I wish I had met Walter “Smokey” Gordon, one of the original Band of Brothers. He died on April 19, 1997 at age 76. His life story, as remembered by his children, is recorded in my book, A Company of Heroes.

Those that knew him say he was an elaborate prankster, an intelligent conversationalist, and a courageous soldier. He was wounded at least three times.

Smokey parachuted into Normandy on D-Day where he was first wounded in the leg. He healed, rejoined his unit, and later fought valiantly in the battle of Operation Market Garden.

He was wounded for a second time in Bastogne on Christmas Eve, 1944, when a sniper’s bullet got him in the left shoulder. The bullet nicked his spinal column, which left him paralyzed from the neck down.

Smokey slowly recovered stateside, but for the rest of his life he suffered with chronic back and shoulder pain.

His children described how whenever someone greeted their father with a pat on the back, unaware of his disabilities, you could see a wince in his eye or face. Yet Smokey Gordon would never mention it.

A third wound came to plague his life. Although Smokey’s parents were never particularly religious, he had become a faithful Episcopalian, lay reader, and altar boy on his own as a child. But as an adult Smokey’s faith would suffer a terrible blow.

He had a twin sister, Cleta, whom he adored. Tragically, Cleta died in her early thirties of breast cancer, leaving behind a husband and small children. It was this wounding that became the turning point of Smokey’s religious life.

Following his sister’s death, anytime Smokey was asked about his faith, he would reply, “Any God that could take away the most beautiful creation to walk this earth, I want nothing to do with.”

I mention this third wound because it’s one that others can relate to, including me. God is all-powerful. Yet grief comes to all of us. So when prayers aren’t answered the way we hope, it’s common to question God, even to turn away from him.

Did Smokey Gordon ever heal from his third wound?

The family has deeply religious relatives with whom Smokey would engage in conversations and debate. Even late in life he could quote Scripture chapter and verse.

His children once wondered how a person who had lost his faith could know Scripture so well. They asked him, and his reply was typical of this untypical man, “Don’t you know that the Bible is the greatest book ever written?”

Due to his deep admiration for Scripture, I like to think Smokey Gordon eventually found peace with God, although I’m not certain.

Scripture teaches how God is good regardless of life’s circumstances, and that God has reasons for allowing tragedies to happen beyond what we can fully understand. One day God will set all things right, either in this life or the life to come.

The writer of Hebrews offers this invitation:

“The fundamental fact of existence is that this trust in God, this faith, is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living. It’s our handle on what we can’t see.”

If you’re struggling with similar questions of faith, my encouragement is to not let disappointment with God go unanswered.

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What follows are a few carefully chosen thoughts about advice—both giving and receiving it.

The context is parenting, and if you’re not a parent, just substitute for parenting whatever category of life you’ve sought advice for recently—business, marriage, book marketing, the best brand of donut. It doesn’t really matter.

Picture a Sunday morning nearly nine years ago. My wife and I lay in bed. Our 4-week-old baby girl lay beside us. I should have felt rested, cheerful, set for an early walk with the dog.

Instead, my shoulders hurt and my eyes bagged. Addy, our colicky newborn, had taken us through another loud and edgy night.

If you’ve never experienced a colicky newborn, just imagine a tomcat tied in a burlap bag with a ferret and a bagpipe. At one point my dear wife had actually banged her head against the wall. “I love this kid,” she said, “but she’s so high maintenance.”

High maintenance indeed. If Addy had been my girlfriend, we would have broken up by then. This little person was proving to be self-centered, opinionated, demanding, and loud. It was always about her, her, her.

Good thing she was cute.

Receiving advice is a way of life for parents of a newborn. Most advice-givers are well-meaning, I want to believe even today. Other advice-givers are cautious, caging their counsel with all types of sensitivities. Still others are tightlipped, protecting their knowledge like an insider stock tip.

My older brother, for instance. He and his wife had two children already, and I’d phoned him the week earlier looking for guidance.

“You’ll figure it out,” was all he said.

I know now there was a lot of truth to that—it put the responsibility on us and our intuition. That helped when the only constant about the advice we were receiving was its inconsistency.

In those first few difficult months, Mary and I read books, phoned advice lines, and talked to friends with older children. We heard some good stuff, but it was all over the board. The advice pointed us in different directions, and few of the recommendations matched up.

Like this . . .

A few weeks after we’d brought our daughter home from the hospital, a neighbor and his wife visited.

The man spoke of child-rearing with the voice of an expert. He had five children and reassured us right away we parents are an easily manipulated lot. With cool certainty, he painted pictures of the disasters that would strike if we didn’t organize our baby’s agenda from dusk to dawn. “Scheduling is the only sure way,” he said. He scanned the horizon with steely eyes.

As he talked, the man’s wife stood behind him shaking her head and mouthing the word no. On the way out she whispered, “Everything he told you is completely wrong.”

Two contradictory views from the same couple. It didn’t get any better than that.

My approach to giving and receiving advice about parenting was solidified one day soon after Addy’s birth when I went shopping for pacifiers.

Addy had been howling nonstop for a few days. One book had said to use a pacifier anytime you want, another had said to wait a few weeks. We decided to give it a shot, so Mary stayed home with Addy, while I went hunting.

Back in 15 minutes, I thought.

At the baby super-duper store, my jaw dropped. Columns of pacifiers stretched for 30 feet. There were traditional nubby-looking plugs. Organic-composites. Dentally-certified retainers. Titanium-alloy, high-tech marvels. I stood in the pacifier aisle for half an hour, reading boxes, scratching my head.

In the end I bought three pacifiers, and Addy hated them all.

