Speaker A
The real secret to locking in is far stranger and far more uncomfortable than anybody wants to admit. So, back in 2019, I was desperately trying to finish my third book, and the deadline was closing in and I was behind. Badly. Now,
Mark Manson reveals discipline is about removing choices, not willpower, and explains how commitment devices transform focus and productivity.
Key Takeaways
- Discipline is about eliminating options, not relying on willpower or motivation.
- Optionality addiction is a major obstacle to focus and commitment.
- Commitment devices help lock in behavior by removing distractions and choices.
- Grieving old identities and habits is a tough but necessary part of change.
- Raising your boredom tolerance is key to overcoming distractions and improving focus.
What the video covers
- Discipline is not about willpower or motivation but about removing distractions and options.
- Manson and a friend locked themselves in a cabin to force productivity by removing all other choices.
- Modern culture glorifies keeping options open, which leads to cognitive overload and lack of commitment.
- Optionality addiction causes anxiety and prevents people from fully committing to goals or identities.
- Commitment devices, like marriage or selling distractions, help remove optionality and increase discipline.
- Fear is not the biggest barrier to change; grief over losing old habits and identities is.
- True focus comes from accepting boredom and limiting choices rather than relying on productivity hacks.
- Manson emphasizes that goals are easy to set, but commitment and follow-through are the real challenges.
- Removing options frees mental energy to focus on what truly matters.
- Discipline is about giving yourself no choice, which leads to better results and personal growth.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and the Cabin Experiment
- 01:19The Myth of Discipline and Willpower
- 02:42Optionality Addiction and Modern Culture
- 04:17The Cost of Non-Commitment
- 05:36Removing Distractions and Commitment Devices
- 06:56The Impact of Marriage on Discipline
- 08:17Grief and Letting Go of Old Identities
- 09:27Overcoming Distraction and Building Focus
- 11:40Conclusion: Discipline as No Choice
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
a good friend of mine was in a similar situation with his PhD dissertation. So, we did something drastic. We rented a cabin out in the middle of the woods. There was no cell service, the internet was terrible, and the deal was simple.
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Neither of us was allowed to leave that cabin until we both wrote 100 pages.
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Now, for the next six days, we woke up, wrote all morning, ate lunch, went for a walk, wrote all afternoon, took a break, ate dinner, and then wrote late into the night. Then the next day we did it
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again, and then again, and again, and again. Now, when I tell people this story, they will often say things like, "Wow, you guys were so disciplined." To which I say, "No, you stupid [ __ ]. We were not so disciplined. If we were
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disciplined, we wouldn't have to drive three hours into the woods and rent a [ __ ] cabin to get any work done. There was nothing disciplined about this. There was no willpower, no motivation, no grit, no determination, no resolve. Yet,
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we both got the best results that we had gotten all year. And the reason was simple.
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There was nothing else to do. And this is the biggest mistake that I see people make when they want to be disciplined and make a big change in their lives.
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They think it's about willpower or grit. They think they need a new protocol or a morning routine to like put creatine in their coffee or something. [ __ ] your creatine.
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Now, these days whenever we can't focus, the first thing we all blame is our [ __ ] phone. It's the phone's fault, it's social media, it's the algorithm, whatever. It's like your phone is a slot machine that can order burrito taxis and
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stalk your ex all in one device. So, no wonder you can't pry it out of your hands every night. But here's the thing, blaming your phone for your inability to focus is like blaming your fork for making you fat. It's like blaming your
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TV for your football team losing. It's like blaming the ATM machine in Vegas when you wake up surrounded by empty tequila bottles and cheap hookers and don't have enough money to get home. The real reason you are not disciplined is
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not that you have too many distractions, it is that you have too many options and you refuse to close off any of them.
