Cal Newport's Advice For Becoming a Disciplined Person | Deep Questions Podcast

all right jesse so i think we should do some questions yup what they come for i got one here from toby toby asks how do i improve my discipline my problem is that i have a problem with sticking to my long term plans well toby i think about discipline really more as an identity that you develop then i do an approach to a particular challenge if you can convince yourself that you are a disciplined person that that is part of your conception of your identity then you will be able to with discipline pursue many different important objectives in your life so the question is how do you get to an identity where you see yourself as a disciplined person well let me tell you what not to do don't just pick out a random ambitious goal and say you know what i'm going to do this i'm going to i'm going to white knuckle go after this really hard goal and because i need to be more disciplined that's what you're trying to do that's not working i'm not surprised it's not working if you've not yet convinced yourself you're a disciplined person taking on ad hoc large discipline requiring challenges is not going to be a route towards success so what should you do instead well i think this is where actually the deep life procedure i talk about the the sort of self-awarely overly pragmatic approach to building a foundation for a deep life that we've been talking about on the show for over two years is perfect for developing a self-identity as discipline so remember there's two parts to this number one you identify the areas of your life that are important to you we typically call these the deep life buckets they differ between different people but our starter set of these buckets tends to be craft what you do what you create constitution that's going to be your health community that's going to be your connections to other people be it your family your neighborhood the people in the organizations where you work at your religious institutions they'll often throw in contemplation we're trying to capture philosophy theology and ethics these are all important areas most people's lives your list might vary for each of these areas the first thing to do is to identify a keystone habit something in each of these buckets that you do every day something that is not trivial but is also tractable and you track your completion of these habits every day if you use something like my time block planner there's a metric tracking space at the top of the daily planning pages on every day you just track those keystone habits right there so for example for constitution you wouldn't have something there like i'm going to do a 45 minute intense workout because that's too hard to expect you to be able to do that every day that's not really tractable but you also don't want to say you know i will do one jumping jack when i get out of bed in the morning like that's not going to get you anywhere so instead you might want to do something like i want to hit this many steps in a day i require a little bit of planning like i walk my kids to school i'll probably have to do one more walk in the afternoon in between meetings and but it's tractable if i think about it my friend brian johnson of optimize fame had this great constitution habit where he had a fixed number of minutes that he never wanted to go beyond without doing i think he would do 10 burpees and it was like 23 minutes or 20 there was some amount of time that he had because he had red somewhere if you sit for more than this much time it starts to be bad and so it's just every whatever it was 23 minutes he would do 10 burpees and was it a fantastic boom now i think it helps that he doesn't work in the bullpen of a crowded office i mean i maybe that would be an awesome thing to do but but it probably would draw some interesting attention you know he he works on his own company so he works at his own house um but 10 burpees three times an hour roughly and the way he pitched it to me is it keeps your ability to concentration to concentrate like a like a laser because your body's always moving it never gets into a sedentary but anyways for someone who works in their own home works from home on their own business very tractable very tractable keystone habit it takes 15 seconds or whatever every time you do it the fact that i think 10 burpees takes 15 seconds shows that i don't know i don't know a lot about burpees does he still do that i don't know we should have him on the show we should we should ask him i know at one point he was training he was really into and i don't think he'll mind me telling this story because i think he's talked about himself um he was really into spartan racing you know the spartan races yeah because he did yeah because he was friends with joe decenna so you knew the guy who started it and he was making a run at some point for doing them at a very high level which requires it turns out it requires a lot of training you have to master a lot of these individual disciplines but anyways in his his house in the the room where he worked which i think might have been their bedroom he had installed into the ceiling of the room the uh hanging obstacles from the sparta race like so i i guess you do like ninja warrior type stuff in that race where like you have to like swing you're holding on to like rope knots and whatever yeah and yeah he installed them into the ceiling of the room so that when he was doing these breaks he's like instead of just burpees let me jump up and just like do the whatever hanging challenge i'll tell you what you do that for a few months your grip strength and balance like you just own it but you don't even i guess that's what you need to do to compete at a