Five quick changes that make discipline 5X easier

Back in caveman days, being disciplined was so easy that discipline wasn’t even a thing.

With a continual threat of death and starvation, there were genuine and visceral reasons for doing things with urgency, even if you didn’t want to do them.

Now, most things are seemingly less urgent.

Without pressing, visible and tangible requirements for us to act in our comfortable, modern world, being disciplined is, well, bloody hard.

Setting goals. Being consistent with our work every day. Eating healthy. Getting out of bed early.

That kind of thing.

The biggest reason is that the benefits of these things are rarely immediately visible.

The benefit of getting out of the way of a rampaging gorilla in the jungle is immediately evident.

We know our life is at stake, and so we do what we need to do.

The discipline is there.

It is straight-forward.

In staying healthy, the immediate benefit of choosing not to eat that cupcake is pretty invisible.

To live a good life today requires discipline for doing things that are good for us — for things that move us towards our full potential.

And most of those things don’t feel urgent. All of it seems — at first glance — equally non-essential.

Here’s the thing:

It’s not more discipline you need. Instead, you need to make discipline come easy.

Like our caveman friends, you want less of a need to be disciplined in the first place.

“The surest test of discipline is its absence.” ~Clara Barton

We have the power and the strategies to make discipline effortless.

We have enough discipline.

We have plenty of discipline for watching Netflix when we’re bored, gaming or eating doughnuts. That requires discipline, but it’s effortless.

We need to apply ‘effortless discipline’ to those things that will make our lives…