I have been thinking, reading and writing about motivation / discipline / procrastination / akrasia for years now. I'm always looking for really good material on the subject. Unfortunately for some strange reason, most of the posts I've seen that get to the front page of Hacker News are woefully oversimplistic.
Even discipline is something that requires some sort of motivation to cultivate. It is something that you have to want to do, and getting yourself to want to do something isn't (in my opinion) nearly as trivial as a lot of people pretend it is.
So screw motivation, screw discipline, what you need is a comprehensive, holistic solution that encompasses almost everything– that's why it's so difficult to change your life.
1- You need to figure out your expectancy of accomplishing tasks. Discipline won't help you if you bite off more than you can chew.
2- You need to figure out what's valuable to you. There's not much sense in getting disciplined at doing something you hate. PG wrote in one of his essays- paulgraham.com/love.html, I believe, where he talks about a doctor who became a doctor because she was so focused and disciplined– despite the fact that she never actually loved medicine.
3– You need to engineer your environment + choose the right peers. This is way more than half the battle, and it also involves taking more drastic action than a lot of people are comfortable with.
4- You need to chop up your tasks into things that have nearly-immediate feedback, because otherwise hyperbolic discounting makes things seem irrelevant and unimportant to us (especially bad if you have ADHD).
5- You need to have a vested interest in doing all of the above. That means having some sort of reason or motive... which you might also call "motivation."
TL;DR:
Motivation / discipline / getting-stuff-done is a lot more complicated than "screw X, do Y".
PS:
"Screw X, do Y" seems to be a rhetoric device writers use when want to drum up strong feelings in people, dividing people into Camp X and Camp Y. Once you learn to see it, it actually gets rather boring and underwhelming. If you skip all the rhetoric, what the writer is saying is to develop habits. "Start small", that's it.
Would've been more interesting to read a post about the specific development of habits. Because, often you'll find, you end up needing some motivation to getting around to changing your habits, too.
>I have been thinking, reading and writing about motivation / discipline / procrastination / akrasia for years now.
Would you mind sharing your blog? I love to read about those kind of things. I don't write (in public) about them but I feel like it's fun and useful to think/meditate about.
>Screw motivation, screw discipline, what you need is a comprehensive, holistic solution that encompasses almost everything– that's why it's so difficult to change your life. You need to figure out your expectancy of accomplishing tasks, you need to figure out what's valuable to you, you need to engineer your environment, you need to choose the right peers, and you need to have a vested interest in doing all of that in the first place.
The one thing that compasses this all is, in my opinion, this:
1) The ability to break things down to their bare minimum
2) The ability to execute those tasks
3) Keeping the goal in sight, always.
Humans are stupid. I am stupid. We are all stupid. We forget trivial stuff. We have to constantly remind ourselves why and for what we are doing something. This is not bad per se, just a lot of people don't. A lot of things can help you in your goal. Motivated peers are, to me, a HUGE motivator. People should also critically examine what exactly makes them happy.
Thank you for sharing your understanding - personally I found this much more useful than the parent article.
It is certainly true that discipline is required for accomplishing a task, but to focus on that alone, trying to make your "feelings inconsequential", is frankly unwise.
Before you can succeed at achieving something you must know:
* What you are trying to achieve
* Why you are trying to achieve it
This is the source of the motivation.
Incidentally, asking "why" is a good way to find out the "what" one level below the current task - something that in my experience is a very useful tool to understand yourself and what you want in life.
Once you have "what" and "why" you can determine "how" (i.e. plot a route) and then it is time for discipline (i.e. just walk the route). But it is much easier to be disciplined if you have the real motivation that comes from a clear understanding of "what" and "why".
It may also be the case that you realise that the reason you have to force yourself to do something is that you shouldn't be doing it. If you hate your job and the spreadsheets that come with it then why are you doing it? The answer could be simple: "money" but in that case there is always the possibility to do something else to achieve that - it is incredibly liberating!
Blindly focusing on discipline is a sure way to one day wake up and realise that what you have been doing is of no importance and that is a hard realisation to come to. If you are lucky, then it is still not too late to do something about it, but the best thing is to never get to that situation in the first place.
Anyway, just my 2 pence - it's worked out pretty well for me so far... ;-)
Amen. Also loved the book 'The Willpower Instinct' [1] in that respect. No magic solutions; just a collection of insights into the multitude of relevant dynamics at play here.
