This is not a fitness article.

But bare with me, because I’m going to use my journey as a fitness connoisseur and as a coach to get a very important point across.

And if you take the next 5 minutes out of your day to digest this information, you could quite literally become unstoppable.

So read till the end.

I’ve coached dozens of clients.

I used to think the key to getting into shape was locking in on the diet, and compounding that with proper training.

But over the years, my own experience has debunked my previous beliefs about fitness.

When I first started my fitness journey, I followed the “gym bro” advice. Get lots of protein. Calories in and calories out. Lift heavy weights 3-5 days a week with a proper gym split. Have a few rest days to avoid overtraining.

And it worked. I went from 115 lbs of skinny fat at 29 yrs old to about 165 lbs with undeniable muscle definition at 33.

But over time, my fitness evolved to focus far more on ancestral eating an bodyweight training. Zero calorie counting. Heavy on the steak and eggs. Light on the carbs. And a very rigorous training schedule.

And it worked again. This time I went from 165 lbs of undeniable muscle definition at 33 years old to 150 lbs and being absolutely shredded at 36 years old.

But in the past couple of years, since moving from the US to Portugal, my lifestyle, diet, and training has shifted yet again. And this shift led to a major revelation.

Since living in Europe, I’ve broken many of the standard rules of fitness. I’ve cut my protein in half. I completely disregarded any form of macronutrient tracking. I stopped all supplementation. My training is extraordinarily unstructured.

By all accounts, I should have declined a bit in terms of my strength, my physique, my energy levels, etc.

But the opposite happened. I got significantly stronger, more shredded (8% body fat), and my calisthenics skills absolutely exploded.

I broke so many rules of fitness, why did my performance improve across the board?

Searching for the answer to this question led me to a mental shift that has profoundly changed the way I live, and the way I view seemingly impossible achievements.

Sticking with the fitness example, most of the advice that’s out there is optimization advice. Meaning, it makes a difference here and there, but it’s not the main ingredient that fundamentally changes a person.

Advice like, “eat this many grams of protein,” or “cut back on these sources of carbs.”

They are not the core drivers of fitness outcomes, and they are not the major leverage points that people think they are.

They just round out the edges. But the foundation of fitness, and most other challenging endeavors for that matter is something altogether different.

The one thing that drives inevitable success is RELENTLESS CONSISTENCY.

This is the single thing that led me to level up so much in my fitness despite abandoning my strict diet or training routine.

Consistently eating a suboptimal diet, and training with a suboptimal routine over time will always outperform the optimal diet or fitness routine performed inconsistently.

Let me repeat in case you skimmed over this part, because it is important.

With time, consistency trumps perfection by a margin of at least several astronomical units.

The moment you ingrain this notion into your mind, life will never be the same.

I’ve learned that no matter what the challenge is, whether it’s fitness, finances, relationships, career, learning very difficult skills, etc… the common denominator for all success is being extraordinarily consistent.

In the book, Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel drives the point home when he speaks of how Warren Buffett’s wealth was earned, not through being more knowledgeable than everyone, but simply by being extraordinarily consistent for an exceptionally long time.

While most investors are “optimizing” by buying here, selling there, shifting strategies based on market conditions, Buffett has stuck to his guns for longer than most of his peers have been living.

This is what makes Buffett different. Consistency + Time.

So my point here is that, if you have any major challenges right now (good or bad), rather than devoting most of your cognitive bandwidth towards trying to find the best way to do it, switch your objective to trying to be as consistent as possible, for as long as possible.

Seriously, think about anything you’ve been doing for a long time. You may even be an expert at something you weren’t even trying to be good at.

That’s what doing something over time does.

But….

Simply telling you that you need to be more consistent isn’t going to cut it. The real challenge is that being consistent is hard AF, especially when you have an option not to be.

This is why you skip workouts, or keep eating donuts when you said you wouldn’t.

It’s why you found yourself scrolling after you told yourself that you need to be on social media less.

It’s also why you dive head first right back into a bad habit after only a few weeks of abstaining from it.

Most of us simply do not have the discipline to be relentlessly consistent.

We accept this notion of “discipline is hard” far too easily without question.

But why exactly is it so difficult?

I like to remind myself that we are animals too. Yet, when I look at the animal kingdom, the concept of “being disciplined” or “being inconsistent” doesn’t exist.

Animals just do what they naturally do, and they make it through life just as nature intended. They don’t need to be more disciplined.

This should be no different for humans, but the key difference between us and every other living animal is that we have significantly altered our environments by building modern civilizations.

What this means is that, while we still maintain ancient hardware (the human brain), we live in a modern society that is so detached from nature, that our brains are unfit for the world we created.

This is known as an evolutionary mismatch, and it is not benign.

To put it succinctly, compared to our distant ancestors, modern life is not only hyper-stimulating, but also forces our brains to make far more decisions than we ever were intended to make.

For example:

We lack discipline because our brains are not hardwired to be disciplined in the modern world.

Fortunately we are not helpless. The human brain is plastic, meaning it can be modified to think and operate differently. Thus, what doesn’t come natural to us, can be trained.

Discipline is a skill which must be intentionally cultivated.

A disciplined mind, is a mind that has the capacity to be relentlessly consistent in any endeavor.

Not only that, a disciplined mind can draw extremely strong connections between delayed gratification and future reward, as well as between instant gratification and future consequences.

This is the basis behind the anti-desire protocol in my 60-day Discipline Doctrine program.

An underdisciplined mind struggles to readily make these connections, which leads to inconsistent action. One week you’re locked in. The next week, you’re unfocused and doing all the wrong things again.

So by training the mind to be more disciplined, you re-wire its neural connections such that delayed gratification is the default. You are less susceptible to the many different forces that will try to pull you off of your path.

You will unlock the capacity to be relentlessly consistent.

And, no matter what you’re trying to accomplish in life, if you possess the capacity to do something more consistently than everyone else, for a longer time than everyone else, then failure is literally impossible.

You leave the universe with no choice but to conspire in your favor.

Invest In Yourself for 2026: