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IMO this makes the most important point at the very end. “Being disciplined” itself is a consequence of motivation, or is effectively that. Building habits howe

IMO this makes the most important point at the very end. “Being disciplined” itself is a consequence of motivation, or is effectively that. Building habits however, requires very little discipline or motivation so long as you build them strategically - I.e. start so small it’d be ridiculous not to do it regardless of how motivated or disciplined you are. And by “start small” I mean “floss one tooth per night for 3 months to build a flossing habit” small. Let your good habits progressively and slowly consume more time, similar to what bad habits do. For all intents and purposes you should just assume both discipline and motivation are completely mythical and you should construct a system of high-leverage habits to obviate the need for them. You don’t rise to the level of your talents/motivation/discipline, you fall to the level of your habits.

dobbysfirstsock 4y ago
Yep. I will say though, its always possible, barring any sort of medical reasons, to get disciplined. I've had months where I go to the gym and then something happens and its easy to not go. There's nothing on this earth stopping me from picking that back up, other than myself... which reminds me, I need to start going again. Crazy thing is you _know_ you'll feel better but getting up and going can be a drag sometimes.
- mach1ne 4y ago
  >Crazy thing is you _know_ you'll feel better but getting up and going can be a drag sometimes. Yeah, that’s because most of your agency is hooked up to the monkey brain. You’re not really fighting anything, your apparent incentives just don’t drive you to go.
  - dobbysfirstsock 4y ago
    For sure. I just can't get over how I know full well that I'll feel better, yet in the moment its like "meh don't wanna go"
O__________O 4y ago
Related pop culture book on the topic of habits titled “Atomic Habits” by James Clear: - https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Habits-Proven-Build-Break/dp/0735211299/ https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Habits-Proven-Build-Break/dp/0...
- ethanbond 4y ago
  Atomic Habits is good. I personally found much more success with BJ Fogg’s “Tiny Habits” regime. He has a book by that title (which I’ve not actually read) and lots of resources online.
  - scajanus 4y ago
    I wasn't a fan of the former, even though it is mentioned way more often and liked the Tiny Habits approach more, too.
  - O__________O 4y ago
    Agree, long list of similar books, mainly cited it because it’s most popular among them. Atomic Habits book also has a companion workbook. Here’s a link to the Tiny Habits book: - https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07LC9KDP5/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07LC9KDP5/ And related Tiny Habits website: - https://tinyhabits.com/ https://tinyhabits.com/
    - Snitch-Thursday 4y ago
      Do you happen to have an opinion re: how this book compares with "The Power of Habit"? I'm trying to decide whether to purchase "Tiny Habits" and the blurb on the seller's page is nice, but somewhat generic.
      - O__________O 4y ago
        Try Googles like this: - https://www.google.com/search?q=%22tiny+Habits%22+vs+%22atomic+habits%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22tiny+Habits%22+vs+%22atom... Which produces comparisons like this: - https://www.tobysinclair.com/post/tiny-habits-vs-atomic-habits https://www.tobysinclair.com/post/tiny-habits-vs-atomic-habi... TLDR: Atomic Habits focus more on systems design. Tiny Habits is focused more on designs a habit. Free ebook linked to on page above above provides more information: https://67d4e809-d682-43a5-b820-b52f25a5db57.usrfiles.com/ugd/67d4e8_e72eb2c0088f48c5b48a57c85eb5f84d.pdf https://67d4e809-d682-43a5-b820-b52f25a5db57.usrfiles.com/ug...
Throwaway020423 4y ago
