There is something strange about modern discipline.
We often describe it as the ability to force ourselves to do something we do not want to do: go to the gym, wake up early, work on the business, push through resistance. Sometimes this kind of discipline is necessary. Some mornings I do not want to run, and some work needs to be done regardless of whether I feel like doing it.
But if this is your normal state, something is probably wrong. If maintaining a certain behavior requires enormous amounts of willpower every single day, the problem may not be a lack of discipline. It may be that the identity and baseline underneath the behavior have never really changed.
The goal is not to make difficult things easy. The more interesting goal is to reduce how much internal negotiation is required before doing them. The external challenge can increase while the internal argument decreases.
Why I carry unnecessary weight through the mountains
The kettlebell is useful precisely because it feels out of place. A heavier backpack would simply make the run harder. Carrying a kettlebell creates a stronger cognitive contradiction: this does not look like something you should be able to trail run with.
That contradiction is part of the training. I am not only increasing physical load; I am deliberately confronting the mind with something it initially classifies as unreasonable and then giving it evidence that the classification was incomplete.
I wasn't doing it to prove I could carry more weight. I was deliberately creating resistance. The physical load produces a specific cognitive experience. At first, the mind reacts almost with disbelief: surely this cannot be something we are going to run with. Then the body starts moving, the first climb arrives, then another, and eventually something that initially seemed unreasonable becomes part of the environment.
That interests me more than the weight itself.
The mind presents a boundary, but that boundary is not automatically the boundary that exists. By creating controlled resistance, I can observe where the resistance appears, how quickly it changes, and how something unusual gradually becomes normal.
Mountain endurance has become one of my disciplines. That changes my relationship with difficulty because I am no longer trying to convince myself that I should become someone who does this. The practice has already started to become part of how I understand myself.
👉 Interestingly, that exact challenge will shape my resilience a lot in the coming days. It’s hard to top that sensation, so the subconscious mind doesn’t bombard me with other emotions all day long.
Modern discipline is often built around resistance
A lot of contemporary discipline culture is built around overcoming yourself. The stronger the resistance, the more admirable the action seems. This fits naturally into hustle culture because suffering becomes evidence of commitment: if the action was miserable but you did it anyway, it appears more valuable.
That can be useful in exceptional situations, but I think it is a poor operating system for everyday life.
Relying on willpower is cognitively expensive because the same internal negotiation keeps reopening. One part tries to execute the behavior while another part attempts to avoid it. Occasionally that is unavoidable, but when the conflict happens every day, the more interesting question is not how to become tougher. It is why the state you consciously want to create remains so far away from the state your system naturally returns to.
That is where the idea of baseline becomes useful.
Baseline matters more than peak performance
I use the term baseline to describe the state we tend to return to under ordinary conditions, especially when tired, stressed, or distracted. It is not the best version of ourselves on a highly motivated day. It is closer to the default.
Many discipline systems focus on increasing the peak instead of moving that default. A person who barely exercises decides to train six days per week. Someone struggling with a business creates a twelve-hour entrepreneurial routine. Another person who has never journaled decides to write ten pages every morning.
For a while, motivation and novelty can keep the system away from its previous state. Then pressure decreases, attention moves elsewhere, and the old pattern returns. This is why dramatic self-improvement attempts can feel extraordinary for three weeks and disappear three months later.
Behavior changed temporarily, but the baseline did not.
Real discipline, in my view, should gradually change what we return to.
Disciplina: from practice to habitus to baseline
The English word discipline comes from the Latin disciplina, connected with discere, to learn, and discipulus, a learner or pupil. That older family of meanings is much closer to how I want to recover the word today. Disciplina includes learning, training, instruction, and repeated practice, rather than simply forcing obedience.
We still hear an echo of that meaning when we speak about an academic discipline or a sporting discipline. Someone dedicates themselves to a particular field and is gradually shaped by the practice.
I think of the process in a simple sequence.
Identity gives direction.
Disciplina provides repeated practice. Repeated practice shapes habitus, meaning the way a person characteristically behaves. Habitus gradually shifts the baseline.
