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Why Self-Discipline?

Self-discipline sometimes gets a bad rap, and I can understand why: On first glance, it seems to be about forcing ourselves to do things we don’t want to do; it seems to impose a rigid structure on our lives and undermine spontaneity.

Self-discipline is, in some sense, about these things. But that’s not what it’s really about: Self-discipline isn’t about denying ourselves pleasure. It’s about pursuing a different kind of pleasure.

We have short-term and long-term wants. Short-term wants can be fulfilled right now, while long-term ones require prolonged and consistent effort. Without self-discipline, we tend to address only our short-term wants; long-term ones get the short-shrift.

Short-term wants can be powerful. Many mornings I wake up and don’t feel like going to the gym. I feel tired and unmotivated. My mind is working frantically to come up with reasons not to go. I (usually) go anyway–and overrule my short-term wants–because I know doing so is in my long-term best interest. (And I tend to feel better immediately afterward, anyway.)

Like most people, I fear public speaking. When I’ve done it, I’ve always been nervous–and sometimes intensely so–beforehand. I short-term want to back out–to call in sick, “forget,” whatever–but I know doing so isn’t in my long-term best interest. I force myself to get on stage and give the speech even though every short-term bone in my body is telling me not to.  And as with the gym, I tend to feel better after giving the speech.

There will always be some conflict between short-term and long-term wants. When we pursue short-term wants, we sometimes override long-term ones (and vice-versa). The challenge is to minimize this conflict. Don’t deny your short-term or long-term wants; acknowledge that they both exist and work to bring them as close to agreement as possible. Self-discipline isn’t about denying wants. It’s about creating a compromise between them.

The Components

Of course, it’s hard to create this compromise — self-discipline isn’t easy. But it’s never impossible: Self-discipline is a skill that everyone possesses, and it can be trained. It isn’t something you can be born without, and it’s not something you can lose forever if you fail to maintain it.

Having had both great success and great failure maintaining self-discipline, I’ve noticed a pattern: it has worked only when a few components are all fully addressed. These components are: clarity, commitment, and consistency.

Clarity

Clarity is precisely defining what you’re going to do. To be self-disciplined, you need a clear vision of what you’re trying to achieve: You need a goal. From the goal, you work backward and define the actions that will be required to meet it.

Why do you need a goal? Because without a goal, it will be hard to come up with specific actions, and the ones you do come up with will seem arbitrary. It’s hard to motivate yourself to do things that seem arbitrary. Realize, though, that you don’t need to know what you want in any definite or ultimate sense to be self-disciplined. You just need a specific goal — and specific goals can be formed even from uncertainty.

Say you have no idea what you want to be doing or where you want to be a year from now. Your goal, then, can be to find out what you want to do. From that goal, you can work backward to generate a list of actions. (If you’re in this situation, incidentally, I recommend making a list of possibilities, picking something, and trying it for a while. Finding what you want takes more than just sitting around thinking about it.)

Here’s another example: I love music, and I know I want to create it. But I have no idea how music will fit into my life in a big-picture sense; I’m still trying to figure that out. For now, I intend to compose and record an album of my own music. I know I do want to do that, and it’s pretty easy for me to see the actions required to accomplish that goal.

It’s important that you feel the importance of your goal. If you don’t, the actions you take will, again, seem arbitrary, and it will be hard to stay motivated. You need to believe your goal is worthy to push past the obstacles you’ll encounter. If you feel uncertain about a goal–and you probably will if it involves doing something new–keep in mind that the point of pursuing a goal can be to obtain certainty.

Say you’re out of shape and considering starting an exercise routine, but you have reservations about the time commitment. You’re considering exercising three days per week, but you’re worried you won’t have time to do other things. As long as you have this reservation, you’ll have trouble motivating yourself. You won’t be able to commit because you won’t believe in the purpose of your goal.

Here’s what I recommend: Don’t try to convince yourself that a regular exercise routine is a good idea. Instead, reformulate your goal: Don’t just say your goal is to get in shape; instead say your goal is to get in shape in a way that doesn’t intrude on the rest of your life. Or, since you probably don’t know how intrusive a routine will be until you try it, say your goal is to find an exercise routine that doesn’t intrude on the rest of your life. You should be able to buy into one of these goals even if you have reservations about a whatever-it-takes approach to getting in shape.

