Motivation Vs Discipline

Don’t ask how you feel. Ask after.

“He who conquers others is strong. He who conquers himself is mighty.”

~ Tao, 33

First i trust everyone is safe. Second i was thinking about something while i was trying to convince myself not to go work out. Which is the basis for this blog.

Motivation is a drug. It feels great, it wears off, and you need more of it to feel the same thing next time. There is a billion-dollar industry of people selling it to you in 90-second clips with orchestral music underneath. Somebody yelling at you at 5 a.m. about grinding. You watch it, you feel the rush, you go back to bed.

That’s not a character flaw. That’s the wiring.

Here is what nobody tells you, Dear Reader. The thing inside you that wants to quit is not your enemy. It’s you. The real you. The factory default. Every animal on this planet is built to conserve energy, avoid pain, and stay warm. Left alone, you will choose the couch every single time, and you will have an excellent reason for it.

So you start negotiating.

“Instinct knows nothing of shame.”

~ #TCTRules

i’ll do it Tomorrow. After my tea, my triple moca caramel latte. My shoulder’s tweaked. i earned hit the snooze. It’s cold. Nobody will know.

You will lose that negotiation. Every time. Not sometimes. Every single time. Because the one sitting across the table from you has read every argument you’ve ever made. It knows exactly which lie you’ll buy. Moreover, it was there for every promise you broke to yourself, and it kept the receipts.

As a result, you cannot win a negotiation with yourself. Therefore, the only move is to not show up to the table.

Indeed, that’s discipline. Not some heroic surge of will. Just refusing to take the meeting.

The iron never lies.

Many people who know me know i have said this: “The iron never lies.” i wish she would lie so much to me.

Three hundred and fifteen pounds is three hundred and fifteen pounds. It weighed that yesterday. It will weigh that tomorrow. It doesn’t care about your title, your comp, your org chart, your followers, or the story you tell at dinner about how strong you “usta’ be”. It doesn’t care that you’re tired or that the meeting ran long or the drop off line at school was backed up a mile or you have homework.

Sitting on the floor, it waits, and it either goes up or doesn’t.

There is no spin in a barbell. No narrative. No stakeholder alignment. You can’t PowerPoint or doom scroll your way through a deadlift.

That’s why i at this point in my life i am extremely pro individual sport and activity. It is the truest mirror there is. No teammate to carry the fourth quarter. No referee to blame. No coach to fire. In a team sport, you can hide in the system for years, just like a massive corporation.

On a platform, on the ice, on a breath-hold,on a wave, or a golf swing, or martial arts, there is nowhere to hide. The scoreboard is you, and it’s honest in a way people almost never are to others and especially to themselves.

And the iron does not care about motivation. Motivation doesn’t add a single pound. What adds pounds is showing up on the days you’d rather set yourself on fire than get under the bar, and doing the sets anyway, and doing them again three days later. Years of that. Boring, repetitive, unphotographed years. That’s the only program that has ever worked.

The clock goes off at 4:45 a.m.

My daughters skate at an extremely high competitive level. If you want to see discipline with the skin peeled off, come watch them before the sun comes up.

The alarm goes off at 4:45. Every day. Not when there’s a competition. Every day. It’s dark. It’s cold before you even get to the cold. The rink smells like Zamboni exhaust and rubber mats, and there are a handful of skaters and a coach or two out there under half the dim fluorescent lights, and none of them feel like being there. Nobody feels like being there at 4:45. They are there anyway.

Then they step onto the ice, and the ice is the most honest surface on earth. Then the transition happens.

There are no pads. No helmet. No mat. They go up, rotate in the air, and if one edge is off by a couple degrees, they come down on a sheet of frozen concrete with nothing between them and it but an Athleta or Lululemon outfit and a hip bone.

Sound carries in an empty rink. You can hear a bad fall from the parking lot. i have sat in those butt freezing bleachers and heard it more times than i can count. And then they get up. And do it again. And fall again. Hundreds of times for one jump. Thousands before it’s clean. Blood blisters in the boots. Bruises stacked on bruises in colors that don’t have names yet. Hands and shins sliced open. Its called #knifeshoelife.

