Be Strategic With Your Hard

Be strategic with your hard.

Making smart, hard choices now likely means you’ll have an easier life later. You’ll also enjoy the journey a hell of a lot more.

Hard = high cognitive and / or emotional load. I’m not referring to physical difficulty.

For those without a high level of mental discipline, the good news is that modern science shows with practice, our bandwidth can be increased. Regardless, it’s imperative that the challenges we take on are aligned with our goals.

We only have so much mental endurance and self discipline in a given period of time. For me, the fastest way to exhaust mental energy is 1 - absorbing other people’s negativity, 2 - working on activities which don’t move the needle, and 3 - doing genuine hard yet meaningful work. I want as much of my energy to go into the third category as possible.

There’s clear evidence that while a task may be draining of our mental discipline, our brains are extremely good at using memory and pattern recognition to reduce cognitive weight over time. I’m against the use of lab animals but this neuroscience experiment illustrates what I mean.

Scientists installed a light connected to a rat’s brain which lit up each time there was activity in its prefrontal cortex. (the part of the brain used to solve problems) He was then placed into a maze with a piece of cheese at the end. The first few times the rat went through, the light stayed illuminated almost the entire time. When the experiment was repeated a number of times, the light stopped going off yet the rat still successfully reached the cheese.

The experiment showed that the task of completing the maze initially took high mental resources but became almost second nature after a few attempts to the point where there was almost no mental load placed on the brain. In our daily lives, the more we do a hard task, the easier it becomes on our cognitive load and less it drains our mental energy.

In a physical sense, running a mile is the same thing. If you’ve never run, the first day you’d probably have to walk most of it. Eventually you’d be able to jog and walk, until you’d finally be able to run the entire mile.

The actual process of going through the maze or running the mile never gets easier; it’s you that gets better. Tasks that were once deemed difficult and took a lot of mental energy become second nature. We then have the ability to add new hard tasks and problems for our brains to solve.

Repeated hard choices don’t just build skill; they build an identity. What looks disciplined to others feels normal to you. You naturally go to the gym, eat healthy and work hard to the point that you don’t feel right on days when you skip a workout or go for a random bad meal with a friend. That’s because you’ve shaped a set of habits into an identity.

And it’s our incredible ability to reshape our identity that should come across as great news.

Improving mental discipline comes from doing things of high cognitive load (expanding your capacity) and repeating those tasks until they seem like second nature. We have the ability to transform into the person we want to be at any given time simply by understanding what habits and decisions need to be made and repeated on a consistent basis until they become part of us.

A few tips:

• Do your hardest cognitive work when mental discipline is highest - usually in the morning. Discipline depletes through the day which is why you’re most likely to give in and eat that bad snack in the evening after a long (ie hard) day.

• Discipline is finite even for disciplined people. You must choose the hard things strategically to maximize the benefit for your life. I personally try to limit my really hard and challenging goals to one or maybe two at any given time, otherwise I find my mental energy really starts to become affected in a bad way and I work less effectively across the board.

• Break down your big, complicated goal into smaller steps, inject logic into the order to complete them, and start working. At the beginning you’ll be excited, then you’ll be exhausted when the novelty wears off, but keep pushing because it will get easier.

• Remember the top three reasons why your discipline gets fatigued from above? Avoid negativity and become super clear about working on tasks which get you closer to your end goal. It’s expected that you end up saying no to most tasks. You need to in order to clear up space to focus on what actually matters.

• Our lives don’t operate in silos or compartments. Increasing cognitive ability, mental endurance and ultimately becoming more skilled has an overflow effect. By working out consistently, you’ll naturally want to eat healthier which gives you better energy to put towards working and becoming more successful. The entire cycle is self-fulfilling.

Be strategic with your hard. Build an epic life.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Comment to keep the conversation going and share if you think there’s someone who will enjoy the content.