How To Build Real Discipline
Good Morning family,
You may have noticed the buzz of the new year dissipating, this is good. It means now, the real work begins. I told you a few digital entries ago that I was relaunching my monthly Private Self Authoring Masterclasses. Well, I'm going to launch them in less than a week and tickets will be limited so, at the end of this entry, you can find out how to reserve tickets. We will essentially take the topic in this entry to a much deeper level. You can join in person and online wherever you are in the world. Details later, back to today’s message.
I love this topic because everyone knows they need discipline, yet so many people really have it. The truth is that it takes real intentionality to really build this muscle.
When we think about success we often think about ambition, big goals and plans! These are very important, however, they are only half the story. The other half is having the discipline to get the stuff done. Without real discipline, our goals, ambition and plans will remain lifeless ink on paper. It’s one thing having lots of passion and drive at the start of the year, it’s another building a strong system that will deliver for you over the course of the year.
I first leant about discipline by playing sports.
It actually began when I first started learning how to play Table Tennis. Interesting fact, both my mum and dad were table tennis champions! They introduced me to the game when I was 14. When I first started playing, I just wasn't that good. It was such a technical sport and I wasn’t getting it. My clunky and brute approach to the sport wasn’t producing the results I had hoped for. Every inflexion of my wrist would have the ball flying off the table, my coach sighing every time. “relax and focus’ she would say.
Things started changing when my parents sought to nurture my interest and invested in a Table Tennis table for our basement in the house. I would race home from school, fold it up every evening and practice. Every single day. This is where I started learning about the principle of treating discipline like muscle and not just a skill. It’s also where I learned about the doctrine of marginal gains. With every practice session, I felt myself getting better and better. Safe to say, it was transformational. I went on to play Table Tennis at a national and international level after representing our country.
Defining Discipline
You may think discussing the definition of discipline is much ado about nothing because it’s so simple to define, but I would disagree. I think the current dictionary and working definition most people have is far too shallow.
Here is the general definition
The practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behaviour, using punishment to correct disobedience.
I would say discipline is about being able to usurp transient pain for eternal or existential joy. Maybe this is a more religious definition, sure, but it gets to the heart of the matter.
On the surface, self-discipline is about finding compelling reasons to do something and then committing yourself to see that task or activity through to the very end. Possessing self-discipline requires having an internal desire, drive, and motivation that propels you forward toward your goal. However, this ain’t just about the pursuit of a goal.
Self-discipline is more specifically about your ability to control your desires and impulses in an attempt to stay focused (for long enough) on what needs to get done to successfully achieve that goal.
Given this definition, self-discipline, in a nutshell, involves committing to long-term gains without falling prey to the pitfalls of instant gratification along the way.
So rather than talking about discipline in this nebulous sense, I want to talk about discipline as a muscle. A muscle is something we all understand. We have them all around our bodies. In fact, there are about 600 muscles in the human body. One universal thing about muscles is that they can all grow and they can waste away if we don’t exercise them.
One of the ways to practically start growing your discipline is not to start too heavy but to start with the bar.
Start With The Bar
I talk about this extensively in my upcoming masterclass. Suppose you haven't been to the gym in a long time because, I don’t know, I suppose there has been a global pandemic stopping you. Your muscles may have become wasted a little bit and you’re no longer as strong as you used to be. Because of an amazing vaccine rollout programme, the gyms open again and you're eager to prove you are still as strong as before. You get to the bench press and you are trying to lift the weights you lifted prior to the lockdown. Reading this, you are probably aware that this is unwise. This person will either fail miserably and be discouraged from trying again or worse, injure themself and have to take time out.
This is how a lot of people treat their goals and discipline. They start far too high and intense, then burn out and then don’t try again. This starts a cycle of saying you are going to change, trying to change and then stopping. You may be starting too high and intense
Instead of being driven by ego, you could start with the bar. By the bar, I mean the metal bar with no weights attached at all. It may be embarrassingly light, but it means you have time to work on your form and ease your way back into things as you get stronger. As you build muscle, you can add more weight and resistance.
