today we're going to talk a little bit about wanting to become disciplined but not being ready to [Music] I enjoy video games YouTube staying up late and scrolling but I wish I was more responsible and self-disciplined whenever I think about changing myself I start to think in a very serious mindset and I start to feel like I might lose all the fun and goofiness that I feel right now I know I have to change someday but I never feel ready and so this is a really common problem that a lot of people face it's absolutely something that I struggled with myself and if we really stop and think about it why should we change right if you're living a life today where you're enjoying yourself you're having lots of fun you're like waking up every day playing video games I remember in my case I was failing out of college but boy did I love every single second of it I'm waking up every day I'm playing video games I used to order fried rice two pounds at a time to save on delivery costs and then I could fuel myself for a 24-hour gaming binge and I was just having such a blast and so sometimes we kind of look at life and we start to think to ourselves okay I should be doing more right like at some point I need to get disciplined I need to start working I need to start exercising I should be doing all this stuff but I'm just not ready to right I actually kind of enjoy my life and that can be so frustrating but if we really sort of think about it what's going on why is it so hard to become disciplined in the first place so let's play that tape through to the end so in your mind what's going on okay I should exercise I should put my life together I should get a job I should gun for promotion I should go to graduate school why what's the point of all that stuff so let's kind of think about it right okay so if I get a job then okay I'm gonna make more money if I make more money I'm gonna work really hard I'm going to grind I'm gonna spend all these years I'm gonna work 60 hours a week I'm gonna make more and more money I'm gonna get more and more promoted for what reason so I can retire early and then once you retire early what are you gonna do I'm gonna have fun well what do you enjoy what do you enjoy doing what's fun for you it's playing video games and watching YouTube and scrolling and just like relaxing and chilling and not doing anything and this is a really common problem we all struggle with sort of having things that we want but feeling like we should be more disciplined so this is the really wild thing thing right is we like kind of know we should get disciplined we know we should be studying harder maybe applying for more jobs gunning for promotion whatever but the truth of the matter is that oftentimes we're just not ready for it right we actually really enjoy our life right now so let's say that okay you did get disciplined right let's say you did it hey I'm gonna like wake up every day I'm gonna work out I'm gonna go to work early I'm gonna be like grinding for like you know I'm grinding at school I'm gonna get straight A's I'm gonna get promoted I'm gonna go graduate school whatever you do that for a while you get paid more money right you get paid more money you grind you get promoted again and again and again and what's the point of working so hard so that you can retire early and let's say you make so much bank that you can retire early and then what are you going to do with your time well then I'm gonna have fun like okay so what do you what do you enjoy doing well I enjoy playing video games I enjoy watching YouTube I enjoy like sitting around and scrolling on my phone and so then your brain is kind of thinking well hold on a second like if the goal of grinding really hard is so that you can retire early and have a good time but what you do enjoy doing is like actually sitting at home and playing video games like why on Earth would you go through all that trouble when you can actually do that right now because our brain has this like circuit that constantly calculates the cost and benefit of our actions so this is the circuit that sort of tells us okay hey we need to go to the bathroom now because we're going to be in the car for three hours and going to the bathroom now even though I don't feel like it it's going to cost me more down the road to go to the bathroom later than it would to do go to the bathroom now so this is a really basic circuit that like is integrated with all kinds of physiologic signals like hunger and thirst and needing to use the restroom but it also does things like abstract tasks right so it thinks about okay what's the cost of studying versus the benefit of playing video games today and anytime you you're looking at that cost benefit analysis that part of your brain is like why would one I want to grind when I and enjoy the rest of my life when I can just enjoy my life today I can just have dopamine today I can enjoy myself and it's going to be great and so this is the really tricky thing is that your brain is actually kind of saying and if you run really kind of think about it right you say you're not ready to change yet which is a really really good self-aware kind of statement and why because what's the point because at the end of the day we're going to end up just doing this anyway and so how do human beings actually get disciplined right because when you've got the joy of Doom scrolling watching YouTube and playing video games versus all of its hard work like what's it for and what we sort of discover is that there's one really important thing that actually causes human beings to be disciplined and that's something called a competing interest and we know this because we've done lots of research on people with addictions and I'd love to tell you all just a simple example of this okay and so I had this patient who had had a skiing injury and then started on opiate medication and they had a genetic vulnerability to it so they got addicted to it super high functioning person really really capable and so I kind of told him I was like hey you know if you need to withdraw if you need to get off of opiates like we probably need to like hospitalize you and like give you pain medications and things like that but they were in a situation where they couldn't afford to do that if people found out that they were getting substance use treatment their job would have all kinds of problems and stuff so they're like you know what I'm gonna do it cold turkey I'm going to do at home and the nice thing about opioid withdrawal is that it's not as life-threatening or medically dangerous as something like withdrawing from alcohol which can actually be lethal so they just decided that they wanted to quit cold turkey and it was one of the most painful experiences of their life and so if you kind of think about it how is a human being able to do that so if you think about the discipline that's required to withdraw off of opiates cold turkey or quit smoking or all these other kinds of things right because if you think about all that stuff all these addictive substances what do they do they increase our enjoyment right they give us dopamine they give us all the stuff so how is it that human beings are able to pay that price and that's the problem with not being ready for discipline is we're not ready to pay the