Discipline

We live in a world where everything is getting shorter. The words we read (you all became y’all, for example), the content we consume (the written word turned to 15 second videos) and our attention spans.

However, there is one aspect of our personalities that we might need to stay intact for a better quality of life.

Let’s take a look at this facet of life, which is becoming more elusive than ever.

In my last article, named “Discomfort”, I ended with a daunting question, which was: How do we stick to things when things get tough? We will try to answer this question in this article.

For my newer readers, in my previous article, we discussed the importance of sticking to something for long enough, especially when we know that the outcomes are going to be good for us. And at face value, this statement makes complete sense.

There is one thing, however, which we fail to consider a lot of times. It is how “busy” we really are, which leads me to something I’d like to call the Catalogue of Human Roles.

The Catalogue of Human Roles

Everyone of us plays multiple roles in our lives. Now, these roles include familial roles like a father, a son, a brother, a friend, a daughter or a mother.

Then there are professional roles, like that of a business owner, an employee, an athlete, a writer, a speaker and so on.

And finally there are others, like an acquaintance, or a politician and so on. These can be considered social roles.

Now I’m not going to comment on whether one role is more difficult or complex than another. But one thing we can all unequivocally agree on is that each one of these roles requires a different version of ourselves.

The Energy Expense

Each of these versions have distinctions in terms of the amount of time, energy as well as physical & mental effort they demand out of us. And since all of us undertake a number of different activities during the day, we have to be all of these roles, sometimes within the same hour or day.

Consequently, we continue to switch between these roles, exerting all the resources I just mentioned over the course of our lives.

(I’m making being a normal person so complex by writing all of this, but I feel that it’s important to set the premise to drive my point home. So, please bear with me).

By now we have realised that we spend a lot of our energy just by playing our normal roles in our lives. And in today’s day & age, I don’t even have to talk about the other time and energy sinks that we deal with on a daily basis (I had to give a subtle nod to my archenemy, social media).

Coming back to our initial question: how do we stick to things when they get tough, while we have this added layer of complexity of the various roles we play?

Well, it turns out, there is one role that we missed till now, which is responsible for us being able to play all the other roles in life, and that role is the role we play for ourselves.

Let’s think about it for a second.

For us to play the roles in our lives successfully, the person underlying all these roles has to have a “why”. And that why is what drives us to do the right thing.

The “why” is what helps us stick to things when they get tough. Now that why could come from the roles above, or from within. There are people way more intelligent than myself who have taken ganders at helping us find our “whys”.

Now in this equation, there is one variable missing, which is the very human need for instant gratification.

The Post Energy Expense Situation

One of the most predominant reasons is to let ourselves astray from the right thing is lack of energy, courtesy of the numerous roles we play. Now, one way to get ourselves back on the path is to go back to the “why” that we just discussed.

But the lack of energy sometimes doesn’t even allow us the bandwidth to think that much either. At those times, just doing what needs to be done, without regard for what we are feeling in the moments, I feel, has proven to be a foolproof way to make progress.

If you stuck around this far, thank you for your time. If you enjoyed this, share this with one friend of yours whom you think will benefit from reading this. Thanks for reading, and I will see you in the next one. 🙂