After a decade of setting goals every year and never achieving them, here’s what finally clicked:
High performers are successful as a result of consistent action, not intense effort.
This single realization led me to a framework for building habits that has changed my life.
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Working from home last year made me realize that at 27, I had no good habits and zero self-discipline.
I was going to bed after 3am and sleeping past noon.
I wasn’t working out consistently.
I was browsing Reddit and watching Netflix for up to 10 hours a day.
I wasn’t doing any of the work needed to build my business…
I hated myself. The more promises I broke, the more worthless I felt, and the louder the voice in my head became:
Why can’t I fix this?
Why am I so weak?
This is how my dreams die.
My life was a train wreck in slow motion. I even contemplated suicide.
Back in November, disgusted with myself, scared, and desperate, I remembered something I'd seen on Reddit. Someone asked Terry Crews how to start going to the gym when you hate it.
At the time, his answer didn't make any sense to me.
"Treat it like a spa. Go there but don't make yourself work out unless you feel like it. If you don't want to work out, just sit there for 30 minutes. But go every day."
For some reason, on a dark day for me a few months ago, it finally clicked.
High performers are successful as a result of consistent action, not intense effort.
I used to think intense effort was the reason for their success. I’d try to copy it, then fail when my willpower inevitably ran out.
Now I realized I'd had it backwards. Their secret is consistent action—intense effort is just the byproduct.
When you do something consistently, the intensity naturally increases over time on its own. If you sit in a gym long enough, eventually you're going to say, "Fuck it, I may as well do some pushups while I'm here."
Focusing on consistency instead of intensity is the key to changing your life: to building lasting habits, crushing your goals, and becoming the person you dream about.
Elon Musk is not successful because of his engineering expertise. He built that expertise because he kept showing up no matter how painful it got.
David Goggins is not successful because he runs ultramarathons like you and I binge Netflix. He can run ultramarathons because he runs every. fucking. day. Rain, shine, cold, heat, feeling great, or feeling awful—it doesn’t matter. He laces up.
That’s their superpower, and you can create it too.
That realization gave me an idea:
Try building only one small habit, and make it so easy it’s laughable. But do it every day, no exceptions, for 30 days.
After sleeping in past noon for almost a year, I now wake up at 6am every day and genuinely enjoy doing it. This one habit is transforming every other area of my life, from my health to my finances.
If I can do it, so can you. Here’s the four-step system that is changing my life (TL;DR at the bottom).
1. Pick one thing you want to make a habit
Only one thing. Not two things. Not five things. One thing.
Discipline is a muscle, and you and I are very out of shape. Trying to build five habits at once that take discipline is like deciding to run 10 miles a day when you’re 100 pounds overweight.
You might do it a few times through sheer will, but you’ll soon find an excuse to stop for the simple reason that it makes you too miserable.
Pick one habit you’re going to build for 30 days. For me, it was waking up early, but these principles can be applied to anything. The rest will come later, I promise.
2. Make it stupid easy
To stay consistent, you have to make things easy at first. We will increase the intensity later.
Remember, our discipline is currently a fat kid with sweaty Cheetos dust in his belly button. We have to start by taking him for a walk around the block, not forcing him to run a marathon at gunpoint.
Make the thing you are committing to do easy, then be aggressive about keeping it easy for 30 days.
Whatever you choose should be so easy you’d be embarrassed to talk about it. Here’s what “easy” might look like for different habits:
- Waking up early: Watch your favorite show as soon as you get up. Skip the workout for now if you don’t already love it.
- Working out: Run 1 mile a day or do 10 pushups a day.
- Eating healthy: Keep eating the junk food, just commit to eating a set number of calories.
Do exactly what you decided to do for 30 days—no less, but no more either.
If you committed to run a mile a day, stop at one mile even if you're feeling good and want to keep going.
