Ordinary Greatness: How Discipline Builds Us

Good morning!

I’ve decided to make the 15th and the 30th/31st my post deadlines, and as the rest of my weekend (Strongman Competition! Weigh ins! Steak! Early bedtime! The Glamour of it all!) promises to be exciting and hectic, I’m posting this now. Thank you to everyone who read the earlier drafts and gave me notes.

This topic hardly applies to just Millenials, that is just the particular lens I’m looking through at the moment. Enjoy!

Ordinary Greatness: How Discipline Builds Us

I hear a lot of people my age defiantly proclaiming their mediocrity, their worthlessness, and their worst qualities. “I don’t have any complex relationships or endeavors that demand anything more of me than showing up and getting drunk! Fuck you if you don’t like it!” This young person has very little personal discipline. Maybe they have some lofty ambitions, but ultimately their day-to-day existence is a wreck. I suspect there are a lot of reasons for this. Lack of spiritual direction, unclear principles, and the general confusion that has been heaped on my generation by well meaning parents and a mainstream culture that idolizes celebrity over actual achievement. We want to anesthetize ourselves to our lack of impressiveness and our burdens. We’re not the future Senators and Nobel winners our proud parents told us we could be and in fact, we’re struggling, so we’re incredibly let down by ourselves and have collectively spiraled into apathy, self-indulgence, and general insufferableness. We seem to have conflated being ordinary with being useless let-downs.  How do we get our heads out of our asses? First we must realize that personal Greatness is one of the keys to fulfillment, and that the path to that Greatness may be much simpler than we imagined.

I am not attempting to pile onto the “Millennials are lazy” diatribe. I am a Millennial, and I take neither pride nor injury in saying so. It’s just when I was born. And what I grew up with was a mainstream way of thinking that values fame, profit, and materialism as the highest markers of success.  So we’ve come to conflate our lack of Big Deal-ness  to mean failure, and this could not be less true. That is a trap of the ego and is a destructive force.  We forget that greatness is achieved by hard work, that hard work is often boring, and that greatness can be unrecognized. Personal Greatness can be simple, and it comes from personal development.  So if being acclaimed is a goal, that’s fine, but finding the greatness in your own life first, without outside validation, is a process of discipline and discovery that will ultimately lead to more personal joy and fulfillment than striking rich or famous in your field/world overnight.

Ordinary can be incredible, and we need to redefine what “greatness” means if we want to save ourselves. We want to be the Best in our fields, but we can’t even be the best at doing dishes. We want to be the best at Big Things, but we often can’t even master small ones. What business do I have wanting to be a GREAT Strongwoman/Writer/Trainer/Performer etc if I can’t even be great at doing dishes, or writing a tiny bit every day or managing my schedule? How can I say I have so much to offer the world when I can’t muster a smile for the person selling me my morning coffee, or hold the door for someone, or ask my roommate how their day was? And these require mostly minimal  effort, I’m not even talking about the type of personal charity that really demands time and energy.

Excellence in small things leads to excellence in all things. Many societies throughout recorded history have recognized this principle – that in order to do well in life, you must put all of your attention in EVERYTHING you do, not just the things that strike your fancy. This concept seems lost in America, with the few exceptions of perhaps some serving in our military and anyone who watched Karate Kid and took it really seriously. Think of any martial arts movie you’ve ever seen. There’s always the impatient student who wants to be a Badass right NOW, and there is the wise teacher who teaches that student that first they must conquer themselves through seemingly mundane tasks. They must conquer themselves through discipline.

Manage your expectations of yourself and put your attention where it matters – sometimes the ordinary road IS the road to excellence. You want to get in shape? Get stronger? Get promoted? Get ahead in general?  That’s awesome. And the work is deceptively simple, it is hard because it is CONSISTENCY in a world full of distractions. If discipline were easy, everyone would be Great.  What are the actual steps for achieving your goals? Examine those steps. Think about what it would take to reach them. Do you have the discipline to get to the gym as much as you need to? To write every day? Maybe you don’t, not yet. So how can you cultivate that discipline? There are many ways, and it’s important to start small. Make a decision to do one thing every-day (that isn’t something you already do, like brush your teeth). Decide to make it as essential as brushing your teeth. Do it for a month. Even if it’s really boring. When that month is over, you will feel accomplished. You will feel proud of yourself. Perhaps you continue that task. Or pick a new one. Have your friends hold you accountable.  Cultivating discipline takes time, it takes effort, and remember, you are literally training your brain to be able to see things through. This is a skill.

I mentioned Personal Greatness before. That means more than just accomplishing your goals. It means creating value in yourself, and thus value in the things you do – this creates a positive ripple effect in the world.  What brings joy, peace, and prosperity? PERSONAL greatness. And this is ultimately where I believe our focus should be. Are you greatly kind? Are you greatly compassionate? Are you greatly wise? Are you greatly analytical? These are the qualities that are gifts to cultivate in a scary chaotic world. But this scary chaotic world is equally beautiful and overwhelmingly prosperous in the right hands. It seems that a lot of the time the world is in the hands of violent, uncaring, capricious, greedy people. So how do we take it back for ourselves? By blacking out drunk? Or by committing to cultivating personal values and habits that contribute to both a better personal whole as well as communal whole?

Developing Personal Greatness doesn’t have to mean unsubscribing from Netflix, cancelling all your brunch plans, or giving all your money away to charity. It doesn’t mean your life completely changes overnight. It starts much smaller than that, and that is perhaps what makes personal greatness so difficult. You won’t get a bunch of pats on the back or hearts or “Likes” or re-blogs. There is no guaranteed reward in anything but the doing. And ultimately, your own regard and belief in yourself has to be enough. You will hold yourself captive waiting for something outside of you to give you meaning and validation. We’re all going to die, and when I die I want to say I lived my life well. I lived it with joy, compassion, enthusiasm, discipline, and with Greatness.

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Cara