Discipline Equals Freedom
Freedom is born of self-discipline. No individual, no nation, can achieve or maintain liberty without self-control. The undisciplined man is a slave to his own weaknesses. - Alan Valentine
I am not disciplined by nature. In fact, I am struggling anew every day to deal with the tension between what I know I should and planned to do and what my dopamine-crazed brain is excited about right this minute. It runs counter to my nature to box myself in and build routines into my life. And yet, every time I muster up the discipline to follow a practice or exercise a habit consistently in a certain area of my life, the result is liberation and a feeling of expanded freedom.
It's completely counter intuitive. How can strictness and constraint lead to more freedom? Discipline is the antithesis of freedom, its structure and rules and rigid restraint. Freedom is… free! No structure and no rules and no restraint. Do what you want, when you want, how you want. Right?
But then when you think about it:
The modern world, with its requirements and obligations and endless demands, begins from a default starting position that is anything but free. You don’t lose freedom, because you never had it in the first place. You have to create it. You have to earn it.
We earn it through work and effort. We earn it through thoughtful planning and careful selection amid competing options for our time. The central ingredient to all of that is discipline.
And August Bradley, one of my favorite thinkers in productivity and systems thinking writes:
Success in business and in life is often associated with taking risks. But discipline does not involve risk. The results are predictable. So many things we want in life are expensive, but not discipline. It’s free.
Worry and stress over money, work obligations, and family/social engagements are constraints. Worry and stress rob us of whatever personal time that we do have. Structured, disciplined approaches to life relieve us of that strain by getting priorities done and carving out genuine time off, giving us back ownership of personal time.
Discipline puts us on the right path. How we feel about our lives is not determined by our absolute standing, but by whether we feel we’re making progress. Discipline produces progress, and along with progress comes the byproduct of feeling good about our lives. Fear and guilt fade in this state.
Discipline indeed does make us free.
