Today I am writing specifically about self-discipline and I want to make sure that there is no confusion between what I mean by self-discipline and what others mean by self-control. Self-discipline and self-control are closely related subjects and it is quite easy to confuse the two.

"Discipline is freedom" touts one pundit. This smacks of government doublespeak from 1984. It sounds like a doctrine set up to enslave you but very accurately states one of the main benefits of self-discipline.

There are two sources of discipline, external and internal. External discipline is imposed upon us by others, i.e. by another person (your boss) or entity (the company you work for) or organization (the army), then your freedom is severely limited. Now if read the quote “discipline is freedom” again, and think of external discipline, it really is a doublespeak dogma designed to yoke your thoughts.

Internal discipline, self-discipline, we develop and nurture within us through exercises, practice and experience. Stephen Covey wrote, "The undisciplined are slaves to moods, appetites and passion."

Self-discipline is not about control, it is about choice. Self-control is about placing your choices in context of a socially acceptable fabric.

It is important to distinguish what I mean by self-discipline and self-control. You most likely have an average amount of self-control. You may not actually follow through with the ramming and running off the road of the jerk you just cut you off at the lights, because that act, whilst it may be an immense amount of fun, would be socially unacceptable and so you exert your self-control. You will just bad mouth the other driver in the privacy of your own head.

Alternatively, failing that, at the least the privacy of your own car. Or even, failing that, the privacy of your own blog post on LiveJournal and MySpace pages that are marked as friends only so only you, your immediate family that you entrust to look at the mostly naked pictures of you getting plastered, and six and a half thousand of your very closest internet friends will ever get to read. Each one is a differing level of self-control, a reduction in what we know to be acceptable and what we are allowing ourselves to do.

Self-discipline is about having the diligence to undertake a number of advanced driving courses, including the "highway patrol pit manoeuvre" used by the police to push vehicles from the road in a high-speed pursuit that would allow you to carry out the act. Moreover, for those who have the opportunity to take an advanced driving course with a bodyguard school or police academy, I highly recommend it. It is your self-control preventing you from using those skills.

The undisciplined lack the freedom that comes from possessing particular skills and abilities, e.g. to play a musical instrument or speak a foreign language. Self-discipline drives you to act consistently and according to what you think and believe, a belief structure built on your own moral principles and your intellect, instead of how you feel at that time, instead of how others want you to feel. It can mean sacrificing the pleasure and thrill of living in the moment for what matters most in life but can open up completely new opportunities and vistas that are unavailable to you otherwise.

What can self-discipline do for you? It will get you through the rest of a project once the rush of enthusiasm has worn off. It will get you to the gym when all you want to do is play World of Warcraft (though I heartily recommend you attempt to do both at the same time). It will let you climb the highest mountain in the world and see the greatest sights.

Without self-discipline, you will never reach the base of the mountain; you will achieve very little, trapped in a small world, barely providing for your most basic needs.

Here is what self-discipline provides me:

• To write every day of my life on whatever topic interests me and be rewarded for doing so.
• To create video games for the largest brands in the industry (Star Wars, Shrek, Civilization, Pitfall, etc)
• To appear at conferences, institutions, workshops and universities to talk on a variety of subjects.
• To stand up in front of an audience of over 1,200 people and give a 20-minute commencement address to a graduating class as the featured speaker.
• Has brought me more than $2M worth of work by running regular technology and video game developer meetings.
• To be published in major industry and technology journals.
• To travel the world whenever I feel like it.
• To wake up at 3PM in the afternoon, after going to bed at 7AM, and sit around in sweatpants on a workday and still get all of my work done.
• To eat whatever I desire, whenever I want.
• To work on whatever I choose to work on, and make money at it.

When the love of an activity has gone, when the initial enthusiasm has worn off, when the zeal and zest for a new endeavour takes a back seat to the daily grind of seeing it through to the end, self-discipline is what gets you through.

Building self-discipline will not let you instantly quit smoking whenever you choose. It will not let you lose 50lbs by tomorrow. It will not turn you into a maestro overnight. The psychology of habit and the psychology of self-discipline are both subtle and polar opposites. We are all weak in certain areas of our lives but self-discipline can be developed just like any other skill.

