Three frogs sat on a log. One of them said “I’m going for a swim”. How many frogs are still on the log?

Three. Saying is not doing.

…

My youngest brother is the most disciplined person I know. Over the last five years, he has refined his diet to maximise his well-being. He has hit the gym almost every day, and now sports a physique like a Spartan.

A couple of years ago, I announced (for the hundredth time) that I had found the motivation to start hitting the gym. With a wearied smile, he turned around and said, “Motivation is useless. It comes and goes. And when it goes, your commitment to work out will go with it. What you need is discipline”.

Such profound wisdom, from someone who was then only seventeen.

I find myself reflecting on this today. For the whole of last week, I woke up and told myself that I’ll go for a run today. But each day I didn’t.

I wanted to run, because I knew that it would give me an immediate dose of satisfaction, dopamine, and serotonin. I knew I’d feel better for the fresh air, for getting my heart pumping, for using my muscles, and for drinking in some nature.

And in the long-term, it would help maintain my health – respiratory, cardiovascular, mental, and muscular – which is something I maintain a strong preference for.

Yet, each day I have failed to go on said run, constructing an elaborate series of rationalisations for why tomorrow will be better suited. None of these counter-reasons were better than the original motivators, however, so why did they win out?

Part of it lies in our intuitive devaluing of abstract long-term goals.

Being creatures accustomed to grasping at quick pleasures, we default to the immediate and cannot grasp the far future. Throughout our history as hunter-gatherers, evolution internalised within our DNA a plethora of short-term, reactionary drivers.

When a predator could leap from a bush at any moment, or when weeks may go without a successful hunt, we were forced to act in split-second frames. In stumbling across a tree bursting with ripe fruit, we gorged and gorged until we could eat no more.

A useful instinct when one does not know of the next opportunity to feed, but not so when we have in our homes a cornucopia of refrigerated delights.

The inverse of this default to the short-term, is our hardwiring to poorly grasp abstract long-term goals like “lifetime health” or “financial stability”. I’d wager that selective advantage has shifted the gene pool towards long-termism in the thirteen millennia since sustenance farming’s advent.

But I’d wager also that our default mode favours short-term, impulsive action. I feel this to be a useful frame for understanding our predominant inability to dial in our eating habits.

But how does it explain the tendency to procrastinate on physical exercise?

I suspect some of the answer lies in a default for rest. Not knowing when we would next have to flee from an persuing leopard, we maintain an unconscious bias to preserve energy resources.

A run for the sake of feeling good seems unjustified, and our genetic hardwiring has yet to catch on that there are few leopards lurking in the undergrowth of West Sussex.

Rest, as differentiated from sleep, is essential. It is allowing your tired brain to slow to the pace of your tired body, by having a quick lie down paired with non-stimulation.

But there is a difference between true rest and procrastinated time wasting. When procrastinating, our brains remain hyperactively engaged.

In procrastinating, we justify why we’re not doing something but know logically that the reason is uncompelling. We therefore don’t buy our own arguments and are forced to recursively justify until the window of possibility has passed.

“Procrastination is the thief of time” is a quote much beloved by my other brother. Time is stolen by procrastination, as it is a state of entirely unbeneficial unrestful inaction.

Motivation is indeed slippery and untrustworthy. Procrastination does indeed thieve one’s time, and is so easily the default when discipline is absent. But what is discipline?

I think of it as acting out of duty to a commitment, rather than acting out of desire. It is silencing the voice that whispers to you to just postpone until tomorrow; it is ignoring the urge to do renege on your promises.

In doing so, we are enabled to work towards the goals we set. It is our bricklaying capacity, which allows us to lay the foundations of the person we want to be. We are able to be people that stand fast to their commitments, regardless of our whimsy and wavering.

I have stumbled across two useful methodologies for cultivating discipline. The first is a method of framing. One of the cornerstones of Alcoholics Anonymous’ philosophy, it is the idea of Just For Today.

To commit to doing something for a lifetime, a year, or even a month, seems like far too gargantuan a task. Instead, we approach a problem on a day-to-day basis. For an alcoholic, this principle manifests itself as: “Just for today, I will not pick up a drink”. Tomorrow I might. But not today.

The trick here, of course, is that tomorrow never arrives. Today is manageable. Before you know it, the insurmountable mountain of a year’s sobriety has been climbed. Not as one singular Herculean effort, but instead the accumulation of many days’ efforts.

The second approach is through the making of public pledges. As I have written about before, in taking a public pledge we create meaningful stakes.

Private commitments, made to oneself, are far easier to break. With public ones, however, we place some part of our reputation on the line. Our reputation as someone who is good for their word. Someone who does not merely say they’re swimming from the frog log, but actually dives on in.

I have used this to positive effect on multiple occasions, clearly being someone with a strong preference to avoid such reputational damage.

Nearly two years ago, I made a public commitment to give 10% of my annual pre-tax income to the world’s most effective charities. I have so far stayed true to my word, and I am confident I will continue to do so.

Just over a month ago, I made a public commitment to publish an article every day. Here we are, 36 articles later, still on track with that commitment. The same also worked with my thru hike of the Appalachian Trail.

I think that the philosophy of Just for Today, combined with making a public commitment, forms a pretty mean duo on the path to discipline.

Clearly, I don’t have the requisite motivation to workout with great regularity. Thus, I must try and cultivate some discipline on the issue. In the spirit of science, I’d like to further test my thesis, by taking a different kind of pledge:

I hereby pledge that every day, for at least the next ninety days, I will

(1) Go for a run; (2) Complete either 100 push-ups or a gym session; and (3) Perform a yoga or stretching routine.

In the spirit of rest, some of these days may be much slower and shorter runs. Some of the workout sessions may be calmer and kinder. But regardless, I will do each every day, and provide an update on my adherence to my commitment on the 10^th of each month.

Let’s see what happens.

…

One of my favourite performances ever, is Shia LaBeouf’s motivational speech titled “Just Do It”. It always makes me laugh but it also does compel me to action. It sounds like the voice of discipline itself. Deeply frustrated, kind of silly, but also completely right.

Whatever you’re putting off, whatever goals you’re delaying the implementation for, use your action to vote for the person you want to become.

“Yesterday you said today”, and tomorrow is today, “so JUST DO IT”.