How To Be More Disciplined - Master Self Control & Focus

00:00:00.000 | I feel like I have two different personalities, one who's very productive and intentional,

00:00:04.000 | another who wants to be a slob, scroll social media, play video games and watch TV all day.

00:00:09.040 | How do I stop falling into the slob state?

00:00:11.600 | Well, Fahad, it's a good question. It's not a original question. And I mean that in the

00:00:17.280 | good sense of your issue is not unusual. Your issue is not something very specific to you.

00:00:23.360 | And in particular, your issue here has nothing to do with some sort of intrinsic character flaw

00:00:28.160 | that has been overcome. I think we often miss when we talk about tales of people who diligently and

00:00:36.080 | disciplinedly work through big accomplishments, we often miss the subtlety that goes into

00:00:42.720 | setting up a lifestyle or work environment in which you actually are able to maintain motivation

00:00:49.680 | and accomplish something big. That is a lot more subtle than we give credit to. It's not just about

00:00:54.320 | some people are able to white knuckle it and some people are weak. It's much more complicated than

00:00:59.200 | that. There's a couple of things I want to focus on here as being important. One has to do with

00:01:04.960 | how you choose what you work on. One has to do with how you build a lifestyle or approach actually

00:01:10.720 | working on it. So let's start with the choice question. And then the second piece will cover

00:01:14.400 | more. That's going to overlap more with the central theme of today's episode about cultivating

00:01:19.440 | discipline as a mindset. But let's start first with the choice of project. Oftentimes, especially

00:01:25.760 | for young people and for how you say here, you're 21 years old. So that that counts as you, you're

00:01:31.680 | half Jesse and I's age, which is its own psychological issue for Jesse and I to deal with.

00:01:37.040 | But don't worry about that. For someone who's young like you, you have to be very careful in

00:01:42.880 | what you choose to work on. So there's a couple of things that is going to potentially short circuit

00:01:48.480 | your motivation. One is you just set too much stuff on your plate. Yeah, I'm going to do this

00:01:53.120 | and this and this because I can't wait to get started and I want to work on all these things.

00:01:56.960 | And I just want to get really motivated and go for it. And your mind gets exhausted and says,

00:02:00.720 | we can't be starting a business and AC in our classes and writing a book and training to be

00:02:06.960 | in really good shape. It's just too many things. The energy involved in trying to keep up with

00:02:12.800 | these things is too much. And it just seems intractable and forget it. Motivation is gone.

00:02:18.080 | The other type of issue that happens here is that your mind, you maybe have one or two things. It's

00:02:21.920 | not the quantity, but your mind doesn't trust your plan for execution. You're like, yeah,

00:02:26.000 | I want to look like Thor, but all you're doing is sort of just randomly going to the gym and

00:02:30.480 | sort of lifting weights. And your mind's like, you don't know what this is not going to lead

00:02:34.560 | the Thor. We're not going to look, we're just doing random stuff. Or you say, I want to be a

00:02:38.480 | famous writer and you're sort of writing every day. And your mind says, this is not how this works.

00:02:42.800 | Just you're writing kind of random stuff or with no guidance, no structure.

00:02:46.320 | What's going to happen with this? We're not going to become a famous writer doing this. So

00:02:50.400 | once your initial, just general excitement about being a writer dies off, we're going to withhold

00:02:56.560 | motivation. And then you're going to find yourself falling off. So being careful about how you choose

00:03:01.280 | what you work on a reasonable load, and then study what you work on and make sure that your plan for

00:03:06.160 | approaching it is evidence-based and logical that your mind will trust. Yeah, we're going to get

00:03:10.080 | results with what we're doing. And to get there, especially if you're young, might mean bringing

00:03:13.920 | your ambition down and aiming at a much closer milestone. So it's not, I want the Pulitzer

00:03:21.920 | Prize. It's, I want to be a regular contributor to the college magazine. So you bring it down to a

00:03:29.040 | more proximate goal. You have a plan to get there that your mind trusts. So the choice of things

00:03:34.000 | matter if you want to have your motivation be sustained. All right. The second big category

00:03:39.120 | here comes to that mindset we talked about earlier during the deep dive earlier in the show.

