After I joined the army I started hearing the word discipline a lot more often. It is such an emphasized value in this organization and even so in this country, compared to the West. People here talk about how you should be disciplined as if it is some ultimate goal that we should aim for and once we know how to tidy up the blankets, all the problems in the world get resolved. And this strange idea flourishes even out of the army. If you look at the Korean saying, ‘Those who sleep 4 hours fail and those who sleep 3 hours will succeed’, it is easy to see how being disciplined in strange ways is seen as such an important aspect. I think a proper fix to that saying would be ‘Those who sleep 4 hours bring the average life expectancy down and those who sleep 3 hours don’t, since they would die so early they become outliers from the group.’
The problem is that discipline is seen as the road to success while it is not. The logic of arguing for disciplines seems to be that if you restrain yourself from all the bad things in this world, you would naturally fill up your time with the good things and land in better places. The reality is that if you try to spend your time under a system ruled by disciplines, you would spend just about enough time to reach the threshold of the system and unconsciously spend the rest of the time on things that do not matter. And this forces people to spend an insane amount of time on things that they do not care about. Think about waiting for lunchtime. Whether it is a group of teenagers or people in their 30s, the moment it is time to leave for lunch, they would leave in an instant and would not make effort to make use of the remaining time after lunch, since these minutes feel like a compensation they get for sitting down while doing something they do not enjoy.
Discipline helps you to get to B by doing A. You can go to a good school by studying things you do not necessarily care about. Going to a good school, you can choose a major and repeat the same thing to land in a stable job this time. Ironically if you were genuinely interested in programming and coded for fun since you were a kid, you would easily land in a job as a software engineer without having to go to university. Additionally you would be coding to get paid, which is something you have already been doing out of your own interest. In the other case, once you reach a goal under the discipline system, you would feel like you need to compensate yourself diving into things you were refraining from to deal with the overwhelming amount of stress generated from spending weeks and months. And the usual way people try to relieve stress is not what they necessarily care about. I can imagine many people crushing a whole Netflix series or getting drunk after they land on a new job, but I can’t imagine the same number of people genuinely passionate about either Netflix or alcohol.
This seems to be why people talk so much about work-life balance. They try to spend as much time as they can out of work or school. These two portions of their life are seen as time they have to spend to make a living vs. time are compensated to kill the stress generated from the former. Maybe it would make more sense to think about work-life fit. If you feel fulfilled from the work you’re doing, which takes much of your conscious time, you would be less stressed. I am pretty sure Zuckerberg thought about Facebook in the beginning stage when he was setting up the site even when he was not directly working on Facebook. He was not doing it out of responsibility; rather setting up the Facebook site was something that was fun and was meaningful to him. He probably did not even think it would become something he would build the first few years of his career upon.
So what is the alternative to being disciplined and still getting somewhere? Some people might say do what you like but I believe this is misleading. What you like is not necessarily something you have potential to make a living out of it. What people like could easily be something that is easy to do and addictive. Playing online games or scrolling through instagram feed are things that could fall into this category for many people. I believe the better alternative is to be constantly curious about new things and spending your time there. This is not easy. It might require more time and effort than it seems like. For people who had not tried spending hours per week on something they are interested in, you might have to be curious for a very long time to figure out what you are curious about and the process would be frustrating. It is so easy to get fed decently entertaining content from platforms such as Youtube and Netflix and most people would find it hard trying to sit down without any distraction for even an hour and think about what they are curious about. You do not have to necessarily leave your day job to do this. I am against the idea that you have to quit your job and suddenly challenge yourself in a completely new area and write this epic of a guy who left his job at a big firm and became a Hollywood actor. Those do happen, but are not that likely neither an efficient way. Instead, try sitting down and calculate how much time you can spend on this soul-searching process per week. Even if you have quite long hours, work out regularly and have a social life, you will be surprised at how much time you have left. Most people would be surprised to see their phone report and how much screen time they have per app. When I sat down and did these calculations for the first time, the number of hours I landed on was so big that I thought I made a mistake. Only after re-doing the calculations several times was I able to realize how much time I was just letting slip. I got 25 per week. I think most people would have something that ranges from 15 to 40 per week.
If you try to chase disciplines, it is easy for you to end up working your way up to a position that seems socially acceptable rather than something you inherently enjoy. It is much easier for most people to figure out what the society they are in would deem valuable than discover what one would value himself. There is nothing wrong with this. But I really recommend everyone try getting out of this cycle. Spend a few hours each week on what you are curious about, maybe ask a friend who is working in that field, read some materials and get started studying or doing a project of some sort. You do not have to be living under disciplines to get what you are getting. Maybe something you find yourself curious about will lead you to your next job or position and you would enjoy it more.