Steven Bartlett Reveals How To Build Unbreakable Discipline

I gotta show you this so Mark Manson put this quote up a few months ago and I've not been able to stop thinking about it the most important question to ask is what pain do you want in your life what are you willing to struggle for anything worthwhile is going to require some degree of pain and struggle so if you're oriented toward the pain and the struggle you're probably going to be more aligned with what you're capable of accomplishing rather than if you just Orient toward the pleasures so good because we say find the thing

which you enjoy the most but really what you're finding is what is the pain you're prepared to swallow the most nothing worthwhile is going to come without discomfort you know even for me and you love doing the show loved speaking to all these interesting people get to fly around the world and all but I would be lying if I said I love writing show notes or doing research in Guatemala airport at three in the morning because I'm on a delayed flight and I've got a flight I've got an episode tomorrow like it's grind it's grind

that I care about and it's grind that I can do that other people couldn't do but it's not not grind right this goes to the discipline equation yes yes yes you might be I'm familiar with let's hit it hit it because that really embodies now Mark Manson quite about the pain you're willing to encounter I was trying to figure out why there's some areas in my life where I'm disciplined and other areas of my life where I seem to lack discipline kind of what I was saying earlier about being a dualistic type of individual and

I came up with this discipline equation that I'd love to interrogate with you because I've not thrown at enough people to know that if it's if it's true or not so discipline equals um the importance of the goal plus let's just say the importance of the goal to you so the subjective importance of the goal how much does that goal matter to you plus the psychological enjoyment you get in the pursuit of the goal right so as you pursue the goal how psychologically enjoy enjoyable and reinforcing and you know is that for you minus the

psychological cost of the pursuit of the goal so I can I'll run you through some examples Simon simck said to me well Steve I take the bins out at 7am in the morning yesterday um I didn't want to do that but I did it it's like okay let's run that through the framework what would happen if you didn't take the bins out that and that sort of underpins and defines the importance of that goal well he'd get a fine and then hit up have an overflowing bin out the front of his house so the Y

is high the psychological enjoyment of pursuing taking the bins out is very low right and the friction of getting out of bed at 7am is high but thankfully the Y is so strong that regardless of the fact that the pursuit the enjoyment of the pursuit is low and the friction is high the behavior still occurs going to the gym learning to DJ in all areas of my life I can run it through that equation and go okay so in the pandemic the reason I've been going to the gym for three years straight now is because

my y searched the the perception of the importance of that goal searched I saw how our existing Health correlates to our health outcomes and I realized for the first time in my life this clear thought that I couldn't unshake that my health is my first Foundation it is this table that everything I love and care about sits upon so that has to be my number one priority reflected in my schedule so that that changed that went up the psychological pursuit of going to the gym is kind of enjoyable there's a bit of a dopamine release

there and it's fun to do that feels good for my self-esteem and the friction associated with it is low unless unless I go to a gym where people know me and I spend the whole time talking then what I what happens if I'm put in that situation so I don't go to gym the discipline equation changes so part of the reason I made a big investment in a company called until is because I can have somewhere I can work out and focus on the workout genuinely in fact that's one of the things that actually changed

my relationship with the gym and nearly threw me off the Habit yep was that psychological cost so how do you how does that sit with you it does you've got the discipline equation death time and discipline yeah what's the Death part so like when I started writing that particular chapter in my book to understand discipline you have to understand the scarcity of time because you know so I I started because I was going to write a chapter about time management people want to know how to manage their time and as I went through the hundreds

of available time management techniques I realized the promoted technique the time blocking all this one two three four the ABC the reason why there's so many time management techniques is because none of them work unless you have this underlying thing called discipline it's the same in The Fad diet industry that industry will always churn out new things because there's an underlying issue which is discipline so it's kind of a mirage industry so the chapter pivoted and started focusing on discipline well the next thing was time um why is time important random numbers if you're how

old are you now 35 okay so you have if you reach the average age of an American you have just over 17 000 days left to live and I think all of that goes to show that time is the currency we're playing with in every moment of Our Lives it's a center point of our influence I talk about the roulette table of my life it's a frame I think through where we wake up in the morning with these 24 chips if you spend eight hours sleeping you wake up with six 16 chips left and how

you place those chips on this roulette table that sits in front of us just before the wheel spins every day determines all of our outcomes in our lives so I've chosen now to put to allocate two chips to this little piece here called Fitness the roulette table spins and I get my returns as I went down that chapter I realized that in the context of time and death um and time management the most important question to answer the fundamental is discipline how can I allocate more of these chips to the things that are in line