This is my invitation to you everyone reading this, trying to build discipline. Find the bar in your life and start with that. Maybe it’s laying the bed every morning. Can you commit to that for a month? Maybe it’s drinking 2 litres of water; can you commit to this for a week?
What you will find is that as you begin with the bar, momentum is generated and the law of marginal gains takes over as the muscle starts to grow and expand.
In other words, yes have ambitious goals, but also have simple and achievable ones that you can see in sight and achieving them spurs you on to attempt more daring goals.
Marginal Gains
The doctrine of marginal gains is all about small incremental improvements in any process adding up to a significant improvement when they are all added together.
It is perhaps most easy to understand by considering the approach of Sir Dave Brailsford. When he became performance director of British Cycling, he set about breaking down the objective of winning races into its component parts.
Brailsford believed that if it was possible to make a 1% improvement in a whole host of areas, the cumulative gains would end up being hugely significant.
He was on the lookout for all the weaknesses in the team's assumptions, and all the latent problems, so he could improve on each of them.
By experimenting in a wind tunnel, he noted that the bike was not sufficiently aerodynamic. By analysing the mechanic’s area in the team truck, he discovered that dust was accumulating on the floor, undermining bike maintenance. So he had the floor painted pristine white, in order to spot any impurities.
Each weakness was not a threat, but an opportunity to make adaptations, and create marginal gains. Rapidly, they began to accumulate.
He went further. The team started to use antibacterial hand gel to cut down on infections. When he became general manager of Team Sky, he redesigned the team bus to improve comfort and recuperation. They started to probe deeper into untested assumptions, such as the dynamic relationship between the intensity of the warm-down and the speed of recovery. As they learned more, they created further marginal gains.
Team GB used to be a joke in world cycling. Indeed, one pundit described the operation as "a laughing stock". But in the last three Olympics, Team GB has captured 16 gold medals and British riders have won the Tour De France three times in the last four years. This is the power of a questioning mindset and a commitment to continuous improvement.
This doctrine also applies to the world of business. Many of the most innovative companies are now using a marginal gains approach. Google, for example, runs 12,000 data-driven experiments annually in order to discover small weaknesses and, thus, small improvements. One such experiment found that by tweaking the shade of the Google toolbar from a darker to a lighter blue, it increased the number of click-throughs. This marginal change increased revenue dramatically.
Aviation is an industry with a marginal gains approach. It is always looking for improvements, however small, to drive safely.
For example, in the 1940s, there were a series of inexplicable accidents involving B-17 bombers. The industry commissioned a psychologist to conduct an investigation. He found that the switches controlling the flaps in B-17s were identical to those controlling the landing gear, and were placed side by side. Under the pressure of a difficult landing, pilots were making a mistake.
A quick fix was required, so a small rubber wheel was attached to the landing gear switch and a small flap shape to the flaps control. The buttons now had an intuitive meaning, easily identified under pressure. This was a tiny change, a marginal adjustment to the design of the cockpit, but it had dramatic results. Accidents of this kind disappeared overnight.
This approach has now been applied to airlines for many decades with remarkable effects. In 1912, eight of 14 US Army pilots died in crashes - more than half. In 2014, the accident rate for major airlines had dropped to just one crash for every 8.3 million take-offs.
As you can see, small things can make a big difference and this is the case with discipline. Start small and stay consistent. This is the right time to really invest in your discipline muscle. There is still so much time in the year to get this right.
Self Authoring Masterclass
If you want to go deeper with this topic, then you can come along to a Self Authoring Masterclass I will hold later this month on the topic of discipline.
We will spend 3 hours going into deep detail and working out how we build real discipline that’s long-lasting. You will be able to join me online and also in person. If you would like to be the first to find out about tickets then use the button below to add your number or email and my team will drop you the message before we go public with it.
Tickets are very limited so do move quickly and click on the link to ensure you get a space.
Have an amazing week.
Will this year be the best year of your life?
I recently sat down with Renee Kapuku to talk about personal development and the realities of being excellent, the sacrifices etc. You may find the conversation useful. It’s the kind of thing I would listen to whilst you do some work from home or on your commute. Lots of gems from this amazing woman.