Also good seems to be The Procrastination Equation [1]– the key insight is that there are (at least!) 4 variables involved in why we don't do things that we say we want to do:
* Expectancy, which is your own estimation of how likely you are to complete a task
* Value, which is how important something is to you
* Impulsiveness, determined by the environment that you're in
* Delay, which is the amount of time between whatever you're doing, and the consequence or implication of the thing you're doing.
Getting things done requires dealing with all of the above variables. "Screw Motivation, You Need Discipline" essentially addresses Impulsiveness- it says to be less impulsive, by cultivating good habits. Sure, but that's just 25% of the battle.
I think part of the discipline problem is the solipsism of our times.
In an army, your environment provides discipline and (often) fosters motivation for (for example) fitness. A fitness class reduces the need to discipline & self motivation to getting yourself to the class. After that, the environment takes care of itself. Self discipline and self motivation is a problematic subset of discipline and we're not really wired to run on it exclusively.
This is part of why you need a partner to start a startup. Having discipline and motivation together is easier than alone. It's why I don't think online education can replace institutional education (though I think it can make it much better) as the default mode. It's why even in one-on-one sports like tennis or boxing young athletes are on "teams."
When in college, I saw my friends, who were once in the military, power through learning at time frustratingly difficult subjects. It didn't take long to see that their consistent efforts yielded progress in excess of what the rest of us "self-motivators" were making. I don't know why that came as a surprise. After all, my Dad, who was a staff sergeant, raised three boys by himself-our mother died when we were 3, 2, 6 mos-while running an architecture firm.
Some may say we need a holistic approach in how we get ourselves to do what can be unpleasant but also life and career enhancing tasks; I think that makes things more complicated than they need to be. The times when I've applied the disciplined approach to work have been my most productive. Other people's mileage may vary.
> Having discipline and motivation together is easier than alone. It's why I don't think online education can replace institutional education (though I think it can make it much better) as the default mode. It's why even in one-on-one sports like tennis or boxing young athletes are on "teams."
I'm very passionate about this!
I think people completely misunderstand what online education is going to be like. Currently, it tends to be approached from a "Just like school but in the cloud" POV.
That's like saying online music is "a record store but in the cloud"- it's not! There's streaming and remixes and downloads and all sorts of interesting things that are enabled by the new model that simply weren't present before.
Similarly, "online education" isn't about sitting through video lectures and then doing tests. It's about reaching out to real people, building real relationships, working on real projects. It's simply self-directed learning, with the guidance, help and support of peers.
There are a lot of things you can learn to do online, and a huge part of it is getting into the right communities, building relationships with the right people, etc.
I did it and it really worked out quite well. The guy who runs it BJ Fogg, also has some quite interesting insights into habits and habit formation.
The habits I worked on were to load my personal kanban every morning while I make coffee, and also to plan my 3 most important todos on it while I have my first smoke of the day. This has resulted in a huge increase in my productivity. Give it a shot.
Even discipline is something that requires some sort of motivation to cultivate. It is something that you have to want to do, and getting yourself to want to do something isn't (in my opinion) nearly as trivial as a lot of people pretend it is.
So screw motivation, screw discipline, what you need is a comprehensive, holistic solution that encompasses almost everything– that's why it's so difficult to change your life.
1- You need to figure out your expectancy of accomplishing tasks. Discipline won't help you if you bite off more than you can chew.
2- You need to figure out what's valuable to you. There's not much sense in getting disciplined at doing something you hate. PG wrote in one of his essays- paulgraham.com/love.html, I believe, where he talks about a doctor who became a doctor because she was so focused and disciplined– despite the fact that she never actually loved medicine.
3– You need to engineer your environment + choose the right peers. This is way more than half the battle, and it also involves taking more drastic action than a lot of people are comfortable with.
4- You need to chop up your tasks into things that have nearly-immediate feedback, because otherwise hyperbolic discounting makes things seem irrelevant and unimportant to us (especially bad if you have ADHD).
5- You need to have a vested interest in doing all of the above. That means having some sort of reason or motive... which you might also call "motivation."
TL;DR:
Motivation / discipline / getting-stuff-done is a lot more complicated than "screw X, do Y".
PS:
"Screw X, do Y" seems to be a rhetoric device writers use when want to drum up strong feelings in people, dividing people into Camp X and Camp Y. Once you learn to see it, it actually gets rather boring and underwhelming. If you skip all the rhetoric, what the writer is saying is to develop habits. "Start small", that's it.
Would've been more interesting to read a post about the specific development of habits. Because, often you'll find, you end up needing some motivation to getting around to changing your habits, too.