Discipline Is Destiny

That’s from a chapter in Part I called “Just Show Up.”

The very first chapter of the book features a case study in discipline on the legendary Lou Gehrig. He played 2,130 games in a row and was known as “the Iron Horse” for his durability. He set the record for consecutive games played in MLB history that stood until the guy who happened to be MY favorite player growing up, Cal Ripken Jr., played in his 2,131st game on Sept. 6, 1995.

When I read Ryan’s line that “Consistency is a superpower,” I smiled, circled it and then wrote out our Soul Force equation.

As you know if you’ve been following along, I like to say that Soul Force is the superpower ALL of our favorite Heroes expressed in their own idiosyncratic ways.

Gandhi had it. In fact, he NAMED it. Martin Luther King Jr. had it—and even mentioned it in his “I have a dream” speech. Winston Churchill had it. So did Eleanor Roosevelt and Florence Nightingale. And Viktor Frankl. And Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.

ALL of our favorite Heroes had Soul Force. And, most importantly... YOU HAVE IT! We just need to ACTIVATE it—which is the ENTIRE point of ALL of our work together.

Which leads us to the Soul Force equation and HOW to activate it. Here’s the equation:

Soul Force = (Energy x Focus x WIN)^ Consistency

From my perspective, if we want to activate our Heroic Soul Force superpowers, we need to do THREE things at the highest possible level.

First, we need to get our ENERGY to truly Heroic levels. Fact is, if we’re not dominating our fundies (Eating, Moving, Sleeping, Breathing!) and have a hard time getting out of bed because of poor lifestyle choices, we’re going to have a REALLY hard time showing up at our best in any aspect of our life.

Then, we need to FOCUS that Energy on what’s truly most important right now—or, as we like to say, on “WIN”—which is short for “What’s Important Now.”

That’s the first part of our Soul Force Equation: (Energy x Focus x WIN). Then we bring in the final and, BY FAR, the most important variable: CONSISTENCY.

KNOW THIS: If you can only get yourself to get your Energy Focused on What’s Important Now once in a while, you will NEVER (!) actualize your potential.

But... If you can get yourself to show up CONSISTENTLY... You can tap into your infinite superpowers. Here’s the quick math to prove the point.

Let’s say your Energy/Focus/WIN/Consistency can be measured from 0 to 100. If you can get your Energy to 100 and your Focus to 100 and put that Focused Energy on What’s TRULY 100-level most important, you’d have (100 x 100 x 100) = 1,000,000 units of awesome.

Nice work. Now it’s time to bring in the EXPONENTIALIZING power of Consistency.

To use an extreme example to make the point: If your CONSISTENCY is a 0 and you can only get yourself to show up at your best once in a while or, insert whiney voice *when you feel like it,* your 1 million units of power, raised to 0, will be reduced to 1.

BUT... If you can CONSISTENTLY Focus your Energy on WIN, you know what happens when we take the 100 x 100 x 100 = 1 million units of power and RAISE IT TO THE POWER OF 100?

I can still remember the morning I typed this into the Google calculator.

(100 x 100 x 100) = 1 million. 1 million raised to the power of 100 = INFINITY.

THAT is how to activate your Soul Force and tap into your INFINITE superpowers.

Dominate the fundamentals to get your Energy to Heroic levels. Eliminate distractions and learn to Focus that Energy like a laser beam on What’s Important Now. Then do that CONSISTENTLY. And YOU, my dear friend, will be the Heroic radiant exemplar we so desperately need you to be.

How do we do that? Discipline. It’s our destiny.

P.S. Cultivating this Heroic Soul Force superpower was, essentially the WHOLE point of ancient Chinese philosophy as well. See Trying Not to Try for the ancient wisdom/modern neuroscience take on the subject. And don’t forget to check out Jocko Willink’s Discipline Equals Freedom.

P.P.S. We talk about the power of aggregating and compounding tiny wins (via discipline!) in this +1 on Atomic Habits: Tiny = Mighty. And, of course, check out Habits 101, Willpower 101, Objective V on Mastering Yourself in the Mastery Series and Basic Training for more.

That’s from the chapter called “Sweat the Small Stuff.”

It comes right after the one we just chatted about. I smiled when I read it. Then I turned around and looked at my wall of heroes. I have a Heroic portrait of John Wooden as a young coach staring at me all day, every day. He’s right below Confucius and Epictetus—the two other philosophers who remind me to live with DISCIPLINE.

His Soul Force—which, I repeat, he activated via CONSISTENCY!—is palpable.

As you know if you’ve been following along, Wooden is one of my favorite teachers. This story about him teaching his players how to put on their socks is one of all-time favorite go-to lessons.

Want to win championships? Fantastic. John Wooden says: You’re not allowed to even TOUCH a basketball until you learn how to put on your socks. PERIOD.

