Monthly Archives: February 2017

Self-Discipline

Every dream, goal and plan comes down to being self-disciplined enough to get through the rough parts and the ability to stay committed until completion.

Self-discipline is our unique ability to control our urges, wants, desires and our emotions in order to reach our goals. It is a mindset that must be built upon so that we make the right choices daily to guide our lives in the direction that is best. It means we must give up small momentary pleasure in order to gain lasting happiness.

I was thinking about where I learned self-discipline. One place I am sure I learned it was when I was at Army and Navy Academy in Carlsbad, California. The morning wake-up bugle call reveille would sound at 6:15am. Your bed had to be made, you had to dress with shined shoes, brass for inspection. I used to get up at 5:30am so I could shower with plenty of hot water and take my time.

I was never in a rush to get ready and out to the quad for formation. There really is something special about being awake while the world around you slumbers. I committed to waking up early at a young age, and it has followed me through my whole life.

When I lived in New York I used to walk two miles every morning at 5am, then get two newspapers and a coffee before I came home. This would set the pace for my day. I felt like it let me get in front of the day before others were awake. I also feel like I have been able to get more finished in my life with this “extra” time.

People always talk about how they do not have any extra time. Why not find that time before the day starts?

Many people feel that being self-disciplined will mean that they will have to give up much of what they feel is good about their lives. There is no doubt that when shifting towards a more disciplined lifestyle your life will change. It does not have to be bad or painful. Examine your life and decide what is important to you. If eating and drinking whatever you wish with no limits is what is important then look at the inevitable outcome. You get to live with obesity, heart disease, and a host of other ailments. How about staying up late to surf the internet or binge watch your favorite show? You must accept being tired at work or school the next day, and not performing well.

What if instead, you choose to eat food that is filled full of nutritional value. Drink more water, keeping yourself hydrated. How would those choices harm you? Eating healthy foods does not mean a diet, it just means choosing the right tasty things to fuel your body. How about choosing to read a chapter of a book each night before bed and get to sleep at a reasonable hour?

Everyone has heard the phrase, “You just have to do it.” It is much easier said than done for the average person with years of bad habits ingrained in their life.

So start small with something that you can do very easily. If you need extra time in your day, how about waking up an hour earlier? If you would like to lose weight, how about starting with a walk every morning before breakfast without fail.

If you make a commitment and stick with it, no matter what, it will translate into other areas of your life. That means you must throw out all the excuses of the past… the “I’m too tired,” “I have no time,” “My alarm did not go off,” or “I’m not feeling well.”

Once you make a habit of the first small change for a month, it’s time to commit to another small change. After a few months of these small victories under your belt, you can clearly see the changes that have come from your new found self-discipline.

This is something that you cannot buy. There is no magic pill. You have to be committed and work on it a little bit every day. Think about this for a minute: why does the diet and self-help industry bring in billions a year? They know that people do not want to put in the hard work necessary for lasting change. A lot of people are looking for the easy way because we all hope there is a way.

The bottom line is that every journey begins with that first step and then continuing to step even when you don’t feel like it.

You must decide what it is you want in the long term. Once you have the goal in mind it will help you push aside the many distractions that will inevitably arise. You may feel discomfort along the way, but knowing that is part of the process makes it bearable. It is time to make decisions that benefit you for the long term. Surround yourself with other people who are self-disciplined and cheer each other on.

Hebrews 12:11

For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.

Proverbs 5:21-23

21 For your ways are in full view of the Lord, and he examines all your paths. 22 The evil deeds of the wicked ensnare them; the cords of their sins hold them fast. 23 For lack of discipline they will die, led astray by their own great folly.

Fear

Failure

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There is no escape, no way to hide. It will find all of us at one point or another during our lifetimes. It has been said that a book of failures would be a great book to read, so that we could learn from other’s mistakes.

Have you ever noticed that there are never any “failure seminars”? There are plenty of speakers on the topic of success. You can catch a motivational seminar online or in a conference room in a hotel most any weekend.

I have failed at so many things I could not even list them all here. The good news is, I took a valuable lesson away from each one. One of the best thing about pushing yourself hard and ultimately hitting your goals, is that our minds tend to gloss over the periods of heartbreak and failure, focusing instead on our successes.

