Get Disciplined, Not Motivated | Hacker News Reader

Get Disciplined, Not Motivated

joelrunyon.com

107 pointsjoelrunyon25 comments

I suggest not putting too much faith in these self-help posts.

The human mind is complicated. Advice that seems helpful could in reality be harmful.

Certainly, the distinction between discipline and motivation is meaningful. And sure, all else being equal, discipline is more useful than motivation towards leading a successful life. But maybe things are not equal.

Am pretty sure there were times in my life when I worked on increasing my discipline (i.e., on cultivating productive habits) when I would have been better served by focusing on increasing my motivation (particularly, by asking what sorts of things do humans typically find motivating, which of those things have I found motivating in the past, and how might I cultivate my ability to take pleasure in one or more of things).

It is fairly clear from Einstein's writing that it was mainly motivation (and in particular curiosity) rather than discipline that fueled his career. For example, he complained in writing about the design of his PhD program because it extinguished his natural love for (i.e., his motivation to do) physics. I tend to think that it would be very unlikely for a human being to be able to exert the degree of effort Einstein exerted on his physical research using just discipline (i.e., if the human being were not motivated or energized by the process of doing the research).

I mean, if you try to increase your discipline, and your attempt succeeds, then that is great. You should make more attempts to increase your discipline even further. But I have found that there is a limit to how much I can do that. And certain self-help authors have caused me to ignore evidence that my attempts at increasing my discipline are no longer having any positive effect.

Added. Also, I think the intense concentration and intense demands on working memory and "fluid intelligence" that programming makes on a person often makes the person less aware of alternatives to willpower, sustained concentration and discipline as ways of becoming a more capable and productive person.

Hollerith, I actually agree with you, but the problem with motivation is it is fleeting. how many people do you know have been motivated to do something and started, but then gave up when they hit an obstacle or it got tough.

So many people bust themselves up because they think they need more motivation, but what they really need to do is transform that initial motivation into creating habits of discipline that are driven by their motivations. Then, when their motivations wane, they can keep on going.

Not all motivation is fleeting: the reason Einstein complained in writing about the few years in which his motivation had been extinguished by his experience in grad school is that during the rest of his career, his motivation to think about physics was consistently strong. And I think some of the people reading this have a consistently strong motivation to provide for their wives and children.

Sure, there are times in everyone's life when one needs to apply discipline because that is the only way to get something necessary done. And it would be foolish to neglect to apply that discipline and instead to wait for a natural human motivation to do that thing.

And sure, the ability to apply discipline is extremely valuable and one should do whatever one can to increase this ability.

And I would for example suggest to readers who have not tried it yet to see if strength training causes an increase in their ability to apply discipline even in parts of life that have nothing to do with physical strength or stamina because strength training tends to improve the health of the mitochondria in the muscles, which might improve the health of the mitochondria in the rest of the body, particularly the frontal lobes of the brain, which would tend to increase ability to apply discipline because IIUC the frontal lobes are almost uniquely dependent on an adequate supply of metabolic intracellular energy.

I just want to point out to readers that there are now many many sources of information about these matters and to suggest that they be initially skeptical of any new source, particularly if he is selling something or likes giving pep talks.

Motivation is not fleeting; there are different motivations and different qualities.

If you teach a dog chasing cars to be disciplined, it will still be a dog chasing cars, but just chasing one.

The people you mention fails primarily because it has frivolous/fleeting/misleading/excessive desires.

You can grin your face like Joel and get a six-pack and be happy, until the moment you get distracted and get a beer belly before you even notice it.

In this case you're chasing a misleading objective. Leading, and understanding, a healthy life will let a person getting in shape naturally - and getting a six-pack much easier.

People who keeps doing multiple things and interrupting them, should find a single valuable objective and pursue it, instead of thinking of discipline.

What guys like Joel don't tell is how formal (opposed to substantial) approaches like "be disciplined" burn out people emotionally. And you never ever get to know how they are ten years after.

All of this, of course, in the context of the complexity of human behavior. I don't doubt that some people need discipline, but I definitively give secondary importance.

It might be useful when thinking about motivation over a longer term, to consider another word: passion

Different things work for different people. Some people, despite being motivated, have sloppy, disorganized lives. I'm one of those people.

There are a number of things I want to do every week: I want to work on my startup, I want to read, I want to write code for fun, I want to blog, I want to spend time on Hacker News, I want to spend time with friends and family, etc. If I don't keep to a strict schedule, I end up sort of mushing everything together into one long, uninterrupted stress-fest where I try to do everything at once and end up half-assing everything. The problem is compounded when I work from home. There have been times when I've found myself sitting at the dinner table, SSHing into my VPS to do some maintenance while writing copy for my website simultaneously taking a phone call from a friend.

Maintaining a strict schedule that I have to follow, no matter what, helps me stay organized and productive and on top of things. I also force myself to sit down with a notebook and pen every morning and review my tasks for the day. At the end of the day, I force myself to write down some observations and thoughts about the day's work in the same notebook. FWIW, I was highly influenced by Stephen King's On Writing. I used to think creativity and discipline didn't mix, but if King can write fiction with his five-hours-every-morning-come-what-may schedule then I can certainly write copy and build websites on my own schedule.

This is, of course, what works for me. I've seen people with highly erratic lifestyles be much more productive than I can ever hope to be. YMMV.

Nice comment. Thanks.

A great distinction. But I tended not to read it with physical goals in mind... I find it strange these days how many geeks seem to have heroic physical goals.

"Like every other guy on earth, I’ve wanted six pack abs forever."

