SELF – DISCIPLINE
The Five Pillars of Self-Discipline
The five pillars of self-discipline are: Acceptance, Willpower, Hard Work,
Industry, and Persistence. If you take the first letter of each word, you get
the acronym “A WHIP” — a convenient way to remember them, since many people
associate self-discipline with whipping themselves into shape.
Each day of the series, I’ll explore one of these pillars, explaining why
it’s important and how to develop it. But first a general overview….
What Is Self-Discipline?
Self-discipline is the ability to get yourself to take action regardless of
your emotional state.
Imagine what you could accomplish if you could simply get yourself to follow
through on your best intentions no matter what. Picture yourself saying to your
body, “You’re overweight. Lose 20 pounds.” Without self-discipline that
intention won’t become manifest. But with sufficient self-discipline, it’s a
done deal. The pinnacle of self-discipline is when you reach the point that
when you make a conscious decision, it’s virtually
guaranteed you’ll follow through on it.
Self-discipline is one of many personal development tools available to you.
Of course it is not a panacea. Nevertheless, the problems which self-discipline
can solve are important, and while there are other ways to solve these
problems, self-discipline absolutely shreds them. Self-discipline can empower
you to overcome any addiction or lose any amount of weight. It can wipe out
procrastination, disorder, and ignorance. Within the domain of problems it can
solve, self-discipline is simply unmatched. Moreover, it becomes a powerful
teammate when combined with other tools like passion, goal-setting, and
planning.
Building Self-Discipline
My philosophy of how to build self-discipline is best explained by an
analogy. Self-discipline is like a muscle. The more you train it, the stronger
you become. The less you train it, the weaker you become.
Just as everyone has different muscular strength, we all possess different
levels of self-discipline. Everyone has some — if you can hold your breath a
few seconds, you have some self-discipline. But not everyone has developed
their discipline to the same degree.
Just as it takes muscle to build muscle, it takes self-discipline to build
self-discipline.
The way to build self-discipline is analogous to using progressive weight
training to build muscle. This means lifting weights that are close to your
limit. Note that when you weight train, you lift weights that are within your
ability to lift. You push your muscles until they fail, and then you rest.
Similarly, the basic method to build self-discipline is to tackle challenges
that you can successfully accomplish but which are near your limit. This
doesn’t mean trying something and failing at it every day, nor does it mean
staying within your comfort zone. You will gain no strength trying to lift a
weight that you cannot budge, nor will you gain strength lifting weights that
are too light for you. You must start with weights/challenges that are within
your current ability to lift but which are near your limit.
Progressive training means that once you succeed, you increase the
challenge. If you keep working out with the same weights, you won’t get any
stronger. Similarly, if you fail to challenge yourself in life, you won’t gain
any more self-discipline.
Just as most people have very weak muscles compared to how strong they could
become with training, most people are very weak in their level of
self-discipline.
It’s a mistake to try to push yourself too hard when trying to build
self-discipline. If you try to transform your entire life overnight by setting
dozens of new goals for yourself and expecting yourself to follow through
consistency starting the very next day, you’re almost certain to fail. This is
like a person going to the gym for the first time ever and packing 300 pounds
on the bench press. You will only look silly.
If you can only lift 10 lbs, you can only lift 10 lbs. There’s no shame in
starting where you are. I recall when I began working with a personal trainer
several years ago, on my first attempt at doing a barbell shoulder press, I could only lift a 7-lb bar with no weight on it. My
shoulders were very weak because I’d never trained them. But within a few
months I was up to 60 lbs.
Similarly, if you’re very undisciplined right now,
you can still use what little discipline you have to build more. The more
disciplined you become, the easier life gets. Challenges that
were once impossible for you will eventually seem like child’s play. As
you get stronger, the same weights will seem lighter and lighter.
Don’t compare yourself to other people. It won’t help. You’ll only find what
you expect to find. If you think you’re weak, everyone else will seem stronger.
If you think you’re strong, everyone else will seem weaker. There’s no point in
doing this. Simply look at where you are now, and aim to get better as you go
forward.
Let’s consider an example.
Suppose you want to develop the ability to do 8 solid hours of work each
day, since you know it will make a real difference in your career. I was
listening to an audio program this morning that quoted a study saying the
average office worker spends 37% of their time in idle socializing, not to
mention other vices that chew up more than 50% of work time with unproductive
non-work. So there’s plenty of room for improvement.
Perhaps you try to work a solid 8-hour day without succumbing to
distractions, and you can only do it once. The next day you fail utterly.
