and I might do a little more just because now I have dopamine to tell me "this is good stuff you're doing, carry on", whereas before I was fighting every second the urge to just leave the thing halfway and go do something else. Life was hard.
I'm on lisdexamfetamine FWIW.
EDIT: the dopaminergic system is exactly how you form habits. When taking amphetamines, you have more dopamine, thus habits are much easier to create. Both the good and the bad ones. You just have to fight against the lifelong learned helplessness that effort is not worth it. That takes a long while to rewire. Ok, time to close HN and clean my flat.
> The meds won't help you "show up" after the euphoria phase of the first week.
As some comments above mentioned everyone is affected differently. I have been on adderall for well over a decade, and constantly for the past 5-6 years in which I formed habits and routines that never stuck when I would go off and on due to hating the 'blunting' effect I felt it had on my creativity and personality.
So a couple months ago when I couldn't find them in stock anywhere I figured no big deal, I could keep doing what I was doing and maybe I was using the meds as a crutch anyhow. I was hoping I would get my old 'fun' personally back to go along with my new older-wiser-mature-self that had good work habits and routines. It's been such a complete disaster I had to ask my doctor to lower my dose because that was the only strength one pharmacy had left out of over 20 stores I called, and had them search other branches. Now I have to choose which days to take them because I have to take twice as many to get the workable dose. It sucks.
I don't think I'm suffering from emotional and creative blunting, but I take a relatively low dose (20mg + 20mg 6h later), so that it works only when I am good shape and eating well. In fact the better my diet, the stronger it feels.
You have much more experience than me, but I believe with stimulants too low a dose is much better than too high a dose. During titration I tried the dosage immediately after and I was a machine, both in productive output and in emotional bluntness. I could've reached my full potential but honestly, it's not worth it.
Now I feel with good diet, good sleep and a little exercise I'm operating at 70% of my capacity, while the rest of my life I was running at 20%. This is good enough for me. When I'm off the meds I can see only negatives: hungry, horny, restless, bored, anxious. Perhaps a little more lighthearted, to be honest.
I agree eating right and exercise makes a huge difference and is working well enough right now by taking meds every other day and making sure that on those days I follow a good eating and exercise routine because it will help carry over the habit to the next day--not always, but most days.
My problem taking a smaller dose is that it puts me to sleep. I sometimes split my original dose to use as a sleep aid because I get great sleep on it. Falling asleep on adderall was not fun to tell my doc or the pharmacist when I first started on adderall. I was recommended for more screening. It still makes me tired for 10-15mins as the first dose kicks in.
Lighthearted is a good word to describe the differences I feel as well. Though I am quite hyperactive, maybe they are related--bouncy and lighthearted off and matching the calm of the Vulcans on them.
I've definitely experienced the small dose sleep aid thing. Noticed it from the caffeine I was self-medicating with before being diagnosed. I've assumed that what's happening is that it's suppressing the distractions that are keeping me up.
Some pharmacies will always tell you they're out of stock to see if you're willing to wait to order them, because they're afraid of facilitating abuse. Rite aid is notorious for that.
> but if I start, you better believe they will get done
I have a note titled "ADHD med cleaning spree" where nearly immediately after taking meds I start to realize how messy my surroundings are and just start cleaning because quite magically, cleaning is now just cleaning.
These "you need discipline, not motivation" remarks are as superficial as the cheap motivational ones.
They fail to adress documented disorders, like ADHD. And also the fact that a huge chunk of the population had its dopaminergic system completely hijacked by artificial stimulants, ranging from food, drugs, social media, etc.
They're so superficial that their answer would be: "you can circumvent your dopaminergic mess with discipline."
Ah, but then you need to remember to make the checklist, and you need to remember to check it. If I get past the first step, I invariably fall afoul of the second.
I have a folder right next to my bed. The only thing I need to remember is to grab the damn thing when I get up. I'll say it's a 90% success rate :)
But more importantly, you'll need to work on your assessment of "invariably". If you think all efforts are predestined to fail, they will. Get help if you can't do it alone.
I agree. In the past, I’ve tried to just be disciplined, stop procrastinating, and push through no matter what, and it lead to horrible burnout where I spent weeks/months being fairly ineffective. If you’re not sleeping at all at night and can’t think straight during the day, even for a couple minutes, you’re simply not going to be effective. You’re also liable to make really bad decisions that will drag on you even after you’ve recovered.
Having a routine though, even a very flexible routine, has been very effective. Things become automatic. Settling into an effective routing often involves not worrying too much about discipline, though. It's easier for people to get to the gym everyday if the goal is "get to the gym, and do something" than it is if the goal is "get to the gym and do a rigorous 2 hour workout." Small steps and environmental changes, as well as not stressing over what's optimal, have been the most effective approaches in my experience.
As someone who also has ADHD, making the gym locker room a step on my daily trip home from work and the place I shower was what finally got me working out regularly. Still, some days I show up, shower, and leave, but most days (3-4 days a week) I'll be able to convince myself to go do a workout, since I'm there anyway.
Motivation is a weird thing. Or maybe it's several things shoved into one word.
A very common mistake is to procrastinate doing something until you feel motivated. Our minds often doesn't work that way.
But if you start the task without any motivation, or expectation it will get done, you'll often find yourself motivated and making progress within minutes.
In reality, once you put some effort in, that can make you motivated.
I wish I could learn this faster. I can't even count the number of things that I've procrastinated and burned hours or days of brain focus on avoiding that ended up taking 10 or 15 minutes to just accomplish once I finally started.
Me too. What's helped me a lot is to just relentlessly make "what counts as starting" smaller and smaller until it's doable. Where "file taxes" is very very hard, "look through email and remember name of my accountant" (and many other TINY tasks...) is much more doable!
I've noticed a lot of times what appears to be procrastination is actually uncertainty as to how to proceed. The mind recoils from it's own inadequacy and just labels the whole thing "bad". An advantage of breaking it down as you say is that it pushes the uncertainty a step further away. You may not know what's required to do your taxes, but you know what's required to search your email. Many times, the way to perform the next step is produced by performing the current one (e.g. your accountant tells you what documents are needed) so the overall task is not nearly as painful as you anticipated.
these tasks are similar to the 'intellgent dumbing down' talked about in Getting Things Done, no wonder they work!
Having said that...I'm not diagnosed as ADHD but I definitely feel I exhibit executive dysfunction symptoms, and one of my siblings was diagnosed, so I'm feeling confident I'm ADHD adjacent at least...and just trying to implement Getting Things Done helped me immensely. Not only does it help with having a less stressful day (no longer do I have "what am I missing? what am I forgetting? Ahhh, angst!" feelings), it also helps me to just stay on task and/or when I switch tasks, know that I have the confidence to come back to wherever I was.
IMHO the problem is that there are so many interesting and semi-intrinsically motivating things that it's very hard to shut them out and "put some effort into" whatever you are "supposed to be doing".
Yep. I will say though, its always possible, barring any sort of medical reasons, to get disciplined.
I've had months where I go to the gym and then something happens and its easy to not go. There's nothing on this earth stopping me from picking that back up, other than myself... which reminds me, I need to start going again. Crazy thing is you _know_ you'll feel better but getting up and going can be a drag sometimes.
>Crazy thing is you _know_ you'll feel better but getting up and going can be a drag sometimes.
Yeah, that’s because most of your agency is hooked up to the monkey brain. You’re not really fighting anything, your apparent incentives just don’t drive you to go.
He mentions building habits in part 2 of the article, using the boiling the frog analogy (imploring the reader to use it for good instead).
My question, though, is how does a good habit expand into a great habit, without motivation? For your tooth example, once you start flossing you might as well floss all your teeth. The upfront cost of getting started with the floss is the worst part of it, but once you're there it's easy. This isn't true for all habits though. For many it's easy to just bail out fast. If I started doing 5 push-ups a day will I eventually do 100 and then 1000? Or would I settle somewhere on a mediocre range because it's easy to stop? Is there some sort of recursion or positive feedback loop that kicks in that rescues me from mediocrity if all I have is discipline and not motivation?
If you start with 5 push-ups a day, you'll hit your limits fast just increasing push-ups by one a day, so spread out your improvements by increasing in several exercises, adding more if necessary. Not to do all of them at once every day, but ones to switch between daily. I started something like this years ago, and I'm still keeping up on it. If life happens and I have to take a break from it, I restart it later and reduce my goals so that it doesn't seem so bad trying to jump back into a routine I was maximizing earlier.
The key was to make it a habit I do every day, like brushing my teeth. If I've had a bad day and miss doing my "workout routine" (such that it is, I'm no Arnold), it feels weird to miss one and I look forward to doing it the next day. So in that way once you've made it to a certain point it's self-fulfilling.
Atomic Habits is good. I personally found much more success with BJ Fogg’s “Tiny Habits” regime. He has a book by that title (which I’ve not actually read) and lots of resources online.
It’s been a while since I read Atomic Habits but I came away with the view he was missing (or just not sufficiently emphasizing) something.
IIRC Atomic was still making things too “big,” i.e. the habit should be so small it fetches accusations of insanity by bystanders and your celebration, accordingly, can be ridiculously small too (just physically smiling induces a tiny reward, which is all that’s necessary for a sufficiently small preceding habit).
