Why Discipline Feels So Hard

And what we’ve been getting wrong about it

When you hear the word discipline, you probably associate it with a particular way of guiding your life.

If you were born around the 3rd–6th centuries, during the early Christian and monastic times, it meant a way of life devoted to learning and spiritual formation. Discipline was about apprenticeship to something sacred.

The monks didn’t perform tasks to be efficient but to be transformed by the doing of them. They rose at fixed hours to pray, copied manuscripts by hand, fasted, tilled the fields, and returned to prayer. The structure served to train the body and mind into alignment with spirit.

Fast forward to the Enlightenment (17th–18th centuries), and the focus of Western culture shifted to rational mastery, and with it, the meaning of discipline started to move in the direction of self-restraint: to control impulses, to make the body and mind efficient instruments of reason.

John Locke argued that children must learn to “govern their desires” and form habits of self-control through repetition. For him, discipline was the training of the will to obey reason.

Immanuel Kant took it further, claiming that freedom is not the absence of constraint but the mastery of one’s own will through rational control — to own your desires rather than be owned by them.

Discipline, in other words, ceased to be about devotion and became about governing the self. The monk gave way to the scientist.

Then came the industrial era. And its aim was to make individuals useful within the system.

The worker was disciplined to perform repetitive labor on time. The student was disciplined to sit still, follow rules, and move through standardized curricula. The soldier was disciplined to act without hesitation. It was all about making people predictable, demanding obedience to an external authority — the employer, the teacher, the state.

Later in the 20th century, philosopher Michel Foucault would describe how this system evolved into the “disciplinary society” — a world where power works less through direct punishment and more through observation and normalization. You obey because you’re being watched.

In the decades after WWII, discipline began turning inward, merging with the logic of self-improvement — a shift that would eventually culminate in today’s culture of self-optimization. The focus moved from obedience to performance.

Books like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, management gurus like Peter Drucker, and later tech culture, all reframed discipline as a means of maximizing output.

The slogan “no pain, no gain” entered popular culture in the 1980s through Jane Fonda’s workout videos, turning effort into a form of virtue. A few years later, Nike’s “Just do it” distilled that same ethos into a command.

Tony Robbins and the self-help crew went one step further, reframing it as self-mastery — turning inner work into measurable success. Meditation for focus, gratitude for productivity, therapy for output.

Hustle-culture prophets like Gary Vaynerchuk began dominating social media in the late 2000s. Productivity YouTubers, life-hack culture, and “5AM Club,” followed.

We began tracking our hours and calories, measuring our value through the dashboards on our phones.

We no longer needed anyone to discipline us — we’d absorbed the idea that our self-worth depends on how well we perform.

You see — words aren’t neutral.

They frame reality. They shape what we notice, what we ignore, and how we judge ourselves.

In a culture that equates discipline with constant improvement, the practice begins to feel heavy — something to live up to, rather than live within. When discipline turns into performance, failure becomes personal. You’re not just missing a task; you’re failing at being the kind of person you’re supposed to be. “I’m lazy. I lack willpower. I’m not the kind of person who finishes things.”

That’s a brutal standard to live under. No wonder so many people feel at war with their own discipline.

But maybe the problem isn’t that we lack discipline.

Maybe it’s that we’ve inherited the wrong definition — one that no longer serves us.

So what if we strip away the cultural layers — the guilt, the optimization, the self-surveillance — and rebuild its meaning from a different perspective?

The Thermodynamics of Discipline

I’m no expert in thermodynamics, but its basic principles offer a powerful metaphor to think about discipline.

Thermodynamics is the study of energy flow, transformation, and equilibrium in systems.

The First Law of Thermodynamics says energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed.

If you apply that lens to human experience, our energy doesn’t disappear either — it just shifts form. From work to pleasure, from making big decisions to running small errands, from moments of deep focus to spirals of anxiety.

In that context, you could say that discipline acts as an energy management system for the mind.

The Second Law introduces entropy; the natural drift toward disorder. Without structure, every system, physical or psychological, slides toward chaos. Discipline, in this light, becomes a form of energy conservation — the structure that keeps your focus from scattering across distractions or moods.

