How To Become So Self-Disciplined It Feels Illegal

Don't force discipline

00:00You 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.

00:14And 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 reached that point of success?

00:33Or did they love what they do? Did they love eating healthy? Did they love working on their business? Did they love doing the hard things? If you feel like you have to force yourself to do something to achieve your goals, you're going to lose.

00:52And 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.

01:09And 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 Gogggin starts running through their mind of just like running and like reaching this point where they just hate their lives and then like dying.

01:28I guess 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?

01:44And 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.

02:11And 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.

02:26And so I thought through that. I'm like, why is it so easy for me to do these things? But for other people, it's like the hardest thing in the world. It's like pulling teeth. You just can't get them to do it. They say, "Oh, I want to I want to get jacked.

02:42I want to lose weight. I want to make more money." And then you tell them exactly what to do. You give them the complete road map 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.

02:55I 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 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.

03:08That'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 loving doing the hard thing or at least what you thought was the hard thing.

03:22So if the people that you label as self-disciplined like David Gogggins or some entrepreneur or some CEO is self-disiplined, 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.

03:40You 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.

03:53Your 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.

04:14And 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.

04:28and 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.

04:47You 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

Discipline is a feature of identity

05:06about. 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.

05:22your 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?

05:35Their survival is at stake. Their 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.

05:53Now, 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 eat healthy. It's actually a part of their life.

06:10It'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 Thirsten 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.

06:31That'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.

06:49We don't only have physical sex and have kids. We survive on the mimedic 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 threatened, then you feel that stress, you feel that survival response that makes you work in the opposite direction.

07:13So, 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.

07:37They don't find it difficult to perform for 12 hours a day sitting down staring at a screen playing video games. It's 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?

07:53You 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.

08:07Like 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.

08:29These people, 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?

08:41It'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.

09:00I'm talking about a very deep and 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.

09:14They 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.

09:31And 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.

09:51It 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.

10:12And 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.

10:32Pepper 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.

10:49So 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.

11:07You think you have something better you could be doing. Human behavior is teological, 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.

11:22If we can understand this process or reverse engineer it, we can leverage it to achieve nearly impossible goals. The

Limbo is the laboratory

11:32second 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 not you're kind of tired of the life that you're living.

11:46The 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.

12:01You'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 2 weeks later and go back to the life they swore against.

12:21Pain 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.

12:42And 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 that it will take you away from the life that you are now disgusted with.

13:02That'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 those things.

13:16So 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.

13:29All of these things, anything that can come to mind, put it on paper. Now, 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 the painful experiences. So when you have this paper, keep it somewhere on your desk, wherever, on your phone.

13:49If 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.

14:06And 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 th this kind of sucks, but it's also a very cool thing because you have control over it.

14:23But imagine that you find a new food like avocados and you're like, hm, 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.

14:45Now, 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 focus on determines what you're probably going to eat in your diet.

15:03So 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 toward your goals and love the things that you want to do.

15:19Now since thinking through this 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.

15:42I'll leave a link in the description for a prompt that I've made, uh, 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.

15:56So you're fed up with where you are. Now what? How do we become disciplined? So

Discipline isn't built, it's discovered

16:03part three is that discipline isn't built, it's discovered. I've been training in the gym for about 12 years now. And I've 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.

16:19I'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.

16:32I've been hitting 10k steps a day for about 4 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 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.

16:56But 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 scenile old people. And the thing here is I was confirming the thoughts that helped me achieve the goal of staying the same.

17:12I 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.

17:25All 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.

17:43And 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.

18:04They 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.

18:21That's what fitness people do. That's what business people do. That's what anyone creating a product has done. They solve a 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.

18:36Your 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.

18:55As 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 lacked self-confidence. So, I used that pain to educate myself on fitness and nutrition.

19:09I 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 push-ups in my room.

19:23I started going to afterchool 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.

19:38I 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.

19:50When 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 certain tips.

20:08And every time I watched, I had this novel 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.

20:25The 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.

20:42This 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.

20:57So 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.

21:13I 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.

21:29and 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 an identity and we're going to kind of rapid fire this and you can do with it what you will.

21:51Step 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.

22:09The 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.

22:24When 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.

22:43Step 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.

22:59By 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.

23:14And it helps you notice information and 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.

23:34That'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 how that's what's framing what you pull out of situations.

23:52One 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 from the goal that they're trying to achieve, right?

24:10It'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.

24:23But 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, uh, 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.

24:48Now, 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 3:00 a.m. Pull out a paper and map out exactly what you're going to do that week down to the hour.

25:04Review 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.

25:24Scroll 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 onto algorithmic social media in general and only go based off of search.

25:41So only search 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?

25:55When you do something intentionally, 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.

26:13Because 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.

26:27Now, 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 Substack. I send out two free letters a week on all of those things.

26:43And 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

How to engineer an identity and reset your life

26:57in the next video. Bye.