5 Things You Must Do to Become a Disciplined Person
Winston Churchill once said that courage is the first of human qualities, because ‘it is the quality that guarantees all the others’. But there is something we can add to that. Something that is much more important than courage in itself. Courage being shown once or twice is great, but what makes a person truly courageous is showing courage on a consistent basis. That is why one of the most important qualities on par with courage, is discipline. The discipline to do what you have to do, no matter how you feel or how imperfect the circumstances are. In his book Discipline is Destiny, Ryan Holiday goes over all the aspects that together form the concept of discipline. He writes about doing hard things, consistency, high standards, and rigorous improvement. In this post, we’ll discuss the five most important points of the book on how you can become more disciplined.
1: Do the Hard Thing First
Procrastination is one of the biggest obstacles people experience when it comes to reaching their goals. There’s always that little voice that speaks to you just before you want to start that says, ‘I’ll just do it tomorrow’, or ‘I can do that later’. Procrastination in itself seems harmless because you don’t experience any negative effects in the short term, but its effects are extremely harmful in the long term. What often happens when you procrastinate, is that you put it off until another day or time, and when that time comes, you’ll put it off again, and often you will never even get it done at all.
Procrastination is especially an issue with your more difficult tasks. If something is hard, it is often easy to say, “I’ll do it when I’m more motivated” or “After this easy task, I’ll start.” But when the next day arrives, the motivation still isn’t there (and will never come), or you’ve finished the easy task and are tired now, so you put it off to tomorrow. Either way, your work never gets done, or it gets done too late, moving you further and further away from your goals.
The best way to stop procrastination is simple: Do the hard thing first. Do that difficult assignment that you need to finish, or that chore that you hate doing, as the very first thing you do. Every other task you’ll need to do that day will seem much easier in comparison. It also ensures that you aren’t able to procrastinate and that you actually get your work done. We often tend to justify doing the easy tasks first to warm ourselves up for the more difficult tasks, and sometimes this may be true. But you need to be careful of this rationalisation, because often it’s just a bad excuse to put off the work that we do not want to do and eventually leads to skipping the difficult work altogether.
There are two different types of people in this world: those who are getting ready to live, waiting for the opportune moment to finally do something with their lives, waiting until every circumstance is perfect, and then there are those who choose to live today, regardless of the circumstances. In the end, the people who wait will find out that the perfect moment doesn’t exist, and the people who act, realize that the perfect moment is always now.
“A man must swallow a toad every morning if he wishes to be sure of finding nothing still more disgusting before the day is over.” ~ Nicolas Chamfort
2: Just Show Up
Real results are the product of hard work done consistently over a long period of time. People often focus a lot on the hard work part, but then forget about the consistency part, making their work futile. To achieve real lasting results you don’t only have to work hard, you have to do it on a consistent basis. There will always be days when you’re not motivated, or when you don’t feel like doing the work you know you should do. But if you only do the work when you feel like it, you’ll miss most of the opportunities for progress that come from the days that you don’t feel like it.
These tiny little progressions you consistently make will eventually compound over time, producing a massive long-term difference. If you didn’t show up on these lesser days, you would have certainly not made any progress, matter of fact, you’d probably even move farther away from your goals. Showing up will give you at least a little progress, which has the possibility to compound into great long-term results, whereas not showing up will certainly produce no results whatsoever.
The days when you don’t feel like it are actually the most important days of all to your progress. These are the days when you keep your momentum going, and momentum is what you’re going to need to achieve long-term results. When you start doing something and you do it for a couple of days, or even weeks, you build up a certain momentum. After a longer period of consistency you’ll experience the full fruits of momentum: you get into a flow, things become a habit, tasks get finished faster, and you notice that you are making real progress. But this momentum can be ruined, simply by a break in consistency, and when this momentum is lost, it’s difficult to get it back. It takes some time to get your momentum going, but when you lose it, it resets, and you’ll have to start all over again. So now all the progress you could have made when you would have been consistent has vanished, but also the time you needed to regain the momentum is wasted as well.
To maintain this momentum, get all the benefits of the compound effect, and achieve your long-term goals, the most important thing you can do is not to work hard, but to work consistently.
“Without motivation you’ll never start, but without discipline you’ll never finish.” ~ Denzel Washington
3: Be Graceful Under Pressure
Nobody likes to see someone lose control over their emotions in any situation. Secretly, everyone pities the person who doesn’t keep his emotions in check. No one is going to admire you when you cry in public and rightfully so. If you show uncontrolled anger, people will stay away from you and believe you’re dangerous. A lack of emotional control shows everyone around you that you are unpredictable and could be a danger to yourself or the people around you. We always admire people who stay calm under pressure, who are stoic, and who control their emotions. We like Batman in The Dark Knight. He has some vulnerable moments in the movie, but when he has to fight the bad guys and save lives, he gets it done, although he would have tons of excuses not to. We admire people who have self-control because we know they are the most useful, and they make us feel safe. You don’t want to be next to someone who is so emotionally unstable that he can burst into a fit of rage at once, or when something stressful happens he loses his mind. We want people who can control themselves and provide results when we need them, especially in stressful situations.
