Anyway, I wanted to talk about being highly motivated and New Year’s resolutions. Do yourself a favor and forget about both. Statistically speaking, the lifetime of your resolutions is coming to a middle anyway, even if it were a normal year. If you’re immensely stubborn, you may get eight good weeks. Or ten. On rare occasions even half a year. But you will fail. You will have watched all the cheesy MotivationTube videos you can stomach and end up at DisciplineTube, gorging on the lessons of retired marines learned in their reductionist and ironically socialist bubble. Ah-HA, so it’s all about discipline, not motivation. But when you listen closely, it isn’t. “I do X every day at T” is not discipline, forcing yourself to do something through sheer will. It’s just a habit.
Maybe I’m a bit slow, but this seemed like a valuable insight to me. If you want to do something, don’t rely on either motivation or discipline. Both will run out. Instead, put yourself into a position to build a habit, so you don’t have to think about doing or not doing X. Have trouble getting out of bed in the morning? Always get up at the same time without exception, weekends included. Want to exercise more? Pick Mo-We-Fr and always work out at the same time. Never re-schedule. Always keep in mind, that any deviation is undoing the habit. Using discipline would be painful, why would you want to?