It’s much easier to stay up late playing video games and getting up whenever you feel like it than it is put down the controller so you can get some sleep, which means you can get a job that pays more than tips. It’s easier to go through your stack of bills once a month and than it is get a calendar out and write down when a bill is due.

But that’s really discipline in a nutshell, doing what’s right, even when it’s hard.

Discipline is very counterintuitive and counter-cultural, the world and your buddies don’t get it and don’t want any part of it because they and all of us are spoiled. Most of us have grown up in a microwave, instant gratification world so we want it NOW. I’m the chief among sinners on this one because sitting right next to me while I write this is my iphone, that I can get instant feedback and connection with a ton of people and I can even hit amazon.com or my crack, the App store and get whatever I want immediately.

But the results of living an undisciplined life are predictable and easy to spot. Thankfully discipline is a skill that any man can develop. Here’s a hint: developing discipline in one area of your life will spill over into every other area of your life. For example exercise. If you’ll make a commitment to exercise for 30 minutes, 3 days per week, 3 months from now you’ll discover that you’ve put the dates your bills are due on the iCal and now you’re not late paying them anymore. You didn’t start out to work on paying your bills on time, you just started running 3 days per week. But somehow, getting up at 5:30 to run started to rub off on other areas. And those areas started rubbing off on others.

Developing discipline overwhelms so many guys because they try to attack too many areas at one time. The chances of any guy going on a diet, quit smoking, going to the gym every day, and stop watching porn all in the same week and making it past monday night are slim in an none. But that’s how most guys do it and that’s why they fail and think they are a failure, when the truth is they are not a failure that just didn’t know how to develop discipline.

If you want to make the jump from boy to man, then you must develop discipline, because you can’t always have what you want, when you want so you have to develop discipline. The reason most guys rebel against the idea of discipline is they don’t know that discipline equals freedom. Productivity guru Stephen R. Covey once wrote, “the undisciplined are slaves to moods, appetites and passions”. An undisciplined man never learns a new language, he never learns how to play golf, an undisciplined man never learns how to play the guitar.

Here’s a little mantra I use to help me develop discipline.

do the right thing,
do it the best of my abilities
do everything in my life that way.

When I’m running and don’t feel like I can finish, I think about that. When I’ve got a project at work that I have to do but I’m not all that excited about it, I think about that. Every time I do, I get this inner satisfaction of knowing I acted like a man and not a boy and that’s powerful! It makes another deposit in my man-account that confirms and reaffirms that I am a man. Which is crucial because the world and circumstances are going to constantly tell me otherwise and try to keep me from even trying. So have a mini celebration the next time you don’t hit the snooze button because you know that you just acted like a man.

Wisdom is what keeps you from marring the wrong woman, taking that job or investing that money before you do it. When you have wisdom, you live a life with very few regrets. Wise people see the same thing in the windshield as they do the rearview mirror.

The question is “what is wisdom”? It’s actually kind of hard to define but here are three common definitions.

• The first is age but just because you made it to 65 doesn’t automatically mean you’re wise.
• The second is intelligence but there are tons of very smart people who no one would mistake for being wise.
• The third is education but just because you’ve got  BS, MA, PhD and other kinds of letters after your name doesn’t guarantee that you’re wise

While none of these make you wise on their own, all three are often found in wise people. The reason is found in a great statement from the book of Proverbs on how to gain wisdom, “Get all the advice and instruction you can, so you will be wise the rest of your life.” So age does matter, especially when it comes to who you take advice from. the more instruction part is getting more education and the combination of advice and instruction equals smart.

That’s how you become wise but we still haven’t defined wisdom. Especially defining wisdom in just a few, memorable words that boys trying to become men can use as a daily filter to help direct their lives. Here it is:

Wisdom is knowing what’s right and how to do it.

Just to be clear what’s right = what God says is right, because that is the only reliable standard.

That’s wisdom in a nutshell. A really simple sentence that applies to your job, marriage, parenting, hobbies,  choice of friends, where you live, well you get the idea. Knowing what’s right and how to do it is really what separates the men from the boys.

