I’m going to push you into disciplined thinking. You don't need to make any decisions or take action—not yet. Let this stimulate fresh discipline in your mind. Think of it as planting seeds of disciplined thought. Nurture these thoughts, and they will blossom into disciplined decisions and actions.
Pre-planning your response to predictable events can be as simple as preparing a handful of disciplined questions to guide your thinking and inform your decisions in specific situations. Disciplined action gets easier when driven by disciplined decisions. Disciplined decisions get easier when driven by disciplined thinking. Nothing stimulates disciplined thinking better than simple questions.
Here are 21 simple questions you can ask yourself the next time you experience any of the seven predictable events I shared yesterday.
When you feel doubt:
- What future scenarios am I imagining that are feeding my doubt?
- Is my doubt fueled more by concrete evidence or personal intuition?
- Can I still take disciplined action despite my doubt?
When you face difficulty:
- Will I get more long-term value by doing this difficult thing or by avoiding it?
- Who do I know that earns excellent personal outcomes by avoiding difficulty?
- How will I feel about myself if I successfully do this difficult thing?
When you make a mistake:
- Was it a mistake of thought, decision, or action?
- How strong or weak was my discipline?
- What is the best way to recover from this mistake?
When you receive criticism:
- Is any part of this criticism true?
- If I don’t trust the source of this criticism, who do I trust to tell me the truth about whether any of it is valid?
- Will I make adjustments, disregard the criticism as irrelevant, or willingly accept the criticism and the consequences?
When you experience complexity:
- Is it as complex as it feels, or is there simplicity I can find and focus on?
- What is the next immediate step I can confidently take in a valuable direction?
- What simple, reliable disciplines will I prioritize doing well?
When you feel frustrated:
- Why does this matter to me?
- What within me is getting disrupted?
- How do I stop this feeling from pushing me into undisciplined action and instead convert it into valuable action?
When you fail:
- How strong or weak was my discipline?
- Am I proud of my effort?
- What skills might have helped me succeed?
You don’t have to wait for doubt, difficulty, mistakes, criticism, complexity, frustration, and failure to arrive before you think about how to respond. You always learn more by going through them, but you never want to go in blind, unprepared, or undisciplined.
Event + Response = Outcome. Do the work.
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