Soulful Sundays: Discipline

“The curse of discipline is that every day looks the same. The curse of indiscipline is that every year does.” —Hemant Mohapatra

Early behavioral psychologists identified two fundamental strategies for shaping behavior—carrots and sticks. Carrots are rewards: do X and expect Y reward, therefore X gets repeated. Sticks are punishments: do X and expect Y consequence, therefore X gets repressed. But scientists found that inputs did not always equal outputs, and observed phenomena of adaptation and diminishing returns. More and more carrots and sticks could become necessary for less and less result, eventually producing more harm than good. Something was missing from this simple calculation. That something was discipline.

The word discipline is derived from the Latin root for learning. Often misconstrued as harsh stricture, discipline is much better understood as structured study. What carrots and sticks fail to account for is our ability to continue learning when immediate rewards and punishments lose their motivational power. Dopamine responses tend to attenuate as events become repetitive and predictable. Dopamine responds strongly to novelty and surprise and also drives learning, but learning requires changing stimuli within enough structure for those changes to remain comprehensible. This learning often occurs in a “zone of proximal development” where we are just at the edge of our ability but still able to process the activity.

Any discipline that is worth pursuing will have two commonalities—it will be both frustratingly simple and infinitely expansive. Bruce Lee was famous for practicing the same kick for hours at a time, analyzing its nuances so that he could apply them across his entire practice. Each kick was a microcosm of his martial art—complete in and of itself but also a part of the whole. Discipline creates a synergistic environment in which the result is greater than just the sum of its parts. By approaching each day in the spirit of learning —and patiently teaching our base impulses a better way of operating—a new world of possibility opens up. We become disciples of greatness.