That’s OK. You did one rep of 8 hours. Two is too much for you. So cut back a
bit. What duration would allow you to successfully do 5 reps (i.e. a whole
week)? Could you work with concentration for one hour a day, five days in a
row? If you can’t do that, cut back to 30 minutes or whatever you can do. If
you succeed (or if you feel that would be too easy), then increase the
challenge (i.e. the resistance).
Once you’ve mastered a week at one level, take it up a notch the next week.
And continue with this progressive training until you’ve reached your goal.
While analogies like this are never perfect, I’ve gotten a lot of mileage
out of this one. By raising the bar just a little each week, you stay within
your capabilities and grow stronger over time. But when doing weight training,
the actual work you do doesn’t mean anything. There’s no intrinsic benefit in
lifting a weight up and down — the benefit comes from the muscle growth.
However, when building self-discipline, you also get the benefit of the work
you’ve done along the way, so that’s even better. It’s great when your training
produces something of value AND makes you stronger.
Throughout this week we’ll dive more deeply into the five pillars of self-discipline. If you have any questions on the subject of self-discipline (either specific or general) that you’d like to see addressed, feel free to post them as comments, and I do my best to incorporate them along the way.
The first of the five pillars of self-discipline is acceptance. Acceptance
means that you perceive reality accurately and consciously acknowledge what you
perceive.
This may sound simple and obvious, but in practice it’s extremely difficult.
If you experience chronic difficulties in a particular area of your life,
there’s a strong chance that the root of the problem is a failure to accept
reality as it is.
Why is acceptance a pillar of self-discipline? The most basic mistake people
make with respect to self-discipline is a failure to accurately perceive and
accept their present situation. Remember the analogy between self-discipline
and weight training from yesterday’s
post? If you’re going to succeed at weight training, the first step is to
figure out what weights you can already lift. How strong are you right now?
Until you figure out where you stand right now, you cannot adopt a sensible
training program.
If you haven’t consciously acknowledged where you stand right now in terms
of your level of self-discipline, it’s highly unlikely that you’re going to
improve at all in this area. Imagine a would-be bodybuilder who has no idea how
much weight s/he can lift and arbitrarily adopts a training routine. It’s
virtually certain that the chosen weights will be either too heavy or too
light. If the weights are too heavy, the trainee won’t be able to lift them at
all and thus will experience no muscle growth. And if the weights are too
light, the trainee will lift them easily but won’t build any muscle in doing
so.
Similarly, if you want to increase your self-discipline, you must know where
you stand right now. How strong is your discipline at this moment? Which
challenges are easy for you, and which are virtually impossible for you?
Here’s a list of challenges to get you thinking about where you stand right
now (in no particular order):
Just as there are different muscle groups which you train with different
exercises, there are different areas of self-discipline: disciplined sleep,
disciplined diet, disciplined work habits, disciplined communication, etc. It
takes different exercises to build discipline in each area.
My advice is to identify an area where your discipline is weakest, assess
where you stand right now, acknowledge and accept your starting point, and
design a training program for yourself to improve in this area. Start out with
some easy exercises you know you can do, and gradually progress to greater
challenges.
Progressive training works with self-discipline just as it does with
building muscle. For example, if you can barely get out of bed at 10am, are you
likely to succeed at waking up at 5am every morning? Probably
not. But could you master getting up at 9:45am? Very
likely. And once you’ve done that, could you progress to 9:30 or 9:15?
Sure. When I started getting up at 5am consistently, I had already done it
several times for a few days in a row, and my normal wake-up time was 6-6:30am,
so that next step was challenging but achievable for me partly because I was
already within range of it.
Without acceptance you get either ignorance or denial. With ignorance you
simply don’t know how disciplined you are — you’ve probably never even thought
about it. You don’t know that you don’t know. You’ll only have a fuzzy notion
of what you can and can’t do. You’ll experience some easy successes and some
dismal failures, but you’re more likely to blame the task or blame yourself
instead of simply acknowledging that the “weight” was too heavy for you and
that you need to become stronger.
When you’re in a state of denial about your level of discipline, you’re
locked into a false view of reality. You’re either overly pessimistic or
optimistic about your capabilities. And like the trainee who doesn’t know
his/her own strength, you won’t get much better because it’s unlikely you’ll be
able to hit the proper training zone by accident. On the pessimistic side,
you’ll only pick up easy weights and avoid the heavy ones which you could
actually lift and which would make you stronger. And on the optimistic side,
you’ll keep trying to lift weights that are too heavy for you and failing, and
afterwards you may either beat yourself up or resolve to try harder, neither of
which will make you stronger.
