I want to follow up on what I said about discipline in yesterday’s post. I said that discipline is “motivation without reason.” I stand by that, as far as it goes, but there’s more to discipline than that, and I want to tell the whole story.
The sense in which I am using the word discipline is the fourth definition in the O.E.D.: “A system or method for the maintenance of order; a system of rules for conduct.” Self-discipline means a way to keep yourself in order. To have discipline you need some idea of order, and some way of maintaining order.
By motivation without reason, I mean a way of compelling someone to act without appealing to their judgment or desires. “Don’t argue with me, just do as I say” is an attempt to invoke discipline. When my executive mind tries to force my sleepy body to get out of bed and go to work, it’s trying to maintain order in my life. From the point of view of my body, some outsider is telling me to wake up when waking up does not seem reasonable. Hence motivation without reason.
As I was saying yesterday, I don’t have a lot of self-discipline. In other words, I don’t go around with a strong and specific idea of what I should do at any particular time, and even when I do have a strong idea, I don’t generally force myself to do those things. What I do instead is I manage myself by a sort of “consensus” of my various parts. Sort of like a parliamentary system in my head.
If sometimes I look like I am exhibiting a lot of discipline, that’s probably not because I am controlling my wild sinning self with the iron bridle of wisdom. More likely, I’m just not experiencing any conflict about what I want to do. That’s what I meant about not needing discipline if you know what you’re doing. When all your parts are in harmony, order unfolds spontaneously and naturally. You don’t need much of a system to maintain order.
But getting to harmony can be challenging. It means, in my projects and in my life, I have to do a lot of wandering and playing and procrastinating until I decide what I really want to do.
I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that anyone else live this way– I often envy people who can point themselves in one direction with conviction– but wandering does have its advantages, especially for a tester.
There is, of course, a necessary distinction between ‘self-discipline” and “will-power’, the latter emphasizing not just doing it anyway even though you know you shouldn’t. So faileth many a diet.
[James’ Reply: Isn’t that the same thing as self-discipline? If not, please say more. In any case, “will-power” is one of those things you need only if you are at war with yourself in some way. No one talks about how it takes will-power to make yourself eat what you crave.
I don’t think I can win in a direct battle against my own biology. I experience my cravings as a sort of invulnerable, immortal elephant. I’m the elephant handler. I can’t fully control the elephant. I can nudge it, a bit; I can bark or whistle at it. If the elephant gets upset, it’s going to break things. The elephant is literally a force of nature. If it gets too hungry, it’s going to break out of its cage and go foraging. I influence the elephant through my understanding of it, not through the force of my will.
I deal with cravings by preventing them. Once I have them, it’s too late. At that point I forgive the elephant and remind myself that tomorrow is another opportunity to get back on track. I prevent cravings by eating good things (proteins, especially) before the cravings develop. Drinking water seems to help, too.
Last night I was too hungry at 11pm and the elephant was stomping moodily in the yard, so my wife made me a big bowl of steamed broccoli. (One of the advantages I have is that my wife acts as a buffer between me and the kitchen.) After the broccoli, I felt fine.]
You spoke of self–discipline as ‘motivation without reason’. Will-power on the other hand, IS an invocation of reason to do or refrain — I KNOW it’s bad for me and why — and then have to choose what to do. We use will-power to do what one should, rather than what one wants.
[James’ Reply: Okay, you’ve convinced me that “motivation without reason” does not define discipline. It’s may be an example of discipline, though. The O.E.D. defines discipline in several ways. I like their fourth entry, which talks about it as some method of maintaining order.
What I’ve been trying to explain is that we can modify a system to make it easier to control. For instance, if you know an easy way to control your weight, considerable less discipline would be required to make it work. The system I’m using now is really pretty easy.]
This is granting your definition of self-discipline. I won’t argue with it that much because the point of a lot of training is to learn to react without thinking. Agreed, most of my testing doesn’t involve situations so perilous that I need to react instantly and correctly, but that may be just me.
Another approach is to just “gut it out” and ignore the craving. Whether this succeeds or not is very personal as to approach and technique, but we allow for that individuality. I simply think it’s as valid an approach as avoidance. Whether it works for you is something else again.
Oh-oh, now we approach troubled waters. Because if we know an easy way to reduce software defects, it would require considerably less discipline on the part of developers to make it work, as opposed to things like unit-testing, and especially code reviews (a technique which we know is effective but which we usually have to constantly fight to implement and keep implemented, and chivvy the developers along with threats and punishments to maintain. Sure, they WANT to write better code, but session after session, people are “unprepared” and haven’t done the work needed. One gets SO very tired of pushing and screaming and trying to make it happen.)
Is the development of those easier ways and techniques the real immediate future of our craft? Should it be? And who’s trying to do this already? Anybody?
[James’ Reply: I heard it said once that whenever philosophy has a great success, it gets renamed as something not-philosophy, with the result that philosophy has the reputation of producing nothing useful. Political systems evolved from philosophical ideas, so did pretty much all science and mathematics. Dig beneath most of the modern world and you’ll find a philosopher.
It’s the same kind of thing with software development. Tools are created to make certain problems go away, or else become much easier to solve, but then we don’t think of those tools as doing “software engineering”. Instead, software engineering becomes whatever is left that the tools don’t solve. No matter what tools we create, software engineering seems to gets no easier, for the simple reason that we keep changing the problem. We take on ever larger tasks. Projects we do routinely today were simply impossible to do with the software technology of 1975.
Socrates once complained that the act of writing things down, which was still something of a novelty in his time, would cause one’s memory to atrophy. Of course, he was right about that: Plato wrote down Socrates opinion on this, but I forgot where!]