On self-discipline

This post is more than a post. I will explain in my next post. If I actually manage to break my habit of failing to write posts that I foreshadow.

I have a problem with self-discipline. People often assume, when they hear I was homeschooled through high school, that my self-discipline must be powerful; the reasoning, I suppose, is that powerful self-discipline would be required in order to do all the work one normally does in high school without the external motivators of grades and class pressure. And they’re probably right. The flaw lies in the assumption that I actually did all the work one normally does in high school. I didn’t. In fact, at the age of sixteen I essentially dropped out of school (it’s hard to tell when you’re homeschooled, but my parents and I knew) to work full-time. When I decided I was ready for college, I took a few months to brush up on those areas of study my father and I felt I was behind in (chiefly math), and then I applied.

Even before I dropped out, my education was not the arduous, time-intensive march I see most high school students conscripted into. I studied mostly what was interesting, and occasionally what was necessary. What was interesting to me ranged from botany to Greek mythology to the Lizzie Borden trial. As I pursued these and other interests, I picked up a wealth of knowledge on any number of topics most high-school students never study. The question which my parents held with anxiety as I entered college classes for the first time was, Is it enough? Are there major holes in her education, areas where she’ll be hopelessly behind her peers?

There proved to be only one, and it wasn’t an area of study so much as a mental muscle. I found that most of my classmates, unlike myself, knew how to do boring work. They could sit at a computer screen under the weight of some assignment that they weren’t interested in, and trudge through it till it was done. I could not do this; my mind rebelled. If it was mechanical, calculative work I could manage it, but to expend creative effort on a project that didn’t interest me proved impossible.

This, of course, presented a problem, as many of the paper topics and research projects assigned to me were not of my choosing and not inherently interesting to me. But I was determined to excel in college. I suppose I could have learned self-discipline, even at that age, but I didn’t want to. My mind was free and fertile, it delighted in weaving stories and unraveling riddles. Why would I subject it to drudgery? Part of my resistance was simple distaste for an unpleasant task, and part of it was fear of losing the joy of thought that had characterized my life till then.

So I found a different way of coping. Instead of forcing my mind to bend to uninteresting work, I simply forced it to figure out how the work was interesting. This proved easier than I would have thought: it turns out that nearly everything is interesting. Some exploratory thought on a paper topic would show its relation to a question I had been thinking about, and then I could address both questions in my work. Each paper I wrote, then, both pursued my already-existing interests and expanded my ideas of what was interesting. A rich, interconnected web of questions began to form in my mind. As the web grew, the connections extended farther, until in my senior year I was seeing fractals in the novels of Nabokov. Instead of subjecting my mind to tedium, I had discovered a glorious playground of ideas, and how delightfully each question speaks to another.

I have a problem with self-discipline, if self-discipline means forcing the mind, or the body, or the heart, to do something it was not meant to do. The consequences are evident in the world of physical exertion: there is a tremendous difference between athletes who train in cooperation with the body’s strengths and internal rhythms, and those who drive their bodies by brute force of will. Both are working hard, but one is building strength and increasing capability, while the other is working toward physical breakdown. I firmly believe that it is the same with any activity of the mind. Work, by all means, but work with your mind, not against it. Instead of working toward getting the project done, work toward the ignition of interest; then you will find that the project is never done, even when completed, because the questions and ideas it has raised have been woven into your mental framework.