When I was in grade school, I had a real problem with homework - I just didn't see the benefit or purpose to doing work on material I already understood. As you can imagine, this wasn't really a supported viewpoint by the teachers who were busy assigning me said homework. Mostly this went on with a few notes home to my parents, and some slipping grades (though the test grades which measured my understanding of the material never suffered). There was one teacher however, who in addition to the above, assigned me in class writing assignments - repetitive sentence writing.

 

She and I waged a battle through the year... in class, I would be assigned to write out sentences, often with my desk facing away from her ongoing lessons (I'm still not sure how that was supposed to help me learn), and out of class I ignored the homework assignments. The battle raged through terms and tests (which I always did well on), and I would call it a draw. I didn't fail any of her classes, and she didn't get me to do any homework, but I did end up consuming quite a lot of paper writing out those sentences. One of the last she assigned me, and stuck for about half the year we shared together, was about 4 paragraphs long. 36 years later, as I write today, I do wish I could remember all of it, but the key for my writing today is the introduction:

 

"Discipline is the ability to finish a task once you have started it."

 

With what I know now, I would go back and have a nice discussion with her as I feel she completely missed the point, especially for the young me, for I never started the homework. According to that definition, I wasn't undisciplined at all.

 

When we think about discipline, we think about adherence to a set of principles that we choose. Maybe it's sticking to a diet or exercise plan, perhaps it's how we control our spending. We admire those who have this attribute to them that enables them to follow through with these restrictions and control, and wonder how they do it.

 

Well, I'm here to tell you that the secret to discipline is actually quite simple. It just takes a little bit of awareness of self beyond the moment (mindfulness meditation practice). I would change what my teacher assigned me to this simple statement:

 

"Discipline is the ability to choose what you want most over what you want now."

 

When we frame it that way, discipline is always acting in our own best interests. It's not any feat of self-control, but it's only the choice to act as selfishly as possible (though over a longer term than shorter term perspective).

 

There's a study analyzing the behavior of young children, they're told that they can either have a treat now, or if they wait a while, an extra treat. Those who can wait do better in later life, performing better on their college entrance exams and being described as more competent.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment

 

So, being able to understand the consequences of ones own actions, and to choose the better long term outcomes for ourselves, not only is a deeper insight to discipline, but it is also indicative of better performance on a number of other measures in our lives.

 

Which leads us to the real secret, to have the short and long term awareness of consequences of our actions, and to consistently make the choices that give us the best benefit. This doesn't mean that we need to always deny the short term wants and desires we may have. On balance though, we want to be holding the awareness of the implications of our behavioral options in mind, and always choosing that which will give us the outcome that we really want most.

 

Now the hidden depth of discipline is to figure out what we really want most, and how to keep in touch with that as it may evolve through our lives, but that's a topic for another day.