Earlier this month, I found myself on the verge of throwing up from exhaustion as I did jumping jacks in the middle of Bryant Park in Manhattan. It was sometime after 5:00 a.m. and the sun had yet to rise.

I had woken up at 3:15 that morning to prepare for the start of “Muster,” a two-day leadership conference led by former Navy SEAL commanders Jocko Willink and Leif Babin.

Willink and Babin are the cofounders of management consulting firm Echelon Front and the coauthors of New York Times bestseller “Extreme Ownership.” They waived Muster’s roughly $2,500 fee for me and Business Insider video producer Joe Avella.

That first morning, 300 Muster participants and I gathered at 4:45 to spend an hour going through a gauntlet of six exercises: flutter kicks, push-ups, squats, jumping jacks, sit-ups, and burpees. We performed each exercise for two minutes and then ran to the next station, repeating the cycle twice and then ending with 48 burpees.

I’m not going to lie and tell you that since this workout I’ve jumped out of bed at 4:30, or even 5:30, to go run five miles followed by 50 pushups. But this experience did teach me a lesson about discipline.

Read the whole story from Business Insider.