I agree. In the past, I’ve tried to just be disciplined, stop procrastinating, and push through no matter what, and it lead to horrible burnout where I spent weeks/months being fairly ineffective. If you’re not sleeping at all at night and can’t think straight during the day, even for a couple minutes, you’re simply not going to be effective. You’re also liable to make really bad decisions that will drag on you even after you’ve recovered. Having a routine though, even a very flexible routine, has been very effective. Things become automatic. Settling into an effective routing often involves not worrying too much about discipline, though. It's easier for people to get to the gym everyday if the goal is "get to the gym, and do something" than it is if the goal is "get to the gym and do a rigorous 2 hour workout." Small steps and environmental changes, as well as not stressing over what's optimal, have been the most effective approaches in my experience.
- atemerev 4y ago
  "Having a routine" is exactly what is impossible if you have ADHD. I am struggling all my life to find a replacement.
  - Consultant32452 4y ago
    [flagged]
  - OkayPhysicist 4y ago
    As someone who also has ADHD, making the gym locker room a step on my daily trip home from work and the place I shower was what finally got me working out regularly. Still, some days I show up, shower, and leave, but most days (3-4 days a week) I'll be able to convince myself to go do a workout, since I'm there anyway.
HPsquared 4y ago
You can think of the habits as the goal, "motivation to build and maintain good habits", which ends up looking like motivation and discipline for more external things. The inner driver though is to maintain good habits.
saiya-jin 4y ago
I don't like recent political spins and ramblings of Jordan Peterson (basically very pro-Putin and pro-Trump last time I checked, and stopped cold turkey with him after that), but as a psychologist he made tons of excellent and practical remarks before that. One of them which sticks with me is about fighting addictions and habits - every time you win this internal fight (go do something unwanted, don't light up that cigarette or drink alcohol) you get a bit stronger and addiction gets slightly weaker. Same for habits and defeating procrastination. The hardest part is the first step, when opposite side (in your own persona) is strongest and it feels its too high a mountain to overcome. With addictions you never chip it away to 0 - that's the unfortunate cold hard truth, but you can chip it away into something you can manage continuously. Good habits are often self-fueling after crossing some threshold, ie exercise and eating healthy.
- fartsucker69 4y ago
  He was so good when he stuck to psychology. It really sucks, all of these public intellectual types think once they become popular it gives them an easy opportunity to make money by speaking about domains they clearly have no expertise in. As soon as Peterson started talking about religion, philosophy, and various politics, it all went downhill very fast. I do make an exception with all of that when all the pub science guys shit on religion though. Can't seem to get enough of that even though I'm out of my angsty atheist teenager phase by 20 years
  - cmh89 4y ago
    It's just a character trait of pop psychology/motivators/influencers. It's not like 'successfully not doing x makes it easier to permanently stop doing x' is a profound or new idea. These folks need to feel popular and build a brand and its really hard to just stick with one thing, as it limits your audience, so you grow in to other venues. Telling people what they want to hear in a nice package that makes them feel smart is a business as old as time. Oprah built a whole empire off of it. The internet has just widened the reach.
- chowells 4y ago
  This isn't a turn for Jordan Peterson. It's who he's always been, and a lot of people tried to warn you about it 5+ years ago. The only new thing is that he's not trying to dress it up in fake objectivity anymore. Have you spent any time wondering how those people knew this was coming years ago, but you didn't see it?
ParetoOptimal 4y ago
> And by “start small” I mean “floss one tooth per night for 3 months to build a flossing habit” small. After taking my ADHD medication, building and maintaining these habits ranges from easy to effortless. Without it or after it runs out... IF I remember... it ranges from seemingly impossible to very hard.
- atemerev 4y ago
  Still impossible to very hard even with medication (though at least I am forgetting things less).
  - ParetoOptimal 4y ago
    I agree. Especially when my sleep/exercise isn't as good as it should be.
- dec0dedab0de 4y ago
  do you mind sharing which medication? I'm on adderall and while it can help me stay on a specific task, and has changed my life drastically, It does nothing for me as far as forming habits.
