In February 2025, I wrote a blog post called Why Discipline is More Powerful Than Motivation.

At the time, the idea made sense to me.

Motivation comes and goes. Some days we feel like doing something, other days we don’t. Discipline keeps us going when motivation disappears.

I still think there is some truth in that.

But after looking at the things I have continued doing since then, I don’t think discipline explains the whole story.

Sometimes doing something gives me new reasons to keep going.

Motivation isn’t only the excitement at the beginning

I used to think of motivation almost like fuel.

We start something new with a full tank.

We’re excited.

Then the excitement fades, the tank gets emptier, and discipline has to take over.

But my experience with FPV didn’t really work that way.

When I first started flying FPV, I simply wanted to learn how to control the drone.

That was enough to get me started.

Then I managed to fly through a gap that had been difficult before.

I crashed less.

My movements became more precise.

I started exploring places I couldn’t easily reach on foot.

Then I became interested in making the flights look more cinematic.

That made me pay more attention to cameras, movement and composition.

Eventually, FPV helped lead me toward videography.

None of that was visible when I started.

I couldn’t have been motivated by those possibilities because I didn’t know they existed yet.

Doing revealed them.

Interest can grow

This is something I misunderstood about motivation.

Interest doesn’t necessarily start high and slowly disappear.

It can develop.

Something catches my attention. I try it. I learn a little more. Learning allows me to do something I couldn’t do before.

And suddenly the activity becomes more interesting, not less.

Psychologists studying how interest develops have described a similar progression. An initial spark of interest can become something more lasting as we continue engaging with a subject and build knowledge around it.

That sounds much closer to my experience.

I didn’t begin FPV with all the interest I would eventually have in it.

My interest developed because I kept discovering what FPV could become.

Discipline still matters

There are also days when I don’t feel like doing something.

Writing can be difficult.

Editing can become tedious.

Studying can require effort when I would rather do something else.

Sometimes I simply have to sit down and do it anyway.

I would still call that discipline.

But I no longer think discipline needs to replace motivation.

It can help me through the parts where what I feel like doing right now doesn’t match something that matters to me over the longer term.

That is a much smaller job than asking discipline to carry everything.

Some things become easier to continue

Repetition changes things too.

When I first started doing something regularly, I often had to remember to do it.

Eventually it could become part of my day.

I have experienced this with writing.

After writing regularly for a long time, I don’t wake up every morning and have a dramatic argument with myself about whether I should write.

I write.

The habit carries some of the weight.

Research on habits suggests that repeated behavior in a consistent context can gradually become more automatic. Interestingly, people with good self-control don’t necessarily spend all day successfully fighting temptation. Helpful habits can reduce how often that fight is necessary.

I like that distinction.

Discipline doesn’t always mean becoming better at forcing myself.

Sometimes it means creating conditions where less forcing is required.

Writing gave me more things to write about

My blog may be an even better example than FPV.

If discipline alone had carried me through more than a thousand posts, I imagine writing would have become exhausting a long time ago.

Instead, something else happened.

Writing made me pay more attention.

Paying attention gave me things to write about.

Sometimes I noticed something in the garden.

Sometimes something about living in Japan made me curious.

Sometimes I realized that something I had believed years earlier no longer made sense.

I investigated it.

That investigation changed what I understood.

And that gave me something else to write.

The activity started feeding itself.

Attention created curiosity. Curiosity gave me something to explore. Exploring gave me something to write. Writing made me pay more attention.

Discipline may have helped keep that process going.

But discipline didn’t create everything inside it.

Not everything needs to continue forever

This also makes me think differently about stopping.

If discipline is what matters most, continuing can easily become the goal.

Don’t quit.

Keep the streak alive.

Push through.

But some of the things I’ve spent a lot of time doing have naturally become less important as they opened the door to something else.

For a while, learning FPV was a major focus.

I practiced almost every day.

Eventually I became comfortable enough with the basics that learning to control the drone was no longer the main attraction.

My attention moved toward what I could do with that ability.

Exploration.

Cameras.

Videography.

Filmmaking.

That doesn’t mean I failed to remain disciplined about FPV.

FPV had simply taken me somewhere I couldn’t see when I started.

The next step became more interesting than repeating the previous one.

So what makes me keep going?

I don’t think there is one answer anymore.

Curiosity can make me start.

Enjoyment can make me return.

Becoming better can make an activity more interesting.

Discipline can carry me through difficult parts.

Repetition can turn something into a habit.

And experience can reveal reasons for continuing that I couldn’t possibly have known at the beginning.

That last part may be what I missed most when I wrote that old post.

I thought motivation started the journey and discipline took over when motivation faded.

Now I see something less predictable.

Sometimes I have to begin before I can discover what will make me want to continue.

And sometimes continuing takes me somewhere else entirely.

I don’t always keep going because I know where I’m going. Sometimes I keep going long enough to find out.