Shows / The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Project MNDST: Daily Discipline is your daily mental training in under 3 minutes. Each episode delivers one powerful mindset framework—drawn from elite athletes like Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan, cutting-edge psychology, Stoic philosophy, and peak performance science. What you'll learn: How to build unshakeable discipline and mental toughness Why identity drives results (not goals) The psychology of confidence, focus, and resilience How top performers train their minds like weapons Frameworks…
Episodes
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 162: Locus of Control
Today's episode teaches Julian Rotter's locus of control — the idea that where you locate the cause of what happens to you shapes nearly everything about how…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 161: Chesterton's Fence
Today's episode teaches Chesterton's Fence — the principle G.K. Chesterton laid out in 1929 that says you shouldn't remove a rule or constraint until you…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 160: The Map Is Not the Territory
Today's episode teaches Alfred Korzybski's principle — the map is not the territory — the idea that your mental model of reality is never reality itself, and…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 159: First-Principles Thinking
Today's episode teaches first-principles thinking — Aristotle's foundational method of stripping a problem down to what you know is absolutely true, then…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 158: Wu Wei: The Power of Not Forcing
Today's episode teaches wu wei, the ancient Taoist principle of effortless action first laid out by Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching. Far from passivity, wu wei is…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 157: Kintsugi: The Gold in the Break
Today's episode teaches kintsugi — the Japanese art of repairing broken things with gold — and what it means for anyone trying to rebuild a habit, a streak, or…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 156: The Backfire Effect
Today's episode teaches the backfire effect — the counterintuitive finding from political psychologists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler that being shown we're…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 155: The View From Above
Today's episode explores the View From Above — a mental practice Marcus Aurelius returned to throughout the Meditations to keep today's crisis in proportion…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 154: The Goldilocks Rule
Today's episode teaches the Goldilocks Rule, James Clear's framework for sustaining motivation by keeping challenges just at the edge of your current ability —…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 153: The Multitasking Myth
Today's episode teaches the Multitasking Myth — the finding from cognitive psychology, anchored by researchers like David Meyer and Earl Miller, that your…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 152: The OODA Loop: Speed of Decision Is the Edge
Today's episode teaches the OODA Loop — John Boyd's model of Observe, Orient, Decide, Act — and explains why the speed of your decision cycle, not the quality…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 151: Optionality: Pay a Little, Keep the Upside Open
Today's episode teaches optionality — Nassim Taleb's principle of paying a small, capped cost to hold a right without an obligation, keeping your downside…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 150: Negativity Bias: Why Bad Hits Harder Than Good
Today's episode teaches negativity bias — the well-documented principle, named and studied by psychologists Paul Rozin and Edward Royzman, that bad experiences…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 149: The Last Time
Today's episode teaches The Last Time, one of the oldest ideas in both Stoic and Buddhist tradition: you don't know which ordinary moment is the final one, so…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 148: Muhammad Ali and the Power of Spoken Belief
Today's episode teaches Muhammad Ali's practice of spoken belief — declaring "I am the Greatest" before the record confirmed it — and what sports psychology…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 147: Eulogy vs. Résumé Virtues
Today's episode unpacks David Brooks's framework of eulogy virtues versus résumé virtues — the distinction between the skills we build for the market and the…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 146: Steelmanning: Argue the Strongest Case Against You
Today's episode teaches steelmanning — the ancient rhetorical discipline of arguing the other side's strongest case before you trust your own — tracing it from…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 145: Memento Mori Revisited: Let Death Sharpen You
We covered Memento Mori once before — but this episode goes deeper, past urgency and into what the Stoics were really after: the removal of triviality. Drawing…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 144: Hormesis: The Right Dose of Stress
Today's episode teaches hormesis — the biological principle that the right dose of stress is the signal to adapt and grow. Drawing on exercise science, Kelly…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 143: Systems Over Goals
Today's episode teaches Scott Adams's model of Systems Over Goals — the idea that a goal tells you where you want to go, but a system is what you actually do…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 142: Digital Minimalism: Choose Your Tools on Purpose
Today's episode teaches Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport's framework for choosing your tools on purpose rather than letting them accumulate by default. We look…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 141: The Flywheel: How Momentum Actually Builds
Today's episode teaches the Flywheel Effect, Jim Collins's model from his landmark research in Good to Great — the idea that lasting momentum isn't built by…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 140: Expected Value: The Math Under Every Real Bet
Today's episode teaches expected value — one of the oldest and most clarifying tools in decision theory — and how thinking in probabilities and payoffs can…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 139: The Bandwidth Tax of Scarcity
Today's episode teaches the Bandwidth Tax of Scarcity, the concept named and researched by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, which shows how not having…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 138: Sympatheia: You Are One Thread in the Whole
Today's episode teaches sympatheia — Marcus Aurelius's Stoic principle that each of us is one thread in a single connected whole. Drawing on Marcus's private…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 137: Ikigai: Where Purpose Meets Practice
Today's episode teaches ikigai, the centuries-old Japanese principle of building a life at the intersection of what you love, what you're good at, what the…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 136: Next Play: Coach K's Discipline of Letting Go
Today's episode teaches the Next Play principle from coach Mike Krzyzewski — the simple discipline of releasing the last moment, good or bad, and bringing your…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 135: Don't Break the Chain: The Seinfeld Method
Today's episode teaches Don't Break the Chain — the habit method Jerry Seinfeld described to comedian Brad Isaac — and why the streak itself becomes the most…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 134: Cognitive Reappraisal: Change the Meaning, Change the