  - sph 4y ago
    The meds won't help you "show up" after the euphoria phase of the first week. But while you are now able to stay on task and complete it, you still have to pull yourself from the couch to the task that needs doing. I have been medicated for a year now, and the common advice of "just do 5 minutes and nothing more" to get myself started now actually works. I still hate doing chores (I am procrastinating rn because my flat needs some cleaning), but if I start, you better believe they will get done and I might do a little more just because now I have dopamine to tell me "this is good stuff you're doing, carry on", whereas before I was fighting every second the urge to just leave the thing halfway and go do something else. Life was hard. I'm on lisdexamfetamine FWIW. EDIT: the dopaminergic system is exactly how you form habits. When taking amphetamines, you have more dopamine, thus habits are much easier to create. Both the good and the bad ones. You just have to fight against the lifelong learned helplessness that effort is not worth it. That takes a long while to rewire. Ok, time to close HN and clean my flat.
dec0dedab0de 4y ago
...start so small it’d be ridiculous not to do it regardless of how motivated or disciplined you are. And by “start small” I mean “floss one tooth per night for 3 months to build a flossing habit” small... The idea of doing something every day in a row for 3 months causes me pain and revulsion. If I think about it a bit longer, I I know I would get mad at myself for missing a day, and would get really mad at myself for forgetting for 2 years, and I'm already jumping the gun at trying to avoid setting myself up for failure. I floss my teeth when they feel dirty, anything else seems unsustainable. But maybe that's why I don't have motivation or discipline.
- ethanbond 4y ago
  Yeah, if you don’t actually want the habit in question then definitely don’t bother. What purpose do you think getting mad at yourself serves?
  - dec0dedab0de 4y ago
    I wish I could build good habits, and getting mad serves no purpose, but it happens. Seeing other people have morning rituals, and mowing their lawn on a schedule, and whatnot seems like a magic trick. I only commented because starting small doesn't make it seem any easier to me, though I do understand that it might help someone else.
BurningFrog 4y ago
Motivation is a weird thing. Or maybe it's several things shoved into one word. A very common mistake is to procrastinate doing something until you feel motivated. Our minds often doesn't work that way. But if you start the task without any motivation, or expectation it will get done, you'll often find yourself motivated and making progress within minutes. In reality, once you put some effort in, that can make you motivated.
- adwi 4y ago
  “Action precedes motivation” is a good lesson I keep relearning.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    I wish I could learn this faster. I can't even count the number of things that I've procrastinated and burned hours or days of brain focus on avoiding that ended up taking 10 or 15 minutes to just accomplish once I finally started.
    - ekanes 4y ago
      Me too. What's helped me a lot is to just relentlessly make "what counts as starting" smaller and smaller until it's doable. Where "file taxes" is very very hard, "look through email and remember name of my accountant" (and many other TINY tasks...) is much more doable!
      - Snitch-Thursday 4y ago
        these tasks are similar to the 'intellgent dumbing down' talked about in Getting Things Done, no wonder they work! Having said that...I'm not diagnosed as ADHD but I definitely feel I exhibit executive dysfunction symptoms, and one of my siblings was diagnosed, so I'm feeling confident I'm ADHD adjacent at least...and just trying to implement Getting Things Done helped me immensely. Not only does it help with having a less stressful day (no longer do I have "what am I missing? what am I forgetting? Ahhh, angst!" feelings), it also helps me to just stay on task and/or when I switch tasks, know that I have the confidence to come back to wherever I was.
antisceptic 4y ago
