Discipline is Saving

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I’ve been taking cold showers for many years now. When I tell most people that, they think I’m crazy. Why subject myself to cold showers when warm showers are available? Why make the act of taking a shower so painful and unpleasurable?

I take cold showers because they’re uncomfortable. Discomfort is not a bad thing. It’s a good thing if it helps you grow. For me, cold showers are a way to test myself, to discipline myself.

Purposeful Pain

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Discipline makes uncomfortable activities comfortable through purposeful pain. The first time taking a cold shower was horrible and my body was shocked from discomfort. Mentally, it was difficult to handle and I did everything as fast as possible. The next time wasn’t much better, but by the tenth time, it wasn’t so bad.

Each time I took a cold shower, I learned how to handle the cold. More than that, I was learning how to get used to uncomfortable situations. The discipline of handling the cold was creating in me the more meta skill of learning how to discipline myself. I was learning to learn.

I learned for example that there’s joy in the journey. Every skill is frustrating to learn at first because you’re no good at it. But if it were easy at the beginning, it wouldn’t really be a skill. The real value comes at the end of discipline. Discipline, in other words, is saving or investing of time. The pain experienced in the process of learning is time spent now to make time more valuable later. A more disciplined and skillful person is more productive over the same unit of time than a lazy and unskillful person.

Consuming Pleasure

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Indulgence makes comfortable activities uncomfortable through desensitization. Porn, gambling and addictive substances are all more pleasurable at the beginning and have diminishing returns over time. By the end, other disciplines start suffering as laziness or impulsive behavior spreads. Indulgences destroy whatever disciplines you have.

The journey becomes hellish, especially as addiction takes over. The beginning of the journey may be fun, but by the end, addictions exact a heavy toll on your life. Indulgence, in other words, is incurring time debt. The pleasure experienced in the process of indulgence is time stolen from the future. An addicted and less disciplined person is less productive.

This is why for personal productivity, it’s much more useful to eliminate bad habits than to attempt creating good ones. The drain from an addiction of some kind is much more costly than a discipline is likely to help. Disciplines take a long time to mature so require years before the real value is gained. Stopping an addiction, especially cold turkey, is a huge boost to productivity because it pays off time debt.

As with finance, pay off the debt first and then think about savings. Indulgence is debt. Discipline is saving.