Mythical vs. Objective Discipline | Artful Balance

The concept of self-discipline serves a certain role in the minds of people who, like me, worry much about meaning, about purpose, and about their place in the world, and sense that to secure those things for the future they must start now.

All across the web-o-sphere, where now endless blogs and books (even books from centuries past) can be found, self-discipline and all its cousins can be summoned for guidance on how to secure a future worth living through principles, structure, routine, schedules, character-building, habits, self-discipline.

Advice on the subject is available at one-tenth-a-cent per thousand words. Here's what reality has taught me.

Mythical discipline is prescriptive, hung up on easy-to-wear, easy-to-talk-about badges:

Waking up at 5 a.m. in the morning.

Cutting out all carbs and sugars.

A disdain for daytime napping.

A stingy position on socializing.

Boasting extreme forms of exercise.

Drinking copious amounts of water.

Objective discipline, though it also looks prescriptive on the outset, bears the following criteria and nothing more:

Is what I'm doing helping me make progress in the areas I care about?

Objective discipline is about ultimate goals, not blind faith in a daily or weekly ritual that is meant to indirectly atone or refine you. Real results do not come from performing self-discipline out of duty or principle alone.

Objective discipline is structured, but is not formulaic like an equation would be. Input "xyz" does not guarantee output "XYZ" unless one re-examines and tweaks her trajectory every step of the way to ensure it. Likewise, in objective discipline, routines that support reaching the overall goal are rigid, but also easily divorced when they're no longer compatible with growth.

Meeting long-term goals takes discipline, that's for sure. But I will not interrupt my objectively-valuable-to-my-goals disciplines to uphold other perfectly-healthy-yet-personally-arbitrary forms of discipline.

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Artful Balance © 2019

These are my personal writings curated from material produced during my structured daily writing times as well as spontaneous thoughts I manage to record. Through organizing and uploading them i hope to learn about who I am as a voice and writer and find ways to improve my writing skills. Though I feel drawn to more cerebral topics, I would like my writing to be an engaging emotional journey none the less.

Someday I hope I figure out a way to assemble my short works into something more coherent and with a more obvious purpose. But right now, these tidbits are the best I can do.