How to balance Discipline & Playfulness

It’s the 26th of December 2023 and I’m walking out of a hostel in Tenerife whilst rubbing my eyes and yawning.

It’s around 9 in the morning and the Spanish sun is warming my skin as I walk down the street to an outdoor gym to do a morning workout.

But I’m doing this walk alone for the first time since I’ve been on this trip, which is weird because everyday since we got here, me and my friend Joe have been working out together each morning.

Before I left the hostel this morning, I had a quick conversation with Joe after not seeing him all night, because a few days ago he met a girl in the hostel who he likes and for the past 2 days they’ve been spending time together.

He’d slept in her bed the previous night, whereas usually we’d wake up in the same room, have a drink and head straight to the outdoor gym to do a morning workout together.

But this morning Joe wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Until I was just about to leave I saw him, asked if he was going to join me for the workout to which he replied “naa, not today mate.” So I laughed and walked out of the hostel.

So as I’m walking to the outdoor gym I feel a mixture of disappointment but also confusion. “Should I have held Joe accountable?” I think. “Should I have stood there and demand he come with me or he’s a coward?”

I get to the pull up bars, put my stuff down, do a quick warm up and get into the session.

But whilst I’m working out I can’t help but think one thing: “who’s in a better position right now? Me doing my workout alone or Joe snuggled up next to a girl he likes?”

So I push through the workout, get it done, pick up my things and head back to the hostel.

As soon as I see Joe when I get back he says “I’m just gonna have a beach day with the mami today. You cool to do your own thing?”

“Yeah, no worries.” I reply.

(Mami = code word for woman).

So I spend the rest of the day alone on the beach, not too surprised with Joe’s choice of how he wants to spend his day.

The following day, I wake up at the same time, get my stuff and head downstairs in the hostel to have a drink before heading to the pull up bars as usual. But this time, as I’m about to leave, Joe, is already stood there, ready in his workout gear and he says he’s coming with me. “You sure?” I say. “Yes.” He replies. “I need it.”

So we head to the pull up bars together and do one of the hardest and most testosterone pumped workouts I’ve ever done in my life, all serenaded by Eminem and old school hip hop.

I’ve never seen Joe workout like this. He’s like an unchained lion who hasn’t eaten for days but has finally hunted down a gazelle.

Joe looks accomplished as we finish the workout, as if he’s shedded his old skin and been reborn anew.

“Good?” I ask as we head back to the hostel.

“That was life changing.” He tells me.

And it’s at that moment I realise, you have to earn your playfulness.

If you’re on self-improvement then the biggest obstacle you’ll face is balancing discipline and playfulness.

Because too much discipline will turn you into a miserable workaholic, shunning social invitations and opportunities for happiness in pursuit of doing your breath work.

But too much playfulness will turn you into frolicking hippy content with sleeping with anything that breathes and never feeling the joys of progress towards excellence in your life.

What you’re after is a harmonious balance between the two so you can enjoy the rush of progression and focus discipline offers whilst being able to adventurously explore life without wanting to always strive for an outcome.

This is a problem I have struggled with in the past, so I’ve thought deeply about how to balance the two. Rest assured I’ve found some satisfying solutions.

First of all, let’s outline what we actually mean by discipline and playfulness.

Discipline:

Discipline is a love affair with progress. It’s staying resolute and consistent with your actions in pursuit of a larger goal.

Discipline could be choosing to work less today so you have enough energy to work tomorrow, choosing to get off your phone at 9pm and instead go to bed, or, simply, discipline could involve you being sexually disciplined, studying for 1 hour everyday or working out despite not feeling motivated.

Without discipline, you aren’t free. It’s only the undisciplined who are subject to their moods, desires and fleeting sparks of motivation.

To cite the mantra of discipline; hard choices, easy life, easy choices, hard life.

But taken too far, discipline will start to have diminishing returns on your life satisfaction.

Why?

Because the act of discipline involves getting your head down, putting your nose to the grindstone and going all in in pursuit of progress. Discipline sometimes requires the forgoing of emotions in order to adopt a serious approach to the task at hand.