price for discipline we're not ready to pay the price to get promoted to go to graduate school to get in shape right we're just not ready yet and so how do you become ready you develop something called a competing interest and so what we learn from getting off of substances is people have to have a good reason to do it so they have to have something called a competing interest which is that I have to want something more than the pain of getting off of this substance and so in your life if you're not ready for discipline which you really need to figure out is what is worth the pain to you right and this is where we fall into another trap this is why this problem is so common right now because right now where do our wants come from our wants and our desires come from the outside and if you're someone who's struggling to get disciplined because you're not ready or you do it like kind of half-heartedly and then you give up where is your desire for discipline coming from is it coming from in here or is it coming from societal expectations I should do this I should do this my parents are doing this my friends are doing this and this is the problem is that all that crap from the outside and our world is becoming more and more focused on fulfilling like external desires right now it's like we have advertisements we have personalized advertisements all these websites are tracking you right so they're telling you all the time what you want so this this game company is like hey you really want this game and now if you kind of think about it we have these like big launches for video games where like we've got three trailer and there's so much hype and we have conventions and they're like hey you want this game hey you want this game and now all these like streamers get early access codes to games right so for like a year before the game comes out the world is telling you hey you want the stuff hey you want this stuff and your parents are telling you you should do this you should do this your friends are telling you you should do this you should do this you look at everyone else around you and everyone's telling what you should do what you should want but none of that stuff is a competing interest because it all comes from the outside and so we as a society have forgotten how to find what we care about so if you're not ready to get disciplined it's never going to work as long as you're developing the discipline for someone else and some of y'all may have even grown up in situations where your parents were very controlling right and they tried to instill discipline but if someone is forcing you to study or forcing you to work or forcing you to do anything that's not actually discipline it's actually the exact opposite because these are external forces that are controlling your behavior the point of discipline is that it's an internal force that overcomes your barriers and so this can be really confusing for a lot of people because even if they've been pressured and they've been successful they can sometimes have no discipline at all and anytime they're left to kind of self-start they struggle with it so what do we do about this the first thing is like I said acknowledge for a moment that a lot of what you want right not not the games and stuff because that's actually what you want that's how you want to spend your time which is why you move towards it right and that's also why you're willing to sacrifice things like external respect or money because you're actually fulfilling your own desires there so how can we start to cultivate healthier desires that sort of qualifies this competing interest that allow us to pay the price to develop discipline so the first question that I have for you is what do you want and if your answer to that question is I don't know then that's a diagnostic sign that your mind has been so clouded by external desires you've been so influenced by advertising and personalized cookies that you don't even know what you want the world is telling you what you want okay so then the next question that we've got to ask you is do you want to change and if you really pay attention to yourself what you may find there is actually you're going to say no I don't want to change yet I don't want to change now and then you may sort of say well okay if I don't want to change then I'm screwed right no no don't worry about it we're going to help you out so then there's one more question you can ask yourself do you want to want to change do you wish you did want to change and then you may find a slightly different answer right chances are we're moving closer to yes and if the answer that question is yes I wish I was different I wish I wanted to change so now we found something actually really really important even though you don't want to change you wish that you wanted to change and now we found something the world is not telling you that right the world is not telling you hey you like need to change maybe they are but they're not sort of going one level above do you wish you were a different person and that you wanted to change and if the answer to that question is yes now we've got something really important so usually when we think about the person that we want to be there's a laundry list of stuff I want to exercise I want to eat healthy I want to put more money in my savings account I want to go to graduate school I want to grind more I want to write a book there's this laundry list of crap okay that we come up with and what you want to do is write that stuff down on a piece of paper and then go through it and then ask yourself okay is this something that I actually want or is this some something that was instilled Within Me is this a want that was transplanted from advertising or parental expectations or societal expectations or does this really come from me and what you'll find is that ninety percent of the stuff on your list doesn't actually come from you what you're going to end up with is hopefully one thing just start with one thing that you actually want and if you can find that one thing that you actually want stop and just like sit with that for a second and then what I really want you to focus on is try to do whatever you can to start that thing in the smallest way possible think for a moment about the person that you want to be not the person that Society wants you to be how do you want to be different and I'm not saying giving up video games or YouTube or any of that stuff I'm saying like Okay so if you want to be a little bit physically healthier then go for a walk every day start with the smallest thing do five push-ups do two push-ups do one push-up whatever that smallest thing is do something pick something that you can do and that you can actually be like sort of satisfied with yourself at the end right because now you're actually moving towards something that you genuinely want now if you try to do this you're going to run into a pitfall and maybe you're running into it already and that Pitfall is but it's not enough so this is where your mind is going to be super sneaky and it's going to tell you like this doesn't make a difference because what difference does two push-ups make right we have all this laundry list of things to do and so we have to be really careful here and this is like so kind of