One day I decided to take up a new hobby: prospecting for gold in the mountains and deserts of California. I really did not know much about it at all, but when my wife and dog and I hiked in the mountains we had seen several people panning for gold in the streams and it got me interested. I started reading everything I could about gold prospecting and the history of the gold bearing regions in California.

The next weekend, instead of heading off on our usual hike, we packed our lunch, a few shovels, and some tools we had picked up for gold panning. We headed to the East Fork of the San Gabriel River. We parked our car and hiked a mile or so up a path along the river. We found a giant boulder and I started digging out buckets of dirt and passing them to my wife who would pan it out in the water. We dug for hours and found nothing, not a trace of that elusive gold. We did have a great time! Our dog fished in the river, we enjoyed the sunshine, cool water, amazing scenery and our hike.

We went back to that river many times. Each time we dug deep holes and found nothing but black sand and tiny gold flakes in our pan. One day, an older prospector came by our hole to chat. He told me where I should dig based on his experience. Later that day we found a small “picker,” which is what you call a tiny gold nugget that is big enough to pick up with your fingers.

We were doing almost exactly what the 49ers did during the gold rush. Instead of iron pans, we used plastic pans, and unlike them, we were not trying to make a living from it.

It turns out that most of the gold is still there, undiscovered. The early miners took the easy gold that they could find near the surface. It is back breaking labor with little payoff to keep digging and looking for the deeper gold. I enjoyed it because it was a challenge and a treasure hunt.

We graduated from panning to setting up a sluice in the water. The next stage was learning how to metal detect in the Mojave desert – which meant getting out there in the early hours before the temperatures rose. Hunting for gold nuggets in the desert with a metal detector is called “nugget shooting.” We joined the Prospector’s Club of Southern California, which gave us access to claims all over the region. Then I graduated to operating a dry washer in the desert.

I learned to love the peace and quiet of the dry, desolate Mojave desert. We started finding “color” almost every time we went out.

I wanted to find a good sized nugget with my metal detector before I left California, but it was not to be. On my last attempt before moving, a solo trip early in the morning, I saw some fellow prospectors find a gold nugget just a few yards away from where I was looking. I guess you could say I failed because I never found that fist-sized nugget I was seeking. Instead, I would say that I gained some useful knowledge and made some great memories.

Prospecting mirrors so much of what we do in life. Each one of us is seeking some kind of treasure. There’s no guarantee you will find that big nugget. Successes and failures: they all come with valuable lessons. I look back on the hours I spent digging dirt holes and wandering the desert not as a failure, but as some of my favorite memories.

My friend Mark and I spoke about the topic of failure this past week. After a successful high school and college wrestling career at Oklahoma State, where he was a two time All-American, Mark began his mixed martial arts career with the WEC (World Extreme Cagefighting). He did well enough to be picked up by the UFC when they bought the WEC.

When I first met Mark, I noticed that he carried himself differently than most of the guys I knew, and he was open about being a Christian. Mark was not pushy with his faith, but he was setting an example by the way he lived and he was always ready to lend a hand to anyone who needed one.

I trained with Mark for his first fight in the UFC, which he lost. It was a bad loss, but he was back to training within a week. Mark Munoz went on to have a long UFC career and while he never won the belt, he always left the ring a winner. He was voted as “the nicest guy in MMA” by the UFC. I learned from Mark that in MMA, a loss does not equal failure. When you keep fighting, improving and moving forward, you are succeeding, regardless of what the outcome of any one fight may be.

Mark told me that if you have a fear of failure you will fall backward. If you embrace it, you will take away a valuable lesson. We all fail. We have to learn from it and keep moving forward.

Resilience, Adversity, and Desire: A real champion in life, whether you are fighting in a cage, prospecting for gold, or trying to get a promotion in your job, is the person that shows resilience even when they fail. Adversity is something to use to make us better, not break us down. We will all face it, but how we view it and push past it will define us. Desire is what will make you get up each day with determination: study harder, work harder, train harder.

Mark also reminded me that what we speak about every day is what we become, so choose your words wisely.

Romans 5:3-5

More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

Proverbs 24:16

For the righteous falls seven times and rises again, but the wicked stumble in times of calamity.

Luke 6:45

A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.

What Drives you?

