An Experiment in Scotch

The gap between zero and one. What an inter­est­ing con­cept that is. If you think about it for even just a lit­tle bit, it becomes pro­found. The dif­fi­culty of jump­ing that gap keeps most of us from ever doing any­thing at all. A sim­i­lar con­cept is that the pur­suit of per­fec­tion is the bar­rier to progress in every­thing. The peo­ple who can con­sis­tently jump the gap from zero to one are the peo­ple who have the best obit­u­ar­ies. They DO things. They don’t let the idea that doing some­thing might not work out ever stop them. They DO things. You can’t wait for inspi­ra­tion, it doesn’t come nearly often enough. You have to just DO things. If you want to be a writer, you have to write. If you want to be a pro­gram­mer, you have to code. Sit­ting on zero, hop­ing for inspi­ra­tion, gets a lot of noth­ing done and leaves us exactly the same dis­tance from one that we were in the beginning.

Dis­ci­pline is the bridge between goals and accom­plish­ments. Jim Rohn

Dis­ci­pline comes before moti­va­tion, not the other way round. If you want to be good at some­thing (or per­haps your goals are less lofty and you want to just not suck), you have to have the dis­ci­pline to work on that thing, even dur­ing the times you aren’t moti­vated. You can’t let the hours escape you, wait­ing for inspi­ra­tion because it’s just not drop­ping by very often.

Dis­ci­pline helps with jump­ing the gap between one and zero as well. In fact, it’s of para­mount impor­tance there. Quit­ting some­thing is always harder than doing some­thing less. Ask a ex-smoker or a recov­er­ing alco­holic. Dis­ci­pline seems to be the most impor­tant qual­ity you can achieve. Unfor­tu­nately, in this day of con­stant divided atten­tion and the shini­est of shiny things at every turn, dis­ci­pline is the most rare qual­ity as well. Find­ing the strength of char­ac­ter to achieve dis­ci­pline makes all the dif­fer­ence in the world though.

This post, full of irony, was inspired by Ze Frank.