Also he allows the option of “time and place” to trigger habits which IMO is very bad advice. 100% of new habits should be placed directly behind an already-established habit, and specifically one that’s already resilient to variations in time-and-place. Takes a while to think of these habits (because they’re truly automatic) but you already have at least a dozen and identifying them is half the trick.
Not sure I’ve seen a breakdown, been studying the format to try to replicate in my own writing. Currently applying to a technical book, we’ll see :)
The format follows what I’ve seen called as the English Essay style (as opposed to European style) – you start with a personal story, yours or a character’s. You use that story as a narrative device to make your point. The character works as a sort of template of the reader. For books, using multiple stories – up to 2 per chapter - works best. Weaving the character stories in and out throughout the book creates a sense of continuity and makes it easier for people to follow.
Whenever you want to make a point, you show the point or at least the situation with a character story. Real stories work best. You also lay out the point explicitly. The reader should never be made to guess. Setting it up as a punchline works, but use this sparingly because, again, readers don’t like to guess.
The whole book should have one, at most two, key points you want to make. It should be reducible to a pithy tweet. The rest of the book is there to make the point sink in for the reader.
The difference between making a point and conveying a point is crucial here.
I have yet to write a bestseller so I am likely missing some ingredients. This format applied to blogs/emails has worked great. People love it.
If you’re aware of other notable examples, would be interested in links to them.
As for my guess, it’s at a best seller format, it’s 100s of tiny chapters, which makes the readers feel like they’re rapidly discovering new information.
Appears writing style you’re referring to might be called “Quest-based technical narrative” — where the author mixes in a topical plot to provide context and maintain read interest.
While I am unable to recall the name of the book, recall a book on chaining hacking exploits that walks through a a fictional story while weaving in technical details.
I don't like recent political spins and ramblings of Jordan Peterson (basically very pro-Putin and pro-Trump last time I checked, and stopped cold turkey with him after that), but as a psychologist he made tons of excellent and practical remarks before that.
One of them which sticks with me is about fighting addictions and habits - every time you win this internal fight (go do something unwanted, don't light up that cigarette or drink alcohol) you get a bit stronger and addiction gets slightly weaker. Same for habits and defeating procrastination.
The hardest part is the first step, when opposite side (in your own persona) is strongest and it feels its too high a mountain to overcome. With addictions you never chip it away to 0 - that's the unfortunate cold hard truth, but you can chip it away into something you can manage continuously. Good habits are often self-fueling after crossing some threshold, ie exercise and eating healthy.
He was so good when he stuck to psychology. It really sucks, all of these public intellectual types think once they become popular it gives them an easy opportunity to make money by speaking about domains they clearly have no expertise in. As soon as Peterson started talking about religion, philosophy, and various politics, it all went downhill very fast.
I do make an exception with all of that when all the pub science guys shit on religion though. Can't seem to get enough of that even though I'm out of my angsty atheist teenager phase by 20 years
It's just a character trait of pop psychology/motivators/influencers. It's not like 'successfully not doing x makes it easier to permanently stop doing x' is a profound or new idea.
These folks need to feel popular and build a brand and its really hard to just stick with one thing, as it limits your audience, so you grow in to other venues.
Telling people what they want to hear in a nice package that makes them feel smart is a business as old as time. Oprah built a whole empire off of it. The internet has just widened the reach.
This isn't a turn for Jordan Peterson. It's who he's always been, and a lot of people tried to warn you about it 5+ years ago. The only new thing is that he's not trying to dress it up in fake objectivity anymore.
Have you spent any time wondering how those people knew this was coming years ago, but you didn't see it?
Nope. For the same reason I know many people who voted for Trump, and then didn't after four years of him.
They just didn't care to spend more brainpower on the issue than they already had. Most people have better things to do than be the most well-informed voter or investigate the history of the people they see on YouTube.
...start so small it’d be ridiculous not to do it regardless of how motivated or disciplined you are.
And by “start small” I mean “floss one tooth per night for 3 months to build a flossing habit” small...
The idea of doing something every day in a row for 3 months causes me pain and revulsion. If I think about it a bit longer, I I know I would get mad at myself for missing a day, and would get really mad at myself for forgetting for 2 years, and I'm already jumping the gun at trying to avoid setting myself up for failure. I floss my teeth when they feel dirty, anything else seems unsustainable. But maybe that's why I don't have motivation or discipline.
I wish I could build good habits, and getting mad serves no purpose, but it happens. Seeing other people have morning rituals, and mowing their lawn on a schedule, and whatnot seems like a magic trick. I only commented because starting small doesn't make it seem any easier to me, though I do understand that it might help someone else.
> And by “start small” I mean “floss one tooth per night for 3 months to build a flossing habit” small. Let your good habits progressively and slowly consume more time, similar to what bad habits do.
The difficulty here is primarily in initiating the task consistently imo. Once you are already at the point of flossing one tooth there likely isn’t much mental resistance to flossing the others. I think it’s better to do things that lower the resistance to starting the task in the first place as opposed to just making the task smaller.
That's exactly the point: activation energy is the hardest to summon, and once you have it's "easy" to finish the rest of the habit (e.g. floss all your other teeth).
If "floss one tooth" is still too much, go smaller: "take my floss out of the drawer and put it on the counter."
For me I don't believe there's a way to make the activation small enough of a thing that I would be able to consistently do it. If my task were to consistently lift a finger every Monday I don't think I'd be able to do it.
Right, but breaking down tasks after "activating" the task probably isn't very useful. Doing the one tooth thing doesn't really help since once you are already there, the gap between doing that and the rest of the teeth is basically nonexistent. You might as well start off flossing all your teeth if you are able to get to the flossing part.
Breaking down activation energy is also hard. Taking floss out and putting it on the counter feels like it might not be reinforcing enough.
Something more useful might revolve around storing the floss in a more readily available position or using something like floss picks and/or other things that might reduce friction. But ultimately, I think everything eventually boils down to raw discipline.
Doesn't those go hand in hand? You dread starting because you don't want or have the energy to spend 20+ min on it. So you reduce the task to taking 5 seconds and eliminate the reason for it being hard. Say, put on one shoe, if you want to develop the habit of walking.
Well this is kind of "smuggled in." If you are flossing one tooth, you need to have floss readily available. The point is that you are eating the (yes, usually significant) startup cost and that's it. Keep doing that until it's not even a cost for you, then you can start eating into the variable cost of a more complete habit.
As far as knowing to initiate the habit, place it directly behind an already established habit. Flossing is easy since you probably brush your teeth regularly.
I think what I'm trying to say though is that there's no benefit to starting with one tooth if you have already paid that "startup cost". Since at that point the cognitive load of flossing one tooth vs flossing all your teeth is basically nonexistent.
One tooth is strictly less time, less commitment, less cognitive overhead than all your teeth.
Simple as that.
Of course this is just the regime that helped me build 4 or 5 brand new daily habits in under two years, all of which I had tried and failed several times before. YMMV.
> You don’t rise to the level of your talents/motivation/discipline, you fall to the level of your habits.
"The enemy's gate is /down/!" (downward) [1]
That is, orientate yourself such that where you want to go is as easy/automatic as falling.
[1] Ender's Game, and the Ender's Shadow sequence. Though, I wish the catchphrase had used "downward" rather than "down", as the latter is confusingly similar to "has fallen / is breached".
You can think of the habits as the goal, "motivation to build and maintain good habits", which ends up looking like motivation and discipline for more external things. The inner driver though is to maintain good habits.
> How do I make my feelings inconsequential and do the things I consciously want to do without being a little bitch about it?”.
> The point is to cut the link between feelings and actions, and do it anyway.
We all wish our feelings had no impact on what actions we take. If we could just get stuff done without caring for what the monkey in us 'feels', we'd be wealthier, happier and our problems would go away.
I just don't work that way. Of course having a bad day is going to impact my ability to get shit done. I fear taking a stance like the one in the article would get me in the habit of ignoring the way I feel - and lead to a permanent sense of guilt/shame/uneasiness and lack of confidence in my hunches. This would have a negative impact in my creativity and joy.
In my case, cultivating motivation has made me productive. When I feel like procrastinating, I question: what believe about this task makes it feel like I want to run away from it?
Writing about my longer term plans helps me spot where I lack conviction. Identifying these items where conviction is low, makes me explore my motivations, look up data to validate my claims and breakdown my plans further.
As I 'debug' my plans, it makes it easier for me to link day-to-day stuff to my long-term plans. I do this writing probably every ~3 weeks and it has done wonders to keep me on task as I have a clear 'why'.
I think there's utility in differentiating between "long term" and "short term" motivation. You should follow your long term motivation, and completely unlink from short term motivation.
Say you have to study for an exam. And you hate it. Ask yourself: Do I want that degree? If the answer is: "well yes in general", then disregard what you're feeling rn and just do. Sometimes you'll be motivated to study, it'll grip you, sometimes you'll hate it - it shouldn't matter. You're working towards a long term goal that you DO want, so disregard short term feelings.
