Transcript & Summary: 5 Easy Ways to Become More Self-Disciplined

[00:00] in this video we're going to be talking about five actionable strategies that you can apply to your life right now to have more self-discipline now before we get started on this I have to say upfront that I do think the lionization of discipline is a little bit of a scam I think we have been told by the hustle Bros that if you're if you're not disciplined that there's something wrong with you and that the solution to all of your problems in life is just to be more disciplined discipline through selft [00:22] discipline you develop like a armor for your mind you just need to have discipline you need to lock in and you need to do it whether you feel like you're or not now I think that does have some Merit but it's it's not the whole story so the way I think of discipline it's like discipline is when you are getting yourself to do something that you don't feel like doing if you felt like doing it you would be motivated but if you do it even when you don't feel like it you would be disciplined so if you imagine trying to do something like [00:47] let's say you want to work on an assignment or you're trying to make a presentation and you really don't feel like it one way of applying discipline is by sort of using like employing discipline throughout the whole journey of working on this task and I like to visualize this like a hill and the task is a boulder that you've got and discipline is where you're like trying to roll the boulder up the hill and you're like oh I don't like doing this but I'm just going to keep rolling the boulder up the hill I'm going to roll [01:11] the boulder up the hill and I'm going to I'm going to eventually get the bould to the top of the hill now this is a very stressful place to be right because you spent all this energy and all this effort rolling this border all the way up the hill and then hopefully you get it to the other end and the project goes over the line or often more likely the boulder just comes rolling back down like sisifus in the Greek myth I think it is and you have to roll the boulder up the hill again this is not a good way [01:34] to live instead the way that I think of things is that really the goal should be to make the work feel so good that it doesn't feel like you're rolling the boulder up the hill but instead it genuinely feels like the Boulder's rolling down the hill when something feels good and when you enjoy whatever you're doing you don't need to rely on discipline so much however unfortunately this is a pipe dream because we can't do that with everything and at some point we have to do we have to do things that [01:56] are hard and some things are just boring and all that kind of stuff so the thing I add to this mental model is that there is a little hump there's like a hump before you start to go downhill and so you always have to do a little bit of a push it takes a small dose of discipline to get the boulder beyond the hump and then once it's beyond the hump if you start enjoying the process that's when the thing starts to go downhill and I think really that is the area where we should be employing all of these [02:22] strategies around discipline it's in getting that border a little bit over the hump now over the last couple of years I have been interviewing a bunch of people on my podcast and meeting a bunch of people in real life and one of the people I had the privilege of meeting a few months ago when I was in Austin is a chap called Ryan holiday who is the Mega bestselling author of this book discipline is Destiny uh but Ryan is also ridiculously prolific as a writer and has written like I don't know a dozen or something books most of [02:47] mostly about sosis over the last 10 years or so and one of the things I really admire about Ryan is that he's very disciplined and and seems to be very consistent at doing stuff and also seems to enjoy the stuff and is also a dad with kids and seems to have just like really happy life and he's in good shape and so he seems to be winning across all fronts he owns a Bookshop I visited his Bookshop he's got a studio attached to the Bookshop it's super cool he's got a team and a big part of the interview was me trying to ask Ryan like [03:11] hey man' how how have you been doing this writing thing consistently for such a long time I'm curious for you like you're presumably planning to write more books but like why like I I don't want to learn from someone who's consistently doing stuff and is miserable but I want to learn from someone who is consistently doing stuff and seems to actually enjoy their life so that's what Ryan at least on the surface seems to be and so in this video I want to share these five actionable tips for self-discipline that I found really [03:34] helpful that I learned from Ryan during our interview and I think it's important you have to know what your main thing is right we live in a world where there's all these other kind of supporting things they're necessary yeah not absolutely necessary but I think they're important but still you have to know what the main driver of everything is and here the advice is you have to know what your main thing is as the philosopher senica famously said if a man knows not to which Port he sails no wind is favorable the thing that I took [04:05] away from this and that I continue to take away from this is just the value of focusing on a very tiny number of things when I tend to speak to people when I'm giving talks and stuff who struggle with discipline if I have enough time to ask them questions I generally find that they're just trying to do too much stuff it is so hard to have self-discipline to do a dozen different things you know Cal Newport has a great new book called slow productivity