On Discipline & Deep Work

2023.08.20

Lindy Expectancy: 16 Weeks

Waking up early has been a slow, multi-year conquest for me. In 2020, I would typically wake up between 9 am and 10:30 am, with a hangover more often than I’d like to admit.

Three years later, I’m editing this blog post at 5:22 am on a Sunday morning. I woke up at 5 and walked outside to see the Milky Way before getting to work.

This was a slow, hard won change that involved incrementally pushing my wake up time back. I made a series of small investments and saw the return each time.

Is there any blessing greater than the ability to grow? I don’t think so.

I finally have my working definition of discipline:

Discipline is doing hard things until they become easy.

In other words, back in 2020, it would have been disciplined for me to commit to even a consistent 8:45am wake up. Now, though? That wouldn’t cut it.

Change Without Shame

I don’t fully agree with Mike Tyson on this one, but I think the answer might be hidden in that quote. There’s a Mark Manson article I’m a bit more aligned with – the goal, in his view, is to focus on associating positive incentives with a desired new behavior, rather than shamefully running from your old way of being.

It’s always a hard battle for me to overcome my negative self judgment around failing to make the “right” choices. This week, someone reminded me just how important it was to not run in shame from your past decisions. Integrating them, even if you wouldn’t make them again, is part of the learning process. Thank you for that.

To change Mike Tyson’s quote to a more positive view: Discipline is doing what you used to hate in a way that you can love it.

Closer to the “Ideal” State

For my part, I currently view discipline as setting up habits that move your default state closer to your ideal outcome. If your habit is to eat fried food five days a week, but you think you should eat salad five days a week instead, there is a disconnect between who you want to be and who you are. That won’t go away unless you change who you want to be or who you are.

If you decide you really do want to be the person who eats salad five days a week, this is where discipline comes in: it’s the change, it’s the hard part. It’s understanding why you’re still eating fried food and understanding why you want to be the person who eats salad. Then, it’s committing to work towards that new state.

Building up the new habit is the hard part. But, the habit itself is sticky. Once you’ve eaten five salads a week for three or four weeks, your new habit will soon be to eat salad five days a week. This is especially true if you’re doing it because you want to be the person who eats five salads a week more than you don’t want to be the person who eats fried food.

Of course, seeing results make the habit easier, but the results rarely immediately come. They take time to come, and, until they do, it is a lot harder to keep the habit up. In the meantime, keeping it up without that reinforcement, can take discipline.

Heart rate optimization

At the start of this year, I found that my resting heart rate (RHR) was much higher than I would like it to be: 78 bpm! I determined that Zone 2 cardio was the solution (sloppy TLDR, running more slowly can help your heart). So, I started running. More specifically, I started running very slowly.

It was hard, at first, to not sprint. I was fighting my belief that working out meant going all out. It was actually disciplined for me to go more slowly.

I started running maybe once a week in January. By the summer, I was running three or four times a week and even stacked the habit with a 6 am wake up to make sure I actually did it.

After 8 months of build up, my RHR is now 69 bpm, and trending down. Some days, it’s been as low as 63 bpm!

And guess what?

I like running now. But, by my definition, this is no longer an act of discipline. Now, it’s just a healthy habit. Remember:

Discipline is doing hard things until they become easy.

Yes, there will still be days when I don’t want to run but I do it anyway, and that’s hard, but the lion’s share of the mental effort has been expended.

So, if what was once a challenge is no longer a challenge… what’s next?

A Distracting Day

Each day, our attention is yanked every which way. Distractions are incessant, and, seeing as every distraction is optimized to make you believe that it is the single most important thing, it’s really hard to sift through noise and find signal. Moreover, it’s hard to enter a flow state and get complex work, such as writing or coding done.

When you are working on something that requires deep focus, every single push notification can take you out of that flow state. I’ll spare you the literature, other than to share one book that does a pretty good job of explaining the point: Deep Work by Cal Newport. To enter a flow state and create the highest quality output that you can, you need a period free from distractions.

Setting up your life in a way conducive to deep work is an endeavor that takes a lot of effort and care. This is particularly true when the task at hand is that big, ugly problem on your to-do list… that one that you kick down the road each day… the one for which “I’ll do it at noon” becomes “I’ll do it at 4” becomes “I’ll do it tomorrow.” For me, that’s the kind of problem I want to tackle with periods of deep work.

But, when might I do it with so many meetings and calls?

This sounds like a problem for our old friend discipline.

Enter: 5 Am

One of Cal’s suggestions to make deep work a habit is what he calls the rhythmic method. It involves setting aside a daily time during which you can dedicate yourself to doing a task with deep focus and no distractions.

For me, the most logical place to drop this is bright and early in the morning, from 5:20 am to 8 am. Not only had I already pushed my wake up time back to 6am this summer, but I also feel amazing when I get the hardest thing done first thing in the morning.

It’s difficult for me to get up at 5 am. It’s not as difficult as it would have been in 2020, though. I’ve worked up to this, gradually showing myself, through evidence, that an early rise brings me closer to who I want to be.

Still, when I’m sitting there in the morning after that alarm goes off, knowing that all it would take would be one button push to go back to sleep, it is a challenge to stay awake and get going.

But, I’ve already resolved the debate. I KNOW what I believe. So, I end the debate, and I get to work. I go and do the hard thing.

A Week In Review

One week into 5 am wake ups, I think the hardest part is actually putting my phone down early enough to fall asleep at a reasonable hour (~9ish).

I’m finding the deep work itself to be challenging to get into. On day one, I don’t think I even started making any significant progress on a task until maybe 6:30, after the break for my first cup of coffee. I was in that groggy mental state that isn’t super conducive to results, just trying the first solution that came to my mind without giving the problem much thought. I hadn’t yet hit flow.

It’s getting better, though. And I’m starting to enjoy it more. I’m finding a rhythm. It’s still difficult, but, when 8 am comes around and I know I’ve already done a very, very difficult thing for the day, I have so much less weight on my shoulders.

I’ve already become closer to the person who I want to be.

If there’s a takeaway from any of this, I think it’s really knowing who you want to be and then committing to incremental changes to bring you closer to that person.

A small series of compounding changes will result in a big shift over time.

See you bright and early.

Cheers,

Noah