I have personally reaped tremendous benefits from pursuing the path of
self-discipline. When I was 20 years old, I lived in a small studio apartment,
and my sleep hours were something like 4am to 1pm. My diet included lots of
fast food and junk food. I didn’t exercise except for sometimes taking long
walks. Getting the mail seemed like a significant accomplishment each day, and
the highlight of my day was hanging out with friends. At the end of a month, I
couldn’t really think of many salient events that occurred during the month. I
had no job, no car, no income, no goals, no plans, and no real future. All I
felt I had was a lot of problems that weren’t getting
any better. I had no sense that I could control my path through life. I would
simply wait for things to happen and then react to them.
But eventually I faced the reality that trying to wait out my life wasn’t
working. If I was going to get anywhere, I was going to have to do something
about it. And initially this meant tackling a lot of difficult challenges, but
I overcame them and grew a lot stronger in a short period of time.
Fast forward fourteen years, and it’s like night and day. I get up at 5am
each morning. I exercise six days a week. I eat a purely vegan diet with lots
of fresh vegetables. My home office is well organized. My physical inbox and my
email inbox are both empty. I’m married with two kids and live in a nice house.
A binder sits on my desk with my written goals and detailed plans to achieve
them, and several of my 2005 goals have already been accomplished. I’ve never
been more clear about what I wanted, and I’m doing
what I love. I know I’m making a difference.
None of this just happened. It was intentional. And it certainly didn’t
happen overnight. It took a lot of years of hard work. It’s still hard work,
but I’ve become a lot stronger such that things that would have been
insurmountable for me at age 20 are easy today, which means I can tackle bigger
challenges and therefore achieve even better results. If I had tried to do
everything I’m doing now when I was 20, I would have failed utterly. 20-year
old Steve wouldn’t have been able to handle it, not even for one day. But for
34-year old Steve, it’s easy. And what’s really exciting for me is to think of
what 48-year old Steve will be able to accomplish… relative to my life path of
course, not anyone else’s.
The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of
strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will.
- Vince Lombardi
Willpower — such a dirty word these days. How many commercials have you seen
that attempt to position their products as a substitute for willpower? They
begin by telling you that willpower doesn’t work and then attempt to sell you
something “fast and easy” like a diet pill or some wacky exercise equipment.
Often they’ll even guarantee impossible results in a dramatically short period
of time — that’s a safe bet because people who lack willpower probably won’t
take the time to return these useless products.
But guess what… willpower does work. But in order to take full advantage of
it, you must learn what it can and cannot do. People who say willpower doesn’t
work are trying to use it in a way that’s beyond its capabilities.
What Is Willpower?
Willpower is your ability to set a course of action and say, “Engage!”
Willpower provides an intensely powerful yet temporary boost. Think of it as
a one-shot thruster. It burns out quickly, but if directed intelligently, it
can provide the burst you need to overcome inertia and create momentum.
Willpower is the spearhead of self-discipline. To use a World War II
analogy, willpower would be D-Day, the Normandy Invasion. It was the gigantic
battle that turned the tide of the war and got things moving in a new
direction, even though it took another year to reach VE Day (Victory in
Willpower is a concentration of force. You gather up all your energy and
make a massive thrust forward. You attack your problems strategically at their
weakest points until they crack, allowing you enough room to maneuver deeper
into their territory and finish them off.
The application of willpower includes the following steps:
With willpower you may take your time implementing steps 1 and 2, but when
you get to step 3, you’ve got to hit it hard and fast.
Don’t try to tackle your problems and challenges in such a way that a high
level of willpower is required every day. Willpower is unsustainable. If you
attempt to use it for too long, you’ll burn out. It requires a level of energy
that you can maintain only for a short period of time… in most cases the fuel
is spent within a matter of days.
Use Willpower to Create Self-Sustaining Momentum
So if willpower can only be used in short, powerful bursts, then what’s the
best way to apply it? How do you keep from slipping back into old patterns once
the temporary willpower blast is over?
The best way to use willpower is to establish a beachhead, such that further
progress can be made with far less effort than is required of the initial
thrust. Remember D-Day — once the Allies had established a beachhead, the road
ahead was much easier for them. It was still challenging to be sure, especially
with the close quarters fighting among hedge rows in
So the proper use of willpower is to establish that beachhead — to permanently
change the territory itself such that it’s easier to continue moving on. Use
willpower to reduce the ongoing need for such a high level of sustained force.
An Example
Let’s put all of the above together into a concrete example.
Suppose your objective is to lose 20 pounds. You attempt to go on a diet. It
takes willpower, and you do OK with it the first week. But within a few weeks
you’ve fallen back into old habits and gained all the weight back. You try
again with different diets, but the result is still the same. You can’t sustain
momentum for long enough to reach your goal weight.
