Everyday Discipline

Discipline is the most basic building block of success. There can not be success without discipline. You may be successful without having other personality traits but you can’t be successful without discipline. Discipline will cause you to have habits which may not be convenient for your feelings but these habits will get you the victory in life. It’s discipline which causes you to organize events beforehand and look for small details which would cause problems. Discipline causes you to ignore fear and do what you have to do even if it will cause bodily harm. Discipline is what causes the athlete to continue the race despite the pain which would subside if he or she were to quit. Discipline is what causes the student to crack open the books and study on a beautiful, clear sky 75 degree spring day. Applying discipline means that you choose to forego immediate gratification for a future reward. Discipline is a rare commodity in the microwave society that we now live in. One reason that the divorce rate is so high in our society is because couples lack the discipline to stay in a bad relationship to try to make it work. The prevailing mentality is that you try marriage and if it doesn’t work then get a divorce. When it should be that the marriage will work at all costs regardless of what it takes. Most professional athletes use steroids or performance enhancing drugs to win their events. Personally this takes the joy out of winning from the point of pure competition. I would rather win because I knew that I was the better athlete not because I used some drug to give me an unfair advantage. All professional athletes have to have extraordinary discipline in order to compete and win but performance enhancing drugs are certainly a shortcut to success. They serve to eliminate much of the hard work needed to insure victory. Discipline means that we will take the hard right over the easy wrong. Discipline to do the right thing will save you when situations go bad. Mental discipline means ignoring the screams in your mind which tell you to do something to do just the opposite. Mental discipline means not screaming out in pain when you are hurting, or getting out of bed early when your mind and body don’t want to cooperate. One of the most extreme circumstances which always required mental toughness was whenever we returned from an extended field exercise in the military. After days in the field we would be exhausted, dirty, worn out and ready to go home to a decent meal and a hot bath. We had to clean our equipment thoroughly before we could leave. This always took hours and was not the most pleasant thing in the world to do. We would scrub and scrape off the mud, grit, sand, and dirt from everything and repack it to be ready for the next use. We would have to service our vehicles and make sure that they were full of gas. During this time it would seem like we were so close to home but yet so far away. No one could leave until everyone was finished so it was especially frustrating when we had to wait on those sections who typically took longer because of their equipment. This was worse than anything else that I ever had to face in the military. This discipline has carried over from that time to now and looking back makes me appreciate it although I sure didn’t appreciate it one bit at the time. Developing discipline is hard work but if you can persevere you will be rewarded by the results that it brings to you. The Good Life