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Let's call this optionality addiction. And in my opinion, it is the defining pathology of our time. Now, modern culture has turned keeping your options open into a kind of virtue. The message that we've all absorbed from childhood is that the smart move is to always
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hedge, to diversify, to never fully commit to a single thing because, after all, what if something better comes along? And because we now live inside devices that are designed to always show us the better thing that could come
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along, it is reinforced into us to never commit, to never box ourselves in, to never, God forbid, be left behind. And this sounds like wisdom. It sounds very sophisticated, like something a very thoughtful person would say at a fancy
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dinner party or on a Twitter thread with 100,000 likes. The philosopher Kierkegaard wrote that there is a dizziness to freedom, an overwhelming disorienting anxiety that we feel when faced with infinite possibilities of our own choices. He argued that the more
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possibilities you face, the more existential dread you will experience because you're standing at the edge of an infinite number of lives that you could potentially live. And the sheer volume of possibility is absolutely overwhelming and confusing. It gives you
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vertigo. You lose track of yourself and what matters to you. And instead of dedicating your energy to the things you care about, you instead default to giving your energy to keeping as many options open as possible. And it turns
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out that while optionality sounds really good on paper, it is cognitively expensive. It is exhausting.
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Non-commitment, it turns out, is quite the commitment. It demands so much of you, and it also is in a way identity destroying. Because when you refuse to commit to anything, you never really become anyone. You remain this amorphous, shapeless blob of potential.
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And potential, as it turns out, is just a polite word for hasn't done a [ __ ] thing. Like the guy who says that he's exploring five different career paths, has three side hustles going, and is dabbling in two business ideas, and is
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thinking about going back to school. From the outside, it sounds like ambition, but it's not. That dude is terrified of his own [ __ ] shadow.
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Because if you never fully commit, then you never fully fail, and you always have an escape hatch. You can always tell yourself, "Well, I wasn't really trying. I got other opportunities waiting for me." It's like a psychological safety net that they've
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convinced themselves is a proper life strategy. Everyone these days says they have a focus problem. They don't. They have an optionality problem. And until you recognize that no productivity system, no morning routine, no app, no nothing is going to save you from
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yourself, nothing is going to happen. Because let's be honest, all of your goals and dreams are, well, it's [ __ ] easy. It's easy to have a goal. The hard part's actually committing to them and pursuing them.
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Like if you want to wake up early, there's nothing hard about waking up early. Set up 10 alarm clocks on the other side of the room. Make it feel like a [ __ ] escape room in your bedroom at 5:00 a.m. each morning. Want
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to get in shape? Go sign up for a year of personal training tomorrow, and make sure there's no refunds. If you want to stop playing so many video games, sell your [ __ ] PlayStation.
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What do you mean? What do you—what do you mean? Oh, no. Did that scare you? Sorry.
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Was that too far? Would you sell your PlayStation? I did sell my PlayStation. For like 10 years I had no PlayStation.
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[ __ ] cowards. Because fear isn't the biggest barrier you're going to face. Fear is actually the easy part. The part that's really going to [ __ ] you up is the grief. I spent most of my 20s as a
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[ __ ] boy nightclub douchebag. I went out drinking almost every night. I traveled around the world and not for like a cultural enrichment kind of way. More of like a getting drunk and passing out on beaches in Thailand kind of way. I went
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to some of the biggest parties in the world. I was often doing drugs, sleeping with random women in random places, and a lifestyle that looked from the outside like kind of this extended vacation with no return date. Then I met my wife.
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And now my wife has had a profound impact on me in a lot of ways. For one, I'm no longer a lost [ __ ] boy. But the act of marriage itself is actually what has been, I think, just
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as impactful as she has. Because the act of marriage is an act of giving yourself no choices. It's a mechanism to remove optionality from your life. And as a result, it made me a far more disciplined person without me even
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meaning to be. See, when I got engaged with her, something interesting happened. There'd been this software running in my head my whole life that I didn't realize was there. And that software was, "Where's the hot girl and is she into me?" It was
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eating up so much of my mental RAM, constantly interrupting and slowing down all the other processes, and distracting me from other things I should have been focused on. And getting engaged was like killing that software. It was
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like control-alt-delete and [ __ ] shutting it off. It freed up so much mental and emotional energy that it allowed me to focus on what I actually gave a [ __ ] about. But then there was something else that happened that was
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much weirder. And that was grief. See, when I dated my wife, I slowly lost nearly all interest in partying, most of my interest in going out, all interest in other women, it just kind of faded.
