why are you still so undisciplined you have ambitious goals and you want to accomplish them but distraction after distraction after distraction hits your senses and it's impossible to stay consistent because of it at one point or another we've all gone on the internet and looked up advice on how to be more disciplined and most of the articles and videos all share the same ideas you gotta have the right mindset remove all distractions and set goals in fact i've made a video describing all of that too it's pretty good advice well you've consumed all of that
type of information and applied it and yet you still give up on your goals just as easily so what's going on the problem is i think we've been looking at discipline the completely wrong way yes all those things i listed off are helpful but what if there's a missing piece to this whole thing what if we took a different perspective and instead of asking ourselves how can i stay more disciplined we ask what do i end up doing when i am less disciplined to fully understand that rather confusing last sentence let me share with you
an epiphany i had when reflecting back on a much different time in my life this video is sponsored by the small business setup software taylor brands but more on that later in 2019 before youtube was my full-time job i was trying many different ways to make money online i knew the 9 to 5 life was not for me and i wanted to use the skills i'd built from making videos for a couple years to start freelancing for different people and companies along with video editing i had also done some coding and graphic design work because
i was going to college for computer science but i later switched majors and ended up graduating with a cognitive science degree that part will be important later in the midst of all that indecisiveness questioning what i wanted to do with my life and giving up on several different paths i got a message from one of my old high school friends and he said he wanted to start a company with me he had just started to make youtube videos on coding tutorials and was gaining a little traction and he too had the hopes of escaping the
9-5 life he had an idea for a company where we coded and designed apps built websites and ran social medias for different companies because that is what we were both good at as i imagined the potential success of starting a company with a friend of mine i had no hesitations so i said let's do it for a while both my friend slash business partner and i were very helpful and disciplined we registered our company which was called agendev as an llc made our logo which in retrospect looks very sus designed and coded a whole website
and even started getting a few clients on freelancing websites like upwork but slowly that motivation and drive that i had when beginning the company started to wear off i started to question whether this was really what i wanted to do or what i was even good at and me and my partner would go back and forth about the workload being unbalanced little by little all these misfortunes and uncertainty surrounding the business piled up and i'd convinced myself that this wasn't for me the benefits were no longer outweighing the drawbacks and so after a few short
months we officially shut down the llc another failed venture in my life the only reason i actually remembered this whole story was because i was flicking through my old videos and came across the video i made with my friend explaining why our business failed in that video i made some decent points we disagreed on future plans had no prior business experience and miscommunicated with our clients at face value anyone would assume that these were all the biggest factors towards the downfall of our business but before we go over the more important less obvious reasons related
to discipline let's talk about the software that i wish i'd used when starting this company taylor brands if you're an ambitious person looking to escape the 9 to 5 like i was then you probably want to start your own llc or limited liability company like i did it can make your business look more professional it can help lower your taxes and it's quite inexpensive to do the biggest hurdle to tackle with setting up an llc is usually how long it takes to set everything up i remember the whole process with my company agendev took forever
to complete but with taylor brands you can completely simplify the process of doing so and you can get plenty of other tools for your business with just a few short questions all you do is fill out some necessary information on the company you want to create and tailor brands takes care of the rest along with registering your llc for you you can also create your company logo check and purchase a domain name design and create a website with no coding experience and create your own digital business card we definitely could have used that logo creator
at agendev i mean what was that look if you've been thinking of finally taking creating a company or brand seriously now is the time to do it with taylor brands so if you're interested in finally following through with your goals to make a legitimate business you can use my link in the description below and you'll receive a limited time 20 discount on their plans so after watching my old video on why our company failed i started to think back on my life specifically and everything else i had tried to do in the past but failed
