- Angela, I just need to get disciplined around my food now.
- Really?
Do you feel like you need a lot of discipline to eat eggs for breakfast?Or to go to the gym these days?
Or to choose fish and veggies at business dinners?
He paused.
- No, not really. It’s just what I do now. Eggs are easy to grab. They’re right there. I have workouts and personal training scheduled.
Actually, this week we cooked a whole butternut, and I ended up having it for dinner instead of rice because it was there. Not really thinking much about it.
And I didn’t have broccoli because, well, we didn’t cook any.
That’s the point.
What looks like discipline is often just good design.
We don’t do what’s “right.”
We do what’s available, easy, and obvious.
Why do Navy SEALs do that hard stuff? If you were surrounded by the context they are in - you'd do it too. There's a hero inside each human, silently waiting to be activated by the right context.
For most things in life, especially habits, the thing we end up doing isn’t the thing we’re disciplined about.
It’s the thing that’s most convenient.
And once that convenience becomes a habit, we call it discipline, and we do it even when it's hard.
On a recent Change Wired podcast with Matt Wallaert, we talked about this same illusion inside organizations.
Leaders often invent complex theories about why people won’t change, learn, or grow.
But the real question isn’t, “How do we motivate people to change?”
It’s, “How do we design the environment so that the right behavior becomes the easiest behavior?”
The best change doesn’t come from willpower, it comes from architecture.
We don’t need more self-discipline; we need better design.
Smarter systems.
Environments that make the right thing the "natural" thing. Humans are, after all, perfect adaptation machines.
I’m more and more convinced that the greatest lever for transformation - personal, organizational, or societal - isn’t in changing people.
It’s in becoming better architects of our habitats.
Being intentional about where and how people act, not just what we want them to do.
So, over to you dear reader,
Where in your life are you still relying on discipline, when you could redesign your environment to make the desired action the only obvious choice?
PS A big part of your environment that drives many of your choices is your reference group - people who you "refer to" for standards and models of mindsets and behavior. Be careful who you make your heroes - they will end up making you.