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It wasn't like a...
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up. But there was also a piece of me, a quiet, private part of me that felt something akin to a a a kind of sadness.
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And not because I wasn't single anymore, I couldn't get drunk with the boys anymore. No, it was like it was more of a quiet sadness at the loss of who I was. It wasn't grief in the sense that I
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wanted to go back to that life, or in the sense that anything bad was happening to me in my new life. It was just this silent grief in the same way you grieve an old place from your childhood that you know you'll never see
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again, or an old friend who you've lost touch with. There's like a sweetness and a sadness to it at the same time. And this is part of discipline that nobody really talks about. When you give up optionality, you will quietly grieve all
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of the other versions of yourself that you will no longer be able to become.
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Every time you choose one path, you are killing every other version of yourself that could have existed. The you that backpacks through South America for 2 years. The you that starts a company in Berlin. The you that dates that crazy
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Russian chick that can drink more vodka than you. When you really commit, those versions of your life cease to exist.
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They cease to be possibilities, and they become phantoms. So, logically, people avoid this commitment because they don't want to feel the grief. And they avoid it in all sorts of ways, not just by being a [ __ ] boy in Thailand, but in all
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sorts of more subtle ways. Like they perform commitment without actually mentally and emotionally committing.
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They do like choice theater without actually choosing. They research endlessly. They plan meticulously. They prepare obsessively. They buy all the equipment. They build all the spreadsheets. They read six more books on the topic. They tell their friends about how they're going to do this
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thing, and then they never actually do the thing. Because doing the thing requires not doing any other thing.
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Because doing the thing requires giving up the other version of yourself that could be doing the other thing. Because actually [ __ ] doing the thing means the ego dying a thousand deaths before you can be born as the person you want
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to become. All that preparation, all the performance, it gives you the feeling of the commitment without the actual cost of it. It's the illusion of forward motion. Because committing to the thing does not require doing more, it requires doing less. And in many
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ways, doing less is actually much harder than doing more. Because when you do more, you get the benefit of the performance. You get to imagine progress without actually having to make progress. You get motivated by all the cool new tactics you can implement. But
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when you do less, you get none of that. When you do less, you are inevitably with the stark reality of discipline.
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That your motivation doesn't really matter. Tactics don't really matter. None of this [ __ ] matters. You either do it or you don't. And the fact that you leave yourself any options means that you probably don't. And speaking of leaving yourself no choice,
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this video is sponsored by BetterHelp. It's one thing to set constraints for yourself, but most of us, we need help.
Speaker A
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In 1519, Hernán Cortés landed on the coast of Mexico with roughly 600 Spanish soldiers. They were there to conquer the Aztec Empire, one of the most powerful civilizations in the Western Hemisphere at the time. They were outmanned, outgunned, in hostile and unfamiliar
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territory. So, shortly after landing, Cortés did something his men thought was insane. He burned his ships. Now, this story is usually told as some motivational anecdote. Burn the boats, be bold, go all in. [ __ ] yeah. And
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that's fine. That's it. Sure. I guess if you're trying to sell Hernán Cortés t-shirts, uh that can make a lot of sense. By the way, if you want to buy a Hernán Cortés t-shirt, check out the link in the
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description below. [laughter] [gasps] Actually? No. [laughter] But I actually think there's something much more interesting happening here.
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Cortés did not motivate his men. He didn't give a rousing speech that made them want to fight harder. All he did was simply eliminate the alternatives.
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When retreat is possible, your brain spends energy calculating it, weighing it, considering it, whether you realize that or not. The calculation is running unconsciously all the time, siphoning attention and resolve like a background process eating up your RAM. So, when
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Cortés destroyed the ships, he didn't add motivation. He just removed deliberation. And you could argue those are kind of the same thing. Like, when you're motivated to do something, you feel as though there is one thing that is far more worth doing than anything
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else. Therefore, the more things you have in your life that you feel like doing, you could argue the harder it is to be motivated about any one single thing. Now, most of us sit around waiting for motivation to strike us like
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a bolt of [ __ ] lightning. Like, one day we will wake up and suddenly magically feel like cleaning the garage.