because i didn't have the discipline to keep going like the football team i joined when i was a kid then quit several months after because i didn't feel good enough or the time i called my baseball coach crying saying i was quitting the team because i no longer felt like i enjoyed baseball or when i switched majors in college from computer science to cognitive science because i told myself that computer science wasn't for me which was really just an excuse that i made for being on discipline and i even thought about giving up on youtube
completely because again i'd questioned whether it was really the right thing for me i had to think deeply about this why did i give up on almost everything shortly after starting it and what did all of these things have in common sure i didn't have the same sort of discipline mindset back then as i do now but there had to be more to it than that and that's when it hit me apart from my change in mindset towards my goals the only other thing that stopped me from achieving what i wanted to was my reaction
towards not being good at something or experiencing a setback it was then that this phrase cemented itself into my mind the most disciplined people i know are the people who are best at not beating themselves up when they are undisciplined it finally all made sense in the past when i slipped up on my goals or i wasn't making what i consider to be significant progress i would beat myself up for it i would wallow in self-pity telling myself you really aren't good enough for anything you may as well give up right now because you'll never
have the skills to be exceptional at this thing and this is by far the biggest problem i see with people who are not disciplined you see discipline isn't just about showing up it's about what you do when you don't show up do you tell yourself i'm an idiot i can't believe you did that you're fool or do you tell yourself well it's all good we'll get them tomorrow my guess is something more closely related to the former self-pity is possibly the most destructive vice you can have but what makes most humans adopt such a mentality
towards not staying on track the biggest factor that i found is having completely unrealistic expectations for yourself and this stems from several things the first being what you've been told is acceptable work let's go back and reflect on your upbringing again as i like to do in many of my videos when you are a child your main priority is to feel seen and appreciated in the world you don't really have your own concept of yourself and your own needs and wants and so you gain most of your perspective on what it means to be a
hard worker from other people since you so deeply want to feel understood and appreciated you will do anything to make that happen if your parents or caretakers never congratulated you or made you feel appreciated no matter how much you tried to work and improve on something then you start to adopt the mindset of nothing i ever do will be good enough i've got to keep trying until someone notices me either that or you'll do the opposite version of this throw tantrums and purposefully self-sabotage until someone gives you the attention you so desperately crave these are
two sides of the same coin because both of them lead to an over-straining of oneself based on a need for approval eventually this behavior becomes so deeply ingrained into you that you never make it out of that child stage to the point where you can discover your own ways of thinking about what it means to do healthy work and how to be self-sufficient it was hard for me to admit this but as a kid and into my teenage years i never really felt like anything i did was good enough and that led me to so
easily give up and never finish things i was never willing to give myself the validation i needed and if i never got it from someone else too then i basically just told myself that this endeavor was useless and that i lacked the competence needed to become good at it unrealistic expectations can also come from an addiction to comparison comparison is more of a natural innate human condition i cannot even begin to tell you how many of the average person's problems stem from outdated software in our brain's programming our survival brains are constantly looking at what
others are doing in relation to us because if our actions are in accordance with what others are doing we will have a greater chance of fitting in and thus have a better chance to survive for the majority of history the ways in which people compared one person to another were usually pretty healthy and i think it's important to have a little comparison because if you want something then comparison can breed competition in that certain field and you'll be more motivated to go after what you want but with the new age of technology people have started
to compare themselves to the most unrealistic looking lifestyles imaginable you could be working harder than 90 of the population but you'll see that one tick tock of a kid making a million dollars and working 12 hours a day and your perceived work ethic will be completely shattered technology has also given people access to the lives of the extremely elite abnormally hard workers to be in your teens and early twenties and compare yourself to jocko willink or david goggins or elon musk is absolutely outrageous you are not them and that's okay you were probably never supposed
to be them along with that the truth about most of these guys including myself is that they can be extremely undisciplined sometimes i procrastinate every single day i'm on my phone all the damn time i'm using it on the toilet and whatnot but the thing is i know who i am and what i'm going after and that doing that sometimes in no way leads me to a lower version of myself as long as i don't pity myself and thus stay in a state of complacency forever so how can we fix this self-pity and unrealistic expectations