Today's episode teaches cognitive reappraisal, the emotion-regulation strategy developed by Stanford psychologist James Gross — the idea that while an event…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 133: The Johari Window: What Others See That You Don't
Today's episode teaches the Johari Window, the two-by-two model of self-awareness developed by psychologists Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham in nineteen…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 132: The Compound Effect, Revisited
We revisit Darren Hardy's Compound Effect — not to repeat the basics, but to get to the layer that actually determines whether the principle works for you…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 131: The Pomodoro Technique
Today's episode teaches the Pomodoro Technique, developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late nineteen-eighties with nothing more than a tomato-shaped kitchen…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 130: The Progress Principle
Today's episode teaches the Progress Principle — Teresa Amabile's research-backed finding that small, visible wins are the single strongest driver of…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 129: The Outside View: What Base Rates Tell You
Today's episode teaches the Outside View — Daniel Kahneman's principle of consulting base rates before trusting your own story about a plan or project. It's a…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 127: On the Shortness of Life
Today's episode teaches Seneca's essay On the Shortness of Life — the ancient argument that the problem isn't how little time we have, but how rarely we spend…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 126: The 10,000-Hour Idea — With the Nuance
Today's episode teaches the ten-thousand-hour idea the way its originator, psychologist Anders Ericsson, actually meant it — not as a magic number, but as a…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 125: Kobe Bryant and the 4 A.M. Process
Today's episode looks at what we're calling the four a.m. process — the idea, rooted in Kobe Bryant's documented pre-dawn training habit, that the unglamorous…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 124: Motivated Reasoning
Today's episode teaches motivated reasoning — psychologist Ziva Kunda's insight that when we want a conclusion to be true, we don't drop our logic, we turn it…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 123: Post-Traumatic Growth: Rebuilt, Not Just Recovered
Today's episode teaches post-traumatic growth, the model developed by psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun, which shows that people can come out…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 122: Temptation Bundling
Today's episode teaches temptation bundling — Katy Milkman's research-backed strategy of pairing something you want to do with something you need to do, so…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 121: Attention Residue: The Tax on Every Switch
Today's episode teaches attention residue — the term psychologist Sophie Leroy coined to describe the part of your mind that stays stuck on your last task even…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 120: Flow: Where Challenge Meets Skill
Today's episode explores flow — the peak state of absorbed, effortless engagement that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi documented across thousands of…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 118: Show Me the Incentive
Today's episode teaches Charlie Munger's incentives model — the idea that if you want to understand why people do what they do, you read the incentive, not the…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 117: The Fundamental Attribution Error
Today's episode is built around the Fundamental Attribution Error, a concept named by psychologist Lee Ross in the nineteen seventies — the deeply human…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 114: Learned Optimism and Explanatory Style
Today's episode teaches Martin Seligman's Learned Optimism — the idea that your explanatory style, the way you explain setbacks to yourself, determines whether…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 113: Tom Brady and the 199th Pick
Today's episode teaches the mental model behind Tom Brady's career-long motivation — the draft slight that became structural fuel. Brady was the one hundred…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 112: Keystone Habits: The One That Moves Everything
Today's episode teaches keystone habits — a concept named and developed by Charles Duhigg — the idea that a single well-chosen behavior can quietly pull a…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 111: Deep Work: The Rare Skill That Compounds
Today's episode teaches Cal Newport's concept of Deep Work — the idea that focused, distraction-free concentration is rare, genuinely valuable, and a skill you…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 110: Kaizen: The Power of Almost-Too-Small-to-Fail
Today's episode teaches kaizen — the Japanese principle of continuous improvement, rooted in the Toyota Production System — and how changes almost too small to…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 109: Thinking in Bets: Judge the Decision, Not the Outcome
Today's episode teaches Annie Duke's model of "thinking in bets" — the idea that a decision should be judged by the quality of the reasoning behind it, not by…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 108: The Framing Effect
Today's episode teaches the framing effect — the insight from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky that the very same fact, stated in different words, leads people…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 107: Beginner's Mind: The Expert's Hidden Trap
Today's episode teaches Beginner's Mind — shoshin — the Zen principle that Shunryu Suzuki captured in one unforgettable line: in the expert's mind, there are…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 106: The Dichotomy of Control — Revisited
We revisited Epictetus's Dichotomy of Control today — not as a lesson in letting go, but as a discipline of attention. The real insight, drawn from the…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 105: Cognitive Dissonance and the Cheap Exit
Today's episode teaches Leon Festinger's concept of cognitive dissonance — the discomfort we feel when our beliefs and our actions don't match — and the sneaky…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 104: Antifragility: Getting Stronger From Stress
Today's episode teaches antifragility — Nassim Taleb's idea that some systems don't just endure stress, they grow stronger because of it — and shows what that…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 103: The Habit Loop
Today's episode teaches the Habit Loop — the cue, routine, reward cycle that Charles Duhigg documented in his reporting and research — and shows how you can…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 102: Failure as the Literal Path to the Shot
Today's episode teaches Michael Jordan's own framework for failure — the idea that missed shots, lost games, and choked moments aren't detours from success but…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 100: Marginal Gains: The 1% Rule
Today's episode teaches Dave Brailsford's philosophy of marginal gains — the idea that a one-percent improvement across every small element of a system…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 99: Satisficing: Why Good Enough Wins
Today's episode teaches satisficing — the decision-making principle Herbert Simon introduced in the nineteen-fifties and Barry Schwartz later brought to life…
- The Daily Discipline from Project MNDST
Episode 97: The Barbell Strategy
Today's episode teaches the Barbell Strategy — Nassim Taleb's idea that the safest and most effective position is to pair an extremely secure foundation with a…