As I return back to a life where I don’t have to travel as much, I can establish a proper routine for excercise, diet and rest. Over the last few years, I made the mistake of thinking that if I wanted different results in life, I needed to do something different. I think this is true for creativity and exposure, but it came at a steep price (financially, emotionally, and physically).
The secret of tomorrow is in the routine today (like meal prepping, consistent hours of rest, etc). Without routine, I was constantly trying to reinvent the wheel and experimenting without consistency. Without routine, it’s hard to benchmark exactly where you are and what you can do to optimize every day. It’s also very challenging to make plans when schedules are unpredicatable or easily disrupted.
As for discipline, I believe it’s a way of committing to decisions ahead of time so that you don’t have to make the wrong choice when you don’t give in when you’re weak. The problem with discipline is that it is similar will-power—it’s a limited resource to always tap into it.
As I get older, I have found that you have to always have to be at the center of routine and discipline, with the willingness to re-evaluate things as needed if there’s stagnation. Many times we look for excitment to spice up life, but there has to be consistency with the use of time in order to move large initiatives forward.