If you want to be more disciplined, read this

Is discipline more important than motivation?

I always ask people — what does discipline mean to them?
Somebody recently said, “doing the thing you don’t want to do when it’s going to benefit you.”

Here’s my take on discipline, motivation, and perfectionism.

A lot of guys start to feel like training is a chore because of the pressure they put on themselves to progress and be perfect.
You’ve just finished an 8–10 hour day, and now you’ve got to do something that also has a lot of pressure attached to it.
If you don’t progress in a linear way, you feel like it’s not good enough.

If that’s you, yes — you’ll have to rely more on discipline to get your workouts done, because that pressure kills motivation.

But here’s what most people online who preach “discipline” don’t tell you about motivation —
They like it.
It’s part of who they are.
It aligns with their values.
These are deeper motivations that keep you going long after the summer or the holiday. And that’s important.

I love training jiu-jitsu.
It meets my need for autonomy (because it’s my independent choice to do it), gives me a sense of relatedness, and meets my need for mastery — which makes me intrinsically motivated to show up.

If you feel a big societal pressure to look a certain way, that can also affect your motivation.
You can get too focused on the “beach body” and not enough on the internal drivers that actually keep you going.
That’s why I always dive into my clients’ internal reasons for change — because most people already have enough external drive.

So, in my opinion, discipline isn’t more important than motivation.
Both are needed for the best results.

But if you hate what you’re doing, the person who actually enjoys it will perform better every day of the week.

Moral of the story: perfectionism can make you feel like you need more discipline — when in reality, you’ve just put too much pressure on yourself to perform.
And that pressure kills motivation.
If your mood after training depends on hitting a PB, it’s always going to feel harder.