5 Easy ways to become more self-discipline by Ali Abdaal
5 Easy ways to become more self-discipline by Ali Abdaal
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How to guarantee you regret your life:https : //dai.ly/x93180y
My honest advice to a perfectionist:https : //dai.ly/x9319i4
My honest advice to someone who’s doing too much : https://dai.ly/x9319ty
My honest advice to someone who feels behind in life : https://dai.ly/x931a78
My honest advice to someone who wants financial freedom : https://dai.ly/x931ex2
If I Wanted to Be a Millionaire Before 30, I'd Do This : https://dai.ly/x931gzm
The Best Book I've Ever Read about Making Money : https://dai.ly/x931j9y
How to Go From $0 to $10,000 a Month in 4 Steps : https://dai.ly/x931kb6
How to Make $10,000 Month Writing Online : https://dai.ly/x931l42
How to 10x Your Income The 4 Ladders of Wealth : https://dai.ly/x931ldm
Why You Feel Lost in Life by Ali Abdaal : https://dai.ly/x933252
How to Figure Out What You Really Want in Life : https://dai.ly/x933hm8
How to Change your Life in a Year - 3 Simple Ideas : https://dai.ly/x933u78
Transcript
00:00In this video we're going to be talking about five actionable strategies that you can apply
00:03to your life right now to have more self-discipline. Now before we get started on this I have to say
00:07up front that I do think the lionization of discipline is a little bit of a scam. I think
00:12we have been told by the hustle bros that if you're if you're not disciplined that there's
00:17something wrong with you and that the solution to all of your problems in life is just to be
00:20more disciplined. Discipline through self-discipline you develop like an armor for your mind you just
00:25need to have discipline you need to lock in and you need to do what you feel like you're not. Now
00:29I think that does have some merit but it's it's not the whole story. So the way I think of
00:33discipline is like discipline is when you are getting yourself to do something that you don't
00:38feel like doing. If you felt like doing it you would be motivated but if you do it even when
00:42you don't feel like it you would be disciplined. So if you imagine trying to do something like
00:47let's say you want to work on an assignment or you're trying to make a presentation and you
00:52really don't feel like it one way of applying discipline is by sort of using like employing
00:58discipline throughout the whole journey of working on this task and I'd like to visualize
01:02this like a hill and the task is a boulder that you've got and discipline is where you're like
01:07trying to roll the boulder up the hill and you're like oh I don't like doing this but I'm just gonna
01:10keep rolling the boulder up the hill I'm gonna roll the boulder up the hill and I'm gonna I'm
01:13gonna eventually get the boulder to the top of the hill. Now this is a very stressful place to be
01:16right because you spend all this energy and all this effort rolling this boulder all the way up
01:20the hill and then hopefully you get it to the other end and the project goes over the line
01:24or often more likely the boulder just comes rolling back down like Sisyphus in the Greek
01:30myth I think it is and you have to roll the boulder up the hill again. This is not a good
01:34way to live. Instead the way that I think of things is that really the goal should be to
01:38make the work feel so good that it doesn't feel like you're rolling the boulder up the hill
01:42but instead it genuinely feels like the boulder is rolling down the hill. When something feels good
01:47and when you enjoy whatever you're doing you don't need to rely on discipline so much. However
01:51unfortunately this is a pipe dream because we can't do that with everything and at some point
01:55we have to we have to do things that are hard and some things are just boring and all that kind of
01:58stuff. So the thing I add to this mental model is that there is a little hump. There's like a hump
02:05before you start to go downhill and so you always have to do a little bit of a push. It takes a
02:10small dose of discipline to get the boulder beyond the hump and then once it's beyond the hump if you
02:15start enjoying the process that's when the thing starts to go downhill and I think really that is
02:20the area where we should be employing all of these strategies around discipline. It's in getting
02:24that boulder a little bit over the hump. Now over the last couple of years I have been interviewing
02:28a bunch of people on my podcast and meeting a bunch of people in real life and one of the people
02:31I had the privilege of meeting a few months ago when I was in Austin is a chap called Ryan Holiday
02:36who is the mega best-selling author of this book Discipline is Destiny. But Ryan is also
02:41ridiculously prolific as a writer and has written like I don't know a dozen or something books
02:46mostly about stoicism over the last 10 years or so and one of the things I really admire
02:51about Ryan is that he's very disciplined and seems to be very consistent at doing stuff
02:56and also seems to enjoy the stuff and is also a dad with kids and seems to have just like a
03:00really happy life and he's in good shape and so he seems to be winning across all fronts. He owns a
