Why “Disciplined People” Don’t Have as Much Discipline as You Think
Typically, the people we look up to seem to be able to muster an incredible amount of discipline that allows them to push through any weakness, cravings, or distractions. The reality is that while they are disciplined, they set their life up in such a way that discipline is much easier.
There are three main ways they evoke a disciplined life style without needing anymore discipline than the normal person: habits, scheduling, and barriers to entry.
Habits
If you have read or listened to any of our content here at CTM you know that we like to talk about habits. Habits are the ultimate tool that successful people take advantage of and use to maximize their days and their time.
So how do habits help make discipline easier?
As you develop a good habit, such as exercise, getting up early, or eating healthy, it becomes easier and easier to carry out. You body adjusts and gets used to the routine and eventually begins to crave it over time, further enforcing it.
If you are on a clean diet for an extended period of time and suddenly eat a bunch of junk food it will literally make you sick. If you work out for a couple of months and then take a week off you will be excited to get back in the gym.
Performing the disciplined habit becomes less and less work and often times becomes something you enjoy doing! Habits help you turn “must do’s” into “get to do’s”.
Scheduling
Scheduling is another incredibly powerful tool for disciplined people. As I talked about in Monday’s post, scheduling your days and weeks ahead of time will greatly improve your productivity for a couple of reasons.
It will help you see everything you need to get done in a day and how long that activity should take. You can then take advantage of Parkinson’s law by limiting the amount of time you schedule for that activity, forcing you to complete it in a faster time. This will greatly increase the number of activities you can perform in a day.
It will also help reduce procrastination. You will see everything that you have to get done today in order to be on track for the whole week, and you will see how much you have to get done throughout the day so that you don’t end up having to cram everything into the last couple hours of the night.
By reducing procrastination, it will give you more free time in the afternoons and will allow you to get more work done overall.
The best part is that you are able to get a lot more done with minimal additional willpower, solely because you have become more organized!
Barriers to Entry
Barriers to entry make it harder for distractions, weakness, or cravings to creep into your life.
Barriers help because they make you have to do something inconvenient, in order to give in to the thing you know you shouldn’t be doing. This is extremely powerful because often times we only give into temptation because it is the easy thing to do, but when we make giving in difficult, then it is much easier to stay disciplined.
Barriers could be keeping your phone in another room while you study so that if you want to check it you will have to get up and leave the room as opposed to it being at arm’s length on your desk. Another could be not keeping any junk food in your house, that way you would have to drive all the way to the store just to give into that temptation.
Barriers can be large or small, the key is that they make you stop and think about whether or not you really want to give in to the temptation.
If you begin to implement these three things into your life, you will find that you are suddenly significantly more “disciplined” in every facet of your life. Now it is time to go out and take action, implement these things, and move down the path of becoming the best man you can be. Good luck.