Who should read this book?
If you are trying to take control of your life and struggling with discipline, this book is a good read. It is a collection of short stories from navy seal Jocko Willnik. This book also contains a 12- Week Workout program at the end which is really good. This is a short read and won’t take you much to read. So, go and get it.
Discipline Equals Freedom: Book Summary
There’s no shortcut in life. It’s a lie. Even if you found one and take it, it won’t lead you where you want to be.
Being the best version of yourself won’t be possible if all you are looking for is shortcuts and an easy way. There is no easy way. There’s only hard work, late nights, early mornings, practice, repetition, study, sweat, blood, toil, and discipline.
Discipline is what overcomes laziness, lethargy, and excuses. It’s the only way of truly achieving what you want. Why?
You have to prepare yourself physically, mentally, and emotionally every single day for fighting with another guy who has the same ambition, goal, and vision as you have.
Where does discipline comes from
It comes from within. Sure, you can have it imposed on by others. But it won’t last long. It can’t stand on its own. What you need and what you are looking for is self-discipline.
Self-discipline comes when you make a decision to be disciplined when you decide to leave a mark on the world.
If you don’t think you have discipline, it’s because you haven’t decided yet to be disciplined. It’s because you haven’t created it and you haven’t become it, yet.
Become disciplined- embrace its cold and relentless power. It will make you better and stronger and smarter and faster and healthier and happier than anything else. And most importantly: Discipline gives you freedom.
When and how to overcome procrastination
You have to do it right here and right now. The idea is not going to execute itself. You have to stop thinking and dreaming about it and take action instead.
Stop making a perfect plan, researching every aspect of it, and reading about it debating the pros and cons of it. Start doing it.
You become good at things by taking one small decision at a time.
Your mind has to be stronger than your feelings.
You have to have control over your mind. You just have to assert it. You have to decide that you are going to be in control and you are going to do what you want to do.
Impose what you want on your brain and move your life where you want it to be.
Don’t let your mind control you.
People ask how can you be tougher? You have to be tougher. You just have to start. How can you wake up early? Well you just have to wake up early.
Stress
Stress is generally caused by what you can’t control. Don’t stress about things you can’t control. If the stress is something that you can control, that is lack of discipline and lack of ownership.
You have to get control of it. You have to impose your will to make it happen. If the stress is something you can’t control, then you have to embrace it. Don’t fight it, embrace it.
How to go in the destroyer mode
The destroyer mode is what allows you to go the extra mile. It takes both emotion and logic to reach your maximum potential and achieve things beyond your limits.
You have to use the other when one fails. When you have emotions saying, you have had enough, override that emotion with concrete willpower and logic. When it doesn’t make any logical sense to go on, use your emotion to push you further.
Use emotion to fight logic and use logic to fight emotions. Develop the attitude and muscle memory to keep going until the end.
Don’t stop when you are tired, stop when you are finished.
Question everything, Don’t accept anything
Questions are powerful. Because that’s where you gain knowledge from. And knowledge as you all know the most powerful of all.
If you don’t question what you do every single day, you can’t be any better than the 90% of people. If you don’t understand something, dig in until you find the reason. Question yourself.
Question everything, Don’t accept anything without finding the answer.
All of us can be better, all of us can do better, if only we start asking the right questions, hard questions.
Fight
You have to do the extra repetition, run the extra mile, go the extra round, and make the right choices.
You have to fight your weakness every single day. Make yourself stronger, physically, mentally, and spiritually. Fight with everything you have got, every ounce of energy, every bead of sweat, every drop of blood until your last breath.
When to compromise and when not to
When working with others and in groups, you have to compromise. You have to find the common ground between teams. And in many cases, if you fail to compromise, you fail to succeed.
External compromise is necessary but not internal. You have to compromise to work with others, but internally it’s different. There should be areas within your life where you can’t compromise
- You can’t compromise hard work
- You can’t compromise being better every day
- You can’t compromise discipline
You have to move fast, think fast, outwork and outmaneuver the enemy. You have to have a burning desire to achieve your goals using every possible tools and strategies.
Nature vs nurture
Neither nature nor nurture is an important to factor for determining success. The willingness to win is. Anyone who became successful has become so because of the choices they made.
Successful people choose who they are going to hang around and who they will emulate. Don’t let nature or nurture make you. Instead, choose to make yourself.
Fear of failure is good
Fear of failure is not always bad. It keeps you from taking risks which obviously is bad but it also keeps you awake at night, planning, rehearsing, and working hard.
Therefore, you should be afraid of failure. You should be terrified of being in the same place every day without achieving anything significant.
Get up and Take Action
Take the risk, take the gamble, take the first step. Start with the smallest step. Don’t let another day slip by.
It is a war against ignorance — and so it leads to knowledge .
It is a war against confusion — and so it delivers understanding.
How to stop procrastination
We all procrastinate because we want to change how we feel. There are days when we just don’t feel like doing it. You want to take a break and rest some time. So, what do you do these days?
You just do it anyway, You get it done. They can be signal that you need some time and those signals might be right sometimes. But, you don’t take today off. Wait until tomorrow. Don’t give in to the immediate gratification that whispers in your ear.
When you feel like putting things off, this is exactly what you need to put off.
When you feel like taking a break, put it off till tomorrow. And when tomorrow comes, if you still feel like you need a break, you take it.
Often times what happens is that you didn’t really need that break. It’s your inner feelings and weakness that ask you for a break.
Regrets
We all have regrets. We could have done things differently or have learned sooner. Regret is poison and it is worthless. So, learn from the mistakes you made and move on. Don’t be a slave to your regrets.
One way to have fewer regrets in life is to take action. Take action now to become a person not filled with regret, but a person filled with knowledge and strengths and power and life.
Why Your Goals Fade Away
In our day-to-day life, we can easily lose the track of the long-term goal. It fades away from your vision. It slips away from your mind.
Your long-term goal should be so embedded in your mind that you never lose the sight of it.
Start with small goals that are more in line with your long-term vision. They will act as fuel for your long-term vision. But when you don’t get the short-term victory on your goals, you easily lose sight of those long-term goals.
Day slip by. Months slip by and then years. And when we look back, we find that we have made no progress.
The first and foremost goal of yours should be to embed the long-term goal in your mind and burn it into your soul.
Think about it, write about it, talk about it. Hang it up on the wall. And the most important of all, do something about it every day, however small that step might be.
Never let a day slip by without you doing something that moves you a little closer to your goal.
Hesitation is the enemy
Hesitation allows the moment to pass, the opportunity to be lost, the enemy to get the upper hand. Hesitation turns into cowardice. It stops us from taking action, from executing what we know we must do. It defeats us. So, we must defeat it.
And to do that, all you have to do is: Go. move. take the action. Step forward, don’t hesitate, do not wait. Go forward and win.
Live everyday
Life is precious. We are blessed to have every day, to learn, to grow, to laugh, and to live. Every day is a new beginning. We should be thankful to live every day with a purpose and passion, to wake up in the morning, for the opportunity to go into the world and live.
Let us laugh and love and let us embrace and venerate everything that life is and every opportunity it gives us.
Negative people and negative talk
There will always be people talking behind your back. There will be people who always try to spread negativity. So what do you do in this case? The classic approach is to confront them and join them in their little game. But a better approach than the author suggests is to work and outperform.
When they are watching you and talking about you, you should be working.
When dealing with people like this, let your first course of action and the fundamental core of how you handle it be very clear and very direct: outwork and outperform every last one of them.
Instead of looking backward and decaying, you get stronger and better.
Fight them as they creep in with their offers of instant gratification and immediate rewards. Fight them for every inch they try to take.
