Monk Mode

Below is an excerpt from an article that appeared at Raptitude.com. While the author talks about a number of different contexts, I think the ideas equally apply to martial arts study and training.

The full post may be read here.

During the late 2000s, around when I started this blog, there was a trend among young male entrepreneurs called “Monk Mode.”

Everyone had a different idea of what that term meant, but generally it referred to taking a definite period of time – a week to three months or more – to focus with unusual intensity on certain important and fruitful pursuits, while abstaining from certain distracting or self-defeating activities.

Somewhat like a monk, you would voluntarily adopt a standard of heightened discipline, following a few non-negotiable rules, in order to bring certain important things to the fore of your life. A person might do this in order to launch a website, finish a manuscript, or return to the level of fitness they enjoyed in college.  

The last time I heard this phrase was around 2009, and at the time it seemed indistinguishable from “working hard until I finish this current project,” which is what I was always trying to do anyway.

The Ancient Art of Exponential Progress

Recently I heard the term Monk Mode again, and it had a ring to it that it didn’t before. In intervening years I’d been on five silent retreats, semi-monastic environments in which you sequester yourself from social and electronic diversions, and live by certain rules of conduct called precepts, in order to create the best possible conditions for advancing your meditation practice in a relatively short time.

It really works. In seven or ten days you can permanently level up your contemplative skills, perhaps as much as you would in several years of more casual daily practice, because of this short and intense emphasis on one thing.

This kind of regimen has to be short though. As potent as a silent retreat is, a week or more away from the world is hard to arrange, and keeping up that standard for months or years isn’t practical. Too many things have to be sacrificed for too long.

The principle behind the retreat format is very powerful though: double down on certain important activities, abstain from behaviors that undermine these efforts, and limit this intensified regimen to a short enough period that you can actually complete it, rather than quit in a huff or drift away from it gradually.  

Monk Mode, as I conceive of it, is a way of leveraging this principle to a less intense degree. You still focus on a certain kind of self-development work for a short period (perhaps writing, meditating, practicing piano, or lifting barbells), you still commit to a list of no-no’s during that time (perhaps no alcohol, no social media, or no sugar), but aside from that you live life normally.

Essentially you’re committing to a new lifestyle standard in certain respects, but for a short enough time that you can sustain the effort to the end.

You might enter Monk Mode for a number of reasons:

• To finish a particular project
• To get past a plateau, or out of a rut
• To go deeper into an activity than you have before
• To get back into something you’ve been neglecting
• To end a period of complacency

For example, say you want to get back to your pre-pandemic level of fitness. The conventional way to go about this is the resolution approach. You slam your fist on the table, perhaps literally, and declare, “Enough is enough! Starting today I’m going to work out again and stop eating crap!” Essentially, you’re making a lifelong commitment to live with greater discipline and sacrifice, with nothing behind it but the emotional surge you are feeling in this moment. You already know how this tends to go.

What if, instead, you could enter a 14-day Monk Mode, in which you visit the gym three times a week, abstain from foods with added sugar, and stretch dutifully every morning and evening. This commitment is finite and doable, and will undoubtedly put you on a much better trajectory by the end of it. Then you figure out a sensible next step, from the new and more confident place your stint in Monk Mode has brought you to.

If fourteen days is too much, make it seven. If abstaining from all added sugar is too much, just do it for the breakfast meal. Dial the standard and duration to settings you know you can complete.