BONUS EPISODE: The Real Truth About Discipline (Chapter 4 Feel-Good Productivity)
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In case you haven't heard, my brand new book, Feel Good Productivity is now out and it's actually a New York Times and also Sunday Times bestseller. So if you've ordered a copy, thank you so much. If you've read the book already, I'd love it if you could leave a review on Amazon. And if you haven't yet checked out the book, you might like to consider checking it out.

Now, when I first got started on my productivity journey, I thought that procrastination happened because of a lack of discipline or a lack of motivation. But when I started looking into the science behind procrastination, I found out that the story isn't so simple. In this bonus episode of Deep Dive, we're going to play a segment from chapter four of the audiobook to find out more. This chapter is all about how to overcome procrastination. One of the strangest videos I've ever seen is called How Bad Do You Want It? It's been viewed almost 50 million times.

The video recounts the story of a young man who goes to an unspecified guru and asks for his advice on how to become rich. The next day, they agree to meet by a beach so the guru can explain the answer. At 4 am the following morning, the man arrives at the seashore. "Walk on out in the water," the guru tells him. The young man does. "Walk a little further," says the guru. The man does. "Keep walking," the guru says. He keeps walking until his head is fully submerged.

Suddenly, the guru is there by the young man, holding his head beneath the surface. The young man struggles violently, but the old man holds him down, only releasing him when he's on the verge of drowning. As the young man gasps for air, the old man says, when you want to succeed as badly as you want to breathe, then you'll be successful.

There's a lot going on in this video. Who actually is the guru, and how precisely does one get that job title? Why is the young man so willing to walk out into the sea at said guru's request? Haven't they just met? Most peculiarly of all, why are there 20,000 comments underneath the video in which people say it has completely changed their life? These days, I find the video both surreal and somewhat depressing. But the first time I watched, I was in the throes of a bout of debilitating procrastination, and I thought it might help.

When I first launched my business while working as a junior doctor, it seemed like no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't break free from the cycle of putting things off and scrambling to catch up.

I wasn't alone. Procrastination has plagued much greater minds than mine. Take Leonardo da Vinci. One contemporary who saw him painting The Last Supper wrote how, quote, he would go for two, three, or four days without touching his brush, but spending several hours a day in front of the work, his arms folded, examining and criticizing the figures to himself. In these moments, the three energizers, play, power, and people, aren't enough.

In part one, we explored how these three forces can help us feel good in our work and life, boosting our energy and helping us do more of what matters to us. But by themselves, they're not the whole story. As my business grew, I realized that however much I integrated the energizers into my life, I could still come unstuck because of another P, procrastination. When procrastination has been a problem for me, I've often been tempted to turn to obvious hacks, just like the one in that weird video.

If you're procrastinating, the video says, it's because you're not motivated enough. And if you just had enough motivation, if only you wanted to succeed as badly as you wanted to breathe, it would happen. I call this solution to procrastination the motivation method. It's very common, and it's total nonsense.

The trouble with the motivation method is very simple. There are plenty of us who genuinely do want to do the things we struggle with. We feel like we've got enough motivation, but there are barriers that get in our way. Time and financial constraints, family responsibilities, physical and mental health issues, among countless other things. Motivation clearly isn't enough. And telling people to simply feel more motivated isn't just unhelpful, it's potentially harmful, contributing to the sense of paralysis that caused procrastination in the first place.

So when motivation fails, where do we turn? When not obsessing over whether you truly are motivated, much advice turns to another principle, discipline. Put simply, discipline is when we do stuff that we don't feel like doing. It's the opposite of motivation. It's taking action despite how unmotivated you are. If you're trying to go for a jog, a motivated response would be, I feel like going for a run because I want to win the marathon more than I want to rest today.

A disciplined response would be, I'm going for a run regardless of how I feel about it. This is the Nike school of getting things done. Just do it. I'm a little more sympathetic to the discipline method than the motivation method. Discipline can be useful. Sometimes I don't feel like going to work in the morning, but I do it anyway. Maybe that's discipline. But this narrative is incomplete. If you're procrastinating from writing that speech you've got coming up, it might not necessarily be that you just aren't disciplined enough to prepare for it.

there might be something else going on under the surface that's holding you back. And the discipline narrative doesn't care about what it is. It just makes you feel bad about yourself. In the words of psychology professor Joseph Ferrari, quote, to tell the chronic procrastinator to just do it would be like saying to a clinically depressed person, cheer up. Motivation and discipline are useful strategies, but they're band-aids covering up deeper wounds. They might sometimes work to treat the symptoms, but they don't change the underlying condition.

So what does work in the age-old fight against procrastination? That's where our third approach comes in. I call it the unblock method. While the motivation method advised us to make ourselves feel like doing the thing, and the discipline method advised us to ignore how we feel and do it anyway, the unblock method encourages us to understand why we're feeling bad about work in the first place and tackle the issue head on.

Imagine you've got a pebble in your shoe that makes running particularly painful, but you have to run over to your friend's house in time for dinner. You're torn. You want to arrive on time, but you know that embarking on the journey is going to hurt. What do you do? The first solution is the easiest. Do nothing. Procrastinate until the evening has been wasted. Miss your dinner and don't get invited next time. The next solution draws upon the motivation method.

That would involve convincing yourself that the dinner is going to be exciting and worth the pain of running. You ignore the pain as you race towards your destination, only to collapse on the side of the road halfway there. But you're not worried as you look down at your quickly swelling foot. When you're sufficiently motivated, you'll be able to overcome any obstacle after all. The third solution is the discipline method. You've committed to the dinner and you're the sort of person who keeps their word. So you run to your friend's house, the pebble breaking the delicate skin of your soul, and lo and behold, you make it.

Unfortunately, the dinner can't go ahead because your friend has to drive you and your bloody stump to the hospital. Discipline is freedom, you recite to yourself as you await medical attention. I would tentatively suggest that all three solutions are off the mark. The fourth and best solution involves a little more critical thinking. What if you took a minute to think, why does getting to my friend's house seem so hard? You would take your shoe off, find the pebble and remove it, and then off you'd run.

This is the unblock method, and it's the focus of the next three chapters. We'll learn that usually procrastination is caused by negative feelings, the inverse of the feel-good energizers we encountered in part one. When negative feelings like confusion, fear, and inertia stand in our way, we put things off. This leads to even more bad feelings, and in turn, even more procrastination. It's a negative loop of low mood and stagnation.

And here in the supplementary PDF, you will find a lovely little diagram where essentially it describes the motivation method, which is the question of how do I make myself want it? That goes into the discipline method, which is how do I push through it? And ultimately, we land on the unblock method, which is where we ask the question, what's blocking me from doing it? Fortunately, the power of all three emotional blockers can be reduced.

In the chapters that follow, we'll explore how precisely these negative feelings affect us and sap our energy, and we'll use the science of feel-good productivity to strategically overcome each of them. I hope you enjoyed that little snippet of my brand new book, Feel Good Productivity. I had so much fun recording the audiobook in a studio in London. It was a lot of hard work, but quite a lot of fun. And so if you fancy listening to the entire book, it is available to purchase wherever audiobooks are sold. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode of Deep Dive.