I've Been Preaching Against the Wrong Thing

How your brain plays telephone with your own beliefs — and why I almost forgot what I actually stand for.

Jul 22, 2026

I recently met with another creator to chat about what both of us are doing.

It was an interesting conversation — we’re both working on similar topics. I talk about discipline as a way to become a more coherent individual: the constant practice of return, so your defaults are closer to what’s coherent for you, so when you drift, it’s easier to return.

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My colleague, instead, talks about productivity. Well, more than talking about it, he coaches on it. At first, while talking with him, I thought to myself…isn’t this what I’ve been preaching against?

I have to admit it felt uneasy, but then another contradictory thought crossed my mind:

Have I really been preaching against productivity?

If you’ve been reading my articles, you’ve probably read my claims multiple times. I even wrote a manifesto to share these ideas.

Discipline was tied to output, to productivity, to obedience. Factories demanded compliance, armies demanded order, and slowly discipline became less about growth and more about control. That shift has only deepened in our time.
Most discipline systems today are built for a version of you that doesn’t exist. They assume constant motivation. Stable attention. Days where nothing goes sideways. They measure streaks, reward perfect weeks, and when life interrupts — as it always does — they leave you with a broken record and the quiet suspicion that you are the problem.
You’ve tried this. The productivity system. The habit tracker. The promise made on a Sunday night. For a while it works. Then it doesn’t. And the gap between who you said you’d be and how you’re living gets wider.

It’s very easy to believe, based on that blurb, that I’m against the idea of productivity. Boy, I feel like even I was drinking that Kool-Aid a little bit.

This exercise of reflecting proved to be helpful: it showed me how I’d been drifting from my own worldview, and that revisiting and clarifying my ideas — something I rarely make time for — is vital to staying open-minded and honestly assessing whether my thoughts still hold.

Let me expand on this.

This is a way of drifting

Have you ever realized, years later, that what you’ve been defending isn’t actually what you believed in the first place?

I know, the phrasing sounds twisted. But have you gone through that? Started with a thought, and then, long after, discovered that whatever came out of it was based on a thought you thought you thought, but you really didn’t think exactly that?

That’s what happened to me. Think of it as the telephone game.

If you haven’t played it, the game goes like this for a group of ten people (though I think it gets fun with 5+ people):

You all gather in a circle. You pick which person will start the game — let’s call them player 1. The last player, in turn, will be player 10.
Player 1 whispers a random phrase in player 2’s ear. Ideally a long one. For instance:
We all went to swim to the river, and I saw Big Foot smoking poppies from a pipe.
Player 2 then repeats the phrase in player 3’s ear, and so on until…
Player 9 repeats the phrase to player 10.
Player 10 says the phrase out loud, and Player 1 follows with the original sentence.

A lot of fun (at least when you are little). There are adaptations of that game nowadays, like Telestrations.

The same thing happens in your head, and I fell prey to it. I unconsciously drifted by allowing myself to distort my thoughts and end up thinking something I didn’t think in the first place.

Here we are talking about the telephone game, with the nuance that in this game there’s only one player: you.

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Ring, ring, ring, Banana-phone

Our brains sometimes play an internal game of telephone.

Different mechanisms participate in this process: memory reconstruction, gist compression, source-monitoring errors and, in some circumstances, something resembling choice blindness.

The brain doesn’t always return to a fixed bucket and retrieve a memory exactly as it was stored. Instead, it reconstructs the experience from different fragments: parts of the original event, its emotional tone, our mood, the context we remember, and associations the brain already has available.

This can happen progressively. Because each version remains coherent with the one before it, we may not notice the transition. It feels as though the memory has remained unchanged.

What the brain often preserves is the gist. The exact wording may change. The degree of certainty may change too. “Maybe this person was upset with me” can eventually become “I knew this person was upset with me,” without us noticing exactly when the possibility became a certainty.

Essentially, the telephone game.

Then there’s the problem of source monitoring. We may remember the content of a thought while forgetting its source.

Did I actually think this at the time?
Was it a later interpretation?
Did someone suggest it?
Did I simply imagine it?

The hippocampus, the medial temporal system, and areas of the prefrontal cortex help us reconstruct context and determine where information came from, but that process isn’t infallible.

We are human. We drift.

Sometimes we fail to notice that a memory or thought has changed. Once that happens, we may begin looking for information that supports this Frankenstein version. We’re not necessarily lying. We may sincerely believe it and explain it using whatever evidence is now available to us.

Choice-blindness experiments demonstrate something similar: people can fail to notice that the outcome presented to them differs from their original choice and then provide sincere reasons for a choice they didn’t actually make.

