You know when you start thinking about something and you just get unnecessarily pissed off?
That's how I am right now. So excuse me if I yell at you for a second.
It's nothing personal. I just am going to be completely honest with you.
I want to start by asking you a question and that question is Do you really think that successful people hated their entire journey to becoming successful?
Do you really think that they had to force themselves to do something that they didn't want to do for a long period of time until they reach that point of success.
Or did they love what they do? Did they love eating healthy?
Did they love working? on their business?
Did they love doing the hard If you feel like you have to force yourself to do something to achieve your goals, you're going to lose and there is something very wrong with the way that you're going about achieving your goals.
Because for successful people, loving it, loving the pain, even though it's not pain when you love it.
Loving the process, the hard thing is their competitive advantage and you don't have that.
That's why you're going to lose. And that's what most people get wrong about self-discipline is they hear that word. self-discipline and then like a montage of David Goggins starts running through their mind. of just like running and like reaching this point where they just hate their lives and then like dying I guess and You think that discipline is about like lashing yourself to do something that you don't want to do to achieve this goal that is probably wrong in the first place, because if you don't actually want to achieve the goal or care about the goal, why are you doing it?
And if you think about that, then you'll come to the conclusion, oh someone else wanted me to achieve that goal.
I don't really want to achieve it. Or your priorities are just completely messed up and in the toilet and we need to That's what we're going to talk about today is like how to go through this process to make self-discipline seamless and get very clear on what it is that you want so that you can do these things without effort.
And as an example, I'm a pretty fit guy, right?
I eat healthy. 99% of the time I go to the gym, I work on my business every morning, I do all of these things that people see as crazy or extreme or as hard. when they're not difficult at all for me.
I thought through that. I'm like, why is it so easy?
But for other people, it's like the hardest thing in the world.
It's like pulling teeth. You just can't. can't get them to do it.
They say, oh, I want to. I want to get jacked, I want to lose weight, I want to make more money and then you tell them exactly what to do.
You give them the complete roadmap and then they do nothing about it or they come up with these excuses like, oh, I had to go to work.
Oh, I had to do this. I had to do this. What do you mean you had to? you have to go to work, but you don't have to work on the goals.
You're trying to escape this life that you don't want to live, but you don't have to do the things that lead to the life you want.
That's what your psychology is in the toilet.
You have no idea what's going on in your head.
And once you figure that out, like we're going to talk about, you'll be able to reprogram that into something loving doing the hard thing, or at least what you thought was the hard thing.
So if the people that you label as self-discipline David Goggins or some entrepreneur or some CEO is self-disciplined, but they love doing the thing, then that points to the first insight that you really need to internalize, and this may not make sense.
You are already disciplined toward the exact goals you are supposed to be because that's how the mind works.
Goals are conditioned into your mind by your environment, your goals become your filter for reality shaping what you focus on and what you forget, Your brain helps you notice and remember information that helps achieve those goals.
And naturally, you act toward those goals and your identity solidifies.
So if doing the hard thing is actually hard for you.
It's that there's another goal in your mind. that is overtaking the goal that you actually want to achieve and that's usually conditioned into you when you were a child.
And to save you a lot of the pain of actually thinking through this, Most people have the goal of staying the same because that's survival.
That's just human nature. You want to stay the same and that's very important to you. and any other goal that comes in conflict with that will lose.
So when it comes time to build the business, or talk to a new person or get in shape and then you find yourself not doing the things that lead to achieving those goals, you can peel back the layers and realize that you are working to stay the same.
You are doing everything in your power.
You are extremely self disciplined at being the same person. that you're trying to change.
And that's what creates this dissonance and just gets you stuck in this limbo phase for multiple years until you do what we're going to talk about.
So the first part of this out of four parts that we're going to talk about is that discipline is a feature of identity.
As an example, someone who deeply identifies, whether they know it or not, as a good student which is usually the process of conditioning when you're a kid.
Your parents... Just force it into you that you need to go to school, get good grades, study, and that's the only thing you know.
Those good students, the students that you know in school that you would consider a good student, It's not hard for them to study for 12 hours a day, right?
