What Boxing, Writing, and Sobriety Taught Me About Building Self-Discipline

Nothing will affect the quality of your life more than your level of self-discipline.

While I’ve always intellectually understood the idea, I did not have much experience with it or any role models of it as a child or even as a young man.

I grew up in the projects, had an unstable childhood, got suspended 15 times in middle school, and never graduated from high school.

For a long time, the only thing I knew was short-term thinking, living in the moment, and trying to survive until the next day. That type of lifestyle is not conducive to developing self-discipline, but those are the cards I was dealt.

You don’t control where you are born, who raises you, or what happens before you’re old enough to defend yourself. But eventually, your circumstances become your responsibility even when they aren’t your fault.

I started boxing at 22. I got sober at 28. Then I joined the Army National Guard, earned a physics degree, became a professional heavyweight boxer, built a writing career, and became a husband and father.

None of those things happened because I transformed overnight into a perfectly self-disciplined person. They happened because I gradually learned how to make myself do what needed to be done—even when I was uncomfortable, discouraged, tired, afraid, or unmotivated.

That is what self-discipline is.

It isn’t waking up at 4 a.m., taking cold showers, or barking motivational slogans at yourself in the mirror. It is the ability to make decisions based on what you value rather than on what you feel in the moment.

Boxing taught me how to develop that skill. Sobriety taught me why my life depended on it.

Self-Discipline Is a Skill, Not a Personality Trait

People often talk about self-discipline as if you either have it or you don’t.

This turns a temporary weakness into a permanent identity.

• You procrastinate, so you decide you are a procrastinator.
• You miss a workout and conclude that you lack willpower.
• You break a promise to yourself, so you assume you are simply an undisciplined person.

The problem with that belief is that it gives you an excuse to stop trying.

I don’t think I was born with an exceptional work ethic.

When I was younger, I was smart enough to recognize what I should do, but not disciplined enough to do it consistently. As the old saying goes, “hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work.”

Said another way, there is a tremendous difference between knowing the right move is and making it.

The distance between those—knowing what needs to be done and actually doing it—is inversely correlated to your level of self-discipline.

If you know what you need to do to get what you want, but you refuse to put in the work, you’re living in an undisciplined life. But if you do what needs to be done, regardless of how hard it is or how long it might take, then you are living a disciplined life.

Discipline is developed in the same way you develop strength, endurance, or any other ability or skill: through repeated exposure to manageable resistance. In practice, what does this look like?

You accept a little discomfort, keep a small promise, or resist turning a temptation into action. The first time you do it, it feels like hell—and that’s where most people give up. But if you continue doing that, then each time it becomes easier.

Until eventually, you don’t even think about not picking up the bottle, going to the gym, watching what you eat, or working on your dream.

The rest of this article will cover the mindset shifts and actionable steps that will help you start building self-discipline.

While you’re going through this, I want you to keep the following saying in mind:

The difficulty of a task is irrelevant if it’s vital to your success.

Lesson 1: Start Before You Feel Ready

When I walked into a boxing gym at 22, I was getting a late start in a sport where many serious fighters begin as children.

However, my age was beyond my control. All I had was a desire to box.

Also of note, I couldn’t control my height, my athletic ability, where I lived, what training options were available to me, or who my competition was.

All I could do was get started, keep going, and figure it out along the way. I didn’t need a perfect plan to get started. Hell, I didn’t even really have a plan besides keep fighting until I’m unable to compete.

I eventually became a Pennsylvania Golden Gloves champion, won the National PAL championship, reached a ranking of 4 in the USA Boxing rankings, and finished my professional career with a 14-1-1 record. None of that was visible when I began.

All I knew was that I had to make the next practice session.

Most people try to plan everything and account for everything that can go wrong, which is just a clever version of procrastination. And then they find a reason to not even get started.

Even worse, they only see the end result, compare it with their current ability, and become overwhelmed by the distance between the two. Because the journey feels so far, they figure it’s not even worth it to get started in the first place.

You need to think smaller. This may seem counterintuitive, but the solution to procrastination and difficulty getting started is to narrow your field of vision.

Because smaller goals are more attainable and feel less overwhelming.

This doesn’t mean making your goals or ambitions smaller and settling for less. Rather, it means changing what you consider to be a necessary condition for success.

You’re not changing the overall strategy. You’re changing the tactics that you use to achieve that strategic goal. For example:

• Don’t focus on writing the book. Write one page.
• Don’t focus on losing 40 pounds. Complete today’s workout.
• Don’t focus on getting rich. Just focus on getting out of debt, and in turn, just focus on paying off one credit card.
• Don’t focus on saving the entire relationship in one action or conversation. Identify the one change you can make that will reduce the stress in the relationship.

Rome wasn’t built in a day.

