In this article, I am going to tell about the main differences between motivation and discipline and explain the importance of each. As an example, I will take programmer work, but it is valid for other works.
Motivation
Motivation gives more reason to work harder and complete tasks as perfectly as possible. Question is - how to get motivation? The answer is - reward. In most cases, people do not work for nothing. The person working in the company always expects to have a salary. Salary is one of the best resources of motivation. Most of us want to buy something, a dream car, a house, etc. Also, after gaining more skills You become more valuable, which means if the employer values Your hard work, he will raise Your salary according to Your value. In this case, You will have more motivation and confidence. This is way better than hearing from someone - nice work.
Other resources of motivation
Having a good salary is a nice thing, but what about other resources. Not every work can be done remotely. For this reason, it is important to have a comfortable working place. Starting Your working day in a clean and enjoyable environment gives You more positive emotions and wish to work. For those who are working in teams. it is important to have a friendly, or neutral company culture. In most cases, at work, we spend 8 h per day, or even more. Working in a company with negative culture can negatively affect health. In this case, I would recommend changing the company, which has an awful culture.
It will have a lot of advantages: better health, there will be more people who wish to share knowledge and better working experience.
How to be motivated and why this is important?
At the start of learning something new, it is easy to stay motivated. It gives the excitement of something new, which can boost productivity.
To stay motivated add goals. At the start do not add something insane like making Your own Facebook in one month. Start from something small like choosing and finishing a video tutorial from YouTube. It will give the pleasure of completing a goal. Also, staying motivated is making Your mental health better.
Discipline
Discipline compared to motivation is consistent. In a long term, disciplined people can get up in the morning easier than motivated. Today You are motivated, tomorrow not. This is why for me discipline is more important than motivation. To reach success in life I would recommend learning self-discipline as soon as possible. Think about Your: habits, health, strengths, weaknesses, temptations, and goals, and plan how to reach them.
Conclusion
Discipline and motivation are both important for our career and health. Motivation compared to discipline is not consistent. For this reason, I would recommend thinking about self-discipline.
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Top comments (4)
Thank you for this article.
Sometimes I have lot of motivation but without discipline it's so easy to slip and go down the rabbit hole of backlog.
Many a times in my career, I have played the catch-up game of previous task not complete, and picking up a new task and then things getting piled on.
So, I had the fundamental question around planning. Do we account for team members state of mind and habits into it? or We stick to estimates and time logs..
Regarding planning, in my opinion would be better to have a set of rules, that apply to everyone.
In my case, I may say that discipline leads to skills, skills to creativity... and then creativity to motivation.
Everyone has their own way to stay motivated and to apply discipline.