The Only Way to Get Important Things Done
The answer, surprisingly, is not that they have more will or discipline than you do. The counterintuitive secret to getting things done is to make them more automatic, so they require less energy.
It turns out we each have one reservoir of will and discipline, and it gets progressively depleted by any act of conscious self-regulation. In other words, if you spend energy trying to resist a fragrant chocolate chip cookie, you’ll have less energy left over to solve a difficult problem. Will and discipline decline inexorably as the day wears on.
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“It is a profoundly erroneous truism that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing,” the philosopher A.N. Whiteheadexplained back in 1911. “The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.”
Indeed many great performers aren’t even consciously aware that’s what they’ve done. They’ve built their rituals intuitively.
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A ritual, consciously created, is an expression of fierce intentionality. Nothing less will do, if you’re truly determined to take control of your life.
The good news is that once you’ve got a ritual in place, it truly takes on a life of its own.
