Wei Sun

Our brains contain both the limbic system and the cerebral cortex. The limbic system is responsible for our emotions and basic desires. When we’re craving dessert or get addicted to TV and games, that’s the limbic system at work. The cerebral cortex contains all of our ability for higher reasoning and planning. This is the part of us that knows about how effort in the short term results in future rewards.

In other words, the limbic system makes you dread starting that important project, and the cerebral cortex knows that you’ll regret it if you procrastinate. And yes, since the limbic system came earlier in human brains’ evolutionary history, its pull can be powerful. The limbic system helped our ancestors survive tens of thousands of years ago, but in our modern world, letting it have free rein can be dangerous.

Discipline, on the other hand, is simply your cerebral cortex’s ability to override the limbic system when it’s in your best interest. The cerebral cortex is the sensible part of the brain — when scientists refer to “higher brain function,” they’re referring to the cortex.

The limbic system and cerebral cortex are constantly battling each other for control, and way too often we allow the limbic system to win. And the more it wins, the stronger it gets, and the harder it is to resist — to our detriment.

Fortunately, our brains are like muscles — we can exercise it and develop it. The more you use your cerebral cortex to keep your limbic system at bay, the easier it will become. If you feel like you don’t have discipline (or that being disciplined is just so hard and painful to do), take baby steps. Always look for small ways to stretch yourself and grow your discipline.

Can you hold your breath through to the end of a freeway tunnel? Are you able to stand on one leg while brushing your teeth, and hang on until the very end? Treat your discipline like a skill, and level up.

So how can we get things done even when we don’t feel like it?

“Not feeling like it” is an illusion. A powerful one, but an illusion nonetheless.

“Not feeling like starting” is a bit closer to the truth, but that’s not quite right either.

“Feeling like not feeling like starting” — ah, we’re finally getting somewhere.

Humans are hard-wired to perceive starting anything as much harder than it really is. It prevented our ancestors from expending valuable energy on anything not immediately vital to their survival.

On the other hand, we’re also hard-wired to experience flow once we get started, because our ancestors’ survival depended on successfully completing the important tasks they do choose to take on.

That’s the secret to beating procrastination: the hardest part of any dreaded task is just starting. Throw all your discipline into just taking the first step, and you’ll find that the rest just takes care of itself.

Our motivation is therefore like a heavy ball stuck behind a speed bump at the top of a hill — it takes some effort to get over the initial bump, but we tend to be fine with continuing once we get into our flow state.

Addicted to a game on your phone? Try leaving the app for a minute. Can’t bring yourself to start an important writing assignment? Just congratulate yourself when you simply open a new Word document and type something — anything — in.

Try this the next time you get stuck: commit to start something and keep it up for just 5 minutes. It’s all right if you want to stop; you have my permission.

But I’m willing to bet that you’re able to keep going. Not only that, but the next 15 minutes will feel hilariously easier than the first 5.

When new members are introduced to an organization aimed towards a common goal, the early period is critical; it sets the stage for the rest of the members’ relationship with the organization.

It is critical to have the new members engaged in back-and-forth communication, and that absolutely cannot happen without a sense of belonging. This also takes some effort on the part of incumbent members and the leaders of the organization. This is because there tends to be some psychological barriers to treating a newcomer exactly the same as one would treat a long-time comrade. The incumbents must realize that all of this is purely mental, and it may even be useful for the leaders to remind the incumbents of the importance of inclusion.

How can “setting the stage” be formally defined? The latest in psychological literature asserts that when an individual encounters a new situation, new neural patterns are created. These new patterns start off weak and diffuse, with great potential for change, since the patterns have not yet been entrenched in the individual’s brain. Over time, however, as the situation is encountered more often, these neural patterns are traversed again and again, and these previously diffuse patterns grow stronger. The neural connections peripheral to these patterns receive less stimulation; this makes the neural pattern more efficient, but less susceptible to change.

One can make the following analogy of rain shaping and transforming its incident landscape. Rain landing on a flat sloping hill will travel down the hill in numerous small streams that readily shift and change, and initially each individual stream will not obviously be any larger than any other stream. However, as the hill repeatedly experiences rain, some small amount of dirt and silt will be carried away via these streams, deepening channels under these waterways. The amount of earth carried away varies from stream to stream, such that certain channels will become deeper — furthermore, the deeper the channel, the larger the stream during the next rain. Eventually, a much smaller number of significantly larger streams — ones so entrenched in the that they are likely to never change direction — will be carrying the bulk of the rainwater. A very similar process occurs during the formation of new neural patterns.

The importance of setting the stage early for new members of an organization is now clear. The new members must realize the neural patterns of inclusion, communication, and confidence in a group setting, and the neural patterns must be reinforced often to make sure that it is set for all future cooperative efforts in the organization. This positive habit has tremendous value — cooperation now is not only natural, but it also comes at absolutely no extra mental expense to the new individual. The individual’s mental resources are therefore completely free for applying to the important tasks at hand, all while painlessly reaping the fruits of collaborative resources. Without active and focused efforts by the organization’s leadership, there is far too much risk of alternate detrimental mental patterns forming (such as isolation, low esteem, etc.). The leaders must therefore be diligent and not relax standards for communication and inclusion as the organization grows.

You have probably heard of Jerry Seinfeld, an enormously successful, consistent, and productive television comedian. One night after a stand-up comedy set in the 1990’s, he told amateur comedian Brad Isaac that the secret to success was to show up and produce every day: “After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job is to not break the chain.” Jerry made no mention of quality, quantity, length of time, or any of the traditional metrics of progress. His only requirement was showing up and producing, no matter what.

We can take Jerry’s philosophy and apply it to any project. The key to a relatively stress-free project completion is to simply start and contribute to them, no matter what, and no matter how insignificantly, every single day. I suggest that you start it as soon as possible – today, in fact, if you can.

For example, let’s say you’re trying to write a book. No matter what, you’re required to make progress. It could be just a couple of lines, or a formatting edit, or even deleting material – just make sure you open and change the files every day. If you are stuck on writing content this week, work on your acknowledgements. If you’re attending to a personal emergency, remove a couple of redundant words from a chapter. If you come across a brilliant article relevant to your work, pop the citation into your references.

For example, on day one, give yourself the minimum requirement of starting the document. Save something like a “book.docx” file and make sure it lives in a backed up location. I highly recommend Dropbox; in fact, for my own personal book project, I synchronized my computer’s desktop with my Dropbox so that my book file is not only perfectly recoverable from any save point, but I can also have a reminder every day to open the file. After that, if you’re up for it, start applying your book’s margins, fonts, spacing, etc. (Or you can push it to the next day; after all, you have already fulfilled your first painless daily requirement.)

Let this strategy be a liberation for you. When you feel particularly motivated to add to your projects, go ahead. If not, simply make a positive change in some small way. No matter what you change that day, be satisfied that you have moved forward in a tangible way and pat yourself on the back.

Some days you’ll be on a roll and work for hours – on other days you’ll only have enough motivation to make small edits here and there.

But whatever you do, don’t break the chain.