Why Discipline, Not Motivation, is Your Key to Success

If you've got a big dream, there will be high-value actions you'll have to do consistently and repeatedly in order to be successful. It's the cumulative effect of taking these actions that creates your success.

Even though we recognise how important these things are, we don’t do them.

A common mistake we make is relying on being motivated to do these things.

We say things like, “I just need to get motivated to do yada yada yada.” But this never works.

How many times have you felt good on a given day and still not done what you said you'd do? You could feel amazing and still not do those high-value tasks that move you closer to your goal.

But also, motivation is ephemeral. It's inconsistent. You can't rely on something inconsistent to consistently drive your behaviour to take the actions you need to achieve your dreams.

You will never always be motivated. You have to learn to be disciplined.

Discipline has a negative connotation for a lot of people. We associate it with punishment. We think of times when we disobeyed some rule or broke a code of behaviour and we were disciplined. We were punished by our parents, our teachers, or our boss.

I want to give you some different perspectives on discipline so you can see it in a more multi-dimensional way and have a deeper understanding of it. That will help you overcome your negative associations with it so you can start to cultivate discipline in your life and leverage its power to achieve your goals and ultimately create the life you want.

One of the dictionary definitions of discipline is “activity that provides mental or physical training.” I would add emotional training to that too. This is important because there are going to be new skills you'll have to learn in order to achieve your goals. Discipline creates opportunities for you to practice intentional repetition. Repetition is the mother of skill. This is how you build competence.

You've probably heard of Malcolm Gladwell's concept of the 10,000 Hour Rule; that it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill. We don't necessarily need to master every skill we learn, but we do need to become competent at them. And the common denominator between competence and mastery is intentional repetition: practice. You can't get that practice in, you can't do that intentional repetition consistently to build your skill without discipline. You don't do one sit-up or one bicep curl or one bench press and get buff. It's the repetition that builds the muscle. Success isn't a one-time thing. It's a habit and a way of life.

Discipline is training yourself to do something in a controlled and habitual way. This overlaps with the idea of intentional repetition. Your habits play a vitally important role in your success. Our habits create our destiny, to paraphrase Gandhi. A habit is a ritual or a routine that you do repeatedly until it hardwires itself in and becomes automatic. If you have the awareness to realise you need to develop certain productive habits to achieve your goals, then you can design and implement routines in your life that are going to install these habits. These routines become the scaffolding to hang your day on. They create a structure that you can just walk into. Then you don't have to try to get yourself to do things. It happens organically and automatically because of the structure.

Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want most. Abraham Lincoln said that. I love that quote because I think it really gets to the essence. It highlights that you're making a choice. You have to be aware of your priorities to make a choice that you're going to be happy with, a choice that's aligned with your values. If you're repeatedly making choices that aren't aligned with your values, you erode your self-esteem and self-trust. It also touches on instant gratification and delayed gratification. A lot of the time when we're not disciplined, we're giving into short-term thinking and instant gratification. Achieving your dreams is a long game that requires you to forgo some of the instant gratification of what you want in the moment for what you want most of all - the thing that would really light your soul up.

Discipline is doing what you know needs to be done, even though you don't want to. I'll give you a little peek behind the scenes. I didn't feel motivated to do this video. And yet here I am. When I first sat down to write this video, I had writer's block. I had no idea of what to write about. I was confronted with the terror of the blank page staring back at me. So I really didn't want to write this video, but I knew I needed to because creating valuable content for people regularly is part of my mission as a coach. It's a high priority for me. And so I did it. I went through the process, even though I didn't feel like it. That's because of discipline. It’s because I’ve intentionally created a habit, a routine, so that I create videos regardless of whether I’m motivated or not. If I relied exclusively on my motivation to do these videos, I wouldn't be anywhere near as consistent as I am. I certainly wouldn't be doing them every week.

Here's one last one for you. This might be my favourite. Discipline is the distance between your dreams and reality. What you do today has an accumulated effect on all your tomorrows. Your discipline bridges the gap between your current reality and your goals. It's like discipline is the vehicle that takes you from where you are now to where you want to go.

We think discipline is hard and so we often opt for the easy way out. Well, life is hard if you live it the easy way and easy if you live it the hard way. It might be hard to be disciplined and consistently show up every day and take the actions that move you towards your goals. But it's infinitely harder to be undisciplined because you'll have to deal with the pain of a life of regret, the torment of unfulfilled dreams, and the anguish of not realising your potential or your purpose.