Now how would this idea apply on a practical level?

It begins with letting go of the performance model — the belief that discipline is about self-optimization, about extracting maximum output from every moment. Instead, see it as the art of consciously channeling the finite energy we have toward what matters, adjusting when life pulls you off course, and finding an honest rhythm between creation, connection, and rest.

Once you have that foundational understanding, the next step is to generate movement. In thermodynamics, voltage — or potential difference — is what drives energy to flow. It’s the pressure that pushes current through a system. Voltage, in human terms, is emotional tension — the force that turns stillness into motion.

In the same way, discipline needs its own source of potential. When you feel a strong emotional pull toward something — love, curiosity, purpose — you’re experiencing that potential difference: the force that turns stillness into motion.

Think about when you fall in love, or when you’re defending something dear to your heart, or reading a book you can’t let go of. Suddenly, you find energy you didn’t know you had.

Compare that to a source that depends on external validation, like a grade, your boss’s approval, or the applause from your peers. They might help generate some energy in the short term, but over time, they are much harder to sustain.

Say you’re seeking the discipline to write. The first question isn’t how to stay consistent, but why you feel drawn to do it. What are you trying to explore, to understand, or to give shape to? A source like that endures far longer than goals like “building an audience of 10,000 subscribers” or “becoming a best-seller.”

But a strong source of energy alone might not be enough to keep you disciplined. If we’re honest, we know that we’ll inevitably find bumps on the road. That’s where the structure comes in. We need to identify the potential challenges that discipline will face along the way, and gradually build a structure to better deal with them.

Gradually is an important word here. It’s unrealistic to expect that the first version of your structure will anticipate every obstacle. You’ll refine it over time, because you’re a living system — you change, your circumstances change, and your structure must evolve with you to stay functional.

Still, if we think in fundamental terms, some challenges are clear from the start:

• Emotions

• Impulses

• Distractions

When I say “emotions” here, I’m referring to the darker, more difficult ones — anger, envy, greed, pride — the parts of ourselves we tend to suppress or disguise. They often rise from what Jung called the shadow self: the aspects we’d rather not see.

Instead of rationalizing them away, as the Enlightenment encouraged, or turning them into performances of self-control, as our era often does, we can treat them as energy — something to be understood, redirected, and transformed into meaningful action or deeper self-awareness.

Take envy, for instance.

It’s easy to condemn it as petty or toxic, but envy is often a signal of latent desire—a recognition of something we secretly long for but haven’t allowed ourselves to pursue.

Think of someone on social media whose success irritates you. Maybe they write about the same topics, get the recognition you crave, and you can’t stand their ideas — or how they present them. If you meet that feeling with comparison, the energy curdles into resentment. If you suppress it, it festers in the shadow. But if you treat it as raw material — energy that can be shaped — that envy can be redirected toward creation, transforming frustration into drive.

A large part of discipline, in this sense, is learning to notice these emotions and redirect their force — to turn what pulls your energy down into something that lifts it up.

Easier said than done, I know. But even the act of noticing — catching the emotion before it takes over — already conserves energy.

Yet emotions aren’t the only challenge. There’s a faster, more reactive force that often hijacks that energy before we even realize it: our impulses

Impulses are the pressure valve that pushes you to release the energy quickly — most times in a non-beneficial way: checking the phone, snapping at someone, indulging, avoiding.

Discipline begins in that small interval between the rising of an impulse and the choice to act on it. By learning to hold that energy for a few seconds longer, you convert reaction into response. It isn’t about suppressing impulses but slowing their release until intention catches up. When you intercept an impulse mid-rise, you regain agency over where that energy goes.

One example would be when you feel the impulse to scroll, a pull born of curiosity or the craving for novelty, and you redirect it toward reading, researching, or exploring instead.

It won’t feel natural at first. These impulses have been trained, often for years, to react in a single way: open social media.

And in a world built to exploit those impulses, distraction becomes the natural next trap. Every craving has its stimulus waiting on the other side of a screen.

Today, there’s a course for every skill, a guru for every routine, a diet for every whim. You can wake up like a Navy SEAL, meditate like a Tibetan monk, or decide between Italian, Indian, or tapas for lunch. You can be anyone, do anything.