At some point, the behavior no longer needs to be renegotiated every day because it has become part of how the person operates. That is where identity starts shaping character in a practical sense: not because declaring an identity magically changes behavior, but because repeated evidence slowly changes what feels normal.
“Immediately prescribe some character and form of conduct to yourself, which you may keep both alone and in company.”
Epictetus, Enchiridion 33
Identity changes the direction of resistance
Once a practice becomes part of identity, resistance can reverse direction. The difficult part may no longer be convincing yourself to do the activity. Sometimes the difficult part becomes convincing yourself not to do it.
I know this problem well. Some days, recovery is the sensible decision. Family obligations, business responsibilities, and other things deserve attention. Yet the activity that once required discipline has become the thing I naturally want to do.
Traditional willpower then returns in the opposite direction. I may need discipline to stay home, recover, deal with administrative work, or spend time on obligations that are less attractive than disappearing into the forest for another few hours.
You could call this reverse procrastination: avoiding one responsibility by doing something objectively difficult that happens to be more aligned with your identity.
That distinction matters because behavior alone tells us very little about discipline. A hard activity can become psychologically comfortable once it is deeply congruent with identity. What matters more is the baseline underneath the behavior.
At first, resistance appears when doing the practice. Later, resistance may appear when not doing it. The activity has stopped requiring constant justification.
Persistent resistance is information
This creates a more uncomfortable question. What if the activity you are constantly forcing into your life is not actually well aligned with the person you are trying to become?
That does not mean that disliking something proves it is the wrong discipline. Competence develops slowly, difficult practices often feel unpleasant at first, and almost every meaningful path contains parts we would rather avoid. Persistent resistance is not proof, but it is information worth examining instead of automatically treating it as a character defect.
Someone may force themselves to run because running has become culturally associated with discipline, while another form of training would fit them far better. Entrepreneurship presents a similar example. There is a strong cultural narrative around independence, freedom and building something of your own, but entrepreneurship also involves uncertainty, sales, financial risk, repetitive work and decisions without sufficient information. Some people thrive in that environment; others would be much better served by becoming exceptionally good inside an organization.
Neither is inherently superior.
The relevant question is whether the discipline fits the direction in which you genuinely want to develop. Forcing yourself into an identity primarily because society currently admires it can become identity conflict disguised as ambition.
The eternal learner
The identity I try to build around is not primarily runner, entrepreneur, CTO, mentor, or athlete. Those identities are useful, but they are too narrow. The deeper identity is closer to eternal learner.
That changes the interpretation of difficulty. Carrying additional weight is not mainly about proving strength. It is about discovering what happens. How does movement change? Where does resistance appear? Which assumption turns out to be wrong? At what point does something difficult become normal?
The run becomes an experiment. Business becomes an experiment. Leadership becomes an experiment. Even failure becomes useful because the learner can convert information into adjustment instead of interpreting every failure as an attack on identity.
This is one reason I think identity belongs underneath discipline. An identity that requires constant proof of excellence makes difficulty threatening. An identity built around learning turns difficulty into material.
“Do it for your own sake, and not for the world.”
Epictetus, Enchiridion 47
Stoicism is not about making life miserable
Stoicism is frequently pulled into modern hustle culture as philosophical justification for suffering: harder workouts, cold showers, early mornings, fewer excuses. Some Stoic practices involve voluntary discomfort, but suffering itself is not the objective.
The objective is reducing unnecessary dependence.
Voluntary discomfort can teach that comfort is not a prerequisite for action. Physical resistance can show that an initial reaction does not automatically represent reality. Reflection can help distinguish an impression from the judgment we build around it.
But there is no Stoic virtue in making life arbitrarily miserable.
If carrying additional weight teaches me something, it can be useful. If I carry it because I need strangers to think I am disciplined, I have simply replaced one dependency with another. The visible action may look identical, while the underlying purpose is completely different.
“From Rusticus I received the impression that my character required improvement and discipline.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 1.7
Metacognition turns resistance into information
Another layer lies beneath this: the ability to observe resistance instead of immediately obeying it.
There is a meaningful difference between thinking, “I cannot do this,” and noticing, “My mind is producing the thought that I cannot do this.” The second creates distance. Once the thought becomes observable, you can examine it.
