Delphic Maxim 21: Cling to discipline

I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.

21. Cling to discipline

Every (weekday) morning my alarm goes off at 5am (or thereabouts), I get out of bed, get dressed and head to the gym. At 7am — these days — I open up a document, type out the day’s Delphic Maxim, and then spend 15 minutes writing whatever comes into my head. For seven months now, I have been slowly making my way through a huge list of ‘great books’ that comprise a canon of literature (it was once ‘Western’, but it’s expanded to something much bigger now).

All this is discipline. They’re little daily actions, but they add up to something much bigger.

Regular practice and consistent effort are much more rewarding in the long term than huge last minute bursts. Every semester when I first teach a class of students, I ask them to take out their diaries or calendars, go to the due dates for their assessments and make a note of them. Then go back a week prior and note that they need to have a full draft completed. Then go back another week and put in an expected word count. Then go back another week and put in another waypoint. And so on back to the start of semester. Why?

Because nobody does their best work at the last minute, no matter how clever they think they are. People can do their fastest work at the last minute, no doubt. But your best work is work that you’ve had time to research, revise, reflect and rewrite. Your best work is carefully considered, digested over a long period of time, chewed over in your mind, and edited and proofed. This just can’t be done overnight — the reading alone is so rushed, how can you possibly think your best ideas are germinated in an evening?

Academia — and particularly social theory and philosophy — was originally a monastic vocation. Academics sat in thought for long stretches of time: they pondered things. And like monastics, this requires a huge amount of discipline. The same goes for incredibly fit people: there actually isn’t a great big secret to good health and a good body. It involves regularly maintaining exercise, eating healthy, avoiding alcohol, getting plenty of sleep and drinking plenty of water. Occasionally bingeing on pizza might not be awful infrequently, but every weekend? Forget about it. You have to have discipline, and often that means keeping your eyes on the prize.

Michael Gardner, a popular writer on education, wrote in his book 5 minds for the future that the disciplined mind was one that would be increasingly necessary in a connected, creative, future world. He uses discipline in two senses here: the first in the sense of ‘maintaining order’ or regular practice, the second in the sense of ‘the disciplines’. This second sense is interesting: Gardner suggested that it is necessary to have a deep understanding of a discipline (or field of knowledge), a type of specialisation that would help you add value and depth to the world.

In the few years since 5 minds was published, there’s been a marked shift towards ‘interdisciplinary’ or ‘antidisciplinary’ capability. In universities, where I work, the focus on drawing together researchers from multiple disciplines to help solve problems has grown hugely. There seems to be a recognition that ‘clinging to discipline’ in the context of problem solving can actually be a problem: disciplinary lenses create blind spots.

But even then, discipline stands in for rigour. You can’t arrive at interdisciplinary capability without having basic disciplinary capability, and you don’t get that without disciplined study. Once again, discipline and maintenance wins the day. It’s small steps, regularly, that was in the long run. Kind of like the compound interest of life: it feels like a small sacrifice today, but in the long term it adds up to something huge. Persistence, frustrating though it may be, pays off in the long run.

Waking up at 5 each morning and knowing that at 7am I’ll be writing for 15 minutes is unbelievably frustrating sometimes (especially when you come across some of the more disconnected, difficult maxims). But I know that discipline is good for me. The gym is a habit now — I couldn’t imagine starting my day any other way, and it’s easy to get up and just do it. I’m now a month into writing these posts every morning, and it’s becoming a habit too.

Discipline is life’s compound interest, and the old saying attributed to Einstein is true:

“Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe.”