03:04bookshop. I visited his bookshop. He's got a studio attached to the bookshop. It's super cool. He's got
03:08a team and a big part of the interview was me trying to ask Ryan like hey man how have you been
03:12doing this writing thing consistently for such a long time? I'm curious for you like you're
03:17presumably planning to write more books but like why? I don't want to learn from someone
03:22who's consistently doing stuff and is miserable but I want to learn from someone who's consistently
03:26doing stuff and seems to actually enjoy their life so that's what Ryan at least on the surface seems
03:30to be and so in this video I want to share these five actionable tips for self-discipline that I
03:34found really helpful that I learned from Ryan during our interview. I think this is important
03:39you have to know what your main thing is right? We live in a world where there's all these other
03:44kind of supporting things. They're necessary. They're not absolutely necessary but I think
03:49they're important but still you have to know what the main driver of everything is. And here the
03:54advice is you have to know what your main thing is. As the philosopher Seneca famously said,
03:59if a man knows not to which port he sails no wind is favorable. The thing that I took away from this
04:05and that I continue to take away from this is just the value of focusing on a very tiny number
04:10of things. When I tend to speak to people when I'm giving talks and stuff who struggle with
04:15discipline if I have enough time to ask them questions I generally find that they're just
04:18trying to do too much stuff. It is so hard to have self-discipline to do a dozen different things.
04:23You know Cal Newport has a great new book called Slow Productivity. The first principle of slow
04:27productivity is do fewer things. Greg McKeown has an amazing book called Essentialism where basically
04:32the whole thesis of the book is figure out what is essential to your life and eliminate everything
04:36else as much as you possibly can and just focus on the vital few. Now a lot of being more disciplined
04:41is wrapped up in our emotional well-being and our mental health and one way to improve that is with
04:45therapy provided by BetterHelp who are the paid partner of this video. BetterHelp is the world's
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04:59a platform that makes finding a therapist super easy because it's online, it's remote and by
05:03filling out a few questions BetterHelp can match you to a credentialed therapist very quickly. Then
05:07you can talk to your therapist however you feel comfortable whether that's via message or chat
05:10or phone or video call. Whether you've got a clinical mental health issue like depression or
05:14anxiety or if you're just a human who lives in this world who's going through a hard time therapy
05:18can give you the tools to approach your life in a very different way. You can message your therapist
05:21at any time and you can schedule live sessions whenever it's convenient for you and if your
05:25therapist is not the right fit for you for any reason you can switch to a new therapist at no
05:29additional charge. So if you're interested in connecting to a therapist from the comfort of
05:33your own home then you can check out BetterHelp at betterhelp.com or enter my name
05:38during sign up and enjoy a special discount on your first month. So whenever I'm in a period of
05:42time where I'm like where I feel inconsistent with stuff or I feel like I'm not as self-disciplined
05:47as I would like to be, I'm not like getting enough things over that initial hurdle and then you know
05:51obviously enjoying the journey beyond that point. Whenever I'm at that point I remind myself to zoom
05:56out and it always comes down to the fact that I'm just trying to do too much stuff. I look at
06:00my calendar, I look at my projects list, I look at my to-do list and I realize I'm just trying to do
06:04too many things. This is something Oliver Berkman talks about in the amazing book 4000 Weeks which
06:09is a sort of philosophical take on time management. Basically the idea is that we are all simply
06:13trying to do too much stuff and this whole thing that we see on social media about you can juggle
06:17all the things and you can have it all and all that like sometimes it is just impossible to
06:22juggle all of the important things that we want to do and so we have to be strategically mediocre
06:27at certain things and eliminate a lot of things off of our plate to whatever extent we can in order
06:32to really focus on what is that one main thing. There's a few prompts that I like to think about
06:36to help with this. Number one is that when it comes to goal setting I limit myself to just three or
06:41four goals for the whole year. If you don't yet have goals for the year you should check out my
06:45three-part video series on what to do if you feel lost in life that helps you figure out like
06:49your life vision and work vision and turn that into a series of goals. A bunch of people have
06:52watched that series of videos it's completely free obviously it's here on YouTube and they found it
06:56super helpful but limiting yourself to three to four goals any more than that for me I find it