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But what if motivation was not creating the desire to do one thing more than other things? What if it was created by simply removing the ability to do anything else at all?
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It turns out that this is what behavioral science has shown for decades. Something that contradicts almost everything productivity gurus will tell you. Motivation does not precede action. Action actually precedes motivation. See, we assume the sequence goes you feel inspired, then you take
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action, then you get results. But the actual sequence goes you take action, you feel momentum, and then the motivation will follow. Cortez understood this intuitively. His men were not going to wake up one morning on the beach, look at the jungle, and feel
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motivated to overthrow the Aztecs. The feeling was never going to arrive, so he didn't wait for it. He made action the only option and let motivation catch up later. I will also let you in on a little psychological secret. Motivation,
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actual motivation, it's not really fun. You're not necessarily excited. That week in the cabin, I don't look back on that week fondly. It [ __ ] sucked.
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There were so many moments where I didn't want to write anything, yet I had no other option. Every person who's locked in and done something meaningful will probably tell you the same thing if they're being honest. They didn't feel
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like doing it most days. They weren't inspired. They weren't riding some glorious wave of passion.
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They just kept showing up. And at some point, the identity caught up to the behavior. I wake up and I write, I eat, I go to sleep, and I do it again the next day. It's just what I do. And I
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keep doing it because there's nothing else to do. There's an uncomfortable truth that I feel like nobody these days really wants to hear or accept, which is that freedom is the enemy of focus.
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We've all been sold this idea that the optimal condition for great work is total freedom. No rules, no limitations, no one telling you what to do. It's just you, the open road, and infinite possibilities. But that's not how any of
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this works. Research on creative constraints shows this over and over. Artists and problem solvers given tighter parameters consistently produce more original and better work than those given total freedom. Because when you can do anything, your brain wastes all
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of its resources on choosing what to do, not actually doing the thing. When you can only do this one thing within these specific boundaries with these specific tools, your brain stops deliberating and instead focuses on executing as well as
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possible. This is the principle behind what psychologists call a commitment device. A commitment device is any structure that you build into your life before the moment of temptation that removes the option to quit. Cortez burning the ships was a commitment
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device. My cabin in upstate New York was a commitment device. Weddings and marriage are [ __ ] commitment devices.
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But, commitment devices are not just dramatic historical gestures. They're a design principle for how you structure your life. A 10-day silent meditation retreat, no talking, no phones, no reading, no writing, no eye contact, no music, nothing. People will fly across
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the world to voluntarily imprison themselves for 10 days in conditions that under any other context you would call psychological torture. Yet, they often describe it as one of the most transformational experiences of their lives. Why? Because every possible
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escape hatch was sealed shut. There's no conversation to escape into. There's no screen to numb yourself with. There's no book to hide behind. When there is nothing to do but sit with your own mind, you finally sit with your own
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mind. The constraints didn't limit the experience, they are what made the experience possible. Across every major religious tradition, whether it's Buddhism Christianity Hinduism the most devoted practitioners do not seek more freedom. They seek more constraint.
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They take vows of poverty. They take vows of silence. They take vows of celibacy. They shave their [ __ ] heads. They wear the same robe every day. They eat the same meal every day.
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They follow the same schedule every day. From the outside, you could say this looks like oppression, but on the inside, it feels to them as liberation.
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Because every decision that's been removed is cognitive energy that gets redirected towards the thing that matters to them most. The final boss to locking in is not difficulty, it's not complexity, it's not the fear, it's not even the grief. It's the boredom. The
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beginning is always exciting. It's a new thing, it's a new energy, there's dopamine spraying in your brain like a champagne bottle after the World Series, and the occasional breakthroughs are exciting, too. You can feel the growth happening. You can feel the progress,
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the payoff. But, the vast majority of any pursuit is the space between those moments. And that space is filled with a lot of monotonous, unglamorous, deeply boring repetition. Anders Ericsson spent his entire career studying people who were at the absolute top of their
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fields. World-class musicians, chess grandmasters, Olympic athletes. And what he found is that the type of work that actually separates the great from the good is what he called deliberate practice. And the defining characteristic of deliberate practice is that it is incredibly boring by design.
