Discipline is what creates a beautiful life. While we live in an era where everything is easy, you need something that will push you.

Think about it, if we want food we can order from an app from the comfort of our couch. If we want furniture, we can order it from Amazon and get it by the end of the day. So what is really challenging us and pushing us to be the best we possibly can be.

Although life is easy, we still do have guaranteed difficulties like death of a loved one, health implications, bad days, etc. Those are the macro problems every human will inevitably face, but what about the micro?

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The cure to an easy life.

Bruce Lee once said, “Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.” Why is that?

Bruce is not saying that he wants a hard life just because, he’s saying this because it builds strength to endure inevitable hardships that life brings. To make it simple, would you rather be strong when the wind comes or weak? Because the wind is coming regardless if you like it or not.

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75 Hard

In December of 2025, my girlfriend and I realized that although life is incredible and we are living the dream we spent years building. With that said, we both understood that there’s more in the tank. We needed a challenge that was going to stretch us beyond where we’ve been before.

So we took on this challenge called 75 hard in the middle of the holiday season (starting Jan 1) . Here’s what it entailed:

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Each day you must have:

→ 45 minute outdoor workout

→ 45 minute indoor workout

→ 1 gallon of water

→ read 10 pages of a non-fiction self development book

→ Strict diet, 0 sugar, 0 alcohol (we also went 0 gluten)

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0 exceptions to anything, if you miss a day, you have to restart entirely. That means regardless of the weather you have to workout outside, regardless of holidays/birthdays there was no sugar allowed. Sounds tough right? This changed our lives, our health, and our careers for the better.

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11 Lessons Learned from 75 Hard

1. Journaling: I decided to keep a journal and document everything I was feeling, the workouts I’ve done, the sleep metrics I had, and the amount of hours I focused on the business each day. Journaling is great because #1 you can reference back to when you need help #2 you’ll have stories to share that will never go away. Keeping track of my performance metrics kept me accountable and gave me a quick solution when I wasn’t feeling 100%. “Oh you were feeling groggy this week?” checks journal “That’s because you averaged 5 hours of sleep per night.”
2. Time management: With both my girlfriend and I having insanely busy days we really had to manage our time. Winning the mornings was a real thing. I found that if I didn’t at least get one workout in the morning, I’d be scrambling at 10pm to try and finish my 2nd workout of the day. Trust me, I don’t advise 11pm outdoor workouts in Idaho or midnight Yoga in my apartment. Winning the morning means winning the night before, going to bed early, rising early. I found the only way to go to bed early was to be focused and get all my tasks done within the day, 0 delay.
3. Have an accountability partner: You learn a lot about your partner during 75 hard**.** Most early relationships are easy in nature. Once marriage begins that’s when the real challenges happen. Doing this challenge with your significant other early on is a great way to see how you both can work together and keep each other accountable when times get hard. I call this “manufactured difficulty.” If your partner has the guts to keep you accountable when you want to eat a slice of pie and skip a workout, you have a keeper. We crushed it.
4. Gamify the challenge: Just like when you were younger and your parents took you for ice cream after getting a good test score.. adults operate with the same behavior. I decided that when we finish 75 hard, we’ll take a trip to the south of France and the coast of Italy. This kept us strong on days we quite frankly didn’t want to be strong. We understood the reward at the end of the race. When times were tough, we thought about how great it will be sitting on the Amalfi coast, eating pasta and singing Volare by Dean Martin.
5. We did it during a holiday and birthday: We realized discipline doesn’t wait for the new year or when your “season,” is over. The speed of implementation dictates your success. If discipline guarantees your win, why would you wait? I want to win NOW, not wait for the new year. Doing 75 hard in the hardest time of the year was actually incredible, we realized you don’t need sweets to enjoy the holidays. You don’t need a day off of working out on your birthday. In fact, the craziest realization is that, staying strict during the holidays actually made us feel so much better. We had more energy and awareness to enjoy our loved ones in the present moment.
6. Stack the mornings: Your best ideas and work happen in the early hours. I stacked my mornings with workouts and business development work, and only had afternoon meetings. On days I did the opposite, I felt less productive and workouts were always pushed to late at night.
7. Focus on feeling good: When you understand what “feeling good” actually feels like, you’ll never want to jeopardize that for short term dopamine. Whenever we were tempted to either do something that would ruin the challenge, we asked ourselves, “will this make us feel good in the long run.” Will the brownie help my workout? Will laying around all day give me energy? These type of questions shaped our daily actions
8. Stay in the vibe: The biggest adrenaline/dopamine rushes I get throughout the day are after a great workout or conversation or even after a sick design. It’s a euphoric feeling, that you can carry with you the rest of the day. Whenever I’d go on my phone and scroll after that adrenaline rush, that euphoric feeling would immediately go away, and I couldn’t get it back the rest of the day. It’s important to note that when you’re on that “runners high,” to keep it. You’ll do your best work when it’s present. The best act to maintain it, is to not chase further dopamine after the action.
9. Motivated by progress: Seeing your mile time get cut by 30 seconds, muscles starting to tighten, bank account getting bigger, and conversations starting to flow better is what we both experienced doing this challenge. It became easy to be addicted to progress. Once you become aware of it, it’s much easier to show up day after day. The hardest part is getting off the starting line.
10. Energy is everything: Referring back to 9 & 10.. when your energy increases everything in your life increases. Working out, growing the mind and body, hydrating daily, will give you a surge in energy. It’s up to you to use that energy to create the life you dreamed of. People will start to feel it when they’re around you. I’ve never received so many compliments within the last 75 days about “Man! I love your energy.” When you are disciplined and do the right thing, high energy is inevitable. Even with minimum sleep, energy was still available because the challenge will make you feel ALIVE.
11. You become strong: We both achieved a different kind of strength during this challenge, something either of us has ever experienced. External challenges didn’t feel like challenges any more. Working out in the Idaho winter wasn’t crazy any more, it was simply “what we do.” Our identity became built around doing hard things. By the end of 75 hard, nothing was a challenge anymore, rather it was our lifestyle. Your tolerance for pain increases allowing you to dominate in an “easy going,” world.

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So what’s next?

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75 hard changed our lives. We achieved some things that were once far fetched dreams. So why stop now? If it was that incredible in 75 days, I wonder what a year of this could look like? It’s no longer a challenge, but our everyday lifestyle. There’s not one day that goes by where I don’t workout 2x, drink a gallon of water, and read at least 10 pages of a book. Very rarely will I have a bite of something sweet. Gluten is completely out of the diet. Better gut health is better energy.

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Cheers to a life of discipline and becoming the people God designed us to be.

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Do Hard Things

-MJ

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