00:03:44.320 | Does your mind think of yourself as someone who is able to handle and stick with internally

00:03:50.560 | motivated goals? It sounds like right now, no. So when I hear I get going, I'm reading you here,

00:03:56.480 | I'm very productive and intentional. And then it sort of falls off and I become a slob.

00:04:00.160 | If I had to guess this productivity and intentionality might be aimed in part at

00:04:05.920 | externally powered goals. You're working because you're very motivated about some particular

00:04:10.240 | outcome. You got yourself excited about it, watching YouTube videos or reading something,

00:04:14.320 | and something got captured you and got your attention going. And that's what's motivating

00:04:19.200 | you to do the work, to return to the books, to return to putting in effort. And when that

00:04:24.000 | external power begins to dissipate, then social media TV comes back. So seeing yourself instead

00:04:31.040 | as someone who finds pride in sticking with internally powered goals, you're going to have

00:04:37.200 | less ups and downs. How do you do that? I'd go back to the deep life stack. I would start with

00:04:41.600 | the discipline layer. I would choose two to three daily disciplines covering a couple of different

00:04:45.280 | areas in your life that are non-trivial, but are also tractable and start marking on a sheet,

00:04:51.200 | on a time block planner, on a calendar, on your wall, wherever you want to do it.

00:04:54.480 | Did I do each of these each day? And really do that for a whole semester. Then return to,

00:05:01.440 | okay, what's my more ambitious goals for what I'm gonna do with my time? You will find that

00:05:05.040 | it's easier to stick with it. Your mind is much more comfortable with, we believe in this,

00:05:08.800 | these are carefully chosen. We stick with things even when they're hard. That is what Fahad does.

00:05:13.520 | That is who we are. You change your self-conception by training your mind to think about what you're

00:05:18.640 | doing differently. All right. So there's nothing wrong about you Fahad. What's wrong is some of

00:05:26.320 | the details of your approach towards your very admirable goal of doing intentional,

00:05:30.240 | remarkable things with your time. So choose carefully and spend some time developing

00:05:35.520 | a mindset of discipline, a comfort with internally powered goals. And I think you're going to find

00:05:40.000 | that this up and down whip sign between I'm working 10 hours a day and I'm on social media

00:05:46.560 | all day, that's going to start to even out. All right, Jesse, what do we got next?

00:05:52.000 | Okay. Next question is from Jacob, a 20 year old from Colorado. I seem to have contracted a case

00:06:00.480 | of what I call seasonal discipline, where I'll be very actively disciplined on following my habits

00:06:05.840 | and systems for a few months at a time, and then fall off really hard for a few months in an endless

00:06:10.720 | agonizing loop. I'm wondering if you have any tips for cultivating a more consistent commitment

00:06:15.920 | to discipline. You got a lot of young people today, Jesse.

00:06:18.800 | I know, I was thinking the same thing. Makes us feel old.

00:06:22.160 | You know, when you were doing the Henson Reed, I was thinking, you know, you haven't shaved in two

00:06:26.400 | days and I was like, mine, I go back and forth a lot, but mine's white now.

00:06:30.400 | Oh, mine is too. Yeah.

00:06:31.520 | Yeah. I don't mind it. I don't mind it, but my beard is, well, it's salt and pepper.

00:06:35.440 | Yeah.

00:06:35.760 | But it's definitely white and I can see it at my sideburns as well. Yeah. My hair is still

00:06:42.240 | mainly brown, but, oh, that's coming. That's coming. We need to balance these 20 year old

00:06:47.920 | questions. I'm telling you, Jesse, next we'll get, I don't know, a 41 year old question is going to be

00:06:51.360 | like a combination of wanting to know about tax filing. You know, I'm doing my schedule C

00:06:59.040 | deductions and wondering if this is the right line item to put that deduction, some mixture of talking

00:07:04.400 | about, yeah, tax filings. And then also, I don't know what else to-

00:07:10.720 | Potential hair surgery.

00:07:11.920 | And like, yeah, hair surgery. I'm thinking about getting like this hair surgery for

00:07:16.080 | that hair surgery. And I would kind of a tax question and also I'm tired all the time.

