Why discipline is overrated

A while back a parent told me her son just didn’t have much discipline. He barely practised at home, and she’d struggled to stick with things in her own youth too. The tone was almost apologetic, as if this were a trait you couldn’t really do anything about. I recognised it — for years I thought the same way.

But the picture doesn’t quite hold up. When I look at the students who do practise consistently, I rarely see extraordinary willpower. What I see is a fixed spot where the instrument lives, a fixed moment in the week, and clarity about exactly what needs to happen. Their character isn’t different — their circumstances are.

Discipline sounds like something you either have or you don’t. In practice it’s far more often the result of an environment that makes the right behaviour easy. A drum kit set up in the room gets played more than a kit that has to come out of the closet first. A student who knows exactly which four bars he’s going to work on starts sooner than a student handed a whole song.

That changes my job too. I can’t really hand a student more willpower. What I can do is lower the bar. Smaller assignments. A set practice slot that hooks onto something already happening anyway. An agreement concrete enough to act on tonight — not “sometime this week.”

The uncomfortable part is that we like pinning perseverance on character, because it gives us a sense of control. But if practising mostly comes down to willpower, then every failure lands on the student. And that’s rarely fair. Far more often the culprit is a routine that was never really designed.

So maybe the question isn’t how to instil more discipline in our students, but how to set up their environment so they barely need it. What would happen if, for your next student, you didn’t work out what they should do — but what would help them start on their own?