The Road to Discipline, Chapter 9

The Aftermath of Your Dreams

Mark Brown

June 14, 2022

Finding discipline causes a lot of changes in one’s life. Some are anticipated and others aren’t. How one reacts to those changes has an impact on the discipline that has been acquired and the people whom it effects. Decisions and actions have consequences and not all of them will fall in one’s favor. This is the aftermath of finding discipline. Discipline takes every bit as much as it gives, if not more, from someone. It helps illuminate what is important at the expense of other things that are just as important. Relationships can be damaged beyond repair, one’s own personality can change to meet the discipline needed to achieve their goals, time disappears before anyone knows it and so many other consequences come from finding discipline. Finding discipline is the key to attaining one’s dream. That has a cost.

This particular phrase is perfect for describing the cost of one’s goals. I first heard it from the original Berserk anime series from the last episode. One of the main characters sacrifices his band of mercenaries to demons to transcend humanity. The phrase has stuck with me for 15-20 years because it’s just that damned good. Talking about the cost of the goals one seeks is a difficult one to have out loud because it can cause some real internal emotional conflict. People don’t tend to like to believe they are dicks or are selfish in any scenario. When the things that need to be done to get to the place they wanted, people leave that stuff unsaid because it can be safely ignored until it can’t be. Perhaps it will never get brought up. The steps to take to achieve the goals are easier to take more confidently in such cases. The desire not to be seen in a negative light stops a lot of people from attaining the goal they seek privately. It’s what turns people who want to be masters of their domain into jacks of all trades. Mastery isn’t about becoming well rounded.

The costs of dreams I am talking about doesn’t just apply one’s own inner soul. The way they effect other people or animals, in some cases, is just important to understand. It’s very easy to finally achieve one’s goal after years of going after it only to find there’s no one around who really gives a damn about them or it, regardless of how helpful it might be. How one treats people along the way towards the goal goes a long way to how it lands on those around when it is finally achieved. Will the people effected respect the goal and the hustle it took to get it done? That is what really matters. One can find respect without the adoration. Sometimes it has to be invented in people’s heads for that to be the case. I’ve mentioned them at least a couple times on this Road but that’s exactly what Michael Jordan and Tom Brady have done to get the stature they have in the NBA and NFL, respectively.

One of the biggest costs that goals have is time. It is a force that never stops moving in one direction and it impacts everyone. It should give everyone a sense of purpose to get what they want done in theory. We know that this isn’t the case. This isn’t just because some goals are so far in the future that they don’t really have a date to be done by. For some, the goal of merely surviving is the first one that needs to be completed then others can follow once survival has been mostly assured. Some goals require a lot of time investment doing tasks that require spending a lot of time away from home or being constantly on call while there. For those with families, one has to hope that the quality of time together outweighs the quantity of it. Relationships strain and break when it doesn’t. For single people, the cost of going after a goal job opportunity may be staying single or leaving a circle of friends behind. Even when a family goes all in together on a venture, personal or business, overexposure is a constant danger. That’s when details one wanted to stay hidden find the light. The demands goals and social responsibilities put on us are often at each other’s throats. That is because…

Dreams actively compete with other dreams on a daily basis. The only ones that win are the dreams that show intense discipline and get favorable bounces along the way. These two sentences aren’t groundbreaking by any stretch of the imagination on paper. It becomes different when those dreams come with people attached to them. Reality is that one could be called upon to end another person’s dream by achieving theirs. This can be traumatic for people who are less competitive or more empathetic. Yes, there are opportunities for multiple people to achieve the same kind of goal but there’s only room at the top of the mountain for maybe a couple of people. Most goals have windows of opportunity to actually happen. Years of planning, personal willing and other people’s unwilling sacrifice and effort all for 1 or 2 chances at it. That can be a heavy weight on the soul to bear.

Some of the costs of dreams is much more straight forward. Goals are things that are written down on a piece of paper and locked away or on sticky notes and put on the fridge. Discipline is the every day work put to make it happen. This can result in everyday becoming the same, more or less. I have watched my life become “sleep, work, lift, eat, repeat” over the last 2 years. It wasn’t much more exciting than that before 2020 so not that much has changed. The pandemic didn’t change much of anything for me, actually. If anything it was “game time” comparatively speaking to 2016-19’s “practice.” What I have noticed since I transitioned to a highly structured lifting schedule is that the act of planning is much more instinctive. There’s always elements that bring slight changes but spontaneity just doesn’t have any room in my life. If asked, I could give someone the daily schedule of the next 2 years of my life. I couldn’t care less about my personal level of enjoyment I get from it because it’s just what needs to be done. That turning personal enjoyment into something less than that is just part of doing business with the goal of greater strength or fitness. I don’t want to put discipline in a negative light but it is what it is. One never, ever gets more out of the goal than they put in. Discipline demands one’s soul be 1000% in it, and eats whomever isn’t.

