The Physics of Easy Discipline with Jia Jiang
Hey Team!
I’ve been on a bit of a break this summer, but I wanted to help celebrate International ADHD Awareness Day by dropping a new episode.
We often think that achieving big things requires feeling miserable during the process. We buy into the myth that if a task isn't agonizing, it isn’t worth the time we put into it. My guest today is Jia Jiang, an expert in rejection resilience, a Duke MBA graduate, and the founder of Wuju Learning. After stepping away from a stable corporate career at Dell and LinkedIn to launch a tech startup, Jia realized his deepest bottleneck wasn't a lack of talent, but a profound fear of rejection. Fueled with this insight, he launched 100 Days of Rejection Therapy and filmed himself requesting absurd things from strangers daily. And this is actually when I first came across Jia 11 years ago, so it was quite the treat to get to talk with him and learn about his new book, Easy Discipline.
Jia brings a unique lens to the table because he’s battled his own severe, late-understood ADHD and procrastination loops since growing up in Beijing when ADHD just wasn’t considered a thing. In this episode, we talk about shifting away from transactional, anxiety-inducing task completion and moving toward what he calls the "Artist Mindset." We also break down how masking and over-indexing on how other people perceive us turns into a form of self-sabotage, where we pre-reject ourselves before we even give our true traits a chance.
Jia's Easy Ambition substack- https://substack.com/@jiajiang
Jia's New Book- Easy Discipline: An Unconventional Way to Achieve Ambitious Things
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/303
YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk
William Curb: It’s so exciting to have you here. I read your first book a decade ago, which is wild—well before I started this podcast—so I was really excited to see your name come up in my email. Let’s hear a little bit about this new book you’ve been writing.
Jia Jiang: Yeah! My first book was about rejection and how to overcome that fear. This second book has a similar root, but the topic is very different. It’s called Easy Discipline. It talks about how to have discipline the easy way. In our society, especially in the past ten years, we hear Navy SEALs or monks talking about how you have to go to war against yourself, do the hard things, and tolerate pain.
When I saw those, I thought, "Wow, that sounds inspiring," but man, I’ve been having wars against myself my whole life, and I’ve never won one. Every time I win, it isn’t because I’m trying to go hard; it’s because I’m trying to go easy. It’s about finding what I love and what I like. That’s what this book is about: how do you go with your human nature rather than against it to achieve discipline?
William Curb: That makes so much sense to me. Often we find ourselves trying to do things in the hardest way possible for no other reason than we think that’s how you’re supposed to do it. We see that "grind" mentality and think we can willpower our way through, but that never worked for me.
Jia Jiang: It can work in the short term, but it depends on how long that lasts. For some people, it lasts a day; for others, a few weeks. But that’s not what you want. You want a new life. You achieve your dreams through lifelong achievement, not a few weeks of willpower. When your willpower runs out and you fail, you stop trusting yourself. You think, "I’m a failure." You lose your self-belief. I call that "hard discipline." It’s not sustainable, whether you have ADHD or not.
William Curb: It’s a lot easier to do things "hard" when you have motivation. But if you build a system that requires 100% effort every single day, you’re eventually going to have a day where you’re sick or tired, and you just won’t be able to keep it up.
Jia Jiang: Absolutely. When you make constant exertion your norm, it’s against physics. In my book, I use the analogy of Sisyphus. Many people feel like Sisyphus, pushing a rock up a hill only for it to roll back down. You can’t sustain that unless you love pushing rocks.
If pushing the rock becomes your identity and something you truly enjoy—not forcing yourself to love it, but actually enjoying it—then it becomes your default state. It becomes hard to stop. Think about people who play video games or watch sports; it’s actually harder for them not to do those things. What if you could turn productive work into that default state? The physics changes. You feel like you’re going downhill even though you’re going uphill.
William Curb: I have friends who love to run, and I’m always like, "How do they do that?" They tell me they’d feel antsy if they didn't run. It’s just what they have to do every day.
Jia Jiang: We see them as Supermen, thinking they are the most disciplined people ever. But from the inside, they’re thinking, "How could I not?" The trick is achieving that state where the action becomes something you love.
