If you are pondering your future — who isn’t? — allow me to introduce the Three Horsemen: discipline, risk, regret.
You will harness and ride some or all of them in your life and they are both your loyal friend and vicious enemy depending upon how you create the relationship.
There is no success in life without harnessing discipline. If you tell me you are out of bed by 5:30 AM and regularly plan your own future, I would buy stock in you without the necessity for us to even meet.
Discipline shows up in everything, but the most important arena is time management.
One of the biggest lies ever told is: “All men are created equal.” Haha, total nonsense to keep the common folk from rioting.
What is true and viciously so is this: “All you get is twenty-four hours in a finite number of days that you do not know.”
You and Elon Musk get the same twenty-four hours each day. It is discipline that determines how effectively you use them.
There is no real progress in life if you do not embrace risk — not recklessly, but prudently.
Try to take as much risk as possible out of every situation, but know there comes a moment when your future is held hostage to how good a job the parachute rigger did on your chute. [You do manage that risk by lugging a reserve chute along.]
The ability to deal successfully with risk is a skill you can acquire. Sometimes it is a charade — never let the bastards see you sweat and sometimes it is sheer terror.
You get better at it the more you operate with it.
Regret is the price tag affixed to one’s inability or unwillingness to deal with both discipline and risk.
You will regret the missed opportunities. You will regret living somebody else’s life. You will regret what might have been.
“I could have been a contender.”
Somebody — today it is your Big Red Car — needs to tell you that life is a graded exercise with few do-overs.
Discipline yourself to win, to learn, to produce a winning performance, to conquer your fears, to accomplish your goals.
Take the measure of risk and know nobody ever drowned in their own sweat and that risk is an inherent part of every great success and every great failure.
Regret is real and it will haunt you for the rest of your bloody life if you don’t exert some discipline and take some risk.
I thought that needed to be said, but what the Hell do I really know anyway? I’m just a Big Red Car.
Wake up early tomorrow morning before 5:30 AM ready to bite the ass off a grizzly bear.
Michael the Archangel dealing the sword to the Devil. He was an earlier riser, Michael.
