Discipline is an often misunderstood concept.  (Though this may surprise you, at no other time in my life did I see discipline misrepresented more than during my four years at Harvard.)  Often met with a groan from teenagers and adults alike, discipline tends to signify work, effort, and overall unhappiness.  Discipline, however, can also mean fun and relaxation if carried out correctly.  For instance, consider the following example of a hard-working yet undisciplined student:

Our student sits down to work on a term paper that she knows should require between two and three hours of focused effort.  Rather than focusing on the task at hand, she grasps at anything to distract herself: chatting online with friends, browsing the web, even cleaning her room.  While this multitasking might yield a robust facebook profile and a cleaner room, it also extends her writing time to five hours instead of three.

Furthermore, this tendency to multitask afflicts our well-intentioned scholar even when she’s not working.  Just as her leisure infringed upon her work, her work always seems to creep into mind during ordinary times of relaxation and fun.  As a result, she is in a constant state of worry about the work looming overhead.

In an ideal world, this student would summon discipline for work and play alike, maintaining a firm boundary between the two.  Given that same five-hour block, you could imagine discipline helping to enable the following sequence of events: thirty minute paper brainstorm and outline, ninety minutes of writing, thirty minutes on Facebook to socialize and clear the mind, an hour of revision, and finally an hour and a half of pure freedom to follow.

Though the adage “life is short” has some virtue, I like to think of life as a very long time… far too long to make yourself miserable.  Therefore, I always strive to balance my daily responsibility with my outside passions and need for leisure.  In essence, the separation of work and play serves as a sort of existential feng shui – i.e. the alignment and balance of energy to ensure health and fortune.

By batching responsibility and focusing to complete the tasks at hand, the disciplined student is left with a pile of excess minutes to appropriate for socializing, sleep, or best of all a passionate extracurricular interest.  When an admissions officer eventually reads that student’s application and asks, how did she do it all – school, sports, music, and still manage to have fun – the answer is discipline.  So remember the key to general success in life is to have the discipline to work hard while making sure, at times, to hardly work at all.  If you maintain this balance, you’ll achieve success and happiness alike.

For an example of a happy and successful person, listen to Stefan Sagmeister describe how he successfully batched  work and play on a grand scale with discipline as the organizing principle: