In this edition of the Peak Performance Newsletter, we will be discussing:

Table of Contents

• Reddit, but for self improvement. Welcome to the S …

• Discipline literally equals freedom, let me explai …

  • Author’s Notes:

  • (Chapter 1)

  • (Chapter 2)

• Treat discipline as a skill and you will experienc …

  • Practical Steps to Take:

  • (Chapter 1)

  • (Chapter 2)

    • Author’s Notes:

Before we start,

Reddit, but for self improvement. Welcome to the Summit Crew.

If that seems interesting to you, then you can click the link below to sign up.

Right now during the pre-launch, I’ll currently be accepting only 50 members in total to keep the community actively engaged.

Before we continue, just a bit of background info…

And lastly,

And in this post, I’ll give you the practical steps that you can use to increase your own discipline so that you can start doing the things that are meaningful to you.

Discipline literally equals freedom, let me explain.

Author’s Notes:

For the first section of the post, I tell you my story/upbringing and it’s basically to help you find that desire, that drive to become disciplined for yourself. But if you just want to skip to the actionable steps on how you can actually become disciplined, then I won’t blame you.

My goal with this post and the reason why it’s so short is because I want more people to stop beating around the bush and start making the changes that they want for their own lives.

Discipline is hard yes, but it shouldn’t be this impossible thing to understand. It’s not because you haven’t found the right tactic or the right system, it’s literally because you haven’t train the discipline skill directly.

Easier said than done, but if you have the courage to change, then that’s all you really need to start taking action.

Don’t try to overcomplicate it, JUST START.

(Chapter 1)

Let me tell you a story.

It was 3 years ago, when I first got into self improvement full time. I was going to the gym consistently, eating healthier, socializing more.

Life was good, but there was something off.

Whenever I did something that would require discipline, say going to the gym or doing deep work, I would never really feel much resistance towards completing the task.

Sure it was hard and grueling at times, but the results that I would get from it would always outweigh the potential discomfort that I faced initially.

I was told by people on the internet that discipline is this super hard, mystical, magical thing that you can only obtain once you meet the “prerequisites and the 7 daily steps”.

Obviously I’m exaggerating, but it left me thinking how many people view discipline as this magical accomplishment that is near impossible to obtain.

And to be honest, I never really “struggled” with discipline throughout my entire life.

Of course, there are sometimes where I would be too lazy to do the work and keep procrastinating for a few hours, a few days, and then I would get back to it as usual the following day.

Discipline, at least to me, was never something that I had to etch into my wall or do some type of weird ritual to manifest.

I can’t really describe it fully, but it was like the discipline to do the hard work was always “there”. Like something I just came more naturally to me than to other people.

And I’m thinking about it while I’m trying to write this email, that it never really occurred to how life would be like for someone who literally has ZERO discipline.

Like I’m talking about zero drive, zero motivation to do anything, and being constantly lazy and procrastinating is just a normal part of their day.

I’m not saying this to be condescending and “yeah I’m better than everyone else”, but it left me thinking “oh damn, some people genuinely don’t have the discipline to do everyday tasks that would be considered easy to do because of how DOWNBAD they are right now”

And as a writer, I have to take responsibility in leading people down a negative path of self loathing for not being capable to take action in their life.

I’ve made all of these posts covering self improvement topics on these “mindset shifts” and advanced concepts that I myself would have found valuable.

But none of them wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

Why?

Because the reality is that most people aren’t even at that stage to even begin comprehending about those topics yet.

Because the reality is that most people hate their life, hate their job, and want a way out, an escape out of the life that either themselves or their own circumstances have put them in.

You know to be honest, I was going to start off with this section talking about how hard it was for me to become disciplined, the struggles that I had to overcome, all that stuff.

You would have been able to relate to me more if I did, and thus you would start to read my emails more, and so I would gained more active readers.

But that wasn’t the truth of my situation.

(Chapter 2)

The truth was that I’ve gotten off easy in comparison to most people.

I look back at it now, and I understand why discipline always came more naturally to me than to others.

You see, I come from a very conservative Asian upbringing, where having discipline in your studies/work was the norm, and any deviation from that expectation would usually result in beatings or humiliation.

My parents were no different, so whenever I didn’t get good grades, then I would have been shunned or abused for underperforming.

And, the reason why I can talk about this so openly is because I’m starting to have a sense of gratitude with how I was raised.

Obviously not for the childhood trauma that I’ve experienced but with how discipline was conditioned into me at a very young age.

I’m not trying to make this overly deep since this is just a post about discipline, but I want to give you a better perspective on how your childhood environment can affect how disciplined you are in your adulthood.

Now if you’ve asked me a year ago on what I thought about this, then I would have had a heavy resentment towards my parents and towards Asian culture in general.

I won’t lie, I still harbor that resentment. I’m in my 20’s now but I often reflect on how much that same parental conditioning still affects how I make my decisions and basically how I view the world today.

But now looking back at it, I do have a new sense of application for my upbringing all be it without the hard times.

Because without those hardships that I’ve experienced during my childhood, how many potential hardships was I able to avoid in the future because I was naturally more disciplined?

There’s a million, possibly a billion people in the world right now who want to change because they hate waking up everyday to a life that they don’t want.

They are ambitious, yes. They want to go to the gym consistently to get in shape because they despise looking at the mirror everyday, they want to start a business or study harder in school to become more financially secure, they want to move to a different place or have more time for themselves but they can’t due to their workplace or their boss.

