Three Ways EQ Can Help You Improve Your Self-Discipline

Honoré de Balzac is undoubtedly one of the greatest French writers of all time. But that wasn’t always the case. You might even say he started out “bad” at writing. Only through an absurd degree of discipline over the course of ten years did he transform into one of the greats. From the age of 20 to 30, he chained himself to his desk, wore monks’ robes while writing, and refused to eat because he believed digestion would disturb his writing process.

Finally, at the age of 31, he achieved his first commercial success—La Peau de chagrin (The Wild Donkey’s Skin). Following this success, he only worked harder and harder. He spent the next 20 years writing and drinking gallons and gallons of coffee (often getting just two hours of sleep). In twenty years, he produced 90 literary novels, including his magnum opus series, La Comédie humaine, which included 48 volumes and 3500 unique characters (a cast only rivaled by the likes of Shakespeare and Dickens).

To be clear, the point of this article is not to talk about how to overwork yourself like Balzac. Rather, the idea is to show how much you can accomplish through consistent self-discipline, and how emotional intelligence (EQ) strategies can help you grow your discipline.

America has an unhealthy obsession with the idea of geniuses. We love to attribute success to raw talent, even though most success stories highlight the exact opposite. Just look at Balzac chaining himself to his desk, or Kobe Bryant, who didn’t score a single point for an entire basketball season when he was 11. Or one of my personal favorites being the baseball player Manny Ramirez, who would get labeled as a “lazy hitting freak” for his nonchalant confidence on the field, but was known by his teammates to practice hitting every day until a literal pool of sweat collected at his feet.

Talent is your natural ability to acquire skill. Skill is your ability to do something. If you’re a talented writer, you might not need ten years of furious, non-stop writing to arrive at your first commercial success. Instead, you might be more like Mary Shelley and write Frankenstein at the age of 19. Talented people need to work to acquire skills, too. They just get further faster. For this reason, a less talented person can still catch up; it just takes time and effort. As Stephen King famously said, “Talent is cheaper than table salt.”

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