Does the idea of having simple checklists and dominating the basic fundamentals bore you? PERFECT. Dominate them anyway. :)

Speaking of checklists, if you haven’t read the Notes on Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto, I think you’ll enjoy them.

Gawande tells us: “The fear people have about the idea of adherence to protocol is rigidity. They imagine mindless automatons, heads down in a checklist, incapable of looking out their windshield and coping with the real world in front of them. But what you find, when a checklist is well made, is exactly the opposite. The checklist gets the dumb stuff out of the way, the routines your brain shouldn’t have to occupy itself with ... and lets it rise above to focus on the hard stuff.”

And, of course: The Big 3 Target Practice protocol in the Heroic app is basically a checklist for high fiving your inner daimon so you can activate your Soul Force by moving from Theory to Practice to Mastery TODAY. Whether you use the Heroic app or another “checklist,” what are the key behavioral targets YOU hit when you’re at your best?

Here’s to putting on our socks as we dominate the tiny things so we’re ready for the big ones. Remember: Consistency is the exponentializer. Discipline is destiny.

P.S. Check out our Notes on Wooden and Be Quick But Don’t Hurry for more Wooden wisdom.

That’s from a chapter in Part II called “Can You Get Back Up?”

I just turned around and looked at my wall of heroes again. This time I soaked in the Soul Force of another one of my heroes: Viktor Frankl.

Of course, we have our Notes on Man’s Search for Meaning. And, more recently, we’ve shared his wisdom and his story in our Notes on William Damon’s great book on creating a meaningful, coherent narrative in our lives called A Round of Golf with My Father. We will chat about him in our Notes on Hero on a Mission in which we discussed the fact that Frankl lost not only his mother and father and beloved wife, Nelly, but their unborn child when he endured the horrors of the Holocaust.

Whenever I am feeling the pain of the challenges I face on our Heroic quest, I look at my wall of heroes and remember the pain THEY felt. And the self-discipline they cultivated to move THROUGH the pain.

As I typed that, I thought of Mister Rogers—another hero of mine who we consider to be an infallibly positive human being. Yes. And...

As we discuss in this +1 on Mister Rogers’ Creative Neighborhood, he struggled, too. So much that he once typed this note to himself: “Am I kidding myself that I’m able to write a script again? Am I really just whistling Dixie? I wonder. If I don’t get down to it I’ll never really know. Why can’t I trust myself? Really that’s what it’s all about… that and not wanting to go through the agony of creation. AFTER ALL THESE YEARS IT’S JUST AS BAD AS EVER. I wonder if every creative artist goes through the tortures of the damned trying to create.?. Oh, well, the hour cometh and now IS when I’ve got to do it. GET TO IT, FRED. GET TO IT… But don’t let anybody ever tell anybody else that it was easy. It wasn’t.”

As I was looking for that quote (which I framed, btw), I found THIS Note from Eleanor Roosevelt (yet another hero on my wall) who said this in You Learn by Living: “The encouraging thing is that every time you meet a situation, though you may think at the time it is an impossibility and you go through the tortures of the damned, once you have met it and lived through it you find that forever after you are freer than you were before. If you can live through that you can live through anything. You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.

You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ The danger lies in refusing to face the fear, in not daring to come to grips with it. If you fail anywhere along the line it will take away your confidence. You must make yourself succeed every time. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

How do we do the thing we think we cannot do? Discipline. It is, I repeat, our destiny.

Perseverance. What the ancients called karteria. Once we discipline our minds and our bodies, we are ready to discipline our souls and, as per the name of this chapter in Part III: “Endure the Unendurable.”

We talked about perseverance in our Notes on Admiral McRaven’s The Hero Code. Both he and Ryan talk about both George Washington and Martin Luther King Jr. as exemplars of the virtue.

Here’s how McRaven puts it: “George Washington was defeated on the battlefield more times than he won. Abraham Lincoln lost eight elections before he won the presidency. Thomas Edison failed ten thousand times before inventing the lightbulb. Henry Ford had two failed companies before he found success. J. K. Rowling was destitute before she got the first Harry Potter book published, and Oprah Winfrey had an extremely difficult childhood before finding her way. Martin Luther King once famously said, ‘If you can’t fly, run. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl. But by all means, keep moving.’”

Just one more step forward. That is how we discipline our souls and endure the unendurable.

Those are words from the final chapter.

They echo wisdom from Musonius Rufus we chat about in this +1 on Theory vs. Practice.

At the end of the day, as we discuss all the time, we need to move beyond Theory to PRACTICE. Then we need to show up with consistency as we strive to attain Mastery.

May we have the Wisdom to know the ultimate game we are playing. The Self-Mastery to play that game well today. The Courage to be willing to act in the presence of fear. And the Love to do it all for something bigger than ourselves.

Courage is calling. Discipline is destiny. Let’s go, Hero!