If it is a losing bet, don't double down.

On my visit to my French cousin, we'd sneak away to walk and talk with our hearts open.  We don't see each other nearly enough, you see, and we think the other is great.  So we have to talk long and hard in the few days we get.  Anyway, I'd said something about how I give up sugar for a month a couple times a year.  "Oh," she said.  "That's so American."

She may have meant the food Puritanism, but I think she meant the larger idea of self-improvement projects.  So American, so striving, so driven, so ceaseless. I do it too.  The list is long, but just for starters I'm trying to revise my walk and the way I stand (shoulders back and down, don't crane head, pelvis tucked).  That's before I get to anything actually productive or try to help anyone else.  So believe me, I know the urge and I'm even glad for it.  Working at projects, including myself, actually does make my life better.

But here's the thing I came to last year.  I'm all for self-improvement.  But I am done with self-discipline.  Done.  As a technique, self-discipline has taken me as far as it can.  I am thirty-six, and self-discipline has been the way I drive myself for as long as I remember.  That's what people told me.  Do it harder, do it again, practice, eat less, restrain more, work at it, push harder.   And I am done with that.  The way I figure, self-discipline has taken me as far as it is going to (pretty fucking far - through lots of school and having a job and owning a house).  Anything that's left is not something that self-discipline works for.  If self-discipline worked on the remaining problems, it would have fixed them by now.

This last year has been about finding other techniques for bettering me.  I got a physical trainer.  This is ridiculous.  I've been heavily involved in sports since I was two.  If there is anything I know, it is how to condition.  But I wasn't doing it, and I was badly out of shape.  So I turned that problem over to someone else and that has been GREAT.  Outsourcing that discipline works, as my bulging triceps can attest.  My sister changes the physical system.  If the clothes aren't folded again, she figures there's a reason.  She'll provide the folding table at the right height, the sufficient hangers and the big-enough dressers until doing the laundry is smooth and easy.  I'm trying to see if bribing me works.  Are there indulgences that I'd trade for not doing something or other?  (Not much success with this one.  My wants are modest and I should just get massages if I ache.)  At any rate, I'm looking for new approaches.  I don't know which ones will work, but I am very sure that self-discipline doesn't any more.*

So, hon, if you want to change your email habits, that's cool.  I think you're perfect, but if you want to be more perfect, that's fine by me.  But I'm curious about how.  Are you going to change your email habits by, you know, trying harder and working at it and reminding yourself?  Are you going to apply self-discipline to this problem?  If self-discipline doesn't work, are you going to beat yourself up for that?  Will you tell yourself to use even more self-discipline?  Will that work?






*Also, it is worth noting that nothing I've ever been good at came about by self-discipline.  I never forced myself to do TKD.  I absolutely loved it in the years I got good.  In the end it was habit, but it wasn't a habit I fought.  The blogging wasn't effort and that blog was only good when I was full of enthusiasm.  Painting my house bright colors was compulsion and a vision for the result, but not self-discipline.