794: Build the Resilience to Match Your Ambition, with Jia Jiang

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).

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