high level you could just jump up there and boom boom boom boom boom and so that's that's commitment it'd probably still work out too during the day i would think separately yeah yeah so he and and he had a whole thing and yeah so you still have a workout so it was less this was less about which which again i think is an important point like if your keystone habits are not their job is not to capture everything you need to do or it's important for that bucket it's like getting up and doing some burpees or whatever throughout the day is a great way of saying you you take motion important you take your body important you think there's a mind-body connection but it's not everything you need to do for exercise you probably need to be doing weights you probably need to be doing cardio so that's it's a good point is that your keystone habits are not trying to take on the weight of everything important in that bucket they are just meant to say that you take that bucket seriously and you're willing to take effort towards that bucket every day that's non-trivial now it takes a while to get those keystone habits right you have to experiment a little bit but you get to the point where you're knocking off you have four buckets or five buckets you're checking off all those all those metrics every day and you see it every day you don't want to break the chain right that's step one you've already now leveled up discipline your identity as someone who's disciplined is now leveled up you do stuff that's optional because it reflects your values even if it's hard now you're at a higher level the next part of my general deep life foundation program is then you dedicate a one to two month period to each of those buckets one by one and overhaul that part of your life when you're focusing on that particular bucket so in the the one to two months you're focusing on constitution now you're getting serious about your health and fitness and you're starting to make changes and figuring out like maybe you're like i'm gonna start training for this sport like i'll tell you right now jesse one of the things i'm doing it's a goal is uh before my 40th birthday which is in june so it's coming up um you might not remember what it's like to be in your 30s of course i mean you've been 40 for literally weeks at this point so you probably don't remember but my birthday is coming up as we've talked about i want to this is arbitrary but i want to be able to once again row 2000 meters on my concept 2 at a sub 2 minute 500 meter pace so this just connects me back to my my my deep pass when i was rowing for dartmouth and i remember the type of splits i could pull so like seven and change something yeah yeah and so i was like i wanna i was like i would feel good at the age of 40 if because i got god knows what i could pull when i was 19 doing this i could pull but i'm 30 pounds heavier now so it does have an advantage like i can actually oh it's a lightweight rower so i can now actually move that thing but anyways it's kind of arbitrary but it's like it's it's hard but not impossible but like i would feel good if i can be pulling sub two minute 500 splits for for a 2000 meter so like i'm training for that right now but that's the type of thing okay when you're doing an overhaul of a bucket you start you figure out these challenges you get your equipment in place i mean not to make a full full circle connection but yeah i got that concept too actually from brian johnson sent it to me as a gift so there we go nice gift yeah he's a nice guy known for a very long time um so guys that's the type of thing you will come away from doing the intense focus on the bucket with like okay now i'm going to start training to do this and i've overhauled my diet and i now enjoying this team this rec you know with other dads that we play whatever and so you know when you you give the one to two month focus you really are changing your life more substantially to really integrate that area of value um more deeply and there's a lot of experimentation in that that's why it takes one or two months you try some things it's not really working so you change your goals or challenges or habits so you find something that's really working you come out of that second step toby you're gonna be a much more disciplined person step one you build that base with the keystone step two you overhaul tractable overhauls to experimentation all the parts are important to your life after that now if down the line you're like oh here's a new long-term plan that i believe in let me do some work towards it no problem that's that's what you do your discipline that's what you're gonna do that's what you're gonna do so once you've changed the identity then you can take on new challenges the only final thing i'll say is even as a very self-disciplined person if your challenges don't make sense if your mind doesn't believe that it's worth doing or that your plan is actually going to accomplish what it is you will still struggle with discipline so you have to be selective and careful in laying out what you do your brain is not dumb if you're like i'm going to be a nobel prize winning novelist because i'm going to do national novel writing month three days in your mind's like this is stupid we don't know what we're doing this is not a good book i'm not going to do this and that's not a failure of discipline that's a failure of planning so that's the only other copy i'll give even after you become a self-disciplined person you need goals your mind actually trusts

Channel: Cal Newport

Views: 218,535

Keywords: Cal Newport, Deep Work, Deep Life, Deep Questions, TimblockPlanner, Deep Questions Podcast

Id: MTS4akJadFg

Length: 11min 11sec (671 seconds)

Published: Thu May 05 2022