Screw motivation, what you need is discipline

If you are inspired to move a mountain, it will get you started, but won't get you finished, unless you can stay inspired for long periods of time.

I agree completely that discipline is the key to building good habits, and after you have a set of good habits maintaining them is relatively easy.

However, motivation is a little more important than the author is making out, and that's in setting an initial direction. Why would you be disciplined if you don't know what you want?

Let motivation tell you what you want, and discipline let you get there.

I have been thinking, reading and writing about motivation / discipline / procrastination / akrasia for years now. I'm always looking for really good material on the subject. Unfortunately for some strange reason, most of the posts I've seen that get to the front page of Hacker News are woefully oversimplistic.

Even discipline is something that requires some sort of motivation to cultivate. It is something that you have to want to do, and getting yourself to want to do something isn't (in my opinion) nearly as trivial as a lot of people pretend it is.

So screw motivation, screw discipline, what you need is a comprehensive, holistic solution that encompasses almost everything– that's why it's so difficult to change your life.

1- You need to figure out your expectancy of accomplishing tasks. Discipline won't help you if you bite off more than you can chew.

2- You need to figure out what's valuable to you. There's not much sense in getting disciplined at doing something you hate. PG wrote in one of his essays- paulgraham.com/love.html, I believe, where he talks about a doctor who became a doctor because she was so focused and disciplined– despite the fact that she never actually loved medicine.

3– You need to engineer your environment + choose the right peers. This is way more than half the battle, and it also involves taking more drastic action than a lot of people are comfortable with.

4- You need to chop up your tasks into things that have nearly-immediate feedback, because otherwise hyperbolic discounting makes things seem irrelevant and unimportant to us (especially bad if you have ADHD).

5- You need to have a vested interest in doing all of the above. That means having some sort of reason or motive... which you might also call "motivation."

TL;DR:

Motivation / discipline / getting-stuff-done is a lot more complicated than "screw X, do Y".

PS:

"Screw X, do Y" seems to be a rhetoric device writers use when want to drum up strong feelings in people, dividing people into Camp X and Camp Y. Once you learn to see it, it actually gets rather boring and underwhelming. If you skip all the rhetoric, what the writer is saying is to develop habits. "Start small", that's it.

Would've been more interesting to read a post about the specific development of habits. Because, often you'll find, you end up needing some motivation to getting around to changing your habits, too.

Let actions determine mood, and not rely on mood to determine one's actions.

And that's why many people choose not to run businesses, and that's fine too. Some make money in other ways, and some don't mind that they don't have a whole lot of money.

If you're succeeding in your businesses, that probably means that it's close enough to "enjoyable" for you to make it worth your while (if not - man, I'm sorry).

I knew folks at Google who had zero interest in ever founding a company. Why? Because they knew exactly what it entailed, and figured they wanted to spend their budget on things like hard technical problems or dealing with office politics rather than on building a business. Ultimately, I decided that wasn't what I want, and a good portion of the reason why is that I wanted the challenge of stretching myself in ways that I couldn't inside a large corporation. But that's a choice as well - I looked at the schleps needed to have some level of sustainable self-determination within Google vs. the ones needed to have some level of sustainable self-determination in a company, and decided I wanted the latter. I don't actually disagree with any of the facts you've put out, I'm just pointing out that one shouldn't immediately leap from those to the article's conclusion.