A Treatise on Discipline

This blog is written from the perspective of someone striving for self-improvement. When you tolerate mediocrity, you get more of it. So how do we become the 1% of the 1%?

Creatures of habit

I often wondered why some people find exercise easy and others find it hard. For a while, I was one of the lucky ones who found it easy - going to the gym wasn't a chore, it was something I anticipated with excitement and passion. Only a few years later and after a hiatus in training did I start finding it a hard to get out and walk, run, or work out. Wasn't I someone who enjoyed exercise? How could that change?

It turns out, forming a new habit is uncomfortable. It requires a deliberate effort on the part of the individual. Going for a run is uncomfortable when not habitual. By the age of 35, almost all of your thoughts, behaviors, and emotional responses are on repeat - coping mechanisms, routines, and patterns learned years ago. Change requires you to override these deeply ingrained systems.

IF you were to stick to your walking routine, you would find after a while that you were heading out the door almost automatically, without thought or effort. Why?

The Neuroscience of Automatic Behaviour

Habits are stored in a different part of the brain than actions that require conscious effort.

Habits are stored in the basal ganglia, a group of nuclei located deep within the brain. The basal ganglia are responsible for automatic behaviors such as walking, talking, and playing sports. When we perform an action repeatedly, the basal ganglia create a neural pathway that allows us to perform the action without consciously thinking about it.

Actions that require conscious effort on the other hand, are stored in the prefrontal cortex - the part of the brain that is responsible for planning, decision-making, and self-control.

Take takeaway is that once an action is repeated, it becomes a part of who you are.

You can become someone who enjoys the gym, or someone who enjoys reading. James Clear wrote, "The process of building habits is actually the process of becoming yourself." Once you decide on your values or principles - the type of person you want to be - you choose habits that enable you to get there, and then cultivate them.

Success is actually a short race - a sprint fueled by discipline just long enough for habit to kick in and take over.

Forming a habit takes time. The research shows a wide range for this gestation period; 2 weeks to 9 months, and this varies on the individual and difficulty of the task being made habitual.

66 days was the sweet-spot. Basically, you can expect your new habit to be uncomfortable to perform for at least the first 2 months. You must accept and overcome this discomfort. After a while, you will reach a turning point as the new action gets encoded in the basal ganglia - it becomes a part of you.

Delayed Gratification & the Problem of "Today"

We are constantly making decisions today that we want to be better people tomorrow. The issue, of course, is that it's always today. When the time comes, we once again sell ourselves short.

I first discovered these ideas in The Science of Self-Control by Howard Rachlin;

1. We suffer from a distortion of perception. Lets think of how we perceive objects with our visual system for a moment.

The x axis here is our distance from both the moon and a tree at 2 points in time (A+B). the dotted lines show what the objects look like from these distances.

• (A) From afar, the moon looks small. The tree in front of it, looks even smaller.

• (B) As we move closer, the tree takes up more and more of our vision until it appears much bigger than the moon, which may even go out of sight entirely. Effectively, the moon - which is many orders of magnitude larger than the tree - fades into obscurity.

We can think of our long-term goals and short-term desires in a similar way. From the vantage point of today, one might want to stop eating junk-food in the short term to fulfill a longer term goal of losing weight. As time moves forward, however, short-term desires become more and more apparent - so much so, that longer-term values fade into obscurity.

2. Long term goals are abstract and intangible.

As the short-term desire approaches, it takes up more and more mindshare. It becomes very tangible. It's real.

Long-term goals and values are more abstract - they're out there in the abyss somewhere. You can’t feel your six-months-from-now fitness or your ten-years-from-now financial freedom. As a result, we discount the future heavily in favour of the present.

Strategies for Success

So how do we actually begin to live differently - to build habits, delay gratification, and discipline ourselves into a better version of who we are?

Here are a few strategies that have made a tangible difference for me:

Singleness of purpose

Multitasking is a lie - it’s just a way to fail at multiple things at once.

When you split your attention, you split your results. I’ve found that progress accelerates when I give myself permission to go all in on one thing at a time. That doesn’t mean neglecting everything else, but it means identifying bottlenecks, choosing what matters right now, and letting your focus reflect your priorities.

Stay connected to your future self

It’s easy to think of your future self as someone else - some distant version of you who will somehow have more discipline, more energy, more time.

But they are you. Every choice you make today either invests in them or robs from them. Every repetition becomes part of their identity. Every effort you make or don't make, they will inherit.

Act accordingly.

Discipline isn't punishment - it's self-respect, paid forward.

Develop a relationship with discomfort

Every meaningful change lives on the other side of discomfort. Instead of avoiding it, lean into it. Learn to sit with it, understand it, and eventually… own it.

Meditation helps. So does exercise, cold therapy, fasting, and focused work. You’re not trying to suffer - you’re training your system to get comfortable with challenge.

Ritualize the morning

The first 2–3 hours of your day can set the tone for the rest of it.

Build a morning routine that grounds you. For some, that’s making the bed. For others, it’s journaling, push-ups, or reading in silence. Stack small wins early - they build momentum.

Prime your state

Your emotional state determines how you show up. You don’t need to wait for motivation - you can generate it.

Tony Robbins introduced me to this idea: movement, breathwork, music, cold exposure - all of these can shift your physiology, which in turn shifts your psychology. Use them intentionally, especially when you’re about to do something that requires focus.

Set a hard lower limit

Ambition is great, but consistency wins.

We often set lofty goals - an hour at the gym, 20 pages of reading, perfect macros. But when life gets in the way, we do nothing at all. That’s the all-or-nothing trap.

Instead, set a hard lower limit - a minimum standard you always hit, no matter what. It could be 10 push-ups, 1 page, a 5-minute walk. It’s small by design. The point isn’t progress - it’s identity.

Once you start, you often do more anyway.but even if you don’t - you kept the streak alive. You showed up. Never put up a zero.

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Change doesn’t happen in a moment. It happens slowly, in repetition during the unseen hours.

You don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. And your systems are built from your habits - so build them deliberately.

Your future self is not a stranger. They are shaped, right now, by your smallest choices.