How to learn work ethics and discipline as an adult?

Seek out a position of responsibility. Be accountable to other people. Be in a situation if you mess up, you'll get severe negative reactions from others. Nothing like an important job to straighten out our psychology and inner efficiency.

"If you can afford to mess up, you probably will" :)

My heart goes out to you. My story is similar. Everything in school came easy to me. Later in life I found myself outmatched by "lesser minds" who knew the value of consistent effort. I knew I lacked discipline, was envious of others whose parents had taught them this, but could not figure out what to do.

If and only if you are like me, the actual problem is that you have not mastered yourself. One who does not master himself is mastered by others. Mastery of oneself is the ability to make a wise decision and execute.

To get started, literally from scratch, I determined to commit to one decision professionally and another personally. Then later I would expand.

By the way, none of this involves delayed gratification. Self-mastery is immediately gratifying day by day and hour by hour as we see the small results. What people call delayed gratification I experience more as compound interest.

At work it was simple. I committed to watching closely those I admire (or envied). I studied their behavior carefully and practiced it myself. As Aristotle said, when you imitate a person's behavior, you gradually gain an internal understanding of it. Sometimes you even know why they do things better than they do, as you have come into it deliberately and with objectivity.

On the personal side I committed to pursue something fun that I enjoy - even past the easy and fun part. Deeper pleasure in something we enjoy become possible when we give up being the dilettante and seek to be the master.

Life is amazing, but anything worth doing requires sustained effort. Pick something that is worth the effort - to you - and master it.

I'm not the most qualified to answer this but...

- Reduce distractions. Pay attention to the things that break your focus and aggressively mute them.[0]

- Treat yourself like a plant, not a machine. You need the right conditions to grow. This means good sleep, good nutrition, and the right setting. This affects your focus.

- Consider that some approaches might not work for you. Not everyone learns well in a classroom. Explore other ways of achieving your goals. Alternative work arrangements could suit you better.

[0] https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/silence

You don't learn it, you practice it. Just start trying, failing, and trying again. You'll build endurance over time.

It's counter intuitive, but the mind and body get better the more you work, exhaust, and challenge them.

Good luck.

If you can't concentrate then you don't know why you are doing it. You have to write down what overall goal you want that you are very interested in then break that up into weekly research tasks where now you recognize that doing those tasks is necessary for said goal.

The only time I really used leetcode was to practice a basic linear algebra course. I had the idea to identify every non-linear problem on leetcode then see if I could use the course I was doing to practice writing linear approximations as solutions then leetcode was interesting to me otherwise yeah I can't just sit there and do it hours per day without a reason either.

Try briefly auditing some advanced open courses and see if anything there is interesting to you that now require self-directed research so you can figure out what's going on. Erik Demaine has a bunch online.

Find an open source project that is interesting and become a contributor now you have to teach yourself the codebase and whatever it is they're doing. Find a technical podcast then make a YouTube video animating in some software visuals to describe what they're talking about. Whatever you choose it should be something you really want to do everyday and then discipline isn't a problem

one thing people haven't mentioned is habits. if there's something you want to do, and it takes a lot of discipline to do, how can you adjust your life so that it takes less discipline to do it?

One way to reduce the amount of discipline you need to do a thing is to start doing it according to a rhythm that you do the thing daily/weekly/whatever, so that it becomes a habit. Initially it is hard and will require more discipline and effort but after a while it will just become the thing that you do by default, or (perhaps at times) a thing you even enjoy doing. Are there one-off changes to your environment or situation that you can make, that will make it easier for you to regularly practice the thing you want to practice?

you mentioned technical interviews. the software engineering technical interview game is a mix of skill + preparation + interview technique + sheer luck. don't neglect the latter "sheer luck" component --- a lot of the outcome will be based on which interviewer you get assigned on the day, how much sleep they got, if the role is being advertised as a formality but they've already decided to promote someone internally, etc. you overcome this luck component by applying for a large number of roles with different companies.

Maybe another thing is to lower your expectations. it isn't necessary to "work extremely hard sustained over a long period" to have a good career or good life.

Maybe yet another thing is starting to think about the longer term, and what your longer term goals mean you need to start doing in the short term. I didn't start to think about long term goals until my late 20s.

There is a lot of psychological research on this. Start with the big 5[1] and then read about conscientiousness[2]. Then realize that conscientiousness is negatively correlated with intelligence at around -0.27 and politically oriented. The last time I commented on this here at HN I went into further detail about what conscientiousness means in real life according to the research and my comment was flagged and suppressed. I guess it made people sad. So I will let you do your own reading.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientiousness

There are two things you can do to improve this:

1. Become detail oriented. Too high of conscientiousness becomes associated with obsessive personality disorders and perfectionism, but that is the direction you must pursue in order to improve in this regard.

2. Be organized and tidy. Do you find cleaning your room stressful? Get over yourself and get it done. Make it a competitive challenge in that the next time can you do it faster and better. Challenge yourself and get it done. Each you do it focus on learning so that you improve for the next attempt. Think like this for everything. Keep in mind its almost always better to be wrong and done than to have never started out of safety.

Highly conscientious people tire less when it comes to making tough decisions, which allows them to make tough decisions continuously for longer streaks of time. You can build stamina about this, but be careful. Quality of decision output degrades dramatically with fatigue. I have had to teach myself to stop programming new things when I become exhausted and when to realize my exhaust limit.

Since conscientiousness is not aligned with intelligence you don't have to be smart to be good at this. That means less smart people will surpass you in life if you aren't good at this.

Creating a task manager / TODO list made all the difference for me, for the simple fact that marking things as DONE provides a little dopamine. Over time you positively-reinforce yourself to do more things to get more magic checkboxes.

