(10-12-2011 05:21 AM)crazyhorse Wrote:  Hey Man

I just saw your reply. Basically it's pretty easy: I used progressive conditioning. And I'm talking about work ethics now.

1) you need to know how much you can do today. So let's say your goal is to work for eight hours straight. You succeed one day and the next day you fail utterly and you can only perform 2 hours. That means that 2 hours is your baseline.

go to step 2

2) establish a solid baseline. Perform that activity for one week straight.

3) establish an improvement routine. Mine was every 3 days I up the ammount of work by 30 minutes. This means that my work time increased with 6-7 hours per week. That's quite a lot. After a while I went to increasing the ammount of time every 2 days.

4) This habbit is small but very effective. Whenever you feel like taking a break always push a little bit further f.e. you start to feel tired push yourself to do 5 minutes extra or to finish the page you're just at.

To give you an idea what I achieved with this. Normally I was the guy who worked one hour and took a brake for 15 minutes (if not longer). Now I can work 6-7 hours with 2-3 minute breaks in between. So while before I would have worked 10 hours and only performed 6 hours or so. I now perform the same ammount of work in 6 hours and 15-20 minutes maximum.

Thanks for your reply, this was what I expected to hear. It's always useful to draw on others experiences.

I've been reading about motivation and self discipline on my own and I'm reaching similar conclusions to both Pavlina's post and Philip's comment. Willpower/self-control is a muscle, that can be trained to grow; on the other hand it is all about working smarter not harder, like in Pavlina's example, using willpower to sail through the ocean, instead of paddling across the waves.

I am, in fact, pretty well disciplined in some areas (no Tv, exercise every morning, health habits) and a dismay failure in some other areas - like studying, despite having good grades. Self discipline never helped me there and it probably won't until I get over my fear of success. In fact, I had an aha moment last week when I realise that I was pretty good at the above tasks but hide the fact from myself.