Discipline need not be painful. How to make easy discipline work for you

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Searching for the secret of success, entrepreneur Jia Jiang studied ancient thinkers such as Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius, 20^th-Century luminaries such as Napoleon Hill and Dale Carnegie, contemporary authors such as James Clear and Mark Manson and even sports coaches such as Russian hockey coaches Anatoly Tarasov and Viktor Tikhonov. All of them agreed on one crucial ingredient: Discipline.

It was not an appealing answer. Discipline, as we understand it, is hard work. It can involve tolerating pain. Indeed, the more pain you tolerate, supposedly the greater your success. Yet this is what the world teaches us is critical to success – call it hard discipline.

He argues, however, that there is an alternative form, easy discipline, that taps into the other half of human nature, in which we seek pleasure. “Easy Discipline makes work fun, exciting, alive. You don’t work hard because you love the result. You work hard because you love the work,” he writes in Easy Discipline: An Unconventional Way to Achieve Ambitious Things.

He points to the two Russian hockey coaches, both highly successful, but each with a different path to glory. Mr. Tarasov’s players trained hard but under a coach who implored them to also have fun. “Why aren’t there any smiles?” he would ask. “You should be happy you are playing hockey.” He loved his players and they loved him back.

Mr. Tikhonov was a tough coach, demanding total obedience from his players, yelling at them and running punishing practices as much as four times a day that had some players urinating blood. Most of his players detested him.

Mr. Jiang says that exemplifies the yin and yang of discipline. And it’s time to celebrate that there is an alternative path to discipline that can also produce great achievement.

“Hard discipline is about forever going against and overcoming human nature,” he writes. “The cost is often both mental and physical.”

Easy discipline works with human nature. It is therefore more sustainable for long-term effort and success. And while hard discipline simply won’t work for most people, easy discipline will.

Finding it will require some changes in approach. He calls his first tool for applying easy discipline to your life “game changer.” Sometimes aspects of your job, after all, are unlovable – even terrifying. If you can’t change what you do, he advises you to change how you do it to better align with your interests, values and personality.

As an introvert, he hated parties and networking, becoming overly anxious at coming up with his share of the small talk involved. It took hard discipline to attend until he figured out how to make it easy: He decided to play a role in such situations that was comfortable, setting a goal of finding out what problem the person he met was facing and helping to solve it.

To have achievement at the highest level, he also believes you must think like an artist. He notes that one of the greatest businesspeople of the modern era, Steve Jobs, always called himself an artist. Too often, people are motivated by a mechanic’s mindset, driven by outcomes and results. Artists also begin with the end in mind, he observes, but that end is an artistic piece that is ground-breaking, challenging conventions and an expression of their inner emotions.

“Mechanics see a product as a vehicle to success. An artist sees a product as a piece of their soul,” he says.

He urges you to consider the world as your canvas. Don’t strive for what works but what moves you. What in your work delights you? What gets you excited? What gives you peace? Seeking those qualities will allow you to seek perfection, not just settling for what’s good enough, and in a way that is satisfying and congruent with your being.

Don’t get hung up on the future. Don’t worry about your future successes or failures. “Instead, focus on this very moment. Give all you can, whether you’re making an important decision, having a great conversation or presenting your ideas. That’s how you ensure a good future,” he says.

Be disciplined, the easy way. Find joy in the moment to find success in the future.

Quick hits

• Ottawa productivity consultant Chris Bailey has become a generative AI enthusiast in recent months. But recently instead of entering a form on a website he decided to have Claude do it, which resulted in him having to spend so much time prompting Claude through the process that he probably could have entered the data himself in the same time or even less. His takeaway: “A tried-and-true productivity principle: The purpose of productivity advice is to increase how much you accomplish per unit of time. The next time you use Claude, ChatGPT or Perplexity to get some work done, reflect: How much time did you save?”
• The benefits of gossip aren’t found in attacking bad leaders, observes executive coach Dan Rockwell. They’re found in helping teams survive those leaders. Gossip helps people make sense of confusing situations and builds trust on teams. But he warns that the benefits of gossip vanish when the goal is humiliation.
• Acceptance is not surrender, says Ottawa thought leader Shane Parrish. It is actually the moment you stop wasting energy on what is already true and start using that energy to decide what to do next.

Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.