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It is the same scales, the same drills, the same micro-adjustments over and over and over and over again. I remember when I was in music school, in my head, I practiced a lot. I would go to my music
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classes for 3 or 4 hours a day, go to the practice rooms, practice for a couple hours. Then, a few nights a week, I would spend a couple hours rehearsing or jamming with friends. In my head, I was playing music all the time. It was
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all I was doing. I got into the second semester and I got a new roommate. My new roommate, his name was Alexi and he was a violin prodigy from Russia. He was already first chair violin in the school
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orchestra and despite being only 17 years old, I mean this is like this is basically being the best violinist in the entire music school. And as you can imagine, he would come back from class every day and proceed to practice in our
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dorm room all [ __ ] day. Now, this was cool for like a week. I mean hearing a brilliant violinist play every day in the same room as you is kind of awesome. But by the end of a
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month, I wanted to kill this [ __ ] kid. You can only hear the same bar of Mozart played so many hundreds of times before you lose your mind. And I just wanted to like smash his violin over his
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[ __ ] head. So finally, I asked him one day. I said, "Alexi, for the love of God, can you please sign up for the practice rooms like the rest of us?" The school provided a couple dozen soundproof practice rooms in the
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basement of the school that music students could book and practice in without bothering anybody else. I used them every day. Why couldn't violin boy wonder use them? And then Alexi looked at me and he mumbled in his slight
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Russian accent, "I do book the practice rooms." It turns out the practice rooms had a 4-hour daily limit which I had never hit and that little [ __ ] was maxing it out before breakfast every day.
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So this little 17-year-old [ __ ] was doing more work before breakfast than I was in my entire day. Needless to say, there is a reason Alexi became a celebrated classical musician and I'm making YouTube videos for you lazy
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[ __ ] Your tolerance for boredom is your ceiling for mastery. That's it. That's 90% of the game. The person who can sit with monotony for longer will eventually win 99 times out of 100 because distraction isn't really about
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the thing distracting you. It's about your inability to tolerate boredom. So the more you train yourself to tolerate boredom, suddenly the availability of distraction ceases to matter. Now, the problem is that raising your boredom threshold is well, it's really boring. It means sitting
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with tedium instead of trying to escape it. It means doing the work even when it feels pointless, even when you feel invisible, when every part of you is screaming for novelty. And it means trusting that the compound returns on
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all of that boredom will eventually show up even if you can't see them yet. So, discipline, it is not a tactic, it's not a morning routine, it's not a productivity hack, it's not an app or a journal, or any [ __ ] you can do
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after watching a simple video. It's a series of simple actions that remove choice, and most people are simply unwilling to remove choice. Why? Because removing choice [ __ ] sucks. It's not fun, it's not exciting, it's not sexy.
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It generates no observable gain in the short run, and it only feels like loss emotionally. It means closing doors and grieving versions of yourself that will never exist. It means acting before you feel ready and then trusting that the
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motivation will follow. It means building structures that remove the option to quit and surrendering the very freedom you think you need to have. It means tolerating boredom at a level that most people cannot stomach. But if you can get through those feelings,
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something amazing happens. The way you see yourself shifts, and your behaviors will start to change automatically. When I was in that cabin in upstate New York, something shifted around day three or four. I stopped feeling like the guy who
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was struggling to finish a book, and I started feeling like a person who just writes every day. It was just what I did. And regardless of whether I felt locked in or not, regardless of whether I thought I was writing something good
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or not, regardless of how I felt or what I thought, I just wrote. And when every other option had been stripped away, what was left was the work and my relationship to it. That is discipline.
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Not a skill, not a tactic, not a mindset. A lack. A lack of any other option than to be who you wish to become.
Topics:disciplinecommitmentfocusproductivityoptional addictionMark Mansonmotivationwillpowerself-improvementmental energy