07:01becomes overwhelming and then I start to think oh I'm not disciplined I'm not consistent I'm not
07:05doing this and that but it's way easier to make consistent progress on like a tiny number of
07:09things than to make inconsistent progress on a large number of things. The other way I like to
07:13think about this is you know for example in work I ask myself the question quite often that when it
07:18comes to my business when it comes to my work if I only had two hours a week in which to work what
07:24would I spend that time doing? Okay cool what if I only had four hours a week? Okay cool what if I
07:30only had eight hours a week in order to work? What would I genuinely spend that time doing and what
07:34would most move the needle? And then I think okay well if that's what I would do in eight hours why
07:38don't I just do that five days a week and that generally gives me so much clarity to realize oh
07:44I really should only be doing two things number one making videos and number two working on new
07:48courses those are the only two things but those things make up like 20% of my calendar rather
07:53than 80% of my calendar. I'm like why? It's because even as someone who is a you know productivity
07:59expert according to my publishers and who makes videos about productivity I've been reading about
08:04this stuff for 15 years and making videos about it for seven years even then I still fall into
08:09this trap of taking on just simply taking on too much stuff and I know that when I speak to people
08:13at events and talks that I do we all struggle with this we all just take on too much stuff
08:18and so the real thing here the advice that you know I was reminded of through through this
08:23conversation with Ryan is just focus on fewer things just do less if you do less then you're
08:28way more likely to be self-disciplined. By the way if you're watching this before the 20th of April
08:322024 I'm actually hosting a completely free online workshop it's an alignment workshop
08:37the idea is that you know we're now nearly four months into the year and so we're going to reflect
08:41on our goals for 2024 we're going to make a plan for what we're going to do moving forward and
08:45figure out what kind of systems and habits we can put in place to stay disciplined and consistent
08:49en route to achieving the things that matter to us it's completely free hopefully there'll be
08:52thousands of people online it's gonna be sick it's like two hours long so you can join that
08:55completely for free link down below. So you might have heard of this guy called Wim Hof he is known
09:02as the ice man because he holds the guinness world record for taking the longest ice cold bath
09:06lasting one hour 52 minutes and 42 seconds which is absurd and he's also done a bunch of other
09:11absolutely mental things like climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in only shorts and running a half
09:15marathon barefoot on ice and snow now I've tried this whole cold shower thing and when I stand
09:20under cold water in the shower I can barely last a few seconds and in that context it would be easy
09:24for me to compare myself to Wim Hof and be like oh man I'm such a failure I'm such a loser like why
09:28can I only stand on the water for 17 seconds and Wim Hof can do it for two freaking hours but the
09:32thing that's important to remember is that he's the expert and I'm a novice and that is totally okay
09:36Wim Hof is like in his 60s and he started taking cold plunges at the age of 17 and because he made
09:41it a daily practice going forward he was able to slowly get better at sitting in an ice bath and
09:45so Wim Hof's global recognition as being the ice man did absolutely not come overnight and so the
09:49thing to remember here is that we're going for progress rather than immediate success if you're
09:54trying to absorb a philosophy or a new way of thinking or transform yourself from here to there
10:01it's it's not 300 pages that you read you know from October 1st to November 17th you know that
10:08takes you a month and a half to read it's much better if you're layering it like a page a day
10:14for a year or two years or three years and you're coming back like the process of that sort of over
10:21and over and over and over again that's that's where the stuff gets absorbed again this is
10:26something I see so often when I do talks and stuff where people are struggling with something
10:30struggling with consistency but it's because their standards are too high they are simply trying to
10:35be too good too quickly again I was giving a talk yesterday and someone came up to me who was
10:41building her youtube channel and she's made two videos in the last like three years and she's
10:44really struggling with perfectionism and the thing I said to her is that look you've just got to
10:48accept that your first 50 videos are going to be absolutely trash for people who struggle with
10:52perfectionism for people who struggle with having to be so perfect that they're not even taking
10:56action the solution is to lower the bar once you've lowered the bar to the point that you're
11:01able to consistently take action now you can slowly raise the bar over time now there's actually