People say that to remind you that worthwhile things take time, but what’s often missed in that statement is that worthwhile things contain many steps. When it comes to goal-setting, break down the bigger goal into smaller parts so that each milestone is achievable and gets you closer to the ultimate goal.

When you look at plans this way, the fear of starting decreases dramatically. Furthermore, each success milestone builds momentum.

When I was writing Hard Lessons From The Hurt Business: Boxing And The Art of Life, I didn’t really know where to start. But I knew that if I just got a few sentences on the page, I’d figure out the rest later. Before I knew it, I was writing pages at a time.

Many times, the path is shaped by walking it, and you can’t know how it will goes until you start moving.

Likewise, my boxing career wasn’t built during championship fights.

It was built during thousands of ordinary rounds when nobody was watching. Roadwork, bag work, sparring, defense drills, conditioning, and repetition created the ability that eventually appeared under the lights.

One of the greatest benefits of self-discipline is that it gives you the ability to take ambitious goals and break them down into ordinary outcomes and actions. And they eventually compound into something great.

Try this: Make the task too small to avoid

Choose one thing you’ve been postponing and reduce it to a ten-minute action. In this case, the goal is to simply work for 10 minutes.

You don’t have to worry about how much you produce or how far you get. The only rule is that for 10 minutes, you work on the task at hand.

For those ten minutes, you may work or sit there, but you may not do anything else. Don’t check your phone, reorganize your desk, or pretend that updating your to-do list counts as progress.

You are training yourself to begin without waiting for motivation and without considering the bigger goal.

Lesson 2: Learn to Stay in Discomfort

Boxing is an education in discomfort.

Between being physically tired, emotionally strained, mentally burnt out, and psychologically tortured, boxing is not comfortable. Even in victory, boxing is remarkably uncomfortable on every level.

It’s all fun and games when you’re first starting out, but if you get serious, you’re very quickly reminded why boxing is called “The Hurt Business.”

However, persisting in the face of that discomfort is the only way to improve—and this is true for all disciplines, because getting good at something will force you to confront your weaknesses as they try to drag you down.

That is one of the major ways that self-discipline is built, and it’s a lesson I carried with me into studying for physics and writing.

You will be uncomfortable for a long time before you feel comfortable, but sticking with someone through that period is the only way to improve. But this aspect of self-discipline goes even further than skill acquisition.

Most destructive behavior begins with an attempt to escape an uncomfortable internal state. You feel bored, so you reach for your phone. You feel anxious, so you avoid the difficult conversation. You feel frustrated, so you abandon the project. You experience a craving, so you search for relief.

The relief reinforces the escape. Every time you immediately flee from discomfort, you teach your brain that discomfort is an emergency.

So when you feel any discomfort while studying for an exam, training in the gym, or even just trying to read a book, you quickly stop because you’ve trained yourself to avoid that feeling.

But it isn’t really an emergency. Discomfort is simply information, and what you do with it depends on how disciplined you are.

Sometimes it means you need rest or to change plans. But most of the time, it just means you are doing something difficult, uncertain, or unfamiliar.

Self-discipline gives you enough space to tell the difference. Because as you develop your ability to persist in the face of discomfort, a funny thing happens:

You stop feeling so uncomfortable, not only because you’ve adjusted to the workload, but you’ve also made enough progress that your desire to continue outweighs any desire you had to quit.

By developing self-discipline, you’ve made yourself stronger and more motivated.

One thing that helped me with this particular aspect of self-discipline was meditation.

The point of meditation is not to eliminate unpleasant thoughts, intense cravings, or negative feelings. It’s to notice them without automatically reacting to them. Once you do that, you realize that they come and go, but you are compelled to react to them.

Incidentally, this is the same approach required in boxing: recognize what is happening, remain composed, and choose your response. And you do this despite being under duress, in pain, and dealing with the constant threat of harm.

You don’t need an elaborate meditation practice. Sit quietly for five minutes and observe what your mind does. You’ll quickly notice how often it tries to pull you toward stimulation or away from discomfort.

That awareness is the beginning of self-control.

Try this: Delay the escape

The next time you want to give up on something, wait five minutes.

You don’t have to promise that you’ll finish. Simply remain with the discomfort for five more minutes while continuing to work.

Pay attention to how the urge rises, changes, and often weakens without being satisfied.

This is a type of mental interval training.

Start with 10 minutes of focused work, followed by a 5-minute break. As you become more resilient, extend the work interval.

The goal here is not to make yourself miserable. It’s to discover that you can be uncomfortable without losing control of your behavior.

Lesson 3: Stop Depending on Willpower

I got sober on December 23, 2013.

Sobriety didn’t arrive because I suddenly developed infinite willpower. I had to restructure my life around the decision. If I continued visiting the same places, following the same routines, and responding to stress the same way, the old behavior would eventually win out.

