The meaning of discipline

Making a commitment over time

Hey y’all,

While reading the guitarist Robert Fripp’s mammoth two-and-a-half pound book, The Guitar Circle, I came across a passage that gave me a tingle in the scalp:

The musician has three instruments: the hands, the head, and the heart, and each has its own discipline.

So, the musician has three disciplines: the disciplines of the hands, the head and the heart.

Ultimately, these are one discipline: discipline.¹

Top-to-bottom: The head, the heart, and the hands.

“In a perfect world,” Fripp writes, “all three together in a rare, unlikely, but possible harmony.”

But what is discipline?

“Discipline, primarily, is our capacity to make a commitment in time.”

I have been turning this line over and over in my head all week. It’s been ringing like a bell in my brain.

Discipline is our capacity to make a commitment in time.

In his book Discipline is Destiny, my friend Ryan Holiday writes that courage is “the willingness to put your ass on the line.” Discipline is “the ability to keep your ass in line.”

My writing teacher, Steven Bauer, used to joke that the first rule of writing was:

APPLY ASS TO CHAIR.

In my early writing days, I used to have that tacked up on a 3x5 card above my desk.

There’s a German word, sitzfleisch: