Moving the bricks

Tao Kan was a governor of a frontier province at a quiet time. He'd spent his life in war and administration, and the peace left him with an ordinary problem: the body and the will go soft without work.

So every morning he carried a hundred bricks out of his study to the yard. Every evening he carried them back in.

His staff asked why, and whether this was some ritual. He said: I'm preparing for the north. If I let my body get used to comfort, when the work comes I won't be able to do it.

If there's a more unglamorous story in Chinese that has survived two thousand years, I haven't read it. There's no enemy, no revelation, no audience. Just bricks, twice a day, chosen deliberately.

I use it because most of what people call discipline is actually a set of bricks they've stopped carrying. The gym you joined in January, the language you practised in March, the register of what actually happened that you kept for six weeks.

The bricks are not dramatic and that's the point. They aren't the work. They're the capacity for the work.

Which bricks have you stopped carrying, and did you stop on purpose?

MOJOWAY's weekly check-in is a brick. Fifteen minutes, same day, every week. Nothing about it will impress anyone, and its absence shows up years later.