In their podcast on leadership titled 5 Leadership Questions Barnabas Piper and Todd Adkins interviewed leaders across the spectrum of life and asked them five different questions listeners would find helpful. One of those questions was usually: What would you tell your twenty year old self? Being that I will be turning 60 in June, the Lord willing, I have been asking myself that question often. This week I’m going to address three responses to the question. Here’s the first and most important: I would tell my twenty year old self to take discipline seriously daily.
Taking discipline seriously daily includes making discipline a central reality in one’s daily life. I have always taken discipline seriously, at least since I started playing organized sports. In order to become good at anything requires discipline. While dictionary definitions of discipline include punishment, instruction, a field of study, training that corrects, molds, or perfects the mental faculties or moral character, control gained by enforcing behavior or order, self-control and more, a simple and helpful definition of discipline as I’m using it here is any practice, repeated consistently, which brings mastery in an area of life. I learned discipline in organized sports because I wanted to be able to catch a fly ball, make a foul shot, carry a football without fumbling and so on. I practiced the same action over and over and over again in each sport so it would become “natural.” Isn’t that an interesting idea: practicing something that is unnatural at first so that over time it becomes natural?
In leadership discipline is essential. So many thoughts, actions and habits of a leader start out being unnatural, but must become natural if a leader is to become great. For example, every leader must learn to care more about the mission or vision of the organization than about people’s opinions. This is not natural, particularly if we happen to be extroverts who want to have lots of friends. Yet, if we don’t learn to be guided by the mission of the organization, if we don’t discipline ourselves to that end, we will find ourselves drifting away from what is necessary to what is popular.
The key point I would make to my twenty year old self is discipline isn’t a habit to be picked up when it’s comfortable, or when there’s time, or if it fits into the newest season of my life with ease. Discipline must be practiced daily. I have never had trouble with discipline in any area of my life for a moment, or a week, or even for weeks. I have always taken discipline seriously, because I have recognized without discipline I will never make the unnatural natural in my life. Where I have fallen down over and over again when it comes to discipline is the daily aspect. All too often my pattern has been to achieve “mastery” in an area of life and then to assume that because it has become natural discipline is no longer necessary or at the very least I can slack off on my discipline in this area.
If we go back to the sports analogy, I mastered catching a baseball quite early. By the time I was eight years old, I could go to the practice of my brother, Tom’s team–he was fourteen years older than I and played on an adult team– go to the outfield and shag fly balls during batting practice with extreme skill for an eight year old. While many of Tom’s teammates would at first shout, “Get that little kid off the field.” Within a few minutes they would see that not only would I not get hurt by getting hit by a batted ball, I would catch anything that was hit near me. I was quite good for my age.
Quite good for my age. That’s a dangerous place to be for any of us, especially if we’re leaders. We can rely on our natural abilities, or our developed abilities instead of continuing to discipline ourselves and continuing to grow in our abilities. I was so good at the age of eight, I decided I was going to be the left fielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates when I was an adult. It was a lofty aspiration. I don’t know whether it was something that could ever have become a reality. I do know this: I didn’t take discipline seriously daily in a way that would have given me the best opportunity to find out. While I would play baseball “often” during the summer months, I didn’t practice daily. I liked water skiing, and swimming, and exploring in the forest behind my house, and you get the idea. Every day was an adventure and every day was fun growing up in the little town of Gipsy, PA, but every day was not disciplined.
If you’re thinking, “Of course every day was not disciplined,” you’re missing the point: In order to excel over time in any area of life, we must discipline ourselves daily. I found out at the age of seventeen I couldn’t hit a ninety mile per hour fastball, and my hopes of playing left field for the Pirates were dashed. I didn’t go to a batting cage and practice daily to see whether I had the skill to hit a ninety mile per hour fastball over time. I faced one pitcher who threw the ball ninety miles per hour, failed miserably, and assumed there must be other ways to fulfill my dreams. That assumption has proven correct, but time and time again, I have failed to exercise the daily discipline that would have seen me become more effective in whatever area expertise I chose.
What area is your chosen area of expertise? As a leader what are the disciplines you must have in order to make unnatural aspects of your life natural, and equally as important to make the areas where you have always been a natural or have practiced to the point that something has become natural better? There was once a commercial emphasis the importance of diligent practice, and I have forgotten the originator of the commercial but the point has stay with me. The commercial showed an NFL receiver practicing a single pattern over and over again. At the end the narrator said, “The difference between an amateur and a professional is the amateur practices until he gets it right. The professional practices until he can’t get it wrong. That’s taken discipline seriously daily.
When you and I will do that in the key areas of our leadership, our leadership will be as effective as it can be. Then we keep practicing an it gets better! I would tell my twenty year old self to determine what is essential in my life and to practice those essentials daily, to tailor my schedule to those matters, to put them in the schedule first so the non-essentials couldn’t take up so much time. I’m not crying over spilled milk. I’m reminding myself that with whatever time I have left, and it could be much time or little, the practice of taking discipline seriously daily will allow me to continue to become a more effective leader. I’m also encouraging those of you who are in your twenties, thirties and beyond to take discipline seriously daily now, because as you do, you will become the best leader you can be over time. Your leadership will grow more and more effective. Your value will increase to yourself, to others around you and to your organization. It’s a simple matter, so simple, but not so easy to do.
Here’s to leading better by taking discipline seriously daily–starting today!