Outsmarting Your Own Excuses

By: Danny Fulford

“Discipline is doing what you hate to do, but doing it like you love it.”

The first time I heard Mike Tyson say those words, I stopped everything to scribble them onto a sticky note. For a long time, that note lived on my desk at work. I’d glance at it occasionally, usually when I was facing a daunting task I didn't want to start.

One morning, I woke up for the gym and I just wasn't feeling it. I was sore, my knees ached, and I had a nagging headache—I felt "blah" in every sense of the word. I told myself, Not today, and pulled the sheets back over my head, fully intending to go back to sleep.

That’s when the image of that yellow sticky note flashed into my mind. I could see it plain as day: the bright paper and my barely legible handwriting. It hit me then that the quote wasn't just about professional tasks; it was a mantra for life.

To be clear: I’m not suggesting you should push through legitimate medical emergencies or risk making a serious injury worse. But that morning, I realized I was just looking for an excuse. It’s a dirty trick our minds play on us to justify what we think we want at the moment.

So, I got up, got ready, and went to the gym. I hated every minute of it. The annoying aches remained, the headache intensified, and I was generally miserable—but I was there.

In Jordan Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life he treats discipline not as a punishing set of restrictions, but as a necessary framework for meaning. He argues that without discipline, an individual is a slave to their immediate impulses, which leads to chaos.

In Rule 4: Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today. Discipline is built through small, manageable habits. If you try to change everything at once, you’ll fail. Instead, negotiate with yourself to do one small thing today that makes tomorrow slightly better.

And you know what? The next time, it was a little easier to get out of bed.

Fast forward to today, and I hit the gym seven days a week. Is that extreme? Maybe to some, but it has become such an essential outlet that I refuse to miss a session. Everything starts with one small step forward.

#motivation #overcoming #mentality #health #wellness

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