with my values what is this the thing called discipline come from if it underpins everything we do it even underpins what you just said there with Fred again and that Mark Manson quote the reason why Fred again is doing that is because his discipline equation isn't is in is in line if for whatever reason you just tipped any part of that equation you could knock him off that discipline yeah with with Jimmy Carr and with all these people that go do that decade of dedication to become Masters in their craft if you look to their

discipline equation you'll see moments where the friction came up and they fell off or they got writer's block or whatever it might be called in their context um and then so you can influence your discipline if you understand that equation when my DJ equipment was on the floor of my spare room I did not gonna use it the minute I put it on my kitchen counter and had it one button away from being able to practice at any given moment yeah put it right in front of it same thing for any Creator if you're starting

to do a YouTube channel and this is this is a life hack here you remember you might have had this in your house when you were younger radio uh infrared socket Turner honors it's like a single remote it's like 10 bucks on Amazon and you leave the wall socket on at all times and you run it through one of these additional sockets and then you plug your into that thing yeah and it's like 10 bucks right on Amazon my entire Studio at home is run through one of these so I go in and I just

press one two three four and everything comes on because when I was first starting out it was super effortful for me to set up the camera and I'm gonna do the thing and I'm already trying to learn to do YouTube and it's terrifying and I'm looking into this black lens and it stares back at me precisely DJ kit can't be on the floor if you want me to practice as much as possible oh make get it in the way put it in the way of things right it's almost harder for me to DJ than it

is for me to to to avoid it this it was on my kitchen counter so I would sometimes be going into the kitchen to eat something and just oh and press the button I'm off four hours later I've just done a four hour DJ practice Yeah if you think about give me something in your life your disciplined out and we'll run it through the equation something you've shown great discipline at recording the podcast recording the podcast does it really matter to you yes is there psychological enjoyment from the pursuit yes is the friction High what's

what's the level of friction um four out of ten four out of ten but if we added up the first part of the equation how much does it matter to you at 10 and how much oh how much what's the psychological enjoyment of the pursuit nine so I'd say we're about 19 take away four and because it's positive the behavior will occur you can do that as a minus four right the behavior will occur if at any point the friction gets really high and for whatever reason if the pursuit of it or the why behind

your you know this objective meaning behind it falls the behavior will not occur I've heard you do this with your meditation practice yeah which is why you're not meditating yeah exactly yeah my why isn't strong enough I don't I don't I haven't quite had the the evidence of it as well sometimes we need a little bit more pain right it's a robusting way to to frame it I guess if Alex was sat here he would say we might say a lot of people are driven by pain rather than pleasure right 100 and that's the Y

part the chip on your shoulder accounts for so much it can account for so much right um you know somebody who had a really bad period of mental health they suffered with anxiety attacks and it lost them something or somebody scorned them and they go oh okay and then they decide to commit themselves to mental health and improving the texture of their own mind that's coming from a place of wanting to prove other people wrong whether someone is driven or dragged is impossible to tell on the surface and I've sat in my podcast over and

over again and asked people are you driven are you being dragged by something when I say dragged I mean some kid on the playground at seven years old told you you're a scumbag and you'll never be anything and you're poor and then that's dragged you that insecurity and that shame has dragged you to entrepreneurship into becoming a millionaire driven is what you know Gary vaynerchuk describes to me where he says his mother loved him so much and she encouraged him so much that he had that drive to kind of like prove her right whatever force

it is it comes down to why which is the start of the equation and even in my case super sh tons of Shame as a kid the only black kid in an all-white area pretty much the poorest family in our street definitely dilapidated house in the context of a wonderful area deep shame and insecurity about not being enough drove me like you've like I was an obsessed hungry dog for it's still doing it now we'll get back to talking to Stephen in one minute but first I need to tell you about epidemic sound if you

have ever tried to put sound effects or music behind any video you will know just how hard it is to do epidemic sound has over 90 000 sound effects plus a vast music library that will avoid any copyright concerns your videos are not going to get demonetized or infringe on someone's copyright which happens all the time if you're not using a professional Library all of their tracks are professionally produced by a diverse collection of artists and are exclusive to the platform if you've ever been wondering how your favorite creators take their videos to the next

level a lot of it comes with sound design and that is the Sound Library selection they have access to so many of them are using epidemic sound and you can join them for free for 30 days by clicking the link in the description below or going to share.epidemicsound.com Modern wisdom plus you will get two months for 50 off and if you cancel within that 30 days you can still keep all of the sounds that you've used during your trial period That's share.epidemicsound.com modern wisdom if you enjoyed that clip with Steven then press here for the

full length podcast go on press it