Their survival is at stake there. their parents goals implanted in their head are at stake.
There's a lot of psychology going on here. that makes it easy for them to study for 12 hours a day.
But you can't because that's not the goal that is intertwined with your identity.
Now I want you to think of a bodybuilder. who had this shift in their life where they went through a breakup or they were really struggling with low self-confidence.
They don't struggle to show up to the gym every day and and eat healthy.
It's actually a part of their life. It's a part of who they are.
It's not painful for them to do so. In fact, it's the other way around.
It's painful for them not to do so. I was on a podcast with Mike Thurston the other day And we kind of resonated or related on this fact that when we travel somewhere, or we go to or we don't have options to eat healthy.
That's painful. That's what throws our mind off.
Because if we don't eat healthy, then our mind or our Identity is threatened.
Our survival is threatened. I've talked about this multiple times, but Humans don't only survive or reproduce on the physical level we don't only have physical sex and have kids.
We survive on the memetic level, the conceptual level, our identity, what we associate with, what we consider who we are.
And if you're a bodybuilder and then that identity, your mental body is is threatened, then you feel that stress.
You feel that survival response that makes you work in the opposite direction.
So closer to the end of this video, we need to understand how to redo that process, how to change who we are, because that's going to determine how difficult it is to do hard things or achieve the goals we want.
Now, one more example to make it very interesting is that a gamer doesn't find it difficult to stare at a screen and perform Perform like you would as an athlete playing a sport.
They don't find it difficult to perform for 12 hours a day, sitting down, staring at a screen, playing video games. very easy to them because that's who they are.
And if it's threatened... If their identity as a gamer is threatened, you see what happens in that case, right?
You threaten a gamer and they just use all of this lingo on you and start trolling you and whatever.
That's a survival mechanism. Right. And they don't understand that because they don't want to understand that their mind doesn't care.
And this goes for little things too, like a person who loves a specific TV show will go out of their way to be self-disciplined arguably in staying up late and binge watching the episode.
And someone who procrastinates their work or what they're studying because it doesn't align with who they are will endlessly scroll on their phone because their goal is to not achieve the goal these people are the gamers the procrastinators the binge watchers the people that are doing the mediocre habits that everyone talks about They're not lazy.
They're actually arguably self-disciplined because that's what self-discipline is.
Right. It's persistent effort toward a goal.
And most average people are extremely persistent toward the goal of a mediocre life And the simple fact that they aren't aware of that is why they're doing it.
And I'm not talking about a surface level awareness here of like, oh, I don't like my life.
I'm talking about a very deep. painful experience that makes you so disgusted. with the mediocre life that you're heading towards, that that just stops becoming an option.
When you look at any successful person, you realize that they went through this.
They hit this rock bottom. They may not have been like poor or struggling to survive or whatever it is, but a psychological rock bottom, not a physical, psychological rock bottom where they hit that.
They just hated the thought of ending up like everyone else. and then they changed in an instant and they loved doing the thing that people consider to be self-disciplined now the objection here is like but dan Those things are comfortable.
Playing a game is comfortable. They don't take effort to do or there's the immediate gratification.
And sure, but writing every morning is very comfortable to me.
It gives me immediate gratification. You just haven't turned the goals you want to achieve into a game.
It's more painful for me not to write every morning than it is to write every morning.
It's more painful for me not to go to the gym or get 10,000 steps a day or do whatever it is. than it is to go to the gym or get 10 000 steps or eat healthy and even as an example of this i've tried to play video games like I did when I was a kid.
Like I'm not judging anyone here who plays a bunch of video games.
Like, I was the same person. I hit 10th prestige in Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 because I was out sick from school for a week and had pneumonia and was that's all I did all day and just had 12 pack of Dr. Pepper near me.
I tried to do that again a few years ago because the new Call of Duty came out.
I downloaded it. I started playing it, but it was just too much.
Like I was there and it just wasn't fun.
I would play a match or two. And then it's like I have something better that I could be doing.
So most people have it backwards. They start working on their goals And then they think I have something better that I could be doing.
