F3 Knoxville

Discipline v Motivation

Rampart

THE SCENE: Beautiful fall morning, clear sky for star gazing
F3 WELCOME & DISCLAIMER
WARM-O-RAMA:

  • Projectivators
  • LBACs
  • Grady Corn
  • Morocan Night Clubs
  • Chatty Pickers
  • Tempo squats
  • Cherry Pickers
  • Tempo Merkins
  • Mountain Climbers

THA-THANG:

  • Mosey to the stadium seats
  • Dora – One works while the other goes down the seats and back up
    • 200 Merkins
    • 200 LBCs
  • Mosey to the playground and rotate through pull ups while working on 150 squats OYO
  • Mosey to upper parking lot and line up on first spaces
  • Mosey to each line do squats, then merkins, then imperial walkers then bernie back. Start with 10 each, then 20, 30, 40.
  • Same idea, except broad jump between, do lunges, dry docks, and freddie mercuries. Start with 10 and add 5 each time.

RTF (with a JB)

MARY:
No time
COUNT-OFF & NAME-O-RAMA
CIRCLE OF TRUST/BOM:

I heard this idea from Jocko Willink, who is a former Navy SEAL officer and author of a book called Extreme Ownership. He articulates the difference between motivation and discipline. Motivation is the opposite of discipline. Motivation is the spontaneous urge or desire to do something, and often leads us to start something new. But motivation is a feeling, transient and fleeting. It may support you for a while, when you are well rested, healthy, and relaxed. But like all feelings, it has a tendency to abandon us when we are tired, or sick, or stressed. Discipline is, by contrast, the learned behavior of perseverance in spite of obstacle. Discipline receives the conclusion of mental activity, in which we identify what we ought to do, and holds us to the doing. Motivation is like the impassioned “falling in love” which often propels us into a romance, but discipline is the agape/caritas/charity love that stands against the flux of time.

Motivation feels good, but discipline bears fruit. Discipline reminds you what you know to be true in spite of what you feel right now. I often desire motivation so that I need not exercise discipline, but my experience is that it usually cuts the other way: When I exert discipline and do what I know I should but don’t want to, I find that motivation often follows. The key is to enjoy it while you have it without becoming dependent on it, for as soon as you start seeking motivation, it will abandon you.

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis discusses this idea in his chapter about faith:

Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian, I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.

So when we see this common thread running through love and faith and discipline, I suppose it comes as no surprise that Jesus followers were first called Disciples, functionally “those under discipline.” So, I exhort you to abandon efforts to “get motivated” and instead “get discipline”.

MOLESKIN:
Always a pleasure to visit the Men of the Fort. I’m even buyin’ the t-shirt…
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
2nd F on Saturday Oct. 1. 2.0 Q at The Project Oct. 8. Brolympics Nov. 5.