00:07:21.840 | And I need to, should I get like testosterone treatment? Yeah. Meanwhile, these young kids

00:07:28.240 | are, yeah. I was up 12 hours, 20 hours straight working on my screenplay and we're like, I only

00:07:35.920 | get two hours of working in the morning before I fall asleep and take a nap. All right, Jacob,

00:07:42.400 | I'm sorry. Let's get back to your question. Seasonal discipline. You, some periods do well,

00:07:47.120 | some periods you do not so well. All right. Very similar to Fahad. So I'm going to have,

00:07:51.920 | again, two solutions here where this is going to overlap with what I talked about with Fahad

00:07:56.080 | is just the mindset training piece. So the very same thing I recommended Fahad that I recommended

00:08:01.600 | at the beginning of the show, I'm going to recommend as a starting point for you as well,

00:08:05.120 | that discipline layer, that very first layer of the deep life stack. Two to three,

00:08:09.600 | non-trivial and tractable, non-trivial, but tractable daily disciplines covering multiple

00:08:15.120 | areas of your life that you track every single day and put most of your productivity, intentionality,

00:08:19.360 | focus, all that willpower on just doing those every day, not breaking the chain. You want to

00:08:23.680 | mark it every day on a calendar. It's a good tune up just to get your mind back in shape as

00:08:28.560 | I don't need external power to do things. I don't need to be in a season where I'm excited or things

00:08:34.480 | are going well to make progress on important things. I can also make progress in the hard

00:08:39.120 | seasons, in the proverbial winters when other things are going on or the work itself is not

00:08:43.760 | going so well. So there's a mindset tune up and I think that returning to that discipline layer

00:08:48.320 | can help with that. And then just like with Fahad, but with slight differences in specifics here,

00:08:54.160 | I would say, let's also think about what this, what you're calling here, habits and systems,

00:09:00.800 | what these habits and systems are. So even if you have the right internal conception of yourself,

00:09:07.040 | it is still the case that if the particular habits or systems you've put in place,

00:09:14.080 | if those particular habits and systems aren't sustainable, or if they have a lot of friction,

00:09:21.120 | they work, but they have overhead that don't need to be there and your mind senses that,

00:09:25.120 | you are going to accumulate stress fractures, right? You're going to accumulate over time,

00:09:31.200 | this friction and grinding of the system's not quite right. It's too big, it's too hard.

00:09:35.040 | It has steps we don't need to do. It's like the system's going to start building up these

00:09:38.160 | stretch fractures until the whole thing eventually breaks apart. And that's maybe why you can only

00:09:43.200 | make a few months. This is very common in the world of productivity systems, that if the system

00:09:48.640 | is not compatible with your life and streamlined and believable, you can last with it for a while.

00:09:54.160 | But after, it gets this clunky, I'm typing these notes and it goes into this note system that then

00:09:59.200 | automatically populates these types of systems. And every day I have a generative AI bot take

00:10:04.720 | these and generate a schedule. And then I use that schedule to sort of schedule my hours.

00:10:09.040 | These types of high overhead, high friction systems, they begin to just accumulate too much

00:10:14.560 | wear and tear until all of the gears get jammed. And then you just say enough with this and you

00:10:18.400 | fall back to doing nothing until doing nothing after a while gets you so stressed out or

00:10:23.600 | overwhelmed by being disorganized that you go and build a new system. And that starts generating

00:10:27.600 | friction until its gears mesh. And then that could also be the source of what you're seeing here.

00:10:31.760 | One season up, one season down, one season up, one season down. So you also want to really check

00:10:36.240 | out your systems here, streamline them. The simplest possible thing that actually helps you

00:10:41.360 | get your work done sometimes is the right thing to do. Get rid of unnecessary things, have a core

00:10:46.880 | document where you keep track of here's what I do and how I do it. So you're not just trying to keep

00:10:51.440 | track of things in your mind and you can see where there's overlap or redundancies or your systems

00:10:55.200 | are sort of out of control. You want something that fits very naturally into your life. So if

00:11:00.080 | you're starting from scratch here, I would say something like multi-scale planning. You have

00:11:04.720 | a strategic plan, a weekly plan and do some sort of daily time block plan during work days, but not

00:11:09.120 | the weekends. Have some sort of good system for capture of your tasks so that you don't have to

00:11:14.320 | keep track of those things in your head. Put those two things together, maybe mixed in with some sort

00:11:20.800 | of fixed schedule productivity mindset of this is my work hours and everything else has to fit into

00:11:26.000 | it. That's a good start for organizing all the professional things in your life. Use very simple

00:11:31.600 | tech tools for implementing this. I'm talking, you know, you have a paper time block planner

00:11:37.680 | and then a couple of Google Docs to keep track of strategic plans and weekly plans. You could

00:11:42.960 | use Trello to keep track of tasks or even just a long text file where you're typing things.