That being said, I think it's hard to get these sorts of insights just by reading a text. It all feels meaningless until you actually feel it. Personally I had the realization once where sort of got annoyed at my feeling of dismotivation, and sort of said, whatever, I'm gonna do it anyway. Then it clicked: I don't need to feel like doing it in order to do it. But this story is probably useless to obvious to anyone who hasn't experienced the same thing.
It's good that you managed to convince yourself and have it 'click'.
The problem is when we tell others to 'just do it' bc we figured out a way to 'just do it' ourselves. It's like telling me to just 'stop eating too much' to lose weight - well duh if I could I would.
Each person needs to come up with their own narrative that makes them believe that if they do X or push through a bit then it'll be alright.
This is what gets me. Of course, if I could do the thing regardless of my feelings I wouldn't read about self-discipline, it would already be handled.
My biggest frustration with the self-help industry is that nothing addresses the fundamental action that needs to be taken. It's little tricks and hacks. They might work temporarily but then that goes away...because guess what you need discipline for sticking with the little tricks and hacks as well.
On the flip side, if you hate what you do, why do it?
>My biggest frustration with the self-help industry is that nothing addresses the fundamental action that needs to be taken. It's little tricks and hacks. They might work temporarily but then that goes away...because guess what you need discipline for sticking with the little tricks and hacks as well.
This is worse when the book is just... anecdotes? Stories about hypothetical clients (or ones they swear exist, but don't), which you can't really port over to yourself.
The thing is, you're never going to get that "manual" from a self-help book. Maybe from a therapist or a coach, but the majority of the work and exploration has to be done by yourself; to the people that feel hopeless, discouraged, depressed and alone (the people who may be buying these books) this is a hard thing to sell, so the authors don't.
The best coaching/therapy is the one that teaches you to do these explorations by yourself. Problem is that it's bad for business to teach people to manage issues themselves vs subscribing them to therapy.
It kind of sucks that I'm stuck in the looking for the best solution instead of coming for a solution. I don't do this when I code and I probably should, and for my personal life I do it too much and probably shouldn't.
I would assume you trust your gut wrt to code: when you come up with a good enough answer you know what the tradeoffs are or at least have confidence that you can fix whatever comes up.
Wrt personal life/feelings, it has helped me talk to therapists and friends who've had similar issues and hear what they did to develop my own intuition.
It's tough! The computer throws errors but feelings are less deterministic and reflective (they change our ability to look into them).
Is it an ad hominem attack to point out that the author is a raving racist?
"For one, a solid proportion of Uber drivers are one bad day away from committing a terror attack, such as allahuakbarramming a van into pedestrians, "[0]
Not an adhom, it's valid to point out to give context to any sideways ideology that might show up. Often times these "discipline, hard world, grind" bloggers are set in a certain ideological context. So pointing that out helps contextualize what you're reading. The idea of "be careful who you take advice from". For example, I would not take advice from someone who believes:
`Impostor syndrome – Pangs of realistic self-reflection in impostors.`
or:
`Harassment (sexual) – Flirting attempts by ugly, short, fat, poor, or otherwise undesirable men.`
or:
`Misogyny – Women who hate men imagining that men hate them back.`
or:
`Planned parenthood – An eugenics programme posing as a human rights campaign`
People who hold really toxic, and in this case overtly Misogyny beliefs, tend to leak it into the rest of their advice and writings.
Adhom would be attacking them for it to detail the argument. Rather, you're just indicating "this guy has some horrible beliefs, be careful". Which is valid when you're getting the kind of exposure a HN top post does.
Thank for that clear response. There probably is an argument that different approaches work for different people. And the things you write about might help someone else decide if your advice might work for them
Yes, of course it is, unless you can draw a connection between a comment like that and what they're writing in this article. Then it would be totally legitimate.
People who fail to find a positive meaning in their life and who try to coerce themselves into activity without compassion for their own vulnerabilities also tend to fail to find positives in other people’s lives and are willing to coerce in general.
Do you think that someone with racist beliefs is incapable of having legitimate opinions on unrelated things? Or that it makes them a monster worth shunning altogether?
If this was a discussion about his Uber article, then I think it would be entirely on point to suggest that he appears to have a biased view that may call into question his conclusions.
I went and read that article since you mentioned it, and I thought it was halfway interesting. Controversial, opinionated, unfair to some Muslims for sure, but he did raise some legitimate points. Shouting him down as racist would be easy, but I think the cultural questions are very legitimate in the modern, diverse world we live in. Even if they're uncomfortable.
Plus, the point nearer the end sounds very legitimate on it's face. Is it true that there are a fleet of really nice cars being driven by people who seem unlikely to be granted the funds to buy them, and then used for ride sharing? If that is in fact true, it would indeed be good to know why. I'd argue that the economics of Uber should make organized crime uninterested, but maybe I'm very wrong.
> Do you think that someone with racist beliefs is incapable of having legitimate opinions on unrelated things? Or that it makes them a monster worth shunning altogether?
Exactly. Take what you like from what they wrote, skip the rest. These constant attempts to mark people as good or evil with no in-between disturbs me greatly. It's possible for a racist to change their stripes. I know because I did it. I grew up in a household that was otherwise normal but my dad had very racist views against blacks. I had normalized that growing up, and over time I managed to change it. It helped that the first African American I ever met turned out to be one of the most interesting people I had ever met.
It's possible for a racist to actually have important things to say on topics other than race. It's possible a person with racist views is otherwise a good person, they just need to work on themselves a little more. And, sure, it's possible they will never move past it or worse will let it consume them. Life isn't simple.
"These constant attempts to mark people as good or evil with no in-between disturbs me greatly. "
Interestingly, what you describe is the sort of black and white thinking that the author does, in the article about motivation/discipline as well as the article on Muslim Uber drivers. They are both sort of ranty, and show a lack of empathy toward people who aren't like the author. In that sense think the racist article is very helpful in taking in the first one.
The article itself isn't helpful to those of us who struggle with productivity issues -- well, at least not this one. I know the situations I do well in and I know the situations I do poorly at. I've been both the proverbial "rock star" developer who had a ton of highly prominent contributions, and I've been the one who got fired for missing deadline after deadline after constantly overestimation my ability to crank out code like I'm in a job interview. I know how hard a thing it is to get the balance right so I stay productive. This article does very little except make me feel bad about myself.
Set aside the question of marking people as good or evil.
Would you recommend that article (the one about motivation) to someone you know? Would you include a warning about the other content on the blog? Would you send it to a young person? If you were putting it on your own blog what would you write about it?
I would probably let people know the author's sense of humor is "edgy" but that the article itself is good. YMMV. I wouldn't recommend it to a young person because of the remarks the author made around the idea of "graduality".
I think that there are lots of really nice people in this world some of whom write really interesting things. I think that someone who writes racist things is capable of having good opinions on other things. But why would I bother with reading them when I can see that the author is happy to publish things that I think are abhorrent. So yeah I think that's equivalent to shunning them. I just don't want to waste my time reading an article sense checking every phrase and fact like it's a PR for a critical module in the code base.
When someone tells you who they are then believe them.
>> Or that it makes them a monster worth shunning altogether?
Yes. Absolutely. There are some ideas that are innately perverse to the point that they should have no place in civil society. I won't support the government banning them, because the government can't be trusted with such power, but not only will I shun people who hold such ideas, but I'll judge and become much more suspicious of people who tolerate those people.
Having one idea is rarely orthogonal to having another. There is a heavy correlation, for example, between holding the idea "some races are better than others" with the idea "some genders are better than others" and "a small subset of society has a divine right to rule over the rest". If they hold such ideas so strongly they feel the need to share it with the rest of the world, rather than rightfully feeling ashamed, then they're probably beyond the point of deprogramming, and for the greater good should be pushed away from the rest of society.
Not all heroes wear capes. What happens if during your eager vigilante efforts you call out somebody wrongly? Do we get to call you out? Or as as a self appointed racism batman you absolve yourself of any false positives?
Conversely, what they're writing in this article is nothing special and the website as a whole is bait. Yes, this advice is exactly what some people need to hear now, today...so what? There is an endless supply of self-help advice on the net, just like there are shelves full of it at the bookstore.
> what they're writing in this article is nothing special
That is both a matter of opinion as well as an accurate observation for 99.99% of all content on the Internet. I think if you read the post (and the author's other ones) looking for answers, you will likely be disappointed. But if you read it looking for questions, it's not terrible.
It's not that the post itself is particularly bad, it's just generic. My point is that generic good advice is filler material that you can get anywhere, and there's no particular need to go rummaging through a landfill for it. In some cases, it's deployed to attract people to the landfill and expose them to more 'edgy' opinions.
The idea that we shouldn't look at things in context, but evaluate every claim in isolation, is a misapplication of academic standards to a decidedly non-academic attention marketplace full of perverse incentives. It leverages FOMO, the fear of missing out on a piece of useful or insightful information.
Can't say I'm surprised given the baity blog title. Sites like this are always 'tune out the noise (but not my blog, pls sign up for daily emails etc. etc).'
"Sensationalist news" plus the terrible writing in general was a tell. I guess this is so old the "fake news!" cliché wasn't popular yet?
Their Twitter is currently ranting about "unstable schizoneurotic bullies, currently trans allied" so not an expert in psychological advice I'm guessing...
