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Real discipline is not about stopping a bad habit. It's about creating a realistic and better alternative. So if you want to build real discipline, this is a common misconception that you need to avoid at all costs. So I'll give you an example that's pretty morbid, but it always really resonated with me, which was my mother was an alcoholic when I grew up and she quit drinking by smoking. Sounds crazy, right? But she went from drinking to smoking to to vaping, to chewing gum to eventually nothing. And so she didn't go from zero to perfect. She continued to replace her bad habits with increasingly better alternatives. I know it sounds nuts, but too often people think that discipline means stopping a behavior immediately, but that almost always fails. So you don't need to be perfect right away. You just need to take a step towards the next best alternative. What you want to do is identify a realistic, better, not perfect alternative to your habit. So instead of drinking vodka, maybe you drink a seltzer. Instead of drinking a seltzer, maybe you have a craft beer. Instead of a craft beer, maybe you're going to have a non alcoholic beer. Maybe then instead of a non alcoholic beer, then you're going to have a Diet Coke. And then after a Diet Coke, you're going to say, I'm going to have a sparkling water. And then from a sparkling water, you can stick with that or go to a water. You see how it goes. It's like you take tiny little steps. You don't just make the big swing all at once. This can be done with food as well. Say you eat dessert every night. You're like, I eat a sundae every night. It's like, oh, I'm going to go from having a Sunday every night to nothing. No, let's go from having a Sunday with caramel, with toppings, with hot fudge, to like, let's have a Sunday with no hot fudge. Then two days later, let's have a sundae with no brownie bites. Then two days later, let's have a Sunday with half the ice cream. And you just continue to gradually swap out alternatives in stages. And so small steps in the right direction turn into big changes over time. It's just that most people are so impatient with themselves, they don't allow themselves to get there. And they stay stuck in this cycle of going, big change and then back out, big change again, back out. So here's the deal. If you want true freedom, you have to stop relying on how you feel each day. Freedom comes from following a plan, not your Feelings. A good example of this is that every year I map out a 12 month plan for my business. And now I do this because what it means is that I take some time, maybe it's a week, it's two weeks, it's five days. And I put all of my effort into figuring out what's the plan going to look like to get me to my goal 12 months from now. Now why do I do this? I do this because I'm trying to get all the hard thinking done ahead of time so that every day when I step into my business, I just get to execute. I don't have to keep thinking, I don't have decision fatigue. I'm not constantly in this tear of like, what should I do? What do I need to do to grow my business? I just know. And I've been able to achieve that level of freedom through structure. Because without structure, I'm going to constantly debate with myself and I'm going to be exhausted because I'm going to be in this cycle of like decision execution, decision execution. And that decision fatigue is going to prevent any kind of meaningful progress because I'm going to be stuck in the cycle of questioning what I'm doing. But if I do all the thinking ahead of time and then I just get to execute, I don't think about it, I just say, you know what, I'm going to play this out. I'm going to see if I make progress. Another example of this is that every Sunday I plan my entire next week. Why do I do that? It is another way of doing this on a micro level, which is I don't want to wake up every day and be like, what am I doing today? I think it's the biggest waste of my time and energy. And there's nothing I hate more than not knowing what I'm going to be doing for the day. Now it doesn't have to be perfect. It's something that you can do. You can test it out for a week and you'll see how much more freedom you feel when just on a daily basis you're not arguing with yourself. And so the question that you can ask yourself is how much energy am I losing by fighting with myself on a daily basis? All in all, discipline isn't sexy. It is boring. And boring is what scales. Boring is what works. If your routine is exciting, you're probably doing it wrong. Because by the nature of routine, if it's exciting, it means you don't do it all the time. Which means it's not a routine it's funny because people say all the time, I would love to see a day in your life, Layla. And I'm like, well, that's boring. As. Because my life is a series of systems strung together every day. And, and so it means, like, I have a system for working out, I have a system for my marriage, I have a system for my business. I have a system for my friendships, I have a system for my family. Like, I have a system for every aspect of my life. But here's the thing. Those systems, those are discipline. And they're real. Are they boring? For sure, they look boring from the outside, but they get the results that I'm looking for in my life. And a lot of the times, most people are just chasing novelty. They want a new workout, they want a new mastermind, a new business, a new meetup, but they don't actually get any results. They just feel like they're making progress because they get to go from zero to one a million times. I'd rather go from one to ten. And so the reality is, if your routine is too exciting, you're probably not actually making progress. And so you want to embrace boring routines. Doing simple things consistently is what actually leads to massive success. I have literally never had a time where I have woken up on a single day and thought, I want to do every single thing today. Seriously. I haven't in a long, long time. Probably 15 years. Because most days I wake up, I at least don't want to do one thing. I don't want to do the workout. I don't want to talk to the person. I don't want to have the hard conversation. I don't want to do the interview. I don't want to do eight meetings. I don't want to run a board meeting. I don't want to look at these financials, I don't want to answer these emails. I don't want to talk to anybody. But I also know that feelings are fleeting and I want the long term satisfaction of. Of knowing that I can stick with something, knowing I have control over myself and knowing that I've mastered something. And what I've seen is that when you start doing it, it adds up. And then you start to feel better about yourself and better than you've ever felt because you're like, I trust myself. I trust myself to stick with the plan. I trust myself to have my own back. Discipline is not just going to bring you closer to your goals. It's going to bring you closer to the person that you want to be. And at the end of the day, I care more about how I feel about myself when I'm by myself than I do about the fleeting moments I had during the day where maybe I wasn't super into something, maybe I didn't want to do it for five seconds. But that always goes away. Building discipline is only half the battle. But if this felt valuable, you can go ahead and watch my video on building microhabits that could change your life.