00:11:47.280 | Simple technologies that are easy to get in and easy to get out that you can access from multiple

00:11:51.280 | platforms. That makes a big difference as you add in other structures or goals around your personal

00:11:55.920 | life. Keep it simple, you know? So again, let's go for simplicity, accessibility. Let's try to

00:12:02.160 | minimize friction. Let's just make the general rhythm of your life something that's very

00:12:06.800 | sustainable. That'll help too. So I don't know in your case, Jacob, which is the bigger problem.

00:12:11.840 | So I don't know if it's a mindset issue, that your systems are fine, but your mindset just

00:12:17.120 | needs right now, external fuel for you to work on hard things. Or if it's a systems problem,

00:12:21.680 | your mindset's fine, but your systems have too much friction. So look at both. But between those

00:12:26.960 | two things, I think you're going to find the seasonality of following systems is going to go

00:12:34.000 | away. One epilogue I will add to this as well is don't reject seasonality outright as an issue.

00:12:42.720 | I think it's an issue if your systems are seasonal. I stop being organized during some

00:12:47.840 | months versus others. I think it's completely fine if your workload is seasonal. In fact,

00:12:53.280 | in my new book, Slow Productivity, which is coming out in March, there's a whole principle

00:12:57.360 | is about working at a natural pace and it really gets into seasonality and how natural and well

00:13:01.920 | suited humans are for that. So I do want to throw that in there. You might just be getting exhausted,

00:13:06.560 | right? Like a professor, by the time a professor gets to the end of spring, traditionally,

00:13:10.240 | they're exhausted because they've gone through a full school year. So to actually pull back some

00:13:14.480 | in the summer makes sense because you need to recharge. If you try to go all out in the summer

00:13:18.080 | after a hard spring and after a hard fall before that, you might just run out of steam altogether.

00:13:23.040 | So I think seasonal workload could be fine as well. So let's throw that in here,

00:13:26.400 | not just as an epilogue, but I'm going to throw this in, Jacob, as my third part of my answer.

00:13:30.000 | Make your workload seasonal, but keep the systems the same. You're still multi-scale planning,

00:13:35.440 | but when you get to some months of the year, the amount of stuff you're putting into your week,

00:13:39.280 | the complexity of your daily time block schedules are much easier. And you get that relief of,

00:13:42.960 | man, this feels great. I can really control my time. I'm taking Thursdays completely off because

00:13:47.360 | why not? I'm using planning so I can move pieces around. This is great. I can actually extract a

00:13:52.960 | lot more relaxation and recharging because I have some structure. So I think a seasonal workload

00:13:57.120 | could be excellent, but you don't want your systems to come and go seasonally. And you want

00:14:01.120 | to make sure that your mindset is one that doesn't require external power. So there we go. I

00:14:06.240 | upgraded this from two parts to three parts, Jacob, and hopefully you will find that useful.

00:14:11.360 | All right. Let's keep going here, Jesse. Yeah. And then the time management video on our YouTube

00:14:17.200 | channel is definitely something you should check out. Yeah. So look under the, what's it,

00:14:21.440 | core ideas is the playlist. Right. So youtube.com/calnewportmedia. Look at the playlist.

