If you clicked on this video, I'm gonna assume
that you're one of the few high school students
who understands the simple truth
that you cannot achieve anything without discipline.
Well, you're in the right place
because the summer of my freshman year,
I found myself in the middle of a worldwide pandemic.
And what was I doing?
Well, my days looked a little like this.
I would stay up late playing video games,
eating cereal, watching YouTube,
and then I'd wake up well into the morning.
And it was the first thing that I did when I woke up.
Well, I would grab my phone and I'd start watching TikTok.
And then once that got boring,
you'd think that I'd start my day, right?
No, I took the easy option and switched to YouTube.
And then after that got boring, what would I do?
Well, I would keep the cycle going
and I would switch to social media.
And then I would go through this cycle in an endless loop.
After hours of laying in my bed,
I would finally go to the bathroom and then what did I do?
Then I'd started watching TikTok on the couch
and all of my days were just spent doing the easy things,
taking the easy way out.
But these days, things are much different.
I'm one of the few seniors of my class to graduate early
and I spend my days building my discipline.
Let me tell you what one of my recent days looked like.
I woke up at the normal time, went through my routine
and then by 4.30, I was in the shower.
And one thing about me is that I only take cold showers
and I don't switch it to warm ever.
But today was different because I had just entered
the coldest day of the coldest week of the year.
Now, if you've taken a cold shower in the wintertime,
you know that it gets cold.
And I was sitting there about to start the water,
just thinking to myself for a second,
it's freezing as balls outside,
but I'm about to hop in the shower.
And I did put the coldest setting
and I endured through that whole shower.
I quickly eat breakfast and I put my hats and gloves on
and it's negative 30 degree wind chill.
I hop on my bike and I start biking.
And then within the first couple seconds,
I could feel my toes starting to freeze
because I made the mistake to only wear two pairs of socks.
That was not enough.
I'm just trying to calm myself
because I'm biking against freezing cold winds.
And then I finally arrive.
I had to go for sprints just to warm up.
So I finished setting up the rings and I do my first set.
And right after that, I have to go for another sprint
because I literally can't stand still without freezing.
So I had to just keep moving this whole time.
Sprint, do a set.
And I just repeated that.
And when I first started doing 10 sets, it was hard.
And the first time I did it,
I actually gave up halfway through.
And then I didn't like that.
So I went back and finished the set and punished myself.
And this punishment became my tradition.
So now I follow this tradition.
After the ninth set, I always do at least three hill sprints.
And I finished the last set shirtless.
And then after that, I go and do a sprint around the block.
And I just remember right before I did this,
literally going to an area in the park
where there was a windbreak
and literally just crouching down and trying to warm up
because I can feel everything freezing off.
But nonetheless, I follow my tradition.
I do the three sprints.
And the moment I take off my shirt,
I felt something I never felt before.
I'd felt cold plenty of times, but this was much different.
The moment I took off the shirt,
it's negative 10 degrees outside
with a negative 30 degree wind chill.
And I can feel the wind blow onto my body.
And this feeling was different
than anything I'd ever felt.
I could literally feel my back, my shoulders, my chest
freeze into an ice cube.
I started to lose mobility
the moment I took off my shirt.
And so I quickly throw all of my gear down
and everything seemed to go wrong
because the moment I took that shirt off,
panic arose because I could feel
that this was different than normal cold.
I was in such a rush that my gloves got stuck in the bench,
but I didn't realize it at the time.
So I quickly do my set, my last set,
and then I run back to the bench where I put all my stuff.
Very quickly put my hat and my gloves back on.
But like I said, I couldn't grab my gloves.
They were stuck in between the bench.
And I was panicking,
but I quickly call myself down and grab the gloves.
And I just wanted to get this run over with,
which is not a very long run.
It's just around the block, but it was different
because I go, I go down the first street.
And I'm running, I'm like, okay, this is okay.
I can still feel myself burning from the cold,
but it was manageable.
And then the moment I took that turn onto the next street,
everything changed because I was running
against negative 30 degree winds, shirtless,
and I could feel my chest freezing into an ice cube.
And I'm trying to move my shoulders around,
just try to like break off the ice
that's growing on my body.
But my mobility is like very hampered.
So I get past this street and I turn.
And this is the longest street of the run.
And I'm just running down.
It's negative 30 degrees outside.
And it's six in the morning and I'm running shirtless.
Still dark outside, no one's awake.
I take that third turn.
I felt those winds pelting my back.
And then I hit that last turn
and I was just trying to get back.
All I could think about was getting that shirt back on.
And when I pick up my shirt, I'm so numb,
I can barely feel it with my hands.
And then I lift up my shirt to put it on
and I can feel all of the vibrations
going throughout my body just from putting the shirt on.
And I feel relieved for about a minute
because when you go through that type of cold
and then you get back to how you were before,
it's just an illusion because yes,
my body warmed back up from those negative degree temperatures
but it only warmed back up to the 50 degrees.
I still have the rest of my workout to do.
So I have to take a couple seconds to denomify my body
because I can't feel my hands.
Then I finally finished my workout
and it's time to bike home.
And usually in these types of workouts
that are cold but not as cold as this,
the bike home is the most rewarding part.
