I found this one practically actionable and helpful
> Motivation, broadly speaking, operates on the erroneous assumption that a particular mental or emotional state is necessary to complete a task.
> That’s completely the wrong way around.
> Discipline, by contrast, separates outwards functioning from moods and feelings and thereby ironically circumvents the problem by consistently improving them.
I think motivation vs discipline is a false dichotomy. I’d argue that discipline is simply a form of motivation that emerges when the pain of avoidance can be adequately internalized. IOW, what we call discipline is just a conditioning that makes procrastination suck more than it sucks to do the task you “know” you ought to do.
Discipline merely describes the phenomenon of consistently making certain choices in the long-run to achieve a goal. We leverage habit-creation precisely because motivation is fickle and habits can facilitate discipline.
Feeling guilty or shameful is not what keeps people from procrastinating or making the wrong choices - that is a colossal failure in that regard, instead guilt just becomes the price of admission to do something other than maintaining discipline. Negative emotion is the price to pay to binge-eat, to avoid exercising, etc.
I think there may be an issue here where the two perceptions of the world are both right. For people with pain avoidance tendencies the part of their brain that creates reward may actually be damaged. So they can only avoid pain as there is no/diminished reward for them in completing a task. The feedback loop for people avoiding pain may be different than the feedback loop for people who are chasing a reward. This would be really hard to understand both ways if you had only ever experienced one or the other.
Why is this downvoted? Questioning the motivation vs discipline dichotomy is a very right thing. You may disagree with arguments, but then present the counterarguments.
From the point of view of SDT (Self-Determination Theory, the main theory in psychology on motivation), discipline is definitely is one of the forms of external motivation (integrated or introjected one, probably). So I do agree that talking about motivation and discipline as two fundamentally different things is wrong, and reframing in through the lens of science of motivation can yield better understanding and actionable conclusions.
It's being downvoted because it's moving the definition around under the premise of science while it's just semantic drifting.
Linguistic has a better track record to understand words and their definition than psychology.
So, discipline is not the same as motivation. Discipline is doing things even if you think you don't have enough energy or motivation at the moment.
discipline
dis· ci· pline ˈdi-sə-plən
1 a: control gained by enforcing obedience or order
b: orderly or prescribed conduct or pattern of behavior
c: self-control
2: punishment
3: training that corrects, molds, or perfects the mental faculties or moral character
[..]
motivation
noun [ C/U ]
us
/ˌmoʊ·t̬əˈveɪ·ʃən/
willingness to do something, or something that causes such willingness:
[ C ] One motivation for reducing the staff was the need to cut costs.
[ U ] You need a lot of motivation to succeed.
> So I do agree that talking about motivation and discipline as two fundamentally different things is wrong, and reframing in through the lens of science of motivation can yield better understanding and actionable conclusions.
And yet this conversation here doesn't provide any actionable conclusion, doesn't provide example of how motivation beats discipline and just jumps into a debate of abstract idea(ls).
Is the word discipline the problem ? Would regularity feel better ?
> You may disagree with arguments, but then present the counterarguments.
The original argument is here:
> Discipline, by contrast, separates outwards functioning from moods and feelings and thereby ironically circumvents the problem by consistently improving them.
Redefining words is not a counter argument.
It's always the same dynamic in this debate, it's like people don't want to hear the world discipline and want motivation to just be enough to act on ?
> Discipline is doing things even if you think you don't have enough energy or motivation at the moment.
Motivaion is anything that makes people do stuff. Gun at your head is also motivation - you'll be willing to do things even if you don't have energy or desire to do this. It's just external motivation and external regulation - it can be very powerful, but short-term (it'll stop working as soon as punishment or reward is removed).
So the theory I mentioned (Self-Determination Theory) is the central theory in psychology that studies motivation. It originated in clinical psychology, very mature (70+ years) and has shown high predictive power in thousands of studies. If you think about it, motivation (="energy that makes people do things") is what underpins everything - from parenting and relationships to education, sports and politics. So why not study it as deep as we can?
What you refer to "don't have motivation" would be better expressed as "don't have intrinsic motivation", which is just one of the types of motivation.
So, sure, if you only consider "intrinsic motivation" as being worthy called "motivation", then discipline vs motivation makes sense. But if you consider full spectrum of external motivations (integrated, identified, introjected and external), than it's very clear that discipline is just one of the forms of identified or introjected) external motivations. External motivations can be very powerful, but the further they're on the spectrum the more short lived they are.
As for the actionable items - again. SDT gives you tools and frameworks how to apply this on the per-case basis. Have you heard the phrase "you should read what you love to start love reading"? That's one of the things that makes perfect sense from the SDT perspective - instead of focusing on "discipline for the sake of discipline", i.e. forcing yourself to stick with this external type of motivation, you could use this as a tool to move your motivations (there could be few at the same time) into the side of intrinsic motivation as much as possible, if you want this behaviour to stick.
