Pete Carroll, coach of the Seattle Seahawks (2011-Present), once delivered a powerful quote that resonated with MTD’s mission towards realizing our vision and maximizing our potential:
The moment you’ve created that vision you’re on your way, but it’s the diligence with which you stick to that vision that allows you to get there.
Easy to be motivated before the journey has begun.
But do you still work towards your vision when you’re being pulled every which way?
We’ve all set goals we say we are dedicated toward achieving, because they will better our lives. Take New Year's Resolutions for example. We see a new year as an opportunity to reset ourselves and climb toward our newly envisioned potential. At this point, nothing has gotten hard yet, the journey seems so worth it. ‘We’ll do anything to get to our desired destination’, we tell ourselves.
Yet, people often lose track of the habits they set out to adopt after a couple days or weeks. Each person has a vision of what their life could be if they made some necessary, yet challenging changes. We seem dedicated toward upgrading our lifestyle, but so often a lack of discipline ultimately reverts us to our old ways.
Nobody wants to set goals they won’t achieve, or worse, they give up on. Yet we do it because our minds are unable to resist the pull towards our old tendencies. Brendan set a goal for himself at the beginning of the summer to get out of bed no later than 7am. Let’s just say it didn’t last too long. Similarly, Rowan set a summer goal to make meditation a quotidian. His meditations have been few and far between.
We often set unrealistic goals, and when we don’t achieve them we feel dejected. Small goals that deliver us with palpable progress will give us momentum on our climb toward elevating ourselves. It is far more beneficial and impactful to set reachable goals that create momentum towards our ambitious vision.
The goal of More Than Different is to become ubiquitous and have the phrase MTD be renowned as a lifestyle paradigm, one for all to embody. However, we’d be remiss to look past the milestones and fail to celebrate our arrival at the small yet significant wins along the way. Rome wasn’t built in one day. But it was built brick by brick for hundreds of years. That’s discipline and one day, that’ll be MTD’s story.
Reaching your pinnacle as an individual is going to be the greatest challenge we face. When you look for the small victories along the way, you can be reminded why you ambitiously set out to go after this vision in the first place. Like we said, it’s easy to be motivated before the journey has begun but finding motivation when you’re apathetic, is what will take you to a place few will ever go. That’s discipline.
Our Goals vary, our lifestyles vary, our visions vary but discipline will take you to your desired destination regardless of your road.
Be present in all the steps along the way rather than trying to sprint to the top of the hill because otherwise, you’ll miss the moments that make the journey so damn worth it.
Brendan McNamara
Co-Founder of MTD
Rowan Paoletti-Newton
MTD Blog Writer