We treat discipline like a moral virtue — something the worthy possess and the rest of us need to cultivate. But what if that framing is exactly backward?

“Discipline and the idea of willpower can kind of get thrown around in a way that almost has this religious zeal to it — that, you know, like no matter what you do in life you need more of this. And there’s almost a morality around it, like you’re a bad person if you don’t have these things.”

Chris Garay runs a calisthenics and hand balancing gym in Washington, DC. He’s spent years watching people try to build movement practices — and watching those practices either take hold or fall apart. What he’s observed doesn’t match the discipline-as-virtue narrative we’ve absorbed from fitness culture.

“If you can set up low friction environments in a way that you can just start an activity or start a task,” Garay explains, “and then build momentum over time — that’s one thing I definitely see with my clients. Once they get into a routine and are building these habits, I don’t really get the impression that it requires a ton of discipline or willpower for them.”

This is worth sitting with. The people who successfully maintain long-term movement practices don’t credit their iron will. They credit something simpler: they’ve arranged their lives so that starting doesn’t require overcoming resistance.

The religious zeal Garay identifies isn’t just unhelpful — it might be actively counterproductive. When we moralize willpower, we create shame around struggling to start. That shame becomes another form of friction, another barrier between us and the practice we’re trying to build. We beat ourselves up for lacking discipline when the real problem is that we’ve set up our lives to make starting hard.

Consider what Garay says about his own training: “That’s why I sometimes don’t always think of my training as something that requires discipline, because I enjoy it a lot. I have a space that I’ve, you know, been fortunate to create that I spending time in.” For him, the discipline question barely registers — not because he’s more virtuous than the rest of us, but because he’s reduced the friction to near zero. He built a gym he wants to be in.

Most of us can’t build our own gyms. But the principle scales down. The question isn’t “how do I become more disciplined?” It’s “what’s creating friction between me and starting?”

Maybe it’s the drive to the gym. Maybe it’s the setup time for a home practice. Maybe it’s trying to train in a space that’s also where you work, sleep, and argue with family members. Garay notes that after COVID, almost nobody wanted to keep training in their living rooms: “They wanted to go to a space that was kind of made and dedicated, in a community of social people that are going to train these ways together.”

The living room wasn’t a discipline problem. It was a friction problem. The space carried too many other associations. Starting there required constantly overcoming that context rather than settling into it.

This reframes the entire conversation. Instead of asking “what’s wrong with me that I can’t stick to this?” we might ask “what’s wrong with the setup?” The people who maintain practices for years and decades haven’t necessarily built superior willpower. They’ve built superior environments.

Garay circles back to this near the end of the conversation:

“If you constantly have to overcome something just to start, then you probably won’t start. So if it’s enjoyable and there’s momentum there, that can be very helpful over time.”

The practitioners who stick around aren’t the ones who’ve mastered overcoming resistance. They’re the ones who’ve eliminated most of the resistance entirely.

This doesn’t mean discipline is a fiction. There are still hard days, still sessions where you’d rather not. But those become exceptions rather than the rule. The baseline state shifts from “constantly fighting to begin” to “naturally showing up because that’s just what happens now.”

We’ve been asking the wrong question. It was never about having more willpower. It was always about needing less.

This field note references the Movers Mindset episode “Intentional — with Chris Garay,” published December 6, 2023.