How To Develop Rock Solid Self-Discipline

If you were to ask someone what “the crown jewel” of life is, you’ll probably get differing responses.

Some might say it’s a robust family life. Others might say a dynamic career. Others still will say high levels of personal financial capital.

While all of these are good and even great, they are impossible to achieve without the real crown jewel of life — self discipline.

Without moderate levels of self-discipline, most success and achievement will be out of your grasp.

Here’s an in-depth look at how to develop this important yet seemingly elusive skill and character trait.

The Shining Light of Civilization

“Discipline is what you must have to resist the lure of excuses.” – Brian Tracy, No Excuses

Civilization and society are built off of delayed gratification.

Everything you see around you – cutting edge businesses, masterful architectural wonders, dazzling works of art, technological wonders, convenient vehicles, all of them are products of self discipline on a macro scale.

On the micro level, your ability to reap and enjoy the fruits of your own labor and that of others will be almost proportional to the amount of self discipline you’ve built up in your lifestyle (though not always).

In other words, success is pretty much impossible without self discipline.

Point blank, end of story. You might as well pack up and go home if you have little or no self discipline or are unwilling to build it.

If you are willing to build it (which I’m sure you are), then read on to get a surface overview.

This article is going to be a brief breakdown on how to develop your self discipline and increase whatever discipline you already have.

What Is Self Discipline Exactly? (the Definition of Self-Discipline)

Self discipline and how to develop it is a topic that has consumed and engaged the most brilliant minds in history, so it’s something worth exploring.

In the article on self discipline vs. regret, I put forth the definition of self discipline as:

the act of corralling and marshaling your emotions, behavior, and mental resources to achieve a goal or intention that would not be achieved in the absence of this intention.

Viewing life through this lens, this is virtually everything good that exists in life. An individual starts bumping up against the bad things in society when they lack self discipline in various areas. Some examples:

• Sleep deprivation or other health problems when a person chronically goes to bed late
• Lack of money for emergencies when a person spends instead of saves
• An STD or accidental pregnancy when an individual or couple doesn’t practice birth control

All of these things come when a person does not direct their emotional and/or mental resources to planning and doing things that automatically do not occur in the absence of such planning.

Conversely, an individual is rewarded when they exercise self discipline:

• Going through 4 years of undergraduate education and coming out with a degree
• Consistently saving money from day one when they start working and then becoming an eventual millionaire
• Deciding to go to the gym on days when you don’t “feel like it” and getting closer to a chiseled body

The things that “don’t come natural” become things that push you closer towards rewards because they are things that civilization values.

Speaking of “things that don’t come natural”, one of them is sacrificing for success. If you want to learn how/why to do that, check out Sacrifice for Success: How to Give Up Things for the Ultimate Prize.

Developing Self Discipline: The Importance of the Will

In the absence of self-discipline, there’s chaos. That much has been established. But what is the driving engine behind self-discipline.

It’s human imagination and quite frankly, the will.

Without any strong environmental shapers of behavior, the human will is the most important factor in developing self-discipline.

It is the “pushing” locomotive force behind doing any thing of any consequence. Before an activity that has value is a habit, it must first be consciously exercised. This is the role of the will or the conscious mind.

The Will and the Prefrontal Cortex

As a human, you can accomplish a lot – especially if you set your mind to it. And it’s all because of the prefrontal cortex.

This portion of your brain is the seat of the rational, conscious mind. It’s also the seat of your ability to focus and what is known as working memory.

Your working memory is responsible for temporarily holding information and organizing it based on priorities.

With a strong working memory, you’re able to accomplish tasks, put things in priorities, planning, self-control, and getting things done.

When you think of someone who has good time management skills and “has their shit together”, chances are that they have an excellent working memory.

They have good self-mastery.

How does the prefrontal cortex impact self-discipline?

Your prefrontal cortex is the last area of the brain to finish forming and it’s the area of the brain which we seem to rely the most on consciously in our day to day (great, yeah?). It takes until about 25 to finish forming, but in some people it will be sooner and others it will be later. Until that happens, you won’t be able to access the top end of your willpower.

This is pretty much why adolescents (especially males) act like idiots, lack empathy, and enjoy “taking the easy way out”. In the interim, to close that gap, socialization AKA habits are intended to help a young child or adolescent act in a way that helps them give value to others.

But what if you weren’t giving good habits as a child? Are you doomed to go throughout life in a suboptimal state? No, not really.

