The 5 Levels of Self-Discipline

- This video is sponsored by CuriosityStream and Nebula.

If you wanna become a more disciplined person the key to doing that is in this book, "The Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg, specifically in chapter five on page 142.

Now you might be thinking the answer is building habits, but that's not it, it's something different and it's hidden in plain sight in one of the studies that he talks about in this book.

So back in the early 90s, just one year after I was born, a psychologist went to a hospital in Scotland and did a study involving patients of knee replacement surgeries.

Now, if you know anything about this type of surgery, you will know that movement and physical rehabilitation is crucial almost immediately after the surgery is done if the patient is going to fully recover their mobility.

But there's a problem, moving after a knee replacement is agonizing, it's incredibly painful.

And for that reason, a lot of people who get this type of surgery never fully recover.

So the psychologist took about 60 of these patients and had them write down specific detailed plans on paper of how they were going to go about their recovery.

And something remarkable happened.

The patients who actually wrote down a plan for what they were going to do are much more likely to do it and push through the pain when it came.

And my favorite example was a man who committed to walking to the bus stop every day to meet his wife as she came home from work.

And that right there is the key to self-discipline.

It's hidden in plain sight in that example, and in interactions that we have with people every single day.

The key is accountability, you could also call it duty, the obligations we have to each other.

When your boss tells you to be to work at a specific time, you are there at a specific time because your boss is relying on you.

When your little brother asks you to pick them up from school, you do it because he is relying on you.

But what about our personal goals?

What about that instrument you've been meaning to learn or the workout routine you're trying to stick to?

With these personal goals, there's nobody else really relying on us.

So we can't really tap accountability to improve our self-discipline, can we?

Well, actually we can.

And in this video, we're going to explore a model that I'm calling the five levels of self-discipline.

Each levels in this model has to do with a different type of accountability that can be applied to augment and improve your levels of self-discipline.

Four levels in this model have to do with our relationships to other people.

And they are the most powerful levels, but the first one is worth mentioning as well.

And that is accountability to yourself.

Now, as the first level, this is the weakest one, but it is not weak per se can actually be very powerful and the study in this book is proof of that.

Now, the man who chose to meet his wife at the bus stop is my favorite example because he involved another person in the equation.

But everyone else who was successful in this study didn't have anybody else that was really relying on them yet they were successful because they held themselves accountable.

They made plans and then stuck to them later on.

Every time we make a plan, every time we sit down and write out a task or add something to our calendar or decide to do something, we are essentially trying to hold our future selves accountable.

And the study here illustrates how to be more successful with that.

Number one, make it tangible, write down what you're going to do, and number two, be specific about it.

Write down exactly what you were going to do and what conditions may cause you to fail.

This last part is also echoed in Seth Godin's excellent book, "The Dip".

When he talks about how marathoners often decide what will cause them to quit before they start the race.

That way they are pre-committing to the conditions that would cause them to drop out, and when the discomfort hits later on in the marathon, maybe 18 or 19 miles in they'll know, I committed to other conditions that would make me quit this is not one of them therefore I'm going to push through.

Level two is the first level where we introduce relationships to other people and in doing so, the accountability becomes so much more powerful because we are a social species.

So while accountability to yourself can be useful when somebody else is holding your feet to the fire, that is so, so much better.

Now, level two is the most casual one in this category.

And it involves introducing an accountability partner into the mix.

An accountability partner is somebody who likes you or cares about you, cares about your goals and your progress, and will put in the effort to make sure that you're doing what you said you were going to do, who actually check up on you.

This is a rare person than you might think.

And a lot of people fall into a common pitfall where they go around telling all their friends and family about a goal that they have, assuming that these people will hold them accountable.

But what actually happens is they end up sabotaging themselves due to something called a social reality.

This is when you feel like you have actually made some progress on your goal, due to the praise you receive from other people after you tell them about it.

You feel like something has happened but in reality, no progress has been made.

And research has found that people who talk about their goals tend to practice less and quit more often.

So in general, you shouldn't go around talking about your goals because you want to avoid these social realities.

But the caveat here is that if you can find somebody who will actually act as an accountability partner, telling them about your goal and having them hold you accountable can be very powerful.

And I have an example here.

So a few years ago I decided that I wanted to read more non-fiction.

So I went to my best friend Martin, and I said, I'm going to read 25 pages of nonfiction every single day for the next three months.

And if I skip even one day, I'm gonna give you $100, so please hold me accountable.

And to help him keep me accountable I also created a spreadsheet for him.

That's right, it is spreadsheet time once again.

So I created a sheet where I would record how many pages I read each day and from what book, and I gave him access to that sheet.

And Martin was actually a great accountability partner.

There were some days where I wouldn't do my reading until like 11:00 p.m. at night, and on those days I remember him texting me or coming up and saying, "Hey, why haven't you done your reading yet?"

And Martin was a particularly good accountability partner because he didn't really want the $100.

- I don't want your filthy failure money, Tom.

