Collin Govender, MD: Altron Karabina.

We’ve all read and heard motivational stories that light up the eyes of everyone hearing them. Sometimes there are popular ones that make their way around industry events, often being repeated at conferences or, more recently, on webinars. “This person made billions after the age of 60” and “that person rose from rags to riches and international acclaim”.

These stories are great as they show us what’s possible. It makes us feel that if this person can achieve this, so can I, right? Right, but it will take far more than feeling inspired and then motivated for a few days. Memes, motivational posters, stories – they are designed to create a spark. It’s why our eyes light up. But sustaining this spark requires fuel, and that’s where many people and businesses get it wrong.

Think back to the last time you heard an inspiring story and became motivated to grow further, succeed in life and re-energise your business. By the time the following Wednesday came around and the routine of daily life reminded you of the challenges in the real world, that motivation was probably not as strong as it was a few days prior.

David Goggins is a retired Navy SEAL, ultra distance athlete, and public speaker. He wrote a book in 2018 called Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind And Defy The Odds. In this book, using his signature tone, he reminds us that motivation is fleeting. It will only carry you so far until it dies away.

What then, is the fuel to keep the spark alive and turn it into a fire that can drive us to achieve new heights? Discipline and accountability. That’s the unspoken hard work, the hours and hours of commitment behind the scenes. That’s the fuel behind motivational stories.

From a business perspective, it’s about establishing the core disciplines that will keep you sustainable. That’s key – establishing where you are good and then showing the discipline to continue growing and honing skills, and then methodically expanding your circle of expertise and experience. Of course, there is a “boring” component – but that’s the price one must pay to build something sustainable, whether it is a career or business.

Nobody would for a second believe that every gruelling kilometre of Goggins’s record achievements was enjoyable and inspiring. On the contrary, it was painful, it was a battle with the mind, it was dealing with injury – but ultimately it was about showing the discipline required to take that next step. And then do it again.

Very well, you may ask, if discipline is the recipe to build sustainable successes, what precisely is discipline?

It’s about creating habits. It's around having cadence; it's about holding yourself and others accountable. This is good and bad accountability. If there is a success, celebrate it. If you or someone else has dropped the call, it must be called out and addressed. For this to work, we must look at ourselves in the mirror and ask: is what we are doing now helping or harming our goal?

If your goal is to run a marathon, will eating cookies and sitting on the couch instead of training help that goal? If you wish to build a strong, resilient, growing business unit, will allowing mediocrity to be pervasive in your team's help you achieve that? If you don’t like the answers, then hold yourself and your teams accountable.If you do like the answers, then celebrate the success. That’s how one builds predictability.

Of course, building this predictability takes resilience. An interesting concept shared by Goggins is that when our mind must deal with difficult circumstances, again and again, it develops a mind callus – the idea being that over time, this callus protects our mind from reopening wounds in the face of challenges. Instead, we’re able to continually break through adversity and demonstrate the resilience required to see our journey through to the end.

Ultimately, like feet landing on the tarmac for dozens of kilometres, it creates predictability and trust in the process. It’s the process that either takes us over the finish line or forces us to stop short.

Business leaders, employees, parents, spouses, students – we all have goals. We know where we would like to be in one, three, five years from now. Yes, read inspirational quotes and books, you must light the spark. But that spark requires the fuel of discipline and accountability, which builds resilience and elasticity, which is vital to sustainability and success.