How to train your brain to have superhuman discipline.

It only takes a few minutes a day.

I define discipline as the willpower to be consistent with a task every single day despite not wanting to do it. With this definition, it’s easy to get caught up on the outcome, to see discipline in terms of its outputs.

They see the guy studying every day, hitting the gym every day, working on their thing every day and they think, how in the world? I could never do that.

Oh but you can.

It’s time to look beyond outcomes and pop open the hood. It’s time to look at the engine that drives it all.

Conventional wisdom teaches you to build a system of habits to get there. 1% better every day is all it takes and over time, your system of habits will take you there.

This article is not about that.

This article is about how to build your raw discipline or even better… your raw willpower - the ability to force yourself to do something even when you don’t feel like it, specifically when you don’t have a system of habits to carry you forward on autopilot.

Because habits take time, planning and thought to build. Habits are the cruise controls of a car. It’s great when you’re already on the highway swimming along, but when you’re stuck on the local roads… when you’re in stop-and-go traffic and there’s a zombie apocalypse brewing, sometimes you just need the ability to floor it and go from 0 to 60 without blinking.

Oh yay, there’s a parade today.

You don’t have the luxury of time, patience nor foresight to build an entire system. You need that raw, ungodly, pure and unadulterated brain power now.

If that’s the case, this article was written for you.

With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s begin.

I like to think of the brain as a Fortune 500 company.

Like any modern corporation, there’s a board of directors sitting at the top. They live in the prefrontal cortex, the executive centers of your brain. Every second, memos are dumped on their desk, sent in from the hundreds of departments in the brain. One part of the brain wants that donut you just found on the floor. Just as fast, another part of your brain sends a counter-memo - clearly, this donut is beyond the 5-second rule and Betty from accounting only dates dudes with 6-packs. Before you can think, a giant memo written in all CAPS and red font is slammed onto your desk with urgency.

Yah, you’re gonna want to take care of that now champ. In all this noise, you barely notice the one tiny little yellow post-it note of a memo sitting on the side there. You already know. You’re stalling. You’re ignoring the few things that actually matter.

Put simply, you’re wasting your time.

But it’s not your fault! You would’ve had time for it except the board is weirdly preoccupied with this hot influencer girl they all follow. She just dropped another video doing some stupid dance and your entire board is now trying to slide into her dms again.

Every corporation has a mission statement, a reason for being. If you are like most, your board of directors have no clue what they’re trying to do. They act as a figurehead. They’ve abdicated all power to the few brain departments that actually run the show.

The stomach department.

Where my snacks at?

The genitals department.

Where my whips and chains at?

And the boredom department.

Where’s my next bottomless pit of mindless entertainment at?

Whatever they want is what you as a corporation wants. No wonder your personal stock price is tanking this quarter.

It’s time to change that.

You need a Why to help you cut through all the noise and distractions.

Whatever thing you want to do, there must be an insanely clear reason why you want to do it. You need to want it so badly, the pain of failing, the prospect of potentially never achieving that dream should be infinitely worse than the day-to-day bullshit of sitting down and actually getting it done. Did I want to study and work my butt off every day in school? No, crushing noobs in Starcraft would’ve been so much more fun but that wasn’t going to get me the life I wanted. Did I want to get rejected and humiliated over and over again trying to meet the love of my life? Of course not. It would’ve been so much easier to stay home but I knew… if I wanted to attract the kind of person I wanted, upping my game was a non-negotiable task.

There’s a ladder of desire in all of our lives. Bottom level is our wants. List is probably a million miles long. I want to be a pokemon master but it’s not a mystery why I’m not. Just wanting something isn’t good enough. You have to bring it to level two - you’re gonna have to need it. Needing something is what’s going to get your Board of Directors to dedicate energy to this goal. But even that’s not enough. If you truly want to succeed, you need to make the thing your ultimate mission, your life’s "Why.” In other words, it has to be a Level 3 desire. A “Must-have.” A thing you literally must have or do before you die.

What often pushes someone into MUST territory?

Sadly… trauma.