Immigrants from these troubled hotspots often end up in jobs such as cab/uber drivers.
Can you please explain without hyperbole/intentional obtuseness which part you find disagreeable? And which race do you think is being referenced?
Nowhere in your link is he advocating for anything except proper vetting of drivers. I'm quite sure it extends to filtering out not only potential jihadis but also far right extremists and mentally unstable people.
In part 2 of the article under discussion, there's this gem:
> In porn, they don’t ask a girl fresh off the street to do anal with five black bodybuilders (high five, guys!). It starts with tasteful semi-nudes (“Hey, it’s a legit modeling job”), then semi-tasteful nudes….you get the idea.
It took me about 30s to find many examples of racist shit opinions on that site. Just check out his "accurate definitions" page - or don't, if you don't want to bother filling your eyes with horseshit.
What you need is happiness!!
I’ve had this beaten in to me many times, that you need discipline.
But for me, what eventually worked was learning to love myself and to relax. Life is a marathon and tomorrow is another day.
Whatever issues I had was not a lack of motivation nor discipline; I had an inner turmoil that was disrupting my ability to execute.
It took discipline for me to get into a workout routine, 4 days a week. Now if I don't do it I get stressed out.
But if I had not pushed through the first two months of exercising those 4 days a week with discipline, I would have high blood pressure, probably be pre-diabetic. Now I have a great BP, blood work is fantastic and I have more energy during the day than ever before.
I had to use discipline and motivation to change what made me happy. Things that are generally good for you are not easy to do. Id rather binge netflix, play video games all night and eat ice cream in my younger days because that me me happy. I was actually just killing myself quicker.
The logic of do what makes you feel good or happy is so flawed. Doing heroine or shooting morphine feels amazing, but that does not make it ok.
Ultimate we are like the rat who will walk across a shock pad time and time again to receive an instant organized versus turning toward the female rat in heat.
I am not saying do things that make you feel good.
I am saying that you have to learn to love yourself, despite your flaws.
So with the realization that staying up all night and playing video games and eating garbage is bad for you, you decided to work out and take better care for yourself.
I too had the same realization, because I realized It is the path to happiness.
Personally I believe we have more agency than lab rats.
Tricking yourself (motivation, discipline, etc.) to do something means you don’t really want to it. This results in a feeling of struggle, and also repression. And thus, ineffective outcomes as you sabotage yourself or fail to “stick with” something.
We all naturally know what it is we really want to do. So stop. Relax. Listen to what that inner voice whisper, right now. Not to what others say you “should” do.
Ask yourself: “what would I love to create?”
Listening to oneself may not come naturally. We are trained by society, our parents, and schools to listen to “authorities”. So thoughts about what we “should” do run rampant in our minds.
But who’s the greatest authority of your life? You.
Once, I truly internalized the above, everything changed. It can happen to you too.
But those days can add up to weeks, and then to months, and then to years. Sure, one day or one week is not an issue in the grand scheme of things, but when you have been having difficulty executing for multiple weeks, months, or years, then I think there is a more serious issues that should be addressed.
For me, I figured out the cause, but I have yet to find any helpful, long-term solutions.
Would be curious to hear what you’ve discovered the cause to be, and potential solutions you’ve considered.
In my experience with my own difficulties executing, I’ve found that ineffective action comes from inner struggle. Inner struggle comes from an inaccurate view about how thought works. See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34692137#34699010.
With less inner turmoil, inspired, effective action becomes effortless to do and maintain.
The problem is that it's easy (very easy) to get stuck in local maxima with regards to happiness. Once I'm in the flow of programming, it's definitely more fun than whatever fidget videogame I'm playing while watching Netflix. But getting started is significantly more work, so I procrastinate to the point of not doing it at all. Or like how having an athletic (and thus conventionally attractive) body type opens up far more oppurtunities for greater happiness than being more rotund, but achieving it requires an ongoing sacrifice of short-term gratification (eating less, working out).
In a fantastic quote from Antony Bourdain: "I understand there's a guy inside me who wants to lay in bed, smoke weed all day, and watch cartoons and old movies. My whole life is a series of stratagems to avoid, and outwit, that guy."
When you are watching Netflix while simultaneously playing video games you are most likely hiding from your problems.
I used to do the same(still do sometimes), but these moments of joy are not happiness. They are a distraction from the suffering you are experiencing in real life.
What I needed was sleep. In order to get that sleep, I had to have my gallbladder removed. Once that was done, I had to stop eating dairy. Now I can sleep again. I feel much much younger.
I cannot believe how long I was going on listlessly, unknowing that my laziness was a side effect of health issues.
It is just so difficult to get them done right. It's almost impossible. How many people are getting quality sleep? I'm afraid that's a very expensive commodity and even rich people might not do that right.
Just a note that my completion rate and tolerance to grit increase dramatically when I had a good sleep, which is very very rare nowadays.
It took me nearly 20 years to realize it was dragging me down, which is now known to be common in my maternal genes. I had a night after dinner with fever, queasy, lack of urination, and upset stomach. I was subsequently affected with stomach and bowel pain and inflammation when I ate for a couple days. About a month prior to this episode, I had a slight sharp pain on the right side under my rib cage(typical location for male gallbladder symptoms). At the time I figured this was due to a misalignment in my spine(quite typical for me at the time). I put together the current condition(associated with food intake) and the previous pain to conclude that I needed to have my gallbladder checked. I went with the least invasive, lowest false negative, and least expensive check first, an ultrasound. Thankfully(more on this later), it showed a polyp near the base of the gallbladder.
With my symptoms and ultrasound report, I was a candidate for removal. Two years after the described episode I had it removed. I opted out of pathology and let the surgeon open up the gallbladder and report to me. He found no polyp! It was full of stones. They varied in size from a grain of sand to 7mm. The ultrasound technician was correct in their assessment of the image, however, the image was misleading.
Every one of my siblings and my mother have suffered for years without any of the typically significant acute symptoms of cholecystitis. One of my brothers suffers occasionally like I did, but every single test for gallbladder issues comes back negative. Anecdotally, I ran into a person who had all tests show negative gallbladder issues, yet had it removed to see if it helped. It cured her bowel issues.
Prior to my knowing what the issues were(20 years), here are the symptoms I can 100% associate with my gallbladder problem. Walking up stairs caused increased heart rate and fatigue after smoking a cigarette. Occasional slight queasiness after eating meals(they must have been high in fat). Rare episodes of fever, nausea, bowel discomfort after a meal that I wrote off as food poisoning or altitude sickness in one instance. General malaise.
My mother and I both were very aware of some of our symptoms, but it was incredibly easy to associate them with other things we had come in contact with. Mold and fragrances are two that come to mind. When I was eating "healthy" I noticed significant improvements in my energy. At the time I didn't realize the "healthy" eating I was doing was low fat. That low fat was reducing inflammation in my gallbladder allowing me to get proper rest. Not eating dairy(maternal genes as well) is reducing inflammation in my gut, allowing me to get proper rest.
Yikes, some of this is hitting too close to home. If you can think of any other info to share please write it out. I'm curious about other symptoms, if there's any alternatives to gallbladder removal that you've considered, whether other members of your family have had similar procedures. Why did it take 2 years to have it removed. What was the recovery like. Etc.
The most important question is how you associate the symptoms with gallbladder. Is it based on your experience before and after?
> if there's any alternatives to gallbladder removal that you've considered
There really is no alternative. The gallbladder is not necessary and when any issues arrive, it is generally removed. I did a lot of reading on that. I could not find any medicinal or herbal alternatives to break up stones.
> I'm curious about other symptoms
It is possible my sense of smell was affected. The days after the removal, I noticed I was smelling things that I had never noticed before. This is still happening a year later. The anesthetics used may have caused this though. One symptom that may have been gallbladder was what I thought was hypoglycemia. I had not been diagnosed, but between meals I frequently would get some slight weakness/anxiety and somewhat trembly. I would go into detail about my sleep pattern, but it was so sporadic toward the end and spinal issues contributed to it as well. Throughout the years though I had trouble getting to bed at a decent time. This was not as significant when I was eating "healthy". I did not notice it correlating to my eating at the time.
> whether other members of your family have had similar procedures
My mother found the source of her similar and more pronounced issues about a year after I had mine diagnosed. She had many similar issues for about the same amount of time. She ended up in the emergency room with a gallstone in her bile duct that had to be removed via endoscope once they got the inflammation down. Many people die from bile stones every year. My two brothers are toughing it out.
> Why did it take 2 years to have it removed
I was eating a very very low fat diet at first and managing fairly well. I was also trying to save money for surgery. As time went on, I could barely function and was going to get it removed no matter what the cost.
> What was the recovery like
The surgery was uneventful. I popped right out of sedation. I attribute this to my body's reaction to the scopolamine patch administered right before surgery. It is used to prevent vomiting. One of the potential side effects is tachycardia. I was wide awake and full of energy from 1pm(after surgery) to 11pm. My family was dumbfounded. When I tried to sleep, I couldn't. I began to realize this was abnormal and removed the patch to see if that would help. Thirty minutes later I was asleep. I was able to sit stand and lay the first night, being careful when changing position not to cause a hernia. The second and third day, if I recall correctly, were the most painful. This was only while laying flat on my back though. In a more upright position I managed to sleep fine. I understand a little now what it must be like to receive a penetrating wound.