11:06a really cool graph understanding this and it comes from a guy called Brian Jeffrey Fogg
11:10otherwise known as bj fogg who you might be familiar with so he's a scientist at Stanford
11:14University and he's created this model for understanding what makes us do hard things
11:19now this is called the fog behavior model or the b equals map model because it says that for a
11:23behavior b to occur three things must happen all at once firstly motivation secondly ability which
11:31is how easy it is for us to do the thing and thirdly the behavior needs to be prompted so
11:35motivation ability and prompt hence map mapped so for example when something is easy but your
11:40motivation is not that high a prompt will trigger the behavior but when the thing is difficult and
11:44our motivation is at the same level the same prompt now will not cause the behavior and so
11:48the way we can think about this which is something that bj fogg talks about in his book tiny habits
11:52where the thesis is broadly similar to james clare's atomic habits it's like if you're trying
11:56to build a habit or trying to do something hard what is the most tiny or the easiest version of
12:01that behavior that you could actually do and because tiny actions are a lot easier to do than
12:04bigger actions we slide all the way to the right hand side on the ability axis which means that
12:09we're more likely to do the thing no matter how motivated we're feeling so if you're thinking
12:13about this in the sense of i'm just trying to do the easiest thing to make a little bit of progress
12:17what tiny action can i take that will help move me forward it makes it a lot easier it makes you far
12:21more likely to do the behavior and then of course as you continue to be consistent by employing
12:26discipline and by getting better at the thing you can always raise the bar over time and the great
12:29thing about this is that it's not just the impact that it has on that one behavior that you're
12:33trying to do like i realized this when i was back in med school that like oh studying for exams
12:37becomes a lot easier if i try and do the tiniest action i.e if i convince myself i'm just going to
12:41do the thing for five minutes that is a very tiny action anyone can study for five minutes very few
12:46people can study for five hours but then once i've done the five minutes it goes to 10 goes to 15 goes
12:50to 20 and then i started to realize oh okay this is how discipline works this is how i can get
12:54myself to do something that's kind of hard and the nice thing about this is that it does not just
12:58apply to studying it applies to every single else thing in my life and so by developing this
13:02generalized skill of self-discipline there's this real sense that you start to know what the process
13:07looks like people say trust the process right but it's hard to trust a process that you have not
13:13been through before once you've done it one time you have a sense of the full scope of the process
13:18or what you think is a full scope of the process and you do it again and again and again and you
13:22start to go oh yeah this is the part where you start to doubt yourself this is the part where
13:25you get excited and then oh wait no it's gonna get hard again but you you start to get a sense
13:30of the rhythms of it and then you can trust the process and then you can also enjoy the process
13:35with anything that we do in life you know just take if you imagine making a youtube video the
13:39first couple of times you make a youtube video it's going to be really really really freaking
13:42hard because there's all these emotional hurdles to get over and all these technical hurdles to get
13:44over but the more you do it the easier it becomes and then the more you trust the process and you
13:49realize oh yeah this is the hard bit oh yeah this is the you know this is the bit where i feel
13:52demotivated oh yeah i've been here before i'm just going to push through or i'm going to find a way
13:57to deal with this with the feelings i've got around this that is really where a lot of the
14:00gains to be had in this idea of self-discipline it's in doing the process a couple of times and
14:04then starting to trust the process over time so action point next time you're struggling with
14:08discipline ask yourself what would the smallest easiest version of this look like but of course
14:13sometimes we do just have to do stuff that's hard right and that is where tip number three comes in
14:18i i would argue that we sort of have a higher self and a lower self right the lower self says
14:23just like eat whatever you want work only when you want say whatever you want don't think about
14:29consequent like there there's this the sort of immediate gratification sort of short-term
14:34impulses that we all have right that if indulged repeatedly tend to get us in a place that we
14:41actually don't want to be so there's this kind of tension between like our higher self and the
14:46lower self i think there's a lot of value in appreciating this tension that we have between
14:49our higher and our lower selves um like so the other day i've recently got a ps5 and i have been
14:55playing horizon forbidden west it's an amazing game and often i'll be playing you know if i've
