794: Build the Resilience to Match Your ...

Jia Jiang: Easy Discipline

Jia Jiang is an award-winning speaker, entrepreneur, and the bestselling author of Rejection Proof. His TED Talk is among the top 1% most viewed of all time, and he has spoken to over 400,000 people worldwide. He is also the creator of Rejection Therapy, a platform designed to help people overcome fear and build resilience, and is the author of Easy Discipline: An Unconventional Way to Achieve Ambitious Things (Amazon, Bookshop)*.

No pain, no gain. We’ve all heard that before – and it’s true that one way to achieve is through a lot of pain. Good news: there are other ways, too. In this conversation, Jia and I explore how to harness the ambition you already have through easy discipline.

Key Points

• Pain tolerance is admired and celebrated. When greatness comes through pain, our society cheers it. When greatness comes through loving work, we are suspicious.
• Hard discipline and easy discipline both produce results, but easy discipline does so with more joy and sustainability.
• Ambitious people often suffer from High Eyes, Low Hands Disease. Higher ambitions create higher expectations that make a gap seem harder to transcend.
• In the game of Catan, it’s not the lucky players that win; it’s the most active players. Professional learning follows the same pattern.
• The momentum loop is the practice of early action generating greater fuel for later action. Even wrong movements are almost always superior to standing still.

Resources Mentioned

• Easy Discipline: An Unconventional Way to Achieve Ambitious Things by Jia Jiang (Amazon, Bookshop)*
• Jia Jiang’s speaking

Interview Notes

Download my interview notes in PDF format (free membership required).

Related Episodes

• How to Change Your Behavior, with BJ Fogg (episode 507)
• How to Get Out of a Rut, with Anne-Laure Le Cunff (episode 747)
• How to Help People Flourish, with Marcus Buckingham (episode 778)

Discover More

Activate your free membership for full access to the entire library of interviews since 2011, searchable by topic. To accelerate your learning, uncover more inside Coaching for Leaders Plus.