Do not ever equate self-discipline with the idea of a muscle, it is neither a single muscle nor a group of muscles, that you pump up, metaphorically being able to lift greater and greater weight. You do not lift heavy weights, rest for a bit, then lift heavier weights immediately afterwards. Discipline is not a single, linear number ranging from 1 to 100 that you can measure easily. Discipline works in multiple planes, it is a multi-faceted artefact of the human psyche, anybody who has studied even a little human psychology can tell you this.

Most people who write about self-discipline and improving it as though you can take it to the gym and do a few hundred crunches so that your discipline muscle can lift more weight is spouting utter bullshit. Self-discipline is composed of several traits, some stronger than others, all working in conjunction to give you the determination to do what you should do and do what you need to. I liken it to levelling up in a role-playing game, which perfectly suits a geek like me. You do not improve in just one area, but in several areas simultaneously. Some traits increase at a greater rate than others, but all of them contribute to the whole, allowing you to take on greater challenges that at an earlier time were beyond you. It is just a fact of life that certain goals, tasks and ventures will require greater self-discipline that others that you will not be ready or able to tackle until you have levelled up.

Refraining from picking your nose in public, no matter how satisfying it may be, is one level of self-discipline. Not picking your nose in public is most likely one of the easiest things to do, or refrain from doing for most of the population. For others… Not so much.

Training for four hours a day, seven days a week, in preparation for not only running in a marathon, not just completing that marathon, but actually run, complete and come in with a respectable time, is a level of self-discipline worlds apart from the picking of the nose example. And it takes even greater discipline to keep training when your life gets busy, no matter what else is going on around you, no matter how persuasive your significant other, friends or family are when they say "just skip it, just this once".

It is possible to take the most undisciplined person imaginable, a 400lbs couch potato, and in a heartbeat make that person the most determined person on Earth. You can do it in a number of ways. You can find their particular weakness and exploit it. You can manipulate their desire. You can provoke their survival response, which is probably the easiest thing to do.

You ever see someone crave pizza or chocolate? Weakness.

You ever watch a fanboy at an Apple expo listening to Steve Jobs reveal the latest hardware? Desire.

You want to see discipline? Take lazy boy out to the Mojave Desert and drop them off in the middle of nowhere without food or water and then drive your truck really slow whilst shaking a bottle of water. If you have the will power to ignore cries of your inhumanity, that person dying of thirst has become a most disciplined individual with a single mindedness of purpose that will make Brian Tracy and Steven Covey look like amateur players attempting to strike out Babe Ruth. The only problem is, this discipline does not last, you have imposed it externally, and you have not changed the person one iota.

There is good news for those that struggle with poor self-discipline. There are techniques that can be taught universally, but I am not going to sugar coat this, not everyone can be self-disciplined, because they will not allow themselves to be. The only problem — and ignoring all of the politically correct, precious snowflake nonsense such as giving an award to someone just because they gave their best effort — is that not everyone is actually equally capable.

I am dyslexic and I suffer from asthma, these two flaws mean that I am a slow learner and I will never complete a marathon that I so desperately want to. No amount of discipline will ever overcome these two problems. As long as I realise this I can make provisions and work around them, but the very essence of self-discipline is pushing myself to achieve rather than using my flaws as an excuse.

Everybody falls down and fails at something. Self-discipline is getting back up and doing it again. It is trying harder than someone to whom it comes easier. It is wanting your goal more than the next guy. Self-discipline will get you through the most arduous of circumstances when sheer talent is insufficient. Raw talent makes you a good artist, but it is self-discipline that makes you a great artist.

Any day of the week I will take a mediocre engineer or artist that has completed a number of projects on their own, right the way through to the bitter end, with all of the details take care of and all of the loose ends wrapped up. I would rather that mediocre worker than an undisciplined, wilful, creative genius who can perform stunning miracles but never on demand, and the miracles they perform are never quite complete, never quite done, and they always leave an uncountable number of loose ends to tie up. The discipline to finish what you start is the difference between those that can, and those that cannot, those that have achieved and those that have not. Most people have enough discipline to just about get by.

To develop your discipline you have to work on several angles to build it up, to improve it and to become a fully rounded individual. Many people try to convince you that discipline is built by toughing it out, by doing one extra arm curl, by spending just a few more minutes at your desk working for an sociopathic corporation, consuming one less Twinkie. It is espoused by those who do not know and eschewed by those that do. This is a faux discipline.