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Recently, when I was taking inventory of my life, I realized that there were several activities that I have always had a passion for in life. The first I wrote about last week: my love for martial arts. Another passion is books. I love all kinds of books, on a broad spectrum of subjects. In the old days, when there were bookstores all over Los Angeles, I would go inside a used bookstore or a chain bookstore and spend hours looking through the shelves, discovering new subjects and new authors.

There is no way to replace the lost environment of a good bookstore. Sure, Amazon will still sell you just about any book. The problem is, you have to know the title or the author ahead of time. Publishers pay for advertising on Amazon, and so you are in their algorithms viewing the books they want you to buy. When I used to frequent book stores I enjoyed the fact that many of the employees were avid readers and they would recommend their favorite authors or set aside books for me. I could browse the aisles and subject matters until I saw a book spine or a title that caught my eye. I would find wonderful obscure books that might lead me to others. I was never big on following the New York Times Bestseller list.

I would find an author I enjoyed and then I would read everything they put out. I’d be sad if it turned out that they had been dead for twenty years and would not put out any new books. I would research their lives, read their interviews, etc. I wanted to find out where they got their ideas from, find out what helped them put words to paper.

Today, researching an author is much easier. Thanks to Youtube I can see many authors speak on many subjects. In all of the available interviews and talks, I found a few things that all authors seemed to have in common. They are passionate story tellers, most never attended special writing programs. They never gave up, they did not listen to the doubters around them.

I wanted to be a writer. The problem I faced was that even after all of my research, I still had no idea what it took to write a book. I never paid much attention to writing or grammar in school.

To begin, I found books on writing and started reading them. This didn’t get me fired up to write. So I tried another approach. I started seeking out authors. Many told me to emulate the writers whose style I liked. I was also told I had to put in the time it would take to learn to write. This is where most people would give up, because the task seems daunting. I had no college education and no background in writing, but what I did have was the desire to write.

I started by writing a blog, which was a relatively new thing at the time. It was bad: lots of typos and technical errors. Yet my content was finding an audience and it became popular. I had a tremendous amount of traffic. I had just as much negative feedback on my blog as I had positive feedback, and I would respond to it all. The blog served two purposes for me: it got me noticed and it helped me gain experience writing stories.

As a result of the blog, I was able to get an agent for my writing and a co-author who was willing to work with me and help me with the storytelling and the editing. Our agent sent the finished manuscript out to over fifty publishers. They all rejected it, most answering with, “Whoever heard of a Japanese mob guy?” It finally found a home by accident, a young woman who was running a publishing house and heard the story mentioned by a friend read the manuscript and wanted it.

Being a published author was an awesome experience. I quickly let go to my head. I started getting contacted by Hollywood producers and directors. Some took me out for meals, others just had me over to hang out. I sold the book rights to Fox Studios and I was soon writing the screenplay with an Oscar winning screenwriter. Through that experience I learned that anything in Hollywood labeled “based on a true story” means that there is only a very vague resemblance to something real.

The end product was not something I was proud of. In fact, I was relieved when Fox passed on it two years later and it didn’t get made into a movie after all. I learned some valuable lessons, but I still wanted to be a screenwriter.

I decided to write something in a different genre. Another screenwriting partner and I wrote a story about a former Confederate Cavalry soldier named Clay Allison who became a successful cattleman in Texas. Clay Allison referred to himself as a “Shootist” because he was a known gunfighter.

We went to History Channel with the script and we sold the idea of the show. We then spent the next year working on it, until they decided to pass on actually taking it to the production stage.

I was pretty devastated at that point. I had been given two bites at the screenwriting apple and failed to have either make it to the screen. I kept thinking about it. Then one day it dawned on me. I had lost my passion for the story. I was writing for money, for the fame and success that would come with the money. I had compromised myself as a writer for the sake of the paycheck. I knew that I needed to return to my passion for writing stories that would connect with the reader, inspire them, the way I had been inspired by so many important authors in my life.

That is the point that I decided to move away from Hollywood. I still pursue writing, but not for the same reasons. If you keep at something and work hard at it, learning the attributes you need to succeed at that endeavor, you will be successful. God will provide opportunities to open up where you never thought they existed. It is easy to quit, to give up when you realize you have hit a dead end in one part of your journey. It is important to keep learning and moving forward after a defeat. Keep in mind that after your worst defeat many times your greatest victory is just ahead.

Matthew 6:21

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Galatians 6:9

Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.

Motivation, Inspiration and Change

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