Have you reached your potential – or are you stuck?
You may know this moment. You feel you could be more; you see yourself sometimes in this future vision. It feels real, but somehow every time you push towards it, you feel fear and doubt. A unpassable, invisible barrier. A voice is telling you to just keep scrolling through the social feed.
And you listen; you obey.
It was your idea to keep scrolling; you are in control, right? This potential is hoaxes anyway, isn’t it?
… still stuck, right? 😔
And you forget again who you could be. Then, after many of these cycles, you start following people on socials who are talking about how to get moving and overcome your own Resistance. “Just do this hack”, “write me a DM, and I will send you XYZ”.
Promises that fit perfectly into your “stuckness”. Fix a little bit and then… what? Keep scrolling socials? Or actually changing something?If your goal is to become a self-disciplined, high-performing stoic practitioner, do you think listening to Ryan Holiday will make you that? Well, that would be like reading a sports magazine to become a sports person. Good stuff, and I listen to him often; Ryan is really great, but he isn’t you, you are not him; you need to go your own path.
To fully understand what he writes about, or what Marcus Aurelius wrote in this book, Meditations, you need to practise for a long time, fail, reflect, intervene, and adapt.
What brought people to push so far without losing their discipline?
How to keep a calm mind while being a CEO, CTO, Team Lead, or Entrepreneur?
How to choose to stay loyal to yourself when no one is looking, when no one really cares about you. How can YOU still care about YOURSELF then? What was their secret?
🍀 You should not go down this path alone, but it all starts with you alone.
The Practice Path (Before Ideas)
Which book should I read?Which course should I take?Which coach has the right hack?
If you want to get something done in your life and actually change, understand this first: you don’t need a coach to start. You don’t need a hack. You don’t need another book or course.
👉 What you need is to stop breaking promises to yourself.
There is only one way to become a disciplined person: to start acting, deliberately, before you feel ready. Everything else is just Resistance wearing a productive costume.
Let’s get practical on how you can implement a Stoic self-leadership practice.
1) Journaling: Establish Your Baseline
The daily practise with just yourself
Journaling is not self-expression.
It’s not therapy.It’s not creativity.It’s a measurement.
🌅 Every morning, write down what you commit to today. Not what you wish you would do. What you are actually willing to stand behind.
🌇 Every evening, compare your intentions with your behavior.
Where did you act deliberately?Where did you react?Where did you avoid?Where did you tell yourself a small, convenient lie to stay comfortable?
… every day!
For the first month, this is the only thing you need to read; no books, just about yourself, your promises, and the results. Are you even honest with yourself?
Who are you? Who do you want to be?
Your journal becomes your primary text. Not because it’s profound, but because it’s honest. It shows you your current baseline, not the version of yourself you’d like to be.
If you don’t know your baseline, every philosophy turns into role-play.
2) Resistance, Discipline, Starting Anyway
Start to develop your intentional Identity.
Once you journal honestly, a pattern appears fast.
You don’t fail because you lack insight.
You fail because something pushes back the moment things matter.
That pushback has many names. Call it fear, comfort, distraction, or self-sabotage. The name doesn’t matter. The mechanism does.
It shows up as:
- “I’ll start tomorrow.”
- “I need a better plan.”
- “I should read a bit more first.”
- “Now isn’t the right moment.”
Discipline starts when you stop negotiating with that voice.
This is the real turning point. You stop acting from mood and start acting from identity. You do the thing because you decided to be someone who does it, not because you feel inspired today.
That’s the moment people often describe as a “second life” or a rebirth. Not mystical. Just practical. You stop waiting for internal alignment and create it through action.
You move from intention to execution.
And this is also the point at which seeking help starts to make sense.
Not because you can’t start alone, but you should start alone. But because once Resistance is visible, you’ll notice another problem: you can’t reliably intervene on yourself every time. Not because you’re weak, but because humans are excellent at rationalizing. We’re built to make our own excuses sound reasonable.
This is where a buddy, mentor, or just reflection partner becomes powerful.
Someone who doesn’t give you a “hack” but gives you a mirror. Someone who can ask, calmly and directly:
“Is that true, or is that Resistance?”
“Are you choosing this, or escaping?”
“What promise did you make this morning?”
We are not always strong – we need external honesty then
Sometimes you need an intervention you won’t do on your own, because you’re too close to your own story. You’ll try to get away with thoughts and actions you wouldn’t accept from anyone else, and you’ll call it being realistic.
A good reflection partner doesn’t create dependency. They strengthen your honesty. They help you practice the move that matters most: catching the moment you start negotiating, and returning to deliberate action.
3) A Simple Operating Rule
The core principle of stoicism
At the core of this practice is one rule you can apply every day:
What is yours to act on, and what is not?
In practical terms:
What is yours:
- your judgment
- your impulses
- your attention
- your actions and refusals
What is not:
- outcomes
- other people
- recognition
- timing
- how things turn out
This is not philosophy. It’s a filter.
Every time you feel stuck, distracted, or overwhelmed, ask:
“Am I trying to control something external, or am I avoiding acting where I actually have agency?”
Discipline grows when you consistently redirect energy back to what is yours.
4) Sustain the Practice (Not Another Reset)
Most people don’t fail because they lack willpower.
They fail because they design lives that require constant willpower.
Self-discipline is not about intensity. It’s about sustainability.
That means paying attention to cycles:
work, training, recovery, recreation, sleep.
If you’re serious, you eventually have to act here. Fix your sleep. Respect recovery. Stop treating exhaustion as a virtue. Build rhythms you can repeat for years, not weeks.
This isn’t optimization.
It’s maintenance.
Here is an optimized version in your tone: clearer, tighter, with boundaries made explicit, without softening the message or turning it salesy. Content is the same, but the expectations are cleaner and safer.
Reflection, Mentoring, and Staying Intrinsic
You don’t have to do this alone forever.
But the order matters.
Start with yourself. Always.
If you need someone to push you to begin, you’re already creating dependency. That’s not discipline; that’s outsourcing responsibility.
Once you’ve started, a reflection partner can help. Not advice. Not motivation. Just mirroring. Someone who listens and occasionally says, calmly and without drama:
“That sounds like avoidance.”
That alone already sharpens honesty.
About Mentoring
Mentoring comes later.
Real mentoring is not comfort. It’s an intervention.
A mentor interrupts your thinking when you start justifying, procrastinating, or inflating things. Not to control you, but to train a skill you don’t yet apply reliably yourself: honest self-intervention.
The goal is never dependency.
The goal is that you learn to do this on your own.
Coaching is optimization. Optional. Expensive. Late.
Apply Pareto here. If you do the basics seriously, you’re already most of the way there. The last layer costs disproportionate energy and only makes sense once the foundation is stable.
And that foundation is not theoretical.
It’s real work, real challenge, real change.
When to Look for a Mentor
If you don’t yet know who you are or what you need, mentoring easily turns into something closer to therapy. In that phase, talking to someone who has been there can help with orientation, especially if you want to change but genuinely can’t find a way in on your own.
But that’s not the core of mentoring.
If you'd asked me for mentoring at that stage, I’d have sat down with you two or three times. I’d listen. I’d push where necessary. I’d intervene where your thinking goes off track. That’s it.
Whether anything changes after that is entirely in your hands.
Will you apply what you’ve seen?
Or will you let the ego take over again and explain why now is different?
Real mentoring starts later. It starts when you’re already in the cycle.
When daily self-reflection isn’t enough anymore. When you want to go from controlling yourself to influencing outcomes, in your work, your team, your career.
That’s when things get tested in the real world.
Does your self-discipline hold under pressure?
Does your philosophy still work when it costs you something, or even everything?
👉 I am changing for the better while making progress in the real world.
That’s the standard.
Modern Escape and the Serenity Test
Here’s the uncomfortable part.
If your drug is Netflix, YouTube Shorts, excessive gaming, partying, or endless scrolling, you’re not fundamentally different from an alcoholic in the mechanism that matters.
Same pattern:
compulsion over choice,
escape over confrontation,
short-term relief over long-term agency.
The substance changed.
The dynamic didn’t.
The useful question is not “Is this bad?”
It’s “Is this chosen, or is it compulsive?”
Wisdom is noticing the exact moment judgment slips and impulse takes over, and intervening there. Not tomorrow. Not after one more video.
That intervention is the practice.
The Point
This is a quiet hero’s journey.
You start unconscious and reactive.
You notice the pattern.
You stop negotiating.
You act deliberately.
You learn to intervene in real time.
At some point, something changes.
You still feel resistance, but it no longer runs the show. You stop fighting the world and start shaping yourself.
Not with hacks.
Not with shortcuts.
Just with deliberate, repeatable practice.
— Adrian