Perhaps the body is genuinely approaching a limit. Perhaps the sensation is simply discomfort. Boredom, fear of failure, uncertainty or familiarity with an older pattern can all produce resistance. The purpose of observation is not to dismiss those signals but to understand them before treating them as instructions.
That is why deliberately increasing difficulty can sometimes be cognitively useful. Resistance becomes visible and therefore examinable.
The goal is not to ignore warning signals. That would be stupidity dressed as toughness. The goal is to stop treating every signal as an order.
Homeostasis and the evidence of repetition
I use the term homeostasis for the tendency of a system to return toward a familiar state. The old baseline has one enormous advantage over the new one: it is already known.
This helps explain why teams return to old communication patterns after an offsite, why productivity resets fade, and why someone can train consistently for a month before gradually returning to inactivity. The system is not necessarily sabotaging itself. It is moving back toward the lowest-friction state it recognizes.
Identity therefore cannot simply be declared. It needs evidence.
A person runs, then runs again. The practice happens in good conditions and mediocre ones, on highly motivated days and ordinary ones. Eventually enough evidence accumulates that “I run” becomes more accurate than “I am trying to become someone who runs.”
The interesting part is that this evidence should eventually become boring. One of the clearest signs that a baseline is forming is that the behavior stops feeling heroic.
Hustle culture loves peaks because peaks create stories: look how early I woke up, how hard I trained, how long I worked. Baseline culture is much less impressive. The thing happened again, as part of an ordinary week.
That boring repetition is exactly what creates capacity.
Willpower should become the exception
None of this makes willpower unnecessary. Bad nights, difficult days, stress, illness, terrible weather, business pressure, and simple lack of enthusiasm will always exist. Sometimes conscious intervention is necessary: I do not want to do this today, but I am doing it anyway.
That capacity matters enormously. I simply do not think it should remain the primary mechanism.
If every day requires a heroic act of self-control, it is worth inspecting the system. The baseline may be too ambitious, the environment may constantly work against the behavior, the practice may not yet have existed long enough, or the chosen discipline may not fit the direction of development particularly well.
Those questions are more useful than endlessly asking how to become tougher.
A discipline that is actually becoming established should gradually require less internal negotiation. That does not mean less physical effort, lower standards or reduced difficulty. Mountain endurance can become physically harder while psychologically becoming more normal. Entrepreneurship can become more complex while the decision to continue on that path becomes simpler. Leadership can involve increasingly difficult conversations while avoiding those conversations becomes less compatible with character.
The external challenge can increase while the internal argument decreases.
Build the floor before increasing the ceiling
This is why I am skeptical of dramatic transformation plans. When someone wants to become physically active, I am more interested in the minimum that can be sustained than the maximum that can be survived. If reflection is the goal, five minutes every day may be more valuable than one extraordinary ninety-minute session. If leadership communication needs to improve, one real difficult conversation each week can matter more than another book about courageous leadership.
The floor comes first.
This is also how I think about physical training. The purpose of repeatedly carrying eight kilograms is not eight kilograms. The purpose is making eight kilograms ordinary. Once that becomes part of the baseline, ten becomes realistic, and eventually another level becomes realistic.
The peak moves because the floor moved first.
“Nothing is so damaging to good character as the habit of lounging at the games.”
Seneca, Moral Letters 7.2
Choose something worth becoming
Before asking how to force yourself to become something, there is a more important question: is that thing actually worth becoming for you?
Not because it looks impressive, because somebody online says successful people behave that way, or because another entrepreneur, athlete or productivity expert has turned their own identity into a universal prescription.
The more useful question is what kind of person makes sense given your interests, abilities, responsibilities and potential. From there, practices can provide repeated evidence for that identity. They should begin small enough to survive ordinary days and continue long enough to become unremarkable.
Let disciplina shape habitus.
Let habitus move the baseline.
Then increase the resistance.
At some point, discipline may no longer be required to make you do the thing. It may be required to govern the person who now naturally wants to do it.
That, to me, is a much more interesting form of discipline.
—Adrian
