All right, Jesse, so I think we should do some questions. Yep. You know what they come for. I got one here from Toby. Toby asks, how do I improve my discipline? My problem is that I have a problem with sticking to my long term plans. Well, Toby, I think about discipline really more as an identity that you develop, then I do an approach to a particular challenge.

If you can convince yourself that you are a disciplined person, that that is part of your conception of your identity, then you will be able to, with discipline, pursue many different important objectives in your life. So the question is, how do you get to an identity where you see yourself as a disciplined person?

Well, let me tell you what not to do. Don't just pick out a random ambitious goal and say, you know what? I'm going to do this. I'm going to, I'm going to white knuckle, go after this really hard goal. And because I need to be more disciplined. That's what you're trying to do.

That's not working. I'm not surprised it's not working. If you've not yet convinced yourself, you're a disciplined person, taking on ad hoc, large discipline requiring challenges is not going to be a route towards success. So what should you do instead? Well, I think this is where actually the deep life procedure I talk about, the, the sort of self-awarely overly pragmatic approach to building a foundation for deep life that we've been talking about on the show for over two years is perfect.

For developing a self-identity as disciplined. So remember there's two parts to this. Number one, you identify the areas of your life that are important to you. We typically call these the deep life buckets. They differ between different people, but our starter set of these buckets tends to be craft, what you do, what you create, constitution.

That's going to be your health community. That's going to be your connections to other people, be it your family, your neighborhood, the people in the organizations where you work at your religious institutions. They'll often throw in contemplation. We're trying to capture philosophy, theology, and ethics. These are all important areas.

Most people's lives, your list might vary. For each of these areas, the first thing to do is to identify a keystone habit, something in each of these buckets that you do every day. Something that is not trivial, but is also tractable and you track your completion of these habits every day.

If you use something like my time block planner, there's a metric tracking space at the top of the daily planning pages on every day. You just track those keystone habits right there. So for example, for constitution, you wouldn't have something there. Like I'm going to do a 45 minute intense workout because that's too hard to expect you to be able to do that every day.

That's not really tractable, but you also don't want to say, you know, I will do one jumping jack when I get out of bed in the morning, like that's not going to get you anywhere. So instead you might want to do something like I want to hit this many steps in a day.

It'll require a little bit of planning. Like I walk my kids to school. I'll probably have to do one more walk in the afternoon in between meetings. And, but it's tractable. If I think about it, my friend, Brian Johnson, uh, of optimize fame had this great constitution habit where he had a fixed number of minutes that he never wanted to go beyond without doing, I think he would do 10 burpees and it was like 23 minutes or 20, there was some amount of time that he had, because he had read somewhere, if you sit for more than this much time, it starts to be bad.

And so it was just every, whatever it was, 23 minutes, he would do 10 burpees. And was it a fantastic boom? Now I think it helps that he doesn't work in the bullpen of a crowded office. I mean, I, maybe that would be an awesome thing to do, but, but it probably would draw some interesting attention.

He, you know, he, he works in his own company, so he works at his own house. Um, but 10 burpees, three times an hour, roughly. And the way he pitched it to me is it keeps your ability to concentration, to concentrate like an, like a laser. Cause your body's always moving.

It never gets into a sedentary, but anyways, for someone who works in their own home, works from home on their own business, very tractable, very tractable, Keystone habit takes 15 seconds or whatever, every time you do it. The fact that I think 10 burpees takes 15 seconds shows that I don't know.

I don't know a lot about burpees. Does he still do that? I don't know. We should have him on the show. He should, we should, we should ask him. I know at one point he was training, he was really into, and I don't think he will mind me telling this story because I think he's talked about it himself.

Um, he was really into Spartan racing. You know, the Spartan races. Yeah. Because he, yeah, because he was friends with Joe Dacena. So he knew the guy who started it and he was making a run at some point for doing them at a very high level, which requires, it turns out it requires a lot of training.

Uh, you have to master a lot of these individual disciplines, but anyways, in his, his house, in the room where he worked, which I think might've been their bedroom, he had installed into the ceiling of the room, the, uh, hanging obstacles from the Sparta race. Like, so I guess you do like Ninja warrior type stuff in that race.

We're like, you have to like, you're holding on to like rope knots and whatever. Yeah. And yeah, he installed them into the ceiling of the room so that when he was doing these breaks, he's like, instead of just burpees, let me jump up and just. Like do the, whatever hanging challenge.