Discipline creates an environment that that openly promotes loneliness. One of the things I have heard about a lot of individual sports is that they are lonely experiences. I’ve heard tennis, golf, swimming, weightlifting, and soccer are all described that way by parents, both famous and not famous, and athletes. If one’s goal is to be a high level athlete in a sport, then days and nights spent doing the the lonely grunt work is the only realistic cost. This is true for players in team sports, too. All members of the team must work individually to be as strong a link in the chain as they can be. That’s hours of shooting the basketball, reps at the plate, running wind sprints, etc. I haven’t even talked about the sleep and nutritional side of it yet, either. It’s all one big sacrifice for the team or the goal, in the case of the individual athlete. One of the best things discipline instills in someone is that desire to at least be a leader of themselves. I’ve heard this concept also called a “self starter.” If they can make it to that point, maybe someone else start to follow the lead and it takes off from there. I’ve talked to too many people who stopped going to the gym because other buddies dropped out for one reason or another. They just didn’t have it in them to go the gym alone. To take this part of the discussion out of the athletic arena, small business owners know they have to be there when no one is coming into the business for there to be any chance of success down the road. That’s time spent away from family and friends that could be used to enjoy the present. Future success is built on the decisions and discipline one shows in the present. This has always been true and will always be with one exception: The lottery.

That’s why it’s important to help brace against the harsh realities of discipline. It’s nigh impossible to achieve anything without help from other people. When dreams compete with each other, some win and some lose. There is a lot of value in both positions. The loser doesn’t always stay in that position. They figure out why they lost and come back more knowledgeable. That is an attractive potential asset for the winning dream. Not everyone’s personality is built to become a vocal leader. When people with similar dreams combine their efforts and their disciplines match, that’s a dangerous combination for other’s with the same dream. This doesn’t mean they are in lock step with each other. It means they bring the best in each other out. This is why finding a good training partner is important for progress in fitness. It’s why people who are amazing at their craft find people who are amazing at managing the businesses’ money. Former NFL player, 4 time Super Bowl champion and Fox broadcaster Matt Millen said on the episode of A Football Life about him that he was surprised at how little on-field football he was actually involved with day-to-day after becoming the General Manager of the Detroit Lions and President of Ford Field, the stadium the Lions play at. That put literally everyone who works for the Lions but William Ford, the owner of the team, under him. I would never suggest he was amazing at this, because the Lions earned the first 0-16 season in the season he got fired and was pretty terrible before that. His surprise at how much of the on field sport he did on a daily basis resonates with me because it shows that one has to both feet on one side of the door to have the chance to be successful. There are always exceptions, of course.

The long term aftermath of one’s dreams on themselves is multiple. I’ve already hit one of the ways it does so. Discipline can turn enjoyment and happiness into relief or worse without prior notice. I’ve heard players on multiple time NBA championship teams say winning felt more relieving than anything else The day-to-day nature of discipline helps one become numb to all of the elements that turn actions done that day into something they didn’t start out as. That can lead to questions like “There’s got to be more than this to what we do, right?” or “That’s why we do this?” Those questions are part of the paradox that is discipline. It demands that we ask those questions, but also understands that they are potentially damaging to it. The cost of one’s dream is that the emotional investment is total. Once something starts to compete with that investment, discipline starts to crack. Whether it is repaired or allowed to keep cracking is up to the individual. Total emotional investment is dangerous to both discipline and dream because when something unexpected hits them, whatever hits them has the force of a Mack truck. It’s pretty damned easy to become Humpty Dumpty. If someone can say something to the effect of “That’s just the cost of doing this,” that is a sign their discipline is super strong or someone is putting up a brave front.

The effort one puts into their dreams on a day-to-day basis makes the dream becoming a reality feel like an achievement. Succeeding in the goal’s completion gives them the feeling of validation that the effort was all worth it. This circle is how success breeds more success and goals become bigger in scope. Dreams cost more in every way possible with up-scaling movement. Understanding and reconciling that one’s decisions and actions have an aftermath with themselves is a step towards proper discipline.