You're missing the psychology of skill and challenge here.
When you turn your goals into a game, you don't just take on a level 50. because you get overwhelmed, but you also don't play a level one because then you get bored. you think you have something better you could be doing.
Human behavior is teleological. Cybernetic.
The mind is a goal-achieving machine. We interpret the world with our identity as the lens and the goals conditioned into our mind shape the behavior that forges who we are.
If we can understand this process or reverse engineer it, we can leverage it to achieve nearly impossible goals.
The second part to this that we need to understand is that limbo, is the laboratory, feeling lost, being stuck in limbo.
Just like you're floating off in space. You're not working towards the life you want. and you're kind of tired of the life that you're living.
The reason you want to be disciplined is that you've exhausted your current stage of life.
You're starting to notice that you've stalled out.
You're starting to notice that every day is the same as the last. you're starting to notice that if you keep doing the same things, you won't achieve the life you want.
You're in limbo and you don't want to be there anymore.
It's painful, but you misinterpret that pain and think of the first solution that comes to mind. be more disciplined.
This is where most people get stuck in a loop of forcing themselves to do something they don't want to do just to quit two weeks later and go back to the life they swore against.
Pain is the signal that change is happening.
So the way out of this is to lean in. You have to become hyper-aware of how painful your current situation is.
What you're trying to do here is you're trying to make the pain of where you are outweigh any other pain in your life.
And once you do that, discipline as you define it, is no longer painful because you don't have to force yourself to do it.
It's the thing you want to do. When you see no other option but to do that thing and you have complete clarity about that it will take you away from the life that you are now disgusted with, that's how you change your identity.
So step one is to write out everything you hate about your current life And I don't want to hear about positive thinking right now because you're wrong and exactly what kind of life you will have if you don't change So you have this paper, you have this note, you have this document of everything that you could come up with. about the experiences you don't want to experience again, the job you hate,
Things in your childhood that you don't want to experience again.
All of these things, anything that can come to mind, put it on paper now and You're doing this at once.
This is going to take 15 to 30 minutes and that's not enough time to really dig deep and excavate the painful experiences.
So when you have this paper, keep it somewhere on your desk wherever on your phone, if it's accessible, perfect.
Then you take a week. and you just contemplate it you think about it all the time you go on a walk even during conversations You go about your everyday life and you notice things from that life that you don't want to be there and you really dig deep into them.
You research them further. Where is this leading my life to?
What are the negative aspects of these things?
You can kind of start to condition how your mind views the world because This kind of sucks, but it's also a very cool thing because you have control over it.
But imagine that... you find a new food like avocados and you're like, Hmm, What are the benefits of avocados?
And then you look those up and you're like, Oh, I should eat more avocados now.
But if you were to look up the opposite, the negative, you would probably find something that would make you hate the thought of eating avocados and then you would never eat them again.
Now avocados is a stupid example here, but you can do that for almost anything.
This is why the diet and nutrition world is all messed up is because you can find negative and positive aspects of everything and what you choose to to focus on determines what you're probably going to eat in your diet.
So if we take that diet and apply it to your entire life, you look up the negatives and you become very aware of where those things lead You have a lot of control over how your mind perceives reality to move you closer towards your goals. and love the things that you want to do.
Now, since thinking and excavating this, well, one, thinking comes from questioning. thinking comes from conversation with yourself.
So if you want help with this, a good way to use AI is just this, not having AI tell you what to do with your life, but having it question you in a thoughtful way so that it can uncover what you don't want out of life.
I'll leave a link in the description for a prompt that I've made the life reset prompt.
You can download that if you want to. So limbo is the laboratory.
That was part two is that you like, Pain is a signal of change.
You need to become absolutely fed up with where you're at in life.
So you're fed up with where you are. Now what?
How do we become disciplined? So part three is that discipline isn't built, it's discovered.
I've been training in the gym for about 12 years now.
And I posted actually one daily routine of mine where you can see what I look like.
If you want, I'm wearing a, XL plus oversized shirt.
I'm 6'5", right? I may look kind of lanky, but one day we'll do a physique reveal i'm in a cut right now it's going really well i'm going to be shredded soon but That's aside the point.