I’ve termed the diminishing effect of discipline ‘trench fever’.

To elaborate, five months ago I realised there was one common theme amongst myself and all my masculine friends when we’d press the discipline button too hard. Although we’d be experiencing riveting progress through our discipline, we realised discipline has diminishing returns which, when taken too far, will make you a pain to socialise with and can actually cause you to self-sabotage.

Trench fever occurs when you begin to develop a negative relationship with yourself through too much discipline. Instead of being your own best friend, you become your own drill sergeant. Thus the voice in your head which is responsible for much of your progress in life, adopts the rhetoric of a tyrant with you as the slave.

Because there’s always more you can do, achieve and strive for. So you need to have a system in place which counterbalances your discipline.

And that counterbalancing force to discipline is playfulness.

But what is playfulness?

Playfulness:

Playfulness is any activity performed in a state of rapture without any thought of reward. Playfulness involves a light approach to life which slices through the tension discipline can oftentimes create.

Being playful could be you doing something creative, dancing with a girl, dancing by yourself, skipping through the woods, laughing in conversation or simply living life with a slight grin on your face because you’ve spiritually realised the silliness of it all.

The revitalising power of playfulness comes from non-grasping.

To elaborate, usually when we act with discipline it’s because we are striving for an outcome; a better life, better physique, more financial independence, more knowledge. But when we act with playfulness we operate from a place of abundance in which nothing feels lacking. We don’t hanker for the present moment to be different than what it is thus our expectations dissolve along with our tension.

For example, approaching a girl because you have an ulterior motive of sleeping with her of making her your wife is tension. Playfulness is approaching a girl just to tell her you think she’s beautiful. Being invited to dance by a girl but being nervous because you can’t dance salsa and don’t want to make a fool of yourself is tension. Playfulness is accepting the dance with a smile on your face and an acceptance you aren’t the best dancer in the world, but you’d rather be dancing and making a fool of yourself than sitting on a bench alone.

But, gone too far, playfulness can litter your life with unstructured chaos, bad habits and excessive hedonic indulgence. Without the counter-balance of discipline, the merely playful may come across as childish, immature and directionless in life.

The man-child intent on spending all his waking hours playing video games is an embodiment of the just playful. Although within his rapture he may feel the bliss of freedom from the cruel cold world, without discipline allowing him to earn his playfulness, he will soon find himself a victim of his own lack of self-discipline when life finally decides to test him.

Hence it is crucial discipline and playfulness are balanced.

So now let’s cover the practical steps to achieve this harmony.

Routine:

“Routine, done for long enough and done sincerely enough, becomes more than routine. It becomes ritual - it becomes sanctified and holy.” - Ryan Holiday

Without some form of routine, progress will elude you.

Some might scoff at the thought of routine and pass it off as being unnecessary, rigid, demanding and monotonous. Doing the same thing everyday? Who would want to do that?

But such comments are only made by people who have never felt the riveting stillness and growth a solid routine provides. Hence, in our first step towards balancing discipline and playfulness, you must build a routine which, with time, morphs into a sanctified ritualistic process which you honour each day. So you can do the work and the work can work upon you.

The Japanese writer Huraki Murakami speaks about why he follows the same routine everyday, “the repetition itself becomes the most important thing. It’s a form of mesmerism. Each day I mesmerise myself into a deeper state of mind.”

It’s through routine that our bodies can tune in and our thoughts are free.

The perfect analogy to capture the importance of routine is Japanese flower arrangers. You won’t catch them frantically rushing to do their work at 3am because they’ve left everything to the last minute. Nor will you see them idly speaking to a friend on the phone whilst doing their work. You’ll see them at the same time each day, serene, still and focused. Relying upon their routine for the certainty it provides in an uncertain world.

However, taking this to its extreme you might convince yourself every second of everyday needs to be structured, and this is where the line between discipline and playfulness begins to get blurred.

If there’s one tip I’d want you to take from this whole article it would be: schedule time for discipline but flexibly (or not at all) schedule time for playfulness.

