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

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1: (Fuck this Event)

• Chapter 2: (Understanding discipline)

• 1. Discipline in it’s purest form, is the skill of …

• 2. Discipline is a necessity, not a luxury.

• Chapter 3: (How to Work Hard)

• 1. Pick a challenging habit that’s still within yo …

• 2. Apply progressive overload.

• 3. Switch out the habit for a more challenging var …

  • The Unfiltered Section:

Before we start,

Why should you listen to me?

I went from not even knowing what discipline was to it now becoming a fundamental cornerstone in my life.

And in this post, I’ll share with you the exact steps that I’ve learnt which helped skyrocket my discipline skill.

(Also, If you’ve wondered where I’ve been, then you can skip over to the last section if you’re interested)

Also also, if this post is too long to read in one sitting, then I recommend that you read it in small chunks (5-10 minutes) when you’re walking around, eating, waiting in line, stuff like that.

This is a follow up to my previous post on discipline, this email just goes further in depth behind why some people seem to be more disciplined than others, understanding how it works, and practical steps you can use to level up your discipline skill.

You can read the previous post here if you’re interested:

Chapter 1: (Fuck this Event)

It was September of 2022 when I first discovered the concept of discipline.

Not self improvement, but that is what kept me on track to living this disciplined and ambitious lifestyle that I have today.

Looking back, I didn’t how far it would take me, but I wished that many more people could have been able to take the first big leap that I did into this culture of improving one’s self.

And that all comes down to doing hard work. We can imagine getting that six-pack, improving our social skills, building our 10/10 business/career.

But all of that is nothing more than a pipe dream unless we at least level up the skill of discipline first.

Unfortunately, most dreams die not because they failed, but because of a lack of action, and I don’t want you to experience that same reality in the future.

Because let’s be honest, it does suck. It’s supposed to SUCK, that’s what discipline is all about.

My first taste of experiencing true discipline was when I was at the worst period of my life, mentally.

Don’t want to go into much detail, but back then, I felt like I really let myself down after spending all my time, pursuing a girl that I knew wasn’t good for me.

It robbed me of my own pride, my own confidence, and I felt the immense desire to prove my own worth to myself again.

I needed somewhere to channel all of the negative energy out, and that’s is when I first discovered the future cornerstone of my self improvement journey, which was the gym.

I went down the fitness YouTube rabbit hole and before I knew it, I was hooked.

I would constantly research about the best lifting techniques for muscle growth, nutrition advice, you name it, I was obsessed.

I didn’t go to the gym with the intention to become this disciplined macho person, but to escape from reality, to deal with my own failures, and it worked, for a while.

I showed up at times even when I didn’t feel like it, because I believed that I owned it to my younger self to keep going.

The gym became a cornerstone of my life, what ultimately kept it together even during hard times, relationship wise and mental health wise.

Overtime, things started looking better for me.

I wasn’t that lazy, Dorito chip eating person that I’d used to be anymore, I became a person that I found to respect, and other people started to respect me as well.

I learnt that from doing difficult things, it doesn’t make your life harder. But rather, it gives you a stronger back to handle life’s challenges without surrendering into a fetal position.

Afterwards, I got into the self improvement culture from the gym, and I was able to take that disciplined aspect of my life and apply it towards improving my productivity, social skills, and the other habits I would pick up along the way.

This isn’t me waving the flag that every disciplined person goes to the gym, but rather I wanted to look behind the lens on what MIGHT and what CAN make a “disciplined person”

In the next section, I’ll go over the 2 realizations that I made looking back on this event that made me understand why I was able to make such a drastic transformation in a short period of time (And how you can too :)

Chapter 2: (Understanding discipline)

Now you might be a bit skeptical about my story and if this is realistically possible to achieve, but first let me explain.

That single story that I told you, and how I dramatically changed the quality of my life within the span of a few years is not realistically possible.

The story I gave you rather, is just an easy example of how you can integrate discipline into your own life through an F-T-E (Fuck this event)

I’ve spoke about what an F-T-E was on this newsletter before, but for this post I wanted to dive deeper on what this fuck this event represents in terms of becoming disciplined.