The surgery was on a Thursday. I was back at the office the following Tuesday. The small incisions(4) occasionally gave me pain and I was afraid I might cause a hernia for about 3-4 weeks. I still feel a slight tingle/itch at two of the sites. I also still feel very mild pain from my non existent gallbladder when I am really hungry or when I have eaten too much oil/fat.
> The most important question is how you associate the symptoms with gallbladder
I knew the typical symptoms of cholecystitis from reading long before I associated it with my own symptoms. My father had typical symptoms and had his removed when he was about 26. He ate fast food and fatty food almost exclusively! My symptoms were atypical. Only in hindsight am I able to pinpoint some of them. I had one typical symptom, but it was not there during my acute attacks, which I described in my earlier comment here. I had so many symptoms that were gradual as I grew older or not severe enough for me to think it was abnormal. I had no idea how bad I was. (I may have misinterpreted your point in this response.)
> Is it based on your experience before and after?
Almost exclusively. My "food poisoning" episodes were, retrospectively, clearly my gallbladder. It was very easy to associate these to the gallbladder once I figured out I had a problem. The smoking and climbing stairs issue went away immediately when I stopped eating fatty food prior to surgery. My sleep was immensely better immediately following the surgery. My energy level was profound following the surgery, even compared to as much as six years before the surgery, before I knew the cause. I am relatively healthy otherwise, so there was not much to decipher. I am acutely aware of what my body feels. I am proficient at diagnosing computer hardware problems and apply the same style testing when it comes to fixing myself. I do not try multiple tests at the same time. This makes it easier to narrow down the cause of issues.
Can you elaborate on `My mother and I both were very aware of some of our symptoms, but it was incredibly easy to associate them with other things we had come in contact with. Mold and fragrances are two that come to mind.`?
My mother and I both have sensitive skin, she had her gallbladder removed. I've lived with overly sensitive skin for most of my life, but never thought it could be gallbladder related.
The week before my diagnosis and severe attack, I was eating a fatty diet. I was at the office and noticed my stomach feeling slightly queasy. I had just that week brought a box of fridge magnets into the room I work in. This was the first time I had a box of them around me. I could smell the off gassing. I assumed this was the problem, since that was the new thing around me. I removed them and seemingly had relief, until the attack. Placebo...
Ten years ago I would visit my parents house and eat fatty meals. I usually had a slight queasiness when I was there. I did not like going to their place. My subconscious mind had taken the queasy feeling and turned it into disdain. They had mold issues. I blew it off as a reaction to that. I know for certain some molds cause a reaction in me, but it is just puffy eyes in the morning after sleeping in a moldy/mildewy place.
I went to Denver and did some hiking in the mountains. After eating a meal in town, I was quite sick. It felt much like a cold/flu without the respiratory symptoms. I blew it off as altitude sickness. I am not a doctor...
My mother has similar stories. Her first bought she associated with a cat that was in our basement. The cat was gone and her problems persisted. She then began to associate her symptoms with mold. The mold was removed and her problems persisted. She then began to blame it on gut bacteria imbalance triggered by her breast cancer and or treatment of. In the end, she had her gallbladder removed in the E.R. after a stone was lodged in her bile duct. She sleeps great and has more energy than she has had in decades.
These atypical symptoms are not easy for a person to diagnose intuitively. Erroneous associations were easy because our diets are not consistent and the symptoms were not immediate or as severe as something like a broken bone.
As far as sensitive skin is concerned. Laundry detergent and soaps come to mind as irritants. I get spots and itches from dairy.
yeah. 75÷ of my lazyness, lack of motivation and no discipline comes from fast harbonhydrates, caffeine and no excercise. and they work in downward spiralling you.
If you have 0 motivation, it could mean you're just getting bored or saturated or stressed out or simply overwhelmed. In any case, do NOTHING for a day or two, don't feel guilt (that's KEY), tell yourself you're taking a break, play games, go ride your bike, walk in a forest, go to a restaurant, whatever suits you. Make yourself feel good. Take a break. Then the next day start by doing something very very simple. If you're working on a very hard problem then run a simple experiment to validate a case, corner case or not. If you feel like you don't feel like it, then just do some silly 5min task, it may be enough to get you restarted and just feel better. Feel good, enjoy life, then get back to work. Changing Job may do the trick too. Or take some vacation, the idea is to just break the cycle.
I found that consuming caffeine is fine if I stretch it out. Downing an espresso all at once will make me crash like everyone else, as the body overcompensates. Sipping it throughout the day will keep the levels steady.
I have a cup of half milk and half coffee, and the coffee is half cafe, drip. So I can enjoy four mugs of hot creamy goodness over a few hours and getting the same caffeine as that one single espresso.
Discipline is merely the embrace of long term goals for which the expected reward is delayed, and at the expense of short term desires. Motivation still comes first. You can't discipline yourself if you aren't motivated to do so. You can't do anything if you aren't motivated to do so.
Exactly my thought. The author doesn't understand what motivation is.
From the article:
> By contrast, discipline is like an engine that, once kickstarted, actually supplies energy to the system.
That's literally how motivation works. Discipline is just a cultural framing of it of things like motivation and rigor.
The thing is that yes, cultivating habits or even just _small_ goals and wins can snowball into you getting more and more disciplined. I know this from first hand experience having suffered depression and severe motivation issues. The only way out is to start with small goals and celebrating your tiny seemingly pathetic achievements.
If I'm allowed to play armchair psychologist, I think this article might just be that. A celebration of having built habits and getting more motivated. Call it discipline because that sounds stronger. If that's true: Great! I congratulate OP. It's hard and it _should_ be celebrated.
I agree with this. Motivation is the why you might want to do something, and discipline is part of the how you get that something done.
Clinical depression, a not uncommon issue, is characterized by having no motivation to do anything, and discipline won't help much in that situation.
Also, one's state of mind can be managed by discipline if one is motivated to do so - for example, I have a ~20-min routine to get into the proper frame of mind for writing or coding, which basically is a bit of cleaning up the workspace, a bit of breathing exercises, a bit of physical exercise, quick shower/brush teeth/etc if needed, then I can work for a few hours in a focused positive state of mind. Discipline means initiating that whole process on a regular schedule.
This is why activities that constantly motivate you are easier to do. Eg video games or sports (physical activity). They give you rewards while you're doing them, so you keep doing them. Starting them is hard, but it's easy to keep them going.
This sounds like the same people who claim that willpower is not affected by stress. I think that is the elephant in the room. So many people are very stressed by their lives and this leaves little room for "optional" things they know they should be / want to be doing.
It's funny though because you only need a short amount of discipline. Because after you use discipline for a while, it just gets way easier as it becomes a habit. Reminds me of this great Bojack Horseman clip - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2_Mn-qRKjA
Years and years ago I started training seriously for a triathlon. Then a half ironman. Then a marathon, and after 2-3 years of having a few races a year on the calendar, I just started exercising every day. At the start, a lot of the days took discipline/motivation to get out the door. After a while, it was just a few days of discipline a week. Then a few days a month, then a few days a year. Now it's automatic, and something I actually look forward to rather than dread (obviously in a hard training cycle there are some sessions I dread, but it's almost like my brain turns off and my body subconsciously gets my stuff and gets me out the door).
For endurance sports I find it helps to put yourself on some kind of structured training plan leading up to each event. There are lots of free or cheap training plans available and any of them will work well enough for a casual age group athlete. This removes the daily decision making process and allows you to focus on execution.
I've noticed a pattern in a lot of people that when they get super motivated, it just leads them to making big grand plans for how they're going to improve themself with X and Y strategy, but when it's finally time to execute, the motivation has worn off and they do absolutely nothing.
I've heard before that you get the same kind of dopamine hit from saying you're going to do something that you do from actually accomplishing a goal. And that definitely seems in line with this behaviour I've noticed in people.
I personally try to not announce any grand plans I have to anyone. Maybe that's just out of fear of commitment, but I find the idea of announcing something and then having nothing to show embarrassing. But sometimes I do execute on my plans, and it feels good having the results to show.
Similarly, I feel the same way about telling others about plans or small successes. I've had so many projects where I've made a prototype that is kinda cool, shown it off to friends, and immediately lost motivation to keep working on it.
I've made a rule for myself now that I can only show projects off if I've hit a point where my motivation is derived from my joy working on the project itself and not for gratification from others if that makes sense.
> I've noticed a pattern in a lot of people that when they get super motivated, it just leads them to making big grand plans for how they're going to improve themself with X and Y strategy, but when it's finally time to execute, the motivation has worn off and they do absolutely nothing.
A lot of this correlates with a manic episode from someone who is manic-depressive
Eh. I'm bipolar and I wouldn't compare this to a manic episode. Lots of people to the whole big grand plans things every New Years. (Authors do it every time they get a story idea.)
It's just part of being human. Thinking about the thing is easier than doing the thing.
That's an extreme watering down of a complex topic. Essentially the study you link is saying that PIC (Positive, Immediate, Certain) outcomes are stronger than PDU (Positive, Delayed, Uncertain) outcomes.
