A Beginner's training program to get disciplined

Discipline: literally a superpower

Here's a few quotes to convince you that discipline is the greatest thing:

• "You will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself...the height of a man's success is gauged by his self-mastery; the depth of his failure by his self-abandonment. ...And this law is the expression of eternal justice. He who cannot establish dominion over himself will have no dominion over others." - Leonardo da Vinci

• "The man who masters himself is delivered from the force that binds all creatures." - Goethe

• "When you've trained yourself, living in constant self-control, neither a deva nor gandhabba, nor a Mara banded with Brahmas, could turn that triumph back into defeat." - Buddha

• "He that subdues himself is mightier than a conqueror" - God

Ok, but I knew that already

Yes, you did. But let's be honest, most people reading this wish they had better discipline, have probably tried to get it, and failed. Shit, the internet is filled with self-discipline guides.

Exactly, so how is this different?

Well, I tried all those other guides and they didn't work for me. Eventually I stumbled upon a system that did, so I'm jotting it down and hoping it's going to help someone out there too.

Enough pep talk, what's the system?

Glad you asked.

My beginner's discipline training system is based on two principles:

• discipline is a skill like drawing and figure-skating, not a moral characteristic like honesty or compassion

• being a skill, it can be trained

That's it. The fact that you don't have discipline is due to you never learning it, probably because in this degenerate society nobody has taught you. It's not because you're inherently incapable of it or have some moral failure that you can fix by just 'being a better person': you can train it.

How?

Like any other skill: by exercise. Like a muscle, like a movement, discipline is trained by repeating increasingly more complex tasks over and over again.

When you train a muscle, the muscle fibers, the motor nerves and the control areas in your brain change and make it easier for you to use that muscle the same way the next time. When you train a movement, the same thing happens, and after a while your body knows what it must do by itself. Similarly, by training discipline your "discipline-muscle" changes, making it easier for you the next time.

Yeah ok, but in terms of actual details?

You need to exercise, which means you need to complete tasks that require discipline. Like all new skills, you can't expect to go in on day one and attempt advanced tasks: you'd fail completely, you'd learn nothing and you'd be bummed. The point here is to incrementally build discipline, so two things are fundamental:

• start small

• don't overdo it

"Don't overdo it" is the most important. Like physical stamina, discipline is a limited resource that you must slowly increase through training. If you decided to take the stairs to your 17th floor office on the same day that you went for your first run in years, you'd be stupidly consuming your stamina on something that you're not training. The same thing applies to discipline: don't give yourself too many exercises at a time! My suggestion is to literally start with one exercise a day, period. During the rest of the day, avoid the temptation of giving yourself more discipline exercises, because that would be counterproductive.

"Start small" means that you shouldn't shoot for going from Lazy McBum to Mr. Willpower over a short period of time. Not only is that stupid, it's completely counterproductive. It's like a guy starting weightlifting and overloading his bar: at best he won't be able to do anything with proper form, at worst he'll hurt himself. Same principle here.

So what do these exercises look like?

I can't tell you what yours will specifically look like since everyone needs discipline in a different area of their lives, but I can give you some examples. Here are some absolute beginner, day 1 exercises. You should do only one, and I stress only one of these per day:

• Deny yourself a pleasure you normally indulge in. For example, if you go on reddit/facebook/youtube too much, deny yourself visiting that site from the moment you wake to the moment you wake again on the following day.

• Give yourself a small task that you know you should do but normally avoid. For example, go for a 2 km walk, or clean your room.

When I began consciously training discipline like this, my very first task was "avoid checking your phone this entire night". It was a night out with friends and I was that asshole who's always on his phone. My task the next day was to eat 1500 calories or less; on that day I did not do the phone exercise and in fact used my phone liberally. The day after that it was to go get a document filed which I had put off for a month; on that day I did not also do the 1500 calories exercise or the phone one.

But you're just telling me to become disciplined by being disciplined!

I'm telling you to gradually increase your self-discipline by progressively training it. "Start small" and "don't overdo it" are principles designed to make it a small but manageable effort for you to do the exercise, precisely because you don't yet have good discipline and thus can't just be expected to power through it. Start as small as you need, even if the exercise if "brush your teeth tonight".

Ok, so how do I progress?