William Curb: So what are some of the things you can do to shift your perspective that way?
Jia Jiang: I use a system called EASY. E stands for Enjoyment, A stands for Artistry, S stands for System, and Y stands for Yourself.
You want to start with enjoyment. Find the thing that is naturally easy for you. We all have something like that, but we often think those things are useless. In school, we're taught there is a "right way" to do things, even if we hate it. But you can't sustain that.
For example, ten years ago, I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I waited seventeen years to start because I was terrified of rejection. Finally, at thirty, I quit my job to build a company. I got rejected by an investor, and my first thought was, "I gotta quit. I hate fundraising. I hate being judged." When I hated the feeling, I failed miserably because I was too tight, looking for the "right" words to say.
So I asked myself, "How can I feel better about rejection?" I found a concept called Rejection Therapy. I decided to do 100 Days of Rejection Therapy, where I looked for rejection on purpose. I filmed it and it went viral. People told me I was brave, but I wasn’t. I just changed my mindset. Instead of doing something I hated, I asked, "How can I have the most fun in this interaction?" I stopped focusing on the result (the "yes" or "no") and focused on cracking myself up. That mental shift changed everything. I performed better because I was no longer afraid.
William Curb: I can see how shifting the goal to "getting rejected" makes it easier. If you do it, you hit the goal regardless of the outcome.
Jia Jiang: Exactly. My goal wasn't even the "no" eventually; it was maximum fun. When I focused on having fun and being myself, I became much more consistent.
William Curb: Focusing on the journey is so important. I’ve had many times where I got the thing I wanted and realized I didn't actually care—it was the getting there that mattered.
Jia Jiang: If the end goal of a hike is just to cross a finish line, you don't even have to go. You could just stay where you are. But if you love the walk, the nature, and the companionship, you can go as long as you want because the walk itself is the fun part.
William Curb: Even for people who find rejection scary, how can they realistically make that shift?
Jia Jiang: You can try a "Momentum Loop." Every day, I focused on what I learned. On the first day of my challenge, I asked to borrow $100 from a stranger. He said no, and I ran away feeling embarrassed. The next day, I asked for a "burger refill." The person said no, but I didn't run. Because I stayed, I had the opportunity to explain myself and even have a good interaction. I learned that if I don't run, I don't have to feel bad. I applied that learning to the next day. Very quickly, I built momentum.
The second thing is the "Artist Mindset." Turn every interaction into an opportunity to create art. Instead of finishing a task or completing a transaction, think, "I’m here to perform." Lean into the moment. When I write emails or have conversations now, I think, "How can I make this the deepest conversation possible?" Because this moment is not replicable. If you focus on the creation in the moment, you have no fear or regret.
William Curb: This really hits home. With ADHD, people often have a massive fear of how others will react, so they "mask" and hold themselves in. It makes it hard to experience the joy of the moment.
Jia Jiang: The more you hold yourself in, the more self-conscious you become. You lose yourself trying to make people like you, and people can sense that tension. If you shift the goal to being your best self, people find you interesting. They see someone different from the run-of-the-mill conversation. Even if you don't "click," you spent that time being your authentic self, and that’s what matters.
William Curb: Often, people are "pre-rejecting" themselves. They assume people won't like who they really are, so they present a fake version that doesn't work anyway. Getting over that fear is a huge step in being the person you want to be.
Jia Jiang: It’s a superpower. Don’t worry about how others perceive you; worry about how you perceive yourself. The people who change the world—in business or art—don't worry about being perceived as "weird." They have an internal drive. If they cared about being liked by everyone, they’d never get started.
William Curb: It’s a silly goal anyway because you can’t make everyone like you. Why did I want those people to like me in the first place?
Jia Jiang: You don’t need 90% of the world to like you. You just need a tribe of people who "get" you. If you have 10% of the world, that’s an enormous tribe. Find your people and don’t worry about the rest.
William Curb: It takes time to build that skill of thinking this way.
