5 Ways to Be Self-Disciplined Without Making Yourself Miserable

Almost everyone has experienced situations where, despite knowing what they should do, they’re compelled by an inner voice to do something easier or more enjoyable. In The Power of Discipline, Daniel Walter explains that if you allow these temptations to dictate your actions, you’ll never reach your full potential. He argues that to combat temptations that hinder your success, you must strengthen your ability to self-discipline.

In this guide, we’ll explore what self-discipline is and why we struggle with it. We’ll also explore the biological tendencies that hinder our ability to self-discipline and how to strengthen self-discipline so you can achieve your goals and reach your full potential. In our commentary, we’ll explore arguments and methods from other books on attaining your goals and reaching your full potential, including Awaken the Giant Within (Tony Robbins) and The Power of Habit (Charles Duhigg).

In a world obsessed with quick fixes and life hacks, social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister and science journalist John Tierney’s Willpower discusses our most underutilized mental resource. The authors explain that willpower functions much like a muscle: It can be strengthened through exercise, it fatigues with overuse, and it needs proper nourishment to perform at its best.

This guide will begin by discussing what willpower is and how it works. We’ll then go over some exercises you can use to strengthen your willpower. We’ll conclude by exploring ways to create healthy and positive pressure to keep yourself on track when your willpower is running low.

Our commentary will further explain the science behind Baumeister and Tierney’s principles, including which of their assertions don’t yet have a strong scientific consensus. We’ll also compare and contrast their ideas about willpower with other productivity guides such as Limitless. Finally, we’ll provide tips to help you make the most of your willpower.

In The One Thing, real estate entrepreneur Gary Keller argues that the key to extraordinary success is focusing daily on the “One Thing” that’s most important for achieving your goal, rather than scattering yourself in many directions. Keller and co-author Jay Papasan explain how to determine your goal or life purpose, then focus intensely on getting there, while avoiding pitfalls such as multitasking, relying on an unprioritized to-do list, thinking too small, misunderstanding willpower and discipline, and neglecting your personal life. When you know and focus exclusively on the most important thing every day, everything else falls into place. Extraordinary focus on One Thing brings extraordinary success.

Positive behavior change is one of the most persistent challenges of personal growth—and in How to Change, Katy Milkman draws from the latest research and presents a powerful strategy for creating lasting change. She argues that real behavior change comes from a deliberate, scientific understanding of how human nature gets in our way and how we can leverage it to our advantage.

Milkman, an economist and professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, explains how to tailor solutions to your specific challenges, subvert common human failings, and cement lasting change. In this guide, we’ll detail her evidence-based approach to behavioral change and discuss her “playbook” for overcoming human foibles ranging from a lack of self-confidence to forgetfulness and procrastination. In commentary, we’ll look at adjacent perspectives on behavioral change from books such as Atomic Habits, Nudge, Awaken the Giant Within, and Hooked.

The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy offers simple tips on achieving success and living the life of your dreams. The idea is similar to compound interest in finance - small, everyday decisions add up to huge returns over time.

While the concept is simple, that doesn't mean it's easy. Hardy presents six strategies for successfully and carefully directing your choices to shape your destiny in a positive direction and offers a plan of action for improving your results.

Is there something you’ve dreamed of doing, but never have? Are you waiting for the right motivation to move you toward your goal? If so, then you’re going about it all wrong. In The Motivation Myth, Jeff Haden argues that you shouldn’t wait for motivation to start you down the road to success. Instead, you make your own motivation by creating a plan, breaking it into achievable steps, celebrating every win, and persevering through disappointments. Motivation isn’t a push—it’s momentum that you generate yourself.

In this guide, we’ll explain Haden’s approach to kickstarting your path to success and creating a cycle of positive reinforcement that builds motivation as you go along. We’ll compare Haden’s suggestions with those of other productivity experts with practical tips on managing time, avoiding distraction, and maintaining mental focus. We’ll also explore what wellness experts say about chasing ambition versus finding contentment in everyday life.

In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson argues that we are frustrated in life and feel like failures because we value and prioritize the wrong things, thanks in part to society’s emphasis on positive thinking, over-involved parents, and our susceptibility to superficial social media messages. This leads us to pursue emotional highs that don’t lead to lasting happiness.

The solutions are counterintuitive and include: be wrong, fail, tolerate feeling bad, accept pain, practice rejection. Because we can’t care equally about everything, we need to prioritize and focus on what brings us happiness and meaning. In other words, we need to carefully choose what we give our f*cks about.

The book draws from several established philosophies (Stoicism, Existentialism, and Buddhism), and we’ll expand and clarify the book’s messages by tracing their origins to these schools of thought. We’ll also explore some of the psychology behind what motivates people’s decisions, and why we’re driven to give so many f*cks about so many unimportant things.

In Who Will Cry When You Die?, self-help guru Robin Sharma wants to know if you’ll feel happy with the life you’ve led when you’re on your deathbed. Sharma thinks that most people lead lives they’ll regret because they focus on the wrong things—success, money, fame—and none of the right things—family, community, love. If you think you might have end-of-life regrets, Sharma provides a collection of pithy life lessons and advice to help you seize control of your life and turn it into one you’ll look back on fondly.

We’ve grouped those lessons into eight broader tactics that will help you cope with adversity, build self-discipline, spread kindness, and more. You’ll come away with actionables you can implement daily to make your life better and background on the philosophies, ideologies, and science on which Sharma draws.

In Be Your Future Self Now, Benjamin Hardy argues that true success requires living up to your full potential—that is, becoming the highest version of yourself. Anything short of this is a form of failure. However, becoming the person you want to be is one of life’s most difficult challenges. Hardy explains that it requires knowing exactly who your higher self is, identifying the big, life-changing goals that will get you there, and dedicating yourself to those goals above everything else.

In this guide, we’ll present Hardy’s argument for why you should commit to becoming your higher self now. Then, we’ll explain how to identify your higher self and Hardy’s recommendations for adopting the mindset and dedication needed to become this person. We’ll supplement Hardy’s ideas with those of other success experts including Daniel Walter (The Power of Discipline), Gary Keller (The One Thing), and Darren Hardy (The Compound Effect).