I struggled with discipline for the majority of my life. I couldn’t wake up early unless I absolutely had to because of work. I couldn’t get myself to do things I knew were good for me, such as meditating and going on walks every day. I couldn’t get a no‑fap streak past like 3 days, and I could not stop wasting hours of my day on YouTube and social media. And keep in mind this was during a period of my life where I was aware that I needed to change. I wanted to change. I wanted to improve myself.
So the longer this went on, the more and more I struggled to be disciplined on these things. The lower and lower my self‑trust became — which, that alone, wrecked havoc on my mental health. I mean, I thought that I wanted to do these things, and yet I just couldn’t do it.
And the thing about discipline is: without it, you stay exactly where you are — just continuing to struggle with the things you're struggling with in this endless downward spiral. And because of this, you will never reach consistency with the efforts you're trying to make. And therefore that life that you wish to have — the discipline is the vessel to get to — will just remain Nothing More Than Fiction.
But it doesn’t make sense, right? We have all these super disciplined alpha male gurus telling us that we just need to be more disciplined. And we look at their lives, and they accomplish many of the things we wish to accomplish, and they accredit it all to their supreme level of discipline. And I, like many people reading this topic, didn’t know that these discipline gurus, these role models, these motivational speakers, were actually making the situation worse for us — because we’re constantly consuming this content that tells us, “Well, you just don’t want it bad enough. You’re not working hard enough. You just need to be more disciplined, bro.” While simultaneously they're flashing their lifestyle, their success, their money, their relationships — and telling us that if you were disciplined like me, you would have this too.
And what this does is all the guys that are consuming this content and that are trying to be disciplined and failing — it just increases their sense of hopelessness, it lowers their self‑image, which — and I'll get into this more later — but it is actually further programming their mind to be less disciplined.
What if I told you that these businessmen, these athletes that got there, didn’t actually get there through sheer brute‑force willpower? Well, that is the case — because that would be impossible. Because willpower is a limited resource.
Imagine you're in a room and you are overwhelmed by this smell of the most delicious chocolate chip cookies you have ever smelt in your entire life. The sweet, savory aroma fills the air and you look across the room and see all of those cookies — not only cookies, but all other kinds of delicious chocolate treats. But instead of being able to walk over and eat them, you have to sit and eat a radish.
Well, there was actually a study that did exactly this. They threw a bunch of participants in this very room — and while some of them were perfectly allowed to go and eat whatever they want (they didn’t have any instructions), others were instructed to sit in there and just eat the radish and resist the temptation and the smells and the yumminess of the chocolate chip cookies over there. After this happened, all participants were taken into another room where they had to work on this seemingly unrelated puzzle, a puzzle that required persistence — a.k.a. willpower.
What they found is that those who had to sit in that room and eat the radish while resisting all the treats gave up way earlier than the people who were allowed to eat whatever they wanted and then just came and worked on the puzzle — because the radish people already used up so much of their mental energy, their willpower trying to resist the cookies, therefore they couldn’t last very long with the puzzle.
So right off the bat, with this information, the first thing we can do is just start to be more greedy with your mental energy, with your willpower, with your decision-making. This is why so many millionaire entrepreneurs wear the exact same clothes and eat the exact same foods every single day — because that's one less thing to try to think about or use up mental energy on.
But while that’s a great place to start, it’s not enough.
As we now know: if all of those successful people actually just relied on willpower to get where they are, it would have run out — just like it does for the rest of us. But if willpower isn’t the answer, then what actually makes the disciplined disciplined?
It’s because the real reason they have this seemingly effortless discipline is that their minds are programmed to do so. And when something is part of your subconscious programming — your mind’s programming — it becomes the default. Therefore willpower isn’t actually always required from them, because they aren't actively resisting anything (compared to you, who has to actively resist your current programming in order to do the disciplines you wish to do).
But imagine if something like working out or being productive felt as effortless as tying your shoe, for example — combined with most of those urges you get to do the bad habits, the bad things — disappearing. Because most of these urges are just surfacing into your consciousness from the subconscious programming.
And finally, since most of the discipline is coming effortlessly, you now have a much higher reserve of willpower you can tap into if something comes along that you actually have to use willpower on.
So what if this bottleneck of discipline was removed from your life? Would there be anything else really standing in the way (besides time) from you and your goals? Or would it just be a seemingly effortless progression to what you want out of life?
This is the level that the elite, high-performing men are on — same with the gurus that preach discipline. They just don’t understand that the reason they’re so disciplined is because of this mental programming. Therefore they think preaching “just be disciplined” is more than enough advice for you. But after you read this topic, you’re not going to have to read them anymore. You’re not going to have to deal with all that shitty advice, because you’ll know how to actually reprogram your mind to be disciplined.
So the first reason why you haven’t been able to be as disciplined as you’d like to be is because your reasons suck. And I know what you're thinking: No, no, I do have good reasons to be disciplined. I do have a strong why to do all this. That is exactly what I thought too when I was sleeping in and playing with my wiener and watching YouTube all day — because one thing our egos are very good at is convincing us the reasons we have to do the things we do are perfectly valid and good enough. But in reality, that’s not the case. If it was the case, you wouldn’t have clicked on this video.
So we need to understand that our brains will find the quickest path to the outcome it desires. So if your reasonings for doing the things you do is, for example, “well, I want to be successful so I can have time freedom so I can do the things I want to do (which is hang out and play video games)” or “be successful so I can attract beautiful women and have sex with them” — your brain’s going to go, “well, you can play Fortnite and watch porn right now,” and you trying to resist doing those things is using up that willpower reserve.