Jia Jiang: The best way to do it is just to do it. Starting tomorrow, ask, "How do I do the thing I love?" and go deep on that. Don't stay at the surface level.
William Curb: Before we started, you mentioned that you didn’t write this book about ADHD, but you wrote it because of your ADHD. Can you tell me more about that?
Jia Jiang: I’ve had ADHD my whole life. I grew up in China, and we didn't have that term back then. I had huge goals—I met Bill Gates when I was fourteen and decided I wanted to be like him. I came to America, went to college early at seventeen, and took computer science because I wanted to be a "boy genius."
But things went awry because of my ADHD. I couldn't focus in class or on homework. A typical night for me involved sitting down to work, feeling bad because the work was tough, and then telling myself I’d browse the internet for "just five minutes" to feel better. Two hours would disappear. I’d feel even worse, try to force myself to work, and then browse again to soothe the guilt. By 3:00 AM, the janitors would walk in to clean, and I felt like a total loser. I was clinically depressed because I wasn't hitting my potential.
I realized I couldn't keep doing things I hated because I’d end up hating myself. I had to use enjoyment and artistry to push myself forward instead of just focusing on the goal. That switch changed my life. Now, I’m an author and a speaker. I found my true relationship with the world by writing my ideas and speaking. That’s my story of dealing with ADHD.
William Curb: I also went into college with a computer science degree and learned very quickly that it was not for me! It’s funny how we value the "hard" stuff more. I’m good at writing, but I used to think, "That’s not valuable because it comes too easy." We equate hard results with hard feelings, but that doesn't really make sense.
Jia Jiang: Real achievement is based on what you can sustain. If you can achieve that mindset of making art instead of just pushing a rock, you expand the pie. There’s a saying: "If you love your work, you’re not working." That’s true. Have a life where you are excited about the task, not just the result.
William Curb: I see artists who try to become professional and end up hating it because they’re doing commissions and paperwork. They aren’t doing the thing they love; they’re doing something next to what they love.
Jia Jiang: There’s a book called The E-Myth Revisited that talks about this. A chef might start a restaurant because they love cooking, but suddenly they’re hiring, firing, and doing taxes instead of cooking. Focus on the task you love. If you love to write but hate organizing a book, outsource the organization. Find an editor or a publisher to help with the "hard" parts so you can focus on storytelling.
William Curb: As we wrap up, do you have any final thoughts for the audience?
Jia Jiang: Most of us listening have ADHD. There is always this feeling that we are falling short of our potential. We have the talent, but we feel like we can't get it together. Stop thinking about those things as flaws. They are just who you are. They can become treasures if you embrace them and build systems to handle the parts you hate.
Don't think you're destined to lose. Use who you are, build systems around your traits, and become your best self. You really do have the ability to change the world.
William Curb: Fantastic advice. Where can people find you and your books?
Jia Jiang: I write a Substack called Easy Ambition. My goal is to turn the pursuit of ambition into play. My book comes out on International ADHD Awareness Day, July 13th. You can find me there!
William Curb: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
This Episode's Top Tips
Stop declaring war on your own brain by trying to grind through tasks using sheer willpower. Willpower is a finite biological resource that inevitably runs out, and relying on it just triggers a cycle of broken resolutions and self-blame. Instead, shift your strategy to working with your human nature by building environment-based systems that remove structural friction from the start.
If your daily routine constantly feels like Sisyphus endlessly pushing a heavy boulder up a mountain, you are fighting psychological gravity. Instead of forcing yourself through tasks with external pressure, anchor the process in intrinsic enjoyment so the activity becomes your default state. When you flip the physics this way, the boulder starts rolling downhill, meaning it actually takes more active energy to stop your momentum than to keep going.
Masking and over-analyzing how others perceive you creates an intense cognitive tension that completely paralyzes the ADHD brain. Break out of this by adopting the "Artist Mindset"—reframing stressful interactions or projects not as rigid transactions where you need approval, but as unreplicable opportunities to express your authentic presence. Focusing on full creative expression in the moment completely bypasses the perfectionism trap and lowers social anxiety.