Motivation vs discipline: what actually keeps you going
The internet settled this one years ago: motivation is for amateurs, discipline is for winners, and you should be up at five doing push-ups. The research tells a story that is more useful than that, and a lot less punishing.
What each one actually is
Motivation is wanting to do something. It's a feeling, and like every feeling it comes and goes: high on the Sunday you sign up for the half marathon, low on the wet Thursday of week five.
Discipline is doing it anyway, whatever you happen to feel like that day. Steve Pavlina, who wrote a long series of essays on the subject, put it about as plainly as it can be put:
Self-discipline is the ability to get yourself to take action regardless of your emotional state.
Steve Pavlina, Self-Discipline
Put that way, discipline obviously wins. Feelings are unreliable, so build your life on the thing that doesn't depend on them. The trouble is what most people picture when they hear the word: gritted teeth, cold showers, a daily fight against your own laziness. That picture turns out to be mostly wrong.
The willpower tank that probably isn't there
For nearly two decades, one of the most famous ideas in psychology was ego depletion. Willpower, the theory went, is like a fuel tank. Every time you resist a cookie or force yourself through a boring task, you burn some, and when it's empty you give in to whatever comes next.
It was a lovely, intuitive idea, and it launched hundreds of studies. Then in 2016 a large replication effort ran the same basic experiment across more than twenty labs, and the effect came out close to zero. Researchers still argue about what exactly is going on, but the simple version, where self-control drains like a battery, is no longer something you should plan your life around.
That matters because the tank picture makes discipline sound like a matter of having a bigger tank. If that were true, the answer would be to fight harder. What the more recent research points to is that the people who seem most disciplined aren't fighting harder at all.
What disciplined people are actually doing
When researchers look closely at people who score high on self-control, a pattern keeps coming up. They report fewer temptations during the day, not more victories over them. And their good behavior leans heavily on habit: things they do at the same time, in the same place, without much deciding.
The psychologist Wendy Wood, who has studied habits for most of her career, found in one study that around 43 percent of what people did each day was done habitually, usually while thinking about something else. That's a huge share of a day running on autopilot. Discipline, in practice, is mostly the job of pointing that autopilot somewhere good.
So the disciplined person you admire probably isn't winning a daily fight with the alarm clock. They've gone to bed at the same time for years, the alarm is across the room, and the running clothes are on the chair. By the time the morning arrives, there isn't much left to fight about.
The more disciplined you become, the easier life gets.
Steve Pavlina, Self-Discipline
Where motivation still earns its place
None of this makes motivation useless. It's bad at keeping you going, and very good at two other things: choosing what's worth doing, and getting you to start.
There's a finding called the fresh start effect, from work by Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman and Jason Riis. People are more likely to go to the gym, and more likely to search for things like "diet," at the start of a week, a month or a year, and right after a birthday. Those dates give you a small burst of motivation for free.
The trick is what you spend the burst on. The instinct on a fired-up Sunday is to do something heroic: a three-hour workout, a new app for every part of your life. Better to spend it on the setup. Book the class for Tuesday. Clear the desk. Tell a friend you'll meet them at seven. Motivation is a poor engine, but it is good at laying track that discipline can run on later.
How to build discipline without hating yourself
Pick one thing. Every January people take on five new habits at once and keep none of them. Choose the one that would make the others easier, and give it a month.
Make it small. Small enough that you could do it on your worst day. Ten push-ups, one page, five minutes of the language app. You can grow it once it's automatic, and you can't grow something you've dropped.
It's easier to keep a small thing going than a big one. And keeping it going is what matters.
Leo Babauta, Zen Habits
Tie it to something you already do. BJ Fogg at Stanford suggests anchoring a new habit to an existing one with a sentence like "After I pour my coffee, I'll write down my three tasks for the day." The coffee is going to happen anyway. Let it do the remembering.
Decide the when and the where in advance. The psychologist Peter Gollwitzer calls these implementation intentions: "When it's 6 p.m. on Monday, I'll go straight from work to the pool." A 2006 review pooling nearly a hundred studies found that plans like this made people noticeably more likely to follow through than just intending to.
Plan for the miss. You will miss a day. Research on habit formation by Phillippa Lally's team at University College London found that missing a single day made no real difference to whether a habit formed. What hurts is the second and third miss, when "I skipped" quietly turns into "I stopped." James Clear's rule for this is a good one: never miss twice.
So which one?
Both, doing different jobs. Use motivation to pick the direction and set things up while you're keen. Use habit and a bit of structure to carry you through the weeks when you're not. And stop treating the days you don't feel like it as a character flaw. Everybody has those days. The only difference is whether the system still runs when they come.
If it helps to have the idea in front of you, we collected some of the better lines on the subject in quotes about discipline and consistency.
Questions
Is discipline better than motivation?
For keeping going, yes. Motivation is a feeling and it fades, so anything that depends on it stops when the feeling does. But motivation is still useful for choosing what to do and for getting started. The best approach uses motivation to set up habits that discipline can then maintain.
Can you train self-discipline?
Yes, though less by forcing yourself and more by building habits and removing temptations. Start with one small habit tied to something you already do, decide in advance when and where you'll do it, and never let one missed day become two.
Is willpower a limited resource?
Probably not in the simple way it was once described. The idea that self-control drains like a battery, called ego depletion, failed to replicate in a large multi-lab study in 2016. Tiredness and stress still matter, but you shouldn't plan around a fixed daily supply of willpower.
What if I have neither motivation nor discipline?
Start with the environment instead. Make the thing you want to do easier and more visible, and make the distraction harder to reach. Then pick a first step small enough to do with no motivation at all. Our guide on how to motivate yourself when you have no motivation goes through this.
How long does it take to build a habit?
Longer than the popular 21 days. In a study from University College London, it took participants 66 days on average for a new behavior to become automatic, with a range from 18 to 254 days depending on the person and the habit.
Keep reading
Start today with something good.
Set it up once. Dailies takes it from there.
