All right, welcome back. I was perusing through social media here in the past week. I came across the post from a mentor of mine. Actually, Rob Sperry who was on the podcast here a few episodes ago. He said something really interesting, he said, “Being consistent is boring, being disciplined is boring, but so is being broke,” and it hit me, honestly, like a slug to the chest. I saw that, and I thanked him. I was like, “Hey, you just gave me my material for my next podcast episode,” and so here we are.
I wanted to talk a little bit about the road to success and why it can be so boring. We all know that in any endeavor that we’re working on in life, there are principles and there are things that happen that we need to work on, that we need to do in order to be better capable of reaching our goals. I think a lot of times we look for the silver bullet. I had a sales leader once tell me, “JR, there are no silver bullets, just a lot of lead ones,” and that was pretty impactful, as well. I’ve got metaphors and different stories for days, especially when it comes to sales. These two together kind of struck me. I want to talk about a little bit about that today.
The road to success really is paved with doing the simple things well. People who are successful in network marketing, people who are successful in business in general, do them better or they do them because others aren’t willing to. Sometimes those things are simple, like servicing a customer, sometimes they’re more complex, like diving into social media; that can be a more complex issue. What they do is they are consistent. Frankly, I have always struggled with keeping something going consistently. I use a different tactics on myself to help put up those guardrails and keep me on the path that I want to go, and so sometimes I will set goals. I’ll set up to-do lists. I will go through and mentally have a checklist of things that I need to accomplish in order to get where I can see where I want to go. I can see that pinnacle; I can see that top of the mountain where I want to go plant my flag, and maybe I need to set up guardrails or I need to rope up in order to be able to climb up to that peak. Those ropes and those guardrails are around simple things.
One of the first books I read this year was Atomic Habits. Fantastic book. I cannot recommend it enough. When I say the word atomic, most of the time the image that will pop into your head is a mushroom cloud. It looks like Hiroshima or Nagasaki. It is a huge explosion and sometimes something that goes atomic can be that. What Atomic Habits it is talking about is actually the direct inverse; instead of going nuclear and blowing up, atomic habits are the tiny, tiny habits, the tiny particles, the atomic particles that we put in each and every day to get to where we’re going.
These atomic habits take consistency. In order to be consistent to continue working on this podcast, I had to set a time up, 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday. That’s when things are going to be published. I’m thinking potentially add a second round each week, but I don’t want to go too crazy yet. I want to make sure that the content is of high quality and that it’s driving value. I’d rather not just hop on here and babble for five or ten minutes at a time that not helpful for anybody. For me, this becomes a creative outlet, and so doing that consistently is really important to me, that’s why I chose two o’clock on Wednesdays. Being disciplined is part of that consistency.
Now, discipline, a lot of times we think about my second or third grade teacher who liked to carry around a yard stick and smack it on the desk when somebody was not doing what they were supposed to be doing. As you guys might be able to imagine, yeah, I kind of talked a lot as a kid, and so that yardstick may or may not have smacked onto my desk more than one time. But that discipline helped me to help me to understand some things and helped me to get better at that particular aspect of my education.
Where I learned discipline more than anything is when I was in college, I was an Air Force ROTC cadet and I thought I wanted to fly F16s for the rest of my life. In fact, I still kind of want to fly F16s for the rest of my life, but that ship has sailed now. Some of my best friends in the world are pilots and did exactly that. I have a friend of mine who, got out of the Air Force, went to work for Delta Airlines, but still for a time, was it part of a reserve unit. He would fly the friendly skies during the week and fly F16s on the weekend. And I’m like, “Okay, I can’t think of a cooler way to continue to serve your country and make a living.”
Life changed; my daughter was born. I decided that wasn’t the route that I needed to take my life. What it did teach me was a lot of discipline. I will call it an opportunity, because it did teach me a lot, to go to boot camp twice now. The first time I went as a trainee and it was an ROTC boot camps was a little bit different than what a lot of kids are going through it are 17, 18, 19 years old when they come out of high school. This was for future officers. It was a month. It was in San Antonio, Texas, in the heat of the summer.
Let me tell you, it taught me a lot about being mentally tough, as I would say, go to my happy place and continue to push because we did a lot of push-ups. I mean a lot of push-ups. In fact, there was one point where our entire squadron was being a disciplined. There’s like 25 or 30 of us in this group. They have us in these dorms and they have what they call the day room, which was a multipurpose room and it had vinyl tiles on the floor, like in the hospital. There were some chairs in there or whatever, and they would use it for a classroom space, or they would use it for discipline. They had all of us in there, and we were all in the forward leaning rest, which means push-up position. We’re all sitting there in up position, and this instructor had us there and was yelling at us for one thing or another.
