how much discipline is required

Summary

I moved houses recently and my disciplined habits slipped for a few weeks. that’s when I had to revisit what discipline actually is. it’s not about being perfect every day. it’s about doing something instead of nothing.

1. the bar isn’t perfection. the bar is: don’t go to zero. some training, not all the training. some pages, not the whole book. anything beats nothing on a hard day.

2. expand your threshold. discipline is a muscle. you grow it by going slightly past your current edge. not by trying to live at the edge full-time, which is how people quit.

3. the 100 day frame, broken into 10 day sprints. don’t commit to 100 days, your brain rejects it. commit to 10. then another 10. by sprint three you don’t even think about it. that’s how the habit installs.

discipline is not a personality trait. it’s an output of a system. build the system, the discipline follows. try harder.

Transcript

introduction to the topic of discipline

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. The question today is simple, and that is how much discipline is required. This is the Better Human Business Podcast. I’m Jerred Moon. And you might be asking a follow-up question. How much discipline is required for what?

I’m talking about how much discipline is required to achieve what you want. To be who you want to be, but maybe you aren’t quite that person yet. To have the business you want, but you don’t quite have it yet. To be the father or mother you want to be, but you’re just not there yet. These are the things I’m talking about, and they all require discipline.

exploring the necessity of discipline in various aspects of life

So the question is how much discipline is required to get what you want. And I’ve gone back and forth on this for years. I’ve gone from the militant, you have to have discipline at every moment, every second in order to achieve what you want, to, hey, give yourself some slack. Give yourself some grace and some space.

We can’t all be perfect. I’ve gone back and forth on these spectrums. I’ve gone back and forth based off of my own human nature, coaching other people, talking to other people, helping other people, listening to concerns and problems of other humans as well as things that I have going on myself. So I’ve changed a lot over the years.

Like I said, I’ve been ping-ponging back and forth. And more recently, I was going through a crazy time, relatively crazy. It was just busy. It wasn’t anything bad in my life. We were moving from one house to the next and things were just busy. If you’ve moved, you know moving sucks and moving a family of five with all that entails and trying to keep the business going and all those kind of things, it was just a lot.

my personal struggles and lessons learned from a lack of discipline

And a lot of my good habits started to fall off, but I allowed them to fall off. I was making the choice to not exercise each day. I’d be like, okay, well, I’m not going to exercise today. It’s just not going to happen. And I would make some excuses for myself, okay, you’re going to be so busy today.

And literally I was, you know, I’d start the days at 5 a.m. and we’d end at 8 or 9 p.m. just getting all the things done that we needed to. I was like, I would tell myself, you don’t really have time to even fit this into the schedule and you’re going to be moving around so much. That’s basically going to be your exercise for the day.

And 10 years ago, if I would have said something like that, I would have slapped myself in the face. So you see how I’ve gone back and forth, but now on the back end of that, looking back at that week, and it was only a week, mind you, of me not being in my routine, not exercising how I want to, not doing the things I know I should do.

the importance of consistency over intensity in maintaining discipline

Looking back, I want to slap that week’s version of myself in the face. Today’s version wants to slap last week’s version and my older version would slap that same week’s version of me right in the face. Because when I look back, I have a regret. I look back and I’m like, hey, you didn’t, where you can slack on the discipline isn’t doing it or not doing it.

You always have to do it. And I’m just going to be talking about exercise specifically today, but you can talk about, you can think about this in any realm you want. Like I said, being a father or mother, the things that you know you need to do to lead your family well, the things that you know you need to do to be a good entrepreneur, a good employee, a good business owner, whatever it is that you are, the things that you know you need to do.

But when I look back, I have regrets and that’s how I know that’s not what I should have done because doing it is what needs to be done. The amount is what can be flexible and that’s the epiphany I’ve come to with discipline. So going back to exercise, I could have very easily fit in a 10-minute workout that day.

how to practically build and apply discipline in daily life

I could have ran a mile or two miles or done a couple of sets of push-ups or kettlebell swings. I could have done something and I chose to do nothing on several occasions that week and I look back and I regret it. I didn’t have to do the one to one-and-a-half-hour training session that I would prefer to do that I honestly couldn’t even realistically do but I should have done something.

A little bit would have been better than nothing and when I look back, I have regret. And that’s how you know how much discipline is required. If you look back at last week, last month, last year and you think that you could have done things differently, could have been a little bit better, you could have squeezed it in, you have regret.

