The Physics Teacher Who Quit

Alignment > Discipline.

You’ve tried being more disciplined.

It doesn’t really work, does it?

It’s Thursday-you versus Monday-you every single week, and Thursday keeps winning.

That’s not to say discipline isn’t important, it’s a wonderful core value, it’s just that when we try to “be disciplined,” we do it with a backwards approach, so let me walk you through a different, and more effective, methodology.

In order to build discipline, let’s not even talk about it.

Let’s start somewhere almost nobody starts before they grind themselves into the ground: alignment.

To do this, let me show you what I mean through a man who rewired how I think about it.

My high school physics teacher used to work at a top-secret government defense contractor.

He couldn’t talk about what he did, but I assume he was building the lasers that Dr. Evil was putting on his sharks in Austin Powers or some crazy shit like that.

Real deal, badge access, the kind of job you’re “supposed” to want.

One day he quit, walked across the street, and took a job teaching physics to teenagers.

Obviously, I asked him why he would do that…

And the answer was pretty amusing:

He said he’d been watching the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark (one of the best movies out there imo), the scene where they finally get the Ark of the Covenant, the sacred biblical wooden chest plated in gold built by the ancient Hebrews to hold the stone tablets of the 10 commandments.

TL;DR: It’s a pretty box that shoots lightning and spirits out of it, killing everyone around who looked.

Makes Elon’s rockets look pretty silly, if you ask me.

If you were to imagine that this was a real pretty box with real pretty lightning and spirits that really shoot out and kill everyone in the vicinity then you would imagine this would be considered a fairly important discovery. Something that everyone would want their hands on to study or use.

And then in the next scene at the end of the movie, a government or military worker nails it into a plain wooden crate, completely unassuming, and wheels it into a warehouse with a million identical crates, and it’s just gone.

Packed up to likely never be seen again.

And my teacher said as he was watching this he thought:

“I don’t want my life’s work to end up as a box in some big government warehouse.”

So he walked across the street and became a physics teacher.

This is a fantastic example of one component of a Definition of Alignment.

After that, he showed up everyday, worked hard, taught with energy and excitement and experiments and likely inspired many, including myself, to be more engaged in physics, if not just science and problem-solving in general.

Alignment is not the world’s scoreboard. It’s not the prestige job (don’t worry I’ll touch on this in a second because I know you didn’t like that), the round of funding, the title your parents can brag about at dinner.

Alignment is when your actual actions match your actual values.

And the reason it matters so much for you specifically is this:

You don’t revert from things that are rooted in your values.

You revert from things that aren’t.

When something is genuinely rooted in who you are, you come back to it even after you fall off, the way you come back to a person you genuinely love after a fight.

But if you don’t have clarity over what your values look like in practice, you don’t consciously or unconsciously know where to revert back to, and you end up in cycles of distraction, overthinking, and avoidance.

This is why you don’t bounce back like a rubber band. Without a clear definition of alignment and the right tools it can take you a long time to find your way back to your values.

You can see this experience in the years-long fights you have with yourself to remove bad habits or behaviors that you’ve been engaging in forever.

This fight is you TRYING to revert back to your values, just without proper support to expedite the process.

When something is unrooted and has no clear association with your definition of alignment (which is usually the case if you don’t have one…) then you drift away from it the second the motivation runs out, and then you beat yourself up for drifting.

To my point above, this doesn’t mean that elite jobs, money, big creative projects, rounds of funding for your startup, etc. aren’t important.

It means that any one of them can be the most aligned pursuit in your entire life, as long as the root is actually yours.

The prestige job isn’t the enemy…

Chasing the prestige job because some part of you believes it’ll finally make you feel like enough, without ever once asking whether you actually want it, that’s the enemy.

The funding you raise to build the specific thing you can’t stop thinking about is alignment… The exact same funding raised so you can stop feeling behind everyone you graduated with is a warehouse box with a nicer coat of paint.

The object isn’t inherently the problem.

Whether it’s genuinely rooted in your core values is.

And what is the product of the day to day fight to maintain focus toward unaligned goals?

Avoidance. Overthinking. Distraction. Cleaning your apartment on a Tuesday afternoon when you should be working. Fabricating the progress you’ve made to your boss or colleague or friends because you weren’t consistent. Opening up a new tab and starting a shiny new project.

And how would you qualify these behaviors in reflection?

A lack of discipline.

So the reason Monday-you keeps losing to Thursday-you is not be that you’re weak or incompetent.

It might be that some quiet part of you knows the thing you’re forcing is a warehouse box.

Or, more likely, it’s that you have never actually stopped to define what your aligned life even looks like, so you’re grinding toward a version of success you absorbed from everyone else and never once checked against yourself.

That’s the tool.

It’s not sexy and it’s not a hack.

It’s defining your core values and getting brutally specific about what alignment looks like for you, so that when you sit down to work, you are showing up with a reason for being there.

Not everyone would make the same decision as my physics professor.

The pay or the opportunity to work on novel technologies may be more aligned for you, that’s not the point.

The point is that by defining alignment in your own life allows for you to change your frame and to stop needing to shame yourself into motion, because you’re returning to something that’s actually yours.