Thread: About Discipline

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  1. #1
    Ugly C Lover audinue's Avatar
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    Question About Discipline

    You've heard everywhere that in order to success you should discipline.

    So the question is: Could we become success without being discipline?
    Just GET it OFF out my mind!!

  2. #2
    &TH of undefined behavior Fordy's Avatar
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    Yes: you could be a defender for the English football team.

  3. #3
    Devil's Advocate SlyMaelstrom's Avatar
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    That's pretty vague...

    However, in my best effort to answer the question, I'd have to say no and if it is possible it would require a tremendous amount of luck. The need for discipline in being successful turns up in many places. One, it's required when you must study and improve aspects of your trade that you might not be fully interested in. I suppose this could be avoided if you have a profound interest in all aspects of your trade. Two, it is required when you must perform tasks for your superiors that might not be fully interested in or fully in agreement with. If you somehow become an overnight success and become your own boss in a day, I suppose this is avoidable, but very unlikely that you will get anywhere without at some point be under someone else.

    ... and then finally, even after you are a success, it demands discipline to maintain that success by developing your ideas further and working with others to achieve greater things. This is avoided if you die young, at the peek of your success, and manage to get a piece of history without really maintaining it for a long period.

    So the answer is no, unless you expect to be a child prodigy that accomplishes something tremendous at a young age and then subsequently gets hit by a bus. Then you can avoid the need for discipline...
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    l'Anziano DavidP's Avatar
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    So the answer is no, unless you expect to be a child prodigy that accomplishes something tremendous at a young age and then subsequently gets hit by a bus. Then you can avoid the need for discipline...
    Sorry. This came to mind.

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  5. #5
    (?<!re)tired Mario F.'s Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by audinue View Post
    So the question is: Could we become success without being discipline?
    Of course you can.

    It is not wise to assume too much around these things. Discipline, dedication, effort, skill, study, all are nice words. Important, even. And conducive of success. But if I'm undisciplined, will I never succeed? I think the question answers itself when put this way.

    Other factors come into play. What about dedication? What about my own genius? What about luck?

    Success certainly is dependent on these things, including discipline. But none of them single-handedly eliminates the chance for success.
    Originally Posted by brewbuck:
    Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.

  6. #6
    Registered User VirtualAce's Avatar
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    Having come from a military family I would say discipline is one of the biggest contributors to success in any field.

  7. #7
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    The next question should, of course, be: how to become disciplined? Is it possible to learn? If so, how?

    I lack a lot of discipline. I love challenging myself and if I do something challenging I can work on it for hours and hours. However, whenever it becomes easy, I get tired of it and quit. In fact, I don't think I've ever finished a pet-project that would take more than a couple of hours to code.
    It's different when I have to code something, for instance for work. For some reason, I get a lot less sick of that, because I have to...

    So, I'd like to add another bit to this discussion: how can you become disciplined? Without joining the army ;-).

  8. #8
    Master Apprentice phantomotap's Avatar
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    how can you become disciplined?
    O_o

    Hire a mistress to smack you with a cattle prod/riding crop every time you start to drift?

    I'm mostly serious. (Feel free to change the motivating factor.) Without outside influence you are likely to lack discipline in training yourself to be disciplined.

    Soma

  9. #9
    Ugly C Lover audinue's Avatar
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    EVOEx you are a lot like me...

    However, I found a nice blog about "how to become disciplined":
    Self-Discipline

    It seems contains some theory and philosophies about discipline.
    Gonna try it somewhat...
    Just GET it OFF out my mind!!

  10. #10
    (?<!re)tired Mario F.'s Avatar
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    I don't think that's an issue with discipline. It's merely a problem of motivation, or self-motivation. And it's quite common and, IMO, unalarming.

    Approaching this problem from the wrong angle will not help you solve it.
    Originally Posted by brewbuck:
    Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.

  11. #11

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    I have this problem where I am unable to discipline myself, and whenever somebody tells me to do something, whether it be a professor or boss or police officer, I get red in the face and I shout "Don't tell me what to do! Woman!"
    I'm not immature, I'm refined in the opposite direction.

