Consistency is Key
“Discipline is choosing what you want most over what you want now.”
It never gets old…
Time to talk about a critical part of long-term growth. It’s something many talk about but few get into…Discipline! Specifically self-discipline, But what is this magical thing that motivational speakers usually broach lightly and certain tough guys seem to swear by called discipline? The way some people talk about it is like some nebulous thing that you somehow tap into, but only if you try hard enough and if your goals are somehow worthy of it. It can be dangerous for those that don’t properly understand how discipline works. Misunderstanding what discipline truly is, how you get it, and the role it plays in your life can start a vicious cycle of trying and failing that if left unchecked will cause a spiral of self-doubt and eroding self-esteem.
What so what is it Again?
Before we discuss how one achieves discipline and the impact it has on life (at least mine anyway). Let get a proper definition of what discipline is exactly. Merriam-Webster defines discipline as the following:
a: control gained by enforcing obedience or order
b: orderly or prescribed conduct or pattern of behavior
c: SELF-CONTROL
PUNISHMENT
training that corrects, molds, or perfects the mental faculties or moral character
a field of study
a rule or system of rules governing conduct or activity
Oddly enough all except number 4 are things that apply directly to self-discipline. 1c is the most direct definition of self-discipline, that is to say, self-control. Most people hear that and think restraint. Self-Control overeating that the last slice of cake. Self-Control over stopping by that fast food restaurant. Self-Control when you feel your temper flaring up. However, self-control is TOTAL control over one’s self, by one’s self, and that is the root of what discipline it. Definition 1a is true because you are enforcing obedience or order over yourself. 1b is true because total control means setting a behavioral stimulus for yourself. It means knowing what you are going to do before you do something rather than the opposite which demonstrates a lack of control. Definition 2 is not something you should be doing yourself because of a lack of discipline. Self-punishment can be very destructive. Corrective action is okay because you are attempting to correct a misstep, but you should not be punishing yourself when you mess up. Life will do that for you. Life’s punishments are often harsher than we would like but everyone has to pay the man and life has a way of making sure you do too. Definition 3 applies to discipline because that’s what discipline truly is about, working toward perfection knowing you’ll never achieve it. Definition 5 is what allows discipline to dovetail into who most people are in the first place: a system of rules governing who we are. As a famous fictional character used to say “A Man’s got to have a code”
So What Happens When you Don’t have Discipline?
Here’s one thing life has taught me: You get away with stuff sometimes, but you don’t get away with most things for very long, and when you do the price to cover it keeps increasing whether you realize it or not. It’s like going to a casino and playing poker. If you don’t figure out the patterns it doesn’t mean you can’t play the next hand, it doesn’t mean you won’t win a couple of hands. But the longer you wait to figure everybody what’s going on, the more likely you are to lose all your money. As the saying goes “If you’re playing cards and you don’t know who the fool is at the table, it’s probably you.” What I held on to for a while was that there were all these all people at the card table I had to beat. The reality is that there are two opponents, Life and Yourself. The faster you figure out who you are the easier it will be to figure out that great opponent called life. The longer it takes you to figure out who you are and get your shxt together the longer it will take you to win at life, achieve your goals and achieve your expectations.
Fun Fact: Most people don’t have much discipline
That may come as a comfort for those wishing to be mediocre or who take solace in being like everyone else. For others, it is an opportunity. If most people don’t have much discipline and are still achieving something, imagine what you can do when you have discipline. Most people are also relatively mediocre overall, but guess what else: Most people are better than most people at least one thing. I truly believe that most people have a talent or a gift for something. That gift may not take you to the Olympics, or the White House, or make you a Nobel Laureate, but it still means you have an innate ability to outperform most people at something. It’s up to you to figure out what that something is. I’ll get to this in a minute, but some people think discipline is the key to achievement. That’s not true. If it was most people wouldn’t achieve almost anything. You can achieve many things without it and people often do. People lose weight without discipline. People graduate from college without discipline. People get promoted without discipline. Do people keep the weight off without discipline? No. Statistically, 95% of people who lose weight gain all of it back. Not having discipline is like putting a governor on your achievement level. It’s like building a house but only bringing part of your toolbox. It’s like fighting life but only being able to punch with one hand. If you’re someone like Deontay Wilder you this isn’t a problem…at first. You’ve got hella power in the one hand and you’ll be able to get by fighting opponents at a certain level and dominating them. However, after you get to a certain level of achievement and want to achieve more you’ll find it much more difficult to accel and achieve using your current toolset. I believe this is how most people operate. It’s certainly how I used to. I relied more on the gifts and talents I had in combination with motivation to get me by. I eventually got to a level in my career, in my health, in my total wellness where my “good enough” was no longer “good enough". On those days I didn’t feel like it, I didn’t do it. That always put me behind the eightball with my goals. I was using my motivation as fuel and motivation wasn’t hitting like it used to. This is because motivation will get you far but it won’t keep you going. Inevitably you're going to have days, weeks, months where you REALLY don’t want to do something. What happens then? Discipline is what happens then.
So What Happens when you do have Discipline?