First take the habits and processes in your life you’ve deemed as requiring discipline. Then figure out your daily minimum for each task.

For example, after experimenting with numerous routines and daily structures, I’ve settled for my daily discipline schedule to involve the non-negotiables of:

• 60 minutes of writing
• 30 minutes of reading
• 1 Workout + solid nutritional eating throughout the day
• 30 minutes of Spanish practice

I have a set time I do each of these things and I try my best not to deviate. If I am not regularly doing these things, I don’t feel a sense of mission and progress in my life which starts to take an effect on my mental health. My routine is ritual for me, and without it, I would be wandering around, picking my nose, wondering what to do with my time.

Perhaps after this there’s one question on your mind, “how do I know how long I should spend on each activity?”

I’m glad you asked.

So before we cover where playfulness fits into this idea of routine, let’s take a closer look at how you can decide how long you should spend on your daily non-negotiables of excellence.

Push the boat out and then come back:

A brilliant piece of wisdom I got from Jordan Peterson when I was 18 years old was; see how hard you can work, push yourself to your limits, then come back.

What this means is twofold. First, in order to create your routine of excellence, you first need to push the limits of your discipline to see how much you can handle.

For instance, let’s say you’ve formed the habits of working on your side hustle, working out and reading each day. Take all of those habits and see how much time spent on each endeavour you can handle.

Perhaps so far you’ve been working our for 30 minutes each day, spending 1 hour working on your side hustle and 20 minutes reading in the evening.

Test yourself.

Can you workout for 2 hours a day? Could you read for 1.5 hours? Could you work on your side hustle for 3 hours each morning as well as managing your other life commitments?

The key is to shock yourself by pushing past your limits. Then when you reach your limit come back to a manageable amount of that habit (measured in time) you can sustainably do each day and use this to craft your routine of excellence.

For example, perhaps you realise 1 hour of reading, a 45 minute workout and 2 hours of deep work are your limits each day and any effort extended beyond those times will have diminishing returns on your mental health and progress.

So now we’ve covered how to test your discipline to craft your routine of excellence, lets now cover how we instil the necessary balance to your discipline; playfulness.

The Churchill principle:

“The key to a happy marriage is to not see each other until noon.”

• Winston Churchill

That quote is what I call the Churchill principle. And it’s been invaluable on my journey of balancing discipline and playfulness.

I am not married. Nor do I have a girlfriend. So I don’t interpret this quote merely from a romantic relationship lens, instead I interpret it from the lens of all social relationships and events.

In keeping with what we discussed about routine, to balance discipline and playfulness, you must first prioritise your disciplined pursuits in the morning before you dial down the discipline button and turn up the playfulness dial.

Because in my experience, I am not at my best socially when I am interacting with people after not having done my disciplined tasks. In this case, my mind is overrun with the open loops of uncompleted tasks and lack of progress, so I struggle to be present in conversation with others as I’m thinking about all the other things I could be doing.  

So in my experience, discipline comes before playfulness.

You have to earn the right to be playful and playfulness occupies your unstructured time outside of your daily non-negotiables.

Remember, playfulness involves any activity which you do for the sake of the activity and not in hope of a future reward. So it could be relaxation after your disciplined pursuits or organising a date in the evening or a meet up with your close friends.

Also in my experience I’ve noticed it’s easy to shun social invitations in pursuit of turning up the discipline dial. But upon reflection I’ve realised this is precisely what causes an imbalance to my discipline and playfulness.

So this is the last thing we’re going to cover.

Socialising:

“Your goal is not to find love, but to remove all barriers which are preventing you from receiving it.”

• Rumi

There’s a term which might come to mind when you hear the word discipline. A modern term coined to comfort all the lone wolfs out there…

Monk mode.

Monk mode is a trend in which people retreat from their previous social commitments and bad habits in order to work on themselves.

For the last 5 months, I was in monk mode. And not everything is as pretty as it seems.

So here’s my testimony…

Six months ago I was living in a lovely apartment with my cousin in Bristol. I had a good paying job and brilliant social life. Life was good.