- So Martin is definitely a great accountability partner.

And if you have a Martin in your life, lean on them the next time you're having trouble sticking to a goal on your own, that accountability they bring to the table is like a force multiplier for your self-discipline.

Now, if you don't have somebody in your life who can act as a great accountability partner, you can always move up to level three, which is to hire a coach or a teacher.

Coaches and teachers are essentially professional accountability partners and they bring some additional benefits to the table.

A great coach is somebody has the expertise in the thing that you wanna learn.

They can either do it themselves now, they're at the level you're trying to get to, or they were at that level one point in their lives and have the experience they can lean on to teach you to get there.

But they also have experience with teaching.

And this is really a true skill area unto its own.

Some people are experts, but they fall victim to what's called the expert paradox, where they are so good at what they do that it's become like breathing to them.

It is second nature, it's completely unconscious.

And because of that, they don't know how to break it down into the manageable beginner chunks that somebody at your level needs to actually understand and make progress.

So a great coach is somebody with both the expertise and the teaching ability, but also someone who is invested in your success.

And this is what separates a great coach from a mere good one.

Somebody who actually cares about you making progress.

Now there are actually platforms out there where you can hire coaches for a surprisingly affordable rates.

Coach.me is the one that I can think of.

But great coaches in my experience often cost a good amount of money.

So this is something where you may wanna look for an accountability partner first and then move up to coaching when you have the means or when you're very serious about making progress.

Now, level four is a whole different ball game than levels two and three, because with accountability partners and coaches, these people are exerting effort to give you the accountability you need for your personal goals.

Level four involves joining a team or a group or an organization so that your personal goal becomes aligned with a common goal.

And in doing so, you now have other people who are relying on you to do your part, and this makes the accountability so much more powerful.

Now, when it comes to teams, I see two different types in this dynamic here.

First, there are groups of people who have come together to all pursue their personal goals in a group setting.

Think about like a casual, but fast cycling ride on the weekend.

There are a lot of these on meetup here in Denver, and I've actually participated in one in the past.

Some of these are what are called drop rides, where if the pack is going faster than you, you are going to get dropped.

Meaning they're not gonna stop up the road and wait for you and let you rejoin the pack, you get dropped, you just need to ride home.

In this instance, you are not really contributing to a common goal so much as you are in a pack of people who are all riding for the camaraderie, but it's still powerful.

If you see a pack pulling ahead of you and you're falling behind, well, there's not a whole lot more in this world that's gonna make you motivated to really step on the gas and try to keep up with that pack.

But the one thing that is more powerful than that, is being part of a team where your input is literally needed for everyone to meet their goal.

Think of a relay race, if you never make it to the area where the next person is waiting for you to pass the baton, they can't run.

And if you're slow, they're never gonna be able to catch up with their competitor.

So whatever your personal goal is, if you can find a team or an organization that you can join, where your contributions will be needed, but you can also develop your own abilities, that's powerful.

The only thing more powerful is level five.

And before I reveal what this level is, I do wanna say that this is not the domain of life facts.

This is not a level to go to if you want to add some self-discipline into your own life, but it is a level that has to be included in this model, otherwise it would be incomplete.

Level five is leadership.

Now, instead of being part of a team and having people rely on you just to do your part, now you've stepped up into a leadership role and everyone is relying on you to guide them as well.

When you're a leader, the accountability is at its highest point, but also the responsibility and the consequences for failure are as well.

So those are the five levels of self-discipline as they pertain it to accountability.

Accountability to yourself, to partners, to coaches and teachers, to teams, and to people beneath you when you were in leadership positions.

Now with accountability partners in general, it can be tough to find good ones who will actually stick with you and hold you accountable.

And in the extended version of this video, over a Nebula, I discuss one more way that can be very powerful for finding those accountability partners and developing relationships with them.

If you haven't heard about it, Nebula is a streaming service created by myself and a bunch of other great educational creators, MKBHD, Ali Abdaal, Wendover Productions and tons more.

And on Nebula, you get access to my new videos before they go live on YouTube and you get them ad free.

In fact, the Nebula version of this video completely replaces this ad with that extended section that I talked about.

You also get access to Nebula plus content, extended editions, additional videos, and even Nebula originals, where we can kind of branch out from our normal topics and experiment with things that might not work on other platforms.

So if you wanna see that, if you wanna see the extended edition of this video, you're gonna wanna get Nebula.

And the best way to get it is actually to get CuriosityStream, because we have teamed up with the folks over at CuriosityStream to offer a bundle.

When you go and sign up at the link in the description down below, you get access to both Nebula and CuriosityStream for whopping 26% off, less than 15 bucks a year, which is hang on a second, are you insisting?

(laughing) I'm doing the rest of this ad with a cat.

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Cat, you're bumping the microphone.

Anyway, thank you so much for watching this video, hopefully you found something helpful in the model that I've developed here, we'd love to hear your thoughts about it in the comments down below, and until next week's video, stay cute.

Oh, you got fur all over the mic, gross.