All of those desires that I just mentioned? They are all forms of freedom that CANNOT be acquired unless you have discipline.

Physical freedom, financial freedom, location freedom, time freedom, forget all of those things if you aren’t willing to start becoming more disciplined right now.

Discipline is the only path to true freedom, and in the next section, I’ll give you practical, autistic level steps that you can apply to start leveling up your discipline skill today.

Treat discipline as a skill and you will experience success.

If there is one thing that I want to into your head about discipline, it’s this.

Discipline is a skill, so treat it like a skill that you can level up and master.

Let me give you a gym analogy .

Let’s say that a complete beginner goes to the gym for the first time. He goes in and tries to lift the heavy 225 pound barbell for the first time.

He fails the lift, obviously, and he complains that because he couldn’t lift it the first time, he’s going to quit and stop going to the gym.

Well, how do you get stronger in the gym?

You get stronger by training consistency, because strength is a skill that you can LEVEL UP overtime. Just like any other skill, social skills, financial skills, emotional intelligence, etc. it is something that you have to repeatedly train if you want to get better at it.

So why is it anything different with building the Skill of discipline?

I’ll discuss this topic more in depth in my next post, but this is just the rundown on how you should view discipline so that it will be easier for you to understand later on.

Since for this post alone, I want to focus on giving you the practical steps that you can take to level up your discipline skill so that you can start changing your life right away.

Practical Steps to Take:

1. Train the skill directly through hard tasks that require discipline.

Really sounds like common sense, but it still blows my mind the amount of people that think that discipline is like an attribute or “personality trait” that someone has rather than a skill that we are all capable of mastering.

For example, you see someone training at the gym very consistency and is extremely jacked, and you might think;

“Oh man, I wish I had the discipline to go the gym consistency like them”.

Well let me ask you this, how do you think they became so disciplined?

It’s not because they were disciplined already so they were able to go to the gym, but that because they went to the gym, they became more disciplined.

So what tasks can I do to level up my discipline skill?

Well the one example that I’ve been using throughout this entire post is…the gym.

That is arguably one of the easiest ways to train your discipline skill directly because it literally simulates the exact variables that you need to master it.

You go to the gym and pick up the heavy dumbbells, you lift it until your muscles give out, and then overtime you’ll increase the weight just slightly so that you’ll always be challenging yourself.

It doesn’t have to be just lifting weights, though I do recommend it. It can be any form of exercise that you enjoy the most, so it could be walking, running, swimming, etc.

Just anything that challenges you, gives you that slight resistance from completing the task, is what is going to help you get experience (or EXP) in that skill.

2. Lower your expectations, seriously.

(Chapter 1)

Now this is a counterpoint to the first actionable step, and you might already be thinking this already.

The answer is that you don’t, and you shouldn’t.

Because for most people, their level of discipline is so low that even on a GOOD DAY, they wouldn’t be able to exercise or do these grueling sessions that they see on social media.

So because we don’t have the level of discipline required to exercise or to get in shape, we should just give up right? There’s no point in doing all of this if I can’t even have the discipline to walk 10 minutes down the sidewalk everyday right?

Not exactly.

You see, what you expect yourself to achieve, and what you can actually achieve are completely 2 different things.

You WANT to be able to exercise for 2 hours without difficulties, you WANT to be able to eat healthy without cheating on your diet, you WANT to lose weight so that you can feel more confident and better about yourself.

But is that actually the reality of your situation?

Unfortunately not.

Like I mentioned earlier, you’ve tried all of those things before. You were consistent for 3 days at most, then it was too hard, and you’ve gave up on it.

The reason why is because that level of discipline is too out of your reach for you to sustain that long term, we need to focus on building your discipline skill directly instead of using short term goals to please our own ego.

(Chapter 2)

So here’s the solution, and it is going to slightly piss you off because it is the unsexy answer.

Lower the barrier to entry so low that even on your worst days, you can still complete the hard task.

We want to choose a task that is challenging, but is still within our current reach of “capabilities”.

Let me explain.

You want to go to the gym because you think that it will give you more results versus if you consistently make your bed every morning.

And you would be right, but the problem isn’t the amount of progress that you get right now, but if you’re actually able to sustain that in the long run.

Most people can’t, and that’s okay. You just need to pick a task that is challenging but within your reach.

So if you’re the person who struggles with making their bed or brushing their teeth every morning, then that is where you should start at.

Now here’s the problem.

You’re ego is going to stop you from listening to me because it thinks that those tasks are beneath it.

I don’t want to come off as harsh or an asshole in this post, but you need to hear this.

You need to start off small because you DON’T have the level of disciplined required to complete those hard tasks comfortably.

It is these small tasks that might feel meaningless at first but those are what actually help you build the level of discipline that you want in the future.

Not all forms of discipline is created equal, because it is relative to each individuals capabilities.

So a common example of an act of discipline is the conventional “wake up at 4 AM and run early in the morning” while an act discipline that is relative to your capabilites would be making your bed or flossing every morning.

I’m just repeating these examples simply as an extreme perspective of someone who has absolutely zero discipline at all. While this section is about lowering your expectations, it’s possible to shoot too low to the point of no reward at all.

The task shouldn’t be so easy to where you would feel like your wasting your time or too hard to where your ego would try to defend your own stubbornness to choose something more sustainable, but rather in the middle.

So for a person with “average” and I mean “average” levels of discipline, their hard work task would be cleaning their room or doing 10 pushups everyday.