twisty and sneaky that it's easy to lose y'all so really try to pay attention to this okay when your mind tells you that the first thing is what is your mind telling you to do your mind is telling you is trying to convince you that you should want all of this stuff because all of those habits or all those desires have been implanted within you right so it's kind of trick you into telling you that this isn't enough the other thing that's really interesting though is that when it tells you those things what is it actually gonna trying to convince you to do it's trying to tell you oh you can't just do one percent you need to go a hundred percent or nothing because your mind knows you're not going to go 100 so what your mind is actually doing in that moment is trying to convince you to do nothing and just continue doing exactly what you're doing because it's doing the cost benefit analysis and it's kind of saying hey actually we can get a ton of benefit by just watching YouTube and playing video games every day so don't bother with that other crap it never works we've tried it before right and so we know it's not worth it so you've got to be super careful about that Pitfall just notice what it's kind of trying to accomplish notice that it's kind of trying to keep you stuck and the reason that's kind of trying to keep you stuck because the mind does this really interesting trick is that it convinces you that you don't want to change that's what it's trying to do right saying it's not worth it and if it's not worth it then we don't want to do it and if we don't want to do it we can continue doing what we're doing so this is what's so tricky is that that that sort of lack of Readiness actually comes from the mind there's one Pitfall that we have to worry about though if you pick one thing and you start to do a tiny little amount that is aligned with what you want your mind is actually going to try to pull a really interesting trick on you the second you start to move forward with something that you want your mind is going to remind you of all the stuff that you should be doing because it's going to get all tangled up and it's going to say you should be doing this you should be doing this you should be doing this so doing two push-ups a day or walking 15 minutes a day isn't going to be enough so it's interesting because the second you start to develop forward momentum the mind will actually trick you by sort of telling you hey it's not enough and what your mind is going to tell you is that it has to be all or nothing and we can kind of see that in the post and if you pay attention to yourself usually when you try to make a change you try to overhaul your life so why does the Mind do this why does the mind tell you that it's all or nothing because the mind knows hey if I make it all or nothing this dumb ass is going to choose nothing and if this person chooses nothing remember it's got that cost benefit analysis running if we don't bother with all this crap what do we end up doing instead we end up playing video games we end up watching YouTube we end up scrolling we end up having a great time getting a ton of dopamine and by the way because we've already done the calculation right so if we start to do all of this catastrophic amazing change we're going to end up in this place anyway so I'm gonna I'm looking out for you that's what your mind is saying I'm Gonna Save you all the trouble and we're gonna jump right to the end of the movie right now we're gonna just retire right here right because if you're a degenerate who's playing tons of video games and you don't want to change what are you actually doing you're retiring at the age of 22 and who wouldn't want to retire at the age of 22. everyone wants to retire at the age of 22 and your mind is like hey you don't need to actually make any money because this stuff is cheap there's free to play games we're actually set I'm going to help be retire right now all you need to do to retire right now is don't worry about all that crap that you should do so I'm going to convince you that you don't need to do any of it so you've got to watch out for that Pitfall because it's waiting for you and it's what's kept you stuck this entire time so just to kind of summarize it's really normal for us to enjoy the life that we have right now because our society is designed that way right games are getting like more interesting when I was growing up when I was like seven years old eight years old you couldn't game 24 hours a day because you had limited access to games you had to go and buy a cartridge and put it into your Nintendo Entertainment System you could play that game for 20 30 hours and then you're done and then there aren't more games to play nowadays we have an endless amount of entertainment and then what we sort of tell ourselves is okay like I should do all of this stuff right but then there's a part of your brain that's actually playing that tape through the end even if you haven't and it's saying okay why should we do that stuff so we can get more money why do we want more money so we can retire early why do we want to retire early so we can do what we want what do we want to do we want to play video games why on Earth what I waste 30 years when I can actually jump straight to that right now and this is why we're not ready to change the other thing to consider is that if we really do want to develop discipline that comes at a cost right exercising eating healthy working hard those come at very high costs so how is it that human beings develop the capacity to pay those costs develop the willingness to pay those costs that comes from a competing interest and this is why things are so hard right now because it's so hard to know what you want why is it hard to know what you want because the world is brainwashing you to want other things right but when a video game company is trying to sell you stuff they're thinking about their own interests they don't care about whether you stay at home and you know become degenerate so our society has made it so that we've forgotten or lost the capacity to even know what we want and so start with that list of shoulds and parents can kind of do that kind of stuff too right where they tell you you should look a certain way you should have this kind of job in society Instagram and like all these other social media things magazines movies they're telling you you should look a certain way or dress a certain way so they're shoving what you want at you but it's not really what you want it's what they want you to want and so how do you get around that there's a really important question you can ask yourself is even if you don't want to change today so be honest with yourself do I want to change no am I ready to change no do I want to become disciplined no so be it do you wish you were someone that wanted to change and if the answer to that question is yes then come up with a list of all the crap that you should do and try to find a single thing that you actually care about and move one step towards it but be careful because your mind will create a pitfall because it'll tell you it's not enough we have to do everything so be super careful about that Pitfall of your mind really focus on what you want and try to implement the tiniest change possible thank you