I’ve been thinking, reading, and studying about this process for a lot of years and have finally broken it down into three elements of being a man: Wisdom, Discipline, and Good Judgment. These three come a verse in the ultimate training manual for men, Proverbs, “Get the truth and never sell it;  also get wisdom, discipline, and good judgment.” Mastering these three elements will get you over the hump and into manhood, but the first question is what do those things really mean and how do you do them? I’ve been trying to come up with simple definitions that also give directions for the “how”. Here’s what I’ve got:

Wisdom is Knowing What’s Right And How To Do It

Discipline is Doing What’s Right, Even When It’s Hard

Good Judgment is Choosing What’s Right, Even When Something Else Looks Better

Or you can just remember three words and live every moment of every day with them in mind: KNOWING, DOING, & CHOOSING.

That’s it. Simple right? Well simple to remember, but you’ll spend the rest of your life reorienting your job, relationships, finances, hobbies and everything else to them. Hard to do but the payoff is worth it.

Over the next several days I’m going to write a post on each one to get you started.

I decided to do a program called Couch to 5k, that’s designed to take someone who wasn’t running at all, me, from nothing to running 5k (3.2 miles) in 8 weeks. To be honest, I never thought I’d actually do it but I figured maybe I’d work up to running a mile and that would help me lose some weight. Well, surprise, surprise, I did do it. I know run 3 miles, 3 days per week. It’s still not my favorite 30 minutes of the day but I have lost weight, so it’s worth it.

Along the way I’ve learned a couple of lessons that apply to other parts of life.

The first is it’s good to have a coach who will keep you on a plan and push you to do more than you thought you could. My coach’s name is Jim. Now Jim’s not a real person, he’s actually the voice on the iPhone app I use. When I first started the program, Jim told me when to walk, when to run, when to walk and so on. Now he tells me when I’m halfway through, then when I’ve got 5 minutes left, then 2 , then 1 minute and finally when I can stop. Jim just relentlessly keeps me going. The truth is there’s no way I’d have been able to this just using the timer on my iPhone, I needed Jim to keep me going.

Same thing with me and other men. I need other men in life pushing me on. No matter what you call them coach, guide, or mentor, they just keep pushing you down a path that they know will us better.

The other thing I’ve learned is pacing. I’m real slow and sometimes my competitive nature kicks in and I want to improve my time, so I start out my run at a fast pace. Too fast. Way faster than my skill and conditioning can sustain me. It always catches up to me about half way through then I have to slow way down and I end up with a slower over all time than when I just keep a steady pace. Focusing on improving my times gradually.

The older I get the more I learn that slow and steady wins the race. Life is a marathon, not a sprint, so I need to always think long-term. Not the easiest thing for me to do but I’m learning.

What are you doing in your life that is teaching you lessons that apply in other areas?

I’m heart broken over the loss of innocence that these boys have experienced.

LIfe will never be the same for these boys. They’ll live a life marked by mistrust, fear and shame all because a pervert chose them to attack. I do not understand how an adult can attack a child. To me it’s the lowest of all crimes. When the coach is convicted and sent to prison, he’ll discover that inmates agree. I’ve visited pedophiles in prison and they have told me that very thing. Prison will not go well for Sandusky, which I have to admit, I’m more than good with.

I want to punch every adult witness who walked away.

The idea that a grown man would WITNESS a child being harmed and walk away is so heinous that they should share a cell with Sandusky. I know some will say “but he was only a graduate assistant and he did report it to his boss.” To which I say, Paterno was rightfully fired for essentially the same thing. Secondly, he was a GRADUATE assistant, which means he was at least 22 yrs. old. A legal adult in every sense of the word. Plus he had just finished up a career as a college football player. I think he would have been able to defend himself against a 50-something year old pervert. Bottom line is one of those two adults should have gotten his butt whipped in that shower.

If that had been me, the sequence would have been tackle Sandusky, get the boy to safety, call the police,  THEN call Joe Pa. The way McQueary handled it was the highest form of cowardice and oh how I wish I could tell him that to his face.

How did any Penn State student with a conscious join a rally to protest JoePa’s firing instead of the sexual assault of multiple little boys?

Does anybody else see how twisted that was? You’re protesting an adult being held accountable for his inaction? Not mention the fact that college football coaches get fired, even JoePa. That’s why they have buy-out clauses, they know there are only two kinds of coaches: those who just got fired and those who are about to be fired.

