Discipline, Consistency, Results

I was having a conversation with a friend last night, about a change we were planning to make, but caught ourself setting a somewhat too big and unrealistic goal for a start. When that happened, I recalled an example of something I heard on a Podcast about how why most addicts relapse after a short period of being sobber: because they force themselves into very abrupt change of habits.

That just had me thinking about how change, improvement and personal development worked – by slow progress. I know it’s hard for a lot of people to take things slow, especially because of how much pressure we get from people around us, creating this very strong sense of urgency to succeed. But as much as we want to get shit done and have them done yesterday, we need to have a bit of patience and take things easy.

Slow progress is better than no progress

Going back to the example of addicts, the flaw in the approach of trying to purge yourself of your addiction completely overnight is that even though it could work for a day or two, relapse is impending and inevitable. Habits, or even worse, addictions for that matter take a lot of time and conditioning to build, so it only makes sense that they’ll take time to undo.

Say you got addicted to social media over a 2-year timeframe, wouldn't it just be logical to assume that purging yourself of the addiction will take some time as well?

Of course, I’m not saying that means don’t try to change, improve yourself, or be reluctant about personal development. The point I’m making is that be realistic about the process associated with these things. You know, maybe start your social media detox by reducing the time you spend on social media slowly, and then drastically over time until the addiction is handled. There could even be days when you relapse into serial scrolling TikTok again, and it's fine. Progress is not a linear curve. It's ups and downs, just with the ups getting higher and the downs not reaching as lower as they used to.

Discipline = Consistency = Results you want to see

The trick, I believe is to be discipline about it: whatever “it” is in your specific situation.

About 2 years ago when I was in final year university, I decided I was going to hit the gym and I was going to hit it hard. And I did. But you know how long that lasted? 2 weeks. To be honest, I would’ve given up sooner than 2 weeks if it wasn’t for my friend @zzzinnn who was my gym buddy. That doesn’t mean I didn’t want to keep going to the gym after the 2 weeks. It was because of something different.

A lack of discipline

For every new thing you start, whether it’s a new hobby, relationship, sport, you name it, there’s a lot of excitement at the start. Naturally, excitement is bound to subside over time as reality causes your disillusionment. After the excitement wears off and when what used to be enjoyable now feels like a burden, the only thing that keeps you still doing that thing are binding things like commitment, responsibility or discipline.

In my case, quitting the gym after 2 weeks was a result of a lack of discipline (and maybe cash, but let’s forget I mentioned that. Lol). I was on and off with it, and only went when I felt like it. Because of that, it was easy to get caught in a streak of absence, and for everyday that added to the number, I got more reluctant and you know the rest.

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I guess the baseline of what I’m trying to say (or have ended up saying) is, as long as you’re consistently making efforts to improve, it’s worth it and better to keep chipping away at whatever you’re doing than to try delude yourself into taking huge steps or changes which logically are not sustainable.

PS: I started writing this post with the intention of saying things completely different from what I actually ended up saying.

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