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5 Easy Ways to Become More Self-Disciplined

2024-04-12 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali, Ryan Holiday · recording, 27:40 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Productivity and time (also: Mindset, motivation and happiness) · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: Lesson from a book, Sponsor segment present, His medical past

Ali shares five ways to be more self-disciplined drawn from his interview with Ryan Holiday: focus on one main thing, aim for progress over immediate success by lowering the bar, accept both the higher and the lower self, build a flexible routine of general principles, and stick to one system instead of switching. He argues discipline is best used only to push work over the initial hump.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — A note on discipline: the boulder, the hill and the hump; why Ali learns from Ryan Holiday

  • ★★★ Ali thinks the lionisation of discipline is a bit of a scam: hustle bros tell people that being more disciplined is the solution to all their problems in life. — 00:00:00

    “the lionization of discipline is a little bit of a scam”

  • ★★ Ali defines discipline as getting yourself to do something you don't feel like doing; if you felt like doing it, you would be motivated. — 00:00:29

  • ★★★ Using discipline through a whole task is like rolling a boulder uphill, stressful and often undone like Sisyphus; Ali says the goal should be to make the work feel so good that it rolls downhill. — 00:01:22
  • ★★★ Since not everything can be enjoyable, Ali adds a hump before the downhill: a small dose of discipline gets the task over it, and that is where discipline strategies should be used. — 00:02:00
  • ★★ A few months before, in Austin, Ali met and interviewed Ryan Holiday, author of Discipline Is Destiny, and visited his bookshop with its attached studio. — 00:02:29 · Ryan Holiday

00:03:20 — 1. The main thing: focus on a tiny number of things

  • ★★ Ali wants to learn consistency from Ryan Holiday because he seems to enjoy his life, rather than from someone who is consistent and miserable. — 00:03:20 · Ryan Holiday
  • ★★ Ryan Holiday says that among the many necessary supporting things in life, you have to know what your main thing is, the main driver of everything. — 00:03:20 · Ryan Holiday
  • ★ Seneca (quoted): Seneca said that if a man does not know to which port he sails, no wind is favourable. — 00:03:20
  • ★★★ Ali's takeaway is the value of focusing on a tiny number of things: people at his talks who struggle with discipline are generally trying to do too much, and discipline across a dozen things is very hard. — 00:04:04
  • ★★ Ali calls Cal Newport's new book Slow Productivity great; its first principle is to do fewer things. — 00:04:04 · Cal Newport
  • ★★ Ali calls Greg McKeown's Essentialism amazing: its thesis is to figure out what is essential to your life and eliminate everything else. — 00:04:04

00:04:37 — BetterHelp sponsor read

00:05:35 — The main thing: three or four goals a year and the two-hours-a-week question

  • ★★ Whenever Ali feels inconsistent or less self-disciplined than he would like, he zooms out to his calendar, projects list and to-do list and always finds he is trying to do too much. — 00:05:35
  • ★★ Ali calls Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks, a philosophical take on time management, amazing; its idea is that we are all simply trying to do too much. — 00:05:35
  • ★★ Since it is sometimes impossible to juggle all the important things, Ali says we have to be strategically mediocre at some things and eliminate a lot to focus on the one main thing. — 00:06:20
  • ★★★ Ali limits himself to three or four goals for the whole year: more becomes overwhelming, and consistent progress on a few things is easier than inconsistent progress on many. — 00:06:20
  • ★★★ Ali often asks what he would do with his business if he had only two, four or eight hours a week to work, what would most move the needle, and then why he doesn't just do that five days a week. — 00:07:15
  • ★★ The two-hours question shows Ali he should only be doing two things, making videos and working on new courses, yet these take about 20% of his calendar rather than 80%. — 00:07:41
  • ★★ Although he has read about productivity for 15 years and made videos about it for seven, Ali says he still falls into the trap of taking on too much. — 00:07:41

00:08:08 — Free online alignment workshop before 20 April 2024

00:08:56 — 2. Progress, not immediate success: Wim Hof, lowering the bar, the Fogg behavior model, trusting the process

  • ★★ Wim Hof, known as the Iceman, holds the Guinness World Record for the longest ice-cold bath, one hour, 52 minutes and 42 seconds, and has climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in shorts. — 00:09:00
  • ★★ Ali has tried cold showers and can barely last a few seconds under cold water, which could tempt him to call himself a failure next to Wim Hof. — 00:09:00
  • ★★ Wim Hof, in his 60s, started cold plunges at 17 and made them a daily practice, slowly getting better; his fame as the Iceman did not come overnight. — 00:09:29

  • ★★★ Comparing a novice with an expert like Wim Hof misses the point, Ali says: we are going for progress rather than immediate success. — 00:09:29

