Is there anything more cliché than the person who starts a blog and declares to himself “I WILL write every week”? A flood of ideas fills the mind for posts; every book, show, car ride conversation, and current event beckons one to start typing away to uncover the core messages, broadly applicable themes, and life lessons. Sadly, similar to the person who joins a gym after the new year, the writer is aflush with something called “Motivation” which, like other fickle phenomena, is known to wax and wane at the slightest disturbance of daily energy and time commitments.
The consistently productive among us must therefore rely on Discipline, Motivation’s plodding, slavish sibling. Where Motivation injects energy and passion with irregularity into a whole host of activities, Discipline is myopic and slightly irrational–if you REALLY wanted to accomplish something, wouldn’t you WANT to do it? This difference highlights the difference between varying levels of cognition: the high-minded, idealistic, well-intentioned part of us that would like to BE a certain version of ourself, and the day-to-day creature that, after a long day, seeks out only creature comforts somewhere near the base of Maslow’s hierarchy.
So the running shoes stay in the closet, the vegetables ickify in the fridge, and the website remains, alas, un-updated. But this too, in its own way is cliché. Bemoaning the human race’s ability to make goals and stick to them has been covered in literature, psychology journals, and Tony Robbins presentations. If we’re looking for solutions to this, there is no shortage of tips and “life hacks” to put ourselves in the right frame of mind to foster discipline. From “Make Your Bed” to “Start With Why“, there are no shortages of ways to “change your paradigm” or “practice the small actions” that snowball into massive life changes. Unlocking this secret within each of us is not only a billion dollar industry, but also a method to wrangle the wild mustang Motivation, break it, and harness its raw transformative power into the workhorse Discipline.
Everyone that successfully tames Motivation into its stolid steady-state sibling (alliteration is fun isn’t it?) finds that it isn’t so easy to keep in the saddle. On cold mornings, hectic days, and energy-depleted nights, working towards a lofty goal seems at once trivial and impossible. It would be so easy to just NOT do the Thing, to mindlessly scroll through TV, social media, or, go out with friends. Perhaps the secret to Discipline is, then, self-manipulation.
A YouTuber I highly recommend, CGP Gray, has a wonderful video called “SpaceShip You” where the speaker imagines a sort of Wheel with two sides as shown below:
Both sides of the Wheel will, when pushed on either side, begin the turn, thus causing a beneficial effect on both, no matter which end feels the initial “push”. As Gray points out, it is often muuuuch easier to focus on the Physical to generate positive motion in the Mental, although I suppose there might be some among us that can simply will themselves into accomplishing physical activity…those people are definitely unicorns! But either way, the positive feedback loop develops, and Discipline comes easier and easier until a disruption ultimately causes the wheel to grind to a stop. Maybe that’s where our friend Motivation comes along, to provide an initial push to get Discipline back online?
I think I’ve stumbled upon as good a conclusion as one could possibly hope in this sort of topic. Hell, I guess even finishing this post after 4 months of silence might be conclusion enough! But maybe the take away here is this: its OK to lose Discipline and fall off the horse (so to speak). We can’t always be Mark Wahlberg in terms of routine:
Maybe that process is the real “Human Condition” oft spoken of in literature. Instead of us being fated to endure a certain amount of negotiable and non-negotiable suffering in this madhouse situation called “existence”, maybe the REAL Human Condition is taming the wild beast that is Motivation into Discipline, falling off, and mastering the Wheel to get ourselves back on track. We do this a thousand or ten thousand times in a lifetime and, if we’re lucky, collect a lot of self knowledge along the way. Maybe that’s the true answer to a question that has vexed philosophers since Socrates (and is how my friends greet each other): “What is Good”? Rather than being the attainment of perfection, and being done, it is the act of striving to be a better version of oneself despite knowing that set backs are constant, inevitable, and happily, recoverable.
Adam's Fathoms 