the first principle of slow productivity is do fewer things Gra GRE [04:29] mccuan has an amazing book called essentialism where basically the whole thesis of the book is figure out what is essential to your life and eliminate everything else as much as you possibly can and just focus on the vital Feud now a lot of being more disciplined is wrapped up in our emotional well-being and our mental health and one way to improve that is with therapy provided by betterhelp who are the paid partner of this video betterhelp is the world's largest therapy service and it's 100% online with betterhelp you can tap into [04:53] a network of over 30,000 credentialed and experienced therapists who can help you with a wide range of issues it's a platform that makes finding a therapist super easy because it's online it's remote and by filling out a few questions better help can match you to a credentialed therapist very quickly then you can talk to your therapist however you feel comfortable whether that's via message or chat or phone or video call whether you've got a clinical mental health issue like depression or anxiety [05:14] or if you're just a human who lives in this world who's going through a hard time therapy can give you the tools to approach your life in a very different way you can message your therapist at any time and you can schedule live sessions whenever it's convenient for you and if your therapist is not the right fit for you for any reason you can switch to a new therapist at no additional charge so if you're interested in connecting to a therapist from the comfort of your own home then you can check out betterhelp at [05:35] betterhelp.com Al abdal or enter my name Ali abdal during sign up and enjoy a special discount on your first month so whenever I'm in a period of time where I'm like where I feel inconsistent with stuff or I feel like I'm not I I'm not as self-disciplined as I would like to be I'm not like getting enough things over that initial hurdle and then you know obviously enjoying the journey beyond that point whenever I'm at that point I I remind myself to zoom out and I always it always comes down to the [05:58] fact that I'm just trying to do too much stuff I look at my calendar I look at my projects list I look at my to-do list and I realize I'm just trying to do too many things this is um something Oliver burkman talks about in The Amazing book 4,000 weeks which is a sort of philosophical take on time management basically the idea is that we are all simply trying to do too much stuff and this whole thing that we see on social media about you can juggle all the things and you can have it all and and all that like sometimes it is just [06:21] impossible to juggle all of the important things that we want to do and so we have to be strategically mediocre at certain things and eliminate a lot of things off of our plate to whatever extent we can in order to really focus on what is that one main thing there's a few prompts that I like to think about to help with this number one is that when it comes to goal setting I limit myself to just three or four goals for the whole year um if you don't yet have goals for the year you should check out [06:45] my three-part video series on what to do if you feel lost in life that helps you figure out like you your life vision and work vision and turn that into a series of goals bunch of people have watched that series of videos it's completely free obviously it's here on YouTube and they found it super helpful but limiting yourself to three to four goals um any any more than that for me I find it becomes overwhelming and then I start to think oh I'm not disciplined I'm not consistent I'm not doing this and that [07:06] but it's way easier to make consistent progress on like a tiny number of things than to make in inconsistent progress on a large number of things the other way I like to think about this is you know for example in work I I ask myself the question quite often that when it comes to my business when it comes to my work if I only had two hours a week in which to work what would I spend that time doing okay cool what if I only had 4 hours a week okay cool what if I only had 8 hours a week in order to work what [07:32] would I genuinely spend that time doing and what would most move the needle and then I think okay well if that's what I would do in 8 hours why don't I just do that 5 days a week and that generally gives me so much Clarity to realize oh I really should only be doing two things number one making videos and number two working on a new courses those are the only two things but those things make up like 20% of my calendar rather than 80% of my calendar I'm like why it's because even as someone who is a you know [07:59] productive expert according to my Publishers and who makes videos about productivity and I've been reading about this stuff for 15 years and making videos about it for 7 years even then I still fall into this trap of taking on just simply taking on too much stuff and I know that when I speak to people at events and talks that I do we all struggle with this we all just take on too much stuff and so the real thing here the advice that you know I was reminded of through through this conversation with Ryan is just focus on [08:25] fewer things just do less if you do less then you way more likely to be self-disciplined by the way if you're watching this before the 20th of April 2024 I'm actually hosting a completely free online Workshop it's an alignment Workshop where the idea is that you know we're now nearly 4 months into the year and so we're going to reflect on our goals for 2024 we're going to make a plan for what we're going to do moving forward and figure out what kind of systems and habits we can put in place to stay disciplined and