Everywhere we look, there is temptation. Gorgeous gems to buy. Exhilarating experiences to indulge in. Partying, drinking, working on incredibly exciting brainstorms, nights that never have to end, meals that can be endless feasts, people that fascinate and that are made to dance off with into meadows and to cavort under waterfalls, enterprises that respond to our input and blossom like magnolias in sunlight.
The more we give, do, absorb, partake, enjoy, relish and the more we do so with reckless abandon, the more we are enveloped in a magic that never comes when we simply nibble at the intensity of life. Everything that is good and great is a narcotic of sorts, tempting us to stretch the envelope, test the limits and keep on breaking the sound barrier until we pass out or fall asleep.
And then there is the countervailing force: Discipline. Like a gravitational field, it pulls us back to a form of conventional wisdom which holds that we must exercise discipline in our lives. That there must be limits to our brainstorming, partying, loving, working, ambition.
We are led to believe that reckless abandon is a form of sin. That it is dangerous. That we must hold ourselves in check. That to be good, honorable, respectable people, we must exercise discipline. That everything has its limits, its limitations, it excesses and that we must know where the lines are drawn and heed them.
This is one of–no perhaps, THE– conflicts in life. When to turn a deaf ear to the call of the wild and when to revel in its pure unmodulated beauty. Its raw potency. Its intoxicating powers.
The direct corollary in business is the tension between opportunism and discipline. Companies that understand how to perceive opportunity and leverage it are, in every case, the ultimate winners. But those who fail to temper this drive and passion to capitalize on opportunity with the discipline to measure the risks, hedge against them and know when to take a pass, they will, ultimately, crash and burn.
Unlike the professors and the priests, the regulators and the rabbis, I don’t have a map for where the line actually lies. For how much is too much. And I don’t believe in splitting the difference, always being in the middle, the mediocre, half in love, the pursuer of good when the red hot excellent is just beyond the line of acceptability.
We all have to find our place along the continuum without — as all too many do– turning down the dial on the call of the wild.
Discipline alone makes you safe.
Danger makes you electric.
Mark Stevens
CEO
MSCO | The Art and Science of Growing Businesses
*Image courtesy rtpeat via Flickr
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This creative tension between discipline and doing something far from the same-old, same-old is a good one. Taking time out for fishing or friends and family does recharge the brain. Thanks for the images of waterfalls!