Well, of course. Taking the inverse - a NIC (Negative, Immediate, Certain) outcome of putting your hand on a hot stove will quickly teach you to not put your hand on the stove. Compare this to cheating a bit on your taxes where the consequence is NDU (Negative, Delayed, Uncertain).
Beyond that, I disagree with your premise that something must be immediately fun for it to get done. There is a lot of literature on this - I recommend highly, "Solving the Procrastination Puzzle".
> MARIA, A WORKING MOTHER of three young children, reaches the end of her day with lots left to do. […] She plans carefully, but kids’ illness, changes at the day care, and both her and her husband’s travel for work always seem to necessitate change in her plans and delays on some tasks.
> These examples in Maria’s life should not be seen as procrastination
Then 3 pages later
> Everyone procrastinates. I believe this, and research has documented this in a number of different ways. In fact, I think that people who say that they have never procrastinated might also say that they have never told a lie or been rude to someone.
hhmm…So, where does poor Maria fall into this ? And should the real lesson be, that the ultimate solution to procrastination is to become a working parent of 3 children ?
I still skimmed most of the book, and it feels like it’s pointed at people that either aren’t actually convinced they should be doing some tasks, and/or can actually get by not doing them for a very long time without much actual consequences (there’s a passage about participants waiting for a week to do a report. If they have such leeway, I’m not sure why it matters they do it earlier than later…)
> That's an extreme watering down of a complex topic.
Fair point.
A person can force themselves... until they break.
So in that sense it needn't be fun as long as you can finish the task before the breaking point.
But there's a threshold beyond which the person cannot sustain the behavior.
Because it's a form of consistent lying to oneself.
A person's brain, on a moment-to-moment basis is trying to pick the 'optimal' choice. The 'optimal' is: most pleasure, least pain.
If the most pleasure, least pain option is beneficial to you in the long-run, the "game" that we play of trying to convince ourselves to do something else disappears.
Which diet will win in the long run:
1. One that tastes better than all available options (including any takeout, or delivery, ice cream, or restaurant you know of)
2. One that tastes worse
My critique is with this flawed concept of "discipline" which to my mind translates to "forcing yourself" aka "lying to yourself for as long as possible"
I understand what you are saying and acknowledge there is a lot of truth in it. I think though that your binary selection is too limiting that I'll describe with an example.
In 2013 I had my routine annual physical and discovered that my triglycerides were about 250. Not crazy high but it made me concerned enough to do something about it. I stopped eating obvious refined sugar completely. I say that very specifically - for example, if there was refined sugar in bread I didn't care about it. But I stopped my once-per-day soda habit, stopped eating dessert, candy, etc.
One year later my triglycerides were 113. Ten years later, I have not had a single soda. So I think at least one option you may have not considered is what I refer to as the "change your mindset" option. Consider an oversimplified list of options before us on the topic of dietary choices:
1. I will indulge my sweet tooth
2. I will deprive myself of sweets
3. I will change my mindset about sweets to "I don't eat that stuff."
#1 is unhealthy. #2 (and I think this is your point) is not sustainable. #3 is healthy and positively changed my life. I'm not on a diet. I don't need to exercise that willpower muscle for the next two weeks and then it's scarf city. I just don't eat that stuff.
And do you know what happened? I had two weeks of terrible cravings for soda and candy. It felt like a mild form of withdrawal. Then I just stopped caring about it. And fruit tasted sweeter. Everything tasted better - it was almost like a taste bud reset.
I've experienced similar things with non-diet things as well.
Probably difficult to actually study this as there are cultural aspects. Most people haven't a particularly well-cultivated sense of discipline because they've grown up in a culture where this is seen as negative.
You're seen as boring or even wasting your life if you don't indulge your impulses frequently enough. Missing out on having fun is seen as a very bad thing.
Trick: Put yourself into a situation that you have some pressure to do what you want to do but not necessarily always fun.
That's why I always want to learn on work instead of opening all those projects without finishing any. Sadly most companies don't agree with me :) They always want to hire experienced players. Can't blame them though.
I see this as being in agreement with what the OP is saying. This study more or less says that people intrinsically have motivation, not discipline. Hence, as the OP says, a need to cultivate discipline.
Also, saying “science calls BS” is incredibly reductionist. Science can say whatever it wants, but that doesn’t change that myself and many others engage in activities regularly that they do not enjoy to achieve ends that they value.
> Also, saying “science calls BS” is incredibly reductionist. Science can say whatever it wants, but that doesn’t change that myself and many others engage in activities regularly that they do not enjoy to achieve ends that they value.
That's fair. "Science might raise an eyebrow at this but it could still be wrong" may have been closer to the truth.
For myself, it is when I enjoy the tedious aspects of some work, I know I could do it as a job. There are always tedious aspects, and when it appeals to some inner compulsiveness (for me, I guess other people like bossing others around, and are suited to that sort of job) then I know I will be able to do well with the totality.
Discipline, at its core, is the consistent application of executive power to create desired outcomes. It is a solution to many _many_ of life's problems, and I encourage everyone to cultivate it and exercise it.
However.. for some people that's not useful advice. A surprising fraction of us (13% and trending up) have some form of ADHD, often including "executive dysfunction", which essentially makes this type of suggestion _hot garbage_.
There's nothing wrong with a post like this, it proposes a solution that will probably be useful to a fair majority of people, and is worth exploring. But if you find this approach to be ineffective and counter-productive, there's not necessarily something wrong with you. Or, depending on how you think of it, there _is_, but it's not your fault, and it's wrong with a lot of other people too.
I feel as if self-discipline is one of the most important of my attributes.
It's worked out well for me.
This is especially true, if I want to ship software, as opposed to just writing it.
Shipping requires a hell of a lot of "not-fun" stuff. Discipline ensures that it gets done.
Also, things like localization, accessibility, and anomaly management are things that often get left on the shelf. They are usually a complete bitch to retrofit, but not such a big deal, to add, at first.
"Winners do what they have to do. Losers do what they want to do."
In my experience, the best overall, top-to-bottom analysis of the psychology of doing hard things over the long term is Mike Israetel's breakdown [0]. I don't normally drop competing links into discussions, but the source is maybe outside the usual range of HN, and it's a big step up in quality and usefulness from the posted source.
Israetel breaks the psychology of weight loss down into different pieces that each have their own strengths and weaknesses and different roles they play in the process. The pieces in his breakdown are inspiration, motivation, intention, discipline, habit, and passion.
For example, the first factor he breaks down is inspiration. Inspiration is the spark that gets you interested. It's the prime mover that helps you get the process started and allows the other factors to come into play. It lasts a few hours, maybe a day.
What I like about Israetel is that he doesn't bag on anything. He doesn't say inspiration is worthless. He tells you what you can and can't expect it to accomplish for you.
Passion is a cliché topic here, so here's what Israetel says about it: passion takes years to develop. But it's optional! Passion is being in love with the process. It's powerful if you can get it, but you can be extremely successful over the long haul without it. Nobody needs "passion" to brush their teeth every day. Habit is sufficient. Many people succeed, and not all of them fall in love with the process.
Finally, a very relevant point he makes is that most of the people pitching you "passion" or "motivation" or "discipline" are really in the business of providing inspiration: a little spark of excitement that lasts a few minutes or hours. They may talk about discipline, or motivation, but they get clicks and get shared because people experience inspiration while consuming their content. Which is fine in the content is useful, but you should be clear about why it feels good.
The author is not wrong. I would just like to add that motivation is akin to free discipline. A highly motivated person is hard to get them to stop. Highly motivated need discipline to stop. lol. So, if you can somehow hack yourself to become motivated, the discipline issue is solved, at least temporarily, until the motivation dies down. in which case you are back to discipline or another dose of motivation.
It seems there are two different uses of the word motivation. One is more fleeting - oh wow, I really feel like waking early and jamming out the rest of this code in my head - and one is more long lasting, my god I don’t know if I can read this story once again, but I am really committed to helping this small human grow up and become a kind and intelligent member of society, so reading it is something I am ready and willing to do, again and again.
The longer term motivation, having a big picture in which your work, fun and dull, is understood to be important and useful, makes both discipline and ephemeral motivation a lot easier to come by.
This operates at many scales - I may try very hard to please a difficult boss, both for the pleasure of approval and as a sort of technical self-challenge exercise (not as a substitute for finding a better boss, but to make the wait more pleasant). Overall, I find my life most fulfilling when it is dedicated to the well being of things larger than just my self, family, society, profession, species, the general goodness of existence.
Other people have long term goals of success or power, and from that desire can spring an impressive amount of discipline and motivation.
If you have to hammer yourself down to get thru your tasks, you might want to think about how a change would be possible.
Quite often when you need motivation, it's because there is something wrong with the situation you are in. Sometimes discipline can help you push through, but it is a double edge sword, as quite often, you would be better by changing your situation.
You need to get reward some times. Nowadays most jobs are structured like slot machines. They dangle positive completion stats, only for them to be meaningless when it comes to give you cold hard cash, or whatever you are expecting.
If you find yourself fishing in a skating rink for someone else's profit, the solution is not motivation or discipline, but noticing it and leaving for a better deal.