But you’ll need to build those habits yourself. Here’s a quick way to get started:

How to Improve Self-Discipline: Exercises and Tactics

Building self-discipline will be one of the most difficult things you ever do, but easily one of the most rewarding. When you train yourself to act in a disciplined way despite easier paths, you make it much more likely for you to succeed in whatever you’re doing at the time.

Here’s some ways to build self-discipline into your life and if you already have good amounts of self-discipline, here’s how to improve self discipline that you may already have.

Outline Clear Objectives

It’s hard to get excited about the journey when the destination is unclear. This is why establishing goals and clear objectives for achievement helps self-discipline move along.

On a day to day basis, this is a simple to-do list. On longer time lines like a month or a quarter, this is a set of objectives or goals that the smaller to-dos will feed into.

One way you can start goal achievement for the month is by planning your week. Once you visualize and set in stone your week, you’ll be much better off seeing what the month or even the year looks like.

But sticking low to the ground on a day to day level, doing things on the to-do list is where it starts. Let’s say you want to clean your house. Break that down into smaller parts. You clean one room, then the next, then the next. You may have to vacuum, dust, etc. Clearly outline what is required for that task to be completed and it will be much easier to summon up the willpower to complete that task.

Exercise the Will

As stated before, willpower is a large aspect of self-discipline. This is what people think of when they imagine “self-discipline”. In a world with many different choices, you have to narrow down those choices and pick one. This is an aspect of willpower and the human will. Nothing gets done without a firm decision to do it.

If you want to clean your room, you have to decide to clean that room. No one else will decide for you. Willpower and decision-making are the cornerstone of day to day discipline and self-management.

Going back to the prefrontal cortex, this will determine how much you can “flex” your will. Deep inside, you might have a very strong will to do something – but you just don’t want to do it. Most of the time, this comes down to a dampened prefrontal response. Your prefrontal cortex is like a muscle and like a muscle, it gets tired. Over the course of a day, your prefrontal cortex will lose the ability to decide accurately and may give into temptation.

The prefrontal cortex gets replenished by sleep, but you can easily expand your current capabilities. You do this by pushing to the limit of your ability and a little bit over. This is done by persisting on things past the point you want to quit or a practice like meditation. Focusing on a single thing for a certain period of time and “swatting away” outside noise.

This is the “push” side to self-discipline. There’s a “pull” side, which I discuss in the audio below talking about the art of self discipline.

Using the will is an important part in beating procrastination. If you want to learn how to do that, check out How to Stop Procrastinating: 7 Foolproof Methods.

Make “Self-Discipline” the Default

Much of the battle of building better habits comes down to finding ways to reduce the friction associated with out good habits and increase the friction associated with our bad ones. – James Clear, Atomic Habits

As I mention in the episode above, one aspect of the “pull” side of self-discipline is to make behaviors that require self-discipline the environmental default. I think this is key because you will only be able to select from activities that are present in your environment.

You want to create an environment where it is easy to engage in activities that have value in the short or long term, rather than one that encourages its opposites. An easy example is weight loss and/or fitness. It is generally agreed that it is better to have more muscle on your body than fat (to a point). What do you do to encourage that? You don’t keep any junk in your house and instead replace it with healthy food.

This is why people who have a drug issue to go rehab. A rehab center is an environment where drugs are not allowed, therefore the addict cannot choose from that option. The rehab center then teaches the addict coping skills and builds up their self-discipline (flex power) so they can effectively choose from better options in the real world.

This is the overarching philosophy behind something like the dopamine detox. You are removing low value activities and make it easier to engage in high value ones. This is the big secret behind those who call themselves “self-disciplined”.

Conclusion + Wrapping Up

Self-discipline is the hallmark of what it means to be human. Self-discipline is the act of controlling your emotions, behavior, and mental resources to achieve a goal or intention that would not be achieved in the absence of this intention.

With self-discipline, your potential for success and achievement is uncapped. Without it, however, you will live a limited existence dictated by the whims of other people and third-parties.

Self-discipline is largely directed by the ability to choose among various “targets” in our environment, then engaging with them. This happens through willpower, an individual’s conscious intention to select higher value activities rather than lower value ones.

A person can train their willpower (and as a result self-discipline) by exercising it and then replenishing it via good sleep and rest and relaxation.

Habit formation, willpower, and environmental selection are the secrets of “self-disciplined” people.

And if you want to take your self-discipline to the next level, check out Cornerstone. Cornerstone is a focused and pragmatic set of 4 modules based around 4 key areas in holistic human self-improvement.

If you want more information on it, hit the jump below.