Not only do you have a rally but you destroy property? What kind of kids are these? What kind of parents do they have? I have a daughter in college and I can promise you that if she ever participated in something so deplorable, her college career on my money would be over. I know not every Penn St student was involved but there were enough to give the entire school a black eye that will take years to overcome.

It reminded me to only have dead guys as role models

I grew up an Alabama fan, so I got to attend several Penn St. games (including the Goal Line Stand Sugar Bowl) and I have to say those where among my favorite. Penn St fans are simply the best fans in college football. They travel every where and win/lose with class. I always thought a lot of how Penn St. had never been put on probation under Paterno. He was what I thought every college football could and should be.

Now, he’s no better than Barry Switzer, Ron Meyer or any other college coach who got caught cheating. That’s really sad to me. It’s also why you should only have dead guys as role models because you KNOW how their story ends.

Lastly:

I’m reminded that everybody has a little Penn St. in their lives.

I heard a preacher (Michael Katschke) say this and it really resonated with me. The point is that everybody has a secret sin that they hope no one finds out about. Everybody has something they are hiding. But the fact is nobody gets away with it forever. Sandusky is one more name added to the long list of folks who thought they could keep their sins a secret, only to be exposed. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, especially those who like me are followers of Jesus. Numbers 32:23 put it this way “you may be sure that your sin will find you out”.

Working on my Penn St’s should keep me busy for a while.

But now I’m 47 and twenty pounds overweight so doing nothing is not an option. I’ve tried lifting weights and had a little bit of success but I still needed cardio to lose the weight I want to, so that means running.

Because I hate running so much I look at that 30 minutes as grind it out time. I just put my head down and get it done. It’s become a discipline. Which makes it like a lot of stuff in a man’s life. Stuff that you don’t love but has to get done, so you have to just grind it out.

Besides getting stuff that you just need to do done, there’s a nice side benefit from grinding: discipline in one area of your life will spill over into every other area. So if you’re struggling to get control in one area of your life, like too much internet surfing, but you keep failing, try developing discipline is some other are, like running. You’ll be amazed at how much one will impact the other.

Just remember, real men grind it out when they have too.

A shortcut that you can take is to get a mentor. Men who have already been where you’re going and who can help you avoid the land mines. Rick Warren put it this way, “While it’s wise to learn from experience, it’s wiser to learn from the experience of others.”

There are tons of men who would love to help you. They’d be willing to sit down with you on a regular basis and just tell you all the mistakes they’ve made. Why? Because the kind of men that make good mentors don’t want other men to have to make the same mistakes they did. Good men love to see other men win.

How to find a Mentor

1. Find someone you want to be like

Not just a guy who has a job that you want but someone with the character traits you want. Study him to make sure he’s the real deal.This probably won’t happen overnight, it will probably take time.

2. Meet with him

The first meeting is not when you ask him to be your mentor. Instead meet him for coffee or lunch, keep it less than hour and come prepared with questions.

3. Review the first meeting

Do you still want to learn from this guy? Was he all you thought he’d be? Did he seem interested? Was there any sort of connection with him? If there was, then go to the next step

4. Follow up

Email him thanking him for his time and ask to meet again. If he says yes, you’re on your way.

5. Go with the flow

You can’t force or manipulate a mentoring relationship. Mentoring is organic, so just go with the flow.

Don’t forget that technology has made so you don’t even have to sit in front of a guy to be mentored by him. You can be mentored by men by listening to podcasts, reading books and blogs

Once you’ve found your mentor, here’s how to get the most out of the relationship.

Do’s and Don’ts of Mentoring

1. Don’t be a wimp when you’re challenged

Remember, YOU asked for it, so suck it up. If you picked the right mentor, he’s doing it to help you get better.

2. Ask for more

Honor your mentor by always asking for as much as he’s willing to give. Don’t make him guess what you want to know.

3. Ask for feedback

Yes, it’s tough but it’s the best way for you to improve. It’s a sign that you’re growing

One More Thing

Don’t be just a taker, be a giver. You probably won’t believe this but there are guys YOU can mentor. Guys who would love to be able to spend an hour a month with you to learn what you know. So when you’re approached about being a mentor, say yes. Be confident that you really do have something to offer.