(But if you are interested in learning what an F-T-E, then I’d highly recommend you read this older post here, where I go really depth on how you can trigger your own)

You want to become disciplined, but first, you must learn what discipline really is.

Since I believe that most people’s perception on discipline is so skewed and misaligned that it actually throws off the people who do want to level up this skill.

So here are the 2 realizations that I’d made which helped me understand discipline for what it really is just based off of my own personal experiences and collective insights.

1. Discipline in it’s purest form, is the skill of doing the hard work especially when you don’t feel like it.

A lot of the hard tasks that we do look like discipline but their actually not.

A disciplined task is completely different than someone who is disciplined.

A disciplined task could be running a mile straight in the morning, since that requires a degree of effort.

But if the person running wanted to run or was motivated to run, then we couldn’t consider them a disciplined person.

Sure, they did do something that most would deem as discipline, but the desire was built off of intrinsic motivation, from not discipline.

Discipline is the skill of doing the hard work when you don’t feel like it, while motivation is the skill of doing the hard work when you do feel like it.

So in order to train the discipline skill directly, then you need to complete difficult tasks that challenge you mentally, that makes you create excuses to not do the task.

If you wanted to run or you wanted to do that long grueling workout, then you’re discipline skill hasn’t been challenged at all.

I know that I’m ranting on this a lot, but why is this so important?

Because I’ve helped many people in the past who wanted to become more disciplined, to wake up without their lizard giving them an excuse not to, but in the end most of them always failed to meet their expectations.

Why?

Because they didn’t understood the driving factor behind discipline, it’s not supposed to be easy. That’s literally the point of it. Getting yourself to do those hard things is what builds character, and that is where real growth is made.

People want to become more discipline, but instead of training the skill directly. They base their discipline actually from their feelings, which is basically motivation at heart.

They listen to their feelings, and it works…for about a week. They start waking up early, exercising more, reading more, eating healthier.

Every feels great right, life is great, their feeling happier, because they were motivated to do so right?

But what happens when those motivating, happy thoughts disappear. I mean it’s inevitable to happen, your motivation will come and go in the same way that your feelings and emotions change. It’s always, fickle, so the motivation that you’re depending on is never going to be absolute.

So after that one week period, let’s say you don’t feel as motivated as you used to. Those happy thoughts start to slip away. Your sore from all of the workouts you’ve did, you’re tired, you just want to lay on the couch, and the last thing you want to do is go on a run first thing in the morning.

So you say to yourself, “It’s okay, I’m really sore right now, so I’ll take a rest day today and THEN I’ll go back to running tomorrow!”

But tomorrow never comes.

Now let’s say that you’ve actually planned to have a rest day scheduled in week recover, ok that’s great.

But let’s say that this person in the scenario wasn’t planning to have a rest day today, but did it instead because they allowed their emotions to get the better of them.

Now I’m not saying that I’m this super ultra discipline guy that is consistent for 365 days of the year and doesn’t make any mistakes.

Because trust me, I’ve made a lot of mistakes in the past. So that’s why I’m giving you the lessons that I’ve learnt so that hopefully avoid making the same mistake that I did.

And that mistake was listening to my lizard brain, even though I already had plans to complete the task anyway.

You might be thinking “Wait but even if you miss one day, then it’s okay because you can just do DOUBLE tomorrow!”

It might make sense on paper, but that line of thinking is just going to set your future self up for failure.

Because think about it, your future self never wanted you to give 2x the amount of work to him simply because you weren’t disciplined enough to do it yesterday. He expected you to do the hard work now, so that he can experience the fruits of your labor.

But now that you cursed your future self with your laziness, is he just going to listen to you and just accept the fate he’s been given? Of course not.

Your future self is going to think that you’re a dumbass (and rightly so) for giving him extra work that both you and him know that you’re not capable of completing.

2. Discipline is a necessity, not a luxury.

Discipline is built off of a need, not a desire. While a lot of people do desire to have discipline, most never get it because of one single reason.

They are just too comfortable with what they’re at right now.

Trust me, I’m no saint. I’m extremely guilty of this too.

But it’s with this realization that I’m able to spot it quickly enough to prevent myself from becoming too comfortable with where I’m at.

