Taking the Hard Way

Once you resolve much of your shame, and once you’ve created situations to provide greater emotional benefits from doing the desired behavior than not doing it, you start to experience discipline without willpower.

You wake up early because it feels good to wake up early. You eat healthy because you feel good about not eating junk and having the right diet. The pain is still there, but you work with the pain rather than against it. You pursue it rather than run from it.

• Most people think of self-discipline in terms of willpower only, which is wrong.
• Individuals who are able to follow the set rules of self-discipline also tend to be the ones who enjoy the routine.
• To succeed in your self-discipline routine, your willpower must be trained steadily over a long period of time.

The idea is to identify challenges and points of failure so you can develop a plan to prevent them ahead of time.

Imagine the most important goal or project you are working on right now. Then fast forward 6 months and assume the project or goal has failed. Tell the story of how it happened and ask yourself, “What could cause this to go horribly wrong?”

Applying inversion to productivity you could ask, “What if I wanted to decrease my focus? How do I end up distracted?” 

The answer to these question may help you discover interruptions you can eliminate to free up more time and energy each day.

Jordan Peterson observed that virtues aim for balance and to avoid the extremes of the vices. Cultivating judgment about the difference between virtue and vice is the beginning of wisdom.

Modern relativism asserts judging how to live is impossible, because good and virtue are relative. Thus relativism’s version of “virtue” is “tolerance.” This leads to people broadcasting their tolerance as a form of self-promotion, and secret vice, which is also known as virtue signaling.

Order is where the people around you act according to the established social norms, remaining predictable and cooperative. Society is simultaneously structure and oppression.

Chaos is where the unexpected happens. 

It cannot be acquired by pleasurable experiences but only by identifying and realizing our own potential, moral and creative, in our specific environments, with our particular family, friends and colleagues, and helping others to do so. 

Whenever you think about self-love, try picturing yourself making a mistake. Forgiving your own mistakes instead of overreacting to them is what self-love looks like.

Sell-love is deeply connected to our relationship to the ones around us, as we are definitely shaped by our experiences. On the other hand, we have what we call self-sufficiency and self-reliance, terms that define the relationship one has with himself or herself, without involving anybody else.

"Self-love is less about the ability to withstand loneliness or establish independence and more about awareness and acceptance of our incompleteness. It’s about letting others love us even when we feel unlovable because their version of us is often kinder than our own. "

Goal-setting is required to decide what you want and planning how to get there. Just having an idea of what you want to achieve is usually not enough. Setting a goal needs to be paired with plans, systems, or habits to make it achievable.

Goal-setting should be SMART (Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.) However, some people argue for being completely process-oriented and ignoring outcomes.

Systems organize your behavior and decisions with formal rules. They are often built off of concepts of scientific management and organizational theory, but it is applied to your personal life. 

A productivity system is one type of system that is aimed at helping you get work done by organizing the things that need doing and telling you when to do them.

Mimic and get help from someone who’s already learned it to get tips and save time.

In order to achieve mastery faster, our first step should be to consult the top players in the field and model the path they have already carved out for us.

...into its basic, fundamental components, to find the most important things to practice first. This shows that very few things actually make a difference in any aspect of our lives, including learning.

Use the Pareto Principle: which describes a goal of generating 80 percent of results by putting in 20 percent of the effort.

It is much easier for us to make decisions that feel good right now (“quick-fixes”) than it is to have the discipline to make decisions that may suck now but feel really great later.

Self-care can be really hard because it’s a long-term play. But your well-being is worth the trouble. 

• Self-indulgence is the “excessive or unrestrained gratification of one’s own appetites, desires, or whims. Self-indulgent behaviors alter our mood or provide us with a means of temporary escape.
• Self-care yields you long-term benefits without causing harm. And in a way, it’s a selfless act as it will make you a more engaged and impassioned person.