That’s to be expected though because willpower is temporary. It’s for
sprints, not marathons. Willpower requires conscious focus, and conscious focus
is very draining — it cannot be maintained for long. Something will eventually
distract you.
Here’s how to tackle that same goal with the proper application of
willpower. You accept that you can only apply a short burst of willpower… maybe
a few days at best. After that it’s gone. So you’d better use that willpower to
alter the territory around you in such a way that maintaining momentum won’t be
as hard as building it in the first place. You need to use your willpower to
establish a beachhead on the shores of your goal.
So you sit down and make a plan. This doesn’t require much energy, and you
can spread the work out over many days.
You identify all the various targets you’ll need to strike if you want to
have a chance of success. First, all the junk food needs to leave your kitchen,
including anything you have a tendency to overeat, and you need to replace it
with foods that will help you lose weight, like fruits and veggies. Secondly,
you know you’ll be tempted to get fast food if you come home hungry and don’t
have anything ready to eat, so you decide to pre-cook a week’s worth of food in
advance each weekend. That way you always have something in the refrigerator.
You set aside a block of several hours each weekend to buy groceries and cook
all your food for the week. Plus you get a decent cookbook of healthy recipes.
You learn about Weight
Watchers, and find out where the closest one is to you, so you can go to
the first meeting and sign-up. Setup a weight chart and post it on your
bathroom wall. Get a decent scale that can measure weight and body fat %. Make
a list of sample meals (5 breakfasts, 5 lunches, and 5 dinners), and post it on
your refrigerator. And so on…. At this point all of this goes into the written
plan.
Then you execute — hard and fast. You can probably implement the whole plan
in one day. Attend your first Weight Watchers meeting and get all the
materials. Purge the unhealthy food from the kitchen. Buy the new groceries,
the new cookbook, and the new scale. Post the weight chart and the sample meals
list. Select recipes and cook a batch of food for the week. Whew!
By the end of the day, you’ve used your willpower not to diet directly but to establish the conditions that will make your diet easier to follow. When you wake up the next morning, you’ll find your environment dramatically changed in accordance with your plan. Your fridge will be stocked with plenty of pre-cooked healthy food for you to eat. There won’t be any junkie problem foods in your home. You’ll be a member of Weight Watchers and will have weekly meetings to attend. You’ll have a regular block of time set aside for grocery shopping and food prep. It will still require some discipline to follow your diet, but you’ve already changed things so much that it won’t be nearly as difficult as it would be without these changes.
Hard Work Defined
My definition of hard work is that which challenges you.
And why is challenge important? Why not just do what’s easiest?
Most people will do what’s easiest and avoid hard work — and that’s
precisely why you should do the opposite. The superficial opportunities of life
will be attacked by hordes of people seeking what’s easy. The much tougher
challenges will usually see a lot less competition and a lot more opportunity.
There’s an African gold mine two miles deep. It cost tens of millions of
dollars to construct, but it’s one of the most lucrative gold mines ever. These
miners tackled a very challenging problem with a lot of hard work, but
ultimately it’s paying off.
I remember when I was developing the PC game Dweep
in 1999, I spent four months full-time working to
create a design doc that was only five pages long. It was a logic puzzle game,
and I found it extremely challenging to get the design just right. After the
design was done, everything else took only two more months — programming,
artwork, music, sound effects, writing the installer,
and launching the game.
I spent all this time intentionally working on design because at the time, I
believed this was where I could get the competitive edge I needed. I knew I
couldn’t compete on the basis of the game’s technical attributes. Before I
started on the game, I surveyed the competition and found a lot of games that I
considered “low hanging fruit.” Most of the market was flooded with clones of
older games, the kind of stuff that’s easiest to make. And most of my early
games were short on design as well, mostly aim-and-shoot arcade games.
It was much, much harder to design an original game with unique gameplay. But it paid off handsomely. Dweep
won the Shareware Industry Award in 2000, and an improved version of the game (Dweep Gold) won that same award the following year. As a
result of the success of that game, I was interviewed by a reporter for the New
York Times, and my interview along with a nice photo appeared in the June
13, 2001 edition (business section). First released on June 1, 1999, Dweep is now beginning its 7th year of sales. It can’t
compete with today’s technology. It couldn’t compete on technology when it was
first released. But it still competes well on design with the best of the other
competitors in its field. I discovered there are a lot of players who prefer a
well-designed game with dated graphics than a shallow light show with the
latest technology. The long-term success of this game brought home the lesson
that hard work does pay.