to unlearn and transform the self-sabotaging voice in you that was developed through a combination of your innate monkey brain and your upbringing three things must be done firstly you need to carve out your own definition of enough ask yourself what is it that you're really going after and what does it take to get there for most people this will involve a more balanced life approach yes you will have to work hard for what you want no matter what but i bet your ideal life doesn't involve working 13-hour days getting pissed off when you don't reach
your expectations and then easily falling back into your bad habits permanently you really need to dive deep and ask yourself how much of what you want is for your own fulfillment versus for the approval of others and based on that i think you'll find that what you do on a daily basis is enough so long as you can stop catastrophizing when you have what you would consider a slip up or a fallback but even if you don't hit your enough for a certain day or even a few days you can never think to yourself oh
it's over progress gone nothing's working i'm worthless you need to just think alright buddy you fell off the wagon abyss that's a natural part of life everyone goes through it's time to buckle down and keep showing up you'll get there in this way you're not going completely soft on yourself and letting whatever you do slide because that is just as unproductive as self-sabotaging you need the balance of not being too soft on yourself to the point where you stop caring with not being too hard on yourself to the point where you give up or harm
yourself when things are tough i honestly think it would do most people good if they just gave up the word discipline entirely and replaced it with the word consistent i think when you focus on just being consistent it's an easier thing to strive towards and it holds far more weight than discipline just start by focusing on the bare minimum when creating your enough you should ask yourself did i show up and did i get a one percent improvement or try to get a one percent improvement because that is truly the key to any success the
second way to transform your deeply embedded beliefs is you have to be willing to suck in 99 of the things you do you're not gonna be born with some god-like ability to do sad thing you have to be willing to embarrass yourself and be crap at the thing you want for quite a while maybe even years before it gets easier and thus it becomes easier to stay disciplined this was a big one for me as a teenager when i didn't see what i considered enough progress in what i was doing or i didn't have a
natural talent for it i was like yup this isn't for me i quit because i didn't realize that everyone exceptional started out as absolutely garbage at the thing they eventually succeeded in but the only way you'll be willing to suck is if you start to transform the last and most annoying piece of this whole process the voice in your head that leads to prolonged setbacks giving up and over analyzation this part is probably the most difficult because the harsh reality of it is that you essentially have to be the parent to yourself that you never
had this means you must disrupt the usual automatic thought process that happens when you have a slip up setback or stagnation of progress implant your desired response and repeat that process until you rewire that response almost permanently and i say almost permanently because you'll probably always have some times where you're a little too hard on yourself when you're undisciplined but when that happens it'll no longer lead to the usual catastrophe the next time you start to feel yourself about to beat yourself up for not staying on track listen to that voice give it the attention
you've been craving since you were a child and tell yourself i notice you i understand why you don't feel good enough you've been neglected for so long and you can't bring yourself to see all the good you've done because that's how you've been programmed perfectionism is my ego not being able to come to terms with the many flaws of the human condition and the truth is you're supposed to be flawed you've already done so much and you're on your way to accomplishing even more and you can feel good enough right now and still be hungry
for more those two things are not exclusive to one another you're doing a damn good job and using your phone too much one day or regressing a little is part of the process you have not fallen off the path you've just stumbled over a rock and you need to get back up just keep showing up and give yourself a break when you need it over time your ability to recognize when your unproductive egoic thought patterns from the past arise will improve and your ability to parent those neglected parts of yourself will improve with it it
will be difficult and it will take a very long time to stick but eventually it will come natural to you just keep showing up thank you to all the patrons on this channel on patreon that is where i put out exclusive content and you can talk to me one-on-one over the phone on there if you want to check that out link in the description and if you want to check out that other video that i talked about on discipline that covers the other part of being disciplined then check it out right here and of course
don't forget to check out taylor brands with the link below to start your business today thanks for watching guys
