Quotes About Discipline

Point #2: Regardless of how you schedule your Internet blocks, you must keep the time outside these blocks absolutely free from Internet use.

The difference in our abilities by the age of eighteen had less to do with the number of hours we practiced—though he probably racked up more total practice hours than I did, we weren't all that far apart—and more to do with what we did with those hours.

The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained.

the difficulty of focus and the hours of practice necessary to strengthen your "mental muscle.

Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don't simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction

Jordan left me in the dust. I played. But he practiced.

A now voluminous line of inquiry, initiated in a series of pioneering papers also written by Roy Baumeister, has established the following important (and at the time, unexpected) truth about willpower: You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.

Discipline #4: Create a Cadence of Accountability

resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom.

Según declaran los autores de The 4 Disciplines of Execution, «cuanto más queremos abarcar, menos logramos hacer».

As the authors of The 4 Disciplines of Execution explain, "The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish." They elaborate that execution should be aimed at a small number of "wildly important goals." This simplicity will help focus an organization's energy to a sufficient intensity to ignite real results

The ability in question is called "attentional control," and it measures the subjects' ability to maintain their focus on essential information.

In the preceding discipline, I argued that for an individual focused on deep work, hours spent working deeply should be the lead measure. It follows, therefore, that the individual's scoreboard should be a physical artifact in the workspace that displays the individual's current deep work hour count.

forcing you to resist distraction and return your attention repeatedly to a well-defined problem, it helps strengthen your distraction-resisting muscles,

be sure to also give yourself a specific time frame to keep the session a discrete challenge and not an open-ended slog.

It was the glacial writing progress during this year that drove Chappell to embrace the rhythmic method. He made a rule that he would wake up and start working by five thirty every morning. He would then work until seven thirty, make breakfast, and go to work already done with his dissertation obligations for the day. Pleased by early progress, he soon pushed his wake-up time to four forty-five to squeeze out even more morning depth.

you might institute a ban on any Internet use, or maintain a metric such as words produced per twenty-minute interval to keep your concentration honed. Without this structure, you'll have to mentally litigate again and again what you should and should not be doing during these sessions and keep trying to assess whether you're working sufficiently hard. These are unnecessary drains on your willpower reserves.

For those familiar with the rigors of such activities, the limit expands to something like four hours, but rarely more.

the end of each of these brainstorming sessions I require myself to formally record the results, by hand, on a dated page.

craft-centric." Getting better and better at what I did became what mattered most, and getting better required the strain of deliberate practice. This is a different way of thinking about work, but once you embrace it, the changes to your career trajectory can be profound.

There is a popular notion that artists work from inspiration—that there is some strike or bolt or bubbling up of creative mojo from who knows where… but I hope [my work] makes clear that waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan. In fact, perhaps the single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration.

David Brooks summarizes this reality more bluntly: "[Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.

Working right trumps finding the right work

You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.