15:00got an evening on my own i'll be playing and it gets to 10 30 pm and i'm like oh it's 10 30 i know
15:0510 30 is my wind down time and i know my higher self wants me to brush my teeth get into bed and
15:09read something on my kindle at the moment i'm reading a new earth by eckhart tolle and then
15:14i'll sleep on time and then i'll wake up early and then life will be good but then what my lower self
15:18is saying is yeah but you know we can sleep at 11 30 and still get eight hours of sleep
15:22and you know we you know we're just in the middle of this quest and like it's really fun and you
15:26know we deserve it we've been working all day we deserve an extra hour on the playstation and then
15:30you know the brain gets overstimulated and then before i know it that extra hour turns into two
15:34hours and it's like there's this whole constant sort of balancing act between the higher self
15:37and the lower self now i actually did um a couple of therapy sessions uh last year with my friend
15:43alec canoja who goes by dr kate and has the youtube channel healthy gamer gg he's a harvard
15:47trained psychiatrist and also a trained monk and so he and i did some like therapy coaching
15:52type sessions where he taught me about something called internal family systems and basically the
15:58idea here is that sort of like in that film inside out uh you actually have like we all have multiple
16:04different characters within our brains and part of the process of becoming an integrated human being
16:09is to recognize that these characters are not good or bad it's not that the higher self is the good
16:17guy and the lower self is the bad guy you know one thing that alec and i did is that we we sort
16:21of made up names for these different characters like there was you know the optimizer uh optimizer
16:26ali there was like uh second in the class ali there was video game degenerate ali and it's like
16:31each there's there's a bunch of these different characters and each of these different characters
16:34have different needs wants perspectives and opinions like for example video game degenerate
16:39ali is saying you know let's keep on playing the playstation but if we were to just shove him into
16:43the corner and be like no shut up you i'm going to be disciplined screw you shoving that character
16:48in in the corner of the brain and like being like no you are bad leads to some sort of rebellion from
16:53that character and so the whole process of internal family systems and it's like a system of therapy
16:57is to sort of get these different characters to talk to each other sort of and to accept that
17:02actually i appreciate your opinion you know video gamer ali to you know the fact you want to play
17:07horizon for an extra hour and i also appreciate the opinion of i don't know optimizer ali who's
17:12trying to you know do the huberman optimizing sleep routine or or whatever and it's about not
17:16shoving them into the corner but actually hearing what they have to say and accepting what they have
17:21to say and in some ways trying to find a middle ground trying to find a way for all them to be
17:25happy um but even if you can't find a way for all them to be happy trying to find a way where at
17:30least they feel like their concerns are acknowledged and so in the playstation example what i do is
17:34that when it gets to 10 30 i know that the video game a part of me wants to play more but what i
17:39do is i say to the video game a part of me how about we turn off the playstation we go brush
17:43our teeth but while we're brushing our teeth we can watch some youtube videos about horizon
17:46forbidden west how about that and then it sort of feels to me like the video game a part of me is
17:50like you know what that seems like a reasonable compromise i'm happy with that i get to have a
17:54bit of a win because we're playing you know we're experiencing the video game content in some
17:58capacity but also the optimizer part of me gets to have a win the higher self as it were because
18:03we're actually going to sleep on time and brushing our teeth now this was all a very somewhat
18:06roundabout way of saying that like one of the issues we can often have when it comes to our
18:09discipline is the the resistance approach of like no bad self you are bad go into the corner
18:16actually if there's a way that we can appreciate this balance between a higher and a lower selves
18:21not really saying that our lower self is bad but that you know we appreciate it we'll take
18:25the advice on board and then we'll make a decision it's trying trying to integrate these two different
18:30parts okay so one of the least disciplined periods of my life was in the few months after i
18:36had taken a break from working as a doctor full-time this was like august 2020 and i'd been
18:41working full-time as a doctor for two years and for the first time i woke up in the morning and i
18:46had no job to go to and i was like oh i have the whole day i had nothing on my calendar everything
18:52was great and i was like now i guess i'm a full-time youtuber so i guess i just need to make
18:56a video today and i procrastinated all day and i didn't make the video and the same thing happened