It's the part where my body temperature
has finally risen up to a point where I'm comfortable
in the cold temperature and I'm just biking home
and enjoying the fact that I just did a difficult thing.
But not today.
I didn't get that kind of salvation today
because I went through a negative 30 degree windshield
workout.
I was only wearing yoga pants.
Those were the type of pants I was wearing, very thin.
And my legs were so numb I can barely even move.
But I find the courage and I find the will inside of me
to stand up and start pedaling harder.
And so I'm biking against this negative 30 degree winds
up a bridge and my toes are starting to turn into ice cubes.
So at this point I only have maybe a two or three block
bike ride, not very long, just a couple minutes.
But all I can think about is getting done,
getting home, getting home, getting home.
My body temperature has dropped dramatically.
Finally get home and I hop off of my bike.
The first thing I do is I feel my balls
and I notice that I can't feel my balls in my sack anymore
because it turned out that when I stood up,
I squeezed my balls up into my body.
So I had to push them back down.
This is so weird.
So then I quickly take off all of my gear
and go into my room and I just lay on my bed,
just savoring the pain because just a couple weeks
before this I read a book called
Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins.
And there was a moment in that book
that inspired me to do that.
After Goggins ran 100 miles without any training,
broke every bone in his body,
he just laid in his bathtub, savoring the pain.
So that's what I did.
And after that I go down to the basement
and I start editing this video.
And as if that was not enough for me,
I went on a one hour long walk.
Now this time I learned my lesson
and I bundled up a lot more and I went on a run.
So how did I get to this point?
How did I get to the point where I have enough discipline
to put myself through all of that?
Well, I followed some pretty simple steps.
Here's an editor's note.
I wanna say that the first thing that I actually did
to improve my discipline was starting to wake up early
because it gives you a huge competitive advantage
over other people when you train before school.
First of all, it increases your discipline
because you're waking up early, that's hard to do.
And you're also going to bed early
to be able to maintain that.
So both of those things are hard to do,
but it's also, it gives you a huge advantage during school
because you've already had your morning lift
and you've already trained before everyone else.
Everyone else just rolled out of bed
and you have been awake for many hours already.
And waking up early before school gives you more time
to actually get ready so you're actually more prepared
for the day.
And it slowly starts to change your mindset
because now you're starting to become different.
You're the only one going to the gym before school.
And so you start to become different
and you start to see yourself differently
from everyone else.
And then as a result,
you start treating yourself differently from everyone else.
And you start holding yourself to a higher standard
than everyone else.
Okay, back to the video.
The first thing that I did was I got very consistent
in my workout routine.
So I would go to the gym every single day
except for rest days and I would bike there.
And biking to the gym built my discipline
because on days when I didn't want to bike to the gym,
I did it anyways because I took advantage of the bad weather.
On those days, not very many people want to go to the gym
much less bike to the gym.
But I taught myself to love biking through bad weather.
Every time I'd bike during the rain or the snow or sleet,
I would just say, man, I love this.
This is what I'm built for.
And then another thing that I did
to increase my discipline was train a lot.
During one of my summers, I was training very hard
because I wanted to make the soccer team.
And so I would go to the gym in the morning
and then I would go train soccer after that.
And just this built my discipline a lot
because I would just be doing hard things all the time.
I'd just be exercising all the time.
But another thing that I implemented was cold exposure.
Around this time is when I started looking into recovery
because you can't be exercising that much
unless you have very good recovery.
And I started taking ice baths,
which is very good for discipline.
And then I also started taking cold showers.
I was not disciplined enough
to put myself through an entire cold shower.
So what I would do was I would start the shower cold
and then I would take my shower warm
and then I would end it cold.
And then eventually I reached a point where
that was not enough.
And so around this time, I read a book
called The Unplugged Alpha
and in it there was one sentence
that he was talking about this.
He said, the simplest way to build your discipline
is through cold showers.
And I realized that I was flawed in my thinking
that taking a cold shower
but also having warm water in that shower
was good enough for my discipline.
No, it was not.
And so after that, I changed my identity
to someone that only takes cold showers
and it's never warm.
And it's been almost a year since that identity shift.
And I definitely think that that's one of the biggest things
that I've done to improve my discipline.
Only taking cold showers and never switching it to warm.
Now, obviously there were a few days
where I accepted myself from this rule
but I can count those days on one hand.
And another thing that I did to increase my discipline
was starting to sleep on the floor.
But that wasn't the reason why I started that.
And I talked about it in this video.
So if you're interested in that, go check it out.
And finally, one of the most recent changes
that I made to increase my discipline
was buying gymnastics rings
and setting them up at my park for my workout
instead of going to the gym.
Because it is much more difficult to workout outside
in sub zero temperatures than it is to workout
inside of a heated gym.
Back to the editor's note.
So to recap, some of the most important changes
that I made over the past couple of years
are waking up early, being consistent in my workouts,
biking, training a lot, cold exposure,
sleeping on the floor and training outside.
If you're still watching this, that means one thing.
You want more.
I'm in the middle of developing a brand new online course
about how to go full time on self improvement
while in high school.
So if you're interested in being a part of that,
go down into the description and fill out the Google form.
The more people that fill out this Google form,
the better the course will be.
So go fill out that Google form
and I'll see you in the next one.