The damaging part is that, because we didn’t notice the transition, we continue labeling the reconstructed version as “the original thought.”

It feels real, but that doesn’t mean it’s accurate.

And we might end up acting on something we thought we had thought, but never actually thought in that form.

In my case, it made me think, during this interaction, that at some point I was against productivity, when it was never about that.

It was about the warping of the idea of discipline into hustle culture.

Productivity is not the enemy

Productivity itself is not wrong. That’s what moves the world; that’s what has moved the world historically.

If all of us were sitting on our butts doing nothing all the time, we’d probably still be living in the Stone Age. In fact, many of us wouldn’t even be here, because where we are right now is the product of decades, centuries, and millennia of other people’s discoveries and work.

Productivity is simply not something to be against. Or at least it doesn’t make sense to be against it.

That said, the idea of productivity is a human construct. A concept we created to determine a qualitative measure of output.

What does this mean? It means its meaning and significance can be bent for third-party interests.

That’s what I’m against.

Before I continue in this branch, let me quickly jump back one level, to show how I was able to find the clarity I needed to clean my memory, so you can use it in your own processes.

Revisiting is the antidote

Because of this epiphanic moment I went through, where I realized I was losing track of my worldview, I decided that regaining clarity was primordial in order to continue.

Why, you might ask?

Because this main belief — that we’ve been warping the idea of discipline to one of performance, and that hustle culture is one of the main culprits for this to happen in modern times — is foundational to my work.

Because I can’t offer a view on discipline without the idea of progress and the need to get things done. At the end of the day, in order to return, you need to act.

The idea of constantly acting rather than just thinking is, in my opinion, productivity. You are productive when you create outputs. When you bring ideas to life. When you change things.

So you can’t be disciplined if you don’t materialize your return.

The antidote for the pollution of the overarching thought (the memory telephone game we discussed previously) that rules your day-to-day, that brings direction to your actions, is to revisit.

I read around Substack, and a lot of people feel ashamed and hesitant to read their first work. If you’ve fallen into that trap, I don’t blame you. I’ve done it too.

But avoiding looking back — either because we weren’t that good at the beginning, or because maybe we don’t agree today with the person who wrote those articles — is a mistake.

A mistake that is expensive.

Revisiting old content is a form of retrospective that helps you address multiple directional questions.

What did I think a year ago?
How much have I changed from the person who wrote 6 months ago?
What things have I learned, that I haven’t recently pondered, and how would that impact my thoughts now?
Looking at the facts and evidence now, would I have done things differently? What opinions do I hold now that should be reassessed?

Answering those questions has material consequences.

You might realize that your opinions have changed, or maybe realize, like me, that you’ve been holding a corrupted thought without knowing it, one that could have been holding you back. You might realize that you have a new opportunity in front of you, that is a version of something you already went through.

All of this has a direct impact on your demeanor, your choices, your status, your relationships, and your work.

For me, it made me realize I needed to reassess what that was that I was against. It made me look back and write this post as a way to consolidate and clear that memory to start with a clean slate one more time.

And I realized this process is not a once-in-a-lifetime process. It’s something that has to happen at a regular cadence, because our brains will drift. Our brains will forget.

And it’s normal. It’s expected. All you can do is follow the process.

That’s what I’m doing now.

What I’m against

That said, I want to leave very clear what I’m against today.

I’m against toxic hustle culture.

The one that is sold by influencers on social media. The one that classifies you as a loser if you don’t follow a blueprint or don’t follow a certain ritual.

I’m sick of seeing coaches on Instagram selling services by appealing to shame and guilt. Sick of those who think that because they have the time to do whatever they’re selling, the rest should follow the same principles or risk being called a loser.

I’m sick of the repeated message on social media praising performative grinding and disguising it as discipline, especially when behind the cameras things are not as portrayed.

That’s what I’m against.

There’s a growing population of neurodivergent individuals, parents, and high-pressure professionals who have most likely been called broken, inefficient, lazy, or told they’re not making the mark.

You are not your productivity.

Hustle culture insists you ARE your productivity — and that’s the poison.

If you ever feel like you’re giving it all in the field and yet feel like a failure, it’s probably because you’ve been conditioned to think of yourself like that. If that’s your case, shoot me a message or send me an email at camilo@self-disciplined.com so we can chat more about it.

In our next paid companion we will practice katas that will help you clarify your memories and ideas on a regular basis.

Until then, don’t forget that your memories are not always like you think they are, and they deserve the most careful scrutiny.

I hope you have a wonderful week!