I listen to quite a few podcasts throughout the week. One of these podcasts (Tribe of Mentors by Tim Ferriss) interviewed Jocko Willink. This phrase “Discipline equals Freedom” comes from Jocko and his time as a Navy Seal instructor. His two most common examples are:

1. if you want to lose weight (freedom from extra baggage), you have to have the discipline to control what you eat.
2. if you want to have financial security (freedom from debt), you have to have the discipline to control spending and to save money.

This mantra triggered an epiphany moment. It brought back memories of parental lessons passed to me, the lessons I’ve learned from the success and failures that I’ve experienced in the past 30+ years and even the current struggles that I’m facing today. I started to mentally categorize these memories and came to a profound realization that many of the successes can be attributed to maintaining discipline from start to finish. This reflection started me down a rabbit hole on YouTube (link, link, link). Just listening to the YouTube links and considering how this one phrase changed my thought process, I ended up buying his book on Amazon.

Currently, there are alot of things that I could do better if I exercised the necessary discipline. And since I recognize that I don’t exercise the discipline, it becomes much easier to recognize when I don’t have discipline as well as ask why I don’t have the discipline. And subsequently, what can I do to gain the discipline. In reality, I have patterns and behaviors that encourages the lack of discipline that I first need to identify and seek a solution for. Then… I can follow Jocko’s advice and “just do it.”