“I’m so undisciplined,” said one of the most disciplined people I’ve ever known in a recent conversation. And he’s not the only one. The majority of the high-performing people that I know (myself included) have all felt at one time or another that their greatest problem was a lack of discipline. Is this really the case?
If you’re like me, you’ve spent a lot of time trying to hack your emotions in order to figure out how to pour in more discipline. And if you’re like me, you’ve found that a quest for discipline is typically more of a wild-goose-chase than a holy pilgrimage.
I once had a recurring dream that I was standing before my own tombstone. In the dream I was horrified to read the inscription:
Here lies Benjamin Israel Robinson: A man filled with greatness, yet who lacked the discipline ever to become great
Did that just give you chills? Every time I think about that image, I get chills. Every man or woman who is cognizant of an internal drive for greatness must wrestle with the fear of that greatness being cut short by lack of discipline.
But I’d like to make a suggestion that might sound ridiculous to you at first, but if you’ll hear me out, I believe there’s some truth here.
Discipline is overrated.
I don’t mean that discipline is unimportant. I simply mean that discipline is not all-important.
This is because discipline never transpires in a vacuum. Discipline cannot exist on it’s own; it is always a consequence of something else. Seeking that something else is far more important than seeking discipline because if you get a hold of that something else, you have apprehended discipline. On the other hand, once you have apprehended that something else, you’ll find that that something else makes discipline superfluous.
Follow me.
Love = that something else. Love is our primary motivator (or at least it should be). Discipline is necessary at the moment at which we are detached from love. Discipline is the process by which we push past obstacles that oppose our love. Once we have pushed past those obstacles, we no longer need discipline because we are motivated purely by love.
Let me give you an example.
Let’s say you are a runner, and you love to run. When you are not running, your love for running typically compels you to run. You wake up in the morning thinking about running, and you go to sleep at night thinking about running.
But in the course of running, you invariably experience exhaustion. While you love running you do not love exhaustion, and so the experience of exhaustion threatens to separate you from your love for running. This is the place at which discipline is necessary.
Discipline is the process by which you take authority over your mind and body, commanding the to do what they do not want to do, in order to fulfill a purpose that has been mandated by love.
If you are a marathon runner, you love running, you love competing, you love winning, you love improving . . . but you do not love exhaustion, you do not love soreness, you do not love blisters, you do not love pain. The components of your love are the ethos of your enterprise. The components of your pain are the pathos of your enterprise. When you experience the pathos, you push through it because you believe that if you do, you’ll come back into the ethos.
When you hit mile 25 of your marathon, everything in you wants to quit, but you don’t. Why? Because of the joy that is set before you . . . the joy of finishing the race and winning the prize.
Discipline without love is bondage. So many of us feel like we should be more disciplined, but we don’t know what we should be disciplining ourselves for. Where’s the love on the other side of it?
Discipline without love is obligation. Do you always feel like you should be doing something productive, but you can’t figure out what it is? Are you afraid that you are wasting your time?
Stop trying to reconnect yourself with discipline and start focusing on reconnecting yourself with what you love!
The love of Christ compels us, said the apostle Paul. The love of Christ, not the obligation of my calling.
Do we need discipline? Yes. Always in this life. Why? Because things are always trying to separate us from love. But discipline is only necessary in the place at which we are disconnected from love.
This is why love makes discipline superfluous. Love is stronger than discipline. Discipline is not unimportant, but neither is it all-important.
And in the end, when we see him face to face, when we are as he is, and the old order of things has fully passed away, we will no longer need discipline at all, because nothing will ever again separate us from the unbridled experiential awareness of his love.