Your self-discipline is not built by denying yourself dessert. Your self-discipline does not get stronger just because you forced yourself to go to the gym. Discipline is never built in this way. All you do is make yourself resentful of your denial or forced servitude. You become a slave to your ego.

I am not saying that you should not forgo the Twinkie, do one more arm curl or spend ten more minutes working at your desk before turning out the desk lamp for the evening. All of those things come from self-discipline. They are because of discipline. They are not discipline itself.

Think of the people in your immediate circle of friends and acquaintances. Pick the most useless deadbeat you know that you are fairly well acquainted with. They have difficulty holding down a job, they work mostly minimum wage, unskilled labour such as flipping burgers or serving macchiato caramel lattes. They spend all of their time in front of the TV, or worse, surfing social bookmarking websites and chatting with their "friends" who are in similar situations and commiserate with each other over their lack of success, poor financial situation, etc. There are millions of people just like that.

The average discipline of the population is underwhelmingly mediocre. The average person barely has enough to hold down a regular job whether it be in web development, office management, or flipping burgers. They might be reasonably good at their job, but should the job go south then that person is left high and dry until they gain new employment. Their discipline is driven by external forces and factors.

Their internal discipline is almost non-existent, there is just enough to drive there to get another job. A little internal self-discipline will make them send out a flurry of resumes or contact a few recruiters, in the initial enthusiasm of a new project, i.e. finding a job to pay the bills, which is just enough to carry them through the first hours of working on the problem. Those first few hours will be spent on day number one, the next day, a few minutes less, and the day after, less time. Then whole days will go by where nothing is done in the quest for gainful employment. The job hunt will proceed in spurts, starting and stopping, other parts of life will intrude.

Internal self-discipline breaks down and job seeking takes a back seat to just surviving. Now let us assume that the unemployed individual is reasonably skilled with a good education and good employment history. We can also assume that the economic situation in the geographic area is not too dire, the job seeker is flexible about what they will take in terms of work and compensation, and competition for jobs is not too fierce, they will get a job, usually in a month or two. As the months drag on and the imminent pain of not having food or the thought of not meeting the rent or mortgage looms, external discipline kicks in and keeps the person looking for work, but very slowly. Finally, after months, with a job offer in hand they give themselves a big hearty pat on the back for being really good. They might, if they are valuable as an asset to a company, may even have two or three competing job offers after a month or so, which they can choose between.

Remember, external discipline imposed on you from outside is not as motivational as internal self-discipline.

Now think about dozens of job offers? What about hundreds of job offers? If you were really seeking a job and truly trying to get work, and diligently sought out every opportunity for employment in your professional field, after five or six weeks, working 40 hours a week, just like you would have done at a regular office job, you will have twenty, thirty, fifty or even a hundred job offers.

You would have contacted every company in your vicinity that might have a potential lead, spoken to hundreds of people, sent out hundreds of resumes, spent countless hours drafting personal cover letters, preparing a portfolio of work, structuring your resume and tailoring your pitch to each individual audience. I know this to be true, and I know this works, because I have personally done this to get work and do this for my company when seeking clients. I know it works because I was able to find work in Los Angeles, California, whilst living in England, with nothing more than e-mail and a few phone calls.

Self-discipline makes you:

• Get up in the morning.
• Prepare for work.
• “Commute” to the office.
• Sit at your desk and focus on work.
• Daily spend 8 hours or more in a crunch project to find a new job.
• Only take a 45-minute lunch break.
• Work at the office nights and weekends.

Self-discipline gets you dozens or hundreds of job offers within the same time frame an average person takes to find one or two mediocre jobs.

Without a monkey on your back, i.e. your former boss, driving you forward, giving you direction, making you put in the hours, making you come back from lunch and walking by your desk to castigate and chastise every time you stop to browse Fark, Digg or Reddit. Because of a lack of self-discipline and without external discipline, you lose focus and drift aimlessly.

You instead spend 3 hours sorting out your MP3 collection, you squander your time staring vacantly at your web browser, laying in bed all day, pottering around the apartment or house, running a quick errand to the storage locker or grocery store that takes three hours out of your work day. Which you would rather have? Dozens upon heaped dozens of job offers, or a well-ordered MP3 collection?

