On Discipline and Success
he who looks too hard at the outside gets clumsy on the inside
This is a minimally edited excerpt from a private conversation I had with the wonderfully inquisitive @hermittoday on Twitter, on the topic of untying knots related to action and success in it.
niṣkāmakarma—discipline—sacredness—pleasure—success
Maintaining success is harder than arriving at it, because you can get there by luck and you can game your luck quite considerably, but maintaining it requires a different skillset—namely discipline and executive function.
I always liked how Alan Watts talked about discipline. He'd say discipline is the prerequisite for true enjoyment and pleasure, directly or indirectly: mastering a skill brings you joy like very few other things (direct), and while feeling jolly from a few beers takes no skill from anyone, the beer would not be able to provide that jolliness were it not for the discipline of the person(s) who crafted the beer (indirect). When you come to view discipline like this, and actually manage to get a taste of how good it genuinely does feel to submit to the rules of some practice, you can begin to practice many things for their own sake without thoughts of success or failure.
Initially when I started this account, I felt like I owe it to the English language I'm using to master the grammar and pay respect to the formalities it employs; proper sentence structure and so forth. This was a form of disciplining myself. It came to me naturally: it wasn't that I felt I need to write perfectly or otherwise my writing is bad and nobody will read it; it was rather that paying my respects to the structural boundaries of the tool I am using (language) not only develops my ability to use it well; it also enforced the sense of sacredness I associated with the practice of writing.
Indeed, I never wrote to be read by anyone; I wrote because I wanted to take notes to myself from this "wise frequency" I happened to be attuned to (or sometimes just conjured myself, it's a thin line), and Twitter provided an apt platform for hosting them easily accessible to myself and other people. But why I started this had nothing to do with what I thought I could get out of it; it was something that came naturally to me, that I kept pursuing because it's been a source of great delight to submit myself to being a kind of a medium for ideas, and honing my skill of writing to support this primary joy. The primary joy in my case here would be "the love of wisdom," much as I detest the title of "philosopher" and what it stands for: I simply, for no reason I can conceive, am naturally inclined to love wisdom; and good command of language is a primary means for serving her, and also the pertinent discipline acting as her means for granting me enjoyment.
Now, anything that is done out of a love for its own sake has a sense of sacredness, as I mentioned earlier. "Sacred" and "loved and done for its own sake" are two ways to refer to one thing. You can only attain mastery in things that you love for their own sake, because then you're naturally inclined to keep doing them when nobody's giving you anything in exchange. The conundrum that is entailed is that here you're at the mercy of fate for the things you love doing for their own sake also being in demand by other people, so that you can turn it into sustenance for your physical being (that is, if you are intending to derive your living from such a craft). And when you do this, you will have to deal with the profanization of your sacred practice, because you are risking to begin doing it for ulterior purposes (namely to please an audience on whom you depend for income). I can only postulate, but I have no doubts that with a long enough timeframe this can be pulled off without sacrificing the integrity of your craft or the taste of your audience, because your audience is formed of those who follow you for precisely who you are and how you specifically are doing it; but it requires patience and time, which one’s conventional needs might not be willing to give.
The discipline required for maintaining success is something you need to have before you get the success. But the way in which you cultivate that discipline mustn't be dependent on thoughts about what it will give you; it has to be entirely niṣkāmakarma, done without ulterior thoughts or motivations. This is easier said than done, but the secret is that, as Alan said, discipline is the prerequisite for pleasure and enjoyment. When you find a sublime fulfilment in the practice of some discipline, doing it consistently is a no-brainer because it feels great and it develops you—everything becomes easier to do when you appreciate discipline, and appreciating it in one craft makes it easier to find and practice it everywhere in the same spirit.
When you're betting for tiles in an archery contest, you shoot with skill. When you're betting for fancy belt buckles, you worry about your aim. And when you're betting for real gold, you're a nervous wreck. Your skill is the same in all three cases—but because one prize means more to you than another, you let outside considerations weigh on your mind. He who looks too hard at the outside gets clumsy on the inside.
Zhuangzi
In this manner of doing things, you really aren't that preoccupied with success or failure, because you aren't doing it with those in mind: you aren't shooting your arrow for an esteemed reward, but for the joy of archery; and thus you're likeliest to perform well, not letting outside considerations get you clumsy on the inside. So your options are either to look for activities that give you this kind of joy-for-its-own-sake, or to adjust your perception with, say, a meditative discipline, to approach everything that you do with this spirit of sacredness.
Success is only downstream of this; and the only success worth having is that which you don't really want; and you stop wanting success when you get really deep down to what the things that you actually want are (because then you figure out that you don't really want most of what you think you do want), and when simply doing things for their own sake becomes a source of deep fulfilment, in comparison to which no reward nor punishment, success nor failure will move you to one direction or other. Success comes to you when you cease to give a shit about it; and practically you cease to give a shit about it when you just lose yourself in the joyful practice of things, of cultivating skill, any skill. It could be an art, it could be the gym, martial arts, trading, writing, thinking, selling, seamanship, photography, software, gardening—any activity whatsoever, only done out of the joy of doing it. It's not the particular activity that matters, but that you are able to practice things for the joy of their own sake; because then you can extend the joy into any activity that you need to. This is really the essence of Zen practice (and discipline); in my view you can ditch all notions of stream entry or the nth jhāna stage or the Glistening Lotus Heaven of the Perfected Bodhisattvas because they will divert your attention from living gleefully in the stream that you are already a direct part of (of course unless those happen to be things or activities that you are drawn to for their own sake!).
I had forgotten most of this, and only remembered the importance of this line of thought when I started writing this response. I feel like my personal knot has had to do with forgetting the significance of discipline, and I can sense it having loosened a tiny bit by the writing of this response. I have been holding too dearly on memories and conceptual attachments, and had forgotten how the whole point of being alive is to find the bliss in discipline. When you find it, thoughts of loss or gain don't enter your mind; they are just thoughts among any others, offering nothing of substance for your practice, whichever it may be. When you go to the gym regularly in this spirit and find enjoyment in the process of lifting weights, you don't care so much about the gains you make because it makes you feel good; and when it feels good, you are inclined to do it again and again, and, lo and behold, the gains accrue from the consistency. Same goes for anything else. Someone tweeted once that Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett were/are just intelligent dudes who happened to like the process of dealing with money; thus they made fucktons of it, without it being really perceptible on the surface of either (as in Buffett driving a hail-damaged 2014 Cadillac and having maccies for breakfast every day), because they didn't do it for what it could've given them; only because that's what they happened to enjoy. And because they enjoy it, they learn the ways of dealing with it skillfully, through consistent practice and discipline (which to them is just entertainment done for its own sake). Again, this applies everywhere.
Thank you for reading.
how do we actually do this
how do i achieve this