Here's why:
Your mind is a crafty bastard. It hates this new path you’re on, so it plays a masterful psychological chess move: It encourages you to do more. Then tomorrow, when you’re sore and busy, it whispers in your ear that you can afford to skip a day.
You did extra, remember?
One day becomes two, two becomes three, and soon you’re right back where you started wondering how it all went wrong again.
It doesn’t matter if you deviate from your commitment in a “positive” direction. You weren’t consistent, and your mind will use that as leverage to break your resolve later on.
Don’t give it the excuse. Keep things laughably easy for 30 days. Once you’ve built the habit, then you can raise the bar.
3. Commit to consistency, not intensity
Consistent action is the key to changing your life, not intense effort.
Our culture celebrates intensity—hard workouts, big wins, and highlight performances. We judge workouts by how much we lift, diets by how fast we shed the pounds, and professional progress by how much money we’re making instead of how much we’re learning.
Change this paradigm, and it changes everything.
Start measuring success by whether or not you did the thing, not by how long you did it, how hard it was, or whether you noticed an improvement today.
Did you lift less weight than yesterday? It doesn't matter. You worked out, therefore you're killing it and can feel good about yourself.
Did you get out of bed on time but proceed to spend the next four hours scrolling through Instagram? It doesn't matter. If that’s the habit you’re working on then as long as you were out of bed the day is still a win.
Committing to consistency over intensity means giving yourself permission to celebrate tiny actions. It means measuring current actions against your previous baseline instead of against other people or some abstract ideal.
Give yourself permission to do things small and do them poorly. Celebrate action, not success.
Measure performance against your previous baseline instead of against other people or some abstract ideal. Focus on slow, consistent progress instead of sporadic Hail Marys.
4. Do it every day
This is the flip side of making it easy: you commit to doing it every day.
And I mean every day—no weekends, vacations, or days off for 30 straight days. If you miss a day, the 30 days start over. No exceptions, no excuses.
Let's say the habit you want to build is waking up early. I don’t care if you went to bed at 3am, it’s the weekend, or you’re on vacation. You’re still getting your ass out of bed at the designated time.
When you have no discipline, you have to treat yourself like an addict in recovery.
In this case, you're addicted to sleeping in. An alcoholic can’t afford to have just one drink, and you can't afford to sleep in even one day either.
Why? Because it’s never just one day, just like it’s never just one drink.
All a cheat day does is remind you how easy it is to compromise. Even if you resume your habit the next day, you’ve now created a back door your mind can use whenever it wants.
You can’t create a new normal if you keep sneaking off to hook up with the old one.
If you feel like you need cheat days, then go back to step three, because whatever you committed to doing isn’t easy enough to start with.
You can build discipline starting with nothing
Change is possible even if you’re starting with zero discipline and years of failed attempts like me.
- Pick one thing you want to make a habit.
- Commit to consistency, not intensity.
- Make it laughably easy.
- Do it every day for 30 days straight.
Once the 30 days are up, look yourself in the mirror and smile. You are a new person. You’ve built your first habit. Now add another one.
You’ve lit a fire in your soul, and it all started with a simple paradigm shift.
Make it your mantra this year: Consistency over intensity.
TL;DR
If you want to be disciplined, you need habits, not willpower.
High performers are successful as a result of consistent action, not intense effort.
My four-step process for building any habit:
1. Choose only one habit
- Doing too much at once dilutes your willpower. Use it all to conquer one
2. Make it stupid easy to do at first
- Examples: 5 pushups a day, eat 200 less calories, watch your favorite show immediately after waking up early
- Do no less but also NO MORE than you agreed to do for 30 days.
3. Commit to consistency, not intensity
- Celebrate action, not success. Give yourself permission to do things small and do them poorly.
4. Do it every day
- No exceptions—think of yourself as an addict in recovery. You can't have even one drink.
- If you feel like you need cheat days, go back to step 2. You didn't make it easy enough to start.
I hope this helps even one person as much as it's helped me.
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