On discipline and freedom
On discipline and freedom
Sorry for not writing sooner. I’ve been heads down and developing a new product that I’m going to launch soon (I’ll notify you when public beta comes out). I’m really enjoying doing that, and time flies as I’m doing it, so there is none left for writing… But, I wanted to share something before I forget. This article is a continuation of my previous article about habits.
(Thoughts about writing won’t leave me alone, but I don’t want to write yet another article about writing, especially since I didn’t publish anything in over a month. So, that will wait for now. Let’s talk about habits and discipline instead.)
For every disciplined effort there is a multiple reward.
Jim Rohn
Discipline. I’ve always had problems with discipline. After sticking to a couple of habits for a couple of weeks, I would get tired of it and just quit them all.
I remember thinking that I am turning into a robot, since I had a checklist of things that I had to do in a day. And so, I’ve abandoned my habits and haven’t had any discipline for a while. Freedom!!! (I hope you read that in Braveheart.) Freedom is what I wanted.
And I do have a lot of freedom with my time. Nothing forces me to wake up in the morning and nothing bad will happen if instead of waking up at 6 am, I wake up at 10 am.
Nothing bad will happen if I don’t do anything productive. If I just go down the YouTube rabbit hole and end up on a series of Giovanni Giorgio memes or binge watch yet another Netflix documentary about serial killers for hours (is there a better way to start a day than watching a bunch of murders?).
I basically don’t have any obligations in a day, except work. And it felt good not having anything to do in my free time. But this feeling only lasted for so long.
I’ve also noticed something about this lack of obligations and alleged pursuit of freedom: it fosters passivity, which leads to depression. Nothing pushes me out of bed in the morning, which is why I’ve usually stayed in bed until 9-10am. Alarm would go off, but I would just turn it off and continue sleeping.
It felt like comfort zone had its arms around my neck and the motherfucker started chocking. So I had enough of it.
Cold showers, motherfucker! Waking up at 6:30 and training right away. This immediately made me feel better.
In other words, I’ve decided to organize myself and give Ultraworking Lights yet another shot (a fucking 3rd shot, sorry, I’m only human). The idea is to track all of your habits in a spreadsheet and to aim for completing them all every day. I’ve been following it religiously for the past 10 weeks and it feels amazing! I’m at around 70% success rate as instructed by their best practices, but here’s my best week with success rate of 87% that I’m really proud of and will probably talk stories about to my grandchildren:
That’s right. I track weekends too, I don’t care.
What surprised me the most is that simply tracking if I wake up early actually inspires me to wake up early. (The first row tracks “Woke up by 7:30”.)
So yeah. That’s it. That’s the article.
This article is just a reminder for me, because I’ll probably forget why I’m doing it. The future me will probably feel good and the lazy fucker will probably think that he doesn’t need habits, or discipline or anything. He’ll probably think he can just have zero habits and still feel great. Well, guess what, you old fart — turns out you can’t!
I mean, you are free to change the habits if you realize that they are not useful to you anymore. They are not set in stone. But, for the love of everything that’s good, please stick to some habits if you want to avoid feeling like a sack of potatoes. Thanks.