I suppose I've wanted it at one time or another, in the abstract "that'd be nice to have" way I've wanted, say, a jetpack. But I've never been interested in putting the time or effort into achieving that level of fitness. I'd much prefer the jetpack. Or even better, learning something new.

An hour or two of hard running every few days to get a nice head-clear and endorphin rush, to be reasonably fit and healthy... then I'd much prefer to play video games and study algorithms.

I wouldn't say "six pack abs" are "heroic", but they are good motivation for getting back into fitness. Some people use marathons to do that, some people do six pack abs.

I've done both (and training for an ultramarathon now) and of the two, six pack abs actually took a lot less time/week than the marathon training did (by a long shot).

IMO one is better off training to _do_ something rather than acquire a external physical characteristic. Most of the people I know who train consistently and have impressive physical achievements (a) enjoy training and (b) train for intrinsic goals, often quantifiable goals.

Like "enter competition X", "win championship Y". Or some tangible set of lifts or times in a run/row/swim, etc.

Wanting to have six pack abs is a ridiculous goal. For some, it's ridiculously easy and sets the bar way too low; for others, irrelevant or even counterproductive.

On the other hand, wanting six pack abs will get you in the right frame of mind to have a nice heart-to-heart conversation with all those skeletal women running grimly along on the treadmills for hours. They, too, depend on extrinsic motivations that are chiefly concerned with appearance.

For most people six pack abs aren't an end goal, but rather a means to get more attractive partners as a bonus on top of becoming fit. It's not actually heroic. In fact getting to the level of fitness where you can do "an hour or two of hard running" is MUCH harder.

Yeah, it makes more sense to (e.g.) want to have the core strength to do 50 crunches followed by a pilates 'hundred followed by a ten mile run (the cause). The low body fat and developed muscles that leads to the six pack abs is the effect of that kind of conditioning.

My dad is the most disciplined person that I know. He got his math PhD in 2.5 years. He said that when he was in grad school, he'd wake up every morning at 4am, work without interruption until 8am, take a 1 hr nap until 9am, work until 5pm, stop work, and then sleep at 9pm. He kept a strict diet of only eating green veggies and never eating meat (plus, he couldn't afford meat).

I've never had any discipline. In college, I decided I'd finally get some discipline and I would do exactly what my dad did. I woke up at 4am every morning, took a 1hr nap at 9am, worked until 5pm, went to bed at 9pm. I wanted to be just like my hero.

In short, it was a total disaster. I was tired constantly. I slept in class all the time. I performed decently in school, but I remember it as a pretty unpleasant time. It was a pattern that was very hard to get to work inside of a college dorm where I also had a roommate sleeping in the same room. I found myself always thinking, "What would dad do?" Not, "What's right for me?" I beat myself up a lot when I couldn't live up to the kind of man my dad is.

I gave up on the idea of discipline, and it's been great for me. When I reflect on when I'm happy or unfulfilled with work, I don't think of it in terms of words like "motivation", "discipline", "inspiration", etc., because those words just express patterns and modes of approaching work that work/don't work for other people. I think, "Why am I tired?" "Why would I rather watch TV than work on my company?" "What are the short-term / long-term tradeoffs?" etc

Insightful - Motivation v/s Discipline. Motivation may be a start but discipline is what carries you through. One of those articles that makes me say "I never looked at it this way".

As someone who had to deal with a bit of depression in the past I think the article got things backwards. Get motivated first, and as your time becomes limited (instead of just being wasted) discipline and organization naturally follow.

I've found discipline helps most when it's not yet needed. When I have an expanse of time, it's easy to end up being unproductive without discipline. Once I'm working under the pressures of time constraint, discipline is easy because it's necessary and not really an option.

I believe there is a variation on this theme in the Marine Handbook. I am not sure if it is harder to see yourself as undisciplined or unmotivated though.

Strangely I get more done when I don't have enough time because I don't get to think about what I'm not going to get done, instead I'm just trying to get most of it done. That's a pretty non-intuitive result for me.

This is a great post, I particularly like this quote:

    "Motivation is the start, but if it’s not solidified into
     discipline,  it usually fades away into regret pretty
     quickly once you realize you never acted on it."

I think it's worth mentioning Stephen Presfield's concept of Resistance here from his book "Do the Work" [1]. I often find myself fired up with a new task, but lacking the follow though that discipline would give me. It's too easy when I want to do something that I don't know how to do (write some Haskell for example) for my little monkey brain to jump off to some interesting shiny thing (HN). Resistance explains this as a way of protecting yourself from the pain of struggling to understand and the risk of failure, by replacing it with something easy and non-challenging.

[1] Read it: http://www.stevenpressfield.com/do-the-work/

It takes motivation to become disciplined. Once you do get disciplined though, you don't need as much motivation to continue doing what you are doing.

“People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.” - Zig Ziglar

I decided to get fit and healthy a few months ago, and boy was I motivated and stuck at it for a week or two well, but I was pretty undisciplined and slipped pretty quickly. I had to essentially codify it into a quick routine, get up and do x, after x do y, when z is true etc. Amazingly treating it essentially as a programming task helped me stick to it more, because once I'd 'written' the routine in to my life it was pretty easy to just go through it every morning.

Motivation is a weird thing, we all start with the best intentions in the world but sticking with the good habits is damn hard.

This is fantastic. A must read, IMO.

Take this with a grain of salt, and some science on the matter.

http://www.iijiij.com/2012/09/01/science-shows-that-self-dis...

Motivate yourself to be disciplined, and discipline yourself to be motivated. False dichotomy solved!

I was motivated to share this fantastic post with other people on social networks

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