If you only got 1 thing out of this post, please let it be this.

If the desire for comfort is stronger than the desire to be disciplined, then you’ll never take action.

A lot of people want to have that level or discipline in their lives, but their lifestyle doesn’t require any hardship to move from that point.

This isn’t to make of people who are comfortable, but this is the harsh truth that I see many young men (including myself) try to avoid.

This ties well with the first chapter about unlocking your FTE, since my core desire was to reclaim my own self worth and pride once again.

It was that hardship, that pain that I’ve experienced which was able to transform my life to where I am today.

Because if I didn’t experience that, then I would became comfortable with where I’m at right now.

I wouldn’t have started to improve my health, my appearance, and I would have never made this newsletter.

Discipline comes from a strong core reason, not from necessarily from superficial gain.

But your reason could be different.

So the big question is, how do you integrate hardship into your life if you’re already comfortable?

Option 1: You can choose the conventional route. Start by leveling up your discipline skill through small challenging tasks, and then work your way up to bigger, more grueling acts of discipline. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, but it will take longer.

Or,

Option 2: You throw yourself into hardships, into challenges. Either purposely or accidentally. Through those hardships, you experience your first F-T-E. From that original point, you slingshot your progress exponentially. Making 5x faster progress than the guy who didn’t embrace hardships in the beginning.

Granted, it might leave you with some emotional scars. But if that’s the price to pay to get you to where you want to be in life, then that decision is up to you.

Chapter 3: (How to Work Hard)

So in this post, I’ve told you my story on how I became disciplined, what discipline really is all about, and now I’m going to give you the practical steps that I’ve used to level up the discipline skill.

Just like in a video game, discipline is a skill that we can level up.

But most people start off with an extremely low level in their discipline skill, so we must choose the tasks that are within our reach.

Let me use a video game analogy that might help you better understand this concept.

Imagine we are in an RPG game. And someone who is currently level 2 (just making random numbers) only has the capacity to only kill the chickens right now.

Every time they kill the chickens, they gain a small % of Exp (experience) which slightly increases their skill.

Overtime, they level up and get to kill harder bosses like the goblins because they’ve practiced this skill for a while.

That’s exactly how we should view our own discipline skill in the real world.

Because, why couldn’t the player just kill the goblin in the beginner to get more Exp and level up faster that way?

Just like how discipline is, you are only capable of completing the tasks that are within your current mental capabilities.

Killing the goblin while you’re still a novice is basically like trying to complete a 1 hour workout everyday even though you still struggle with making your bed in the morning.

It’s not sustainable. So we’re better off focusing on the small tasks that we can handle right now, so that we can eventually get to completing harder tasks in the future.

Here are the actionable steps I would recommend as a complete beginner.

1. Pick a challenging habit that’s still within your reach.

It can be anything, as long as it challenges you to complete the habit.

If it’s too easy, you’re discipline skill isn’t being trained.

If it’s too hard, then you won’t be able to sustain it long enough to see results.

Doesn’t have to be the gym, just a habit that requires discipline to complete.

It can be cleaning, making your bed, reading, doing deep work, or studying.

2. Apply progressive overload.

Once you feel mentally capable of completing the habit consistently, then the next objective is to make it more challenging.

That’s the purpose of progressive overload, increasing the difficulty of an action to yield more progress and results.

I’ll use the gym analogy for simplicity. Let’s say that this week, you hit bench press for 60 pounds 6 times.

Then for the next week, you aim to either increase the weight or increase the amount of reps (times) that you complete the movement.

So if you wanted progressive overload in your reading habit, then you would increase the duration of the reading session to make it more difficult.

3. Switch out the habit for a more challenging variation once it gets too easy.

The goal is to keep constantly challenging yourself in terms of leveling up your discipline skill.

So if you feel like making your bed everyday is no longer a challenge for you, then you can switch it out for something harder such as walking outside for 5 minutes everyday.

Once that becomes easy, then you can change the habit for exercising for 30 minutes everyday.

And then so forth.

I used to only be able to do deep work for 45 minute MAX before becoming too mentally fatigued.

But now, I’m been able to increase that to (2) 90 minute blocks before having to take a break.