So I've been in the gym for 12 years. I've been writing. online for about five.
I've been hitting 10k steps a day for about four years.
I have various habits that make people think like, how do you do that so consistently and for all of those habits the first time that i tried them i fell off multiple times because I didn't hate the life or I hated the life, but I wasn't. deeply aware of how much I hated the life that I was living to the point where I would change.
But I remember one of the first times that I was like invited to go on a walk with someone.
And I'm like, go on a walk like that's for senile old people.
And the thing here is I was confirming the thoughts that helped me achieve the goal of staying the same.
I didn't want to do those things but felt like I had to.
And when I finally formed the habit, it was different than the other times when I tried to force it.
They weren't hard to do. They were the byproduct of experimentation and discovery.
All of those habits became a part of my life for four specific reasons.
The first is that I was deeply aware of a painful problem in my life.
Two, I searched for evidence to support a desirable future version of myself.
Three is I changed my physical and digital environments to solidify my new identity.
And four, I blocked out time during the week to do those things as if I were going to be doing them for the rest of my life.
The first step there is to become deeply aware of a painful problem in your life.
You do not understand how powerful that can be to become deeply aware of a problem because most people don't want to solve their problems.
They don't realize that life is just a series of problems and you build solutions and you get better that's how you make more money You solve your own problems.
The way you solve a problem is with a project.
The project is a solution. You can turn that into a product and put it online.
That's what fitness people do. That's what business people do.
That's what Anyone creating a product has done.
They solve the painful problem in their own life or someone else's.
If you just solve your own problems for life, just continue. and not get distracted from the series of problems that are laid out in front of you from shallow to deep, your shallow problems right now are get in the gym.
Get fit, eat healthy. You're overweight.
You feel sluggish. You lack energy. You don't have money.
Start a business. You solve the problems in your life and then you have experience to the point where you can make more money.
As an example of this entire process, when I was in middle school, I was the tall and super lanky dude and I didn't like how I looked.
I felt awkward in my own skin and I lack self-confidence.
So I use that pain to educate myself on fitness and nutrition.
I even remember reading this book that was called Nutrient Timing for Peak Performance on the Bus Ride to middle school, like who reads nutrient timing for peak performance on a bus ride to middle school.
I started doing pushups in my room. I started going to after school weights. and my love for the gym just slowly picked up from there.
Now to change my environment, When I was in middle school, I couldn't really change my physical environment, right?
I lived with my parents. I had certain friends, I was in this specific physical location, but the beautiful thing about the modern world is that you have the internet.
You can literally curate your digital environment that creates and programs your identity by immersing yourself in the right information.
When I would get home, from school, I would go straight to my computer and just watch the two to three fitness vloggers at the time when YouTube was just starting out and that changed my entire life they'd make videos about their programs or certain exercises to try or and every time I watched, I had this novel feeling hit of dopamine because I had something new to try.
I had some new knowledge to experiment with.
I could go to the gym Try the new exercise.
Try the new program. Stick to it. See progress.
Create this feedback loop. Fall in love with it.
Eat correctly. so on and so forth. The same with nutrition.
You're probably not sticking to your nutrition because you're not surrounded by the people in your physical or digital space that give you these new tips and tricks and knowledge that you can implement and see direct feedback from.
This is another topic for another video, but Daily learning and self-education is so freaking important. because all of these things overlap and intertwined.
Just treat daily self-education toward your goals as a habit and your life will change.
So this entire time I didn't just pick a random diet or go to the gym and start doing random exercises because that's extremely chaotic.
The mind craves order. psychology, hierarchy of goals, turning your life into a video game, everything that we've talked about before.
I wasn't trying to force myself to doing something random because I had clarity and novelty and dopamine that was leading to me doing something.
The problem here is that one, most people aren't hyper aware of a painful problem in their life. so their mind doesn't release dopamine at the sight of a potential solution And two, they learn without experimentation, so they never make the progress necessary to act as a feedback loop that keeps them motivated.
So far, we know that limbo is the laboratory.