Nowadays I just recommend "Read atomic habits", since I've noticed that just saying the same thing in the title, hinting at the importance of small habits is not enough to convince people.
But I recommend that with the intent of the reading being conductive for some self reflection and attempts at improving via trial and error, I'm aware that that are no easy solutions for the problem of procrastination since there are a multitude of possible causes, and real life issues can't be fixed blindly applying what you read in some self help book.
Discipline is tricky. A LOT of the signalling in modern life is just to tempt you into distractions. You're probably reading this on a rectangle that distracts you all the time.
I think everyone likes to talk about motivation, because we all want the calm mania like flow state that effortlessly provides willpower over obstacles that would otherwise frustrate a disciplined person.
When I was younger I used to worry about having the right goals to work towards. Now I consider it more important to be moving towards something. You eat an elephant in small bites.
Treating motivation and discipline as alternatives is a mistake. In fact you need both. Think about "getting stuff done" as a high-jump (or pole-vaulting) bar. Motivation increases your height and discipline lowers the bar. Some people need to jump higher even when the bar's already low. Some people are already jumping as high as they can and need the bar to be lower. Some people are in both states at different times, and recognizing which one you're in is an important life skill.
Courage is not the absence of fear (which is likely ignorance of the real situation or just stupidity), it is having the fear and doing the right thing anyway.
Similarly, discipline is not being motivated, it is lacking motivation and doing the right thing anyway.
EDIT, add:
One motto of Ben Franklin was:
"Never put off until tomorrow what you can get done today."
I'm pretty sure that for many of those things he did, he did not feel "motivated" at the time. Yet his legacy in science, diplomacy, and role in founding a nation is unparalleled.
So what do you do when conventional discipline doesn't work?
I'm bipolar, so let's throw every single piece of advice out the window, including any suggestions you think you have for me. :)
My solution is managed chaos. It takes advantage of motivation by seeking to reducing activation energy. Start by throwing away any concept of measurement or success. This is a best effort system.
- Keep tasks really small and don't commit to them. You need the option to abort early if you lack sufficient energy. If you're sitting down, your only goal is standing up. You can always sit back down.
- Forget about efficiency. Seriously. Stop. Inefficient but done is better than not doing it.
- If you're motivated to something productive, do it, even if it's not what you want to do most.
- Do not "remember to do things". Attention is precious. If something is important, do it immediately or stick it on a calendar to ignore later. (Use timed reminders, not todo lists.) Don't keep them in your head unless absolutely necessary.
- If you're not motivated, look for ways to reduce activation energy later. I like to cleaning up or organizing my living area.
- If you're going to watch YouTube videos, try to do something else at the same time.
I would say motivation is needed, at least initially, to be disciplined. A personal anecdote. When I was in school, I had really bad handwriting bordering to illegible. Then I met someone who had almost calligraphical handwriting. I so much wanted to have that kind of handwriting. I tried and gave up. But the motivation was there. So I decided that I will change one alphabet at a time. And thus it began. I started with "a" till I made it as perfect as I could, without worrying about other letters. Then "b" and other letters followed one by one. The initial few letters were the real test of discipline. By the time I was through, I no longer had the motivation to be a calligrapher, but I was much better with my handwriting. Though later I did practice calligraphy, it was not for my original motivation but more for my own pleasure.
Indeed. All my life I had the causality backwards. Personally for me, it's the discipline that leads to motivation.
Motivation on its own is almost useless. As a saying goes (don't remember the author), you need to be boring and predictable in day to day life so that you can be wild and unpredictable in work.
I guarantee, highly productive people aren't going through the day forcing themselves to do stuff they don't feel like doing. Gordon Ramsay is not like, "Oh lord, another cooking show that I have to discipline myself to do."
Highly productive people are obsessed. They're in the flow. And there are techniques to work yourself into obsession or a flow state, but it's much more tricky and difficult than the author suggests.
He says, "discipline is like an engine that, once kickstarted, actually supplies energy to the system." Kickstarting an engine is easy. What he's talking about is more like building an engine.
Building a day-to-day fixed routine was a life-changing decision for me.
1. I have stable point to rely on when life turns chaotic.
2. I have an overview of my life, and make it balance: physical health and mental health, work and relax.
To quote Haruki Murakami [^1]
> I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.
I like the David Burns "Feeling Good" approach, which is to commit to just one simple task — like, "I'm gonna open up my IDE. I can commit to that." Then maybe one more, "I'm gonna document that method I wrote."
It's amazing how effective this can be at getting the ball rolling. My problem with saying "discipline is what you need" is that to many people that just adds even more pressure when they're maybe feeling overwhelmed or unhappy.
But it's easy to commit to a very small task, and it's surprising how often you'll find a whole afternoon of work has passed.
> Motivation, broadly speaking, operates on the erroneous assumption that a particular mental or emotional state is necessary to complete a task.
A similar dismissive argument can be made of discipline.
“Discipline, broadly speaking, operates on the erroneous assumption that you can dominate yourself to execute endlessly without fear of utterly snapping.”
At some point you look up and realize you’ve wasted the best decade of your life trying to build something nobody wants, at which point you start considering the shape of objects you might put in your mouth besides food.
Jim Collins would say that a "great" company doesn't need to build alignment, everyone who works at a WalMart or McDonalds understands how the company creates value for customers and how their role makes that happen. (Whereas I've worked at startups where the only person who would claim to know the answer to that question is the CEO and the rest of the people would tell you they are not so sure about the CEO)
Collins criticizes Covey for making it appear that alignment is something you can get from hiring a consultant or otherwise paint on.
Covey might point you to building habits that embody discipline whereas Collins would say having the right motivation makes it all happen naturally. My take is that highly disciplined people who don't have intrinsic motivation are not in a sustainable situation and likely to burn out.
I know somebody who was an alcoholic in high school, then was super-disciplined for 10 years but also lonely and miserable, one day he started drinking again and started relating to people better but then he got in multiple DWIs and he found he really had to quit drinking. For him strict discipline turned out to be not sustainable and he had to scale back and really rebuild his life from zero.
I have severe ADHD. Discipline is very difficult for me, because at the core of my predicament is a lack of dopamine production. My brain is stuck always hunting for stimulation. This in turn creates anxiety because you can't get anything done!
Discipline is wonderful, but what helps more than discipline is constant reminders of steps and tool to continuously nudge myself back on track.
This is a really hard topic. The article goes in the right direction that feelings should be consciously suppressed to make "unpleasant" things a habit. Like washing the dishes.
A sense of responsibility over "feeling like doing it" must be cultivated.
The meta game of all of this is that, to get anything done by discipline, you need to want that, in the same sense that one wants a glass of water. No sequence of characters are guaranteed to make you stand up and act without a sincere will to do it. Trying to reprogram yourself to want it is an exercise of luck where some succeed, some not. Then one day you wake up and have it, like a blessing.
I decided to go to the gym 4 weeks ago after years of trying and failing. Since then I've been going consistently even when not feeling like doing it. Can't pinpoint a motive other than god updated my firmware with the will to do it. I hope it lasts long enough.
"You're free to do what you want, but you're not free to want what you want"
I stopped reading at "I AM SO PASSIONATE ABOUT THESE SPREADSHEETS" because as an engineer by training, I find spending hours debating and crafting Office documents with equally very senior people who can go to almost extreme lengths to avoid saying "I don't know" (how to deal with an issue, or sometimes, even, how to change font formatting) to be soul-crushing and utterly abhor the fact that they seem to take up most of your time as your career progresses.
I do agree about making chores routine work, though. After a while your brain starts being able to do things in parallel and you breeze through the annoyances while pondering actually interesting things--the only caveat is that in a chaotic organization it becomes really hard to establish a routine, and thus all the habit forming effort you put into work may be widely off the mark.
So if you are having trouble with motivation _and_ discipline, the problem may not actually lie with you (alone).
It’s said that life is a marathon rather than a sprint. But I think it’s mix of both. More challenge one takes on, more they have to sprint. To me this favors willpower (shorter bursts) than discipline (long periods).
Obviously one needs to brush teeth every day, but that’s in my book a habit. It becomes fairly automatic and low stakes over time. But pushing through a final in a school, or working on a presentation for your boss on Friday night is different.
Willpower also favors lazy people like me. It allows me to do whatever most of the time and then push hard for short bursts.
Our minds like to freely pursue whatever looks interesting, that’s why you need “discipline” to help you stay focused. Motivation is another way staying disciplined because the motivation keeps your mind from pursuing other ideas.
Main point is staying in the focus in the area and not stray off too far. This is difficult because sometimes you need to pursuit/pivot ideas when they may not work. Or you need rest. The balance is difficult to handle and they are all not sure bets.
My experience is to do whatever it takes for you to stay in the zone. Everyone is built different
Daniel-san wanted to stop the beatings in High School. That was the carrot. Mr. Miyagi showed Daniel-san how to stand up to the the bullies through discipline. That was the stick. Come to think of it, if it wasn't because the Cobra Kai jerks Daniel-san would have never learned karate and self-discipline. There has to be certainty. Like Mr Miyagi said it more or less: "You either do it or you don't, if you stand in the middle you'll get squashed like a grape"
To me those are good skills, but at the end of the day the important thing is to work in a way in which after going through a project (or after getting some rest in between projects), you have as much or more energy that before starting the project.