Infinite choice looks like freedom — until every open path makes commitment feel like loss. Beneath that freedom hums the anxiety that you could be doing more. Because, of course, everyone else seems to be.

But that realization doesn’t sit well in a capitalist culture built on perpetual desire. So the system offers its cure — the illusion that if you just self-optimize, become a little more efficient, you can do it all. And to sell that fantasy, it wraps everything in the language of “convenience”:

• one-click delivery

• frictionless entertainment

• smart tools that think in our place

Distraction has never been easier. Everything you could want is a tap away.

Here, discipline becomes the structure that filters those distractions and keeps your energy contained.

I haven’t received a phone notification in a decade — and I haven’t been exiled from society yet. Some people who expected instant replies have drifted away. But that’s exactly the point: discipline filters distractions. If someone measures the worth of our relationship by my WhatsApp response time, maybe the relationship isn’t worth it.

With a strong source of energy in place, and a structure to manage emotions, impulses, and distractions, discipline begins to shift — from self-performance to self-energy management. It becomes the force that resists entropy, redirects drives, and sustains purposeful order in a world that naturally drifts toward chaos.

Eventually, part of the structure becomes self-sustaining. Effort gives way to rhythm; discipline dissolves into habit.

But before rhythm takes hold lies the most fragile phase: beginning — when energy exists only as potential, and chaos still outweighs form. It’s there that discipline is most fragile, and most essential.

The Energy to Get Started

When you’re getting started on something, you’re faced with a series of unknowns that demand a lot of your energy:

• no proof your effort will work

• no feedback loops reflecting back value

• no momentum to carry you

• no identity yet to anchor you

• no external structure to lean on

• no visible progress to reassure you

In a culture that equates discipline with performance, where we evolved to rely on social reinforcement, visible outcomes, and predictable reward cycles, the weight of emotions, impulses, and distractions grows heavier.

That’s why so many writers circle the act of writing without ever fully entering it — reading about it, planning it, organizing notes, tweaking tools, posting occasionally, thinking about it constantly — but never quite sitting down to face the page.

And without noticing, that’s where most of the energy leaks.

At first, it feels safe to linger on the sidelines. It keeps the dream intact: the vision of how things could be, where everything aligns, the work flows easily, and no one questions your talent. In that imagined future, you never have to face contradiction, missteps, or criticism.

To protect that dream, you keep orbiting around it. Some even cling to the possibility that “I could do it if I tried,” by never actually trying. It’s easier to build convincing reasons to delay — I need to pay the bills, I’m too old now, I don’t have time — than to risk discovering what the work might really demand.

But every hesitation hides a kind of tension: energy waiting to move somewhere.

When you have a creative impulse, that’s stored potential energy. If you channel it into motion, it transforms into something useful.

If you hold it in, it doesn’t disappear; it just disperses into mental friction: rumination, self-doubt, guilt.

Procrastination feels exhausting not because we do nothing, but because we’re losing energy through constant internal negotiation. The energy stays trapped in potential form, slowly converting into emotional heat.

For nearly twenty years, I hovered around my own potential energy. I poured my curiosity about human behavior into marketing and performance, chasing growth metrics that left little room for meaning.

From the outside, I looked like what society calls a disciplined person. But deep down, I knew I’d built a structure designed to amplify the wrong kind of energy source.

This year, the awareness of that disconnect became unbearable — and it finally gave me the courage to start this newsletter and tap into the potential energy I’d been holding back for years.

As expected, the familiar challenges showed up right on schedule: the doubt that what I’m writing matters, the fear that thoughtful work no longer has an audience, the temptation to measure progress in numbers, and the awkward pauses when friends ask, “So, how’s work going?”

Yet the source felt different this time. The act of turning that stored energy into something meaningful gave me strength to build the structure I’d need to face those doubts — and to keep going.

Eventually, I found the courage to leave my role as CMO of a fast-growing company — and give myself permission to fully dedicate my energy to the craft.

It’s still scary at times. But the longer I walk this path, the more I understand Mary Oliver’s words:

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave it neither power nor time.

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