Introducing the Power of Discipline

We're talking about the power of discipline. Discipline is a word that people find kind of like a dirty word. They're scared of discipline. Why are they scared of discipline? It invokes effort. People are like, oh, discipline. I don't want to put out discipline. Right. But if people focus on discipline and focus on the power of discipline, the rewards are enormous. Right. Get discipline under control. Figure it out. And that's what we're going to talk about today. So the power of discipline relates, as Kim said, habits, prioritization, procrastination, and decisions. Those are the four topics we'll be talking about today. And let's just talk a little bit about. One of the questions that fascinates me the most is why don't we always do what's in our own best interests? Why don't we always do that? You'd think that we would. We don't always seem to act in our own best interest. If you could push these buttons, these four buttons here, like, would people push this exercise for an hour? If you wanted to get this into your practice for this year, Exercise for an hour, four times per week. Eliminate my worst habit this year. Instill a new great habit, like regular exercise or whatever that great habit is for you. Improve your relationships, increase your income. If you could just push a button and that would be done at the end of this year, how many people would do that? Yeah. So for those people who didn't raise your hand, it's like, oh, that sounds. There's the effort. I don't want to put the effort in. But. But forget about the effort. If you could just do that. I surmise that people would do that if they could just push the button. So that's kind of where we're coming from. So let's figure out what it is that we're afraid about this discipline, this willpower. Discipline. In the simplest of terms, this is my definition. It's the ability to do it in your overall best interest by controlling your thoughts and thus your actions. That's what it's all about, controlling your thoughts. If you can control your thoughts and you can do anything. Lift my arm. I thought to do that. If you control your thoughts, you can do anything. And it's also the ability to not take an action, not to do things that you don't want to do. Right. That you deem are not in your best interest. That's why we've got the cheesecake right here. Right. Who wants to eat a whole cheesecake? Mmm. Sounds good, but probably not in your best Interest to do that. Because you get on the treadmill tomorrow, you're like, why did I do that? So question, what is more important? Right? What is more important in terms of success in life? Is it intelligence, your iq, your innate iq, or is it discipline, which is more important? What do the studies show that's more important? And, you know, one of the things we wanted to talk about was, I usually bring this up at the beginning of the seminars, is that knowledge does not apply itself. We must make the application. It's not going to just apply itself. So smart people are great, but are the smartest people always the most successful? No. Right. It's not always the case. Discipline. Right. Discipline. Willpower. That's what gets you the success. Of course, the combination is an amazing combination. But studies show that discipline is the better predictor of success in intelligence, by far. That's why we've got grit. That's on all the human resources checklists. Grit. Does this person have grit? The greatest part of grit is discipline. It also brings in passion, perseverance, courage, and resilience. People talk about grit as resilience. You're able to overcome these obstacles that come about in your life. So grit is a. And I consider all of it, really, to me, that's all. Discipline, just another word for it. So it is the greatest predictor of success. So here's a great little study, kind of a cute little study where the proctor came in, had these little kids come in, hundreds of kids, actually. This is a big study. Some of you may have seen it. Proctor comes in and they bring a marshmallow to these little kids. They give the little kid a marshmallow and say, you know what? If you cannot eat this marshmallow for 15 minutes, you get two marshmallows in 15 minutes, right? You'll get two. If you could just not eat the marshmallow for 15 minutes, right? So let's see how this plays out.

Okay, so I'm gonna go. And you can eat the marshmallow now, but you won't get another marshmallow.