I'll tell you what you do that for a few months, your grip, strength and balance, like you just own it, but you don't even, and I guess that's what you need to do to compete at a high level. You could just jump up there and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

And so that's, that's commitment. He'd probably still work out too during the day. I would think separately. Yeah. Yeah. So he, and he had a whole thing and yeah, so you still have a workout. So it was less, this was less about, which again, I think is an important point.

Like if your keystone habits are not, their job is not to capture everything you need to do, or it's important for that bucket. So like getting up and doing some burpees or whatever throughout the day. Is a great way of saying you, you take motion important. You take your body important.

You think there's a mind body connection, but it's not everything you need to do for exercise. You probably need to be doing weights. You probably need to be doing cardio. So that's, it's a good point is that your keystone habits are not trying to. Take on the weight of everything important in that bucket.

They are just meant to say that you take that bucket seriously, and you're willing to take effort towards that bucket every day, that's non-trivial. Now it takes a while to get those keystone habits, right? You have to experiment a little bit, but you get to the point where you're knocking off, you have four buckets or five buckets, you're checking off all those, all those metrics every day.

And you see it every day. You don't want to break the chain. All right. That's step one. You've already now leveled up discipline. Your identity as someone who's disciplined is now leveled up. You do stuff that's optional because it reflects your values. Even if it's hard. Now you're at a higher level.

The next part of my general deep life foundation program is then you dedicate a one to two month period to each of those buckets one by one. And overhaul that part of your life when you're focusing on that particular bucket. So in the one to two months, you're focusing on constitution.

Now you're getting serious about your health and fitness and you're starting to make changes and figuring out like, maybe you're like, I'm going to start training for this sport. Like I'll tell you right now, Jesse, one of the things I'm doing. It's a goal is before my 40th birthday, which is in June.

So it's coming up. Um, you might not remember what it's like to be in your thirties. Of course. I mean, you've been 40 for literally weeks at this point. So you probably don't remember. But, uh, my birthday is coming up as we've talked about. I want to, this is arbitrary, but I want to be able to once again, row, uh, 2000 meters on my concept to at a sub two minute, 500 meter pace.

So this is connects me back to my, my, my deep past when I was rowing for Dartmouth. I remember the type of splits I could pull. So like seven and change. Something. So yeah. Yeah. And so I was like, I want to, I was like, I would feel good at the age of 40.

If, because I got, God knows what I could pull when I was 19 doing this, I could pull, but I'm 30 pounds heavier now. So it does have an advantage. Like I can actually, I was a lightweight rower, so I can now actually move that thing, but anyways, it's kind of arbitrary, but it's like, it's, it's hard.

But not impossible. But like, I would feel good if I can be pulling sub two minute. 500 splits for, for a 2000 meters. Like I'm training for that right now. Uh, but that's the type of thing. Okay. When you're doing an overhaul of a bucket, you start, you figure out these challenges.

You get your equipment in place. I mean, not to make a full, full circle connection, but I got that concept too, actually from Brian Johnson. Sent it to me as a gift. So there we go. It all nice gift. Yeah. He's a nice guy. No, for a very long time.

Um, so anyways, that's the type of thing you will come away from doing the intense focus on the bucket with like, okay, now I'm going to start training to do this and I've overhauled my diet and I now am joined this team, this rec, you know, with other dads that we play, whatever.

And so when you, you, you give the one to two month focus, you really are changing your life more substantially to, to really integrate that area of value. Um, More deeply. And there's a lot of experimentation in that. That's why it takes one or two months. You try some things it's not really working.

So you change your goals or challenges or habits. So you find something that's really working. You come out of that second step. Toby, you're going to be a much more disciplined person. Step one, you build that base with a keystone step to you. Overhaul tractable overhauls to experimentation. All the parts are important to your life after that.

Now it's down the line. You're like, oh, here's a new long-term plan that I believe in. Let me do some work towards it. No problem. That's that's what you do. You're disciplined. That's what you're gonna do. That's what you're going to do. So once you've changed the identity, then you can take on new challenges.

The only final thing I'll say is even as a very self-disciplined person, if your challenges don't make sense, if your mind doesn't believe that it's worth doing or that your plan is actually going to accomplish what it is, you will still struggle with discipline. So you have to be selective and careful in laying out what you do.

Your brain is not dumb. If you're like, I'm going to be a Nobel prize winning novelist because I'm going to do national novel writing month. Three days in your mind's like, this is stupid. We don't know what we're doing. This is not a good book. I'm not going to do this.

And that's not a failure of discipline. That's a failure of planning. So that's the only other copy I'll give. Even after you become a self-disciplined person, you need goals your mind actually trust. (upbeat music)