I talk all the damn time about focusing on building discipline rather than relying on motivation. Being able to consistently focus on your studying is far better than relying on music or YouTube videos.

Study after study has shown us this.

But it’s easy enough to say be more disciplined how do you actually do it?

Well first up, the totally shameless plug. If you want to be more disciplined you have to start by being more organized. You can grab a (totally free) download of the Ultimate Student Organizer here. It’s got everything you need from an overall look at your course load to planning out individual study sessions.

The generic advice you get everywhere is going to be making a vision board or think of where you want to be in 5 years.

When you’re facing down the barrel of a 6-hour study session — 5 years away might as well be a lifetime. We understand the logic that studying now will help us later but not in a way that’s actually helpful.

So a couple of things which can actually help:

Develop your study awareness. Test what works in your studying and don’t just accept what you’ve been doing so far. Start easy. One of the reasons I love the Pomodoro technique is you don’t need to convince yourself to study for hours on end. It’s a lot easier to get yourself to focus on something for 15 minutes and the more you do it — the easier you’ll find it to do more and more of these each day. Reward yourself. Seems pretty common sense (I know) but sometimes our self-discipline crumbles when we don’t see immediate results from our effort. Planning an essay that’s due next week doesn’t produce instant results. Starting your revision for an exam that’s still weeks away won’t provide immediate gratification. Setting yourself a short term reward can be a bit of a crutch — but it’s an effective one. The Ultimate Student Organizer obviously. Removing temptations. Probably the easiest way to improve your discipline is not to test it. Turn off the phone. Not just flipped over — I mean away out of sight. The act of having to power it on and wait for it to load is a barrier to checking it.

I’ve mentioned Simon Sinek before. He gave a TED talk (and wrote an entire book) on Start With Why. Notice how I didn’t like the video here? Because you don’t really need to spend an hour right now reading the video — but the gist is basically knowing why you’re studying is going to make improving your discipline a whole lot easier.

I wanted to share this advice from Rhett Reisman:

Even the things you like the most will get boring or difficult

To be disciplined about anything in the long term you need a why

The strength of your why will determine how disciplined you can become

Example: If Lebron’s why was: win an NBA championship he wouldn’t have had anything to play for after his first championship

If his why was: win a championship with Cleveland, he might have retired after winning in 2016

Clearly, those things are not (or at least are not anymore) his why.

His why seems to be: prove that you are definitively the greatest basketball player of all time

That’s a really f***ing strong why

Why do I need to go to the gym today even though it’s the offseason?

Because Michael Jordan would have and all the current hungriest guys in the NBA who want to prove they are better than you are doing two days.

Studying is the same way

Why are you studying?

Maybe so you can make your parents happy (maybe the weakest why)

Maybe so you can get into college (also a weak why but slightly better)

Maybe so you can be smart (better but not specific enough)

Maybe so you can become smart enough that you’ll be able to hold an intelligent conversation with a leader in a field that you are interested in (great why — it is specific and very achievable)

You might say “But Rhett I’m interested in electrical engineering why do I need to learn about grammar and writing.”

You probably don’t. Plenty of electrical engineers are clueless about grammar and writing.

BUT if you become great at writing or at least more competent than the average electrical engineer you be able to set yourself apart by more effectively communicating your ideas.

If you can more effectively communicate your ideas, you can use that skill to make yourself useful to a more senior electrical engineer (this could be another student in a leadership position or a professor or a boss, etc…).

Providing value to that senior person will open up access to an array of opportunities that otherwise would have been unavailable to you.

That’s one example, but it’s easy to do this thought experiment with variables if you are creative enough (doesn’t have to be electrical engineering and writing)

TLDR; pick a good why and go back to that when you start to question why you’re doing the really boring thing that you’re doing.

Ask Yourself “If I Had to, Could I?”

Imagine that you are sitting at your desk. Behind you is an intruder with a weapon pointed at your head. If the only thing between life and saying goodbye to the world as you know it was studying for the next several hours (with scheduled breaks), could you do it? Of course, you could! Nothing in the world would mean more than your life at that moment. So, if you could do it then — drop everything and give studying everything you have in you — then you can do it in the safety of your own bedroom or library when the stakes aren’t quite that high. It’s all about mental strength. Give yourself a pep-talk. Tell yourself, “I have to do this. Everything depends on it.” Sometimes, imagining a real life-death scenario works when you’re staring at 37 pages of differential equations.