Discipline

I used to think that just because I was in good shape, I was a pretty disciplined guy. I went to the gym, I ate decently, went easy on the vices and all that good stuff.

A few years later, I realize... not so much. It's really a matter of degrees, and I was lucky enough that the lowest degree of discipline met the requisite minimum for my goals. The sad truth of it is that my body is probably just genetically predisposed to respond well to resistance training and etc, the same way some of you can grow full Amish beards and porn 'staches.

My goals and motivations changed over the years, from wanting to run 10ks, bench as much as possible to looking good naked, but I never once really felt super committed and driven towards them. I'm not saying that I didn't work at them, or that things were effortless for me; I was just lucky. In a way this was kind of a startling realization for me, because I had tied my concept of discipline, drive and commitment in with those achievements for a long time. Do I know how to truly buckle down and conquer something when I'm presented with challenges? Do I actually have it in me to achieve that which isn't in my immediate reach?

One of my clients is tiny, probably 5 foot 1 and 110 lbs, and the amount to which I push her is borderline excessive. But I do it because she's got the discipline to keep with the workout and not give up so she's seeing great results accordingly. Yes, there are contextual social roles at play here, and yes people that get trainers are probably self-selected to have more discipline... But coming to a session and really bringing it to a session are two entirely different things.

Anyway, I tend to use the analogy of video games when I think about traits like that. Everyone has a certain amount of "trait points" that they can assign to themselves, and they can either max out some certain traits or spread them around in alarming mediocrity. So for me, this has no doubt come at the cost of my sense of direction (zero points), allergy resistance (zero points) and resistance to awkwardness (one point).