The start of 2025 was a crucial period for me, really life-defining. Less than a month after my thirty-second birthday, I met the person I talked about in the manifesto, and the day after I walked into the dojo at the back of the gym where I used to go. Little did I know, the changes those two days were going to provoke in my body were nothing compared to the ones in my mind.
The two events were completely unrelated, by the way. It’s funny how life sometimes decides to put a giant mirror in front of you and says “This is you, now look at the rest of the world and decide by yourself if you’re satisfied”. The answer was a big fat no, of course.
“Comparison is the thief of joy”, you might say. Sure, you would be right, but comparison is also something we do naturally out of our own instinct. We must avoid comparing ourselves to others in the aspects of our lives that are too different, but we can’t ignore the gut-wrenching feeling we get when we notice that our human experience has been so limited.
What do we do when we get this feeling, then? We can fall in a bottomless pit of desperation and pity ourselves (and I did this for some months, I won’t lie), or we can decide we’ve had enough and we won’t let our future selves feel this again when they look back.
Ok, we chose the second option. Does it come easy? Absolutely not, now both our bodies and our minds are actively working against us because they are not used to this kind of effort. What does it take to defeat them? Something we have never shown in our lives: discipline.
Before karate, my relationship with discipline was simple: I didn’t have one. I had built my life around the avoidance of difficulty, and it made me a man I wasn’t proud or fond of. This behavior was so internalized that I could compare it to water finding the lowest point.
Whenever something required sustained effort, I always found a reason to stop.
“I can’t do it right now, I’m not ready”
“I don’t like this, I don’t want to do it, even if it benefits me”
“I’ll do it when I feel motivated”
The last one, especially, I think I used the most. Let me tell you, this is a politician-during-election-campaign-level lie. Waiting for motivation kills more dreams than actual failure ever will.
I was already going to the gym before I started karate, this probably gave me a small foundation of discipline to work with, but not enough to change my mental model. I was still trying to get through what needs to be done as fast as possible so I could get back to doing nothing. Efficiency in service of emptiness.
After a year and a half, I’d like to say that’s completely behind me, but it isn’t. You can’t undo in mere months what decades built into the structure of your thinking, especially when those decades were the ones in which your mind was forming. I don’t even know if it is possible for me to get totally rid of this mindset; maybe I’m stuck with this fight forever. I did notice some changes, though, and they’re important. If only a year and a half can do this to my mind, I am impatient to find out what five years are going to give me (apart from, I hope, a black belt).
Karate didn’t make discipline magically appear in my mind, at least I don’t think so. It gave me something to be disciplined about.
That’s the distinction nobody makes. Discipline isn’t a personality trait you either have or don’t have. It can be developed for something that matters enough to show up for. Without that thing, there’s nothing for the discipline to attach to — it just floats, abstract and useless, while you read articles about morning routines and feel vaguely guilty.
I had a pre-existing passion for karate, planted at twelve and dormant for many years. When I found in that gym they were teaching the same style I had practiced as a kid, something reactivated. A switch happened in my mind, and I sent a message to myself:
“You have been given a second chance, don’t screw this up”
Then I started building the discipline, bit by bit, top of something that was already mine.
That’s why it worked where other things hadn’t. I had found a passion, something I hadn’t felt in a very long time, and I clung so hard to it that my hands are still aching, and I don’t plan to let them rest.
The moment I understood something had changed was the summer of 2025. The orange belt exam, eighteen years after the last time I had changed my belt.
I almost cried. That was the moment stuff got real; I was back, and I was back for good. I had done something I said I was going to do, and the result was real, visible and tied around my waist. For someone who had spent decades avoiding results because results require effort, this was not a small thing.
Since then, something has shifted in how I approach the rest of my life. Sure, it’s not a complete 180 — I still have the fears, the insecurities, the old patterns pulling at me, but now I know I can fight. I’m not talking about a physical fight, rather a mental one: when things go wrong, I know I can find a way through. My belt proves it.
I have a green belt exam coming. For the first time, I’m not just hoping I’ll pass. Sure, I’m nervous, but I know I have what it takes.
Discipline is what happens after motivation leaves, which it always does, usually not too long after the start. The excitement, the vision, the energy – when everything fades away and you don’t feel like showing up anymore, discipline will give you a kick in the face and make you.
In the end, that’s what discipline actually feels like. When that horrible monster crawls from the darkness under the couch and tells you that “one more YouTube video won’t hurt”, discipline is the hero who cuts the monster’s throat and threatens to do the same to you if you don’t get to work for what you care about.
Do you know what happens when you know what you have to do but don’t do it anyway? Go back to the first five paragraphs of this article, and you will find out how the hero can become a much worse monster.
That’s the whole secret, if there is one. It’s a thing worth facing the monster for. Find that thing, the discipline will follow. If you’re 30+ like me and you noticed the same patterns I described, please know that you are not alone. There’s a tough battle ahead of you, and I can’t promise you victory, but I can tell you that not trying guarantees defeat.