Just like any other kind of training, you progress by gradually and regularly increasing the difficulty and number of your exercises. For example, after about a week I did a day with "eat 1500 calories or less" and also another small exercise, "complete 2 pages of your class report".

Don't overdo your progression! You must challenge yourself, but not so quickly that your discipline-muscle can't keep up. Imagine a beginner weightlifter that starts at reasonable weights but then goes on to add 10 Kgs to each one of his lifts every time; he's quickly reach the same point of being overloaded as if he had started with too much.

But how do I make myself do the exercises?

The point is that by starting doing something, that training will make you more capable of doing more complex/bothersome/unwanted things in the future. That's why we start small and increase it: right now you feel like you have zero discipline, but surely there is one task that you can make yourself do just because, even like I said a task as small as brushing your teeth tonight. Then tomorrow you do another. Then tomorrow another. In my experience this will strengthen your "discipline-muscle".

That's it?

No, there is one last rule

• when you've decided an exercise, you do the exercise, period.

You're not allowed to change it. You're not allowed to move it to another day. You're not allowed for any reason whatsoever not to complete it within the day it is assigned to. Even if it's inconvenient, especially if it's inconvenient. Even if you think you have a good reason to, especially if you think you have a good reason to.

Lack of discipline is also connected to the cognitive trap of always finding an excuse for why you just can't do what you should be doing. The only way to avoid that cognitive trap is to exclude it completely. The exercise, once decided, is fixed and immutable.

You know in military boot camp when they make soldiers do stupid shit like cleaning floors with toothbrushes? that was a training technique to teach them, in part, discipline. The point was not just punishing them, or humiliating them, or any of that jazz; it was to train them to execute a task no matter that they didn't see the point at that moment and to execute it well. That is the mentality you must have: you do the exercise because it's the exercise and for no other reason. If a reason not to do it comes up that's too bad, you're doing it anyway even if it sounds completely unreasonable.

And if I don't?

Ever missed a throw in basketball practice? ever drawn a crooked line practicing drawing? failure is a built-in part of training any skill. You have to expect failure. You'll catch yourself postposting tasks because reasons. Some day you'll just not do one, most likely. That's an unavoidable part of training, and if you're not failing ever you're not challenging yourself.

When you fail, that's that. You had that failure, it happened, move on: next day, next task. Failure doesn't set you back. Failure is expected, planned for, and embraced. You assign your next day's task and do that tomorrow.

This doesn't make sense to me

Well shit, after writing all of this I hope it did. If it doesn't, then I hope at least it gave you some food for thought, and maybe you'll incorporate some of this into your system, or teach me a better way.

But if you just don't know if this is for you, then I suggest you try. First, you got nothing to lose. Second, seriously, you can't committ to brushing your teeth tonight? or not reading reddit until you go to bed? that's how you start. One simple task, one a day. It worked with me.

Yeah about that, how did it work for you?

Well, I started in the following situation: I was doing things in my life, like school and work, that I had to do because of external pressure (monetary, mostly). But I didn't have discipline. I rushed papers at the last hour, studied up for exams the night before, the usual shit. It got pretty bad at one point, I failed some classes and risked failing out (which doesn't exactly work the same in my country as it does in the US, but it would have sucked mighty balls nonetheless).

All the while I was trying to figure out discipline. The only discipline I had ever had was training in the gym, because I had started young and it had become a habit. Eventually, after trying I don't know how many guides on the internet, I stumbled upon the thought of trying to train discipline the same way I trained muscle.

I won't lie and say I became Mr. Willpower in a year or some amazing shit. But it did work. I did move in about a week from never doing homework unless I absolutely had to turn it in to doing it on a fixed day just because that was my exercise. I remember the first day I did that I postponed the homework until late at night, but I still did it (as inconvenient as it was at those hours, and it was inconvenient and I skipped a party for it), days and days before it was due. Postponing it was a 'failure', but I still did it.

As I had hoped, my tolerance to doing things because I had decided to do them grew like strength when you train. Today I'm not Mr. Willpower, but I definitely do have the ability of deciding to do something and then doing it. I attribute most of where I am in life (compared to where I could be otherwise) to that.

Well, thanks

No problem, hope it's been useful. Let me know in the comments how you did trying this, or if you have other experiences in not being disciplined and then getting disciplined.