consistent on [08:49] route to achieving the things that matter to us is completely free hopefully there'll be thousands of people online it's going to be sick it's like 2 hours long so you can join that completely for free link down below so you might have heard of this guy called Wim Hoff he is known as the Iceman because he holds the Guinness World Record for taking the longest ice cold bath lasting 1 hour 52 minutes and 42 seconds which is absurd and he's also done a bunch of other absolutely mental things like climbing Mount kilamanjaro [09:13] in only shorts and running a half marathon Barefoot on ice and snow now I've tried this whole cold shower thing and when I stand under cold water in the shower I can barely last a few seconds and in that context it would be easy for me to compare myself to wiof and be like oh man I'm such a failure I'm such a loser like why can I only stand on the water 17 seconds and Wim Hoff can do it for two freaking hours but the thing that's important to remember is that he's the expert and I'm a novice and that is totally okay Wim Hoff is like in [09:37] his 60s and he started taking cold plunges at the age of 17 and because he made it a daily practice going forward he was able to slowly get better at sitting in a ice bath and so Wim Hoff's Global recognition as being the Iceman did absolutely not come overnight and so the thing to remember here is that we're going for Progress rather than immediate success if you're trying to absorb a philosophy or a new way of thinking or transform yourself from here to there it's it's not 300 pages that you read [10:04] you know from October 1st to November 17th you know that takes you a month and a half to read it's much better if you're layering it like a page a day for a year or 2 years or 3 years and you're coming back like the process of that sort of over and over and over and over again that's that's where the stuff gets absorbed again this is something I see so often when I when I do talks and stuff where where where where people are struggling with something struggling with consistency but it's because their [10:33] standards are too high they are simply trying to be too good too quickly um I was I was giving a talk yesterday and someone came up to me who was building her YouTube channel and she's made two videos in the last like 3 years and she's really struggling with perfectionism and the thing I said to her is that look you've just got to accept that your first 50 videos are going to be absolutely trash for people who struggle with perfectionism for people who struggle with having to be so perfect that they're not even taking [10:56] action the solution is to lower the bar once you've lowered the bar to the point that you're able to consistently take action now you can slowly raise the bar over time now there's actually a really cool graph understanding this and it comes from a guy called Brian Jeffrey fog otherwise known as BJ fog who you might be familiar with so he's a scientist at Stanford University and he's created this model for understanding what makes us do hard things now this is called the fog behavior model or the b equals map model [11:22] because it says that for a behavior B to occur three things must happen all at once firstly motivation secondly ability which is how easy it is for us to do the thing and thirdly the behavior needs to be prompted so motivation ability and prompt hence map map so for example when something is easy but your motivation is not that high a prompt will trigger the behavior but when the thing is difficult and our motivation is at the same level the same prompt now will not cause the behavior and so the way we can think about this [11:49] which is something that BJ fog talks about in his book tiny habits where the thesis is broadly similar to James cla's Atomic habits it's like if you're trying to build a habit or trying to do something hard what is the most tiny or the easiest version of that behavior that you could actually do and because tiny actions are a lot easier to do than bigger actions we slide all the way to the right hand side on the ability axis which means that we're more likely to do the thing no matter how motivated we're [12:12] feeling so if you're thinking about this in the sense of I'm just trying to do the easiest thing to make a little bit of progress what tiny action can I take that will help move me forward it makes it a lot easier it makes you far more likely to do the behavior and then of course as you continue to be consistent by employing discipline and by getting better at the thing you can always raise the bar over time and the great thing about this is that it's not just the impact that it has on that one behavior [12:33] that you're trying to do like I realized this when I was back in med school that like oh studying for exams becomes a lot easier if I try and do the tiniest action I.E if I convince myself I'm just going to do the thing for 5 minutes that is a very tiny action anyone can study for 5 minutes very few people can study for 5 hours but then once I've done the 5 minutes it goes to 10 goes to 15 goes to 20 and then I started to realize oh okay this is how discipline works this is how I can get myself to do something [12:55] that's kind of hard and the nice thing about this is that it does not just apply to studying it applies to every single else thing in my life and so by developing this generalized skill of self-discipline there's this real sense that you start to know what the process looks like people say trust the process right but it's hard to trust a process that you have not been through before once you've done it one time you have a sense of the full scope of the process or what you think is a full scope of the [13:19] process then you do it again