This week’s newsletter will be fairly short.
I have been busy working on different things. I’ve been trying to get back to editing my book, which is still in the works — sorry about that. I’m working on it and will keep you posted!
Most recently, I’ve been working on merging my technical background with the ideas I’ve been spreading through Self Disciplined to build Kyno: infrastructure to help multi-agent systems follow the same direction based on a mission and principles, enabling bottom-up agency and principled judgment on a per-agent basis.
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This adds to the ecosystem I’ve been trying to build:
Adaptable Discipline for individuals.
Adaptable Organizations for organizations.
Kyno for AI agents.
If you are interested in any of these, please take a look, and feel free to ask any questions. If you want to integrate Kyno into your systems, you can email me at camilo@cizambra.com.
All of this has been built around the same idea:
Drift is the default. The return is the skill.
We’ve had multiple subscribers join us in the last month, so please let me welcome you all 🎉. I hope you stay with us for a long time, and that the content this newsletter brings helps you and the ones you love. Please don’t be a stranger — say hi in the comments or via DM.
As you can see, the topics vary, but they all surround the same idea:
What do we do when drift exerts its pull?
So what do we do when that happens?
Nobody is exempt from drifting
And I will be categorical here: nobody is exempt from drifting.
Drift can be thought of as the behavioral cousin of entropy. It’s the force that tries to pull us away from what we deem coherent. This happens when we act against our principles or when we optimize for things we don’t really value.
I said nobody is exempt from drifting because life is not linear. If it were, life would be really plain, and nobody would have issues achieving their goals. Which, if you think about it, sounds good at first, but…what would life be without challenges?
I remember playing World of Warcraft — a very popular MMORPG until a couple of years ago — and once I reached a point where I had completed the maximum level, I just didn’t find anything really entertaining to do there, so I quit playing. A connoisseur of the game could say, “But what about the raids?” and whatnot, but that wasn’t really my jam. My jam was to complete quests, solve problems, overcome obstacles, and get rewarded for that.
I think, to some degree, we all want that. But that comes with the short-term cost of the downs in life. The obstacles. Our own behavior getting in the way because of the pull of drift.
And it’s okay. I think once we make peace with the fact that drift is always going to be there, it’s easier to understand and bear.
But we need to keep it at bay
While it’s okay to understand and accept that drift is going to be around, and that this is normal, we also need to understand that drift needs to be managed. Otherwise, it can become the dominant force in our lives.
Think of this as the following situation: imagine your bedroom. In order to keep it clean and clutter-free, you need to put some effort into it. If you don’t, it’s fine for a couple of days, but in the process, it starts getting cluttered. At some point, if you don’t take care of it, the temptation becomes strong, and the chances are that the mere thought of cleaning up will feel like a hassle. You will just leave it for later, which will make the problem worse.
The same happens with drift. In order to keep coherence in your life, you need to return to coherence, but that takes effort and comes at a cost.
👉 Want to actually train this, not just read it?
Each week inside Discipline Circle, I publish a short Paid Companion you can work through in 10 minutes on a slow day, so the idea sticks when a hard day hits.
$9.99/month.
This is where discipline comes in
If you ask around, discipline is understood in different ways: being systematic, organized, having strong willpower, being resilient, meticulous, and so on.
The thing with that is that, by treating it as a trait, discipline can quickly become moralized. This has a consequence: because drift is inevitable, when it happens, it tends to mess with our identity, and in many cases, it makes us feel like there is something wrong with us.
Discipline is not a trait; it’s a practice. The practice of returning over and over to coherence. It’s the constant effort we put into cleaning up our room every time it gets messy.
Returning is the skill we need to learn: how to do it quickly and how to build the conditions that favor its practice.
Adaptable Discipline is the framework I built to help you engineer the conditions to practice discipline and return faster each time.
You won’t be able to eliminate drift, but it will give you a better chance of managing it.
In our next paid companion, we will go through some exercises that will help us train our return skill, so we have them handy during our practice and can make returning a reflex when drift exerts its pull.
For now, take a look at the guides, see if they can help you, and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask.
I hope you have a wonderful week!
✨Ideas Worth Exploring
If this piece resonated, here are a few more that go hand-in-hand.
Very important. Returning to baseline is a skill we practice dozens of times per day.