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%?

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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, after a hiatus in training, I started finding it hard to even go for a walk or run. Wasn’t I someone who enjoyed exercise? How could that change?

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

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

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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 deep within the brain. The basal ganglia are responsible for automatic behaviours such as walking, talking, and playing sports. When we perform an action repeatedly, these regions create neural pathways that allow us to perform the action without conscious thought.

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

The key takeaway: once an action is repeated often enough, it becomes part of who you are.

You can become someone who enjoys the gym, or someone who enjoys reading. As James Clear wrote:

“The process of building habits is actually the process of becoming yourself.”

Once you decide who you want to be, you choose habits that enable that identity — and then cultivate them.

Success is actually a short race: a sprint fuelled by discipline just long enough for habit to take over.

Forming a habit takes time. Research shows a wide range — from 2 weeks to 9 months — depending on the individual and the difficulty of the behaviour.
66 days is the sweet spot. For about two months, your new habit will feel uncomfortable. Accept this. Push through it. Eventually, the behaviour moves to the basal ganglia — it becomes you.

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Delayed Gratification & the Problem of “Today”

We are constantly making decisions today that we hope will make us better tomorrow.
The problem, of course, is that it’s always today.

When the moment comes, we sell ourselves short.

I first encountered this in The Science of Self-Control by Howard Rachlin.

1. We suffer from a distortion of perception

Imagine your long-term goals as the moon, and your short-term desires as a nearby tree.
From afar, both look small — the moon even smaller. But as you move closer to the tree, it grows to dominate your vision while the moon fades out of view entirely.

The same happens psychologically: as short-term rewards approach, they loom larger and drown out the abstract vision of your future self.

2. Long-term goals are abstract and intangible

As the short-term desire approaches, it feels real.
Long-term goals are distant and vague — you can’t “feel” your six-months-from-now fitness or your ten-years-from-now financial freedom. So we discount the future and overvalue the present.

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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?

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. Progress accelerates when you give yourself permission to go all in on one thing at a time.

Stay Connected to Your Future Self

It’s easy to think of your future self as someone else — a more disciplined, more motivated version of you. But they’re not separate. Every choice you make today either invests in them or robs from them.

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 — meditate, exercise, use cold exposure or fasting. You’re not trying to suffer; you’re training your nervous system to handle challenge.

Ritualize the Morning

The first few hours of your day set the tone.
Build rituals that ground you — journaling, reading, or light exercise. Stack small wins early; they build momentum.

Prime Your State

Your emotional state determines how you show up.
Movement, breathwork, music, or cold therapy can all shift physiology — which then shifts psychology. Use that to your advantage.

Set a Hard Lower Limit

Ambition is great, but consistency wins.
Set a minimum standard you never miss — 10 pushups, 1 page, 5 minutes of focus. The goal isn’t performance, it’s identity: never put up a zero.

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Closing Thoughts

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

“You don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

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.