The Truth About Goals and Discipline

I recently did a post explaining my bizarre technique for achieving self-growth by taking massive action instantly, as opposed to dividing it up over time.

As a result of this, I was able to do a 17+ mile walk in just over 5 hours, whereas normally, I would have been sat on my ass playing video games on a Thursday evening.

I wanted to share a little more on why I feel this is so powerful, and some “logic” on why it works so well, and how it can help you.

I had someone on Twitter say to me… “Dean, but 5 one hour walks are easier than one five hour walk”.

Here is the thing, and if you take one thing from this post, here is the key point…

5 x 60 min walks are MUCH harder than 1 x 5-hour walk.

You see, this is why many people fail to go to the gym regularly… the gym work is often not the hard part, the hard part is getting motivated, overcoming your thoughts, which will often say things like “LOST is on tv tonight, and it is cold outside, why not skip the gym this once?”.

For most people, it takes a lot of energy, will power, and focus to fight through the mental barriers to take the first step.

In fact, the first step is BY FAR the hardest step to take.

So perhaps it makes more sense to take that first step as few times as possible?

In some cases, it uses more energy psyching yourself up, than it does actually doing the task.

If you are able to break through this mental barrier, you may by now be in a bad mood, perhaps feeling a little more tired than normal, afterall… you just had a mental war with yourself.

So now you get ready, perhaps get changed, thus using more physical energy… you then walk or drive to your destination (gym, university etc), and then, finally, after all this effort, you begin your task.

Now, can you see why 5×60 minute walks require MUCH more energy than 1×5 hour walk?

And this is assuming you win your mental wars for the full 5 days.

For most people, after day 2 or day 3, they lose interest, become bored, and then find excuses not to carry on.

So in reality, 5×60 minute walks may = 120 minutes of walking, and three days of feeling guilty that you watched LOST instead.

Another reason my massive action theory works so well, is due to something I learned from Tim Ferriss and Eben Pagan…

Write this down:

“The importance of a task is directly related to the time allocated to it”

In other words, the more time you spend thinking about a task, the bigger it seems.

This can heap huge amounts of extra pressure onto a task or goal, and thus increases the chances that you will use up more mental energy with things like stress, worry, anxiety, doubt etc… and also, it will increase the chances of you not actually completing the task.

There was literally a 90 minute window between my having the idea to do a long walk, and taking the first step on my 17+ mile hike.

Had I planned it for the following week, there is every chance that I would have gone off the idea, lost interest, or magnified the challenge to such a level that I would have made excuses not to do it.

So don’t listen to the people who tell you to “think it over”, “sleep on it”, “think it through” etc… that advice only works for highly disciplined people, and in today’s world of info overload, those people are truly a minority percentage.

So take massive action today.

Dean