Discipline

I just went to the Dayton Naturals amateur bodybuilding competition in Dayton, Ohio. I was there to support my 55-year-old brother, who was competing in the physique division. He killed. The guy is a unit. I’ve been following his journey over the last nine months, and let me tell you, I really don’t have a desire to do anything like that. I don’t have the discipline. Discipline around working out, discipline around food, anything—I am a very undisciplined person.

But I am also a successful person. I am successful in spite of being undisciplined. I mean, yes, I am disciplined in minor ways, I drag my ass out of bed in the morning and take a shower and get dressed and go to work, and I am a machine when it comes to writing—not many people have the discipline it takes to sit down and write a book, let alone six. But discipline is not really important for the things that I do. You don’t need discipline to be a trader (more on this in a minute), you don’t really need discipline to be a writer, and you don’t need discipline to be a DJ. These are things that require creativity and intelligence, not discipline. I am a good DJ/writer/trader because I have creativity and intelligence, not discipline. If you want to run an Ironman, you need discipline. Fuck that, I say, I literally do not care. Now, I’m not dismissive or scornful of people who do that, because they can do a thing I cannot do, and they shouldn’t be dismissive or scornful of me, because I can do a thing that they cannot do. We are all differently abled.

I was disciplined at one point in my life—in the military. You want to know something about all my old Coast Guard buddies? They are skinny! Even to this day, as 51-year-olds. You want to fit into a blue uniform, you have to stay thin. Now, the Coast Guard is pretty permissive when it comes to working out in the workday, at least, it was when I was in. I used to get a full two hours at lunch to pick things up and put them down. Towards the end, I was actually so massive that I was over the weight limit for my height, but I got an exemption because my body fat was below some threshold. The military has a culture of working out, and you get time to do it, so people do it. In the private sector, on Wall Street, you’re working out at 3:30 in the morning, and my attitude was fuck that, there is no way in hell I am getting up that early to work out. So I got fat. I guess, in retrospect, it wasn’t as much of a matter of being undisciplined as it was prioritizing sleep over fitness. But yes, I was unwilling to make that sacrifice. David Goggins would have. That’s the discipline, I guess.

But there are a whole bunch of jobs/occupations/hobbies in the world that don’t require a lot of discipline. I have a friend who is an artist—he makes amazing art. He needs creativity and intelligence, but he doesn’t need discipline. Oddly, he is one of the most disciplined people I know—he works at night, and he is up at all hours every night making art. But no, he doesn’t need discipline to do what he does. And as I mentioned, I don’t need discipline to do what I do. If you are a receptionist in a doctor’s office, you need not necessarily be disciplined, but you need to have attention to detail. There are a lot of jobs like that. If you are working on an oil rig, you need strength, more than discipline. If you are a teacher, you need the daily discipline of prepping classes and showing up every day and bringing some energy, but it’s not the type of discipline you need to train for an Ironman. You can get by doing a lot of things in life without having discipline. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t make my bed in the morning. The five minutes can be better spent on something else.

Typically, creativity and discipline are incompatible. It is difficult to fit creativity in structure. Now, people try to do it—Stephen King says you should write 500 words a day or whatever. I can do this in dribs and drabs, but there are some nights I sit down on the couch and I would rather watch the Yankees lose than work on my novel. It’s hard to force creativity. I should be more specific—I can sit down and shit out an essay or a newsletter without a lot of effort, but if I am going to be doing truly creative writing, it takes a lot of energy, and sometimes I don’t have the energy. Oddly, long flights are good for creativity—nobody is bothering me, and there is nothing else to do. I can get some good writing done on a long flight. The key is to have unstructured free time. There have been studies done on this as it pertains to innovation—if you want your scientists or engineers to make important discoveries, just give them a bunch of time to fuck around with stuff. Tinkering. You can’t plan innovation and creativity—it does not happen on command. The vast majority of scientific discoveries are accidental.

I have written about this before, but I think that disciplined people tend to look down on creative people, whereas creative people do not look down on disciplined people. The Ironman athlete sees a 345-pound disheveled mess of a human being—what a piece of shit—without realizing that the fat guy is Jelly Roll and has a phone number in his bank account and a hot wife. Jelly Roll is not disciplined, but that does not make him any less worthy of admiration! You could have said the same about Jonah Hill, one of the best actors of our time. The disciplined person will look down on Jonah Hill, because Jonah Hill does not have the discipline to control what he puts in his body. The disciplined person looks down on both rich and successful people because he does not have any appreciation whatsoever for creativity and intelligence. In the DJ world, very, very few DJs are jacked. Bossi from Cosmic Gate (who I met once), and…I am drawing a blank here? Cristoph? The time is better spent in front of the computer engineering the perfect kick. Correspondingly, creative people don’t look down on disciplined people at all. You can run an Ironman? Wow, that’s fucking awesome. I’ll go further and say that discipline gets more respect than creativity, which is why people run Ironmans, Tough Mudders, and plain vanilla marathons. I ran a marathon when I was 24, and I have been cashing in on that ever since. This is true even for the novices. I know a guy here in Myrtle Beach who runs 5Ks very sloooowly and posts his times to Facebook, and gets all kinds of hearts and thumbs up. I spend some time creating a DJ mix, a work of art, and it’s a fucking boneyard in the likes and comments. Same for my artist friend, the prolific guy making art at night. Nobody cares. This doesn’t annoy me—it’s just the way of the world. I bet if I got my fat ass out and ran a 5K in 12-minute miles, I’d get over 100 likes, even though that would be the least important and impressive thing I did in my entire life. I’m not even sure I could go that long without a ZYN.

I do have a huge amount of respect for my brother for doing this bodybuilding competition. Discipline! I can’t do it! I can’t eat microscopic amounts of chicken and rice for three months—I’d literally go insane and start running around with a chainsaw. No, I’m more of a creativity and intelligence type. I said we would get back to trading. A lot of people think that traders have to be disciplined, such as cutting losses, etc. I tend to disagree with this. If you are systematically disciplined about cutting losses, you will never have any gains (unless your entry points are perfect). There are occasions where you will want to let your losses run for a little while, and even (gasp) add to a losing position. All successful fund managers have done it. What is needed is a little creativity to figure out how to stick with a losing position in a way that limits losses and gives you exposure to the upside. Another habit of highly successful fund managers: conviction. Without it, you’re scratching around and earning zero.

Maybe at some point in the future I will get some discipline and lose some weight. I could stand to lose about 30 pounds. My brother has offered me the services of his personal trainer, which I am grateful for. If you don’t have discipline, you can always borrow someone else’s—that’s the whole point of the personal trainer business. You hire some hardo to chase you around and yell at you, and then you lose the weight. I do have a lot of respect for people who have discipline—every so often I take a dump on the guy who gets up at 3:30am to work out, but the reality is I wish I could do it. And I used to do it—when I lived in Hoboken, I would get up at the ass-crack of dawn to go running, in sub-15 degree weather. My motivation has…dissipated. If I were disciplined and creative, I would be freaking Superman. Hear hear to that.