Discipline VERSUS Freedom

The word discipline is by itself polarizing. It draws some people to it like a bug to a bug light and at the same time drives others away as if even the thought of discipline is repulsive. Even more intriguing is the popular value placed on discipline as THE KEY to success. But is it that simple? Discipline = Success? Does the path to success really need to be as extreme as people like Jocko Willink and David Goggins proclaim?

In his book Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual, Jocko Willink states unequivocally that discipline is the only way.

   “How do you become stronger, smarter, faster, healthier? How do you become better? How do you achieve true freedom? There is only one way. THE WAY OF DISCIPLINE”. - Jocko Willink

For most of my life I was philosophically aligned with Jocko’s claim. I was personally sold out on the value of discipline and focused on continually strengthening my resolve to live a “disciplined life”. I didn’t join the elite US Navy Seals as Jocko did, but long before he penned his proclamation on discipline I was waking early for 5am workouts, reading and journaling daily and structuring my workday to extract the most productive use of my time. Early in life I learned as a high school wrestler how discipline in sports is indeed an absolute differentiator, especially in individual sports where your own preparation determines whether you win or lose. There are no slacking teammates to blame. I recall one opponent I wrestled, a state ranked competitor, who pinned me on our first encounter. I wasn’t anywhere near a state champion athlete, but I lost only a couple matches per year and I was only pinned once. After that bout of being on my back hearing the referee slap the mat with enthusiasm something snapped within me. My amygdala, the area in our brains that triggers “fight or flight” response , went hyperactively to FIGHT! I made a vow to NEVER be humiliated like that again. ! And how did that vow manifest in my life? Discipline. I enslaved myself in a rigorous self training and conditioning agenda, running bleachers after practice, drilling with a jump rope for hours, and treating every partner in practice sessions as a championship bout. You get the picture. Speaking of pictures, if you’ve never seen a wrestling referee “slap the mat” declaring a pin, click on the word "humiliating" for an illustration of the subtlety of that gesture. Humiliating. 

Later that same season, I beat the guy who pinned me. I mention this not to boast but to share an important lesson I learned. That one successful high school match (rematch) created a physiological cord throughout my body (mentally, physically, emotionally) to form a personal doctrine that discipline equals results. Manifest affirmation of a universal human axiom? Not for me to declare. What I do know is that the resulting quest for discipline in everything put me in my own personal prison. I became enslaved to a rigidity for decades that eventually began to limit me in life and discipline appeared to be leading me far from freedom.

“Discipline calls for strength and fortitude and WILL. It won’t accept weakness. It won’t tolerate a breakdown in will. Discipline can seem like your worst enemy. But in reality it is your best friend. It will take care of you like nothing else can. And it will put you on the path to strength and health and intelligence and happiness. And most important, discipline will put you on the path to FREEDOM.” - Jocko

Why was discipline not freeing me? No doubt, I was getting results both personally and professionally from being a “disciplined person”, but it felt far from freeing. What was I missing? 

I’ve grown ultra skeptical about anyone claiming absolutes, only because my life experience has proven most, maybe all popular axioms to be directionally correct but surely not worthy of maxim status. Jocko’s proclamation of “discipline is the only way” appealed to the “get after it” in me, but also triggered skepticism. The formula discipline = freedom didn’t solve for me.

Enter the missing link, selected discipline. Gary Keller in his book The One Thing seems to directly contradict Jocko’s formula for success.

“You don’t need to be a disciplined person to be successful. In fact, you can become successful with less discipline than you think, for one simple reason: success is about doing the right thing, not about doing everything right.” - Gary Keller

And now Keller too is boldly using the “F-Word”...

“When you do the right thing, it can liberate you (free you) from having to monitor everything.” Keller (parenthesis mine).

Keller here claims doing the right thing is the freedom catalyst. He does not glorify discipline, but he doesn’t completely expel it’s value either. In fact, he offers something very insightful and helpful.

“The trick to success is to choose the right habit and bring just enough discipline to establish it. That’s it. That’s all the discipline you need. As this habit becomes part of your life, you’ll start looking like a disciplined person, but you won’t be one. What you will be is someone who has something regularly working for you because you regularly worked on it. You’ll be a person who used selected discipline to build a powerful habit.” - Gary Keller, The One Thing

Selected discipline. Urgh. I don’t have to radicalize discipline in my life? ?????♂? After 40 years of “getting after it”, now you tell me there was a more balanced approach with the same high probability of success? Consider Keller’s point on discipline more closely. 

“Don’t be a disciplined person. Be a person of powerful habits and use selected discipline to develop them.

Build one habit at a time. Success is sequential, not simultaneous. No one actually has the discipline to acquire more than one powerful new habit at a time. Super-successful people aren’t superhuman at all; they’ve just used selected discipline to develop a few significant habits. One at a time. Over time.”