Then school. Then homework. Then back on the ice. Then off-ice training. Then bed early, because 4:45 comes around again whether anyone is ready or not.

It is relentless. It never ends. There’s no offseason for an edge. Take two weeks off and the ice tells you about it immediately.

And what does the world see? Four minutes. A pretty sequined dress. More Swarovski® crystals under the lights. A smile. Music. Maybe a medal. Everyone in the stands says she makes it look so easy.

Yes. That’s the point. That’s what ten thousand falls look like when they finally stop showing.

I have been in rooms with some of the most driven people in technology, sports, and even the military special forces.

My daughters are tougher than all of them.

The sea of screaming fans.

Music is the same lie with a bigger audience.

You see the stadium. The lights. Fifty thousand people screaming the words back. The guitarist who plays something so fast and so clean you’d swear it was a gift from God handed down at birth.

It wasn’t. Most of the great guitarists (and muscisians) i have have met put themsevles through ten hour guitar workouts. Ten hours. In a room. Alone. Scales, chromatic runs, legato, the same four bars a thousand times with a metronome that doesn’t care how you feel. The players who rise to the very top are putting in eight to ten hours a day, every day, for years, before anyone knows their name. Calluses on calluses. Wrists that ache. Missed parties, missed girlfriends, missed everything.

i spent enough time behind a console to know. The take you hear on the record might be the forty-seventh take. The “effortless” solo is the one they could finally play without thinking because they played it five thousand times while thinking.

The crowd sees ninety minutes. Nobody sees the ten thousand hours in a room with the door shut.

And here is the dirty secret: most people who say “talent” mean “i didn’t see the practice.” #TCTRules says most confuse charisma for genius. Most also confuse discipline for gift. It’s easier that way. If it’s a gift, you’re off the hook. If it’s discipline, the only thing between you and them is whether you get up at 4:45.

The water does not care who you are.

My personal church. The water doesn’t care who you are or who you think you are. That’s the part that gets people literally killed.

The ocean doesn’t know you’re a C-Level Executive or a doctor or a lawyer. It doesn’t know about the patents or the exits or the corner office. Paddle out into double overhead surf with a big ego and a small skill set and the ocean will explain the difference to you, personally, with a two wave hold down.

This is why i write the lowercase i, Dear Reader. In terms of the ocean and the universe, we are nothing. That isn’t humility as a pose. That’s extreme physics.

My niece is a competitive diver. She goes into the water from above. i go into it from the surface and below the surface.

Same water. Same indifference.

The women’s platform is 10 meters up. 33 feet There’s no board to spring from, just a ledge and the wind and the long look down.

By the time she reaches the surface she’s moving around 35 miles an hour, and at that speed water stops being water (water molecules cannot displace fast enough). It’s a concrete wall, just like her cousins who make contact with the ice. Enter a few degrees off and it doesn’t matter how brave you were on the way down. The surface will grade you, instantly, and the grade goes straight into your spine, your knees, your ribs.

Three seconds in the air. That’s all the crowd sees. A body falling clean, feet first, barely a splash. They clap and look at the next one.

What they don’t see is the years. The thousands of entries from lower heights, working up a meter at a time. The dryland training. The core work. The body you have to build just so the water doesn’t break it. And the part nobody talks about: the fear. Every single time. You don’t train the fear out. You train yourself to step off with it.

The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. You do the thing then get the courage after you have entered the cave and done the thing.

~Joseph Cambell

That is discipline in its purest form. Standing on a ledge several stories up while every ancient circuit in your brain says do not do this, and doing it anyway, because you decided on the ground that you would.

Freediving teaches the same thing from the other side.

Somewhere down there the contractions start. Your diaphragm starts slamming like someone is kicking a door in. Every cell in your body is screaming go up, go up now, you are dying.

