Toggle Pleasure and Pain: Discipline thrives when the pain of not achieving your goals outweighs the pleasure of distractions.
Use this principle to your advantage:
Increase pleasure: Reward yourself after hitting milestones. For example, enjoy a favorite treat after completing 500 words or a SaaS project milestone. Increase pain: Set penalties for missed goals. If you don’t wake up on time, pay a friend $20. If you skip a creative session, automate an embarrassing tweet. These small shifts rewire your brain to associate positive emotions with discipline and negative emotions with procrastination.
Bonus: Stick with It Consistency builds trust, speeds up your process, and makes creativity second nature.
Think of an untidy room: cleaning after one day is easy, but waiting weeks or months makes it exponentially harder. The same applies to creativity—more entropy equals more effort to create order.
By showing up consistently, you eliminate chaos and build momentum. With practice, creativity becomes a natural, enjoyable habit.