But then I started to make quick progress on my YouTube channel and I realised I want to make content for the rest of my life. I’d finally found my purpose in life.

So I quit my job, left my flat and temporarily moved in with my mum, three hours away from Bristol in Kent, to go all in on my purpose. I only called my friends a few times a week, I hardly met anyone face to face and I was working around 10 hours a day whilst working out, eating well and planning my future.

Overall, monk mode brought me the most progress I’ve ever seen in my life (from the standpoint of YouTube and fitness) but to say there were some lonely nights and moments of despair would be an understatement.

Around 5 months in to monk mode I noticed a sign. I was walking around my estate on my routine afternoon walk and a stranger was walking towards me. The custom in the UK is to say hello to people you don’t even know, but I was walking on a long path, so we were both awkwardly getting ready to say hello to each other. Occupying myself by pretending to look around at the trees whilst walking towards this stranger, the time came to say a brief hello and continue walking. But I’ve never struggled so much to say a simple hello to someone not to mention the experience was incredibly nerve racking. I hadn’t felt that socially anxious since I was 17 years old.

So when you’re struggling to socialise and begin to feel awkward in causal conversation, that’s when monk mode needs to end. Because isolation is perilous for your social skills.

And it just so happens the best way to instil playfulness in your life is through social connection.

Unless you’re a psychopath, most of your social interactions involve being in the moment and treating people as an ends within themselves, not a means to an ends.

Hence socialising involves a non-grasping. Because if you’re grasping to achieve an ulterior outcome when socialising with people, you’ll exude this intention in your actions and the interaction will boil into clunky awkwardness.

However, being with others in a state of playfulness and non-grasping allows us to flirt, tease, laugh, smile, cry and dance. Additionally, other people can snap us out of our discipline in one very peculiar and hilarious way; by seeing the insignificance of our disciplined pursuits.

Because everyone is so preoccupied with what they’re doing in life, they are unlikely care much about your disciplined pursuits, despite how sincerely you take them, which gives you a much needed respite from thinking about them and talking about them all the time.

Hence it is the mark of the playfully disciplined person who doesn’t shun the social world, but instead respects the Churchill principle and is thus more of a social magnet because he has closed his disciplined loops for the day before he came out to socliase and gaze into the eyes of those he’s flirting with.

Lastly in Hinduism people are seen as condensed forms of prana, which means life energy, and as direct incarnations of the godhead. And when we respect this manifestation of prana on the physical level, we can pass into the next level of spiritual development. So through this lens, shunning other people blocks our spiritual growth. It is only by realising the one suchness which all things and beings emanate from that we can reconcile our feigned indifference towards others through a merely disciplined approached.

So, in the same way as you need to understand your daily minimum requirements for discipline, you also need to understand your weekly minimum requirements for socialising.

Perhaps one evening spent with your friends per week is enough. One salsa class every Friday gives you all the social playfulness you need for the week. Or an outreach day of walking around your town, going into shops with a friend, and sparking up conversations with beautiful strangers is enough to quell the overwhelming force of too much discipline.

Lastly, make sure your acts of playfulness don’t hinder your ability to act with discipline the next day.

So, to summarise:

• Discipline is a love affair with progress and the art of staying consistent in pursuit of a larger goal
• Playfulness is anything performed in a state of rapture without any thought of getting a reward. It involves a light approach to life which slices through the tension discipline can sometimes create.
• Discipline involves acting to see progress towards an outcome
• Playfulness involves acting with a light-hearted, non grasping approach where you aren’t bothered about seeing an outcome

To balance the 2:

• First create a routine for your daily non-negotiable acts of discipline (push your limits then come back from there)
• Respect the Churchill principle (prioritise discipline before playfulness, not the other way around - earn your playfulness!)
• See people as condensed forms of life energy and outlet our playfulness through flirting, teasing, socialising and loving
• Make sure your act of playfulness doesn’t hinder your ability to be disciplined the next day!

Thanks for reading.

Lew x

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