Modern society has told you that showing your emotions and being vulnerable is a good thing, and that is partially true. You need to let some of your emotions out sometimes, and there are issues you have to talk about or they’re going to eat you up. However, this emotional vulnerability needs to stay selective. If you show everyone your vulnerabilities all the time, people are going to think of you as weak, and that’s not something anyone desires to be.
Feeling negative emotions such as anger or fear is completely normal, in fact, you’d be a psychopath if you didn’t. But what matters is what you do with these emotions. Are you going to let them control your life and your actions, or are you going to control your emotions? Are they going to detriment your life, or are you going to make them useful and use them to prosper?
There are going to be situations where you’ll be under a ton of pressure, and these are the times when you need to exercise self-control the most. You will experience moments when everything depends on the decision you make, people will rely on you, and events will change for better or worse depending on your actions. These are the times when you need self-control, not act out on emotion, not get afraid or angry or sad, and not do anything irrational. These are the times when you need to remain cool, think, and then make the best decision possible with a straight face. The world doesn’t care about how you felt when you made the wrong decision, it just cares about the result. Tired, scared, angry, sad, doesn’t matter. What matters in this world is results, whether you like it or not. Talk about your problems and vulnerabilities, but do it selectively and in moments of calm and peace. When it’s time to perform, you have to perform regardless of how you feel.
“The nearer a man is to a calm mind, the closer he is to strength.” ~ Marcus Aurelius
4: Strict with Yourself, but Tolerant of Others
Setting high standards for yourself is crucial. You’ll never rise above the standards you put on yourself. If you set the standard low, you’re not likely to move far past that low point. If you put it higher, chances are even if you don’t reach it, you’ll still end up with a better result than with the low standard. However, it’s important to realize that the high standards you set for yourself should not, and will not, apply to others. Not everybody is going to have their standards at the same level as you, and that is okay. In fact, it is an enormous advantage: because you set your standard higher than most, you’re likely to achieve more than most.
What many people get wrong when they improve in life, is that they expect that everyone else wants the same and should do the same, preferably in the same way you did. When you try to apply this in the real world you’ll soon realize that this only leads to disappointment and frustration. Other people are not like you, and not everyone has the same drive or ambition that you have and may not be made for the high standards you’ve set for yourself. Others may simply not be interested in setting higher standards or they set these standards on subjects that do not interest you. Trying to get other people to become as disciplined as you, or trying to make them realize that they can achieve what you believe you can will only lead to frustration. What you’re forgetting is that no two people think exactly alike, and often people think about the world and themselves in a totally different way.
What you need to do is accept that most people are different from you. Not everybody is going to set the high standards for themselves that you would expect from yourself. Other people are better than you at different things, sometimes they may complement or add to something you are missing yourself. It’s not bad that people are not as strict with themselves as you, or don’t believe the things you do, they just have a different worldview.
You should set high standards for yourself to become the best person you can be, but when it comes to others you should set the bar very low. When others therefore live up to these lowest expectations, you’re not upset, and when they exceed them, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. The only person in the world you really have control over is you, you control your actions and the standards you set, and you have no control over anyone else’s. So why bother pushing your standards on others? Expect the highest of yourself, because you can alter your actions, but expect the lowest of others, for then they will always positively surprise you.
“I’m prepared to forgive everybody’s mistakes, except my own.” ~ Cato the Elder
5: Improve Every Day
The quest to become better every day never ends. There is always something you can improve on, some task you can do more efficiently, something new you can learn, and there is always something you can do to improve yourself as a person. Every single person has a certain potential, the best version of them that lies in the future, and this potential can only be fulfilled if you get better every day. This ties back to the previous point of showing up every day. Every new day is a day that you can improve on something, no matter how large or little. There is something you can make progress on, something new you can learn, or something you can do to get closer to your ultimate potential. You don’t have to go hard every single day and make massive improvements. There will be days when the improvements are drastic, or when you have some sort of transformative experience, but those days are rare. Most days you make a little progress or improvement. But what you do with these days is way more important than on the rare days. The progress and the improvements you make on these days if done consistently will compound and produce massively positive or negative results. The rare days are the ones where you may get a solid boost, but all the other days are the ones that matter most.
Another aspect of getting better every day is taking responsibility. Self-improvement is just what it says, improvement of self. You alone can decide to improve yourself, no one can do it for you. How you improve yourself and what you improve on relies on the decisions you make yourself, not on what others do. What this means is that you need to stop hoping for the world to help you and start helping yourself. Stop looking at politics to improve your life, stop looking at people who are more successful than you and thinking that they should just give you money because you ‘deserve’ it. You’ll always get what you deserve, and what you deserve is based on the work you put in. Only you can do that work, and only you can decide to improve.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” ~ Aristotle