Importance Of Discipline In Life
I recently spoke to an audience at Florida State University, where my longtime friend Mike Martin is the head baseball coach. Mike has coached many Florida State University (FSU) players who have gone on to successful careers in Major League Baseball (MLB). We had some time to chat, so I asked Mike about one of his proteges, Buster Posey, who is a catcher and first baseman for the San Francisco Giants. "Mike," I said, "that young man has gotten off to a phenomenal start in his career. How do you account for that?"
"Simple," Mike said. "It's a matter of discipline. Of all the players who have passed through my program, I have never met one who had the intense self-discipline of Buster Posey."
Buster was drafted by the Giants fifth overall in the 2008 Major League Baseball Draft after his junior year at Florida State University. He was moved up from the Fresno Grizzlies AAA farm club on May 29, 2010. By July, Posey had become the team's everyday catcher and the best defensive player in the game. In the month of July, Posey batted a league-high .459, knocking seven homers and twenty-three RBIs. Posey's phenomenal performance prompted Jeft Fletcher of MLB Fanhouse to write, "Buster Posey has become a big bat much quicker than anyone could have reasonably expected."
In his first season in the majors, Posey became the sparkplug for the team and was a major factor in getting the Giants to the 2010 World Series against the Texas Rangers. He hit his first postseason home run in game four, and the Giants went on to win the World Series, four games to one. Buster Posey hit .305 for the season, with 18 homers and 67 RBIs, and was voted National League Rookie of the year.
The young phenom describes his philosophy of self-discipline this way: "I feel like if you're committed to do something, why not do it 100 percent? Let's say, for example, I'm playing ball but I decide to slack in school. I feel like that's going to carry over to baseball, that mentality. So I've always tried to put my nose down and just give everything I've got in whatever it is I'm doing."
At age fifteen, Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci conquered the world, winning three gold medals at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal. Four years later, she came back and won two more gold medals at the 1980 summer games in Moscow. Almost single-handedly, Comaneci popularized the sport of gymnastics throughout the world and was named one of the Athletes of the Century by the Laureus World Sports Academy in 2000. She is often asked the secret to her success – and her answer is disarmingly simple: self-discipline.
"If I work on a certain move constantly," she says, "then finally, it doesn't seem so risky to me. The idea is that the move stays dangerous and it looks dangerous to my foes, but not to me. Hard work has made it easy. That is my secret. That is why I win."
So discipline yourself to master your skill and your profession. Concentrate on making the most challenging thing you do look effortless. Whenever you see a gymnast, an athlete, a musician, or an actor perform an amazing feat of skill, remember that you are not just seeing talent at work. You are witnessing the result of countless hours of practicing and rehearsing until the well-nigh impossible seems utterly simple. Self-discipline, good habits, and hard work will take you to your dreams.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul – better known as novelist V. S. Naipaul – is one of the most successful writers in the world. He is a British Trinidadian of East Indian descent and the author of such works as A Bend in the River, The Enigma of Arrival, and In a Free State. He was knighted in 1990 for his literary accomplishments. In 2001, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature; and in 2008, The Times of London ranked him seventh on its list of "The 50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945."
Both V. S. Naipaul and his father, journalist Seepersad Naipaul, had dreams of writing novels. But the father never published a single novel and died before his son achieved international acclaim for his work. Seepersad gave his son a lot of good advice for becoming a successful writer, urging him to be a voracious reader, to develop his own style, and to carry a notebook to jot down his ideas and impressions.
Yet it was the son who attained the success that always eluded the father. V. S. Naipaul possessed one great strength that his father lacked: self-discipline. The younger Naipaul often arose before dawn and wrote in the early hours of the morning. For him, writing was a daily regimen, an unbreakable habit. His father, however, procrastinated and made excuses for not writing, seeming to fear rejection and failure more than he desired acceptance and success.
Father and son exchanged letters, and in those letters V.S. Naipaul urged his father to develop habits of self-discipline. "Your experience is wide and if you write merely one page a day, you will shortly find that you have a novel on your hands … You have enough material for a hundred stories. For heaven's sake start writing them … Stop making excuses. Once you start writing you will find ideas flooding upon you." Excellent advice – but the older man either couldn't or wouldn't take it.
Seepersad Naipaul wrote a number of short stories and subntitted them to magazines. When the stories came back with rejection notes, Seepersad became despondent and stopped writing for weeks. His son, V. S. Naipaul, also wrote short stories, submitted them, and received many rejections – but he refused to accept an editor's rejection as an excuse to stop writing. Instead, he saw each rejection as motivation to increase his self-discipline and work all the harder. As he wrote in a letter to his sister, "My story about Rosie was rejected, just one of a number of rejections.
Still this is my apprenticeship, and one expects rejections."
What a stark contrast! Here are two writers, not only from the same culture, but from the same family. Seepersad Naipaul was a professional journalist, so he clearly knew how to write. What was the one difference that separated the wannabe novelist father from his Nobel laureate son? Self-discipline. Self-discipline is the stuff dreams are made of. To learn more, you can check out Importance Of Discipline In Life.
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