and again and again and you start to go oh yeah this is the part where you start to doubt yourself this is the part where you get excited and then oh wait no it's going to get hard again but you you you start to get a sense of The rhythms of it and then you can trust the process and then you can also enjoy the process with anything that we do in life you know it's just take if you imagine making a YouTube video the first couple of times you make a YouTube video it's going to be really really really [13:41] freaking hard because there's all these emotional hurdles to get over and all these technical hurdles to get over but the more you do it the easier it becomes and then the more you trust the process and you realize oh yeah this is the hard bit oh yeah this is the you know this is the bit where I feel demotivated oh yeah I've been here before I'm just going to push through or I'm going to find a way to deal with this with the feelings I've got around this that is really where a lot of the gains are to be had in this [14:01] idea of self-discipline it's in doing the process a couple of times and then starting to trust the process over time so action point next time you are struggling with discipline ask yourself what would the smallest easiest version of this look like but of course sometimes we do just have to do stuff that's hard right and that is where tip number three comes in I I would argue that we sort of have a higher self and a lower self right the lower self says just like eat whatever you want work only when you want say whatever you want [14:28] don't think about consequent like there there's this the sort of immediate gratification sort of shortterm impulses that we all have right that if indulged repeatedly tend to get us in a place that we actually don't want to be so there's this kind of tension between like our higher self and the lower self I think there's a lot of value in appreciating this tension that we have between our higher and our lower selves um like so the other day I I recently got a PS5 and I've been playing Horizon forbidden West an amazing game and often [14:58] I'll be playing you you know if I've got an evening on my own I'll be playing and it gets to 10:30 p.m. and I'm like oh it's 10:30 I know 10:30 is my wind down time and I know my higher self wants me to brush my teeth get into bed and read something on my Kindle at the moment I'm reading A New Earth by eart Toll and then I'll sleep on time and then I'll wake up early and then life will be good but then what my lower self is saying is yeah but you know we can sleep at 11:30 and still get 8 hours of sleep and you [15:23] know we you know we're just in the middle of this Quest and like it's really fun and you know we deserve it we we've been working all day we deserve ant hour on the PlayStation and then you know the brain gets over stimulated and then before I know it that extra hour turns into 2 hours and it's like there's a constant sort of balancing out between the higher self and the lower self now I actually did um a couple of therapy sessions uh last year with my friend AR kenoia who goes by do K and has the [15:45] YouTube channel healthy gamer GG he's a Harvard trained psychiatrist and also a trained Monk and so he and I did some like therapy coaching e type sessions where he taught me about something called internal family systems and basically the idea here is that sort of like in that film inside out uh you actually have like we all have multiple different characters within our brains and part of the process of becoming an integrated human being is to recognize that these characters are not good or bad it's not that the higher self is the [16:16] good guy and the lower self is the bad guy you know one thing that Al and I did is that we we sort of made up names for these different characters like there was you know the optimizer uh Optimizer oi there was like uh second in theclass oi there was video game degenerate Ali and it's like each there's there's a bunch of these different characters and each of these different characters have different needs wants perspectives and opinions like for example video game degenerate Ali is saying you know let's [16:40] keep on playing the PlayStation but if we were to just shove him into the corner and be like no shut up you I'm going to be disciplined screw you shoving that character in in the corner of the brain and like being like no you are bad leads to some sort of rebellion from that character and so the whole process of internal family systems and is like a system of therapy is to sort of get these different characters to talk to each other sort of and to accept that actually I appreciate your opinion you know video gamer Ali to you know the [17:06] fact you want to play Horizon for an extra hour and I also appreciate the opinion of I don't know optimize R who's trying to you know do the hubman optimizing sleep routine or or whatever and it's about not shoving them into the corner but actually hearing what they have to say and accepting what they have to say and in some ways trying to find a middle ground trying to find a way for all them to be happy um but even if you can't find a way for all them to be happy trying to find a way where at least they feel like their concerns are [17:31] acknowledged and so in the in the PlayStation example what I do is that when it gets to 10:30 I know that the video gamer part of me wants to play more but what I do is I say to the video gamer part of me how about we turn off the PlayStation and we go brush our teeth but while we're brushing our teeth we can watch some YouTube videos about Horizon forbidden West how about that and then it sort of feels to me like the video gamer part of me is like you know what that seems like a reasonable compromise