Ask HN: How do you stay disciplined in the long run?

My discipline comes from a lifetime of sports and has carried over to my work life (even though I now do martial arts as a hobbyist instead of competing as a college athlete); many of these can be read as workout / health points but are actually applicable across your life.

It starts from the long-term goal: if you want to be extraordinary, you need to do things differently than the ordinary. People are going to give you a hard time about some of the changes you're making, so you need to be ready to ignore them and accept the fact that if you want to have a different level of discipline than others you need to do things differently.

Discipline is compound interest in your life - you are doing the little things the right way every day, and all those pennies are eventually going to add up into millions. This applies to food, working out, pushing on projects, learning new skills etc.

The best advice is to make it easy for yourself - pick a FEW, SIMPLE, things that you can control and start from there. Stop eating the same snack or having a glass of wine after work. Start waking up at 6 am. Then evolve to going to the gym from there. Build habits.

You also need to accept that you're not perfect, and no man is an island. This part was the hardest for me - I built up walls around myself (thinking that I needed to keep my habits exactly as they were since they had gotten me this far) and thus cut off opportunities and other people. Eventually I was able to be a bit more chilled out while still keeping the discipline in the right areas. I found that 7 habits of highly successful people really helped me; I also recommend "Wooden on Leadership" and "The Score Takes Care of Itself" as examples of champions putting this bottoms-up approach into practice over years and reaping the rewards.

There is no shortcut. There is nothing fancy. Control what you can control, don't worry about the rest of it, and trust in the process. Feel free to message me if I can be helpful

I would like to add my 2 cents here :

1. If you want to do something but not able to do anything about it, maybe its not something you "want" to do. It's like swimming against the tide, it'll always be hard. So, instead find something you "want" to do. For ex: deep down you might enjoy painting, but looking at an article on how some programmer made millions by selling his startup, you might be tempted to try your hand at coding. But no matter how much you motivate yourself, your mind will continue to resist when the implementation phase comes, as, deep down, that's not what you are interested in.

2. When you start a project, don't spend too much of time on planning/research. Any project you start, try to finish atleast the most important parts of it while your initial enthusiasm lasts. If you spend most of your initial enthusiasm on planning/research and other stuff, you'll have little energy left for implementation. Start and course correct along the way.

Love this insightful comment. Me personally, I am a "status quo" person. It's my greatest strength and my greatest weakness. I'm the kind of person who can take an old used car and keep it going forever. It never gets fully restored but it doesn't get any worse, either. It may even get a little better over time with some new gauges and hi-end replacement parts.

My goal is simple: Make a platform called "Nocode", which helps non-programmers to control their application. No vendor lock-in anymore.

More generally, try to avoid "hype", instead, make yourself a goal which is good enough to save you and others from pain of code debts.

I hate code. It's the worst thing a person could do (though people do it forcely or for passion).

Discipline helps us to achieve certain goals according to a specific and highly effective plan.

For me:

- You should determine the long-term goal to achieve.

- Determine the benefits of achieving this goal and what you can lose (time, money, energy, comfortable, ...) when you achieve your goals (good mental preparation).

- Plan short-term goals and it is important to make small plans to complete (that's the biggest motivational way).

- Consider and evaluate the plan regularly.

- Follow the plan to create a habit, this process is difficult, if you change yourself, you must overcome it.

- Finally, you can share what you have accomplished with friends, colleagues, or through blogs. Since then get comments to improve the plan and create energy for yourself.

My cycle: goal -> value achieved -> motivation -> plan -> habits -> share.

ps: Small simple things will create great happiness.