We know that Self-discipline isn't built, it's discovered, and now we need to understand how to engineer ourselves. an identity.
And we're going to kind of rapid fire this and you can do with it what you will.
Step one is recognition. Who you are determines what you consider important.
You must first recognize that you are pursuing a series of goals, whether you are conscious of them or not.
Those goals frame how you interpret reality, and you usually notice things that confirm your current way of life.
The goals that your mind operates on stem from your conditioning.
This is the first thing that you need to become aware of. and your conditioning stems from your environment, your parents, your teachers, your peers, your culture, the goals that society gave you when you were a child.
When you turn 15, 16, 17, 18, you can start to think, why am I on this life trajectory?
Did I even choose any of this? And the answer is probably no, unless your parents were extremely high agency and taught you how to navigate your teachers and peers while you were young.
Step two is strategic dissonance. To avoid getting trapped in a state of feeling lost or limbo, you let the divide between who you are and who you want to be grow wider.
You cultivate dissatisfaction with your current lifestyle by noticing where you will end up If you don't change by becoming aware of the problems in your life, you prime your mind for pattern recognition. that's what your mind is a pattern recognition machine that's what leads to good dopamine your brain starts to confirm that change is the right thing to do and it helps you notice information in conversations and books and social media content and other things that help you achieve your goals.
This is kind of funny because in order to learn something new, You don't need to take a course on it or read a book about it or read something specific, an article about how to do a specific thing that's helpful.
Right. There's nothing wrong with those.
But by simply having this goal that you deeply care about, you'll achieve it because that's the thing on your mind that's what that's what's framing how you perceive reality.
That's what's framing what you pull out of situations.
One person can read a book. And their goal is to get a job and they're going to pull information from that book that relates to getting a better job. there's a person who is losing weight and you can read a spirituality book and that spirituality book is going to be framed by from the goal that they're trying to achieve, right?
It's going to give them the mental and spiritual strategies to, let's say, deal with the low energy that comes from being deep in a cut.
If you read The Power of Now, When you're prepping for a bodybuilding competition, that's going to help you manage the emotions that come with that.
But a person who is really struggling to start a business, it's going to help them in that case.
That's what I mean by the goal frames your perception.
So another thing there is that if you're not getting anything from reading or from watching podcasts or whatever it may be, and you're just watching them for entertainment.
It's usually because you're not trying to pursue a meaningful and self-generated goal.
Now step three is environment engineering.
Unfollow people who don't put out information that helps you achieve a better life.
Throw away the food that you allow yourself to eat at 3 a.m.
Pull out a paper and map out exactly what you were going to do that week down to the hour.
Review and iterate every week. You need that feedback loop.
Immerse yourself in the people places and things that give you new things to try that can help you achieve your goals, the little novel tactics, things to experiment with.
Follow new accounts even if you disagree with them or don't like them as a person, but their information helps you achieve your goals.
Scroll through Amazon until you find a book that sounds interesting.
Scroll through YouTube until you break out of your normal algorithm and can start curating another one.
Or, Don't go on to algorithmic social media in general and only go based off of search.
So only searched YouTube videos. Intention is what matters here.
Intention is what are you stretching towards?
That's the Latin. origination of it is what are you stretching towards?
That's what intention is. What goal are you achieving?
Is that top of mind? When you do something intentionally and You're thinking about what you're going to do.
Does it help me achieve my goal? No. don't do it.
Intention is you giving a direction for your mind to rewire itself toward.
Step four is self-experimentation because problems that aren't solved through experimentation aren't solved for good.
Rather than being assigned another goal, you try everything until you find the one thing that you can't pull yourself away from.
Then you repeat that process until it becomes who you are.
Now, if you want more on self discipline, self improvement, business, all of those things, human potential, finding, figuring out what you are good at in life, so on and so forth.
Subscribe to my sub stack. I send out two free letters a week. on all of those things.
And if you want to continue watching, you can watch my last video titled You Have 36 Months to Make It. that'll be up somewhere on the screen so with that like subscribe while you're here it's just a button click thank you See you in the next video.
Bye.
