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Comment by nazgulsenpai | Hacker News Reader

"I have spent the last eight months researching the JVM--reading the docs and articles and doing exploratory coding in various languages with which to write the Jacobin JVM."[0]

I wish I had the discipline to decide I wanted to do create a long-term pet project, spend months researching what kind of project and which programming language to implement it in, and to still be motivated enough to keep actively updating it 2 years later. Also, the code comments are educational, and the write-ups are inspiring. Great stuff.

[0] from http://binstock.blogspot.com/2021/08/a-whole-new-project-jvm... linked from article

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Discipline gets a lot of attention around here.

My suggestion is to find something that piques your interest for a long enough time. Thought around the "Flow" concept [1] suggests to pick something that is just within reach of your capabilities.

And perhaps try meditation to exercise building up discipline.

It also helps to ask yourself several times per day: "What would be the smartest thing to do now?", until it becomes a habit. You will then accidentally think that phrase, which gives some freedom to override other (possibly) bad habits.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

All of these have one problem, they're fickle. Intrinsic motivation, flow.. things most (myself included) seek and love, are not guaranteed.

The experience of adjusting difficulty and investment (you feel tired, you have emergencies.. do less, but do something, have rest days), going slow and steady versus inspiration driven is key IMO.

What is hard is accepting the near invisible small steps that don't seem to bring you closer to your goal.. that's where motivation dies.

Motivation is fickle, discipline is about doing the action when you’re not motivated and don’t want to.

Motivation comes and goes. Discipline shows up for work every day, rain or shine.

I’ve worked on long term projects, and it’s the discipline that lets you power through those tasks you don’t want to do. It’s required to finish anything of substance.

One thing that’s really helped me build discipline is the gym. It’s hard, I usually don’t want to go. But even on the days I don’t feel it, I go and get a workout in, even if it’s not a great workout. Even if I just go for a walk in the park or on a treadmill some days.

Once you do something consistently enough, it becomes habit, and develops its own inertia, to the point where it can become harder not to do it. I think habit and consistency are important in maintaining discipline.

And the experience I was mentioning is well summed up by "develops its own inertia". You become fine tuned at adjusting activity to keep inertia in some range, avoid the zero which would cost you long time to recover that inertia, but don't over work yourself. Cause a life of overworking is dreadful, the key is finding the sweet spot. I even think we're build for that, the right kind and amount of stimulation keeps life interesting.

Discipline is just another word for motivation. You are motivated to start, and are motivated to keep going. The only reason you call it discipline is to give yourself the illusion that you can’t lose it, but you can

I disagree that they’re the same.

When you have motivation, you don’t need discipline. The work comes naturally because you want to do it. When that fades, and it will, discipline is the only thing keeping you from quiting.

I understand what you think the difference is but I think you’re wrong

I could say the same to you.

Can anyone comment on the intersection of discipline and flow? I've always seen it as, flow is when you're doing something you enjoy, and discipline is when you force yourself to do something whether you enjoy it or not. But I've often found that just putting in enough time (about 45min-1hr for me) will trigger a flow state, or "evaporate" most resistance I had to a task.

So paradoxically I found that it's easier to work for 2 hours than for just 1, since the whole first hour is just getting settled in. This seems to go against the pomodoro stuff (working in 25 minute increments).

I think it's important to note these approaches aren't one size fits all.

What you're saying rings true for me: it's easier to work for 2 hours vs. 1, and the pomodoro method absolutely has not worked for me the few times I've tried.

I have friends and coworkers who are the opposite though. Their barrier to the "flow state" is much lower than mine but they seem to fizzle out faster.

IMO it's all about experimenting with different approaches and finding blend one is to your taste.

I've been looking into the field of reinforcement learning lately, and that gives an interesting framework to think about topics like these.

It seems that flow is a state of being in which you are almost constantly rewarded for your actions. Discipline might be a way to get there.

I suppose that some people accidentally stumble into a state of flow, and others don't, but feel an urge to get there. In order to get there, they try things that give an instant reward (drugs, social media), or they try things that they think will give a big reward in the future (things you read in books or hear from wise people).

Now, the question is, how are these rewards set? Is this something you can fiddle with? Will discipline actually change what you like? I guess some people enjoy discipline by itself, which makes all this highly complicated stuff to investigate properly.

I'd love to make a highly integrated webserver. At this point it seems like spending tons of time getting caught up on what other people have done, why they have done it. Trying different techniques to see what actually seems to work. Where abstractions need to be and what provides the nicest transition between accessing different portions of stack. At this point I'm getting paid to work in tons of languages and integrating different stacks.

I wish somebody would unify these things but I'm running out of time in the day .

People that are able to commit time to projects like that are truly amazing.

Reading the sibling responses so far, my only advice is to not take advice from random strangers on the internet about this sort of thing. You will just get bad takes tainted by survivorship bias.

May not be the best advice, but a BSc/MSc thesis (or phd for the even more masochists) may give one just the right amount of pressure to be able to go through a bigger project. At least it did help me.

have you tried 'redbull' ?

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