This is not a new idea. Just a new messenger for the modern era. Marcus Aurelius was talking about this thousands of years ago.
> At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”
> Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?
Rough self-talk from Marcus Aurelius in this passage. Not a big fan of this kind of approach personally. I've found that if I need to do this kind of self-motivation, I should be thinking much higher-level for the causes -- why do I not want to get out of bed? Perhaps I'm not working on the right thing, and need to change careers? Or perhaps I'm not dealing with something emotionally that is preventing me from doing my best work. In my experience, especially if this apathy is persisting over weeks+, it's been something much deeper than "oh I'm lazy and I just need to get up"
Yeah, MA is very keen on the separation between brain (what he calls the "directing mind") and body, to the extent that he thinks it's possible for the brain to ignore pain because that's the body's problem, and it's only something that makes the brain feel bad if the brain chooses to feel bad about it. If your philosophical framework looks like that then it's not really conducive to "fix the things in the outside world that make you naturally not feel like getting up", because the axiom is "none of that outside world stuff should be able to affect my brain unless I want it to". I find his writing interesting but this is one of the areas where my foundational beliefs and his are miles apart.
MA was a sage, but as Seneca said we do not have to be a sage. We should instead content ourselves with walking the same path, if at a crawl.
But really, what negative external could be more intractable than the hordes of Germans lining upon the Rhine and Danube? And yet MA rose up each morning to deal with them as seen in that documentary with Russel Crowe
Something similar comes up in Buddhism. The concept that pain is inevitable, but suffering isn't. You will feel pain, because that's part of life, but suffering is you holding on to the pain or trying to prevent/stop it.
I think it does "let the world in", but doesn't hold on to it as it's passing through. If that makes any sense.
I think this point about spiders would be more compelling if we actually saw that some spiders were lazy and some were not, and the lazy ones died and the non lazy ones didn't. The fact is that spiders and birds and whatever animal just generally doesn't have the desire to "lay in bed under the blankets". If nature gave us the desire to do so, doesn't that mean it isn't wrong if we're using nature as a guide?
This is a good point if you take the perspective that we are independent of our environment. Our desires and needs are natural, therefore we should follow them.
However, if you consider that we co-evolved with our environment and all of its challenges and constraints, then our desires and how much we feel them are simply the result of optimizing our survival over hundreds and thousands of generations.
E.g. the 'difficulty' of our environment is a 50. We have to have a desire of 51+ to survive: a will to live. The 'lazy' spiders all had <50 and no longer exist.
Therefore, if we change environments to something much easier to live in, then our desires are kind of vestigial optimizations that may not provide the kind of guidance on the optimal way to survive in the new environment - they may take hundreds or thousands of generations to unwind. Modern civilization in particular has created such a massive shift in challenges and resource availability that it's not hard to find examples of this.
E.g. we have a strong desire to rest even when we don't need it because we co-evolved in environments where rest was scarce (due to need to survive), so when we had the opportunity we took it. Same with food: food used to be scarce, so we needed a strong desire to get it, but now food is abundant and we still have that desire and wind up eating too much.
In both circumstances, the environment was the pace-setter, but thats now changed, so we need to be our own pace-setter.
I don't think the GP or Willink himself has ever suggested it's a new idea. Stoicism and that military Willink/Goggins/etc type of motivation go hand in hand.
Nature in this context would be things you have to get done except more of a belief that each person has a specific pre defined role. He's still very much talking about using discipline to accomplish this role and often self admonished for not getting more of his own role done.
> At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”
> Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?
Not even "discipline", but what is "nature".