The Road to Discipline: Chapter 10

Becoming a Prisoner of Success

Mark Brown

June 21, 2022

No single feeling is more intoxicating than success. There’s so many emotions running through someone in that moment. Happiness, of course, is the at the top of the list. Physiologically speaking, we know that is our body is giving us a huge shot of Dopamine. This feeling is nice in the moment but is also a cause for concern because we can get the same rush from outside sources that are ruthlessly terrible for us on every conceivable level. So, while completing the goal should always be the driving force to our everyday habits, there is value in minimizing the feeling success gives us. This isn’t to say major goals shouldn’t be celebrated, but the eyes should always into the future beyond the moment of success. That’s what keeps discipline in tact when success keeps piling on itself in front of us. However, there is something lost by becoming a prisoner of success. Keeping in mind the scope of how decisions made in the present effect the future helps us avoid becoming prisoners of success.

I remember my first and only eagle in my 15 years of golfing very well. It happened on hole 10 at Grand View Golf Course in Des Moines a couple years ago. The hole is a par 4 and the green is very reachable off the tee shot. I can still see the ball rolling in. I don’t even need to close my eyes. My golfing buddies from work and I started on hole 10 that day. I hit my first swing of the day onto the green 15 feet from the pin and made the putt. Bam! Just like that. I even got as birdie 2 holes later but 6 holes in I was still 2 over. Then the round went to shit. Those first 3 holes though. Damn. I’ve never even remotely come close to doing that since. It took me 12 years to get a par on the hole after I made a birdie. Success in golf for us people who don’t golf every weekend is so fleeting. I learned golf is a sport that requires me to be emotionally dead inside a long time ago, but that first eagle, man. That’s the kind of success I am talking about that needs to be put in the rear view mirror almost immediately. The seeds of the failure for that round were embedded in how I felt in the minutes after the ball went in the hole. I knew full well that it was hole 1 out of 18 and I have had some astounding “the train is off the rails” rounds of golf in my day. There’s nothing surprising about either the eagle or the round falling apart pretty soon after it.

Success is required by anyone with aspirations for a number of different reasons. The first is that it tells the person with aspirations that they are on the right track to more and bigger success beyond what they just achieved. In essence, it helps boost someone’s positive mindset. Second, a lack of it for an extended amount of time, which is situation dependent, means something needs to be changed to help better the chances of it or the time has come to move on entirely from the stated goal. Third, incremental successes buy time for someone to build up the resources to really make a push when the opportunity is presented. This why discipline is way more important than motivation will ever be. Without the day-to-day planning and discipline, the opportunity passes by without anyone realizing until afterwards. Failures lead to success because they emphasize learning the negative consequences side of failing. One can learn from the same things from success as they did from failure. The lesson doesn’t sink as well because that’s the difference between “actually feeling” the consequences and “could have felt” the consequences. This where becoming a prisoner of success can really start.

Linear progression is a term given to improvement that doesn’t dip or flatten. Ever. Or at least an extended amount of time. It is an absolute pipe dream for anyone who wants to chase this. It’s one of the signs many knowledgeable’ people I know use when wondering if people are using performance enhancing drugs or not. In a true linear progression, there’s no room for even a modest plateau in it. Any lifter who is fully natural gets stuck at some point in their lifting life. This happens because people who are natural don’t have the recovery capabilities of people on PEDs, illegal or legal and banned or unbanned. They are all PEDs to me. Right now, my 1RM on both deadlift and bench press is kind of stuck. The latter stupefies me more than the former. I understand why that’s happened. I’m not obsessed with getting the linear progression back in line because I know what I would do in order to get it at this point. However, there’s a lot of reasons why chasing a linear progression is tempting. I’m not just talking about lifting at this point. Anyone wanting to take a passion and turn it into a business is going to feel this temptation.

Attaining the linear progression can take many forms. One could do this by pushing their chips into the middle of the table every hand, to borrow a World Series of Poker analogy. This is an insanely risky strategy, of course. To throw every resource one has at a goal is both reckless and possibly necessary, dependent on the nature of it. If the goal is literal physical survival, then continue by all means. If less so, one might consider a less risky plan. One could could go the opposite route, start so low or conservative that by the time they are ready to compete, the window of opportunity has passed. Being risk averse can be every bit as damaging to success as throwing everything at the goal. Yes, one could say that they never failed along the way but the end is where the ultimate failure awaits. Both of these paths are ways where one becomes a prisoner of success. Learning to embrace failure along the way allows someone to figure out in the moment when they need to risk more or risk less, and what kind of resources they need to make them. Embracing failure breaks the mental hold success can have on someone.

Resisting the societal programming of pushing only successes is a necessary cog to one’s best growth potential. It also allows someone to be more truthful when they have a message to send. That in turn leads to the message becoming more meaningful over both the short and long terms. Putting success ahead of the truth, or at least the appearance of it, is the source of drama in the fitness social media sphere. Natty or Not Youtube videos are a popular genre of content for many mainstream content creators. The crux of the videos is to determine if a person is telling the truth about being “natural.” A few creators that influence me have dozens of them in their library. Greg Doucette has said he uses them to talk about finer points within the argument and help viewers manage self-expectations. Others are out to catch people in a lie. The important part to me is that a lie, no matter how small, discredits any work that’s been done and damages the message given, no matter how truthful or pure it is. I can separate the message from the messenger, but others can’t so the statement holds water. The most effective argument I’ve heard in both the comments and videos when talking about the subjects of Natty or Nots is that the subjects of the video are using their physical appearance to sell a product, whatever that could be, and are doing so under a false pretense by not telling the truth about their natural status. It’s not that the public at large cares if they are or aren’t natural, it’s that they are being morally duplicitous.

