But a lack of self-discipline might hurt you in areas which are much more serious.
If you keep avoiding hard talks with your spouse, eventually you will have a problem.
If you do projects or activities with friends and always shy away from the unpleasant or dirty work, you're not being a friend they can trust to really go the extra mile with them. You will lose good friends over this. I personally have grieved a good friend over this.
If you never put any planning and execution effort into your family activities, there won't be any.
If you always keep away from doing mundane things like dentist visits, grocery shopping, regular house cleaning, your kids will suffer for your laziness.
And, maybe the worst: If your kids happen to not be overly gifted easy-achievers, and you do not teach your kids that most goods things have to worked hard for, then you have denied them a lesson their future life will depend on.
That's the ruthlessly-pragmatic reason to not "accept this side of who he is": nobody else is going to, especially not the people who pay him.
So while a manager may dislike that they perceive someone to be slacking off, it doesn't necessarily mean the person isn't providing a lot of value to the company. Value produced and hours worked are fairly loosely correlated for knowledge workers.
If you were running a startup, would you rather have 12 focused hours per day from a mediocre programmer or 2 from Linus Torvalds?
What I'm doing with my extra time is not productive by any measure and although it makes me really good at producing random facts at dinner parties....I can't see much else gained by the time I waste.
I think there is: different people have differently tuned reward-centres in the brain.
The book "the procrastination equation" by Piers Steel tries to capture those differences in equation form. Although it's probably faux-math, the key idea seems good to me: procrastinators are more sensitive to the time-until-reward dimension of a given rational choice.
And of course, being physiologically different is not an excuse to procrastinate away. Once we understand the nature of the beast, we can game our brain (as the book describes), and (I hope) we can then maybe benefit from brain plasticity to get better at this stuff over time.
Very disciplined people might be able to. You can't discipline yourself into being more disciplined. Accept that first.
I would also suggest that we probably should make a distinction between mental "sprinters" and mental "marathon runners". Mental sprinters need to rest between sprints. I'm also the sprinter type. Unfortunately our society and some bosses don't understand sprinters. It's not the standard worker model, as for intraverts which are generally wiser than extraverts.
Unless the procastination is causing serious problems, like not paying the bills in time, bad hygiene and getting sick from it, I would also suggest to accept beeing a mental sprinter and stop complexing in front of marathon runners.
This book talk about some of the topics you touched upon in great detail.
> Good.
I'm not sure whether that is good at all. Of course, we're all different, but what worked for me was quite the opposite of this: I learned to accept myself the way I am.
Like you, I've grown up being the smartest of the class. Other people had to sweat and I could just sit it all through. A result was decent grades and a complete lack of discipline.
If I'd be me, but with more discipline, I'd probably be doing my work better and faster. Maybe I'd be more successful, by some measure of "success". But that's not me. That's somebody else. In fact, that somebody else doesn't exist. With my "lack of discipline" come other traits that most super-structured people don't have. Creativity comes to mind. I'm also very well informed because I look around on the net a lot for stuff that interests me, such as open source libraries. My colleagues are often amazed that I know these things - all they know is what they learned in that .NET 4.5 class half a year ago. I'm sure you recognize this, becausr you wrote something along similar lines in a comment further down this thread.
This is you. People are willing to pay you a big salary for something that you only effectively work on around 3 hours a day. That's nice. There's nothing wrong with that. Other people work harder than you, maybe you work smarter than some.
There's a chance that there's someone out there who's just a smart as you, just as creative, and also very disciplined. I doubt it, but that's possible. Accept that. You were the smartest guy in your class, but you're not the best-performing person in the world. That's fine. Nobody's perfect, and neither are you.
Once you accept this, once you embrace your lack of discipline, you can let it work for you. Yeah, yeah, some days maybe you didn't work on that thing you said you were going to work on during the morning stand up, but you might've very well done something much more valuable.
It's very difficult to grow if you're completely unhappy with where you are now. Try to be happy about what you got (difficult, I know), and then continue. It'll be easier.