I try to keep everything in there. Of course I have my daily routine, project goals, scheduled events, people birthdays, etc.. But I also have things like vehicle maintenance, system maintenance, chores for home, and stuff like that.

There is no magic. You need to define the task and complete the task.

Larger tasks are just smaller tasks.

A six hundred page book is one hundred nights of reading six pages a night.

I have forgotten to add "Ask HN" to the title.

@dang can you please add it?

Your post resonated with me enough quite a lot. I was having the exact same thoughts at 24. College kicked my ass too except I failed out with 1 class left to go towards a CS degree from a good and well known school. I had no discipline at all. I had no work ethic. I literally did exactly what I felt like doing in the moment. I look back at myself now and realise that I was pretty much unemployable.

I knew I wouldn't make it following a traditional path so I started a business and figured out how to make money. Being broke and not having rent money kept me focused. Then I went back to being undisciplined. Girls, parties, travel, booze, food, and video games. When money ran out I became hyper focused on making money again until I could eat caviar by the spoonful. I found a profitable niche and then I didn't have to work more than 10 hours a week. I did this for about a decade until my mid-30's and I still never developed any discipline. I let the business die out of boredom; by the age of 36 I was flat broke again.

I found a co-founder and a customer who paid a big deposit upfront and we set up a new company to build the product. We hired people and I realised I had to change. I suffered for years having to wake up early enough to start work before 9. Things went okay but not great. I tried to adapt to the normal world but it was painful. I hated having to turn up everyday but I turned up anyway. I would feel guilty for turning up late. This was an unhappy period of my life.

But by the age of about 40 I finally learned how to do shit that I wasn't in the mood to do. This is a really valuable skill and what keeps me going in between periods of inspiration. I did this by learning to feel satisfaction for completing boring tasks reasonably well.

Being able to hire people to do tedius stuff for you is also helpful.

Now I'm in my mid-40's and I've found what I think is a healthy middle ground. The company is still going and it's grown to 20 people. I stopped feeling guilty about being late or about any of my other flaws. I just accept myself and do my best and that's okay for me. I feel like I'm on a good and healthy trajectory and while I'm not rich I am very happy and content. I love my life.

>I have zero discipline. How do I get more disciplined? >How do I learn to work hard, with regularity, with no immediate returns for a long period of time?

I don't think there is a silver bullet here you have to try to find what works for you. I'll list some ideas that I think helped me but keep in mind that I never solved my problems I instead found a way to work around them.

- Having a good work ethic will make you a great employee. fuck that. Instead learn to relentlessly chase your goals and to fight through periods where you have no motivation.

- Work on things that naturally motivate you and make you feel good.

- It's a lot easier to learn to work hard if the returns are in clear sight. For long term motivation it's just a matter of extending your vision further out into the future.

- Making money is addicting. Let yourself get focused on chasing your next score.

- Try to create a positive feedback loop for yourself where more effort directly translates to more money.

- Putting effort into doing something every day will lead to you getting better at that thing. Once you experience that for yourself you may find it easier to motivate yourself for long term goals.

- Stop feeling guilty. Don't get trapped in a guilt/escapism loop. Forgive yourself to break out of it.

- Fear of losing your apartment when you're two months behind on rent can be pretty powerful motivation, but it only works for a little while before you become numb to it.

- There are lots of situations where the lazy solutions are the best solutions.

- Pay people to be disciplined and work hard for you.

- Instead of adapting to your environment, learn to make your environment adapt to you.

you just have to do it.

[delayed]

You will need to build up habits, slowly. Discipline is mostly a collection of habits. Look at Atomic Habits for example. If you can't manage to read the book (or listen to it), there are some YouTube and TikTok videos about it. Or a first habit to implement could be to read the book for 10 minutes each day before going to bed (tie it to something you do every day).

Another angle might be mindfulness training (meditation). If you can become more aware "in the moment" of when you become distracted or side-tracked, then it should become easier to preempt it.

This is probably not what you’re looking for: You need to first lower your expectations. The reality is most “work” is fundamentally unchallenging, and with the exception of some smaller, early stage companies, the day-to-day will generally feel closer to high school than college in terms of complexity.

You might be expected to get something done in a week that’ll take you 2 days. As a smart person, you are probably used to procrastinating. Use that to “pace yourself” and learn to keep up appearances. And get used to BS, because you’re going to see a lot of it.

Practice meditation:

- Learn meditation

- Go to meditation retreat

- Keep practicing meditation. Use it as an exercise in focus.

- Sit and study. When you feel bored, close your eyes, take a deep breathe in and out, meditate for a bit. After a couple (or a few) minutes (maybe even get up for a stroll or a little break), then, continue work.

Re-Program your mind:

- Listen to motivational speeches & music daily on youtube and spotify

- Example Channels: Eric Thomas, David Goggins, Motiversity, Fearless Motivation.

I can tell you for one thing - avoid graduate school for now. You will find yourself becoming a 40 yo postdoc with barely a living wage.

Have you considered the military? Your background sounds a lot like mine and this was the path I ended up taking and am really happy I did. With a degree you can commission as an officer, you’ll learn a lot of discipline, time management and other really good habits.

Competitive sports are a microcosm of life.

In addition to the "just keep trying" comments, I think it's also a thing that improves with age.

When I was younger, I used to be able to work "harder" but less sustainability, like a blue star that burns bright but supernovas pretty soon. Over time, I've gotten more like a red dwarf -- better at burning low, slow, and sputtery but sustainably. 1 hour per day adds up to a lot if you do it every day! You can read a 600 page book in like two weeks at that rate (and that's how I read books). :D