He mentions building habits in part 2 of the article, using the boiling the frog analogy (imploring the reader to use it for good instead). My question, though, is how does a good habit expand into a great habit, without motivation? For your tooth example, once you start flossing you might as well floss all your teeth. The upfront cost of getting started with the floss is the worst part of it, but once you're there it's easy. This isn't true for all habits though. For many it's easy to just bail out fast. If I started doing 5 push-ups a day will I eventually do 100 and then 1000? Or would I settle somewhere on a mediocre range because it's easy to stop? Is there some sort of recursion or positive feedback loop that kicks in that rescues me from mediocrity if all I have is discipline and not motivation?
- godshatter 4y ago
  If you start with 5 push-ups a day, you'll hit your limits fast just increasing push-ups by one a day, so spread out your improvements by increasing in several exercises, adding more if necessary. Not to do all of them at once every day, but ones to switch between daily. I started something like this years ago, and I'm still keeping up on it. If life happens and I have to take a break from it, I restart it later and reduce my goals so that it doesn't seem so bad trying to jump back into a routine I was maximizing earlier. The key was to make it a habit I do every day, like brushing my teeth. If I've had a bad day and miss doing my "workout routine" (such that it is, I'm no Arnold), it feels weird to miss one and I look forward to doing it the next day. So in that way once you've made it to a certain point it's self-fulfilling.
11235813213455 4y ago
> “Being disciplined” itself is a consequence of motivation You can swap the terms as well, there are exercises or tasks that you start enjoying with time, repetition and experience
alxlu 4y ago
> And by “start small” I mean “floss one tooth per night for 3 months to build a flossing habit” small. Let your good habits progressively and slowly consume more time, similar to what bad habits do. The difficulty here is primarily in initiating the task consistently imo. Once you are already at the point of flossing one tooth there likely isn’t much mental resistance to flossing the others. I think it’s better to do things that lower the resistance to starting the task in the first place as opposed to just making the task smaller.
- rwc 4y ago
  That's exactly the point: activation energy is the hardest to summon, and once you have it's "easy" to finish the rest of the habit (e.g. floss all your other teeth). If "floss one tooth" is still too much, go smaller: "take my floss out of the drawer and put it on the counter."
  - dan_mctree 4y ago
    For me I don't believe there's a way to make the activation small enough of a thing that I would be able to consistently do it. If my task were to consistently lift a finger every Monday I don't think I'd be able to do it.
  - monktastic1 4y ago
    I think they are saying that it doesn't make sense to call it "starting small" if it is the "hardest to summon."
    - suddenclarity 4y ago
      Doesn't those go hand in hand? You dread starting because you don't want or have the energy to spend 20+ min on it. So you reduce the task to taking 5 seconds and eliminate the reason for it being hard. Say, put on one shoe, if you want to develop the habit of walking.
  - alxlu 4y ago
    Right, but breaking down tasks after "activating" the task probably isn't very useful. Doing the one tooth thing doesn't really help since once you are already there, the gap between doing that and the rest of the teeth is basically nonexistent. You might as well start off flossing all your teeth if you are able to get to the flossing part. Breaking down activation energy is also hard. Taking floss out and putting it on the counter feels like it might not be reinforcing enough. Something more useful might revolve around storing the floss in a more readily available position or using something like floss picks and/or other things that might reduce friction. But ultimately, I think everything eventually boils down to raw discipline.
IIsi50MHz 4y ago
> You don’t rise to the level of your talents/motivation/discipline, you fall to the level of your habits. "The enemy's gate is /down/!" (downward) [1] That is, orientate yourself such that where you want to go is as easy/automatic as falling. [1] Ender's Game, and the Ender's Shadow sequence. Though, I wish the catchphrase had used "downward" rather than "down", as the latter is confusingly similar to "has fallen / is breached". [Edit: s/r'r Shadow/r's Shadow]