This is why a lot of guys have to just keep reading those same motivational topics over and over and over — because they don't have good enough whys within them. So they need to hear something — blasting the why they should do something and be disciplined and work hard — into their consciousness just in order to be disciplined for little bursts here and there.
And the best way to detach and combat these urges when they appear is by building the skill of mindfulness — and the best way to do this is through meditation.
In order to actually rewire your mind to be disciplined on these disciplines you wish to do, you need to alter your reasonings. Now, there’s two types of reasonings — there’s two types of why. You can have what you’re working towards and what you’re running away from. Right now, let’s start with what you’re running away from, because often it’s more powerful.
The mouse that’s running away from a cat that wants to eat it is going to run faster than a mouse just running to some cheese.
In order to develop this anti-reasoning, you need to figure out: What happens if I don’t get disciplined? What happens if I don’t do these things? What happens if I don’t change? And not just a week from now, a month from now, six months from now, but 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 20 years from now, if you do not change — what does your life look like?
Spoiler alert: it does not remain the same. It is going to get worse and worse and worse over time. And then you have to take that and ask yourself: Why is that bad? — and you have to think about all the mental suffering, the lack of fulfillment, the excuse of a life you're going to be in — and generate those negative emotions that create the cat you're going to run away from.
And then you need to figure out what you’re moving towards. What are your goals in life? And whatever they are, I promise you they’re not good enough. Why do you want that goal? Why is that? Take your goal and ask yourself “why” at least five times in order to get to a core goal — something that is truly what drives you (and you may not even know what that is right now). It may surprise you.
For example: I was in a call with one of my Mental Mastery students, and he was telling me how he was struggling to wake up early in the morning. He would always hit snooze and go back to bed. At first, he was trying to ask me if there's any sleep tactics or hacks to, once you wake up, stay up and go about your day. But I asked him, “Why do you want to wake up early?” His answer was super generic: “Well, it’s productive. I’ll have more time in the day.” Then I asked him, “Why do you need more time in the day? Why do you need to be more productive?” And he couldn’t give me a reason.
So it’s like — no , you don’t have the discipline to wake up early. You have no actual reasoning to be up early. Compare that to how I developed my discipline to wake up early: it was because I need time in the day to be productive and get work done, because I need to reach a certain level of financial freedom and success, because I want to retire my mother, and I want to be an amazing role model for my baby brothers as they’re growing up. I need the money that success will bring because I want to achieve the best human experience I possibly can.
And the other side of that is if I don’t — I will feel like I have wasted my life, and it will send me into a depression, and I will — every time I see my mom continuing to work unretired, continuing to struggle to pay bills, my baby brothers don’t have a role model to watch — it would cause me so much immense depression and suffering.
You see why it’s so easy for me to get up early? Because I need to. There is no negotiating my way out of it.
So do this as an exercise: go on a piece of paper, a document, a journal, and write these things out. I promise you: whatever your reasons are at first, they are not good enough. Over time, keep prying and prying and prying until you can get to the source of why you want to do something. Get that crystal clear future vision of the life you want for yourself and those you care about. And get a crystal clear vision of the life that you are terrified of ending up in.
What’s going to happen is: over time, as you dwell on these things, as you read these things over, as you visualize these things — you are going to begin to program that subconscious part of your mind to work towards that. And when you’re able to gain clarity on why waking up early, working extra hours a day, eating healthy, going to the gym, quitting pornography, quitting video games, quitting drugs is required to get to that future you want — they become the vessels that will carry you there.
Your brain is going to realize that, and be like, “Okay, this is what we do now. We need to do this,” and that is going to become your default. And once you start doing this — and you're doing all these disciplines you want to do — it will enter the second phase, which is shifting your identity.
There was a study done in 2011 that tracked 205 people for a week. They all had these BlackBerrys that would constantly ping up and ask them questions throughout their day regarding discipline and motivation and willpower. This research found a huge paradox in human psychology: all of the people who would answer these surveys and say things like “I’m very disciplined and I have a lot of self-control” had fewer instances throughout their day-to-day life in that week where they had to be disciplined, where they had to resist temptation, compared to the people who didn’t see themselves as very disciplined, who didn't see themselves as in control. They reported way more instances of having to resist temptations and use willpower and try to be disciplined.
What that means is: people who believe that they are super self-controlled and have strong willpower didn't have to use as much willpower as other people. And this is because — as we know — their unconscious default is to just be disciplined.
So what you need to do as you begin getting rid of these bad habits and doing the disciplined things is view yourself already as a disciplined person, and let every single disciplined action you take further justify that identity to yourself. Plus, our brains love doing things that reinforce our previously held beliefs — it actually releases dopamine when doing so. This is why people are addicted to consuming content online about their political beliefs.
What I didn’t mention earlier is: when I was going through that period of having absolutely no discipline to do these things, I still went to the gym and worked out almost every single day. It did not take an ounce of discipline from me to do so — because going to the gym was just part of my identity. It was just something I did. And there was no rationalization, there was no resistance to get there — it was just effortless.
So in your day-to-day life, whenever you feel lost, just zoom out to your reasons. Gain clarity on why these disciplines are the vessel to where you need to be. And what that's going to do is cause you to do every single disciplined thing and not do every single bad habit — with intense levels of intention — because you are doing the things you know you need to do to get the life you want and avoid the life you'd hate. Plus, it will be easier to remain consistent in this because it becomes who you are.
That’s it. I really hope you learned something from this topic. I hope you're inspired to do the things I said — to be disciplined.
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