  12. #12
    Registered User C_ntua's Avatar
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    You can be motivated but not disciplined though. I am mostly the opposite. There are a lot of ways I guess becoming self-disciplined and self-controlled what works for you or anybody else depends.

    As for the question, discipline is merely a factor on success. It helps it is not the only one. If all the other qualities are great, you will become successful. Self-discipline is self-control. The idea is that with self-control you can go closer to what you want to do.
    But probably any positive quality is helpful. Well, because its positive

    Success is also a very vague meaning.

  13. #13
    spurious conceit MK27's Avatar
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    Someone gave me a old surfboard late last year (I live on a beach) and I just picked up a wetsuit this morning. Having just watched this:

    Surfing: How To Stand Up (Sports & Outdoors: Surfing)

    I've now spend maybe 5 minutes jumping up from prone by the hall mirror to get into "stance". In the video he says practice for a good 15 minutes first.

    Because I'm undisciplined, I'm gonna test a hypotheses here that it doesn't matter, and head for the water! Will report back later...

    C programming resources:
    GNU C Function and Macro Index -- glibc reference manual
    The C Book -- nice online learner guide
    Current ISO draft standard
    CCAN -- new CPAN like open source library repository
    3 (different) GNU debugger tutorials: #1 -- #2 -- #3
    cpwiki -- our wiki on sourceforge

  14. #14
    spurious conceit MK27's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by MK27 View Post
    Because I'm undisciplined, I'm gonna test a hypotheses here that it doesn't matter, and head for the water! Will report back later...
    Okay, well I dunno if being more disciplined by jumping up and down on the beach first would have helped, but I will commit my statistic by admitting I did not, in fact, learn to surf in one day.

    I'll further refine that WRT the concept of "standing up", which I did plant my feet on the board a few times, but I most certainly did not stand up.

    So I did not, in that sense, achieve success, altho I have a few observations:

    1) Even extremely cheap wetsuits are plain and simple AMAZING wrt body temp in the water. Like the difference between stepping outside in freezing weather wearing nothing (wow, that is unbearably cold) and wearing a nice synthetic fiber outfit (hey, i'm happy).

    2) Surfing is a much more vigorous activity than I would have guessed via casual observation. At this point, I'd almost compare it to mountain biking WRT to the amount of energy you consume getting to the point where you get to bounce down the hill for a while. Hopefully this is reduced as you acquire some finesse.

    Quote Originally Posted by Mario F. View Post
    Eventually I suppose I could come up with known cases of success being achieved by undisciplined, lazy, dumb, lucky or undedicated people.
    Well, I did not really surf from a standing position today, so I am not one of those cases. Can I be considered successful as undisciplined later if I do it? Or will the fact that I failed on day one prove that some kind of discipline was necessary?

    Quote Originally Posted by Mario F. View Post
    For a undisciplined one: Picasso
    Okay, now I am confused because as I understand it Picasso spend much, much time drawing and painting *before* he created any art of note. Like there are no famous works created by Picasso created in his first year of painting, so in what sense is he "undisciplined"? Who on earth would bother to keep painting for years meaninglessly* without discipline?

    * by which I mean, achieving no kind of "success"
    Last edited by MK27; 06-29-2010 at 08:14 PM.
    C programming resources:
    GNU C Function and Macro Index -- glibc reference manual
    The C Book -- nice online learner guide
    Current ISO draft standard
    CCAN -- new CPAN like open source library repository
    3 (different) GNU debugger tutorials: #1 -- #2 -- #3
    cpwiki -- our wiki on sourceforge

  15. #15
    Lurking whiteflags's Avatar
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    Inspired by the discussion, I went and looked up discipline's etymology (and again to refresh my mind at the time of this writing). Essentially all it takes to be disciplined is to either take instruction from a sensei, impose a reward system to guide personal growth, or both, I guess.

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