Willpower is easy when you’re having fun.
I never needed anyone to tell me to play video games, explore the internet, or practice soccer tricks. If anything, it was hard to get me to stop. Writing has been the same. Sure, some days I don’t feel like sitting down, like tackling the hard passage that’s next, but as soon as I get going, flow kicks in.
We all gravitate towards different things, but most of us have had our own version of this experience. There’s a big lesson in it we often ignore, mostly due to societal obligations or traditional education: optimize for easy.
If you can find an activity in which talent and interest carry you from being mediocre to above average, you have a new potential career. The timing and specifics of making it financially productive might neither be clear nor work out in the end, but if doing the work comes easy, that’s a huge head start.
To some degree, becoming more skilled supports this growing commitment, but if you start in an area you genuinely dislike, you’ll likely never get that far.
That’s why, generally, I support advice like the following, which comes from Naval Ravikant, the founder of AngelList and a prolific startup investor:
“Discipline is really overrated. Discipline is just you fighting with yourself to do something you don’t want to do. It’s more important to find something that you want to do and that can be productive, as opposed to trying to discipline yourself. Self-discipline is tough. You won’t sustain it. Tiger Woods didn’t become a great golfer through self-discipline.”
As helpful as it is on a macro-level, if you apply it to a small time frame, this advice falls apart. What’s great for your career is terrible for your day-to-day.
Imagine everyone in your office quit showering. Or dressing properly. Luckily, most of our needed if not fun behaviors have become habits by the time we rely on them. That said, barring multi-millionaire status, the road to which is long, most of us will always keep facing the occasional to-do we don’t like.
I don’t believe I can solve your quest for meaningful work in an article. It’s a slow process that depends on you trying things, being consistent, and adjusting as you go. What I can do is show you some of the small ways to reduce friction along the way. To summon discipline when you do need it.
Here are 14 scientific ways to increase your willpower in one minute or less.
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