Discipline Is Not a Virtue

Why treating discipline as a moral trait makes it harder to practice, and what changes when you stop

Mar 11, 2026

My dad is a huge supporter of my journey.

He reads my articles pretty much every week. He is naturally curious and likes to learn and know more things, in general. I thankfully got that trait too, so of course when he asked me about my ideas, I tried to explain them to him with all the details he needed to understand.

That started with a question from me.

When I say discipline, how would you define it?

Mostly everything I knew about life came from him and the adults that shaped my world growing up. I remember my school years hearing: “Study and work hard so you can have a good future”.

So when he said

Being methodic, consistent and somebody that keeps their word...

I wasn’t surprised.

My parents’ generation — I think they would be catalogued as baby boomers — grew up with the same message. In order to have a good future, you have to get good grades, go to college, get married, have kids.

In that order.

A big chunk of the millennial population — my generation — in Chile probably heard a variant of that growing up. In many cases that led to actual success, kids that drank the kool aid and now are leading different fields. In many other cases, it led to anxiety — at the very least — and increased levels of mental health issues. We are just behind Gen Z in mental health strain, according to recent studies.1

Many of us have learned the benefits of working smarter rather than harder, but we are still caught in a rat race that has gotten worse over the years.2

If you didn’t follow that path then you were screwed.

What followed — and this I saw a lot — is kids who join college or the workforce without any idea of what they want to do. In some cases even worse, kids with student debt studying to please their parents but not exercising their degree, having to pay the cost of years of self-deception.

The advice many received back? Be more disciplined. Settle down. Stop fooling around. No wonder so many young adults are gravitating toward the no-contact trend nowadays.3

I think be more disciplined is the staple advice we receive from people in positions of authority — or anything that resembles that.

Unfortunately, the worldview that feeds that advice is warping how we think about what discipline is for.

Some Are Already Noticing It

That old frame didn’t disappear, it just got remixed. Let’s go back to my dad’s words:

Being methodic, consistent and somebody that keeps their word.

Would you define discipline that way?

I would bet that if you follow the newest wave of motivational newsletters, your answer is no — and that’s great. Our understanding has been the same for centuries.

When we used to think of discipline, the typical answers were:

“Keeping your word to yourself”
“Doing what you said you would do”
“Choosing the long-term over the short-term”
“Being consistent”
“Mental toughness”

But there is a new wave of motivational posting that tries to move away from the idea of punitive discipline. I love coming across it. Some of the posts I find are:

Discipline is not motivation, it’s doing the task even when your emotions say no.
Discipline is to wait for self-regulation before engaging.
Discipline is self-respect
Discipline is serving your future self.

I’ve seen it a lot. And while I love coming across it, it reinforces my message.

The problem is that probably all of these people posting these motivational messages are struggling with discipline right now, and this is their way to remind themselves to push through. But it takes one bad day to break the streak. And when that happens, that self-respect, that self-service, that identity they built through the process, goes to the trash.

Beyond that, I think the real problem is that they don’t have a grounded definition of what discipline actually is.

We talk about it as if it were a virtue. A virtue we all should aspire to.

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Virtue Carries Morality

There’s nothing wrong with aspiring to something we deem good. At the end of the day, we all want to choose right. Do the right thing.

The thing is, when we want to do this — the right thing — we immediately imply that there are better and worse kinds of people.

For instance:

courageous vs cowardly
honest vs dishonest
disciplined vs lazy

So when we aspire to a virtue, we are aspiring to something that is not neutral. We aspire to something that carries morality.

So aspiring to become disciplined, as if it were a virtue, creates an implicit message:

disciplined people are better people

It takes less than a minute on social media to find motivational posts about how “discipline will take you where motivation can’t”; about how “real men build their lives on strong discipline”; about how “one year of relentless discipline can create a life most dream about.”

I don’t blame them. Those are the posts that get likes.

People like clarity. For a moment, someone is telling you what to do to move forward, even if you never do it. Posts like that can reinforce identity too. When we like them, we’re not just reacting to the message — we may also be signaling the kind of person we want to be, and sometimes the kind of person we want others to see.

The problem is that this creates a loop. Those signals get rewarded, so they get repeated. And over time, that pushes culture toward performance. Toward virtue as display. Toward status. At the end, we start spending more energy looking aligned than becoming aligned. And with that, the idea of discipline gets warped more and more, little by little.

The disciplined look like better people. But are they really?

Discipline Doesn’t Make You Virtuous

J. Edgar Hoover is a good example of this.

Hoover ran the FBI for nearly fifty years and helped turn it into one of the most organized institutions in the country. This was not a sloppy man. He cared about structure, procedure, image, standards, and control — and you do not build something like that without being deeply disciplined. The Bureau he shaped was built around order, files, hierarchy, and carefully managed power.