Both David Goggins, Navy Seal ultra-marathoner described as the “toughest man on Earth” and Jonny Kim, every asian kid’s worst nightmare - Navy Seal sniper, Harvard doctor, NASA astronaut - had traumatic childhoods. Goggins describes his home experience as “hell on Earth” while Jonny had to literally plead with his dad not to murder him and his family at gunpoint. With that as your backstory, the pain of discipline, the discomfort of dedicating time to change your life becomes absurd in comparison. That’s another reason why you see people hitting the gym after they get dumped. Getting fit is no longer a level 1 desire. It moves to Level 2 and becomes a necessity and for a select few, shoots all the way up to Level 3, becoming a permanent fixture of life, as everlasting as breathing. Do you need to be disciplined or use willpower to remember to breath every day? In the end, pain is all relative. If the pain of sticking with something you supposedly want is is too much for you, that just means you don’t want it enough or the pain of the status quo isn’t bad enough for you to care.

Finding something you truly MUST have is oddly one of the most liberating experiences in your life. It’s the paradox of choice. Having too many desires will paralyze you with inaction. Give your Board of Directors but one North Star to work on. But if you have a non-negotiable purpose and yet, still can’t execute on the day-to-day, your problem is different: you have an incredibly weak mind.

Your prefrontal cortex board of directors are feeble-minded old farts too timid to exert real control. Rest of the brain walks all over them. You want to make your life better but the rest of your brain doesn’t respect you.

Your brain is a lawless wasteland overrun by the momentary whims and fancies of your separate departments. I don’t care how strong your Level 3 purpose is, you still won’t be able to get anything done.

That’s why you need to dedicate time each and every day specifically strengthening your board of directors.

Daily prefrontal cortex training.

In other words, you have to hit the daily mental gym, the most fundamental and important exercise of your entire life.

There are two components to prefrontal cortex training.

To understand these two components, I’ll extend the Fortune 500 analogy further.

Doing something you don’t want to do is basically your Board of Directors telling another whiny brain department to shut the hell up and stand down - and not just conceptually… but physically. When you override the desire of another brain department, there’s a physical brain circuit of neurons literally doing so for you. I imagine the Board of Directors sending out its secret Gestapo police force to do this dirty work, a force that can quite literally be built, trained and strengthened over time. This is the heart of what discipline and willpower really is. This is fundamentally why it’s a skill meant to be strengthened and not just something you’re born with. People aren’t just born swole. It takes dedicated time and effort in the gym to get there.

Each time you override a silly need to scroll on the phone is quite literally the prefrontal cortex sending a neuronal brain signal to tell that department to shut the hell up and stand down. The more you do it, the easier it gets because your brain is quite literally shaped by the actions and thoughts you do on a regular basis.

Neuronal connections that fire together wire together.

The more frequently and consistently you shut down the urge to scroll, the easier it will become the next time because eventually, an entire circuit of neurons gets built for this very purpose.

This is what I call building the Secret Gestapo Police Force of the Brain. The Board sends out a request and the Gestapo get it done. The more reps you do, the stronger your Gestapo becomes.

Every time I don’t feel like doing something, I tell myself, this is perfect. This is just some stupid department sending me a whiny note.

Wah - I don’t want to study.

Wah - I don’t want to go to the gym today.

These departments are just whiny spoiled kids. Am I going to give in to a whiny spoiled kid who doesn’t want to eat vegetables? If you do, you set a dangerous precedence. Kid knows you’re soft and he’s gonna walk over you.

Instead, I tell myself, this is an opportunity for my Board of Directors to get another rep in… another chance for my prefrontal cortex to strengthen its ability to govern. Whiny kid’s gonna eat his vegetables or he’s not gonna eat anything at all.

This is how you reframe mental pain… how you own it and take back control. You aren’t just some person cowering in the corner helpless in the face of pain… you’re out there ready to embrace it when it comes. Heck, sometimes I actively go out there and seek the pain myself. Realize the difference in mindset here… when you treat these moments as the reps in the mental gym of life that they are, they become a lot more bearable. More importantly, they begin to transform your brain and your life with it.

But just like the physical gym, you don’t want to overdo it… consistently skip gym day and guess what? You’ll be weak as crap. Doesn’t matter if we are talking muscle or brain. It’s just a fact of life. You either choose the pain you want to face today or let the pain of tomorrow choose for you.