So she's telling the little kid, if you don't. She's telling what? I just said, if you don't eat this marshmallow for 15 minutes, you'll get two. The kids are like, trying not to eat it. Trying not to eat it. Eat this. Tr. Distracting himself. The key is he's distracting himself. Watch that. He's like, what can I do to not eat the marshmallow? Didn't do it. Quite. Didn't do it. Don't do it, don't do it. Hitting the marshmallow, doing everything but eating the marshmallow still didn't do it. So this young gentleman earned himself two marshmallows. He did not eat the marshmallow. Now, the funny thing about this study is that it wasn't really done to understand long term fulfillment. What it was done was how do people distract themselves from a desire? What is it? And they figured out they just come up with all kinds of different ways to distract. You saw how the kid distracted himself all different ways, hid himself from it, licked it, all kinds of different things. But the interesting thing was one of the parents of the study looked back. He noticed the kids were in his son's class and noticed some of the kids that were able to pass the test, a lot of kids weren't able to. The kids that were able to pass the test and delay gratification, those kids were more successful by far than the kids that ate them, than the kids that ate the marshmallow. So it basically shows that. And by far the statistics were those who could delay gratification, they were happier by far. By all measures, they had higher SAT scores by 211 points, by the way, on average, went to better colleges. The list is, it's a long list. Those who couldn't delay gratification increased drug use, jail time, gambling, bad stuff. Right? Bad kids, Right. Just because they didn't. Just because they could not eat a marshmallow. That's why this happened. So they didn't have discipline. Right. This just goes to show the power of discipline, the importance of discipline. So where can we get this discipline that you speak of, Rich? It comes from your brain, right? Comes from your brain. That's where it comes from. So we need to understand our brain. So the evolution of the brain. There are three layers of the brain in terms of the timeline of the brain. The first part of the brain is the reptilian brain that controls your vital functions. It controls your heart beating, controls your breathing, controls all the vital functions. We're not going to worry about that. It's already automatic, already taken care of. Then we've got the limbic brain, the old brain that controls the emotions, the subconscious decisions. That's in the amygdala. That could be a problem, as we'll see. Then there's the prefrontal cortex, the new addition, the new version of the brain. It controls conscious decision making, sight, hearing. It's the prefrontal cortex that people speak up. And that's where discipline comes from. That's where we're really interested. That's where your discipline comes from. We're going to talk a lot about that. Within the prefrontal cortex, there are three regions in there. The first region, it's a proactivity region. That's the do it. I will. I'm going to do this. I'm going to set a new habit, right? I'm going to instill a new habit. That's the proactivity region. That's the eat kale and make sure it's organic. That's the impulse control. There's another region. That's the impulse control region. That's the don't do it. Don't eat the cheesecake, right? Don't stay up all night surfing the web. Get to the important things. And then there's the other region in the prefrontal cortex. That's the go get it. That's the fulfillment part of the prefrontal cortex. That's long term desire. That's what I want. Going for the things that you really want, deep fulfillment there. And that's where this kind of comes in. So the problem is there's a struggle between the old brain and the new brain, right? There's a mismatch, and the mismatch is based on our environment. The old brain was used to dealing in an environment where tigers were chasing after us, where there was famine. The old brain is just dealing with those things and handling those things. That's not the environment we live in now. And believe it or not, when you go back, people actually were eaten by. There were predators that did eat us. We were not always at the top of the food chain. So the reason why is the change of environment. So there's this struggle. The primitive brain, the amygdala, that has survival instincts. We still need them, right? It's not like the old brain is not necessary. It's still very necessary, especially when emergencies happen. We need to be able to act quickly. That's a survival instinct. Weirdly, somebody got bit by a dog today, right? But that's a reactive tendency to overreact to things, right? So that's a tendency to overreact. A dog bites you, you're like, all dogs are bad. Now the dog bit me. Now all dogs are bad, right? It instills that into your memory. I'm always going to be, dogs are not tigers. I'm always worried about dogs. Now, from going forward, the evolved brain, right? That's the prefrontal cortex. The focus is on long term responsibilities, right? That's where your Executive functions are. That's where your willpower is. That's where the power of reasoning comes from. That's in the prefrontal cortex. That's goal setting. That's suppressing urges. Not eating a cheesecake, right? The good news is that that's where proactivity comes from. The good news is that the great architect in the sky created this new version of our brain to override the old version of the brain. When the old version of the brain was saying, you know what? Eat cheesecake. Because there may be a famine, eat as much of it as you can. So we want to get fat. It overrides and say, you know what? Food is plentiful. We don't need to do that. So thank God we have this new version of the brain, but we need to use it. So the primitive battle. There's always this primitive battle between the old version and the new version, right? That's the typical. You know, here's Homer Simpson, the typical devil on the shoulder, angel on the shoulder. Eat the cheesecake, go ahead. Who cares? Enjoy yourself. You worked hard today, Homer. You'll work it off tomorrow. And then the news angel is like, yeah. The good angel is saying, yeah. Just think about when you're on the treadmill tomorrow burning off 2,000 calories. You're going to run for five hours. Don't do it. That's a struggle. So can we build up willpower? Can we build up discipline? Is discipline a muscle? No, technically it's an organ, but it behaves like a muscle. It gets stronger and it grows when you do certain things, right? The brain matter actually grows when you do certain things, which we'll see in a second. If you neglect it, it actually gets weaker and smaller. You don't use your willpower. You get weak. Your willpower muscles get weak. So how do you strengthen the. How do you strengthen the brain muscle? You use it, right? Mental exercise. Decide and follow through. That's why a lot of times you see older people and they're doing puzzles, right? Their brains are usually sharp. They're doing all these puzzles. They're keeping their brain sharp. Meditation and relaxation. Meditation is probably the greatest way to improve your brain muscle. The studies show that you increase your. Your white matter and your gray matter when you meditate immensely. Physical exercise, great for building your brain. Nutrition, Low glycemic foods. Your brain does not like sugar, right? You're bombarding with sugar. Slow breathing, oxygen, prana. That puts your parasympathetic, stress reduction, sleep. People know that kind of an obvious thing. So these are ways to strengthen the brain muscle, which strengthens your willpower, strengthens your discipline. How do you weaken the brain muscle?

