Everyone talks about delayed gratification and maintaining consistent long-term focus as things you can just wake up and magically decide to do. Well you can’t.

not you specifically, of course. I know the readers of this magnificent blog are only the most decorated, self-important of beings ;)

extra funny because I reckon I’m the only one reading the things I write

At least I know I can’t.

and because I am the most HUMBLE person around, I’ll assume that most people can’t either

and if you can somehow always make and stick to long-term +EV decisions, I don’t think there’s much utility in reading anything I write

Raw discipline is difficult. I refuse to believe that the kind of natty, intrinsic, pull yourself up by the bootstraps discipline that self-help books froth at the mouth over is anything but an extreme rarity, found in true outliers. Even then I’d sooner classify it as a myth than anything most people can derive value from emulating.

I say all of this as someone who can, and often does single-mindedly stalk goals to completion. But never out of any inherent willpower or ability. In fact, I often feel that out of my peers, I am the most at mercy to my brain’s electrochemistry.

the animal within you, the beast longing to be unleashed to indulge and enjoy

And that’s because greedy decision making is such a simple paradigm to move through life with. Why make locally difficult choices for the prospect of long-term rewards when I can simply push the dopamine button at every turn.

• Sleep in? Of course
• Snack? Y E S
• Lounge around and spam video games? Sign me up

shout-out to the 3000 calories of Kinder chocolate bars I dusted off while watching The Grand Tour

Easy vs Hard Discipline

So how does one get things done in this world of infinite temptation and ever decreasing willpower?

The framework I’ve landed on revolves around the observation that I have quite sharp peaks and troughs in motivation, with a general inverse proportionality with time of day. My actions reflect my transition from Jekyll to Hyde, the goal being to make consumption decisions when I have more clarity so as to rob myself of the optionality later on.

I know that if I’m up at two in the night and the desire for snacks starts creeping in, there won’t be much stopping me from clearing every cupboard and digging through every drawer. At the same time, for most of my daily existence I’m quite rational about my needs and wants.

Easy discipline is when you make a choice at the decision barrier—where your willpower is high and the desire for any particular “negative” action is low (not buying snacks when you’re out shopping). This bumps up the effort required to undertake said action later (I want to snack late at night).

Of course, the flip side of this is that you lose the optionality of ever snacking at home, even in situations where it would be fine to indulge.

Alas, this optionality is only available to those who can commit to hard discipline: buying the snacks, knowing it makes it easy for you to overconsume during the night, but trusting that you won’t.

tl;dr pull the trigger at the easy discipline checkpoints if you can’t trust yourself to pass the hard discipline ones

this explanation feels a bit shoddy so here’s a graph where I strove to use as many colors as I could !

Weaponized Procrastination

But what about things that aren’t gated by external decisions? Choosing to practice an instrument or spend five hours grinding ranked in League isn’t something that can be access-separated temporally short of locking your computer away for the night.

This is where I utilize my next biggest strength: procrastination. I keep a decently large rotation of things I should do {study, work out, climb, practice guitar, write, ...}, each with its own variable level of effort required. Then, when I don’t feel like doing something difficult, I just context switch into something else that is marginally easier or more fun and keep the cycle going as my interest wanes.

is my attention span cooked chat

at my old job I had a friend who set up his VS Code to play Subway Surfers on the bottom half for maximum focus

tl;dr

• Natty discipline is hard
• People make greedy decisions
• Getting things done requires you to first figure out how you tick
• Then it’s all about creating the right framework to exploit your tendencies and force yourself into the long-term +EV path while ALSO making short-term +EV decisions