SDT is actually quite approachable and actionable itself. I think gamedev is quite familiar with it, and they use the tools to make computer games intrinsically motivated.
I think that's just moving the definitions around. The traditional understanding of the word "motivation" is "the desire to do something". Discipline, in contrast, is doing something regardless of desire.
So you can move the definitions around, but at the end of the day; there are still situations where people succumb to doing or not doing something based on emotion, and the decision to do it regardless of desire is still discipline.
You’re saying that if you do something you otherwise don’t want to do because you have the discipline, then you are not doing what you ultimately desired. Then why are you doing it at all? The only thing that directs you to “be disciplined” is the desire for what the disciplined behavior will bring you.
You can call it moving definitions around, but at the end of the day if we don’t ultimately do what we ultimately desire, then what really is meant by the word desire?
> The only thing that directs you to “be disciplined” is the desire for what the disciplined behavior will bring you.
Which just proves that motivation is not enough. You need discipline. Is the word discipline the problem ? Would regularity feels better ?
> You can call it moving definitions around, but at the end of the day if we don’t ultimately do what we ultimately desire, then what really is meant by the word desire?
That's not a counter argument, that's now playing with the definition of desire.
I am increasingly convinced that procrastination and lack of focus are rooted in character flaws and bad habits, and as a result, that they are amenable to reform.
If we look at, shall we say, the traditional definitions of perseverance, effeminacy, and delicacy[0], we find that someone who perseveres is someone who "does not forsake a good on account of long endurance of difficulties and toils". Effeminacy is the inability to undertake what is not pleasurable, whereas delicacy is the inability to endure displeasure ("properly speaking effeminacy regards lack of pleasures, while delicacy regards the cause that hinders pleasure, for instance toil or the like").
We "moderns" are certainly a soft people. We cannot help but indulge ourselves, we cannot bear what we do not like, and we refuse to embrace the yoke. We are slaves to our appetites and desires. FOMO, which is opportunism, and a culture of instant gratification, are the result and the encouragement of the inability to forsake lower goods for the sake of higher goods, and so we undergo dissipation. And what is dissipation but a lack of focus? And what is the procrastinator avoiding if not discomfort, if not displeasure?
Naturally, this becomes the default mode of operation when life is perceived to have no end. If there is no highest pleasure, no highest good, then all we have left are lower pleasures. Perhaps paradoxically, even the lower pleasures lose their proper flavor and become denatured in the absence of the highest. Thus despair is consummated.
> Effeminacy is the inability to undertake what is not pleasurable, whereas delicacy is the inability to endure displeasure
Wow. Not only is that whole site preachy an woo-tacular, that definition is sexist AF. There are not many experiences more displeasurable and uncomfortable than carrying a fetus for 9 months and going into labor. To say nothing of monthly hardship for decades on end.
There's also the brain fog and forgetfulness, and the fact that their bones are literally being eroded for calcium in order to develop new skeletal structures, making everything that much more painful over time.
Women put up with a lot of shit. A domestic violence victim will endure such treatment for years and may ultimately end up dead for it. The same sort of men behind that will open fire on random civilians in a crowded shopping mall just because their ego was threatened.
The post you linked reads like they're trying to sell me something. I find it hard to believe someone is truly wise when they begin their argument with "the first, more popular and devastatingly wrong option is..." That style of writing strikes me as being both condescending and manipulative. "Hey reader, you aren't a putz are you? No, you're a free thinker on the hunt for wisdom! So you'd agree that..." Guess I shouldn't expect too much from a site with that tagline, though.
As for the argument about disclipline... That sounds appealing, but what is "discipline"? They say:
> How do you cultivate discipline? By building habits – starting as small as you can manage, even microscopic, and gathering momentum, reinvesting it in progressively bigger changes to your routine, and building a positive feedback loop.
OK so discipline is built out of habits, which are built out of small actions that gradually scale up. All well and good, but it feels like we're back to the original problem of motivation. That is, to cultivate discipline you must be sufficiently motivated. Seems circular.
Atomic Habits is a great book on exactly this. I am really wary of the whole “productivity-boost” category, but this one book is solid from a scientific background and has good, actionable points.
> Motivation, broadly speaking, operates on the erroneous assumption that a particular mental or emotional state is necessary to complete a task.
> That’s completely the wrong way around.
> Discipline, by contrast, separates outwards functioning from moods and feelings and thereby ironically circumvents the problem by consistently improving them.
https://www.wisdomination.com/screw-motivation-what-you-need...