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Everyone has dreams. And while creativity, hard work, and enthusiasm are all important traits to help you live your dreams, you’ll struggle to get anywhere without the discipline to see things through.
It’s what gets you to turn up on the hard days. To keep going when you face a setback. To block out the doubt and regulate our emotions.
You can push through the discomfort of today for the delayed happiness of tomorrow. Because sometime inspiration and willpower won’t be enough.
The internet is full of advice for how to improve your discipline, from atomic habits to discipline equalling freedom. But how can you filter who to listen to?
Take a trip to opposite land
Whenever I want to get better at something, I use a technique called ‘inversion’. I imagine what someone would do if they wanted to get worse at that thing, and then do the opposite.
If you didn’t want to lose weight but wanted to get fat, you’d eat junk food, get bad sleep, drink only sugary drinks, and have dessert with every meal. To lose weight, do the opposite.
If you wanted to always be tired, you’d go to bed late, sleep for four hours, drink loads of coffee before bed, and leave the TV on loud all night.
To improve my discipline, I studied the habits of successful people on the internet and around me. Then through trial and error, and also using the protege effect and trying things out with coaching clients of mine, I developed a comprehensive list of the common habits that hurt your discipline.
Here are the top things disciplined people don’t do. If you want to improve your discipline, start by doing the opposite to these.
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#1. Think only about outcomes
Focus on the process, not the product.
You can’t control whether you’ll increase profit this year. You can develop habits that cut costs.
You can’t guarantee your product will be a huge success. You can guarantee you’ll turn up everyday and work on improving it.
You can’t guarantee a post will go viral. You can guarantee you’ll write posts everyday.
“You control the effort, not the results” — Ryan Holiday
Habits give you daily wins. Daily wins give you the motivation to keep going by building a winning mindset. And over these wins stack into bigger wins.
And by showing up everyday to work on the things that are important to you, you’ll build an undeniable stack of evidence that you are who you say you are.
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#2. Rely on feelings
Emotions are like an instinct. They can be a useful tool, but benefit from logic and a clear head to utilise them fully.
Think of your mind as a committee, not a single voice. You’re going to get inputs from everywhere: instinct, emotion, rational thought, ego, and on and on. Each of these gets to cast a vote when you encounter a situation. It would be a high risk strategy to nominate and then rely on purely one of these. And yet so many people let their feelings grab the steering wheel in key moments and never learn how to control this. Or they get led astray by impulsive emotional responses so many times they learn to hate this element of themselves, never learning to harness the value of it.
Emotions are a normal, healthy response to life. I’m not here to tell anyone that they should or shouldn’t feel anything. What I’m advocating is the centuries old idea of recognising there is a third step. That we have power not over how we feel, but how we respond to those feelings.
Emotions tell us things about ourselves and the world. We should listen to them like we do advice. It’s useful, sometimes. But it isn’t the only thing.
Consider the committee in your mind. Utilise all parts of it to get the best results in your life. Because there are no bad parts of your mind, only how they’re applied.
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#3. Wait to ‘feel ready’
There’s never a perfect time. If you’re always waiting until you’re ready, or you feel motivated, you’re significantly minimising your opportunities to get things done.
The best way to feel ready to do the thing is to start doing the thing.
“How do you cure runner’s block? You go for a fucking run.” –Mark Manson
The funniest part is most of the time, starting when you don’t feel ready ends up summoning motivation anyway. When the rubber hits the road, all the positive feelings of progress seep in.
Don’t overthink it. Just count down from three and start.
“Easy productivity hack: Instead of spending time “getting in the mood to work”… Just start working. Confront the work. People think they need perfect conditions to start, when in reality, starting is the perfect condition”. — Alex Hormozi
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#4. Make excuses
You cheapen your accomplishments when you make excuses for your failures. As if the only reason you didn’t succeed is bad luck or someone’s agenda against you.
This kind of thinking destroys your ability to self-reflect. As by not being honest with yourself about your shortcomings and failures, you’re giving yourself a free pass that stunts growth.
“A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.” — James Joyce
Honesty gives you agency. Even if it was bad luck, so what? You played a part. There’s something you can do differently. And who’s to say you won’t be unlucky next time?
Don’t ruin a great lesson by excusing it away.
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Conclusion
If you want to stop living life on hard mode, develop your discipline.
If you don’t know what advice to follow, use inversion to think about what you definitely should not do. Then work backwards from there to discover simple behaviours that can improve your discipline.
Start with avoiding these four things:
- Thinking only about outcomes — focus instead on developing good habits that will lead you towards the outcomes you want
- Relying only on feelings — They’re a tool, but need to be balanced (or you’ll be living on impulse)
- Waiting to feel ready — You can’t trust you’ll always feel ready. You can trust that you’ll show up anyway. Build that muscle
- Making excuses — Failures and setbacks are your custom-made lessons from the universe. Don’t miss these glorious nuggets by explaining them away
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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The post 4 Simple Things Disciplined People Don’t Do appeared first on The Good Men Project.