You aren’t. Not yet. That’s CO₂ talking, not oxygen. It’s an alarm, not a fact. It’s the native self opening negotiations at depth. Yet in freediving slow is fast. Going fast burns oxygen. The ultimate mental discipline.

Motivation will get you in the water. It will not get you through the contractions. It will not get you off the ledge. Nothing does that except the decision you made before any of it started, that you were not going to listen.

And here is the other half of it, the half the hype videos leave out: discipline also means knowing your real number, not the one your ego wants.

The water will let you believe whatever you want about yourself right up until it doesn’t.

The iron keeps you honest on land.

The ice keeps you honest at 4:45.

The platform keeps you honest at ten meters.

The ocean keeps you honest at depth.

None of them care about your opinion of yourself. You decide before. Then you stop voting.

Coders already know this. A while loop checks first. If you don’t feel like it, the body never runs. A do loop runs first and asks questions later. It always executes at least once.

Motivated people are running while loops and wondering why nothing happens. Then order their triple caramel mocha and cinnamon bun.

Now the part that doesn’t go on a coffee mug.

Discipline has no morals. It’s a blade. It cuts whatever you point it at. i pointed mine at the work for thirty years and it was magnificent. The code shipped. The patents granted. And that same blade cut through birthdays, and relationships, and phone calls i should have made. The discipline didn’t do that. i did. i picked the target.

So yes, there is only discipline. But be very careful where you aim it. It will give you exactly what you asked for and take everything you didn’t think to protect.

Get over that bar. Get on the ice at 4:45. Step off the ledge. Get in the water.

Don’t ask how you feel. Ask after.

EVERFORWARD. Stay Non-Linear. Stay Curious.

Until Then,

#iwishyouwater <- Kandui Memos Of Perfection. Aint nuthin to it.

🤘💜🌊

MUZAK TO BLOG BY: Mr Robot, Vol1 (Original Television Series Soundtrack) by Mac Quayle. i wish they would bring this show back. The most factually accurate technical show ever besides Silicon Valley.

NOTES:

BTW i researched this the numbers hold up: 10 meters is the women’s at the diving events, and a fall from there hits the water at roughly 30 to 35 mph. On The deceleration going from 35 mph to a relative halt inside the pool happens in a fraction of a second, generating an average deceleration force of 5g to 10g. This deceleration translates to an impact force equivalent to absorbing 3 to 5 times their own body weight. For a 130 lb diver, their hands and wrists must instantly withstand over 400 to 650 pounds of localized force to break open the surface.

For elite womens ice skaters during jump spins elite female skaters typically achieve an average of 4.2 to 4.9 rev/s in the air during triple jumps. In terms of Revolutions per minute (RPM): This equals approximately 250 to 300 RPM.
Radians per second: In physics terms (ω = 2π × rev/s), this is roughly 26 to 31 radians per second. Upon landing a triple jump, a skater’s body routinely absorbs an impact force of 5 to 8 times their body weight, with peak deceleration forces spiking up to 13g to 14g for a fraction of a second. For an elite female skater weighing around 120–130 lbs, a 5g to 8g landing translates to her single knee, ankle, and hip instantly absorbing 600 to over 1,000 pounds of force on a rigid steel blade.

For surfers a 12-foot (double overhead) wave behaves like a falling ceiling of water. If the lip lands directly on the surfer, the crushing force is immense. While a 33-foot wave lip can deliver 410 tons of force (the weight of 500 cars), a heavy 12-foot wave (especially a thick reef break like Hawaii’s Pipeline or Tahiti’s Teahupo’o) can dump a solid 1 to 2 tons of water pressure directly onto the human body in a fraction of a second. On free-falling 12 feet into the trough of a wave means hitting the water at roughly 18 to 22 mph. Because the water entry is completely uncontrolled, the sudden deceleration can spike brief, localized impact forces up to 5g to 10g, frequently causing blunt trauma, broken ribs, or concussions. Surfers routinely describe this as feeling like getting T-boned by a car or slammed onto hard-packed concrete. Then there is hitting the bottom not the water with all that.. Ask me i know.