Mental Mastery

Feb 10, 2024

If you want to take action on this newsletter you should check out this free notion template I put together for you. It’s made up of journal questions that coincide with what is in this letter.

2 Weeks ago, I completed a 4100-word newsletter about willpower. It was released just before this one.

Not a single second of it felt like work.

2 years ago, I was in high school. In fact, at this exact time, I was in what was called “academic recovery” (essentially summer school during the school year) because I wasn’t turning in my English essays.

In fact, I failed English class at least one semester every single year since middle school. I hated writing. And I refused to do things that I hated.

Now I'm a writer. I write every day because it’s fun. It's also the base of my business.

Now that same morning that I wrote the newsletter, I also went to the gym at 5 AM.

Let me take you back one year this time(I promise this will all come together.)

“Hey lil bro, let me tell you a story”

It’s early 2023 and I have 2 gym memberships. One near my job and one not really that close to anything but my friends went there.

I thought that having a gym near my job and having one to go to with friends would make me more likely to go but it was the exact opposite.

I went once to 2x a week maximum. Most weeks I wouldn’t go at all.

(I was also eating way more calories than I should have been at the time thinking that I was “bulking”)

I was around 165-170 in this picture. Meaty asf(I'll show you what I look like now at the end.)

Anyway, now I go to the gym 6x a week. Soon be adding running to my off days so I'll be exercising 7 days a week. Also hopping on a new program.

I’ve been exercising consistently for a least 4 days a week for 8 months straight. I’ve only missed enough workouts to count on one hand.

But I actually hate the gym. I rarely feel like going. But I go anyway.

How is it that I used to hate doing both of these things and now one of them I love to do and don’t need discipline, while the other I still don’t like? (in fact, I like it even less now)

The difference between the two is that one is fueled by passion and the other is fueled by discipline.

Play The Right Game

Before you learn how to build discipline, you need to ask yourself something:

Am I doing the wrong things?

If I have so much resistance towards this thing, is it really what I should be doing?

Is there a way that I could do this thing differently that would make it more enjoyable?

If you lack the discipline to start something or every time you do the task, you don’t enjoy it even after you’ve started, you may be doing the wrong thing.

For example, imagine someone who is trying to get into an online business right now. There's all of these business models that you could get into that are very profitable but that doesn't mean you should do them.

No matter how much money you make from it is it with it if you hate your life?

I don’t think so.

I’d much rather make less money doing something I love than make a ton of money but I actually hate my life.

In fact, I only just started making more money from my business than I was making from my job that I quit almost 4 months ago(it was a pretty good-paying job, especially for someone my age.)

But I hated it so much that I saved up thousands of dollars and got a part-time job to fuel my endeavors and quit my full-time job.

And things worked out.

Instead of relying on discipline to do a task, wouldn’t we rather be motivated to?

In Feel Good Productivity, Ali Abdaal mentions how all motivation falls on a spectrum.

One end of the Motivation Spectrum has extrinsic motivation and the other, is intrinsic.

Intrinsic motivation comes from the inside. Driven by:

• self-fulfillment
• curiosity
• genuine desire

Extrinsic motivation comes from the outside. Driven by:

• money
• material rewards
• social approval.

I’d like to think that the complete switch in my attitude toward writing shows that intrinsic motivation is way more powerful than extrinsic.

True and lasting motivation comes when you are in alignment with your ideal self and your values.

When I was in school, I was in a position where I “had” to do the work because I would fail the class if I didn’t.

Not because I wanted to.

I had no power in the situation and I didn't like that. The only motivation that I may have had at the time was to avoid the negative circumstances that would arise if I didn’t get my grades up to pass. Which only made me resent the work even more.

Now I write because it brings me fulfillment. And I choose to write every day. And I get to choose what I write about.

I have the power now and I like it that way.

You may find that you completely eliminate the need for discipline by choosing the right tasks to do.

Ones that align with who you are.

Create Your Own Clarity

If you know for a fact that the task you're trying to do is in alignment with who you are and you genuinely want to do it, then you may actually be undisciplined.

But before we rely solely on discipline there is another way to go about this:

What you actually need is some clarity on what you need to get started.

There might be something else going on that is holding you back from doing the task.

When I feel resistance towards something, I know that there’s an obstacle that makes me feel this way.

I have negative feelings toward the task for whatever reason and pinpointing and eliminating it becomes the number one priority.

These feelings usually stem from some sort of doubt and confusion. You may also be anticipating some sort of discomfort or pain.

Think about the things that you do on a daily basis.

That's your routine. You’ve probably been going to school or working 5 days a week for years right?

Probably doing the same tasks before and after those things as well. It's what you know. It’s your life. Your little bubble of comfort.

