The Rawness

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to The Rawness RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I’ll do part 2 of the stereotyping post on Monday. I felt like tackling something else today instead because it was a timelier issue, and by next week the topic will be a little stale.

This blog is fairly new, but I had another blog before so I know a lot of the cliches that come up on a regular basis. One of them is the mandatory New Year’s Resolutions posts that pop up all over the blogosphere on January 1, and this year was no different. I pretty much can’t stand that stuff. I forgive women for making those posts, because symbolic rebirths and brand new personal declarations provide them with some sort of emotional release, and to women experiencing emotions is more addictive than a cocaine and heroin speedball and even therapeutic at times. I’m cool with that and respect it. But I really don’t like seeing guys do the whole New Year’s resolution thing. It just doesn’t feel right to me. It bothers me almost as much as meeting a man who hate Fight Club, which of course means I can’t befriend them. (This is not a joke, by the way. I literally do not trust men who hate Fight Club and avoid interacting with them at all costs if possible.)

As VK said:

The next time I post will be in 08 when I’m done with a little side project. Just do me a favor and DONT post your gay new years resolutions. Seriously nobody but God and your grandmother care and I even doubt God gives a shit. Especially if your going to “stop smoking” or “start exercising more”. You really waited to a calendar date to do something that can improve and lengthen your life?

Or as Roissy put it:

Fuck resolutions. They are for people who couldn’t get their shit together the previous 365 days.

Pithy, but on point.

The main problem I have with New Year’s resolutions is that since it’s tied into a specific day to start, and it’s only considered a success if you can keep it up all year long, the moment you fall off the wagon, you’ve blown it for that year. Because it’s tied into being a continuous run of a good habit starting from January 1, once you fuck up the resolution is a failure and you convince yourself you might as well slack off until the next January 1st. Forget that. Any day is a good day to start a bad habit, and if you were really gung-ho about the achieving something you wouldn’t be able to casually put it off until the next year, you’d be attacking it the first chance you got.

But if you are serious about changing something about yourself, whether or not it’s in the form of a New Year’s resolution or not, I want to give you a piece of advice. Don’t attack it as a whole laundry list of problems that need solving. Don’t think of it as a dozen or more things you have to change about yourself. Because once you do that, you end up with a huge daunting list of things to tackle at once and you end up getting intimidated by enormity of the task, which just makes it easier to fall off the wagon.

I don’t care how many problems you think you have, you actually only have two at most: vision and/or discipline. That’s it. Everything else is just a symptom of your lack of those two things. Can’t stop smoking? A symptom that you lack discipline. Alcoholic? Symptom that you lack discipline. Studying hard but can’t get good grades? You lack vision and need to work smarter instead of harder. Bad credit? Possibly a lack of vision and discipline. Take dating for example. Do you approach the opposite sex with ease, date people often but still can’t find a mate? Then you have the discipline to put yourself out there, but it’s your vision that sucks. You need to grow some better game. Or maybe you have decent social skills but don’t put yourself out there enough socially? Then your vision is fine, but your discipline needs work. What you have is not a bunch of problems that you need fixing, what you have is a bunch of symptoms of one or two larger problems called vision and discipline.

You can look at all types of people and group them into four categories: people with both vision and discipline, people with vision but no discipline, people with discipline but no vision and people with neither vision nor discipline. In sports, Michael Jordan had both. The baseball book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game has plenty of examples of athletes with only one or the other. Billy Beane for example was an incredible natural talent, but he didn’t have the correct discipline and never was able to become the best player he could be. Lenny Dykstra, his teammate, had nowhere near the same amount of natural talent as Billy, but he had an incredible discipline and desire to be nothing else on earth but a baseball player. He wouldn’t even read for leisure for fear of damaging his eyes for baseball. Phil Jackson is another example of someone who as an athlete was considered more of a hard worker (discipline) than a natural talent (vision).

Now sometimes someone can have such a surplus of one trait that it makes the deficit in the other trait hard to notice. Some students are so naturally bright that they can score high grades without having to study hard. They have lousy discipline but it flies underneath the radar and goes unnoticed because he’s still getting the results. His vision compensates for his lack of discipline. Another example is in the gym. I see some guys with horrible form, no rhyme or reason to their workout, no set exercises or routines to follow, totally playing it by ear, yet they’ll have great bodies. And the reason is that despite their lack of vision, they have incredible discipline when it comes to working out. They are there every day, no matter what the weather, they stay for two hours or more a day and they throw up big weight. So the inefficiency is compensated for by their drive. The only danger with these guys is that when they hit a wall and can’t improve any more, they’re suddenly screwed because they neglected the other trait so badly. So that guy who never studied suddenly reaches a level of schooling where natural talent won’t cut it anymore and now he’s screwed because he’s neglected to build up good study habits over the years. And those guys who only use hard work and no planning to exercise reach a point where they can’t get any more gains just from spending hours in the gym, yet they have no idea how to make their workout smarter either.

So if you have a ton of shortcomings that need fixing, realize that the real problem is either vision, discipline or both, and work on how to improve them. Usually when we have bad discipline in one area, we have it in many areas. The same goes for bad vision. People who have made bad choices in the past tend to continue to make bad choices. Some people say that and not injustice and capitalist exploitation is the real reason why the poor stay poor and the rich get richer. You might hate to hear that, but consider this: why do so many lottery winners go broke and often end up in even worse financial straits than before? Because they went from bad vision and/or discipline with no money to bad vision and/or discipline with a millionaire’s bank account. The tendency of people who have made bad decisions in the past due to low vision and discipline to continue to make bad choices due to low vision and discipline has led to changes in how we do a lot of business now. For example studies show that people with bad credit also tend to have higher car accident rates. So now car insurance companies factor in your credit report when figuring out your car insurance premium. The rationale is that rather than the person just having specific problems dealing with money and bill payments, the person has a more fundamental character flaw that’s much bigger than just bills and also applies to how they deal with driving too. Same for jobs. More and more job applicants have to submit to credit reports and background checks, because the thought is that whatever vision and discipline you displayed in the past, even if it was in a different area of your life, is a good indicator of the vision and discipline you’ll display in all future endeavors.

So my point here is simple. Don’t just make a list of a bunch stuff you don’t like about yourself and think the job is done. Try to figure out what the list is telling you about yourself. Is your discipline bad, is your vision bad, or is it both? Then just attack those two things. Once you get those two things down, everything else will fall into place. And remember, you don’t have to wait until January 1 to start.

Recommended Reading:

• Moneyball and The Blind Side by Michael Lewis are true stories about athletes, in baseball and football respectively, and both books, especially Moneyball, give great examples of the role vision and discipline play in helping an athlete reach his full potential.
• Naruto vols. 1-3: Naruto is a Japanese manga comic. It’s a coming-of-age tale of young ninja clans striving to be the best they can be. All of them have different talents and skill levels, but while some are natural geniuses, others are hard workers and other are a mix of the two. It’s a great allegory of how we compete in real life and it illustrates the conflict between visionaries and hard workers accurately and beautifully. It was this book that actually first made me realize the vision vs. discipline theory in the first place. Plus it has ninjas kicking ass all day and killing each other a lot, which is always cool. I have to warn you though, this saga is long. Over 20 volumes long. And addictive as hell.
• Fight Club movie and book:  Self-explanatory, masterpiece, needs no introduction.  Not really that important to this article, but fuck it, everyone should read and watch it.

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...