That rings axiomatic now too. Prioritize your finite time on this planet and focus it on only what’s important. Who can argue with this as “directional truth”? And a step further, to develop habits for those chosen life priorities also makes sense when we understand what a habit is and that it can be intentionally developed. It doesn’t even take too long do accomplish a new habit. Research has proven that on average, we can develop one new habit every 3 months or 4 new habits a year. That’s pretty darn impactful if you think of a habit as an investment getting compound interest, the initial “investment” doing the work down the road with no additional effort on our part. And we can make several of those habit investments a year.

What do we do with this apparent polarization on how to view discipline in life? Do we just form two camps? The Discipline in All Things Camp and the Selected Discipline Camp? Is this a “Tastes Great/Less Filling” dichotomy? Do we have to choose the one that best suits our nature or preference, like choosing Republican or Democrat? Actually, it appears to me an inherent compromise exists within these two doctrines, a merging of the two philosophies for balanced application in life, provided you’ve already chosen to seek “success”. These are the 3 points I consider the merging of the Jocko and Keller doctrines:

1. A foundation of self discipline seems non-negotiable, but it’s not everything. Every worthy achievement in our lives will require us to draw on discipline. At the heart of self discipline is will power and our will needs to be exercised to be strengthened, same as with physical strength. We will need this reservoir of will power and discipline to achieve anything worthy in life. To Jocko’s doctrine, foundational discipline would seem indirectly...discipline in everything. But if we view discipline as excerise for the will, maybe we don’t need to “live in the gym” get it’s benefits.
2. Prioritization is the game changer. This is Keller’s “selected discipline”. Why would anyone marginalize or trivialize this point? To leverage the most value and satisfaction from our finite lives, we want to choose wisely what we spend our time on and surely don’t want to default our way through life, allowing “fate” to have the wheel. Even if you declare yourself as a “take life as it comes” person, you are in a way prioritizing... to do or deal with the next thing that lands in your path. To Keller’s doctrine, we don’t need extreme radicalized discipline in everything, but choose deliberately and wisely how you spend your finite time on earth.
3. Using habits as building blocks for success leverages the best of discipline and prioritization. Keller’s insight makes good sense and he’s personally proven it out in his own life. Breaking old habits or creating new habits is far from easy and the absolute need for discipline in the process is intuitive and unarguable. Merging Jocko and Keller schools of thought, choosing via prioritization with enough discipline to build new essential life habits would seem to have a high return for the precious and finite time we have to invest.

All this of course presumes everyone on the planet wants to be “successful”. But do they (we)? Personally, I don’t believe everyone wants to be wholly invested in “being successful” in the Western cultural definition of success. Many people simply want to just live. They cherish relationships over task achievements and are content and grateful for what they have now. They aren’t burdened by the weight of relentless, self-imposed personal success agenda. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s contrary to the media themes we are flooded with daily. This clip from Mark Manson’s bestseller hits this point dead center:

“There’s no way we can process the tidal waves of information flowing past us constantly. Therefore, the only zeroes and ones that break through and catch our attention are the truly exceptional pieces of information—those in the 99.999th percentile. All day, every day, we are flooded with the truly extraordinary. The best of the best. The worst of the worst. The greatest physical feats. The funniest jokes. The most upsetting news. The scariest threats. Nonstop. Our lives today are filled with information from the extremes of the bell curve of human experience, because in the media business that’s what gets eyeballs, and eyeballs bring dollars. That’s the bottom line. Yet the vast majority of life resides in the humdrum middle. The vast majority of life is unextraordinary, indeed quite average. 

This flood of extreme information has conditioned us to believe that exceptionalism is the new normal. And because we’re all quite average most of the time, the deluge of exceptional information drives us to feel pretty damn insecure and desperate, because clearly we are somehow not good enough.” - Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

I chose the picture as cover for this article to highlight the point I’m making here in the closing. There is no One Way when it comes to life. There are 7.6 billion ways. We, every person alive today, are unique and distinct individuals and have the right and hopefully the freedom to cut our own creative path through our brief existence in world history. There’s nothing wrong with learning from others how to sharpen ourselves to live a better life, but those others don’t define us. The world’s success dominated media stream may be dominating the headlines, but it doesn’t need to dominate our lives and recolor what we believe to be truly important. Treasure your individuality and tread cautiously before selling out and tattooing yourself with one person’s axiomatic doctrine. Discipline may equal freedom for some, but individuality - free to be me - is more universal and valuable to us all.

“You will have a growing appreciation for life’s basic experiences: the pleasures of simple friendship, creating something, helping a person in need, reading a good book, laughing with someone you care about. Sounds boring, doesn’t it? That’s because these things are ordinary. But maybe they’re ordinary for a reason: because they are what actually matters.” - Mark Manson