    “we're going for progress rather than immediate success”

  • ★★ Ryan Holiday says a philosophy or a new way of thinking is absorbed not by reading 300 pages in a month and a half but by layering it a page a day for years and coming back to it over and over. — 00:09:58 · Ryan Holiday

  • ★★ People at Ali's talks who struggle with consistency often do so because their standards are too high: they try to be too good too quickly. — 00:10:26
  • ★★ At a talk on 11 April 2024, Ali told a woman who had made two YouTube videos in about three years because of perfectionism to accept that her first 50 videos will be trash. — 00:10:26
  • ★★★ For people whose perfectionism keeps them from taking action, Ali says the solution is to lower the bar until they act consistently, then slowly raise it over time. — 00:10:55
  • ★★ BJ Fogg, a Stanford scientist, created the Fogg Behavior Model (B=MAP): a behaviour occurs when motivation, ability and a prompt come together at once. — 00:10:55
  • ★★ In the Fogg Behavior Model, a prompt triggers an easy behaviour even at low motivation, but the same prompt does not trigger a difficult one at the same motivation. — 00:11:28
  • ★★★ Following BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits, whose thesis Ali likens to James Clear's Atomic Habits, Ali advises finding the tiniest, easiest version of a habit or hard task, which makes you far more likely to do it however motivated you feel. — 00:11:55 · Atomic Habits, James Clear
  • ★★ In medical school Ali found studying for exams easier by telling himself he would study for just five minutes, which then grew to 10, 15 and 20. — 00:12:25
  • ★★ Self-discipline is a general skill, Ali says: having gone through a process a few times, you learn its hard and demotivating parts and can trust, and enjoy, the process. — 00:13:44

00:14:14 — 3. The lower self and the higher self: the PlayStation at 10:30 and internal family systems

  • ★★ Ryan Holiday argues that we have a higher self and a lower self, the lower self wanting immediate gratification. — 00:14:14 · Ryan Holiday
  • ★★ Ali recently got a PS5 and plays Horizon Forbidden West; at 10:30 p.m., his wind-down time, his higher self wants bed while his lower self argues for another hour, which can turn into two. — 00:14:40
  • ★ Ali is reading Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth on his Kindle. — 00:15:09 · Kindle
  • ★★ In 2023 Ali did a few therapy and coaching sessions with his friend Dr K of Healthy Gamer GG, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist and trained monk, who taught him internal family systems. — 00:15:43
  • ★★★ In internal family systems, as in the film Inside Out, we have many characters in our brains, and none is good or bad: the higher self is not the good guy, nor the lower self the bad guy. — 00:16:12
  • ★★ With Dr K, Ali named his inner characters, such as Optimizer Ali, Second-in-the-class Ali and Video Game Degenerate Ali, each with its own needs and opinions. — 00:16:12
  • ★★★ Shoving an inner character into a corner and calling it bad leads to rebellion, Ali says; internal family systems has the characters talk to each other and acknowledges each one's concerns. — 00:16:42
  • ★★ At 10:30 Ali offers the video-gamer part of himself a compromise: turn off the PlayStation and watch YouTube videos about Horizon Forbidden West while brushing his teeth, so both parts get a win. — 00:17:27

00:18:16 — 4. Flexible routine: the undisciplined months of 2020, structure versus rigidity, general principles