There’s no way Dweep would have been able to hold
out this long if I had taken the easy way out during the design phase. I dug
for gold two miles deep, so it was much harder for anyone else to unseat the
game from its position in the market. In order to do that, they’d have to outdig me, and very few people are willing to do that
because creative game design is excruciatingly difficult. Everyone says they
have a cool game idea, but to actually turn it into something workable, fun,
and innovative is very hard work. When I look at other games that are
successful over a period of 5+ years, I consistently see a willingness to take
on hard work that others aren’t willing to tackle. And yet today the market is
even more overcrowded with cloned drivel than when I started.
Strong challenge is commonly connected with strong results. Sure you can get
lucky every once in a while and find an easy path to success. But will you be
able to maintain that success, or is it just a fluke? Will you be able to
repeat it? Once other people learn how you did it, will you find yourself
overloaded with competition?
When you discipline yourself to do what is hard, you gain access to a realm
of results that are denied everyone else. The willingness to do what is
difficult is like having a key to a special private treasure room.
The nice thing about hard work is that it’s universal. It doesn’t matter
what industry you’re in — hard work can be used to achieve positive long-term
results regardless of the specifics.
I’m using this same philosophy in building this personal development
business. I do a lot of things that are hard. I try to address topics that
other people don’t and bypass the low hanging fruit. I strive to explore topics
deeply and search for the gold. I do lots of reading and research. I write
lengthy articles and give my best ideas away for free, so I’m constantly forced
to better my best. I launched this business in October of last year and have
been working on it full time for essentially no pay.
Meanwhile I’m working hard in Toastmasters to build my speaking skills (my
one-year anniversary was June 2nd). I belong to two different clubs and attend
6-7 meetings per month. I became a club officer about a month after joining,
and I was just elected to a second officer position. I’ve given many speeches,
all of them for free. I’ve competed in every speech contest since I’ve joined.
If I had put all this time into my games business, I’d have a lot more money
right now. It’s a lot of hard work, and I’ve probably got at least another year
of training before I’m ready to go pro. But I’m willing to pay the price
whatever it takes. I’m not going to take the easy path to a shallow position
where I will only come crashing back down again. I won’t get up on a stage and
spout a bunch of fluffy self-help sound bites that still garner applause and a
paycheck but which don’t ultimately help anyone. If it takes years, it takes
years.
I’m taking the same approach to writing my book. It’s a lot of hard work.
But I want this to be the kind of book that people will still be reading 10
years from now. Writing a book like this is at least 10x
harder than the kinds of books I see dominating the psychology section of
bookstores today. But most of those books will be off the shelves in a year,
and few people will even remember them.
Hard work pays off. When someone tells you otherwise, beware the sales pitch
for something “fast and easy” that’s about to come next. The greater your
capacity for hard work, the more rewards fall within your grasp. The deeper you
can dig, the more treasure you can potentially find.
Being healthy is hard work. Finding and maintaining a successful
relationship is hard work. Raising kids is hard work. Getting organized is hard
work. Setting goals, making plans to achieve them, and staying on track is hard
work. Even being happy is hard work (true happiness that comes from high
self-esteem, not the fake kind that comes from denial and escapism).
Hard work goes hand-in-hand with acceptance. One of the things you must
accept are those areas of your life that won’t succumb
to anything less than hard work. Perhaps you’ve had no luck finding a
fulfilling relationship. Maybe the only way it’s going to happen is if you
accept you’re going to have to do what you’ve been avoiding. Perhaps you want
to lose weight. Maybe it’s time to accept that the path to your goal requires
disciplined diet and exercise (both hard work). Perhaps you want to increase
your income. Maybe you should accept that the only way it will happen is with a
lot of hard work.
Your life will reach a whole new level when you stop avoiding and fearing
hard work and simply surrender to it. Make it your ally instead of your enemy.
It’s a potent tool to have on your side.
Industry is working hard. In contrast to hard work, being industrious
doesn’t necessarily mean doing work that’s challenging or difficult. It simply
means putting in the time. You can be industrious doing easy work or hard work.
Imagine you have a baby. You’ll spend a lot of time changing diapers. But
that isn’t really hard work — it’s just a matter of doing it over and over many
times each day.
In life there are many tasks that aren’t necessarily difficult, but they
collectively require a significant time investment. If you don’t discipline
yourself to stay on top of them, they can make a big mess of your life. Just
think of all the little things you need to do: shopping, cooking, cleaning,
laundry, taxes, paying bills, home maintenance, childcare, etc. And this is
just for home — if you include work the list grows even longer. These things
may not reach your A-list for importance, but they still need to be done.