But that discipline did not make him good.

Jean Seberg was an actress, best known for Breathless, who had also supported civil rights causes and donated money to the Black Panther Party. That was enough to put her in Hoover’s sights. In the logic of Hoover’s FBI, she was not just an actress with political sympathies. She became someone to discredit.

So the Bureau came up with something ugly and small. While Seberg was pregnant, Hoover approved an effort to plant a false rumor with gossip columnists that the baby’s father was a Black Panther member. The point was not truth. It was not justice. An FBI memo stated the goal was to “cause her embarrassment” and “cheapen her image.” Hoover even approved waiting until she was visibly pregnant so the rumor would land harder.

And it worked in the worst way. The rumor spread publicly, even though the child was her husband’s. Seberg went into premature labor, and the baby died two days later. Years later, in 1979, FBI files were released publicly and confirmed the smear campaign. Seberg died that same year.

This is what I want you to take from this story: a man disciplined enough to help build one of the most structured institutions in the country still used that same discipline in the service of humiliation, intimidation, and cruelty. Discipline did not make him better. It made him more effective at serving what was already in him.

Discipline made Hoover more capable. It didn’t make him good.

So, if discipline is not a virtue, then what is discipline?

Discipline as a Practice

It’s sort of ironic that this newsletter is called Self Disciplined. But I have never — from what I can humanly recall — written a specific, well-rounded definition of discipline.

And the main reason is that I didn’t have one.

When I started, my idea of discipline was the same I described above: discipline as a virtue. I call it traditional discipline.

With time I started forming my own ideas about what discipline is and what it is not. And I realized that discipline is not about the streaks, but about how fast you get back on your feet — how fast your comeback speed is.

My problem was that I was still conflating some elements. At least that was my hunch. Then I realized my instinct was right when I kept circling the idea of realignment — of returning to your baseline.

All that thinking — for months and months — led me to this:

Discipline is not a virtue. Discipline is a practice: the deliberate practice of returning.

With returning, I mean the ability to return to the direction you set for yourself every time you drift — the ability to return to coherence.

Turns out, returning is a meta-skill, just like learning how to learn. This means the skill applies to multiple domains — playing piano, swimming, learning to control your anger, and more.

And because it’s a meta-skill, you can train it. You can become better at it. And in order to do that, you must practice.

The practice of that skill is what we call discipline.

The Practice is Neutral

We talked about how virtue is a word that carries morality — so treating discipline as a virtue inherently carries morality with it. The disciplined are better. Period.

When we reframe discipline as a practice, it immediately loses that trait. It becomes neutral.

Let me illustrate with an example:

You want to learn soccer. You have played before with your friends, and you have some notion of how the game goes and its rules. But you want to become better at it.

So you join a local team and train. Every week, you go with your team and practice drills, plays, and then you put what you learn in practice in the field.

You play a match against a visiting team. And you win. That doesn’t necessarily make you better than the other players at soccer, but it shows you that your skill has improved. You just won the game. Congrats. Now, does winning make you good?

The week after, you play against another team. You are not so lucky this time, and you lose. Does that make you worse than other players at soccer? No — and in fact, it also doesn’t necessarily show that your skills regressed. It was circumstantial. Same question applies here. Does losing the game make you bad?

Now replace soccer with discipline. Instead of becoming better at the most beautiful game, you are becoming better at realigning. And you are practicing. In real life.

Does practicing it make you good or bad? The answer is no. The practice itself is neutral. What you do with it, is what has moral value.

So What Does That Mean?

If this realization shook your world, great — it shook mine too, for the better. If your brain is processing at 1000 km/h, it’s because this is a full flip on the idea of discipline, for a couple of reasons.

The flip matters because it moves discipline from something you have to something you train. And if you can train it, you can get better at it — which means drifting is not a flaw, it’s part of the practice. Returning is what you’re actually building. That also means you can design better conditions for it, which is exactly what Adaptable Discipline is built around. And it means the question of whether you should practice discipline is yours to answer — there’s no moral weight either way. Some people train it intensely, others lightly, just like any other skill. The pace is yours.

Think of one area where you drift today — maybe you procrastinate under stress, you have anger issues, or you are learning abstract painting but haven’t been able to stay consistent. Find the smallest way back. Repeat it. And if you drift again, remember there’s always a return. You just have to train it.

If you are interested in training your returning skills, every Thursday I release a new weekly paid companion based on the reflections we do — like this one. It’s $9.99/mo. There I share my own approach to training return, so you can practice discipline at any time.
In this week’s paid companion, we will train how to catch the moment you shift from describing a behavior to judging a person — starting with yourself.

For now remember, discipline is not a virtue. It’s a practice.

I hope you have a wonderful week!