dobbysfirstsock 4y ago

Yep. I will say though, its always possible, barring any sort of medical reasons, to get disciplined. I've had months where I go to the gym and then something happens and its easy to not go. There's nothing on this earth stopping me from picking that back up, other than myself... which reminds me, I need to start going again. Crazy thing is you _know_ you'll feel better but getting up and going can be a drag sometimes.

mach1ne 4y ago
>Crazy thing is you _know_ you'll feel better but getting up and going can be a drag sometimes. Yeah, that’s because most of your agency is hooked up to the monkey brain. You’re not really fighting anything, your apparent incentives just don’t drive you to go.
- dobbysfirstsock 4y ago
  For sure. I just can't get over how I know full well that I'll feel better, yet in the moment its like "meh don't wanna go"

O__________O 4y ago

Related pop culture book on the topic of habits titled “Atomic Habits” by James Clear: - https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Habits-Proven-Build-Break/dp/0735211299/ https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Habits-Proven-Build-Break/dp/0...

ethanbond 4y ago
Atomic Habits is good. I personally found much more success with BJ Fogg’s “Tiny Habits” regime. He has a book by that title (which I’ve not actually read) and lots of resources online.
- scajanus 4y ago
  I wasn't a fan of the former, even though it is mentioned way more often and liked the Tiny Habits approach more, too.
- O__________O 4y ago
  Agree, long list of similar books, mainly cited it because it’s most popular among them. Atomic Habits book also has a companion workbook. Here’s a link to the Tiny Habits book: - https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07LC9KDP5/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07LC9KDP5/ And related Tiny Habits website: - https://tinyhabits.com/ https://tinyhabits.com/
  - Snitch-Thursday 4y ago
    Do you happen to have an opinion re: how this book compares with "The Power of Habit"? I'm trying to decide whether to purchase "Tiny Habits" and the blurb on the seller's page is nice, but somewhat generic.
    - O__________O 4y ago
      Try Googles like this: - https://www.google.com/search?q=%22tiny+Habits%22+vs+%22atomic+habits%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22tiny+Habits%22+vs+%22atom... Which produces comparisons like this: - https://www.tobysinclair.com/post/tiny-habits-vs-atomic-habits https://www.tobysinclair.com/post/tiny-habits-vs-atomic-habi... TLDR: Atomic Habits focus more on systems design. Tiny Habits is focused more on designs a habit. Free ebook linked to on page above above provides more information: https://67d4e809-d682-43a5-b820-b52f25a5db57.usrfiles.com/ugd/67d4e8_e72eb2c0088f48c5b48a57c85eb5f84d.pdf https://67d4e809-d682-43a5-b820-b52f25a5db57.usrfiles.com/ug...

Throwaway020423 4y ago

I agree. In the past, I’ve tried to just be disciplined, stop procrastinating, and push through no matter what, and it lead to horrible burnout where I spent weeks/months being fairly ineffective. If you’re not sleeping at all at night and can’t think straight during the day, even for a couple minutes, you’re simply not going to be effective. You’re also liable to make really bad decisions that will drag on you even after you’ve recovered. Having a routine though, even a very flexible routine, has been very effective. Things become automatic. Settling into an effective routing often involves not worrying too much about discipline, though. It's easier for people to get to the gym everyday if the goal is "get to the gym, and do something" than it is if the goal is "get to the gym and do a rigorous 2 hour workout." Small steps and environmental changes, as well as not stressing over what's optimal, have been the most effective approaches in my experience.

atemerev 4y ago
"Having a routine" is exactly what is impossible if you have ADHD. I am struggling all my life to find a replacement.
- Consultant32452 4y ago
  [flagged]
- OkayPhysicist 4y ago
  As someone who also has ADHD, making the gym locker room a step on my daily trip home from work and the place I shower was what finally got me working out regularly. Still, some days I show up, shower, and leave, but most days (3-4 days a week) I'll be able to convince myself to go do a workout, since I'm there anyway.

HPsquared 4y ago

You can think of the habits as the goal, "motivation to build and maintain good habits", which ends up looking like motivation and discipline for more external things. The inner driver though is to maintain good habits.

saiya-jin 4y ago

I don't like recent political spins and ramblings of Jordan Peterson (basically very pro-Putin and pro-Trump last time I checked, and stopped cold turkey with him after that), but as a psychologist he made tons of excellent and practical remarks before that. One of them which sticks with me is about fighting addictions and habits - every time you win this internal fight (go do something unwanted, don't light up that cigarette or drink alcohol) you get a bit stronger and addiction gets slightly weaker. Same for habits and defeating procrastination. The hardest part is the first step, when opposite side (in your own persona) is strongest and it feels its too high a mountain to overcome. With addictions you never chip it away to 0 - that's the unfortunate cold hard truth, but you can chip it away into something you can manage continuously. Good habits are often self-fueling after crossing some threshold, ie exercise and eating healthy.

fartsucker69 4y ago
He was so good when he stuck to psychology. It really sucks, all of these public intellectual types think once they become popular it gives them an easy opportunity to make money by speaking about domains they clearly have no expertise in. As soon as Peterson started talking about religion, philosophy, and various politics, it all went downhill very fast. I do make an exception with all of that when all the pub science guys shit on religion though. Can't seem to get enough of that even though I'm out of my angsty atheist teenager phase by 20 years
- cmh89 4y ago
  It's just a character trait of pop psychology/motivators/influencers. It's not like 'successfully not doing x makes it easier to permanently stop doing x' is a profound or new idea. These folks need to feel popular and build a brand and its really hard to just stick with one thing, as it limits your audience, so you grow in to other venues. Telling people what they want to hear in a nice package that makes them feel smart is a business as old as time. Oprah built a whole empire off of it. The internet has just widened the reach.
chowells 4y ago
This isn't a turn for Jordan Peterson. It's who he's always been, and a lot of people tried to warn you about it 5+ years ago. The only new thing is that he's not trying to dress it up in fake objectivity anymore. Have you spent any time wondering how those people knew this was coming years ago, but you didn't see it?