Self-discipline requires that you develop the capacity to put in the time
where it’s needed. A lot of messes are created when we refuse to put in the
time to do what needs to be done — and to do it correctly. Such messes range
from a messy desk or cluttered email inbox all the way down to an Enron or Worldcom. Big mess or small mess — take
your pick. Either way a significant contributing factor is the refusal to do
what needs to be done.
Sometimes it’s clear what needs to be done. Sometimes it isn’t clear at all.
But ignoring the mess won’t help no matter what. If you don’t know what needs
to be done, the first step is to figure it out. This may require you to seek
out information and educate yourself. In order to launch this blog last year, I had to figure out how to do it. I took
time to educate myself by reading other blogs and
evaluating various blogging tools. It wasn’t
difficult for me, but it required a significant time investment.
Sometimes we allow little annoyances to linger a bit too long. In January my
wife and I bought a new house. But it was only last weekend we finally unpacked
the last box. We did most of the unpacking in the first few weeks after the
move, but a couple boxes were shoved into a corner, and neither one of us
wanted to unpack them. Why? We didn’t know where to put the stuff they
contained. It seemed simplest to just ignore the problem and hope the boxes
would magically unpack themselves. Finally we got them unpacked last weekend
and took care of a few other home repairs that had been on the back burner as
well.
It wasn’t difficult or costly to do these things. It was simply a matter of
time to get them done. It didn’t require much skill or brainpower. All we had
to do was just accept that they needed to be done, take a few minutes to figure
out how to do them, and then do them.
Put in the Time
There are many problems in life where the solution is largely a brainless
time investment. If your email inbox is overloaded, this is not a challenging
problem. Believe me — there are bigger challenges in life than handling old
correspondence. I guarantee you have the brainpower to handle it. Getting your
email inbox to empty is purely a matter of time. Maybe it will take you several
hours to do it. If it’s worth several hours to get it done, then put in the
time. Maybe enjoy some relaxing music as you do. Otherwise just hit Ctrl-A
followed by Delete, and be done with it.
How many problems do you have on your to do list right now that can be
solved with the simple application of industry? Sometimes you don’t need to be
particularly creative or clever about it — a brute force solution will do. But
it’s easy to get stuck in a pattern of wishing that a brute force solution
wasn’t necessary. It’s tedious. It’s boring. It’s not that important anyway.
And yet it still needs to be done.
By all means if you can find a way to avoid a time-consuming solution and
find a faster or better way to bypass or eliminate the problem, take advantage
of it. Delegate it, delete it — do whatever you can to remove the time burden.
But if you know it’s something that won’t get done except via your personal
time investment, like the ornery boxes in my home that refused to self-unpack,
then just accept it and get it off your plate. Don’t complain. Don’t whine.
Just do it.
Develop Your Personal Productivity
Disciplining yourself to be industrious allows you to squeeze more value out
of your time. Time is a constant, but your personal productivity is not. Some
people will use the hours of their day far more efficiently than others. It’s
amazing that people will spend extra money to buy a faster computer or a fuel
efficient car, but they’ll barely pay any attention to their personal capacity.
Your personal productivity will do a lot more for you than a computer or a car
in the long run. Give an industrious programmer a 10-year old computer, and s/he’ll
get much more done with it over the course of a year than a lazy programmer
with state of the art technology.
Despite all the technology and gadgets we have available that can
potentially make us more efficient, your personal productivity is still your
greatest bottleneck. Don’t look to technology to make you more productive. If
you don’t consider yourself productive without technology, you won’t be
productive with it — it will only serve to mask your bad habits. But if you’re
already industrious without technology, it can help you become even more so.
Think of technology as a force multiplier — it multiplies what you already are.
If you want to make better use of your time, I recommend you begin with the
approach in this article:
Triple Your Personal Productivity
The basic idea behind the article is to first measure your current level of
productivity (the article explains how to do this via time logging), measure
your current “efficiency ratio,” and then gradually ramp it up.
I first wrote that article in 2000, and I’ve continually come back to this
method again and again, at least once every six months. It makes me consciously
aware of exactly how I use my time. I last applied it a few months ago,
tracking my time usage over a period of several days, and I was surprised to
find that there was little room for improvement. It took me five years since
writing that article to reach this point, but I finally feel I’m using my time
efficiently. I still have unproductive days now and then, but they’re the
exception. Most of the time I look back on my days and think, “I really got a
lot done today. It would be hard to have done it any better.”
Five years ago I knew what I needed to do. It took me that long to build the
strength and discipline to be able to do it on a consistent basis. THIS WAS NOT
EASY!