When we are faced with uncertainty, we start to make judgments. These judgments come from the expectations that we have towards that thing.

You can’t discipline yourself to go to the gym, because you have preconceived expectations of the pain you will derive from it.

What if people stare at me?

I don’t know what exercises to do.

Is the weather good enough to go to the gym? It’s kind of cold.

Then the more time you give this negative thought loop to survive, the more limiting beliefs and irrational fear you’ll get. Making you push it off even further.

I think I’ll just go on a diet instead.

None of my friends work out either so why should I go?

I walk a lot at work anyway. I don't need to exercise.

All of these thoughts and negativity from something that hasn’t even happened yet.

You’ve now cast so many votes for that type of person that they're being sworn into office.

It’s become part of your identity to not work out.

All of this can be avoided by creating clarity for the thing you're trying to achieve.

Creating clarity is easy when you ask yourself 3 questions:

What is the purpose behind the action I’m trying to take?

What is the end goal?

What are the priority tasks that I need to accomplish?

In my case, the way that I was able to start actually

going to the gym and get consistent was by identifying and changing the why behind going. I originally was going to the gym to get bigger so I could get attention from people and post my progress on social media. Like most young men.

But it was clear that that approach wasn't working. Instead, I decided to think in the long term:

What kind of person do I see myself as 10 years from now health-wise?

I wasn't really sure what I wanted to look like, but I knew that I wanted to feel healthy and be in good shape.

While thinking about my future self, I also realized that he would be grateful if I got into the habit of fitness and good nutrition now. At age 19 as opposed to later when it's way harder to.

I had come to the conclusion that I wanted to be in good health more than I wanted to fuck up things for my future self. That became my reason for going.

I now want to go to the gym, more than I want to sleep in because I know that if I listen to my brain right now, it’s going to bite me in the future.

Once you understand what you want to do and why you want to do it by developing a deeper reason for doing it, you can move on to level up the discipline skill.

Making Discipline Easy

A lot of that uncertainty that we talked about before can be drastically reduced by simply making discipline easy.

What I mean by that is by making the thing you’re trying to be disciplined in as easy as possible. Easier than you think you may need to make it. But not so easy that you’ll think it’s too beneath you.

If your task seems out of reach, you will hesitate to do it. Because you are uncertain and anxious. You need a plan to get started. That plan creates clarity, and clarity creates action.

You need absolute clarity on what to do with the perfect mix of confidence.

“To learn, you need a certain degree of confidence, not too much not too little. If you have too little confidence you’ll think you can’t learn, if you have too much confidence you’ll think you do not have to learn.”-Eric Hoffer

Confidence comes from knowledge. The things that we are already confident in, we know how to do them. You aren’t confident in doing the thing you want to do because you don’t know how to. There’s too much friction in the way.

You need to make your system so efficient to the point that it requires a minimal amount of energy to get the desired goal.

The more energy required to do the thing, (more friction) the less likely you are to do it.

Chances are, the thing is you're not disciplined because you're playing at a level way above your skill level.

When I struggled with gym consistency, I believed that if I didn't go 4-5 times a week on a specific schedule, then I was failing, and it wasn't worthwhile.

I set an expectation for myself that I couldn't meet. When I fell short, instead of adjusting my expectations and showing some humility, I would berate myself.

This made me feel bad and, in turn, discouraged me from going to the gym. You can see how this creates a self-defeating cycle that doesn't make sense.

You might feel compelled to follow someone else's approach because you believe it's the only way to be successful.

This is a common issue with hustle culture. It has escalated to a point where the quality of work is overlooked, and the focus is merely on outdoing others, often at the expense of personal relationships.

Rather than fixating on the output, consider your input. Focus on what you can do now.

I realized that consistency is the key to achieving my fitness goals, a fact I had previously overlooked.

I stopped obsessively consuming fitness content, worrying about protein synthesis, whether my friends were going to the gym, and the speed of my progress.

I began to adopt a long-term mindset by tempering my expectations and distancing myself from an unrealistic ideal.

From this perspective, I set a new expectation where my skill matched the challenge.

For me, maintaining a routine of going to the gym every other day, about four days a week, worked well. This made scheduling other activities easier and prevented feelings of being overworked, as I had a rest day after each workout.

To ensure consistency, I joined a gym near my house. This allowed me to exercise before or after work without needing to carry workout clothes around.

Setting a manageable goal and reducing the friction of starting will lead to consistency. If you're struggling with consistency, it may be an issue of difficulty rather than discipline.

Newtons First Law

For around 3-4 months, I followed this routine without fail and it became a habit for me.

That was until I got hurt at work and had to take time off the gym to let my shoulders heal.

Instead of using my injury as an excuse to rest, as I might have done in the past, I immediately considered what I could do to replace resistance training.