Okay, so now you have your Mission Statement and your Board of Directors are all Beefy Swole dudes that never miss leg day, you are ready for the next step…

Building The Gestapo Secret Big Brother Police Network

…that monitors the streets and squashes any dissent before it happens.

In other words, awareness.

Your little departments can still wreak havoc and secretly push stupid things through if your Big Brother network is too weak to even realize it’s happening. That’s what happens to me when I’m 2-hours in a doom-scrolling session and I suddenly realize, holy crap, what just happened… it’s already 2am? Da hell. And only then does your board of directors know to send the Gestapo in to shut down this illicit activity.

Imagine being able to curb this nonsense at the very beginning. That’s why it’s equally important to strengthen this network through dedicated practice. By quietly observing my mental state, I search my brain and body for any discomforts or urges. In this analogy, I am sending out the Gestapo preemptively to walk my streets and patrol every nook and cranny. What departments are going to wreak havoc today?

And when I do find an urge, I do something called urge surfing, an idea first introduced by Alan Marlatt, a clinical psychologist and director of Addictive Behaviors Research Center at the University of Washington. When an urge comes, I non-judgementally observe it. I notice how it feels physically in your body. My goal isn’t to fight it nor to stop it but simply to notice it. And when you do, you simply breathe through the craving.

In the beginning, urge surf for 10-seconds before deciding what you want to do next. Each subsequent day, simply increase this time by one-second. At some point in time, you’ll be able to urge surf for 30-minutes straight, which is perfect because these urges are just like ocean waves. They come in strong but they all eventually dissipate within 20 to 30-minutes, sometimes even sooner. People use this technique literally to quit cigarettes.

And when the urge starts to fade, that’s when you act. This is when your beefy prefrontal cortex takes back control and each time it does, it makes itself even stronger. This one-two punch combo is how you build unstoppable discipline, how you learn to build seemingly infinite self-control.

Any craving or distraction gets picked up by your surveillance state immediately. Sitting in brain jail, this craving weakens from the lack of execution. It’s just a memo on a desk after all. You and your Board of Directors wait until it’s weak enough and then that’s when you simply quietly send in the Gestapo to “deal with it.”"

“Dealing with it” is what I call doing an “anti-task.” An anti-task is defined as a task another brain department wants you to do but ends up not getting done because it’s overridden by your Board of Directors. Can be as small and simple as I want to eat this candy bar right now and you simply decide… no. I won’t.

Doesn’t mean you can’t eat it later or even in 5-minutes after you’ve urge surfed… but the fact that you exerted self-control in the moment and stopped yourself for however long you did… is what counts. When your prefrontal cortex sees it can deliberately stop another brain department from having its way, it gains even more confidence. Doesn’t matter you still ate the candy bar a few minutes later. Even if you just delayed eating that candy bar for one-second, that’s still a win. You’re just in the early stages of developing self-control. That’s the 1-pound weight. Over time as you do these exercises, that self-control is only going to increase. Just like a real gym, with enough time and reps, you’ll be able to start lifting heavier and heavier weights.

Every single day, you must do three anti-tasks. I call this exercise, the Three Little Pigs. You know the three houses in the story? One is made straw, another’s made of sticks and the third is bricks. Stopping yourself from reflexively reaching for that candy bar may be your straw house anti-task.

Oh your phone just sent you a notification? Could be that hot instagram girl you’re following. Maybe she’s trying to slide into your dms. Harder to ignore than that candy bar for sure, but it doesn’t matter when your goal is to build the sexiest brain alive. Resist that urge to check and complete your stick house anti-task. With that out of the way, it’s time to look for today’s brick house anti-task. Three houses, three reps a day, all in increasing difficulty.

The great thing about this training regimen is it’s incredibly simple to do. It’s basically one key central idea - creating your authoritarian state and ruling with an iron fist.

In summary:

Step one. Build up the dictatorship and give it absolute power.

Step two. Build up your surveillance state and

Step three. Strengthen your secret police force.

Step four. Get confused by all my abstract analogies and take a nap.