D is for Discipline and F is for Focus

I must unabashedly confess that I am a victim of the bug which never lets you fulfil your personal goals. To be frank I am not really a victim but a borderline strange case. Over the past 41 years I have made some of the most ambitious personal goals and plans to achieve those goals. When I am making these plans , I am perhaps as serious as Donald trump was when he spoke about creating a wall on the Mexico border. No kidding.I am serious enough to create a formal plan on how I'd achieve these goals but when it comes to execution, well that's where the real problem lies. I would start religiously where I execute the plan every step as its described but as I move along something happens and I either halt or stop executing as ruthlessly as I started. I would initially blame it on the vagaries of a middle class life but I was actually fooling myself. It was also eating me from inside because every time I'd crash in the night, I'd feel extremely guilty. A part of me felt burdened by the fact that I was just wasting my life. I'd remember the numerous reprimands I'd get from my dad when I was a kid that I will have a dark future because I wasn't serious about my life. I had worked hard to reach where I am to prove my dad wrong but now I am again at a stage where I am repeating history. Unfortunately like smoker's regret this would be short lived and I'd be back to doing the same. This had to be fixed. This time I was super serious. But to defeat your enemy you need to know more about your enemy than he knows about himself if Sun Tzu is to be believed. I tried understanding what was going wrong. Was it procrastination? Was it because I am an unambitious person or have come to become one? Was it because I had animated ideas about myself being this great character who can achieve great feats in my mind but as soon as reality hit hard, I'd just give up? As I was evaluating all these, I heard this apple podcast where Ken Kocienda one of the original creators of the Apple iPhone software spoke about how they built the iPhone. What struck me in that entire 1 hour 38 minute podcast was the a single word- focus. From Steve Jobs to everyone who built the iPhone, the only thing that they did was focus deeply on their mission to build the best phone in the world. It was what kept them alive and it was what made them create a discipline. Yes that's right. The underlying word is discipline. It's ironical since I come from a family where half the men are in the armed forces and discipline forms the core of their lives. Come to think of it and I believe I was never really disciplined and that is precisely why I chose careers outside Armed forces. Not that my dad is particularly proud of it. Anyway I discovered that when I start executing on my goals, I am actually quite disciplined but in the coarse of a few weeks I move away from it. I move away because something else catches my attention which to my mind seems more important and thus that is the point where I start focusing my synergies in something entirely different. That explains why I read 3 to 4 books at a time. The problem was lack of focus and discipline while completing a singular task and somewhat of a casual attitude to these goals deep in my psyche. They say realisation can change a man forever and it has kinda done the same for me since the time I realised it. I now use Nir Eyal's techniques to complete the daily tasks that I am supposed to do be it completing a coding lesson in data science or reading 50 pages of a book or writing a blog. I don't rest until I wrap up these tasks diligently and I do them religiously. No short cuts. Only when I have finished these tasks is when I think of doing anything else lesser in priority. Having said that I don't do them in a stretch. I keep taking 20 minute breathers to ensure I don't get bored to the extent of completely quitting and that I must say it's worked wonders for me. More of it in Indistractable by Nir. Bottomline is that there is no shortcut or escapism that would help you achieve your personal goals unless you bring in discipline and razor sharp focus to the the equation. I started being disciplined from March 2022 and in these 2 months it's helped me a lot. Now I can sleep in peace without feeling any regrets. Maybe its time you do something to knock this syndrome off or you'd be as regretful as I was all these years.