I had been consistently working out to the point where going to the gym every other day had become a part of my identity. When I was unable to keep up with this routine, I felt physically stressed.

Despite before, not even enjoying the gym and struggling to go once a week, losing that habit now caused me stress.

In response, I started running as a substitute. I ran every other day for a month and a half, maintaining the same consistency as my gym routine. I subsequently became a runner.

If I had skipped the whole story of how I started small and told you, guys, that now I go to the gym 6 days a week and run on my off days, you would have thought I'm an extremely disciplined person.

But now you can see that I have shaped my life around this thing and it's part of who I am to do this. Even though it does take discipline to go, because most days I wake up wanting to go back under the covers, I still can push through when I think about my ideal self, and how I don't want to lose the momentum.

Building this discipline and consistency is so powerful because it translates over to other parts of your life. Now that I’m consistent in the gym and have built up my discipline skills, it opens up opportunities to try new things that are a little above my skill level.

For about three to four months, I adhered to this routine without exception, which became a habit for me. Similar to Newton's First Law of Inertia—once an object is in motion, it tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by an external force.

My routine was only interrupted when I had an injury and had to pause gym visits to let my shoulders recover.

Rather than allowing this injury to ruin my momentum and serve as a reason for rest, I immediately looked for a substitute for resistance training.

Running became this substitute, and I did that every other day for a month and a half, maintaining the momentum of my gym routine. The consistency of that original routine led to its integration into my identity. Not being able to work, due to the injury, caused me a lot of stress—which just shows that this identity stuff really works.

I had built up this part of myself, and something was trying to take that away from me so I fought to survive it.

If I had skipped the story of how I started and told you that I now go to the gym six days a week and run on my off days, you might assume that I'm an incredibly disciplined individual. However, the reality is that I have shaped my life around this activity; it has become a part of who I am.

“Don’t change your diet to change your life, change your life to change your diet”

Although it requires discipline to maintain—especially on mornings when I don’t want to get out of bed—I still manage to persist. The momentum I've built propels me forward, aligning with Newton's First Law, and the thought of my ideal self keeps me from losing that momentum.

The discipline and consistency I've developed through my exercise routine have had a profound ripple effect, extending into other areas of my life. With consistency in one area established, I now have the confidence and discipline to explore new challenges that slightly exceed my current skill level.

Just like Newton's First Law, once the momentum of discipline is established, it tends to stay in motion, driving personal growth and opening up new possibilities.

As I continued to maintain this momentum, I realized that much of it was becoming automatic, a concept I now refer to as "Integrated Identity."

I’ve mentioned this in the letter, “This is Why You Cant Change” and a few others.

Similar to an object maintaining its path due to inertia, our actions and habits can become an integrated part of our identity, so much so that they begin to happen almost automatically.

Integrated Identity is the process of programming our minds to incorporate certain habits and behaviors into our backend code.

Much like how a computer program runs certain functions automatically, our minds can be programmed to carry out these disciplinary actions as a natural part of who we are.

In my case, going to the gym and running became more than just activities I did; they became part of who I was, seamlessly integrating into my identity.

This is the power of Integrated Identity. When we consistently engage in certain behaviors, they start to make up our sense of self. We no longer have to consciously push ourselves to do these actions; we do them because they are a part of who we are.

Once an object is in motion, it continues to move unless acted upon by an external force. Similarly, once a behavior becomes part of our Integrated Identity, we continue to carry it out, almost effortlessly.

This doesn't mean we can't change or adapt. Just as external forces can change an object's direction, new experiences, knowledge, or goals can reshape our Integrated Identity. The key is to harness this concept to foster positive habits and behaviors that align with our ideal self and values.

To summarize, the process of building discipline isn't just about forcing yourself to do things you hate. That’s only scratching the surface.

It's about aligning your actions with your values, reducing friction to make tasks more manageable, and integrating these actions into your identity.

It's a journey of self-discovery and growth, where you learn to understand your motivations, limitations, and capabilities.

Remember, the journey starts small, with simple tasks that you can build upon. As your discipline grows, so does your ability to tackle more challenging tasks and achieve your goals.

Remember that discipline is not a punishment, but a means to live in alignment with your true self. It's the key to personal growth and fulfillment.

I think even Goggins would agree with that.

Stay consistent, stay patient, and most importantly, stay purposeful.

Make sure to check out 14 Days To Purpose, a free journaling course to aid you on your self-improvement journey with actionable steps and questions you’ve never asked yourself.

p.s. this letter is bigger than the last one. 4636 words:)

This is me now btw:

In between about 145-150 regularly and maintaining.

This probably won't be the last time we talk about discipline but, that’s all for today, enjoy your weekend.

See ya.

-Abraham