The Essence of Self-Discipline
Self-discipline is essentially a person trying to operate as a machine rather than as a human being.
This is why children ‘these days’ are always said to ‘need more discipline’. They ‘need to be disciplined by their parents’. When a child misbehaves the most common explanation for it selected is that the parents didn’t teach him or her enough discipline.
Well, children aren’t meant to have much discipline – they’re very new human beings and they have yet to have their humanity as systematized as it is in grown-ups. Of all the human beings on the planet children are the least like machines.
If you want to be more disciplined then what you want is to exchange spontaneity, impulse, desire and various other aspects of your humanity for mechanical efficiency.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – but once you make that realization you can see that self-discipline doesn’t work the way it supposedly does.
The Effectiveness Myth
From Stephen King to Arnold Schwarzenegger – the most successful people tend to be those who put in an unusually high number of work hours and who, naturally, are regarded as highly disciplined people for this.
They’re not.
No-one can operate like a machine for their whole lives, denying themselves non-productive activities indefinitely, allowing themselves rest only when it’s deemed to be needed and constantly pushing on with what’s best. King does not write 2000 words a day, 365 days a year, because he can discipline himself to sit at his desk for x many hours every day and do so. That would be insane. King adores writing and his working practice is a routine for him. Schwarzenegger did not become Mr. Universe by disciplining himself to spend God knows how many hours in the gym. He has a ridiculous amount of drive and, I should think, his training sessions were made routine. There will be more on that later.
Yet, when we hear of these people, the friend who gets straight As at school or the millionaire businessman or the marathon winner, we’re likely to credit their success to hard work. Lots of it. And that must mean discipline.
There is a lot of work, but it doesn’t feel hard for these people. The difficulties they encounter are compelling challenges, the competition they may have to fight is invigorating, the failures are learning experiences…but the one thing you can be confident these people don’t like overcoming is apathy. This is when self-discipline comes in – as a technique to push you for that bit longer, but not as a way of living life.
The Productive Life – Constant Discipline
You cannot use self-discipline to lead a life you do not want to live. I know: I’ve tried it. For over a month I lived a life in which I denied myself television, video games, films, fiction and general recreation. I slept, ate, drank, did my job (at that time I was a games tester, and, trust me, being a games tester is not the same as playing games), did work (related to Japanese, personal development and writing) and very little else. At another time I led this existence while I was unemployed.
This way of life wasn’t as bad as you might think – I did not go Jack Torrance crazy and try to hack up my family with an axe. All work and no play might have made me a dull boy, but not a homicidal one.
It was like turning the color down on my life and putting it on mute. It wasn’t much worse than it had been before and it was no better – but then I wasn’t expecting it to be. What I was expecting, what all this deprivation of media was for, was to be more productive.
Didn’t happen. I could not fill the hours I ordinarily spent on recreation with more work. In fact, what happened was I would pace the house randomly and talk to myself more. I’d tidy up more frequently, re-arrange things, alphabetize things. When it came to doing work I got probably less done because I felt I hadn’t had breaks from it. I was taking breaks, but because they weren’t spent doing anything fun they didn’t feel like breaks.
I had the self-discipline to resist every fun indulgence but there was no point to it. My life was a little worse for it and I didn’t get any more done than I had before.
Now, you could argue that there are workaholics out there who spend almost their entire lives in the office and can lead this lifestyle for years.
This is true. But, taking into account my efforts at the ‘all work’ lifestyle I wonder how much those office-dwelling workaholics actually get done each day. I wonder how fast they work. I wonder how much of their time at the office is actually spent at their desks. I wonder how much of the time they spend at their desks is spent just clearing email and reading pages on news sites. I wonder how the amount they get done each day compares to that of their 9am-5pm colleagues. More to the point
– I wonder if their workaholism is an improvement on their quality of life and/or if it will improve it for the future.
We don’t bleed oil
What I forgot in my efforts to live the most productive life ever is that the only reason I wanted to do that was to achieve more and, thus, to be happier. ‘Happier’ – what is this event? It does not compute. We machines know not of this ‘happier’. Please enter a numerical value.
No-one is an especially ‘disciplined’ person. The most successful people are those who have made successful behavior routines.
Routines are not followed by discipline either – once something becomes a routine you just do it regularly without thinking about whether or not to.
Really successful people, those in that better place, have in part used discipline to found those routines, along with motivation and maybe fear as well. These are the Inclination.
For now keep in mind that self-discipline is a tool - not a permanent psychological condition or a way of life.