  • ★★ Instead of a resistance approach to discipline that calls the lower self bad, Ali advises appreciating it, taking its advice on board and deciding by integrating both parts. — 00:18:16
  • ★★★ One of the least disciplined periods of Ali's life was the months after he took a break from full-time medicine in August 2020: with nothing on his calendar, he procrastinated all day and did not make a video, day after day. — 00:18:16
  • ★★ Working 50 to 60 hours a week as a doctor, Ali made more YouTube videos than as a full-time YouTuber; without structure or routine he was very undisciplined, and the constraint was his own psychology. — 00:18:59
  • ★★ Ryan Holiday thinks most self-published books don't work because there is no forcing function: no approval needed to start, no deadline and no constraints, a freedom that can be a death sentence. — 00:19:24 · Ryan Holiday
  • ★★★ Ali's fourth tip for self-discipline is to think about the routine or structure you are creating around the thing you want to do. — 00:19:50
  • ★★ Ryan Holiday's routine, as Ali tells it: wake up, exercise, take the kids to school, several uninterrupted hours of deep work in the morning, and a relaxed afternoon, nearly every day. — 00:19:50 · Ryan Holiday, deep work (concept)
  • ★★ Routine is valuable, Ali says, but being so tied to a rigid routine that you cannot deviate from it is fragile: then your discipline goes through the floor. — 00:19:50
  • ★★★ Ryan Holiday says that as he got older and more successful, the rigidity that served him early on had to give way to flexibility, though he asks each time whether it is complacency or laziness. — 00:20:31 · Ryan Holiday
  • ★★ Ryan Holiday: Without flexibility, Ryan Holiday says, rigidity sucks the fun out of the work, is not sustainable over a long time, and is easily blown apart by the complexity of life. — 00:21:12 · Ryan Holiday
  • ★ Robert Greene (quoted): The last law of Robert Greene's The 48 Laws of Power is to assume formlessness: a visible plan opens you to attack, so keep yourself adaptable. — 00:21:12
  • ★★★ Routine and structure matter, Ali says, but being too rigid does not help: strategic flexibility is where we want to be. — 00:21:49
  • ★★ Ali's friend Paul Millerd stays consistent with writing through the mantra "write most days", not every day. — 00:21:49
  • ★★ Matt D'Avella's two-day rule for the gym is never to skip two days in a row: flexible enough for his life as a dad, structured enough to keep him consistent. — 00:22:13 · Matt D'Avella
  • ★★★ Ali finds the sweet spot of flexibility and structure that keeps him disciplined in general principles rather than specific routines. — 00:22:13
  • ★★★ Ali's general principle: most days, wherever possible, he does at least one hour of deep work before checking messages, Slack, email or other shallow work. — 00:22:45 · deep work (concept), Slack
  • ★★★ Ali aims for the gym at least three times a week, but 15 minutes with three sets of three exercises counts as a full session, his minimum viable session, so he stays consistent. — 00:22:45
  • ★★ Sahil Bloom stays consistent with exercise through A, B and C goals: an hour of weight training, else about 20 minutes of vigorous exercise, else a 15-minute walk, such as around an airport when travelling. — 00:23:33

00:24:10 — 5. Stick, don't switch: Ryan Holiday's note card system and Seneca's euthymia

  • ★★ Counting a short walk keeps the streak alive, Ali says: you don't need an hour in the gym every day for momentum, sometimes just seven minutes of exercise. — 00:24:10
  • ★★ Ryan Holiday says a productivity system, a business or a lifestyle is about picking one thing and sticking with it through life's ups and downs. — 00:24:10 · Ryan Holiday
  • ★★ Ryan Holiday is prolific because for about 20 years he has kept the same note card system for writing; he admits a slightly better system may exist but sticks unless one is transformatively better. — 00:24:51 · Ryan Holiday
  • ★★★ Constantly changing productivity apps or writing systems in search of the secret does not work, Ali says: everyone he knows who is more consistent picks one thing and does it repeatedly. — 00:25:21
  • ★★ Sticking to one routine, system or workout plan reduces the cognitive burden of deciding what to do, which, Ali says, lowers the hump of discipline. — 00:25:43
  • ★★ Ryan Holiday professes to have no secrets other than not quitting. — 00:25:43 · Ryan Holiday
  • ★★★ Ali calls picking something and not quitting the biggest secret to success he has heard: people who switch every six months, from business to note-taking system, produce far less. — 00:26:13
  • ★★ Ali still hopes the next writing app will make him consistent; had he just used Apple Notes every day, he says, he would have written much more. — 00:26:36
  • ★★ Ryan Holiday cites Seneca's word euthymia, tranquility: the sense of the path you are on, undistracted by the paths that crisscross yours. — 00:26:36 · Ryan Holiday

In the description and comments

  • ★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Answering a viewer's suggestion of a podcast with Dr K of Healthy Gamer GG, the channel says it is happening soon. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: discipline · Ryan Holiday

Also: People: Alok Kanojia · Andrew Huberman · BJ Fogg · Cal Newport · Eckhart Tolle · Greg McKeown · James Clear · Matt D'Avella · Oliver Burkeman · Paul Millerd · Robert Greene · Sahil Bloom · Seneca · Wim Hof

Works: A New Earth · Atomic Habits · Discipline Is Destiny · Essentialism · Four Thousand Weeks · Inside Out · Slow Productivity · The 48 Laws of Power · Tiny Habits

Organizations: BetterHelp · Stanford University

Concepts: deep work (concept) · euthymia · Fogg behavior model · implementation intentions · internal family systems · mental contrasting · notecard system · perfectionism · shallow work · two-day rule

Places: Austin

Products: Apple Notes · Horizon Forbidden West · Kindle · PlayStation 5 · Slack

Also centred on discipline: First Live Hangout + Rapid-fire Q&A · How to Be Effortlessly Disciplined: 5 Mindset Shifts · Is discipline always the answer? 🤔 · How to actually be disciplined 😕 · Discipline is Overrated 🤔

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