When you pursue the path of developing your personal productivity, it may
cause you some days of hair-pulling and teeth-gnashing, but it does eventually
pay off. I think many people are attracted to the idea of becoming more
productive out of basic common sense. It doesn’t take much brainpower to figure
out that if you use your time more efficiently, you’ll complete more tasks, and
therefore you’ll accumulate results faster. Personal productivity allows you to
create enough space in your life to do all the things you feel you should be
doing: eat healthy, exercise, work hard, deepen relationships, have a wonderful
social life, and make a difference. Otherwise, something has to give. Without a
high level of personal productivity, you’ll likely have to give up something
that’s important to you. You have conflicts between health and work, work and
family, family and friends. Industry can give you the ability to enjoy all of
these things, so you don’t have to choose work over family or vice versa. You
can have both.
Of course industry is only one tool among many. It will allow you to
complete your work efficiently, but it won’t tell you what work to do in the
first place. Industry is a low level tool. Working hard doesn’t necessarily
mean working smart. But this weakness of industry doesn’t remove its powerful
place in your personal development toolbox. Once you’ve decided on a course of
action and see your plans laid out in front of you, nothing can do the job as
well as industry. In the long run your results will come from your actions, and
industry is all about action.
Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not;
nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not;
unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of
educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The
slogan “Press On” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human
race.
- Calvin Coolidge
Persistence is the fifth and final pillar of self-discipline.
What Is Persistence?
Persistence is the ability to maintain action regardless of your feelings.
You press on even when you feel like quitting.
When you work on any big goal, your motivation will wax and wane like waves
hitting the shore. Sometimes you’ll feel motivated; sometimes you won’t. But
it’s not your motivation that will produce results — it’s your action.
Persistence allows you to keep taking action even when you don’t feel motivated
to do so, and therefore you keep accumulating results.
Persistence will ultimately provide its own motivation. If you simply keep
taking action, you’ll eventually get results, and results can be very
motivating. For example, you may become a lot more enthusiastic about dieting
and exercising once you’ve lost those first 10 pounds and feel your clothes
fitting more loosely.
When to Give Up
Should you always persist and never give up? Certainly
not. Sometimes giving up is clearly the best option.
Have you ever heard of a company called Traf-O-Data?
What about Microsoft? Both companies were started by Bill Gates and Paul Allen.
Traf-O-Data was the first company they started, back
in 1972. You can read the story of Traf-O-Data here. Gates and Allen ran it for several years before
throwing in the towel. They gave up. Of course they did a little better with
Microsoft.
If they hadn’t given up on Traf-O-Data, then we
wouldn’t have such rich collections of Microsoft
and Bill Gates jokes today.
So how do you know when to press on vs. when to give up?
Is your plan still correct? If not, update the plan. Is your goal still
correct? If not, update or abandon your goal. There’s no honor in clinging to a
goal that no longer inspires you. Persistence is not stubbornness.
This was a particularly difficult lesson for me to learn. I had always
believed one should never give up, that once you set a goal, you should hang on
to the bitter end. The captain goes down with the ship and all that. If I ever
failed to finish a project I started, I’d feel very guilty about it.
Eventually I figured out that this is just nonsense.
If you’re growing at all as a human being, then you’re going to be a
different person each year than you were the previous year. And if you
consciously pursue personal development, then the changes will often be
dramatic and rapid. You can’t guarantee that the goals you set today will still
be ones you’ll want to achieve a year from now.
My first business was Dexterity
Software. I started it in 1994, fresh out of college. But after running it
for more than a decade, I was ready for something new. I still run Dexterity on
the side, but it’s not my full-time focus anymore. It takes me only about an
hour or two a week to maintain it, partly because I designed it to be as
automated as possible and to provide me with a passive income. It was
successful to the extent I wanted it to be. I could have continued to grow it
much larger, but I knew I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life making
computer games. Creating my own game company was my dream at age 22, and after
publishing a couple dozen games, I feel I accomplished that goal. 22-year old
Steve is very satisfied. But today I have different dreams.
Did I give up on Dexterity? You could say that, but it would be more
accurate to say that I was infected by a new vision of something that was far
more important to me. Had I stubbornly persisted with Dexterity, this site
would never have existed. I’d be working on a new game instead of my first
book.
In order to make room for new goals, we have to delete or complete old ones.