ParetoOptimal 4y ago

> And by “start small” I mean “floss one tooth per night for 3 months to build a flossing habit” small. After taking my ADHD medication, building and maintaining these habits ranges from easy to effortless. Without it or after it runs out... IF I remember... it ranges from seemingly impossible to very hard.

atemerev 4y ago
Still impossible to very hard even with medication (though at least I am forgetting things less).
- ParetoOptimal 4y ago
  I agree. Especially when my sleep/exercise isn't as good as it should be.
dec0dedab0de 4y ago
do you mind sharing which medication? I'm on adderall and while it can help me stay on a specific task, and has changed my life drastically, It does nothing for me as far as forming habits.
- sph 4y ago
  The meds won't help you "show up" after the euphoria phase of the first week. But while you are now able to stay on task and complete it, you still have to pull yourself from the couch to the task that needs doing. I have been medicated for a year now, and the common advice of "just do 5 minutes and nothing more" to get myself started now actually works. I still hate doing chores (I am procrastinating rn because my flat needs some cleaning), but if I start, you better believe they will get done and I might do a little more just because now I have dopamine to tell me "this is good stuff you're doing, carry on", whereas before I was fighting every second the urge to just leave the thing halfway and go do something else. Life was hard. I'm on lisdexamfetamine FWIW. EDIT: the dopaminergic system is exactly how you form habits. When taking amphetamines, you have more dopamine, thus habits are much easier to create. Both the good and the bad ones. You just have to fight against the lifelong learned helplessness that effort is not worth it. That takes a long while to rewire. Ok, time to close HN and clean my flat.

dec0dedab0de 4y ago

...start so small it’d be ridiculous not to do it regardless of how motivated or disciplined you are. And by “start small” I mean “floss one tooth per night for 3 months to build a flossing habit” small... The idea of doing something every day in a row for 3 months causes me pain and revulsion. If I think about it a bit longer, I I know I would get mad at myself for missing a day, and would get really mad at myself for forgetting for 2 years, and I'm already jumping the gun at trying to avoid setting myself up for failure. I floss my teeth when they feel dirty, anything else seems unsustainable. But maybe that's why I don't have motivation or discipline.

ethanbond 4y ago
Yeah, if you don’t actually want the habit in question then definitely don’t bother. What purpose do you think getting mad at yourself serves?
- dec0dedab0de 4y ago
  I wish I could build good habits, and getting mad serves no purpose, but it happens. Seeing other people have morning rituals, and mowing their lawn on a schedule, and whatnot seems like a magic trick. I only commented because starting small doesn't make it seem any easier to me, though I do understand that it might help someone else.

BurningFrog 4y ago

Motivation is a weird thing. Or maybe it's several things shoved into one word. A very common mistake is to procrastinate doing something until you feel motivated. Our minds often doesn't work that way. But if you start the task without any motivation, or expectation it will get done, you'll often find yourself motivated and making progress within minutes. In reality, once you put some effort in, that can make you motivated.

adwi 4y ago
“Action precedes motivation” is a good lesson I keep relearning.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  I wish I could learn this faster. I can't even count the number of things that I've procrastinated and burned hours or days of brain focus on avoiding that ended up taking 10 or 15 minutes to just accomplish once I finally started.
  - ekanes 4y ago
    Me too. What's helped me a lot is to just relentlessly make "what counts as starting" smaller and smaller until it's doable. Where "file taxes" is very very hard, "look through email and remember name of my accountant" (and many other TINY tasks...) is much more doable!
    - Snitch-Thursday 4y ago
      these tasks are similar to the 'intellgent dumbing down' talked about in Getting Things Done, no wonder they work! Having said that...I'm not diagnosed as ADHD but I definitely feel I exhibit executive dysfunction symptoms, and one of my siblings was diagnosed, so I'm feeling confident I'm ADHD adjacent at least...and just trying to implement Getting Things Done helped me immensely. Not only does it help with having a less stressful day (no longer do I have "what am I missing? what am I forgetting? Ahhh, angst!" feelings), it also helps me to just stay on task and/or when I switch tasks, know that I have the confidence to come back to wherever I was.