Self-discipline is not about restricting what you can and cannot do, but about directing your life, it is about ensuring that when your work is done, you can walk away knowing that you have nothing else to worry about, it is about structure. Self-discipline is knowing that spending eight hours at your desk was eight hours of valuable work. Self-discipline is about getting out of bed when you want to, not when you feel like it.

There is a big difference between the restriction (self-control) and structure (self-discipline). It is as different as laughing with a comedian and laughing at a clown.

Self-discipline is knowing that when you watch popular cable or broadcast television, the ultimate waste of time as far as I am concerned, you do it consciously and have chosen to do it, not because you “just felt like it." The consumption of television was a conscious decision that you pursued, not something that just happened because you could not think of anything else to do or procrastinated on what you should do.

I play World of Warcraft and I confess I play World of Warcraft a lot, I engage in a lot of other video games too, I also, on occasion, though very rarely, watch an episode of popular culture television shows. But when I do this, I choose to do it. And when I am done watching or playing… I am done.

Self-discipline enables me to do this at any time I choose (unless there is a hectic deadline) because I know how my time is allotted, what elasticity I have in various tasks, where my time has gone that day and where my time will go in the coming hours. I am acutely aware of every moment of what I need to do next, of what my next action will be. I am deeply cognizant of how much time I can "waste" practicing empty endeavours for the sheer pleasure of pursuing them. And yes, that includes spending three hours sorting out my MP3 collection.

There are techniques to improving discipline and there are huge advantages to learning and using these techniques. Each of the techniques, paradoxically, requires discipline. Some of the techniques that can be learnt, cannot be taught until the student is ready to learn them. The old adage, when the student is ready to learn, the master will appear rings true.

If you have ever studied martial arts, you know that, when you start out, there are techniques beyond your capabilities no matter how you attempt them. No amount of desire, no amount of discipline in other areas of your life will make you capable of them. First, you start with the simple moves, the simple techniques, and you learn through rote memorization, through drilling, practice, study and long hours of pursuit of the disciplinary ideals. Only after study of the most basic techniques are you capable of progressing to the next stage of study. This is discipline. It can be enshrined in a circular reference of itself.

The most basic discipline technique — and it is a foundation skill, and one that most people teach because most people who talk about personal development and discipline never actually progress beyond this stage — is goal setting.

Did you ever draw up a shopping list of what you need at the local grocery store? That was goal setting, simple though it may be. Did you ever create a list of errands and chores that should be taken care of that day? That also is goal setting. Have you ever sketched out the floor plan of your living room or office to decide where all of the furniture will be placed? That also is goal setting.

Do you need to revise and review your goals every day? Absolutely not. It is advisable to always bear your goals in mind as you make your way through life, it is advisable to review your goals regularly, but every day? Every week? Only if you want to develop an abnormal form of obsessive-compulsive disorder for how your life should be.

Should you set goals for everything? No, don’t be silly. I do not need to set a goal of what I expect to achieve when I take a bathroom break.

Come back tomorrow for part two where I share with you techniques that you can use to improve your self-discipline.

Update: Part two of of the self-discipline article is available.

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This is the second part of my article on self-discipline that continues where the article from yesterday left off. Today I am writing about techniques you can use to build up part of your internal self-discipline.

Awareness

Discipline is deciding, consciously, that you need to act in a certain way, or perform a certain task, possibly repeatedly, in accordance with your most basic goals. It requires an awareness of self that few people have and even fewer people are willing to pursue. Awareness, even when sought, does not come easily. Many people believe they are one type of person, or act in a particular way, but to an outside observer the person’s actions are not congruent with their goals.

Having solid foundational goals and a daily task list is important but you cannot have either of these things without first giving yourself over to introspection and analysis. This does not mean you need to run out and get $300 an hour therapy from a psychoanalyst or spend your days in endless meditation for the ultimate truth of whom you are. Some of these can help, and are tools in an extensive toolbox.

No, the simple acts of journaling your thoughts, first in an unstructured way and then later in a more rigorous exploratory structure will pay huge dividends with regard to self-analysis and your own inner awareness. This journaling will also help you to find hidden goals that you may not be aware you desire. It may also help you to eschew some goals that you thought you cared but after exploration no longer do.

Persistence

It could not be simpler. Build a routine. Stick to it.

That’s it.

