Discipline On Bad Days
Most people misunderstand discipline.
They think itâs to suffer your way forward. Force yourself, no matter what.
Well, if you have to force yourself, you already lost.
Friction and resistance are great for training, but not on your daily systems.
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The truth is simple.
Discipline is a feature of identity. To know thyself.
To act in alignment with who you believe you are.
Who you want to become.
And what you can do right now to bridge the gap.
Not All Days Are Equal.
Some days you have high capacity and you can go deep.
Some days you have medium capacity and you stay administrative.
On bad days? You fall into low capacity. And here, even if you move 1 millimeter, you are still disciplined.
Thatâs the whole game.
What destroys people isnât chaos, but entropy.
To get to entropy (decay, randomness, burnouts, and the lot), is using wrong systems often.
Chaos demands elastic discipline and dynamic constraints.
Elastic discipline = Shrink the habit/process/work instead of abandoning
Dynamic constraints = Cut options/tasks to keep only what moves you forward
(Pareto principle is the mainstream dynamic constraint we all know.)
Move your body. Even two minutes walking can unstuck the system.
Thirty seconds breathing to pull attention back into your body.
Thirty seconds of squats.
This is not a workout letter. But find exercises to energize you.
Another great way is to start with small wins.
Simple relevant tasks to move forward and build momentum. Momentum is enough to stop the slippery slide.
But what if priming wonât work?
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Project Knightfall
As Alan Watts coined:
âYouâre under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.â
Thatâs the first exercise to surf from âthe day and I collapsed tooâ to âI did the Thing though.â
Break the pattern. How?
Well, if you feel like the day is gone, execute your crisis protocol. To have that you need a good day before to create this:
A pre-built repository of templates, scripts, workflows, and pre-decided tasks. When your mind is fried, donât improvise. Donât think. Only execute what your past self engineered.
This is how professionals survive bad days. They donât rely on willpower. Inspiration. Or even worse motivation. They use (whether they know it or not) preloaded decisions.
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Friction Is The Enemy.
So understand when and how this force appears.
Find the specific moments, people, situations, and tasks that activate collapse.
Protect your energy and time before these with religious intensity.
And if the entire day burns to ash? Time to rest.
Discipline on chaotic days is not about giving the 1000%.
Itâs giving the minimum viable execution.
Discipline some days is just elastic, adaptive, anti-entropy, minimal.
Perfect days donât exist. And if they do, donât rely on âperfect.â
Train to survive the bad ones.
Lifeward,
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