00:14:26.800 | There's a playlist called core ideas. There's one titled, a video titled time management,

00:14:32.480 | where I talk about that multi-scale multi-scale planning. Yeah. It shows up, shows up right in

00:14:38.240 | there. It's a good place to start is something interesting. This is where we talk about

00:14:42.080 | something interesting that you, my listeners have sent into my interesting@calnewport.com

00:14:46.560 | email address. So I want to load my password. So I'm going to load up now a short post that

00:14:56.160 | one of you sent in that I thought was interesting. Okay. So here we go. Here's the post. This was

00:15:02.080 | posted on, I suppose, LinkedIn. I have it up on the screen. So if you're watching youtube.com/calnewportmedia

00:15:10.320 | episode 256 or the deep life.com episode 256. All right. This is about Harrison Ford. I thought this

00:15:16.240 | was appropriate because there's a new Indiana Jones movie in the theater. So I'll be taking

00:15:20.880 | my boys to shortly. Here's what this post says before he was Han Solo or Indiana Jones, Harrison

00:15:27.600 | Ford was a carpenter in 1964, Ford moved to Hollywood to become an actor, but I arrived on a

00:15:35.040 | metaphoric bus full of people who had the same ambition, he said. So he came up with this plan

00:15:40.320 | to prevail over the competition. As Ford spent time around the other aspiring actors on that

00:15:44.480 | metaphoric bus, he became aware of something. Most of them were in a hurry. They're in a hurry to

00:15:50.160 | make it or to make lots of money or to prove something to someone, whatever the reason most

00:15:55.120 | run a tight timeline. So forms plan was to do the opposite, the length of his timeline to do so.

00:15:59.360 | Ford said, I had to have another source of income. So I became a carpenter by doing carpentry. He

00:16:04.000 | explained, I was able to wait it out as the years went by the attrition rate eliminated many of

00:16:08.320 | those people from the competition pool until finally there are only a few of us left on the

00:16:13.520 | bus from the entering class. I always saw life that way. You just have to find a way to stick

00:16:18.720 | it out to prevail. All right. I like that story because it's a great vignette of slow productivity

00:16:24.480 | in action. There's something that's both effective and sustainable by working on a small number of

00:16:30.960 | things over a long period of time consistently. This is the definition of internal powered goals.

00:16:38.080 | The theme that unifies this episode. I'm sticking with this, even if I'm not excited about it every

00:16:44.000 | moment, even if my motivation goes up and down, even if my success or failures have periods where

00:16:49.120 | one is big and the other's down and that's flops back and forth. I'm going through a hard period.

00:16:53.360 | Now I consistently make progress and not just working blindly, but really getting feedback,

00:16:59.280 | adjusting. You can imagine Harrison Ford struggling with roles early on, pivoting when he sees a

00:17:05.120 | different type of role, seeing he's a special type of training. It's this relentless return.

00:17:09.520 | What can I improve here? What's not working? How can I adjust my trajectory? You're making

00:17:15.440 | adjustments. You're letting evidence come in. You're learning more, but forward momentum always,

00:17:20.000 | always continues steps every day. So you're moving in the right direction, adjusting your path,

00:17:24.240 | always moving. This more often than not is what unlocks really interesting impact and

00:17:29.120 | interesting opportunities. A slow productivity approach, a small number of things that through

00:17:34.240 | internal power, you keep pursuing over time, just relentlessly. I'm sticking with this, updating how

00:17:42.640 | I do it, but sticking with it over time. Small number of things done really well, reasonable,

00:17:47.760 | sustainable pace really is, I think a very sustainable strategy for a deep life, a very

00:17:53.200 | sustainable strategy for eventually doing, achieving deep accomplishments. So I thought

00:17:58.560 | that was a good story to end on. Productivity doesn't have to be fast. Productivity doesn't

00:18:04.320 | require constant intakes of motivation, inspiration. Productivity doesn't require

00:18:10.080 | these 10 hour YouTube productivity, YouTuber style, binges of I'm just out white knuckling

00:18:17.360 | everyone else. Sometimes it's as boring as Harrison Ford said, I'm just going to take my time and keep

00:18:23.280 | working on this craft, taking feedback, adjust, taking feedback, adjust, having a second trade

00:18:28.320 | to support myself until finally American graffiti happens. Then Star Wars happens, then Indiana

00:18:34.160 | Jones happens and the whole thing breaks open. So sometimes slowing down is the right way to actually

00:18:38.800 | make it farther down the path as paradoxical as that can seem.

How To Be More Disciplined - Master Self Control & Focus | Cal Newport

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