16 Mar Discipline: Speaks for itself

This post must begin with all credit and major props and respect to the one and only Jock Willink for his book Extreme Ownership and the many that have followed along with his podcast.  My path to Jocko, Extreme Ownership and came via my W2 role but the concepts certainly followed me home.  If you find yourself reading this post you are either a Jocko fan and somehow google sent you my direction, or more than likely you are a personal finance fan and you want or need discipline or more discipline in your decision making and life.  The thing about discipline is I’m not very good at it, it is something I have to work really hard at for a while until I’ve created a habit and then I just need a teensy bit of discipline to stay on the path toward whatever specific thing I’m working toward.  Take this blog and and website for example, this is my 32^nd post I’ve written in under 30 days of blogging, and since I wrote this in binge format to have a years worth of content at the moment I have a total of 55,899 words in the document across 32 weeks of content, and some other data that would be associated with home pages.  I’m not sure if that’s good or not, I know I could do more, but I decided to do this, got disciplined and focused to write at least 20 minutes a day and as much as I enjoyed to on weekends. Discipline works, we’re going to explore it some more.

If you aren’t familiar with Jocko Willink, just google the guy and he’s everywhere.  The dude has made some waves in the world since he and his Seal Platoon Brotha’ Leif Babin released their book, Extreme Ownership.  There are no gimmicks, no B.S., just tried and true principles that apply to combat, work, and personal life.  Recognizing that discipline over motivation is the path to success was a really powerful concept for me. Discipline does not care if you want to eat well as you planned, want to sit down and write for 20 minutes or want to put on your shoes and go for a run.  Discipline says “go”, “do it”, “c’mon get goin we don’t have a choice”.  Conceptualizing it in an overly simplified manner might be thinking back to being a kid, you didn’t want to go to the grocery store and if you let your lack of motivation or desire to go and your parents accepted that, eventually you wouldn’t have any food.  Do you think your parents wanted to go? Nope, they probably didn’t want to go either but they knew it was the best thing for the household.  So rather than focus on being motivated by whatever external force was going to get them amped up to go shopping, they just went shopping and got it done and you got drug along with them.

Discipline is waking up early all 7 days out of the week, not only on the days you have to for work.  I’m not going to tell you that you must get out of bed at a certain time, but I’d strongly urge you to get up as early as you possibly can for a couple of weeks and I bet you realize you can get up earlier. I’m not as cool as Jocko who is famous for waking up at 4:30am every day and taking a picture of his watch and posting it on twitter.  I get up between 4:50-5am daily, post no pictures, and get my computer out to do a few things that matter to me.  Jocko gets up and works out immediately, I get up and read a little, write this blog little, work a little,  go for a run, and come back to typically see my son awake by 6:30am.  I think in the first 90 minutes of my day I’ve accomplished like 80% of someone’s new years resolutions that they are probably failing at: Read for pleasure/desire, Write or accomplish a goal, get ahead of the work day or “do a little more” to get promoted, workout consistently, spend more time with my family.  I’m not trying to toot my own horn but seriously, that is what you can get done in 90 minutes.  I feel like I’m live tweeting based on the way I closed the opening paragraph of this post but it is 5:27am and I’ve already read for pleasure and have written half of a blog post after waking up at 4:55am.  I heard you screaming at your computer screen several sentences ago the following two screams: “What time do you go to bed!?”, and “I could never get up at 5am, I sleep until 7 and barely make it to work by 9!”.  To you I say, 9:45-10:30PM, and that you can do it if you want to, try, do it for a couple weeks and form a habit.  I’ve watched several that claim it can’t be done get it done and within a few weeks say “wow, its amazing what you can get done when you get up early!”

What the heck does waking up early have to do with personal finance and FI? It has everything to do not only personal finance and FI, but everything to do with EVERYTHING to do in your life that you do and don’t want to do.  Who wants to wake up early? Seriously.  I didn’t want to do it when I started, I did it because something like 70% or more of the most successful people in the world state that they are up early and getting after it in the morning.  If I want to be them, I need to BECOME like them, this is one step.  Think about the power in conquering your day from the beginning by choosing to get out of bed instead of hit the snooze button. You have already began your day by making a hard choice instead of any easy one, then you got up early for a reason so you may as well do whatever it is you wanted to do that lead you to force yourself out of bed in the morning, and it compounds from there.  When we make hard choices and stay disciplined in our behaviors, it transforms us as people and changes our mind and the way we look at everything.  It goes from a decision to be disciplined to get out of bed in the morning to choosing to be disciplined enough to skip the donut in the break room (whatup Jocko), make that extra cold call to get a prospect, put a little more effort into that report before turning it in, or make the choice to be more present when you get home from the office when you might rather stare off into space.

Discipline saved me from myself, and my oh my did it do a great job.  I do fail, however.  I fail discipline from time to time, it does not fail me.  I don’t sleep in so that’s not my issue, maybe an occasional snooze button here or there but that’s not my issue.  My discipline failures are more around things like choosing to write this post, or doing things for my work that I really don’t like to do, but have to be done, and instead of just doing them and moving on I let them ride as long as I can and complete them against a deadline (which exists for a reason, so congrats deadline, you worked!). Are you ready for a real world example or two of where discipline lead to results? My first rental property, and the decision to fire my financial planner and self-manage my retirement accounts were a direct result of getting up early and reading / learning every day.

Take our first rental house for example, once I made a decision that I wanted to buy a rental house with this cash windfall I had coming my way, I had several months to figure it out.  Every Saturday and Sunday morning for something like 4-6 months I was up at 5am and I read and studied anything I could surrounding real estate investing, and studying my marketplace until about 7am.  That put me onto podcasts like the biggerpockets real estate podcast, and books like The Millionaire Real Estate Investor and Rich Dad Poor Dad.  I began listening to those things during my drive time when I didn’t have work calls to make, instead of the sports talk radio or music that I’d normally listen to.  After all that, we received the cash that we were expecting to come in and we bought our first rental.  Boom, discipline to the rescue.

All that discipline lead me to the FIRE movement and the concept of index funds and investing.  I have an entire post about Firing my Financial Planner you can read in full detail, but what that post maybe doesn’t talk about is the 50 episodes of bigger pockets money podcast that I listened to and kept hearing this common theme again and again.  I finally gave in and read JL Collins book The Simple path to Wealth and it tied everything that I had already heard, and knew, together plus more.  While I knew for a year or more that my planner and I were misaligned, I was scared and didn’t know what to do.  Discipline put me on the path to becoming a consistent and lifelong learner, learning a little bit every day in the areas that mattered most to me put me on the path to the books, and then I had to choose to execute.  I did, and it worked.  My net worth grew, I no longer had this head trash, and I was no longer fighting with the guy on decisions about what was best for MY MONEY and everything I had built.  It was a massive relief and weight off my shoulders and discipline is the root of it coming to fruition.

I’m likely not the first person in the world that has told you that the most successful people get up early in the morning to get ahead of the day instead of letting the day get ahead of them.  Heed their example and achieve their results over time.  Consistency wins over bursts of energy more often than not.  Discipline allows for consistency because you can set yourself up to do what you need to do little by little and over time.    Get disciplined, get your goals written down, and get going after them and you’ll look back in a short period of time and be impressed with what you knew you were capable of but didn’t know how to find or make the time!