The modern world glorifies discipline.

People online tell you that the key to everlasting productivity, success and happiness is found in that little package called discipline.

I’ve fallen into a weird rabbit hole with it in the past.

I’ve consumed countless videos from gurus online showing me their methods to unlock maximum discipline. I thought there was just one piece of knowledge I was missing that would instantly unlock the reservoirs of discipline buried within me. I’ve tried using discipline to be more productive but it’s never worked out. I’ve never been able to sustain it because you can’t.

Everything changed when I realised this truth that most people don’t want to hear: discipline is overrated.

Why discipline is overrated

Discipline consists of two elements:

• Forcing yourself to do something you don’t want to do (but have to do)
• Forcing yourself to avoid doing something you want to do (but shouldn’t)

There are many problems with this if you think about it.

If you force yourself to do something, you won’t do a good job at it, which is what matters. You don’t want to do it. How will forcing yourself to do it make a difference?

As I mentioned earlier, it’s not sustainable.

When you try to do difficult work, you likely feel a force preventing you from taking action. The force of friction. Discipline is trying to brute force your way through that friction to get to the other side.

This is admirable but you realistically won’t be doing this every day.

Many people who preach about discipline talk about how it’s better than relying on motivation (which isn’t great either) for getting things done. Ironically, discipline relies on motivation. Some days, you simply can’t muster up the discipline to overcome the friction of doing something, since you don’t feel like it. It just feels impossible.

Relying on discipline is a quick recipe for burnout. You’re exerting far more energy than necessary to do anything. On the days you fail to be disciplined (which will happen), you’ll feel horrible about yourself as well. That’s not any better.

Discipline ignores the fact that friction is a real thing. It tries to fight it.

I used to say that to change your life, you need to simply stop doing the wrong things and start doing the right things. It’s not that easy. That’s like asking a clinically depressed person to start being happy.

You’re in a losing battle by fighting friction with discipline. A more sustainable approach involves leveraging it. It involves making the right things the default and making the wrong things ridiculously hard.

There are three ways you can do that:

1 – Master the art of environment design.

Most people chase grand “hacks” (like just being more disciplined) to solve their problems. They ignore the power of the small but mighty fixes that really do the heavy lifting.

The easiest, most overlooked change you could make right now to improve your life is to optimise your environment.

Trying to be disciplined in a distracting environment where it’s impossible to do the right things is futile.

The author James Clear puts it well in his book Atomic Habits:

Simply resisting temptations is an ineffective strategy. It is hard to maintain a Zen attitude in a life filled with interruptions. It takes too much energy. In the short-run, you can choose to overpower temptation. In the long-run, we become a product of the environment we live in.

It’s far easier to reduce the friction of doing the right thing than to fight through it. It’s far easier to increase the friction of doing the wrong thing than to simply resist the urge. Think of it this way:

Being disciplined is like trying to run with an annoying pebble in your shoe. Optimising your environment is taking the pebble out.

For example, if you want to focus during your work, put your phone in another room. You know it will distract you. Don’t resist that temptation. Eliminate it entirely. If you want to drink more water, make it obvious. Place water bottles in different locations around your home so they’re hard to miss.

You can also optimise your digital environment for the right behaviour. If an app is distracting you on your phone, downloading another app that blocks it entirely at certain times is a smart solution. (Or just delete it.)

If you can master your environment, you can master your life. It is the invisible hand that shapes human behaviour, as James Clear describes it. Trying to ignore its influence on you with discipline doesn’t work.

2 – Don’t brute force it.

As mentioned earlier, discipline involves brute forcing your way through your work meaning you won’t do great work at all.

Why bother? Why not make your work so easy you don’t have to consider it?

There are two ways you could do this.

The first is to make the smallest possible start. Before you start anything, it can seem incredibly overwhelming. You don’t know where to begin. For the simplest tasks, discipline can work. For more complex ones, it’s better to ask a simple question:

How can I move from here to the next level?

It helps to think of your task as a video game. When you haven’t started it, you’re at Level 0. The jump from Level 0 to Level 1 isn’t challenging. You just need to find the simplest action you can take to move there. That could mean writing the first paragraph of your essay (or the first sentence if that’s too hard). Do one push-up or one squat. Hop in the cold shower for one second. Just feel the water.

You want to break the task down so much that starting it doesn’t require overcoming any friction at all.

What matters isn’t making a grand start but starting at all. A step in the right direction is infinitely better than doing nothing.

The second method is to make the task fun.

Listen to good music. Keep your dog around. Do whatever you must do to make the work slightly more bearable and enjoyable. Enjoying the work is what makes it sustainable over a long period of time.

To be successful, you must first be consistent.

3 – Make a contract with yourself.

With this tactic, you can throw discipline out of the window.

If you’re struggling to start a good habit or break a bad one, sign a contract. Lay out a clear punishment for yourself if you fail to do the right thing. This could mean handing over money to a friend or jumping into an ice bath.

The punishment shouldn’t kill you of course. It should be scary enough that you don’t become complacent and the more extreme, the better.

I use a similar but less intense method for this newsletter.

I’ve promised to send an article every Monday and Thursday. If I don’t deliver, the world’s not going to end, but my readers will be disappointed and that would be the punishment for me.

This is an example of a public contract which is highly effective.

To make one, tell people online and who you know what you’re going to do and when. You’ll have no choice but to show up when the time comes.

A better way to view discipline

You might think I dislike discipline, but that’s not the case. It’s not that evil. Sometimes, it’s necessary.

This post’s title says that discipline is overrated, not that it’s useless, stupid, or foolish.

For a reason.

Some situations do require discipline. If you have big exams coming up, you have no choice but to study for them unless you want to fail. If you have a book to publish, you have to show up and write each day unless you don’t care about it succeeding.

The issue is that the common approach to discipline involves brute forcing your way through your work.

It involves neglecting your happiness and sanity as well. This isn’t necessary. While you still have to do what’s required, you can make those things far easier. You don’t have to burn yourself out by fighting friction.

Instead, work with it. Befriend it. (Ok, reducing friction isn’t really befriending it but it’s a nicer way to think about it.)