Discipline = Practice – Knowledge/Theory

Have you ever spoken to someone who just learned something new that they were excited to share with you ? Then when you were done asking them about everything cool about it, you got that disclaimer : Oh, I haven’t done it myself yet, but it’s totally cool, I hear. Don’t you feel disappointed in a way, or just less inclined to investigate for yourself ?

I think this is because we know that Practice > Theory (at least in theory). Someone who comes out of med school may *know* about an operation -do you want to be that person’s first operand (pun intended) ? It may be hard to quantify what the delta is between the two – maybe gaps existed in the book knowledge, or maybe it’s just the likeliness of error of execution goes down with practice. Either way, the delta exists. And I name that delta ‘discipline’.

Really, the way I mean to put this – is that it is through discipline that knowledge of theory gets turned into a skill that can be counted on – a skill backed by practice, or successive attempts of application of that theory. And, conversely, a person lacking discipline may have a backlog of knowledge they’ve yet to apply (though I’m not claiming that is either a sufficient or necessary condition).

Discipline is what is taught when you have to do homework. You read the math chapter (or only refer back to it if you find you can’t do the problems, as I did), then you do a ton of exercises. What these do, aside from drilling the mechanical actions of ‘carrying the 1′, is show you a way for you to absorb the material deeply, how to have practiced addition, as opposed to being able to recite the rules for practicing addition (a skill very valuable for teachers, but truly independent of being able to practice addition with any ease)

Discipline, not innate ability, or even motivation in my opinion is what differentiates everyday superstars from everyday John Does. Motivation without discipline goes in circles, doesn’t finish what it starts. Innate ability is an only guessed-at quantity not nearly even approximated by IQ, and so no reliable or agreed upon measurement can quantify it, nor has any existing test of ‘aptitude’ correlated exceedingly well to say, informal polls of coworkers as to ‘Who is the most awesome?’.

Discipline can breed motivation. Success motivates harder attempts. It rarely works the other way around – the point when you feel least motivated to do something is the time when discipline is most likely to be the determinant between action and inaction. And without action there is no practice.

I hate to oversimplify, but ponder what role discipline is serving for you in your life, and send me your thoughts. My thesis is that by focusing on your discipline for one week, you will have good things to report to me at the end of that week.