19:01the next day and the same thing happened the next day and the same thing happened the next day and
19:04actually when i was working full-time 50 to 60 hours a week as a doctor i was making more youtube
19:09videos than when i had no day job and i was a full-time youtuber and this was really interesting
19:13this was like what the hell is going on i was very undisciplined and very inconsistent when i did not
19:19have a structure or a routine to my day and i realized over time that actually hang on being a
19:25full-time youtuber is actually now it's not like the the calendar that's my constraint it's my own
19:31psychology and it's my own mindset um and this speaks to something that ryan mentioned as well
19:36this is why actually i think most self-published books don't work it's that because there's no
19:41forcing function required to get approval to start um there's no deadline there's no constraints as
19:50to how long it can be what it can look like you can basically do whatever you want which you would
19:53think would be an artistic sort of creative dream but it's actually like uh potentially a death
20:01sentence so tip number four for actionable ways to improve your self-discipline is to really think
20:05about what is the routine or structure you are trying to create around the thing that you want
20:09to do in ryan's case he was talking about how he's got his clear routine where he wakes up
20:13he does some exercise he drops the kids off at school and then he works for several uninterrupted
20:17hours in the morning doing some deep work and then the afternoon is chill and he can do what he wants
20:20and that is how he's so consistent because he just does the same thing pretty much every day
20:24so routine is valuable but then the the thing the thing is we don't just want to become like one of
20:28those oh i have to get get up at 5am and do this and do this and do this and do this and do this
20:32and sort of become uh it's it's a very kind of fragile place to be if you're so tied to your
20:37routine that you can't deviate from it otherwise your discipline goes through the floor and that's
20:41where the idea of flexibility comes in i have found as i've gotten older and more successful
20:48that the rigidity that served me well early on has had to give way into a kind of flexibility
20:56now there's always a tension or a concern is that flexibility actually just complacency
21:02or laziness um and i have to question each time what is my motivation here but but that rigidity
21:09has to become flexibility or one you suck all the fun out of it and two it's not sustainable
21:17over a long period of time and it's not it's very susceptible to being disrupted or blown apart by
21:24the complexity of life now this idea comes up in robert green's book of the 48 laws of power where
21:31the last law is to assume formlessness now green writes by taking a shape by having a visible plan
21:37you open yourself to attack instead of taking a form for your enemy to grasp keep yourself
21:42adaptable and on the move so basically the idea here is that yes routine and structure is important
21:48but being too rigid doesn't actually help you there's a certain strategic flexibility which is
21:56where we want to be okay so how do we find this sweet spot between structure and flexibility
22:00uh there's a few different ways i think about it uh one is that something that my friend paul
22:04millet says which is for him the way he stays consistent with writing is that his mantra is
22:08write most days it's not right every day it's not right every single day it's right most days
22:13that's like as long as he's writing most days he's making progress similarly matt develop has
22:16something called the two-day rule when it comes to the gym which is simply don't skip two days in a
22:21row i'm allowed to skip one day but i'm not allowed to skip two days in a row now that is enough
22:25flexibility for it to well be flexible and adapt to his life especially as a dad but it's also
22:30enough enough structure and enough rigidity that it actually helps him stay consistent and
22:34disciplined the way that i think about these things is i find that going for general principles
22:38rather than specific routines is where i personally find this sweet spot of flexibility and structure
22:43that allows me to stay disciplined so for example a general principle that i have is that most days
22:49wherever possible i will do at least one hour of deep work before i worry about like checking
22:53messages or slack or emails or any shallow work tasks i also have a bit of a rule where the goal
22:58is to hit the gym at least three times a week but 15 minutes in the gym counts as a full gym session
23:04so if i do 15 minutes and three sets of three exercises that is my minimum viable session and
23:08that means i can stay consistent with the gym rather than feeling oh i don't have a full hour
23:12to work out therefore i might i might as well not work out at all and my friend so i hope bloom has
23:15an idea that i found really helpful like i was hanging out with him a couple of months ago
23:19and i asked him how he's how he's able to stay so consistent with exercise he's absolutely jacked
23:24he's like a hybrid athlete he's training for like a ultra marathon and also is jacked and seems to