This taught me an important distinction: willpower helps you resist an impulse, but self-discipline helps you build a life in which you encounter fewer unnecessary battles.

Alcohol addiction is an extreme example, but the principle applies everywhere.

If junk food is always in your kitchen, you must make a good decision every time you see it. If your phone is beside you while you work, you must repeatedly resist the urge to check it. If you stay awake until two in the morning, your morning routine begins as a negotiation with an exhausted brain.

Environment matters because you don’t have unlimited capacity for self-control. Not only is it finite, but it changes with sleep, hunger, stress, emotion, and fatigue.

An intelligent approach to building self-discipline accounts for all of these factors and looks to improve them as well. If you set your environment up for success, you end up relying on willpower less to make major changes in your life and develop self-discipline.

For example, consider the following examples from my personal life:

• When I made the decision to quit drinking, I stopped going to bars and only socialized with friends over coffee. I completely removed the temptation to drink so that my self-discipline could strengthen. Now, over a decade later, I can be in a bar with zero temptation.
• I used to have a problem checking different pages on the internet while trying to work. I started keeping only one tab open at a time while working. If I had an idea or remembered something important I wanted to check, I wrote it in a notebook. It’s amazing how much stuff seems important, but when you look back at it later, you realize it was just a distraction from the discomfort of work.
• There was a time when I had to get up to be at the gym by 6 a.m. It was much easier if I packed my training gear and laid out my supplements the night before.

The idea is that I made it easier to do what I needed to do, so I didn’t use up my self-discipline on trivial tasks. That allowed me to strengthen it by focusing on what actually mattered, rather than letting it drain and barely scrape by with mediocre, uninspiring results.

Try this: Find the first point of failure

Choose one recurring behavior you want to change and identify what happens immediately before it. For example:

• Maybe you skip training because you come home and start doomscrolling.
• Maybe you eat badly because you wait until you’re hungry to decide what to eat.
• Maybe you lose an hour online because you pick up your phone to answer one message.

Don’t attack the final behavior. Change the event and the environment that starts the sequence.

Pack your bag and go to the gym straight from work. Eat on a schedule. Put your phone in the other room when you start to work.

Self-discipline becomes easier when you interrupt a bad habit before it gains momentum, and a large part of that is eliminating the conditions for bad habits to even start.

Lesson 4: Use Structure to Protect Your Priorities

After getting sober, I joined the Army National Guard. Later, I earned a bachelor’s degree in physics while continuing to train and compete.

Physics didn’t care whether I felt inspired. Neither did boxing. The Army certainly didn’t.

I had to learn time management because several demanding parts of my life were competing for the same limited hours. The answer wasn’t to become maximally productive every minute of the day. It was to decide in advance which responsibilities mattered and give them protected time.

People often say they don’t have enough time when the deeper problem is that they haven’t assigned their time a purpose.

If an important task exists only as something you hope to fit in later, it will usually be displaced by something easier. Self-discipline means deciding when the work will happen before the moment arrives.

That reduces the number of decisions you have to make under pressure.

Don’t look at a schedule as a prison. Look at a schedule as a way to protect what’s important.

Try this: Establish one non-negotiable block

Pick one activity that would materially improve your life: exercising, studying, writing, planning meals, or developing a professional skill.

Give it a specific place on your calendar three times this week. Define the minimum amount of work that counts. When the time arrives, begin whether you feel like it or not.

This is more useful than designing a perfect daily schedule you will abandon by Thursday. It also builds on the previous tips by forcing you to start before you’re ready, setting up your environment, and managing the initial discomfort of sticking to a light schedule.

Lesson 5: Connect Discipline to Something Larger Than Yourself

Doing difficult things became easier once my decisions no longer affected only me.

Becoming a husband and father changed the meaning of self-discipline.

Training, working, protecting my sobriety, and managing my emotions were no longer private acts of self-improvement where only I reaped the benefits or suffered the consequences. They affected the stability of my family and the example my son would grow up watching.

Responsibility and accountability are powerful behavior modifiers and can be a stronger motivation than ambition.

When you only act for your present self, immediate pleasure and distraction have a powerful argument.

However, when you remember the people who depend on you—or the future version of yourself who will inherit today’s decisions—delayed gratification becomes easier to accept.

Don’t interpret this to mean that you should neglect yourself for everyone else. Maintaining your physical and mental health allows you to contribute more, remain dependable, and reduce stress within the relationships that matter to you.

This just means that when everything is no longer about you, it’s much easier to be self-disciplined.

Self-discipline is often described as restriction, but its deeper purpose is freedom. In fact, I’d argue that when it comes to improving your self-discipline and self-control, most people need more responsibility—not less. Because through that responsibility and discipline, you truly become free.

