Note: You are reading a video script.
Abraham Lincoln once said, “Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want the most.” But is it possible to prioritize what you want the most over what you wish to do now? To not only have the desire for what you want the most but also have the urge to work for it?
Let’s try to break down Lincoln’s famous quote in this discussion.
When it comes to any task or job, we inherently seek a challenge. A task without a challenge is boring—it doesn’t excite you. Anything without a challenge doesn’t offer curiosity. Your mind naturally seeks mystery. “What is next” is the urge of the human mind. However, if the challenge is too hard, it can lead to frustration. Complication is always annoying. Your hard work must pay off. You must witness the results. The challenge has to be conquered.
And so, any activity that offers both a challenge and an outcome is going to attract you. You won’t need to force yourself to work on it, but you would have a natural tendency to engage with it. Find something in your life that offers a challenge, then learn how to conquer it. You’ll find yourself more motivated and engaged.
This man (referring to a man in animated video) loves fishing because it offers him a challenge and curiosity. By the end of the day, he sees the outcome. This one loves to play sports for the same reason: on one hand, sports offer him a challenge, and on the other hand, they push him to win. That’s why the bigger the challenge, the greater the victory and the more rewarding the experience. This writer loves to seek solutions in centuries-old quotes. He is exploring whether Lincoln’s words hold the key to overcoming the challenges of modern life.
All of these people feel the challenge and experience the outcome in their jobs—that’s why they see themselves engaged in those activities. Some smart people understood this human mindset and used this idea to make money. This is how we now have gambling machines and video games—a challenge followed by an outcome.
Now the question is: is it possible for your goal to offer you both a challenge and an outcome? Absolutely. Let’s apply this to our journey of making videos for Solid Clarity, where our goal is to reach one million subscribers in the next two years. How do we maintain discipline and motivation throughout this journey?
One million followers is the outcome of our goal, but this outcome seems to be beyond our control. It’s up to the viewers, and thinking about this goal might make us feel disappointed. Especially in the beginning, it’s hard for the videos to perform well on YouTube. So, this is probably not the right outcome we are seeking. We need to find something else in our journey, something that’s in our control.
After careful study and research, we found that the content we are making actually requires 100 videos to reach one million followers. This means making 100 videos will get us one million followers. This sounds interesting, right? We just took control of our outcome by replacing the number of followers with the number of videos. Focus on the number of videos instead of the number of viewers.
However, 100 videos in two years mean we are talking about the outcome after two years. Which is not desirable because we want to feel excitement every single day.
How do we do it?
Let’s round up the figures to 96, which will be 48 videos a year, 4 videos a month, or one video per week. Still, waiting the whole week doesn’t seem like a good idea. But if we slice each video into 6 portions it might solve our problem.
Here we go, we got a challenge and an outcome for every single day. Working on one portion of the video is our challenge, and by the end of the day, we witness the outcome. Sounds super amazing—every single day offers us a challenge and excites us with a sense of achievement.
This wonderful idea seems like it solves our problem of discipline. However, there’s probably still something missing, and that is, how to apply the idea to gain the maximum outcome. To understand the usage of this idea, we need to draw your attention to an interesting fact.
Have you ever noticed that people who live with a plan seem to be more fulfilled? They usually have a higher sense of achievement. On the contrary, people who are disorganized seem to do more but often lack that sense of accomplishment. You know why? Well, it’s because the human mind enjoys experiences more when you keep it waiting. At the breakfast table, the mom tells her kids that she is going to cook their favorite pizza for dinner. The kids think of pizza the whole day, waiting eagerly until it’s 7 o’clock. Perhaps that’s why fancy restaurants make us wait longer for the food to be served.
So, the point is, for us to have a sense of fulfillment in our journey of making videos, we first have to divide the video into six portions and then we must do the task on that particular day—not earlier or later. When you have a big project and you divide it into small pieces, some parts will be your favorites, while others might not be as entertaining. However, if you don’t touch the entertaining pieces and wait for their specific day, you will already be excited for them even if you are working on the less exciting parts of your project. The mom actually fed beans to her kids at lunch and guess what? Nobody complained because they were expecting something more delicious in the evening
Here you go. You are excited either by working on your favorite part of your goal or by waiting for it. Perhaps we have made great progress in this discussion to make our goal simple, easy, full of excitement, and achievable at the same time.
Let’s summarize this whole discussion:
• Slice the project into daily, doable portions.
• Never touch your favorite slice before its day and don’t delay your least favorite part for tomorrow.
• Get yourself used to a daily challenge and reward system.
• And last but not least, thanks to Lincoln for giving us the key to discipline in just one line.
And to thank Solid Clarity, for discussing discipline, you only need to subscribe to the channel. If you want to do more, you can like the video and share it with other fellows.
Thanks for watching.
Until next time, keep working and always stay excited.