Kind of the opposites. Don't use it, right. Lack of use. Use it or lose it, right? Stress turns off the prefrontal cortex. And this is a good thing. And when you're in an emergency situation, you turn off all thought. You don't make any conscious decisions. When you're in an emergency situation, the prefrontal cortex turns off and the. And the amygdala turns on, says, we got this. You need to jump out of the way of a train. You don't want to be thinking, you.

Know, should I jump?

No, let me think about that for a second.

Boom.

Run over, right? You don't want to be thinking about that. Your kid's about to be run over. You grab your child, turns off your pre prompt, turns off all reasoning ability. And that's a good thing. That's why we need the old brain physical exercise. Now, believe it or not, that's in both of them. And the reason I put that in there is because if you have a major willpower challenge to handle, don't be using your willpower early in the day. If you got some major willpower challenge.

To handle on later in the day, you know what? Take it easy. Save your willpower for later in the day. I know one of the New York Giants I saw was, you guys could probably guess who it is, was working out before a giant playoff game, really important playoff game at Green Bay. And he's out there with no shirt on, running around, no shirt on, freezing. Green Bay is really cold, freezing to death. And I had just started studying this. I was like, no, what are you doing? Save your willpower for the game. Anyway, of course they lost the game. And he had a horrible game. Poor nutrition, really bad for your brain, bad for your willpower. High glycemic foods, brain does not like being bombarded with sugar. Shallow breathing. Everybody take a good breath for their brain. Deep breath. Sleep deprivation, really bad for your brain. So that's how you weaken your discipline, weaken your brain muscle. There's an interesting study that was done kind of on the topic that I was just talking about. Does your brain, does your discipline get fatigued? And the answer is yes. So they did a study where they put two bowls in front of each of the participants in the study. One was a bowl full of chocolate chip cookies. One was a bowl of radishes, Right? For one of the participants, they said, you know what? You can eat for this group, you can eat as many chocolate chip cookies as you want. There is no willpower involved in that. For the other ones that are saying, you know what, you only get the radishes, but leave the chocolate chip cookies. You can't have them. Right? There's some willpower involved in that. So they used their willpower up. They were using it. Then they gave them an impossible test, but they didn't know. They thought this test could be handled, and they were trying to figure it out. Trying to figure it. There was no answer. Trying to figure it out. The folks that ate the cookies stuck with the test for 19 minutes on average. The folks that didn't only stuck with it for eight minutes. They gave up after eight minutes. It's proof that willpower is a muscle that does get fatigued. Good news. Discipline is not always necessary. If you're inspired, right? You don't always need to use discipline. If you're inspired, utilize inspiration, right? If you're doing something that you love doing, are you going to do it? Does LeBron James have to be inspired to get out on the basketball court and practice? No, man, he loves what he's doing. He gets out there and just does it. Right? Inspiration. So there's motivation and inspiration. They are different. Inspiration comes from within. It's much more powerful than motivation. Right? You're called to act. Inspiration is always positive. Motivation, it's good. It's not that it's bad, but it comes from outside. It's done to you by these motivational speakers. I'm talking myself out of a job. It's done to you. It can be positive or negative, Right? You can motivate somebody to do something in a negative way. You can put a gun to their head, right? Can motivate them to do things. He can motivate them to do bad things. So the idea is, you want to find your passion. What is it that you love doing? You want to go to play every morning and not go to work? Right then. Life is about flow. You guys, I'm sure, have heard about flow. When you're in the flow, life is amazing. Right again, that's LeBron James, man. When he's doing what he does, he loves what he's doing. One of the ways, One of the things that I always found interesting is people think they need to be inspired or motivated to start on something. You know what? I'll do it, but I just need to be motivated or inspired. No, just start. What happens when you start? What happens when you're like, you really don't want to do something, you just start. Even if you're not inspired by it for some reason, you just start. What happens when you do that? All of a sudden, you become inspired and you're motivated. You get on the treadmill. I don't want to do this. Just start running. All of a sudden, you know what? I'm feeling inspired. I'm feeling motivated. Right? So you keep going. That creates inspiration and. And then that creates momentum. You start running faster, maybe listen to some music, and that just keeps. That's a great thing to do. So the point is just start. Action precedes motivation and inspiration. Just start.