There are many talents and qualities in successful people that I admire. Consistent among all of them are an extreme amount of hard work, unwavering confidence, and innate skill. Maybe the most interesting, quirk they all seem to have, which is also hard to quantify is discipline. Discipline can be described in a lot of ways, but for my purposes, I think discipline is the ability to do something you don't want to do, consistently.
We often think that discipline is some innate characteristic that people either have or don't have, but I think, like every other human behavior, discipline is the sort of thing that can be flexed like a muscle. The best way to flex it? Do things that you don't want to do.
To be clear, this isn't about changing your perspective on the things you don't want to do, so that one day you will. Such a strategy only seeks to move the goalpost rather than tackle the root cause. If we're honest, even after doing what you don't want to, you still won't want to do it. And that's ok. In some ways, it's expected. What does matter, is being able to do when it matters most. After Kyrie Irving hit the shot of a lifetime, they asked him how he did it. His response was that he practiced that shot and shots like it for hours on end, so executing in the moment was easy.
It sounds simple in theory, but like all theory, is hard in practice. Hard things are hard.. Doing things you don't want to do is hard, precisely because you don't want to do them. It's hard because your brain has a very easy time coming up with a rational, reasonable explanation for why you feel the way you do. (Some people call these excuses). And it makes sense! Your brain is the product of thousands of years of evolution that have selectively chosen the paths most likely for survival. So when it comes to you with its internal arguments for one decision over another, it's a pretty informed debater. The problem with your internal wants and desires is that they're high signal for local happiness, but terrible indicators of long term joy.
Good long term decision making requires sacrifices in the short term that pay and compound in the long term. Your brain simply doesn't have all the data necessary to process future rewards and so you have to do the best with what you know now, to try and predict where you'll end up tomorrow. That kind of framework makes sense when survival is the only goal, but in today's world, there's a greater and greater sense that learning how to make strategic long term bets, is the best way to achieve outlier success. So if you care about making good bets over a long period of time, learn to reduce noise. To reduce noise, train your ability to remove it from your decision making process.
So I've told you what to do, but I haven't told you how. In theory, there are lots of ways to begin a journey of cultivating discipline, but the one with the greatest chance of success, is probably one that starts small. Pick the smallest nuisance in your life and make a conscious effort to commit to doing it, no matter what. At the point that it has become a consistent habit, one of two things happen. Either you begin to enjoy or at the very least not dislike the activity anymore, in which case you should pick a new thing to add to the list. Or it will continue to irritate you, in which case, you should keep doing it. Again, the goal is go against your internal thoughts in areas where you know the long term benefit will pay off. You can't do that when your long and short term goals are in alignment.
Doing things you don't want to do gives you a clear sense of agency because life doesn't just "happen" to those that actively do when every internal signal says don't. Doing things you don't want to do makes you appreciate what it means to be human. You get the opportunity to go against your own internal urges and wants in favor of some rationalized greater good. No other species on the planet can relate to having that kind of decision making power. So do when you don't want to, because you'll want to act like you do when it matters.