If you are a college student, you already have a routine. If you work for a living, you have a routine too. You get up in the morning (assuming you work days), get ready for work, commute to the office, show up at your desk, put in however many hours you are required too, and then have another routine for going home. Your whole day cycles around basic routines.

If you are like most people, your morning routine is pretty much the same from one morning to the next. It is this routinized part of life that lets you get through the morning when you are only half-awake and have not had any coffee yet. Routine allows us you proceed through life without having to make moment-to-moment decisions about what to do next. Routinizing parts of your life is a good thing, especially when you need to develop persistence to see something through to the end.

Most people are very, very good at building routines to live in. The problem is that the majority of people routinize almost every aspect of their life and then just let the world happen around them. We would refer to those people as being "stuck in a rut." And the poor, stuck sod has no way of getting out of the rut, most of the time they’re not even aware they are in a rut, and they lack the tools to get out.

An extreme act of life has to happen to them, a huge boulder in their path of life, has to be thrown up to bounce them out of that rut. Putting your goals and projects into a routine will ensure they actually move forward and get processed. Routine is one of the foundation tools of building self-discipline.

Commitment

Once you have decided on a direction that you want to grow in, one of the hardest parts, after all the planning and thought-provoking journaling, is actually getting started on the endeavour. This is a huge step for most people. You often hear the phrase "one day I’d like to…" or "I need to make time to learn…" as though merely by wishing for something it will come to pass.

For a few lucky individuals, or those with amazing autonomous self-discipline already instilled in them from birth, the desire, the goal, may happen for them very easily. For the rest of us, those of us that go through life with ADD, ADHD, or just the general mediocrity of enough to get by in life that we have had drilled in to us from the first day of school, require something a little more.

Commitment comes from making a conscious decision, there is that word again, conscious, to act on your plans. For many people, the act of planning is too great a task, for others, the act of the first task is the hardest. All the planning in the world will not turn in to productivity if the plans are then ignored and you go back to just doing the same-old-same-old that you were doing the day before.

How can you commit to a project, goal or endeavour? How can you develop persistence? There are a few tools for that, and those are given below.

Scheduling

The art of scheduling is actually the art of creative procrastination. You can set up a commitment for some time in the future, be it two minutes from now, or two months from now, and when the appointed time rolls around, you perform the task at the fixed date and time and then move on to something else completely unrelated.

How can scheduling work? Easy, have you ever gone to college and attended class? Do you have Monday morning meetings? Those are scheduled; they take place at a particular time and day, with or without you. If you show up late, you usually have some explaining to do. Nobody waits for you, unless you are the CEO. Part of your job or life is to be at a particular place at a specific time. You cannot just reschedule arbitrarily without having to work it all out with a whole bunch of people.

When you schedule your goals you should only attempt to schedule the next step, do not try to lay out a grand plan of days and times of when things will be done by — unless of course you are attempting to develop the entire schedule in to a routine, and if so, see the next section.

You set up one task that can be completed in a single sitting, perhaps write a single page of your book, and when it is time to work on that, you do so. At the end of the scheduled time you figure out where you are, what you have gotten done, make some notes of what was achieved, where you left off, and so on. These notes are important because they are for your future self. Your future self may come back in a few hours or a few months to work on the project again.

It is important that you get these notes down clearly and succinctly so that you can quickly and easily pick up the threads of the project again. This way you do not waste valuable time figuring out what you did last time. Once you have compiled your closing notes you decide on the next task that should be done and schedule that.

By scheduling out the tasks one at a time, you gain the benefit of not failing. It is very easy to be overly optimistic and schedule out dozens or hundreds of tasks with estimates of how long each of them will take, and then after three or four of the tasks you find yourself falling behind, and by task number ten you are so far behind you are disheartened.

By writing out your notes at the end, you build up an effective and valuable journal of achievement that you can review to find out how well you estimated the amount of work, problems that you did not foresee, and ideas for new tasks in the current goal or even new goals.

Routine

Same as with persistence, building a consistent routine that you follow without question, until there is no more to do, will push you to commitment. The routine becomes part of the commitment. Let us say you decide to create a new mini-goal of studying a foreign language. You do some research about what your options are, such as Rosetta Stone or a local community college, you take a wild stab in the dark about which language you are going to study, you pick up some brochures on local colleges to find out what time class is and how much it costs. And then… nothing!