And sometimes new goals are so compelling and inspiring that there’s no time to
complete old ones — they have to be abandoned half-finished. I’ve always found
it uncomfortable to do this, but I know it’s necessary. The hard part is
consciously deciding to delete an old project, knowing it will never be
finished. I have a file full of game ideas and some prototypes for new games
that will never see the light of day. Consciously deciding that those projects
have to be abandoned was really hard for me. It took me a long time to come to
grips with it. But it was necessary for my own growth to be able to do this.
I still had to solve the problem of setting goals that might become obsolete
in a year due to my own personal growth. How did I solve this problem? I
cheated. I figured out the only way I could set long-term goals that would
stick would be if they were aligned with my own process of growth. The pursuit
of personal growth has long been a stable constant for me, even though it’s
paradoxically in flux at the same time. So instead of trying to set fixed goals
as I did with my games business, I began setting broader more dynamic goals
that were aligned with my own growth. This new business allows me to pursue my
personal growth full-out and to share what I learn with others. So growth
itself is the goal, both for myself and others. This
creates a symbiotic relationship, whereby helping others feeds back into my own
growth, which in turn generates new ideas for helping others. Anyone who’s been
reading this site since last year has probably seen that effect in action.
The direct and conscious pursuit of personal growth is the only type of
mission that would work for me. If I made it my mission to master real estate
investing, for example, I’d probably become bored with it after a few years.
Since I want to keep growing indefinitely, I have to maintain a certain level
of challenge and keep raising the bar ever higher. I can’t let things get too
dull and risk falling into a pattern of complacency.
The value of persistence comes not from stubbornly clinging to the past. It
comes from a vision of the future that’s so compelling you would give almost
anything to make it real. The vision I have of my future now is far greater
than the one I had for Dexterity. To be able to help people grow and to solve
their most difficult problems is far more inspiring to me than entertaining
people. These values started oozing out of me as I ran Dexterity because I
favored logic puzzle games that challenged people to think, often passing up
the opportunity to publish games I felt would make money but which wouldn’t
provide much real value to people.
Persistence of action comes from persistence of vision. When you’re
super-clear about what you want in such a way that your vision doesn’t change
much, you’ll be consistent in your actions. And that consistency of action will
produce consistency of results.
Can you identify a part of your life where you’ve demonstrated a pattern of
long-term persistence? I think if you can identify such an area, it may provide
a clue to your mission — something you can work towards where passion and
self-discipline function synergistically.
How important is passion as a success factor?
Some people believe it’s the single most important factor, painting passion
as the fuel that drives success.
I disagree.
Passion is simply an emotional state, and a temporary and unstable one at
that. The reason passion gets so much credit is that it helps motivate action.
And action is what generates results.
Look at it this way:
P = Passion
A = Action
R = Results
Given:
P causes A
A causes R
Conclusions:
P causes R
No problem there. That’s logically correct.
R requires P
Nope. You can’t infer this to be true from the givens.
But what if you also know this:
S causes A
S is not P
Now you can say that the statement “R requires P” is definitely false.
S = Self-Discipline
Are you dizzy yet? Here’s what I’m saying in English:
- Results come from actions (no action, no results)
- Passion can lead to action and therefore generate results
- Self-discipline can also lead to action and therefore generate results
- So passion is NOT required for results
Passion is nonessential for success.
Which is better though: passion or self-discipline? I’ll argue that
self-discipline is the better fuel.
Like any emotional state, passion waxes and wanes. Sometimes you’re highly
motivated. Sometimes you aren’t. Passion has its peaks and valleys, so if you
base your actions on your level of passion, your results will depend on your
emotions. Feeling passionate? Great actions, great results.
Feeling dispassionate? Weak actions, mediocre results.
Using passion as your only fuel will no more assure you of success than
being in love will ensure a successful long-term relationship.
Self-discipline is far more important than passion, especially in business.
In fact, if you develop the quality of self-discipline to a high degree, it
will put passion to shame.
Self-discipline allows you take action and therefore get results no matter
what your emotional state. Where passion is erratic, self-discipline provides
steadiness and stability. And because your emotions aren’t in the way, your
decisions are more likely to succeed because they’ll be made from a state of
disciplined intellect rather than from emotional peaks and valleys.
Which would you bet on if your life depended on it?
If you wereto undergo open heart surgery, would
you want a disciplined, dispassionate surgeon or an undisciplined, passionate
one?
If you were being tried for murder, would you want a disciplined, dispassionate
defense team or a an undisciplined, passionate one?
If you were flying in the Space Shuttle, would you want the ground controllers
to be disciplined and dispassionate or undisciplined and passionate?
Passion is great, but it’s icing. It needs self-discipline to back it up.
Self-discipline is quieter though. Passion gets more attention these days becuase it makes more noise.
.