Commitment

The second component of self-discipline is commitment. Once you have clarity about what you’re trying to achieve, you need to come up with short-term actions — and then you need to commit to doing them.

Your commitments need a time frame and a definite success point; they’re useless without them. In particular, short-term actions should be fully achievable within the next few months. If you’re trying to develop an exercise routine, a good one would be to perform a trial routine for three months.

Make sure not to think too much about how things are going while you work on the commitment. The time the evaluate a commitment is after you’ve met it. Once the time has elapsed, you can gauge how things are going and make any necessary changes.

Why not just plan to stop the routine if it’s not working out? Because sometimes it won’t be working out. Particularly in the beginning, you’ll feel uncomfortable, tired, and distracted much of the time. You’ll feel annoyed by how exercise is disrupting your normal routine. You need to push through this period to understand what regular exercise (or anything) is really like. That’s why commitment is important: it gives you reason to keep going even when things don’t seem to be working out. Remember that this commitment is only for the short-term — you’ll have a chance to evaluate what you’re doing after the time is up.

Consistency

Part of being committed is being consistent. Consistency is important for two reasons: First, you can only follow through on your commitment by being consistent; you’re not going to get much accomplished if you flake out all the time. Second–and perhaps more importantly–consistency actually makes self-discipline easier. The more consistent you are, the easier it is to be consistent. Every time you uphold a commitment, you make it easier to uphold the next one (and every time you flake out on one, you make it easier to flake out the next time).

Clarity helps you to be consistent–and without it, you probably won’t be–but it’s far from sufficient. Consistency is the hardest part of self-discipline. Every day is a battle for consistency: You don’t get things done in the future by thinking about them; you get them done today by doing them.

The good news: Consistency can be practiced — and if you find it hard to be consistent, that just means you’re out of practice. To get better, you need to challenge yourself. I like Steve Pavlina’s weight-training analogy: Self-discipline is like a muscle. It can be strong or weak, and it can be trained. Just as you shouldn’t try to bench press 300 pounds on your first visit to the gym, you shouldn’t attempt more self-discipline than you can handle. To get better, you must gradually increase the weight (difficulty), always moving slightly beyond what’s comfortable.

It’s important to recognize your present limitations. Though it’s easy to say, “I’ll go to the gym five days a week,” it’s much harder actually to do that: Your self-discipline may simply be too weak. Instead of setting yourself up for failure, recognize your present limitations and set less-ambitious short-term goals. Plan to go to the gym one day per week, and do that for a few months. After that time has passed, try something more challenging.

If you’ve set a goal for yourself and you’re finding it extremely difficult to be consistent, you’ve probably overshot your bounds. If you keep trying and failing to maintain consistency, you may give up. Don’t let that happen: If you’re inconsistent for too long, reshape your short-term goal. Having to do that sucks, but it’s better than the alternative. And as you gain experience, you’ll get better at setting realistic goals for yourself. You’ll also get better at being consistent, which means your goals can increase in difficulty.

If you’re bad at being consistent, it helps to overcompensate. Start out with a rigid, fully-planned routine, and make exceptions only when you absolutely have to. This doesn’t sound like fun–and it may not be–but rigidity helps a lot in building consistency. It’s much easier to turn away every distraction than it is to weigh the costs and benefits of each as it arises.

The idea here isn’t to change you into a person who loves a predictable routine and hates spontaneity. It’s only to help you build consistency. Once you’re confident in your ability to maintain a consistent routine, you can start to lessen its rigidity. Self-discipline doesn’t have to be a trade-off between planning and spontaneity. The more self-discipline you have, the more possible it is to be spontaneous while still maintaining a fairly set and regular schedule. If your self-discipline is low, this is very hard to do — which is why it’s good to overcompensate in the beginning.

Wrap Up

If you make sure you have the three components covered, you’ll have much greater success maintaining self-discipline. They’ve worked for me, and I’ve seen them work for many other people.

Don’t be fooled by the idea that self-discipline is about denying yourself pleasure. It’s not. Self-discipline’s about balancing between your short- and long-term needs. Don’t let either dominate the other.