If you guys didn’t know this, in boot camp, everything you do is wrong and you’re always late. It doesn’t matter if you’re 10 minutes early, you were already late and you’re making the person who’s getting you there even more late. They’re always yelling at you for something and part of it is to break you down and part of it is to help instill some esprit de corps, because you have band together as a team, and part of it is to make you stronger. This case was making you stronger because we were sitting there doing push-ups.
We’re in this room for an hour. Through 75% of that time we were in a push-up position and were doing various states of push-ups, whether they were all the way down or we were pushing all the way up or the very favorite of them was to go half up, which only half a push-up and holding yourself there is painful. But in that hour, you’ve got 30 warm bodies in there. The walls started to sweat. The place stunk to high heaven, which we, of course, got yelled at later and had to clean up. It taught us this discipline. Nobody was complaining, at least not audibly, while we were in there because that just meant more pain. That discipline, that being able to go to your happy place, got instilled in me.
It could further got instilled in me when I was actually a part of… You guys, maybe you’ve seen A Few Good Men. You’ve seen the rifle drill teams. My 15-year-old daughter is on a drill team, which is very different than what I did. We would take these 12-pound M1A Garand rifles, and we would spin them. We would flip them. We would throw them. We do all kinds of cool stuff while we were marching around. It looked kind of cool. If you’ve seen A Few Good Men, the opening scene of that, that’s the Marine drill team, and they’re incredible. We did some of that.
We would get inspected in these in these competitions. There is nothing crazier than having a very large drill instructor who just had extra onions on his Philly cheese steak for lunch within three inches of your nose yelling his brains out for something stupid. There was a small thread hanging out of my shirt or something like that. The idea here is to get into your head, but it taught me discipline. You think the next time I went up for an inspection like that that I had one of those threads hanging out? No, I learned it. I fixed it. I moved on and it made me stronger. The old adage of what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger is absolutely true.
When it comes to success, when we’re consistent and when we’re disciplined, it might be boring, but it makes us strong, and it makes us so that we don’t have to deal with being broke. Being broke is painful, so is disciplined, so is consistency. It’s painful. It can be boring, too, but guess what? Your life can be really boring if you’re broke because you can’t enjoy what’s out there. You can’t go and do things. You can’t spend time with your family doing activities that are incredible.
My wife and I have planned a trip for our family. Our oldest is leaving to serve a mission for our church in Toronto, Canada, in July. Before that, we’re having a family vacation, we’re going to New York City. I’m the only one in the family who’s ever been to New York, so I’m excited to show them around a little bit. We’re going to go to a Broadway show. We’re going to go see the Statue of Liberty. We’re going to go to a baseball game. We’re going to do all these very quintessential New York things.
It’s because of consistency and discipline that I can do that with my family. It’s because I’m willing to do the small things that I can get big things. I’m a big fan of the scriptural quote: by small and simple things are great things brought to pass. In business and in life, it’s never more evident than doing those small and simple things, those atomic habits, because when we can do the simple things, maybe it’s getting up an early hour so that we can spend enough time to meditate or to do personal development work or to reach out to people in your business who need help. Whatever the case is, we will always need that opportunity to do those small things.
When we take those opportunities, instead of wasting them, we’re going to multiply our efforts. I’m a big fan of Grant Cardone’s 10X. It talks about doing 10 times what everybody else is doing, and that’s going to bring him success. I agreed, well, yeah you put 10 times more effort into something, obviously, you’re going to have a greater success opportunity there. It’s the same with all aspects of our business. When you’re going out there, when you’re making contacts, but when you’re making sales calls, whether it’s a network marketing business or a traditional business, you’re always going to be doing small things.
For my day job right now, I have a goal each day to contact between five and ten doctors, those are the small things that I need to do to get through that and to reach my higher goals. When I do that, I find success. When I don’t do that, I wonder, gee, why am I not having any success? When you do the little things, the big things happen.
I can’t emphasize this enough. By small and simple things are great things brought to pass. By being consistent and being disciplined, being a little boring, we’re going to have huge success. You won’t be broke. Being broke is boring. Don’t be boring. Be exciting. Be willing to put in the work, and you, too, will have incredible success. That’s all I’ve got for this week. Guys. Look forward to next week, or I’ve got a couple of the interviews coming up with some incredible people. I look forward to sharing those with you. Until then, have a great day.
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