The article assumes discipline needs to be forced on you. Which is false.
The few people I know who have been able to build self discipline on their own are immensely successful.
It seems to comes from an extreme form of self determination.
I made the mistake of reading a number of parenting books, and they pretty much all start out with some form of: "You must be self disciplined or this method won't work."
In one case it was just sheer ambition but he wasn’t poor to begin with and in the other it was practicing a religion focusses on positive thinking which she adopted that also buikt her determination.
It is interesting to juxtapose with Agassi and The William sisters.
These two people are also on the top 0.1% Of their respective disciplines.
About William sisters, wasn't their father the first coach? Not to indicate anything but it falls in childhood experience catalog I think.
The whole idea that we have some attribute (willpower or self-discipline) that we can apply to our lives seems really iffy to me.
I'll try reading these books, but I expect it to be less helpful than taking stimulants every day.
It seems to me, and I might be wrong, that desire to do one's duty, If I am correctly interpreting the word "Conscientiousness" comes from finding one's specific purpose. When one is doing a duty that is not in line with one's particular purpose for being alive, then no amount of guidance is going to help. Instead, I would suggest that one go in search of one's purpose in any way that works for that particular person. This is why I think making a living without some focus on purpose is the main problem for many people when it comes to finding meaning in life. If there is no meaning in life, whats the point, hence the lack of "Conscientiousness" maybe.
If someone cannot remember their keys or has trouble playing email tag, their problem may not be that their life is not rich with meaning.
To paraphrase Shopenhauer, you are free to do what you want, but you are not free to will what you want.
Admittedly I don’t know the literature; but I increasingly hear that the so-called Big Five personality traits (of which conscientious is one) are regarded as more plastic than they once were. But perhaps it is simply, as you imply, isolating and substituting the behavioural components of the trait you wish to change. “Fake it ‘til you make it,” in a sense.
The brain is plastic, to an extent.
I can grow my biceps, not through willing them bigger, but by doing dumbbell curls. We absolutely can change our ways of thinking about the world in a similar fashion. Otherwise there would be no point in going to school, of seeing a therapist, of reading a book.
>After mindfulness-oriented meditation training, participants in this group (n = 15) showed an increase in character traits reflecting the maturity of the self at the intrapersonal (self-directedness) and interpersonal (cooperativeness) levels. Moreover, increased mindfulness and conscientiousness and decreased trait anxiety were observed in participants after the training.
In patients with MS.
How do you know / what does it mean? Are they happy? Or just rich? Are they destroying what's left of the world by building stupid penis-shaped rockets to pretend they're astronauts when they're really not and never will be?
The modern world is way past the point of stupid. And we dare call it "civilization". It's the opposite of civilization. It's active destruction by accelerated accumulation of useless wealth.
I think it's better to not be part of that machine at all.