antisceptic 4y ago

He mentions building habits in part 2 of the article, using the boiling the frog analogy (imploring the reader to use it for good instead). My question, though, is how does a good habit expand into a great habit, without motivation? For your tooth example, once you start flossing you might as well floss all your teeth. The upfront cost of getting started with the floss is the worst part of it, but once you're there it's easy. This isn't true for all habits though. For many it's easy to just bail out fast. If I started doing 5 push-ups a day will I eventually do 100 and then 1000? Or would I settle somewhere on a mediocre range because it's easy to stop? Is there some sort of recursion or positive feedback loop that kicks in that rescues me from mediocrity if all I have is discipline and not motivation?

godshatter 4y ago
If you start with 5 push-ups a day, you'll hit your limits fast just increasing push-ups by one a day, so spread out your improvements by increasing in several exercises, adding more if necessary. Not to do all of them at once every day, but ones to switch between daily. I started something like this years ago, and I'm still keeping up on it. If life happens and I have to take a break from it, I restart it later and reduce my goals so that it doesn't seem so bad trying to jump back into a routine I was maximizing earlier. The key was to make it a habit I do every day, like brushing my teeth. If I've had a bad day and miss doing my "workout routine" (such that it is, I'm no Arnold), it feels weird to miss one and I look forward to doing it the next day. So in that way once you've made it to a certain point it's self-fulfilling.

11235813213455 4y ago

> “Being disciplined” itself is a consequence of motivation You can swap the terms as well, there are exercises or tasks that you start enjoying with time, repetition and experience

alxlu 4y ago

> And by “start small” I mean “floss one tooth per night for 3 months to build a flossing habit” small. Let your good habits progressively and slowly consume more time, similar to what bad habits do. The difficulty here is primarily in initiating the task consistently imo. Once you are already at the point of flossing one tooth there likely isn’t much mental resistance to flossing the others. I think it’s better to do things that lower the resistance to starting the task in the first place as opposed to just making the task smaller.

rwc 4y ago
That's exactly the point: activation energy is the hardest to summon, and once you have it's "easy" to finish the rest of the habit (e.g. floss all your other teeth). If "floss one tooth" is still too much, go smaller: "take my floss out of the drawer and put it on the counter."
- dan_mctree 4y ago
  For me I don't believe there's a way to make the activation small enough of a thing that I would be able to consistently do it. If my task were to consistently lift a finger every Monday I don't think I'd be able to do it.
- monktastic1 4y ago
  I think they are saying that it doesn't make sense to call it "starting small" if it is the "hardest to summon."
  - suddenclarity 4y ago
    Doesn't those go hand in hand? You dread starting because you don't want or have the energy to spend 20+ min on it. So you reduce the task to taking 5 seconds and eliminate the reason for it being hard. Say, put on one shoe, if you want to develop the habit of walking.
- alxlu 4y ago
  Right, but breaking down tasks after "activating" the task probably isn't very useful. Doing the one tooth thing doesn't really help since once you are already there, the gap between doing that and the rest of the teeth is basically nonexistent. You might as well start off flossing all your teeth if you are able to get to the flossing part. Breaking down activation energy is also hard. Taking floss out and putting it on the counter feels like it might not be reinforcing enough. Something more useful might revolve around storing the floss in a more readily available position or using something like floss picks and/or other things that might reduce friction. But ultimately, I think everything eventually boils down to raw discipline.

IIsi50MHz 4y ago

> You don’t rise to the level of your talents/motivation/discipline, you fall to the level of your habits. "The enemy's gate is /down/!" (downward) [1] That is, orientate yourself such that where you want to go is as easy/automatic as falling. [1] Ender's Game, and the Ender's Shadow sequence. Though, I wish the catchphrase had used "downward" rather than "down", as the latter is confusingly similar to "has fallen / is breached". [Edit: s/r'r Shadow/r's Shadow]