#83 | Undisciplined
It's the bleak midwinter (almost), and the temperature has plummeted to 15-degrees. The dog is sleeping inside to stay dry. For a moment, I even had to put a jumper on earlier.
As the weeks thump on (we're basically in June, fuck), I thought it was time to dig out my New Year's resolutions to see what I'd promised. But, heck, I can't find where I put them! Six months into 2022, I can't even remember one nor find where I saved them. That doesn't bode well.
At the start of this year, I remember mulling that "there is something different about this time". I thought I'd keep to my resolutions (not smoking was it? and reading more? it's hard to remember). My New Me has slipped from my fingers and floated down the wicked river of time'; he’s now beyond reach. So I'm left with Old Me, who's still in beta.
Come to think of it, when we're planning for things, it always feels it will be different next time. We'll assume we'll be more courageous or disciplined, and then we aren't.
Discipline, I think, is about executing a plan with military efficiency and relentless focus. It's about turning up day after day with unblinking enthusiasm for the road ahead. I am, by this measure, not disciplined. I waver from project to project, start books I don't finish, and return to emails I left half drafted a year ago. Fortunately, I am lucky that I like to get up early; a healthy amount of anxious energy throws me out of bed. Otherwise, my dilly-dallying between tasks would leave me very little time in the day. This lack of discipline manifests in getting drawn into Vitalik's blogging archives for hours (this most recent one is good), crawling Wikipedia, and writing these missives (my favourite distraction).
Nevertheless, discipline isn't a one-time thing. A disciplined person is not default-disciplined forever. And after a long drought of discipline, a lazy person can recover as if waking up from a long sleep. The act of 'returning to discipline' is itself discipline. We can do a lot if we do a little, and do it often.
'Returning to discipline' plays out in my life weekly. I have a friend with whom I pledge, most weeks, to hit sales goals (his targets are fundraising). We sit down, put together a spreadsheet with those we plan to approach, get the formatting pretty, and share progress throughout Monday.
Yet, even though I begin with optimism ('this time, I will do 50 outreaches a day!'), I never sustain my excitement for more than two days. Monday is generally productive, but Tuesday comes around, and I become criminally undisciplined. By the end of every week, I forget what I set out to do at the start. Worse still, every week I fail to hit the goal and count myself a failure. It's a tragic weekly cycle that has lasted for over a year.
But I do 'return to discipline', and so does he, and so over a long time, we consistently hack away at the problem. At one point, knowing the flaw in our flakey personalities, we decided to 'game' ourselves, to say we'd only do it every Monday, but then we started skipping weeks altogether! We discovered we had to aim for the stars to land on the clouds.
So, it's worth remembering that even if something doesn't stick as much as we'd like, just doing a little bit here and there eventually takes us down the road we dream of wandering.
My week in books
All About Love by Bell Hooks. Recommended by Mont; it was delicious. I never read crap like this, and it surpassed all expectations. A section about truth resonated: "the wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings. The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others. When men and women punish each other for truth telling, we reinforce the notion that lies are better. To be loving we willingly hear the other's truth, and most important, we affirm the value of truth telling. Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love."
Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn. It was just as good! Another quote: "As I grew older, I learnt that the expectation that someone will save you from who you are, or from what you have or don't have, is a fallacy. Expecting someone to fill in a hole that's within you? That's expecting too much of any one person. That's not your friend's job or your partner's job. That's your job."
Live well,
Hector