You have spent your most precious resource, your time, doing the planning and research, and then you just left it all hanging out there. Perhaps you are hoping that someone else will come along and do the actual work for you. After all, you did the hard part already; you did some research and came up with the bright idea of learning something new, should you not be rewarded now?

By building a routine in to how you handle your new goal, once you have decided on one, will push the endeavour forward and let you actually achieve a satisfactory result. The routine I tend to use, once I have come up with a goal that will take longer than five or six hours to achieve, is to set up a fixed time and place I need to be to actually work on that goal. It might be at my desk in the office, it might be at the local coffee shop. It is all about location…

Location

It can be difficult to achieve your goals when you have mental noise cluttering up your life. I work from home most of the time so it is even worse. I am trying to concentrate on something I do not want to do right now. My attention deficit disorder is making me antsy today; all I want to do is surf the net and play World of Warcraft.

But I know I cannot do those things because then I will feel really bad, and I need to make a conscious decision to goof off like that, but hey, I’ve got some laundry to do, and those shirts need folding and putting away, while I am here I might as well make the bed. Yeah, let’s go make the bed, I haven’t made the bed in a few days and the sheets are becoming all tangled up. You know, while I am here making the bed I will change the sheets and pillowcases too. Wow, will you look at the dust down the back of the bed; I had better get the vacuum cleaner out.

Well what do you know? It’s 4PM already and I haven’t had lunch and whilst I haven’t gotten done what I originally set out to do I’ve been busting my arse all day taking care of stuff around the apartment, I deserve a break, right?

By changing my location, by removing myself from the mental clutter and the thousand other tasks clamouring at me, and three cats wanting attention, and a girlfriend (who also works from home) who, you know, just wants to talk for a bit because well, she’s kind of bored of what she is working on too… by changing location I am able to refocus my energy and my mind on to the important task.

For my writing, I take my laptop and iPod to a local coffee shop. When I go to this coffee shop, and I only ever go to this one coffee shop for this one specific purpose, I enter my "writing club." It is a club with a membership of precisely one. By doing this, by putting myself in a different location I am able to focus on what needs to get done for hours on end. At the coffee shop I spend two hours there doing nothing but writing.

I picked this particular coffee shop because the WiFi is not free so if I want to log on I have to make a conscious decision to pull out my wallet and type in my credit card information. I made a conscious decision to change how I work.

I routinized the habit so that I do not have to make a decision of where I should work, how long I should work for, or when I should work. The decision is made for me. I made myself get stuck in a rut so that I can get my writing work done. Very rarely do I show up at the coffee shop and have no will to work. If I am there for 15 minutes and just cannot get in to it, I quit, I leave. The writing club is not a place for surfing the web, chatting with the person at the next table or texting friends. I cut my losses, I cut class, and I head home.

By doing this I also know that, for today, I failed. I can log it in my journal, analyze why I felt that way, what went wrong, and figure out how to adjust my behaviour so that the next time I am there I can work on preventing it from happening again. This analysis helps me stick to my goals with valuable feedback.

Feedback

Getting feedback, positive or negative is a perfect benchmark of achievement. Do not be concerned with negative feedback; it is a valuable character-building tool, you just do not want to take it personally. When I talk about negative feedback, I really do mean something constructive. "You suck" is not constructive, but being able to tally up the number of days you did and did not attend the gym is valuable. If your feedback is properly constructed then all feedback is positive.

The two pitfalls many people fall in to when gathering feedback is that it is either arbitrary, i.e. touchy feely, non quantifiable, or that the feedback measures too much.

Let’s say your goal is fitness. You want to attend the gym, you want to lift weights, and you want to do some cardio work too. Many people will fall in to the planning pitfall where elaborate systems of measurement of achievements are kept. how many miles were run, how many crunches were crunched, how many reps were uh, repeated.

So you set out to measure all these things, and then one measurement falls behind and you feel a twinge of failure. A little later you fall behind on something else, and another pang of disappointment and pretty soon, like wearing out your hit points in a role-playing game, you are hoping the Dungeon Master subscribes to the "zero hit points means unconscious" rule rather than the "you are dead, give up" rule. From the very beginning you are trying to measure all of your statistics like some grand master goal setter when you have not even grasped the basics of how all the pieces of your life move.

