When you think of the word discipline, what comes to mind? In today's episode, we're going to hopefully give you a new perspective on discipline. And give you some tools to build stickier habits. My name is Jonathan Cutrell, you're listening to Developer Tea. My goal on this show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers. Everyone has a different relationship with the concept of discipline. For some people, this immediately goes back to their childhood where they were grounded or they lost their allowance. This was a punitive kind of discipline. And this mental model of discipline might have carried forward into their lives. Now, the interesting thing is if you are one of those people, if you have the mental model of discipline conflated with the model of punishment, that there is some negative consequence for not doing the thing that someone is telling you to do, and we'll talk about who the someone is in the second, then it's possible that you believe that all good things that happen in your life require pain. All good things require some kind of punishing penance. And this simply isn't true. Of course, we know in psychology that behavioral modification happens through a variety of mechanisms. One of them is through some kind of painful experience. We will respond to a painful experience. But this isn't the only passage to achieving something that we want to achieve. So we have this idea that discipline which equates to difficulty or pain or struggling in our minds is necessary to accomplish something. This is broken. Another kind of variation on this idea of discipline is the idea of exactness. Discipline is to many people perfection. When we think about discipline, we might think about punctuality. We might think about having a kind of spotless record. We think about inspections or quality control. That discipline is necessary to follow through on all of those things. And if we break that chain of perfection, if we are late, then we are not disciplined. Once again, assembly isn't true. Instead, I want you to think about discipline as the will to continue despite unexpected circumstances. This isn't the same thing necessarily as, let's say grit, although it could be kind of compared to that. Instead what we're looking at is discipline requiring some level of fortitude when things change. Instead of thinking of the opposite of discipline as laziness or being wax, think of the opposite of discipline as quitting and giving up. Now it is important to note that there is a difference between discipline and perseverance. Perseverance might be considered a raw energy where you are not going to give up ever, but you might blindly be doing the wrong thing. Discipline is choosing to do what we know is the right thing to do, right, or choosing to constantly improve, right, choose the high quality path. Don't skip the line. Don't try to take a shortcut. Discipline is doing those things in the face of changing circumstance. What's interesting is that there is a body of research around the idea that discipline is not about perfection. It's not about performing on time every time. It's not about pain. It's not about suffering, but it's about flexibility. It's about instituting behaviors that are resilient to changing circumstances. Once again, I'm reading How to Change by Katie Milkman. We talked about this on our interview on Developer Tea, but this concept is so important that I wanted to kind of dedicate an episode to it. The idea is in her book, she calls it Elastic Habits. If you have a brittle habit, if you have a habit that is dependent on all the stars aligning, on everything happening just right. The timing is right. You have all of the overhead that you need to have out of the way. You have the right resources at hand. You have the right energy at hand. All of that has to happen in particular specific ways. If that's what you're waiting on, then your habit is brittle. Your behavior becomes brittle. Discipline is the opposite of this picture. Discipline says, I'm going to find a way. I'm going to look at my circumstance and adapt to it so that I can still accomplish the thing that I set out to accomplish with this habit building process. I don't need all of the stars to align. I don't need my environment to provide the stage for me to act in a particular way. I'm going to choose to act based on what I have available. Very simple examples of this. This is actually directly from Katie's book. Simple examples of this is having a specific time that you wanted to go to the gym. Unfortunately, let's say maybe you had a meeting that got scheduled for that time. You can't go at that time anymore. Then discipline approach would say, well, it's scrap going to the gym today. That's an undisciplined approach. A disciplined approach adapts to the circumstance. Maybe the disciplined approach in this case is that you can't exercise at the gym, but the gym is not really the thing that you care about. The thing that you're disciplined about is being active. You rearrange your thinking and you make time in your schedule later in the day to go for a jog. In this specific way, discipline is about finding the core of what matters and not letting go of it. Undisciplined approaches ignore. They ignore priorities. They ignore finding the core of what matters. And they instead assume that the script will be written for them. I don't want you to hear me incorrectly here. discipline does not mean that you have boundless energy. Discipline doesn't mean that you unwisely push into territory that is dangerous to push into. So what is the practical takeaway? If you want to become a disciplined person, you have to think about discipline differently. And you're developing a habit, get to the core, the essence of what you care about. What is the effect that you're trying to achieve? What is the goal? Develop flexibility with your habits. Develop flexibility in your day to day life. This might mean saying no to more things so that you have the opportunity to persevere to stick to the things that you really care about doing. When things change, when circumstances change, having the flexibility to still, to still stay with what you were planning to do, this is the core of discipline. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Make sure you subscribe and whatever podcasting app you're currently listening to. I'd love to hear your stories about discipline and any thoughts that you have. I don't like doing this in a one way conversation kind of format. I'd much rather you join the developer to discord. Head over to developer.com slash discord. It is a free community. It will remain free. Thanks so much for listening to this episode and until next time, enjoy your tea.