There is No Secret
“There is no secret.” I heard this phrase from a YouTube video the other day, and it’s stuck with me. It was from a young Asian man named David Park who had transformed his life, all by starting to workout like the former Navy Seal David Goggins. He went from couch potato to running ultramarathons in months, and by a year later, he looks so different you almost think he’s a different person. It’s inspirational, but even more inspirational was the advice he shared.
Lots of people are looking for that golden nugget of information that help us make a breakthrough, he mentioned. But that’s not how discipline works. No matter how you put it, at the end of the day it is just about making the decision to do something. There’s no perfect pill or hack to it. You just have to get up and do something with your life, and do that consistently. In Park’s words, “everything comes down to showing up every single day.”
People have asked me how I’m so disciplined, and I tell them the same thing he did: it’s a choice. I’m not different or special. Neither is anyone else achieving something through discipline. It’s the consistency that matters. Take this quote from writer Tim Urban:
“The difference between the prolific writer and the self-loathing person who doesn't write anything is one writes 15 hours a week out of their 112 waking hours a week and the other does zero out of 112 waking hours. So 1/7th versus 0/7ths.”
Replace the word “writer” with anything else you are doing: biking, reading, coding, selling, etc. Of course skills matter, but the person who is more consistent almost always wins. And even if it’s not about competition, they win at life. And that’s what most of us want to do, because only a few of us will hold an Olympic Gold or start a business as big as Amazon. That’s not desirable for everyone. But guess what is desirable? Being consistent in the things we care most about in life. Once you decide what you care about, start doing it, and do it as consistently as you can. When you do that, you win.
