As martial artists, we arrange our lives around discipline.
The Art of Manliness blog as some thoughts on this. An excerpt is below. The full post may be read here.
When it comes to keeping your New Year’s resolutions, you probably think you know the secret to success.
Whether you’ve resolved to lose weight, eat better, use your time more effectively, or even to amor fati, you’ve simply got to get more disciplined.
Right?
Certainly, discipline plays a crucial role in making any mindset or behavioral change. We’ve said as much ourselves.
But the exact nature of this need for discipline is frequently misunderstood.
When most of us think of changing our lives, we think we need to become a more disciplined person. To increase our level of discipline permanently, indefinitely.
The problems with this idea, however, are two-fold, and partly account for why so few people are able to keep their resolutions longer than a few weeks.
First, it’s incredibly difficult to permanently increase your level of discipline, which is a disposition that seems to be semi-fixed and innate. Just as our weight has a default “set point” that it wants to return to despite effort to put on or take off pounds, our discipline seems to have a set point which it wants to snap back to as well. That doesn’t mean discipline can’t be developed and enhanced in strength, it’s just an extremely arduous task in which change is measured incrementally rather than by large leaps and bounds.
Second, living a more disciplined life, forever, is an incredibly daunting prospect — both practically and psychologically.
Trying to permanently live at a higher level of discipline is like running a long-distance race of indeterminate length. When your legs ache and you feel like you can’t go on, you call out to those on the sidelines, “How much further to the finish?” To which they reply, “We don’t know. A long ways though. Just keep going.” The idea of continuing on at the same pace seems impossible, and with no end in sight, all your motivation drains away and you throw in the towel.