I'm happy with that I get to [17:54] have a bit of a win because we're playing you know we're experiencing the video game content in some capacity but also the optimizer part of me gets to have a win the higher self as it were because we're actually going to sleep on time and brushing our teeth now this was all a very somewhat roundabout way of saying that like one of the issues we can often have when it comes to our discipline is the the resistance approach of like no bad self you are bad go into the corner actually if there's a way that we can appreciate this balance [18:19] between a higher and our lower selves not really saying that our lower self is bad but that you know we appreciate it we'll take the advice on board and then we'll make a decision try trying to integrate these two different parts okay so one of the least disciplined periods of my life was in the few months after I had taken a break from working as a doctor full-time this was like August 2020 and I'd been working fulltime as a doctor for 2 years and for the first time I woke up in the morning and I had no job to go to and I [18:49] was like oh I had the whole day had nothing on my calendar everything was great and I was like now I guess I'm a full-time YouTuber so I guess I just need to make a video today and I procrastinated all day and I didn't make the video and the same thing happened the next day and the same thing happened the next day and the same thing happened the next day and actually when I was working full-time 50 to 60 hours a week as a doctor I was making more YouTube videos than when I had no day job and I was a full-time YouTuber [19:12] and this was really interesting this was like what the hell is going on I was very undisciplined and very inconsistent when I did not have a structure or a routine to my day and I realized over time that actually hang on being a full-time YouTuber is actually now it's not like the the calendar that's my constraint it's my own psychology and it's my own mindset um and this speaks to something that Ryan mentioned as well this is why actually I think most self-published books don't work it's that because [19:40] there's no forcing function required to get approval to start um there's no deadline there's no constraints as to how long it can be what it can look like you can basically do whatever you want which you would think would be an artistic sort of creative dream but it's actually like uh potentially a death sentence so tip number four for actionable ways to improve your self-discipline is to really think about what is the routine or structure you are trying to create around the thing that you want to do in Ryan's case he was [20:10] talking about how he's got his clear routine where he wakes up he does some exercise he drops the kids off at school and then he works for several uninterrupted hours in the morning doing some deep work and in the afternoon is chilling he can do what he wants and that is how he's so consistent because he just does the same thing pretty much every day so routine is valuable but then the the thing the thing is we don't just want to become like one of those oh I have to get get up at 5:00 a.m. and do this and do this and do this and do [20:31] this and do this and sort of become uh it's it's a very kind of fragile place to be if you're so tied to your routine that you can't deviate from it otherwise your discipline goes through the floor and that's where the idea of flexibility comes in I have found as I've gotten older and more successful that the rigidity that served me well early on has had to give way into a kind of flexibility now there's always a tension or a a concern concern is that flexibility actually just complacency or laziness um and I have to question each [21:05] time what is my motivation here but but that rigidity has to become flexibility or one you suck all the fun out of it and two it's not sustainable over a long period of time and it's not it's very susceptible to being disrupted or blown apart by the complexity of life now this idea comes up in Robert Green's book the 48 Laws of Power where the last law is to assume formlessness now green writes by taking a shape by having a visible plan you open yourself to attack instead of taking a form for your enemy to grasp [21:41] keep yourself adaptable and on the move so basically the idea here is that yes routine and structure is important but being too rigid doesn't actually help you there's a certain strategic flexibility which is where we want to be okay so how do we find this sweet spot between structure and flexibility uh there's a few different ways I think about it uh one is that something that my friend Paul Millet says which is for him the way he stays consistent with writing is that his Mantra is write most days it's not right every day it's not [22:11] right every single day it's right most days it's like as long as he's writing most days he's making progress similarly Matt dellaa has something called the two-day rule when it comes to the gym which is simply don't skip two days in a row I'm allowed to skip one day but I'm not allowed to skip 2 days in a row now that is enough flexibility for it to well be flexible in a up to his life especially as a dad uh but it's also enough enough structure and enough rigidity that it actually helps him stay [22:33] consistent and disciplined the way that I think about these things is I find that going for general principles rather than specific routines is where I personally find this sweet spot of flexibility and structure that allows me to stay discipline so for example a general principle that I have is that most days wherever possible I will do at least 1 hour of deep work before I worry about like checking messages or slack or emails or any shallow