Concentrate on one single measurable thing first. Get that as part of your routine, then start measuring other things. Reduce your variables. So what do you do when you get to the gym? Lift some weights, run for a bit, hang out by the women’s locker room hoping that the entrance hallway is not built so perfectly that it prevents you from sneaking a peek inside?

Measure those goals later, your goal right now is get to the gym, so that is what you measure, get feedback on that. A simple calendar with a big red X through each day you are supposed to go indicating that you attended is all that matters when starting out to measure things. I personally suggest you try using Check-off Grids which I have written about in the past.

Pick the simplest thing that can be measured and measure that, ignore everything else, and here is the important thing about feedback, if you miss a day, do not try and catch up by going an extra day the following week, say "screw it" and move on. Realise and accept that your routine got broken and that it starts again on the next routinized, scheduled day.

Thinking of attending toastmasters? Missed it on Tuesday night? Think they will hold two meetings next week for you so you can "catch up?" Didn’t think so. That is how life is. If you know you cannot catch up, and if you know that if you are not there, it takes place without you, you become a lot more committed to actually showing up in the first place.

Self-discipline, when applied consistently across the important areas of your life, is a huge driving force, more powerful than raw talent or innate skill.

When I was a child attending school, my academic results were lacking, to say the least. I did not enjoy studying, all I wanted to do was goof off and do my own thing, the amount of discipline I could bring to bear on my day to day studies were minimal at best. Even with special academic help and home tutoring, my lack of interest in studying, coupled with various learning difficulties, made any attempt to study an arduous task for my tutors and me. I was essentially wasting away my time.

Once I "graduated" out of high school with the minimum of results required, I bounced around aimlessly for several years until settling in to a real career as a video game developer. I had already been developing computer games on my own time for several years but societal pressure to “get a real job” drove me in to the workforce just like every one of my peers. Discipline in those earlier years would have helped me, but the frustration I felt with even the most basic of tasks did not instil in me the self-regulation to see that particular endeavour through.

Later in life, I returned to college by determining what qualifications I needed to pursue a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science. When I first decided to return to college, it was merely on a whim. A friend at the time wanted someone to go along with to find out what classes the institution offered. I signed up at the same time and for the first six months or so, we attended class together regularly.

I found I was actually enjoying the study, I was finding that the homework that was set was trivially easy, and not only that I was generally getting my homework done the evening that it was assigned. This never happened when I was forced to attend school and learn at the pace of everyone else. True learning, not just rote memorization demanded by someone else, became an eye opening experience.

My friend rapidly fell behind in their studies and eventually dropped out citing the fact that they had to work during the day so it was not easy for them to take night classes whereas, they opined, I did not actually have a job, not a real job anyway. Running two small trading companies that I operated, kept me busy for about six days out of the week, but did not actually count as a real job. When I started on the college course, a degree was the furthest thing from my mind. I knew I had no academic prowess, only one of my immediate family for three generations (and we are a large family) had been to college and gotten a bachelors degree.

Towards the end of the course, my lecturer asked me what I wanted to do afterwards and maybe I should give some thought of going on to higher education. With some encouragement from him and a few friends I had made at the college, I tentatively decided I should apply. I was in my early twenties at this stage.

I applied, the new college reviewed my application and after careful consideration rejected me based on my past school qualifications rather than my current studies. I talked to the admissions officer and some of the lecturers at the new college directly and they agreed that if I could get a passing grade in my current studies they would allow me to enrol, but I also had to maintain a certain grade point average at the new college. The demanded GPA was above the average GPA score for the class.

After getting myself the most basic qualification I needed to be accepted I went on to get myself a first class four-year bachelors degree, completing all of my required studies for it, in just two years, whilst earning $60K a year in a game development job at the same time.

I will not say that the work was not stressful but by applying discipline, by setting goals, goals I will admit I accidentally fell in to at first, without realising these were goals I wanted. By using the tools of discipline, scheduling, journaling, feedback, location, routine, I was able to move my personal life to another completely new level of existence that I was unaware of previously and when I became dimly aware of it, I believed I would be unable to attain it.

My earlier experiences coloured my decisions, I had pre-decided before ever thinking of the outcome, that higher learning was not for me. And yet, when I pushed myself, when I applied the techniques I had learnt, I found that the application of simple tools allowed me to be far more advanced than many of my classmates. Psychology shows that self-discipline is a better indicator of success in all forms of life than IQ, wealth or talent.

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