This drama surrounding the viability of messages sent by social media influencers, actors and athletes about health illustrates how mixed up we are about the subject. The fact is that there are more PEDs around us than there ever have been. Someone reading this should check out the World Anti-Doping Agency’s, WADA for short, banned list and then see how many boxes in their medicine cabinet are on it. Then they should read up on how many more are potentially headed to the banned list. It’s a very long list. We are marketed PEDs on a daily basis, but because they don’t have “enough” of an effect to be thought of as PEDs they don’t get the kind of scrutiny legal supplements that mess with our hormones get. That includes energy drinks, pre-workout supplements, fat burners, supplements at-large, medicines, testosterone therapy treatments and new prescription drugs entering the marketplace. That makes the drama surrounding people who are the subjects of Natty or Nots both dumb and worth paying attention at the same time. That’s where this drama intersects with my topic in this essay. Societally, being “natural” holds more value in the public realm than being publicly on some form of banned or unbanned PED. We are not at a stage where PED use in general is okay as a society at-large. I don’t know when that will change. I think it’s really stupid that we don’t just accept most of the supplements and drugs out there as PEDs. If one has to lie to maintain their progression, linear or otherwise, then they are a prisoner of success. The lie limits one’s ability to travel multiple pathways to get success. One should strive to open as many pathways to success as possible, not shut them down. Social media influencers would be much better off realizing viewers and followers care more about the lie than the fact that someone is using PEDs sooner rather than later. Strongman, as a sport, is built on the shoulders of guys who have used PEDs as a part of their plan to get the size and strength they have. Know what Strongman fans don’t care about at all? That the sport is full of guys who wouldn’t pass a drug test. That’s part of why the sport is growing quickly at a grassroots level.

Now for something less big picture. What does becoming a prisoner of success look like in day-to-day life? Someone of high discipline tends to have a highly planned life because they need to figure out where everything fits in on a daily basis to keep getting better than they were they day before. With that kind of focus, it only follows they will have an eye on the future and build days, weeks, months, and years with that kind of approach. This is how one would actually achieve linear progression if they could. In this way, a prisoner of success also becomes a prisoner of the future. Future success always comes at the present’s expense. Thus, the battle of the present and the future is always raging. One can have an eye on success over the years, but living is done in the present. Building and maintaining relationships helps mold the present and the future, both for personal and business reasons. It is important to understand that doors may open a path of success that one didn’t know even existed. Becoming a prisoner of success can lead to doing unnecessary damage to relationships. It is those relationships that help someone become better in both the short and long term. The reason why Rome survived Hannibal’s assault from 218-201 b.c. was because of the relationships the people running the city-state made with other Italian city-states. Hannibal couldn’t get city-states like Naples to forego their agreement with Rome. As a result, any advantage he had on the battlefield was lost when Rome no longer gave battle. What worked for Rome works for everyday folks in every day situations, too. Note, I didn’t say “past” when talking about the present or future. The past is irrelevant until specific things in the past become relevant.

How about some more about the present? Many prominent professional athletes have talked about regretting they didn’t smell the roses while they were busy competing in their chosen sport. It’s just one of the many consequences of living a life where getting better everyday is ridiculously hard. So much focus has to be on being in the moment that they miss the scenery around them. A major part of why the roses don’t get smelled because success is the name of the game. Bill Parcell’s quip about “why they keep score” is brutally spot on. Sports, especially at the professional level, is a zero sum game. One either wins or loses. If one ties, they didn’t win. It’s that simple. I see you hockey, soccer and football people! There are two more parts to the regret. The first is that they realize they are in a wish fulfillment position. They get paid a ridiculous amount of money to play a sport. The reality is that the vast majority of fans never had the disciple required to get close to doing it but that feeling doesn’t ultimately matter. The second is that time spent on the game field, practice field and the locker room is time that can never be replaced with anything else. A locker room is a second family to these guys. A bond gets formed that lasts a lifetime, especially if winning happened. The downside of the emphasis on success is that the bond remains incomplete until the goal of winning is in the back seat. When success is driving the train, there’s not usually a lot of stops to get off it so one has to keep looking out the window to not miss anything Becoming a prisoner of success is pretty damned easy.

Success is easy to overdose on. Getting stuff done, constantly improving and moving forward all feel good in the moment. It helps validate our goals and the practices we have to get them completed. Success also helps us make decisions we regret. Lies to maintain progress and failure to build relationships in the present because we’re too busy looking to build the future are just two paths that can be blocked when we let success drive us a little too much. Remember, other people are busy sacrificing, hopefully willingly, so we can have our moment of success. Eyes should always toward the future but sacrificing everything about the present to get there is probably a bad tactic.