I saw a comment thread on here a while that made me stop and think. It was something like, "People like Sebastian and other people I read/follow/etc online are doing so much, and I feel like I can't live up to that standard."
Well. I know myself, and I've also dined, traveled, socialized, and worked with many people that are heroes and exemplars to the people around them. And I'll tell you this -- there's a hell of a lot of publication bias.
From Wikipedia --
Publication bias is a bias with regard to what is likely to be published, among what is available to be published. Not all bias is inherently problematic – for instance, a bias against publishing lies is often a desirable bias – but one problematic and much-discussed bias is the tendency of researchers, editors, and pharmaceutical companies to handle the reporting of experimental results that are positive (i.e. showing a significant finding) differently from results that are negative (i.e. supporting the null hypothesis) or inconclusive, leading to a misleading bias in the overall published literature. This is usually a bias towards reporting significant results, despite the fact that studies with significant results do not appear to be superior to studies with a null result with respect to quality of design.
The concept was named after publishing in scientific journals -- people would set up correct experiment designs, but abandon the experiments or not publish the results unless something interesting/positive happened.
So, a lion's share of published papers have interesting stuff happening. Yet, when doing good science and testing hypotheses, most attempts to break new ground are going to wind up with your hypothesis wrong or getting inconclusive results.
Likewise, people experimenting in personal development or business development will share all the initiatives they do that worked, but give nowhere near the attention to the ones that didn't work.
When someone finds a working strategy or intervention that works consistently, they'll publish the hell out of it. When things go off the rails, it usually gets quietly swept under the rug.
In full disclosure, today I had three cans of Red Bull and four giant German pretzels (two were cheese pretzels). I could explain my theory on why that happened (I had an amazing 2-day run of putting in 30 really high quality work hours, followed by 2-3 flat days, a common pattern I've noticed, and I gave in to junkfood and distraction on those days).
So me, am I super disciplined? Maybe sometimes. But you hear a lot more about those times than you do about Laugenbrezel mit Käse und Red Bull.