On Discipline
This is a follow-up from On Moving Forward, which waded into this territory—discipline of action, speech and thought—and elicited a DM of how exactly do you rebuild discipline?
It is a fair question, because while there is no shortage of advice on the importance of discipline, they don’t tell you is how to acquire it. I think deep down everyone wants to be disciplined but when they can’t stop themselves from making poor choices—the story of man, really—they just assume it’s just not in their genetics and go on living a shit life. But what I believe to be the truth is that discipline is a muscle, one that can be improved through exercise or one that atrophies when ignored.
“In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves…self-discipline with all of them came first.”
Before getting into it, Blind Spots rants incessantly about this topic. It’s probably 40% of the book, a Protean motif in the forms of discipline gained and lost, self-defeating behavior, feedback loops, the severe consequences of deceiving oneself and finally the hellish ascent to rebuilt discipline. If you were compelled enough to click on something called “On Discipline” then you will get a lot out of it, and if your life is so fucked up that you don’t have $9.99 to spare, DM me and I will mail you a copy.
Every single mistake I have ever made in my life stemmed from a lack of discipline. Markets, women, drugs, crime, it can all be traced back to doing something that I knew I shouldn’t be doing, but being unable to stop myself.
I didn’t grow up with a lot of discipline. It wasn’t until I was out of college that discipline entered my life, and it wasn’t by choice. I worked for some hard-headed motherfuckers that beat it into me with everything except for their fists. External discipline, you could say, rather than internal or self-discipline. But it was the best thing that could’ve ever happened to me. I needed it. Being completely objective, all the good qualities that I have came from my early mentors, and all the bad qualities I have are my own.
Anyone who trades markets for a living knows the importance of discipline. The name of the game is to stay alive and honor your stops. Every single blow-up in the history of investment management started with a fund manager who broke discipline on one stop and it spiraled out of control from there. I’m in this category. Looking back, I have met hundreds of portfolio managers over my career and they all fall into one of two types. There are nice guys, and there are complete psychopaths. The nice guys all end up out of work sooner or later, the psychopaths put up legendary numbers and bank hundreds of millions in the process. The common trait amongst the psychopaths is severe discipline, severe to themselves, to the book and to the employees under them. It’s a level of discipline bordering on neurosis, a pathological obsession, a human tornado of disturbingly compulsive behavior over what most would consider irrelevant details. The thin-skinned refer to this as being an asshole, yet history makes it clear: these are the same people who emerge from the arena victorious. Does the success inevitably come at a cost to their health and their relationships, yes, but that’s another story.
After about four years of being brutalized by external discipline, I’d built enough internal discipline—or at least come to appreciate the benefits of it—where my life started to change. I started developing discipline on investment process, on writing and on good habits, all from internalizing the maxim sweat the small details until you end up with a puddle of perfection. The basic building blocks of discipline are boring as hell. It’s about doing the same things every day, which is the “secret” behind all the greatest athletes of all time. They were born with some level of above-average talent, but they became great by shooting 10,000 free throws in an empty gym after everyone else had gone home, and then doing that week after week for years while everyone else got tired of shooting free throws. I tried to build that mentality into my life. Sleeping eight hours consistently, going to the gym seven days a week consistently, eating clean, hours spent each day after the market closes breaking down tape and then hours of journaling, all at the same time every single day. Everything started to go right over the subsequent five years and I credit it to the zealotry of self-discipline.
When I broke discipline on all those things I just mentioned, everything went wrong. I wrote a little bit about that part. By a little bit, I mean enough for a 225-page book. So let us merrily breeze past the downfall and skip to the rebuild.
The path to regaining broken discipline is to make tons of little promises to yourself and never break a single one of them. This process must haunt you every waking minute of every day, and you must commit to waging a full-scale war on yourself that will never end until they lower you into the grave. If this sounds extreme, look around you at how grossly undisciplined the average person is; it was Spinoza who wrote that all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.
You must live by the credo of be kind to others, but be merciless on yourself. You want people to see you in action and have their first thought be “that guy is on a fucking mission,” that you are possessed by demons, driven by some force and moving about with alacrity and intensity. Blinders up, ambient noise muted, engaged in ferocious battle on a field visible only to you and to the Most High. For real, I don’t have a better word for it: you have to be a complete psychopath. You have to have a deep, burning, inextinguishable desire to be exceptional and you have to absolutely loathe mediocrity in all its forms. Perfect discipline is synonymous with being exceptional. Broken discipline, no matter how small, is synonymous with mediocrity. You must be furious at yourself whenever it occurs. If you aren’t, you will never make sustainable progress.
“Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.”
Physical exercise is a good starting point for rebuilding discipline and in keeping promises you make to yourself. Walk into a room and say I’m not leaving this room until I’ve done 500 push-ups. And then don’t leave. Take breaks to catch your breath if you have to, walk around, curse yourself for picking such an aggressive number, but do not under any circumstances leave that room until you’ve done 500. Your mind will try and get you out of there at 300, 350, 400, 450, it will invent reasons why you’ve done enough or why 500 was a crazy choice. Maybe it was, but you can’t break the promise to yourself. You can learn from it and pick 400 next time, but you cannot submit to the flurry of spontaneous and impetuous whimsies the mind will assault you with. If you walk out of that room having done 499 push-ups, or done 500 knowing that you cheated on a few of them, like, you have to be disgusted with the man in the mirror. How do you expect to get anywhere in life knowing that you can’t even keep the little promises you make to yourself?
Be robotically boring about the basics: sleep, diet and exercise. Go to bed at 9:00 and wake up at 5:00, seven days a week, or even better 8:00 to 4:00. Same time every day, no deviating. Go the gym seven days a week, ideally right after you wake up. Same time every day, no deviating. Eat the same things every day. Zero alcohol, zero drugs. Get used to saying no to a lot of things, and get used to setting healthy boundaries with people who can’t appreciate the positive changes you are trying to make.
At a certain point you must sacrifice what other people think about you for what you think about yourself. Your level of discipline is a direct reflection of your self-love; put another way, discipline reflects pain you are willing to endure today that your future self will love you for. Your ultimate goal with all of this self-denial is to mold yourself into a machine that operates with precision in everything he does, a man who consistently gets what he wants out of life, who has ironed out all his defects of character and who has locked his mind in the grips of a steel vice. If people call you weird, great, they’re probably right. Mediocrity is average and anything that deviates from the average is by definition an outlier.
Your mind is not your friend. You have to treat it as if it is a wild and untamed beast, one that will prevent you from achieving your goals unless it is constantly and relentlessly beaten into submission. Only fools will push back on this notion, because it is one grounded in thousands of years of studying humanity and stems from the origin, from the foundational documents of Western civilization, in the story of the Fall of Man. Trust not thyself until the day of thy death, my brother. This same mental discipline applies for ego and for vanity and for all passions and impulses that spring up afresh each day. The war is never won. The day you assume the war is won is the day you submit to temptation, break discipline and find yourself right back at the lows.
“Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished.”
All I bring to this party is thirty-eight years of mistakes, and I wouldn’t be so forceful with my language if I wasn’t speaking from a place of impregnable conviction. Years of keeping all the little promises you make to yourself is how you build self-discipline and mold yourself into the person you want to become. Just remember that if you want peace, you must prepare for war.
Discipline is freedom,
GB