Sobriety gave me freedom from alcohol.

Financial discipline gives you freedom from desperation.

Emotional discipline gives you freedom from being controlled by every provocation.

Healthy habits give you more freedom to use your body and mind as you age.

The disciplined choice often feels restrictive in the moment, but it produces a life free of stress, worry, and negative feelings.

When Jocko Willink said, “Discipline is freedom,” this is what he meant.

Try this: Name who benefits

Choose one difficult commitment and ask who benefits if you keep it.

Maybe you exercise to stay active with your children. Maybe you build a business so your family has more security. Maybe you study because your future work could help people you haven’t met yet.

Write down the answer and read it when your initial motivation disappears.

And if you can’t find someone who benefits, think about your future self. When I got sober, joined the military, and returned to school, I didn’t have anyone depending on me except for the version of myself five years in the future.

I wanted more options because I hated the life I had for my life up to that point.

Lesson 6: Treat Failure Like Fight Film

My only professional loss taught me more than an undefeated record ever could have.

After you lose a fight, you can either protect your ego or learn why you lost so it won’t happen again. You can’t do both.

The same applies when you break a promise to yourself, but the ego protection comes in a slightly counterintuitive manner.

If you tell yourself that you messed up because you’re lazy, weak, and lack discipline, you’re assigning the failure to an intrinsic personality trait that is beyond your ability to control. By telling yourself that you messed up because that’s just the way you are, you’re making it nearly impossible to be anything else.

Compare that to saying exactly why you messed up, rather than giving it a personality trait.

• “I only slept four hours.”
• “I didn’t study enough.”
• “I went to the bar and broke my plan.”

If you take responsibility for the actions that led to your mistake, you can correct them.

You are not a mistake. You made a mistake. There’s a big difference, and it’s all in the wording, which thus influences your perspective.

Failure is not proof that you don’t have self-discipline. It’s proof that you didn’t follow your plan and may need to make an adjustment.

This is how persistence is developed. You don’t pretend the failure didn’t matter, but you also don’t turn one mistake into permission to keep failing.

• If you miss one workout, return for the next one.
• If you waste the morning, recover the afternoon.
• If you eat one bad meal, make the next one better.

The faster you return to constructive behavior, the less damage a mistake can do.

Progress depends less on never falling off course than on shortening the distance between the mistake and the correction.

Try this: Conduct an honest review

Write down the last commitment you failed to keep and answer three questions:

1. What exactly happened?
2. What condition made failure more likely?
3. What will I change so the same situation doesn’t happen again?

Create a specific adjustment. “Try harder” is not an adjustment.

Going to bed earlier, preparing food in advance, scheduling the work, asking for accountability, or removing access to a temptation are adjustments.

Lesson 7: Reward Progress Without Weakening the Habit

Self-discipline should not make life joyless.

You can reward yourself for reaching meaningful milestones, but the reward should not undermine the behavior you are building.

Celebrating a month of sobriety by getting drunk would obviously be absurd. So is rewarding a week of healthy eating with an uncontrolled weekend or finishing a productive morning by losing the rest of the day to your phone.

Choose rewards that reinforce your identity and recovery.

• Take an afternoon off and see a movie.
• Buy something nice for yourself.
• Spend time with your family.
• Enjoy a cheat meal without turning it into a weekend.

The purpose of a reward is to acknowledge progress, not reactivate the pattern you are trying to escape.

Over time, the work itself also becomes rewarding. Keeping promises to yourself builds confidence.

Confidence makes difficult action less emotionally expensive. This creates an upward cycle in which self-discipline supports personal growth, and visible growth makes further discipline easier.

The Point of Self-Discipline Is Not Perfection

I am not perfectly disciplined.

I still procrastinate, experience cravings for comfort, and I still have days when my attention is scattered.

The difference is that I no longer treat those feelings as commands or personality traits.

• Boxing taught me that you can be tired and keep your hands up.
• Sobriety taught me that you can experience an urge without obeying it.
• The Army taught me that standards still exist when you are uncomfortable.
• Studying physics taught me that confusion is not a signal to quit.
• Writing taught me that waiting for inspiration is an excellent way to produce nothing.
• Fatherhood taught me that discipline is one of the ways love becomes visible.

These lessons all point to the same truth:

Self-discipline is the ability to remember what you want most when you are tempted by what you want now.

You build that ability through small, repeated decisions.

You do not need a new personality. You don’t need to hate yourself into changing. You don’t need perfect motivation, superhuman willpower, or a complicated productivity system.

You need to keep one small promise today.

Then keep another tomorrow.

That is how self-discipline is built. That is how your identity changes. Eventually, the person you once wanted to become is simply the person your repeated actions have made you.