A common saying is consistency is key. Well, discipline is the key to consistency. If you want success to be sustainable then discipline is a requirement. There is no one in the history of anything that has sustained long-term greatness without being consistent in what is required for that thing. Sounds like a mouthful, right? I’ll break it down using an example. You can take analyze any high-level achiever this way, but I’m going to use someone with name recognition. Lebron James is an iconic basketball player, even the most skeptical have him in their top 10 best players ever. At 38 years old there is a good chance he will make an All-NBA first or second team. It is fairly well known that he spends 2+ million dollars a year on trainers, dieticians, coaches, and therapists and he’s been spending money like that since he first came into the league. Lebron James is consistent about all the things athletes don’t enjoy about basketball. Training, eating a certain way, studying film, practicing, saying no to distractions. It’s served him well and has been one of the keys to his long-term success. One might think it’s as simple as his talent level playing out on the court. It’s reasonable to come to that conclusion until you look at someone like Carmelo Anthony. Anthony came into the league in the same draft class with less hype but in the first couple of years, people believed Lebron and Carmelo to be in the same conversation. So what happened? Carmelo is about the same age (37) why couldn’t he sustain the way Lebron did? Some of that boils down to discipline and distractions. Now don’t get me wrong, the average player should pray to have a career as great as Carmelo Anthony’s, but if you want to be a consensus all-time great, more importantly, if you want to maximize your potential, then you MUST grow your discipline level. Discipline is what makes a good man a great man. It’s what makes a man a reliable bedrock of his community, it’s something that his spouse and children will appreciate even when they are sure what it is. It’s something that will make you dependable with your peers and your clients. Discipline will take success and make it sustainable in a way that will affect lives beyond your own.
Time for some Myth Busting
There are some myths about discipline that I have realized both on my own journey and in talking to others. Some may not apply to your impression of what discipline but based on what I know it to be I’ll lay out a couple:
Total Discipline is Achievable
False. The most disciplined people I have ever seen or heard of falter. This is because that is how humanity is wired. Imperfection is built into everything we do and create. The cold unthinking machines we create are not perfect they just make fewer mistakes than we do. Perfection is something we strive for knowing in our minds it is unachievable. So too is discipline. It is not something that ever gets perfected, it’s something that just improves as we go along.
Once you’ve got Discipline, you’ve got it
I’ve found this to be false. Maybe most people with a level of discipline would disagree, and that’s okay. In my life though, I’ve found that the core of who I am is pretty much solidified. I can’t change my natural cravings, my natural disposition, my natural outlook, my natural disposition etc. What I can do and have done, is use discipline to create regulators and governors around the root of those behaviors. They are like mental bouncers in the club that is my actions. Left unchecked I would be a very hedonistic person. Eating 5000+ calories a day, drinking every day, smoking every day, and using women as a distraction. I know that very well about myself at this point. I also know that if I decided to ignore those governors that I am making an active choice to slide toward being that person. This isn’t what I want and doesn’t make me happy long-term. Discipline is like muscles, it’s something you have to work at consistently or it will fade. At least in my experience
Strong Discipline is something You can get quickly
This one is definitely false. Motivation is something you can get almost immediately. It’s why motivational speakers are so popular. Oddly enough I’ve never heard of a “discipline speaker”. This is because discipline isn’t something that someone can speak into you. It’s something you have to take for yourself. A coach can’t give it to you, your parents can’t pass it down to you, and you can’t inject it into your body like a vaccine shot. Discipline is something you have to build on your own and it is something that takes time for most people. Building strong Discipline, in my experience, is a long process. The good thing is, like muscle building, you’ll begin to see results pretty quickly. Just know it’s not the end of the road it is the beginning. There are very rare people that can achieve strong discipline in a matter of months but those people are VERY rare and their life achievements usually show themselves to be very rare people. When I say very rare I mean like 1 in 10 million type of rare. My point is it probably isn’t you, but you never know until you try right?
Look guys its Undisciplined Robert! :facepalm:
So Where do I procure some of this Tasty Discipline?
The short answer is “within yourself”. Which means it’ll be quick and easy, right? It certainly won’t be quick and it will be as easy as you make it. We talked previously about knowing yourself and the importance of your why. Your why is like a feedback loop that grows your discipline. If you have a weak “why” it won’t feed your discipline and you are forced to rely on your mental toughness to carry you the rest of the time. Whether your why is strong enough is up to you and you’ll likely find out the hard way whether it is or isn’t. Discipline isn’t usually in the big decisions of the day it’s in the small ones. Knowing that I’ve found that it’s easiest and best to start with the small decisions of the day. I got this trick from a book I read (if you know the book leave a comment). We’ll discuss the book in a later entry but the trick is to start with making your bed. It seems small and insignificant but if you don’t make your bed every day, making your bed will make a world of difference. I always thought making your bed was silly. Why make my bed if I’m going to lay in it again? Just do it. The feeling of doing something you didn’t really want to do but did anyway will help spark that disciplined growth. The next thing might be setting a hard time to go to bed and wake up in the morning and actually following it. The things you do to establish discipline should be small things that don’t have large consequences when you don’t do them. While we are never aiming for failure you don’t want to mess your life up with some dramatic goal when you haven’t placed all the building blocks together yet. Go with a crawl-walk-run method. Once you’ve moved from making your bed consistently and regulating your sleep cycle move toward something that’s in line with a key goal of yours. Let’s say you have a goal to lose weight, start parking your car further away so you have to walk more. After you are doing that consistently reduce your fast food consumption by two meals each week. After that go for a 15-minute walk every day. That snowball effect along with the benefits you receive will help you build your discipline over time. Discipline will feed itself by reminding you of where you were and how you got to where you are now.
If your discipline isn’t strong enough your mental toughness will fail you eventually. Motivation is that rocketship that will get you out of earth’s orbit but your discipline is what’s going to get you to the moon. Your why feeds your motivation which feeds your discipline. Over time your discipline will continue to grow but only if you challenge yourself. If you keep lifting the same weight forever your body gets conditioned to that weight over time and your muscles don’t continue to grow. Growth is the goal here. Grown Man Shxt is about achievement, consistency, and improvement and if you want those things then discipline is something you want as well. Just understand that your life will have to change if you want to grow your discipline. You will have to start saying yes to certain things and no to others.
- Rob Immortal