Discipline?

"Yes. I know. I know those donuts are tempting. All those colourful sprinkles, the cream filling. The glaze, the glorious glaze!

And on top of all that, they’re free. Someone brought them in and just left them here, right here, right in front of me. Surely this is some kind of sign, some kind of miracle, right? I mean food is food, and if it’s free, I pretty much need to eat it. It would be ungrateful for me to say no, right? Right??

Wrong.

Dead wrong.

Those donuts aren’t food, they’re poison. Same with chocolate chip cookies, the double-dutch chocolate cake, the can of soda, the bag of potato chips, and the pretzel-wrapped hot dogs. All that junk isn’t food. It doesn’t fuel you, it kills you. It literally kills you. It isn’t going to make you stronger, faster, healthier, smarter, or better, it’s going to do the opposite. And you know this. You know you do not need any of that junk.

“But it’s the only choice.” Wrong. Unless you have gone an extended period of time without food, you don’t need to eat. And you definitely don’t need to eat that poison. You don’t need to eat. You don’t even know what hungry is. Humans can go 30 days without food, you can make it.

So when those foods are tempting you, calling your name, and enticing you with their sugar-coated lies, get angry. Get aggressive. Stand your ground in the battle, and fight by saying “No”.

Hold the line. Hold the line for your health, for your mental toughness, and exercise your will, which I promise is stronger than the will of a donut.

If you want it to be.

So, hold THE line."

The passage above is from a chapter titled 'Sugar Coated Lies' from a book called Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual by Jocko Willink. If you don't know who he is, and you want to hear from a guy who lives and breathes a no-excuses mentality, then have a read through his full book on Spotify and check out his backstory.

I go back to this book whenever I feel like I'm slacking on the things that are important to my health, self-development, relationship, and business. If you read the chapter, and thought to yourself, "this is a bit extreme", then you'd be right. But if you read between the lines and look a bit deeper than the donuts that he's talking about (you could substitute donuts for anything that you know is an Achilles heel for you, such as alcohol, trash TV, cigarettes, etc.), there are some takeaways that we all can benefit from.

I highly recommend listening to the whole book (around 80 mins total) on your morning commute over the next week. It'll make you laugh, it'll make you think, and it'll provide a mirror for you to look at your own efforts. Personally, I always get a reinvigorated sense of purpose whenever I hear Jocko tell me about those Sugar-Coated Lies that we all fall prey to sometimes.