I’ve found myself in a position where I get dozens of messages on a daily basis from people asking me for advice.
99% of the time, any valuable piece of advice that I could give involves discipline. It is not rare either that discipline itself is "the answer" that people are looking for.
And even when it’s not someone’s question I’m answering but I just decide to share with you something that I believe could improve your lives, I find myself having to mention the importance of discipline.
And no matter how hard I try to offer a fresh perspective and give out some practical advice that will actually help you get going, I cannot escape saying that, at the end of the day, none of the advice really matters because you just have to do the actual work.
This is where I run into a problem.
If I tell you that, at the end of the day, you just have to do the work, it could be seen as if I’m overlooking an important fact. Some people were raised and have been living in undisciplined environments, and it’s extremely difficult for them to "just do the work." In some cases, they even believe it’s impossible.
This is a fair point, so let me address it. And it should come as no surprise that I am going to be using real-world examples while doing so.
When I first started going to the gym around 11 years ago, I had a training partner. He was my age and of similar build. We would go to the gym 5-6 days a week and work out together. He was putting in the same amount of work as I did. He was slightly stronger on some exercises, and I was on others. But we were as equally matched as training partners could be. Except for one thing. He was extremely undisciplined with his diet. I simply couldn’t understand it. And I judged him hard for it.
"How can’t you just start eating clean, man? You already know what are the right things to eat. Just eat those things and cut out the crap."
I kept judging until I realized how ignorant I was. In the span of a couple of weeks, he invited me to his house at least 5-6 times. Every single time I came over, there was a stack of pizza boxes and an XL Coke bottle on the lunch table. Eventually, he told me that, ever since he could remember, they would order pizza for lunch. Sometimes they would switch it for hamburgers. But he never had a home-cooked lunch in his life. And his family, 4 of them, would go through 2 XL coke bottles a day.
This was the first time I realized what kind of a disadvantage some people have been put in by their environment.
By no means did I grow up in a fitness-focused family. We didn’t know the macronutrient ratio of our meals. But there was an awareness that a home-cooked, whole-food meal was better than processed junk food. So that’s what we ate the vast majority of the time. There were also rarely any snacks or sweets in the house. So that’s why they weren’t a habit but what they were supposed to be: a treat. And anyone who has experience with trying to change their body will know that just those two things make a really solid foundation for a healthy way of eating.
I looked at our different situations and realized that not everyone has the same starting point and that just doing the thing that needs to be done is even more difficult for some people than it already is.
So now you hopefully understand that I am not coming from a place of ignorance when talking about discipline.
However, if you think I just gave you an excuse for why you cannot be disciplined, you are gravely mistaken.
There is something more that I learned along the way. Both from the example of my ex training partner as well as from the numerous different people I’ve met throughout my life since then.
No matter how you approach the situation, no matter how many different ways and how far you want to break it down, at the end of the day, being disciplined is still up to you.
My training partner eventually started cooking his own meals. A teenager who had never had a home-cooked meal in his life started cooking 3 meals a day. And I wish I could say that I encouraged him or helped him in any way, but I didn’t. I was just a kid who only knew to feel sorry for him when I realized his situation. The change he made was all his. No one pushed him or dragged him into it. No one held his hand. One day, he just decided to take matters into his own hands.
Was he inspired by me or someone else from the gym? Was he inspired by a fitness influencer or an athlete that he was following? Maybe he was. But it was he who had to decide not to be a slave to his environment. It was he who had to start cooking those meals. No amount of inspiration or motivation can do the actual work for you.
You will find people from all kinds of backgrounds develop into some of the most disciplined people you will ever meet. And this is the most interesting thing about that: the story that you tell yourself about those people explains who you are, not who they are.
Let’s take, for example, someone who came from a toxic and destructive environment but managed to make themselves into a respectable person.
There will always be those who say, "They had no other choice but to raise above their environment." And this is, with all due respect, the most stupid and weak thing someone could say. It gives zero credit to the person who decided to take their life into their own hands. It ignores the fact that there is always a choice between making your life even worse or trying to make it better.
If you decide that you have no power to direct yourself and your life, you will always find excuses. In some people you will see that they are disciplined because they grew up in a right kind of environment with proper support system. In others, you will see how they are disciplined because "they had no other choice" but to be better than their environment. You will try to negate the fact that people have the ability to make a choice to be disciplined because you want to relieve yourself of the responsibility of making that choice.
However, there is a catch: You have to make a choice about how you see those stories. You have to make a choice between seeing those stories as people having control over their lives or as people being completely shaped by their environments and life circumstances.
No matter how hard you try, you cannot escape the fact that it is up to you to make that choice.
And if you can make a choice for the way you see someone else’s story, you can make a choice for the way you see yours.
And how you see your story will influence what you make of it. If you choose to see that people have some control over themselves and their lives, you will end up using that to take action and start changing yourself and your life in the direction you want. No matter how "bad" your environment is or how unsupportive it is of the changes you want to make, if you admit to yourself that you have control over your life, you will make a change.
So yes, I understand that it’s not easy for you to just do the thing that needs to be done. It’s not easy for anyone. And it might be even more difficult for you than it is for most people.
But you still have to just do the thing. And it is absolutely in your power to do it.
Everything else that you tell yourself is just an excuse.
Thank you for reading.
If you like my work and get some value from it, there is zero-cost support in the form of subscribing, liking this post, commenting if you have any thoughts on it, and of course sharing this with anyone who would find it interesting.
Or you can consider becoming a paid supporter of Existential Espresso for 5$ per month. By doing this you would be helping me to keep investing time into researching and writing all the content on the daily basis.
What you get by becoming a paid supporter is access to the locked essays (such as “Why Having a Price on My Head Didn’t Upset Me”or “Why Living With a Bulletproof Vest is The Best Thing to Ever Happen to Me”), as well as an opportunity to recommend topics for future essays.
However, even taking the time out of your day to read what I have to share with you means more to me than you can imagine. Thank you.
Discipline will forge you. You may want to run for the challenge, but you are still destined to grow. That´s the simple question you should want to ask: what if my destiny comes? Will I be prepared?