Just as the athletes discarded everything and competed gumnos—free from anything that could possibly burden them—so we must get rid of every encumbrance, every association, habit, and tendency that impedes godliness. If we are to excel, we must strip ourselves to a lean, spiritual nakedness… Men, we will never get anywhere spiritually without a conscious divestment of the things that are holding us back. 

A Young Man’s Lesson in Discipline

Sometime in the early summer before entering the seventh grade, I wandered over from the baseball field and picked up a tennis racket for the first time—and I was hooked! It was not long before I became a ten-year-old tennis bum. My passion for the sport became so intense, I would idly hold a tennis ball and just sniff it. The pssst and the rubbery fragrance upon opening a can of new tennis balls became intoxicating. The whop, whop and the lingering ring of a sweetly hit ball, especially in the quietness of early morning, was to me symphonic.

That fall, I determined to become a tennis player. I spent my hoarded savings on one of those old beautifully laminated Davis Imperial tennis rackets—a treasure that I actually took to bed with me. I was disciplined! I played every day after school (except during basketball season) and every weekend. When spring came, I biked to the courts where the local high school team practiced and longingly watched until they finally gave in and let me play with them. The next two summers I took lessons, played some tournaments, and practiced about six to eight hours a day—coming home only when they turned off the lights.

And I became good. I was good enough, in fact, that as a twelve-and-a-half-year-old, 110-pound freshman, I was second man on the varsity tennis team of my large three thousand-student California high school.

Not only did I play at a high level, I learned that personal discipline is the indispensable key for accomplishing anything in this life. I have since come to understand even more that it is, in fact, the mother and handmaiden of what we call genius.

Examples of Greatness Through Discipline

Those who watched Mike Singletary play football and observed his wide-eyed intensity and his churning, crunching samurai hits are usually surprised when they meet him. He is not an imposing hulk. He is barely six feet tall and weighs maybe 220. Whence the greatness? Discipline. Singletary was as disciplined a student of the game as any who have ever played it. In his autobiography, Calling the Shots, he says that in watching game films, he would often run a single play fifty to sixty times, and that it took him three hours to watch half a football game, which is only twenty to thirty plays!1 Because he watched every player, because he knew the opposition’s tendencies—given the down, distance, hash mark, and time remaining—and because he read the opposition’s minds through their stances, he was often moving toward the ball’s preplanned destination before the play developed. Singletary’s legendary success was a testimony to his remarkably disciplined life.

The legendary Jack Nicklaus, the most successful professional golfer of all time, once quipped, “The more I practice, the luckier I get.” Michael Phelps’s eight (yes, you read it correctly—eight!) gold medals at the 2009 Olympics in Beijing were the result of thousands of hours and miles in the pool of disciplined boredom. The glory of a Steph Curry three-point shot that wins a basketball game at the buzzer is the apex of a life of inglorious discipline! It is common knowledge that Curry practices in the offseason for three hours a day, six days a week in the summer. It is also well known that after elaborate preparation he will shoot between six hundred and seven hundred baskets, counting only the ones he makes. On intense shooting days, the number increases to at least a thousand.

Canadian icon Wayne Gretsky, regarded as the greatest ice hockey player ever, became what he was because early on he disciplined both his mind and his body for the rough-and-tumble game. As a boy, he systematically charted the angles of the ricocheting puck so that he came to anticipate what was going to happen on the ice better than any player in the game. The “Great Gretsky” was there when the puck arrived. Listen to how Gretsky describes himself: “I wasn’t naturally gifted in terms of size and speed; everything I did in hockey I worked for.” And then later, “The highest compliment that you can pay me is to say that I worked hard every day. . . . That’s how I came to know where the puck was going before it even got there.2

Michelangelo’s, Leonardo da Vinci’s, and Tintoretto’s multitudes of sketches, the quantitative discipline of their work, prepared the way for the cosmic qualitative value of their work. We wonder at the anatomical perfection of a da Vinci painting. But we forget that da Vinci on one occasion drew a thousand hands.3 In the last century, Henri Matisse explained his own mastery, remarking that the difficulty with many who wanted to be artists was that they spent their time chasing models rather than painting them.4 Again, the discipline factor!

The Essential Nature of Discipline

We will never get anywhere in life without discipline, be it the arts, the trades, business, athletics, or academics. Whatever your particular thing is, whether it is swimming, football, soccer, basketball, tennis, surfing, mountain climbing, bull riding, motocross, chess, math, computer science, the guitar, the sitar, writing, poetry, or painting—whatever it is—you will never get anywhere without discipline.

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