work tasks I also have a bit of a rule where the goal is [22:58] to hit the gym at least three times a week but 15 minutes in the gym counts as a full gym session so if I do 15 minutes and three sets of three exercises that is my minimum viable session and that means I can stay consistent with the gym rather than feeling ah I don't have a full hour to work out therefore I might I might as well not work out at all and my friend s Bloom has an idea that I found really helpful like I was hanging out with him a couple of months ago and I asked him how he's how he's able to [23:22] stay so consistent with exercise he's absolutely jacked he's like a hybrid athlete he's training for like a ultramarathon and also is act and seems to hit the gym every day in some capacity and he taught me about his system of a b and c goals so when it comes to Fitness for example his a goal like if it's an a day like gold standard would be to do weight training for like an hour that's his a goal but if he's not able to do that his b goal is to do some sort of form of sort of uh vigorous exercise for like 20 minutes or [23:51] something to that effect and if he's not able to do that his SE goal is to just walk around for 15 minutes or something like that so on a day where he's traveling for example and he doesn't have access to a gym and he doesn't have 20 minutes to do some vigorous exercise he will just walk around for like 10 minutes in the airport and that will help him take off his seag goal which will help him stay consistent with the goal of getting enough exercise if you just tell yourself that actually doing 15 minutes [24:15] of walking around the airport also counts it allows me to keep my streak alive and you don't need an hour in the gym every day to have momentum you sometimes just need 7 minutes of exercise to have that momentum I think just as a productivity system or a business or a lifestyle what it's about picking a thing and then sticking with that thing right um through the ups and downs of what life inevitably brings you okay the final point in this video is that really everything becomes a lot easier when it [24:49] comes to discipline if you stick to the method that you are trying to do now one of the reasons why Ryan holiday is so prolific when it comes to writing is because for the last like 20 years he has been sticking to exactly the same system for writing he has this note card system he talks about it in one of his YouTube and a bunch of his YouTube videos and yeah he admits that maybe there's some sort of slightly better system out there but he also fully knows that unless the system is transformatively better than the one he [25:16] already has the value of sticking to what he's already doing is way better for his self-discipline and for his consistency than trying to constantly change productivity apps or writing systems or oh that one new piece of the software that's just come out that's going to be the secret the thing that I need to stay productive and disciplined finally that's just not true being productive and being disciplined being consistent from like literally everyone I've spoken to who's more consistent than I am and stuff they just pick one [25:40] thing and they just do it repeatedly and if you have one thing one routine or just one system one workout plan you just do it repeatedly you're massively reducing the cognitive burden like the mental friction that come that comes to kind of deciding what to do and that again lowers the hump coming back down to a discipline analogy the thing feels good so you able to sustain the momentum of doing the thing but to get over the hump initially you lower the hump by reducing the cognitive friction the [26:05] cognitive overload and you reduce that by just sticking to the same system I uh profess to have no no secrets other than don't quit this is by far the single biggest secret to success if ever I've heard one which is just pick something and do not quit if you do something for decades there is literally no world in which you're not going to succeed at the thing right the problem is if you do something for 6 months and then switch to something else and something else something else whether it's on a Mac [26:28] level like what sort of business you want to run or even on a micro level like what sort of note taking system you want to use those are the people that produce a lot less output and are a lot less disciplined and less consistent and ultimately less impactful than the people that just have a system and just stick to that system this is something I still struggle with I still love to think that like the next productivity writing app is going to help me finally be consistent with my writing but honestly if I were just to use Apple [26:51] notes and I just use that system every freaking day I'd have written so much more than the fact than what I've done because I've been trying to screw around with these different systems and different apps senica had this word emia which he defines as Tranquility he says Tranquility is the sense of the path that you were on and not being distracted by the paths that crisscross yours he says especially from those who are hopelessly lost okay so this video was about five actionable tips from Ryan holiday that I've [27:20] personally applied to my life around self-discipline but if you're interested in a more evidence-based approach I actually did a video a few months ago which is over here which is about I think fiveish more evidence-based strategies for discipline that talks about uh implementation intentions and mental contrasting and a bunch of really cool stuff around if you're struggling with this discipline thing I think you'll find that video really helpful so thank you so much for watching and I'll see you there bye-bye