If you have regret, more discipline is required. So I can’t tell you, yes, you have to be 100% militant. You have to be perfect at all times. You have to never have any slack. That’s not necessarily what I’m going to say but what I’m going to say is if you look back and you have regret, more discipline is required.

tips for setting realistic, achievable goals to foster discipline

And here’s what I’ve learned over and over in life is one thing that you need to do when you have the opportunity is you need to expand your threshold. One more time, you need to expand your threshold when you have the opportunity. This is something you learn about yourself when you put yourself in difficult situations whether that is running an ultramarathon or a 5K or exercising every day for 100 days without missing, whatever it is, you need to expand your threshold.

You learn it when you challenge yourself. In the military, we would learn this all the time. We would go to training schools or do all these different things because you have your normal life which most people can handle and then when something else gets thrown in there, you go from 8-hour days to 12-hour days or you’re doing a lot more physical activity and you realize that you can handle it.

You might not be able to handle it forever but you are getting stretched. Your threshold is getting expanded. When you actually feel that expansion, you’re growing. You might not be able to always maintain it but you’re expanding your threshold and when you do, you realize you can do it. And so what I wish I would have done is the days that I was working 16-18 hours a day to get my family moved, I wish I would have also thrown in a two-mile run just to see what the hell that feels like.

why reviewing and reflecting on your actions is crucial for growth

And I regret that I didn’t do it. I had an opportunity to expand my threshold beyond what I was capable of or beyond what I was capable of but beyond what I was comfortable with, should I say, not capable. And I should have expanded my threshold. I look back, I have regret. That means more discipline was required.

And that’s going to be different. This answer is better than here’s how disciplined you should be because if you finish this week and you look back on it and you did half as many things as someone else, one of your peers, but you’re good with it and you’re like, I couldn’t have done any better, I couldn’t have been more disciplined is not required for you.

You are comfortable. You are where you want to be and that’s fine. But if you look back and you know you could have done things differently, you could have been better and you have regret. More discipline is required. So here’s a small thing that you can do. If you want to practice the art of discipline, I talk about this in my book Killing Comfort and I want anyone out there listening who wants to expand their threshold as I challenge you to do one thing for 100 days straight.

the benefits of starting with simple tasks to build discipline

But I’ve started to rephrase how I say that because it’s too overwhelming for people to think of doing something every day without missing for 100 days straight. I want you to do something every day for 10 days without missing. Then I want you to do that 10 times. And yes, it’s the exact same thing, right?

But it changes how you view it because you’re looking at your chunking like our memories even work better. That’s why phone numbers can be chunked into three, three, four is our memories like our brains work better with chunks of information. So if you just think, hey, I’m in sprint one of my 10 days of discipline, I’m trying to do the same thing every day for the next 10 days without missing.

You do it. Now you feel like you’ve made progress. Hey, I’m 10% of the way there. Let’s do this one more time. I can do this for another 10 days. It’s a reframe of how you’re looking at it, but it’s ultimately still doing the same thing without missing for 100 days straight. This will expand your threshold and make you better and give you the ability to be more disciplined.

encouragement to expand your thresholds and challenge yourself

Now what you pick is up to you. I always talk about discipline as if it is fitness or lifting weights. If you can’t squat 500 pounds, then you don’t start with a squat at 500 pounds, do you? You’d get crushed. You don’t go to discipline. You don’t try this activity of doing something for 100 days straight.

You don’t start with, you know what, I’m going to exercise for two hours every day for 100 days straight. When right now you’re only exercising two or three days a week and it’s for 30 minutes. No, sorry. You can’t do it. You haven’t earned it. You’re not there. You’re not ready. So you have to pick what is realistic for you to do for the next 100 days.

And I don’t care how painfully simple it is. No matter what it is, doing something 100 days in a row without missing will expand your threshold. So it could be something as simple as I’m going to take a multivitamin every day without missing for 100 days. I’m going to, you know, cause that sounds so silly, but like it happens, right?

We want to take a multivitamin. We start forgetting. We miss a couple of days. Like it’s okay. Well, I’m going to focus on it. I’m going to do this. I’m going to take this multivitamin. It might seem simple, but it’s going to expand your threshold cause you’re going to do it every single day. You will not miss.

And then you’re going to realize that you can actually do something every day for 100 days. And then you can move on to the next thing. Maybe it can be more complicated. It can be more serious. It could be more impactful in your life. Something like that. But you need to expand your threshold and to expand your threshold, you need to try harder.