Discipline

“…I’ve never known a man worth his salt who, in the long run, deep down in his heart, didn’t appreciate the grind, the discipline.”

Those were the spoken words of Vince Lombardi. Discipline can mean different things to different people. To the famous football coach and leader Lombardi, it meant hard work and sacrifice. Hard work isn’t just the number of hours invested or the blisters and bruises incurred. Hard work is discipline, the kind of focused effort that develops self-control. Discipline is born of hard work and it helps you make hard decisions. It helps you embrace the pain associated with change. It helps you stay on track in the face of stress, pressure and fear.

Discipline is also sacrifice, giving up one thing for the sake of another. Achievement involves choices and choices mean sacrifice. Despite what today’s advertisement’s tell us, you can’t have it all. If you decide to get to work an hour earlier to get your paperwork done before the phone starts ringing, you must either sacrifice and hour of sleep, or go to bed an hour earlier (even if that means skipping your favorite late-night TV program).

Study the great performers in any field; music, theater, sports – and you will find they all possess an enormous degree of discipline, a sense of duty. They have learned self-control and they exercise it.

“Once you have established the goals you want and the price you’re willing to pay, you can ignore the minor hurts, the opponent’s pressure and the temporary failures.”
~ Vince Lombardi

All too often our culture celebrates success without any sweat. Our media tend to focus on people who achieve their goals in a seemingly effortless way – the “overnight success.” There are no overnight successes! All of those people we celebrate for their effortless success have actually put a lot of hard work and sacrifice into preparing for their moment of victory. Yes, they may make it look easy, they may even talk in a way that makes their achievement sound inevitable. But if you look and listen carefully, you will see, just below the surface, lies hard work and sacrifice.

I’ve read a lot on Coach Lombardi in my life. A consistent theme for him was “paying the price.” He felt that achievement required habits of commitment, mental toughness, passion, hard work and the willingness to make sacrifices. It stings and it hurts when you fall short of your goal. Sometimes you just want to crawl into a corner and lick your wounds. You don’t want to think about work this weekend; and you certainly don’t want to call on prospects, or go that Monday morning meeting with your V.P. or your manager. That’s the price you pay (hard work and sacrifice) to get into the arena!

Winning is not everything – but making the effort to win is. On my wall in my office is an excerpt from a famous Vince Lombardi speech, and it says, “A man can be as great as he wants to be. If you believe in yourself and have the courage, the determination, the dedication, the competitive drive, and if you are willing to sacrifice the little things in life and pay the price for the things that are worthwhile, it can be done.”

Have a safe and wonderful 4th of July and please remember those whose sacrifices made, continue to give us our freedom to even practice having discipline in our lives. Relax on this holiday weekend and don’t take anything in your life for granted!