Chase Hughes: “I define discipline as your ability to prioritize the needs of your future self ahead of your present self”
“How can I change my discipline?” is one of the most common questions the behavior expert gets asked. Become a butler for the future you he says.
The world around us can be chaotic so we often try to seek order in our own lives to weather the storm. Thus, it should come as little surprise that the number one question behavior expert retired U.S. Navy chief Chase Hughes gets is, “how can I change my discipline?”
“Discipline is the gateway drug to everything else in authority and it’s the gateway to composure,” he told Steven Bartlett, host of The Diary Of A CEO podcast. Hughes defines discipline “as your ability to prioritize the needs of your future self ahead of your present self.”
Hughes explains that by putting long-term goals above short-term desires you can turn that into a generator of dopamine, the “feel good” hormone the body produces. “I want past-tense me to be a source of dopamine for present-tense me,” he says. “If I can start looking backwards with gratitude, that’s the fastest way to make discipline dopamine-generating.”
How to get a dopamine kick through discipline: Become your own butler
“The tricks are to start small,” Hughes highlighted before sharing with Bartlett how his past-tense self is a source of dopamine for his present-tense self. “So like when I go to bed at night, I will pop out the little Keurig coffee thing and stick the thing in there, put a cup under there. Everything’s like ready to go so when I wake up in the morning, I just go bam! And everything’s ready.”
He explains that he also lays out the clothes he’s going to wear as well as preparing a checklist of what he needs to do the next day so that he is “lowering the threshold of how much attention I’m spending” once he wakes up.
“So, I’m gonna set my life up in every single way that I think I possibly can as if I were a butler for future me,” he added. “Everything that I could possibly do to make my future self go, ‘oh man that’s awesome!’”
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