23:29hit the gym every day in some capacity and he taught me about his system of a b and c goals
23:34so when it comes to fitness for example his a goal like if it's an a day like gold standard would be
23:39to do weight training for like an hour that's his a goal but if he's not able to do that his b goal
23:46is to do some sort of form of sort of vigorous exercise for like 20 minutes or something to
23:52that effect and if he's not able to do that his c goal is to just walk around for 15 minutes or
23:57something like that so on a day where he's traveling for example and he doesn't have access
24:01to a gym and he doesn't have 20 minutes to do some vigorous exercise he will just walk around
24:05for like 10 minutes in the airport and that will help him take off his c goal which will help him
24:10stay consistent with the goal of getting enough exercise if you just tell yourself that actually
24:14doing 15 minutes of walking around the airport also counts it allows me to keep my streak alive
24:19and you don't need an hour in the gym every day to have momentum you sometimes just need
24:23seven minutes of exercise to have that momentum i think just as a productivity system or a business
24:32or a lifestyle whatever it's about picking a thing and then sticking with that thing
24:38yeah right um through the ups and downs of what life inevitably brings you okay the final point
24:45in this video is that really everything becomes a lot easier when it comes to discipline if you
24:52stick to the method that you are trying to do now one of the reasons why ryan holiday is so prolific
24:57when it comes to writing is because for the last like 20 years he has been sticking to exactly the
25:02same system for writing he has this notecard system he talks about it in one of his youtube
25:07a bunch of his youtube videos and yeah he admits that maybe there's some sort of slightly better
25:11system out there but he also fully knows that unless the system is transformatively better
25:16than the one he already has the value of sticking to what he's already doing is way better for his
25:21self-discipline and for his consistency than trying to constantly change productivity apps
25:25or writing systems or of that one new piece of software that's just come out that's going to be
25:30the secret the thing that i need to stay productive and disciplined finally that's just not true
25:34being productive and being disciplined being consistent from like literally everyone i've
25:38spoken to who's more consistent than i am in stuff they just pick one thing and they just do it
25:42repeatedly and if you have one thing one routine or just one system one workout plan you just do
25:46it repeatedly you're massively reducing the cognitive burden like the mental friction that
25:50it comes that comes to kind of deciding what to do and that again lowers the hump coming back down
25:56to a discipline analogy the thing feels good so you're able to sustain the momentum of doing the
26:01thing but to get over the hump initially you lower the hump by reducing the cognitive friction the
26:05cognitive overload and you reduce that by just sticking to the same system i profess to have no
26:10no secrets other than don't quit this is by far the single biggest secret to success if ever i've
26:16heard one which is just pick something and do not quit if you do something for decades there is
26:20literally no world in which you're not going to succeed at the thing right the problem is if you
26:24do something for six months and then switch to something else and something else something else
26:27whether it's on a macro level like what sort of business you want to run or even on a micro level
26:31like what sort of note-taking system you want to use those are the people that produce a lot less
26:35output and are a lot less disciplined and less consistent and ultimately less impactful than
26:39the people that just have a system and just stick to that system this is something i still struggle
26:43with i still love to think that like the next productivity writing app is going to help me
26:47finally be consistent with my writing but honestly if i were just to use apple notes and i just use
26:52that system every freaking day i'd have written so much more than the fact than what i've done
26:56because i've been trying to screw around with all these different systems and different apps
26:59seneca had this word euthymia which he defines as tranquility it says tranquility is the sense of
27:07the path that you are on and not being distracted by the paths that crisscross yours
27:14it is especially from those who are hopelessly lost okay so this video was about five actionable
27:19tips from ryan holiday that i've personally applied to my life around self-discipline but
27:22if you're interested in a more evidence-based approach i actually did a video a few months ago
27:26which is over here which is about i think five ish more evidence-based strategies for discipline that
27:31talks about uh implementation intentions and mental contrasting and a bunch of pretty cool stuff around
27:35if you're struggling with this discipline thing i think you'll find that video really
27:37helpful so thank you so much for watching and i'll see you there bye