Discipline can be fine for 3 or 6 months to finish a very tough deadline, but if you go through 5 years of discipline where every day you are more tired that the previous day the quality of the work will suffer a lot.
I wrote about this too, a long time ago and perhaps a bit more directly[0]
I didn't write much since, mostly because I have been achieving the goals I set myself and returning to write things on my blog is not one of those current goals.
So I think what I had to say worked, for me at least.
This reminds me of the book “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” (admittedly by the since somewhat disgraced for other reasons, Amy Chua) where the central argument is that by pushing children to continue doing something even (especially) when it gets hard, they will find confidence and fulfillment. Children need to “borrow” their parents’ discipline in the beginning until the flywheel starts moving in them and they develop their own discipline.
This is effectively the usual advice that some neurotypical people give to others, with little appreciation for how others may be different. "Get some discipline", "build a habit", etc.
If this approach works for you then that's great, I'm sure it will work for many people. But to suggest it will work for anyone and everyone is ridiculous.
> If you're not motivated toward the end-goal, what do you apply your discipline to?
To everything you do. Does a carpenter leave in a crooked nail? Probably not, and that is not discipline, this is just their professional ethos, or pride.
Discipline and a certain quality standard needs to be one's modus operandi, not the special sauce you apply in special situations.
And before this comes across as over the top, I truly think that there are people who care about quality and being precise no matter what they do — having such a mode of operation will inevitably lead you down a different road in your career, because caring about the wuality of your craft/work makes you care about the result of your work even if you don't care about the object/project in itself.
The only way to truly break such people to constantly force them to deliver bad quality.
The way I understand it, the carpenter is disciplined here because they are motivated by the end goal. The goal being to create the best product they can to satisfy their clients.
Discipline just ensures that this goal is reached. But one should have motivation and remain motivated during the process.
I can't prove it but I'm suspicious this was ripped off from a recent Theo Von discussion with Jocko Willink which just came out 3 weeks ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkJQDueUtww and makes the exact point.
This is a good article but it frames motivation and discipline in terms of getting a task done. I think another important aspect of discipline is the ability to *not* do something you want to avoid (think abstaining from a negative habit).
In my experience cultivating discipline to *not* do something has always been harder.
No. Actually when you have a vision and do something you love, really, then you don’t need motivation or discipline. Then you just need every possible moment to execute it, and you will feel relaxed while “working” on it. So consider to just sit down quiet until you know what ignites you like that.
It's really important to remember for a subset of the population pain avoidance, and not reward, is the main driver of motivation. It's very hard to build discipline with pain avoidance as your main driver. If you don't have this it will be very hard for you to understand.
My experience with discipline is to have exterior pressure, both social and mechanical.
Asking a teen if they took the trash out, and also having a recurring alarm on their calendar that the day is trash day are the exterior pressures I am suggesting. This trains the expected pattern of behavior.
Sort of related to this, what works for me (more often than not) is writing down one task I need to do, and focus on that. I've conjured up a quick tool for myself where I can write down the task and complete it once it's done.
I call it the one item todo list. Keeps me from being overwhelmed with all the complexity that surrounds the goal I want to achieve. I know if I just focus on this one thing, I'll be one step closer.
Screw discipline. what you need is my paid medium subscription "the power of YES".
Currently accepting new subscribers at www.notarealnewsletter.com/couldbearealnewsletter/subscribe?utm_medium=email&utm_source=yc&utm_content=1249871092
Periodically rethinking and questioning what you do isn't a bad thing. So many PhD candidates, to name just one of tens of thousands of demographics, have squandered so many disciplined years executing a plan they later regretted.
Does this lead to the same results? It feels like the difference between a paid article and a comment on a social network. Both have their place, but it's not fun to read a wall of paid recommendations for a restaurant.
If somebody is skilled to write engagingly with discipline, shouldn't they have been able to create something even more beautiful if they had followed their instincts?
TLDR: ask yourself "why don't I want to do this?" Pay attention to the feeling, be honest, and try to address the problem it points at.
In my personal experience, negative emotions are strong indicators that should not be ignored, overridden by external motivation, or powered through with discipline. Emotions seem to be like mental shorthand for different kinds of problems, or like flashing signals from the subconscious trying to get my attention.
If I interrogate that feeling, I have a chance to address the root of the problem. Or I discover that I'm never going to solve the problem, so I need to find a way to accept it.
The reasons for being stuck, feeling unmotivated, or whatever, usually boil down to a few simple problems. I don't know what to do next, I don't know how to get started, I don't want to do this thing I have to do, I don't think I should be doing this at all, I don't think I can do this well... blah blah blah. All of those problems translate into the same kind of emotional malaise, but there are different strategies for addressing each. The strategies aren't very complicated, but I first have to acknowledge the feeling and try to understand it.
(Note - as an ADHD-enhanced person, this experience may only be relatable to others with the same gift. Maybe neurotypicals have magical executive function juice that lets them power through anything, but then... why are they reading this article?)
I agree with you. Getting started (and getting other people to start) requires motivation, wherever that might come from. But seeing things through takes discipline - and the two are not the same.
I, too, would rather have benevolent parents that protect me and make sure my needs are all covered for the rest of my life. But that's just not how the world works.
Often when a manager or professor says that it translates to “I can’t be bothered helping with your career advancement, just do this minimum project and get out of my face”
The advice in this article probably won't work for neurodivergent people like many of us reading HN.
That's because for stuff like ADHD, we have infinite enthusiasm for stuff we want to do, and zero enthusiasm for other tasks. It's like someone versed in music telling someone to "just play the piano" when that part of the brain hasn't been developed in the other person. We can replace that missing functionality with todo lists, reminders and digital assistants. But in the end, we must face the fact that we may never develop a flow state for tasks that feel mundane to us beyond a certain point. Meaning that those tasks may always feel manual to us, forcing us to pay an ongoing tax that others don't often perceive.
After experiencing profound burnout just before the pandemic, I learned a couple of things about my mental models that might be useful. Keep in mind that the only thing real is reality, so I'm not saying that these models are how it all works, just that they touch on other insights that make things easier:
1) Anxiety about finishing an upcoming school or work assignment is a physical response in the body identical to excitement. That's why when under extreme pressure, we somehow find the energy to comment on social media or play video games instead of studying or working. The problem isn't a lack of motivation or energy, but where it's directed.
2) The mind is separate from the brain. This may be a hard pill to swallow for people who identify with their prowess in certain mental fields like programming. If doing a task feels insurmountable, it's not a problem with our problem-solving skills, but something physical in our brain chemistry. It's like the oomph to trip the neuron threshold voltage is too low, so it takes additional manual effort to think.
What finally worked for me was NOT to keep exercising my motivation and discipline (which are already overtrained by 2 orders of magnitude), but to rehab and strengthen the other areas of my life which had been neglected. Loosely, that means having dessert before dinner. Here are some examples:
* I carved out Saturdays for myself. Regardless of how much work I have to do, or how many plans I have to cancel, or even if I have bills to pay, I spend my free day now on Wikipedia deep dives and geeking out on various physics spreadsheets like Tony Stark, living my best life.
* I turned correcting my deficiencies into acts of gratitude and love. I feel that burnout is the full loss of all automatic thinking and habits after the brain stops cooperating. So even the simplest act like brushing one's teeth can feel insurmountable. The fix is to remove time from the equation and stop thinking about any step beyond the current one. Which also eliminates any subsequent step or the knowledge of how many more times the step will need to be performed over a lifetime. Instead, find a fond feeling or memory and linger in it while brushing your teeth, so that your mind comes to associate it with pleasure instead of pain.
* I learned to meditate with my eyes open, surrounded by distraction. Just quiet all internal dialog and observe the matrix unfolding before you. The mind is the nexus of an infinite fractal of intersecting probability curves, so the slightest change in perception affects the whole reality. The brain struggles for a bit to hog your attention before finally giving up, then becomes more open to new ideas because it so enjoys being heard. This allows one to shift between tasks without expending effort because the mind moves along the multiverse until it finds the reality where the brain is already eager to get to work.
Basically the above is about setting boundaries, prioritizing yourself, mindfulness and most importantly: coordinating them with action so something manifests. I suspect that the rampant outbreaks of procrastination and burnout in tech have more to do with opportunity cost than shortcomings in work ethic. I also think that the global awakening gives us a rare opportunity to grow out of that dysfunction.
..and I just spend an hour writing this when I should have been working. But now I really really want to get to work because I've gotten it out of my system!
Dictators and psychopaths are motivated. Only conditional on wanting the right thing is discipline what you need. Lack of motivation is, I believe, generally a half-assed search for a better option, which impulse can be very good.
And by “start small” I mean “floss one tooth per night for 3 months to build a flossing habit” small. Let your good habits progressively and slowly consume more time, similar to what bad habits do.
For all intents and purposes you should just assume both discipline and motivation are completely mythical and you should construct a system of high-leverage habits to obviate the need for them. You don’t rise to the level of your talents/motivation/discipline, you fall to the level of your habits.