Clearly then, I concluded, child-rearing experts don’t exist. If they did, the directions would have been plain, and at least one of the pacifiers I’d bought would have worked.

Ah well.

In the years since, the plethora of pacifiers has put advice giving and advice receiving into perspective for me.

I know now that in most gray areas of life, such as parenting, book marketing, business, marriage, and which donut to buy, some advice works, and some doesn’t.

In the end, my older brother’s advice continues to ring true—for me, and I’m sure it will for you, too.

You’ll figure it out.

Question: What advice have you received lately? Did it work? Or not?

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I want to put in a good word for actor Neal McDonough. I don’t claim to know the man. Not closely, anyway. But what I’ve seen of him, I admire.

A few years back I was the writing collaborator for Lt. Buck Compton’s memoir, Call of Duty. Neal had portrayed Buck in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, so I contacted Neal to gather input for the book’s epilogue.

Neal was in France at the time shooting a movie, and he and I spoke by phone for about 30 minutes, then corresponded by e-mail several more times as the edits of the epilogue were passed back and forth.

Neal talked about how Buck Compton had changed his life in two big ways. Before Neal landed the role in Band of Brothers, he had been acting in professional roles for about a decade but hadn’t done anything major, just independent films and smaller roles. He’d even considered giving up acting and had moved from Hollywood back to his hometown of Cape Code to reevaluate his career.

Band of Brothers landed huge, and after portraying Buck, Neal McDonough’s phone never stopped ringing. He went on to act in a number of hit movies and TV shows, including Flags of Our Fathers, Minority Report, Boomtown, and Justified. He’s the Paul Newman of our generation.

Another big life change for Neal has a connection to the filming of Band of Brothers, and to his travel to London for the project. On his first day in the city, he and two friends were in a pub where Neal met a beautiful 6’3” model from South Africa named Ruvé Robertson. They were married in 2003 and today have four young children.

A few months back, Buck Compton turned 90, and a big birthday celebration was held for him in Burlington, Washington, his hometown. Neal and Ruvé, along with James Madio, Michael Cudlitz, and Richard Speight, Jr. (three other actors from Band of Brothers) flew up from Los Angeles for the day to wish him well. It was the first time I had met Neal in person, and he greeted me with a big hug.

We didn’t have the opportunity to talk much, as the party was packed. But what stood out to me was how gracious, gentle, and honoring Neal was toward his wife throughout the event. Neal spoke from the mic and thanked Buck profusely. If it wasn’t for Buck, Neal would have never met Ruvé. Neal spoke through tears, and when he came off the stage, he gave Ruvé a passionate kiss.

Skeptics would say he was showboating because of the crowd. But I doubt it. Here’s why.

In 2010, Neal lost some $1 million because he refused to do a sex scene in ABC’s series Scoundrels. The script called for him to make love on screen with co-star Virginia Madsen. Neal said no and was fired. (He had also turned down sex scenes with Nicollette Sheridan when acting in Desperate Housewives.)

Critics had a field day. They called Neal McDonough a prude, a fool, and a hypocrite. He’d do scenes involving violence, just not sex.

Whatever.

I doubt if Neal’s a goody-two-shoes. And you’ve got to be smart to make it in his career. I’d venture to say he doesn’t object to doing violent scenes because there’s no doubt in his mind he’s acting in those. In everyday life, he doesn’t struggle with the temptation of grabbing a gun and killing a man.

But Neal knows he’s red-blooded, same as any man. Hollywood has got a horrible track record of infidelity. Neal doesn’t do sex scenes because he wants to safeguard his integrity. That’s plain smart.

When it comes to Hollywood, you can have your rudeness, your bad taste, your impropriety. But I’ll take an actor any day with a generous heart, dignity, and style.

Neal McDonough, I raise my glass.

May you continue to lead well.

Question:

What traits do you admire most in a man?

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In ages past, life required fewer decisions. You married Sally, the only eligible girl in the county. Your daddy worked as an oat farmer, and you did too. You drove a Model T, and it was painted black.

By contrast, options abound these days. Your university offers 300 potential majors and 3,000 potential spouses. You can drive a Subaru, Scion, Saab, or Suzuki. With 200 TV channels, (not to mention TiVo, DVDs, Netflix, and Hulu), you can flip through reruns of Matlock until your remote control explodes.

Here’s a fundamental rule of decision-making. When you say yes to one thing, you say no to another. That’s why decision making is difficult. One door opens and another shuts tight.

Having endless choices today means it’s easier than ever to become stuck in the mire of analysis-paralysis. A big decision lies before you, and you hope to leave your options open for as long as possible. So you hem and haw, dilly and dally, and delay the inevitable.

But by remaining undecided, you’ve actually made a choice. You’ve inadvertently chosen a big fat pile of . . . nothing!

And when you choose nothing, then nothing happens. For instance:

• Your career stays stagnant.

• The girl grows impatient and dumps you.

• Your marriage suffers because you’re too chicken to get that vasectomy.

So how does a leader make decisions?

Below are five principles of sound decision-making.

1. Start with prayer.

You might be a stringent atheist who thinks prayer is a load of dishwater. If so, skip to the next point.

Yet I place prayer in first place for a reason. If you’re a person with any modicum of faith, then you may find that sometimes you’ve positioned prayer dead last, and that needs to change.

Why? The epistle of James lays it out bluntly and boldly. “If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him.”

Start by praying, then proceed.

2. Write out the pros and cons.

Do your research. Chart the practical ramifications. Make your list and check it twice.

Each decision contains both opportunities and challenges. If you buy a house then you won’t be a renter anymore. If you marry a girl then you won’t be single anymore.

You’re a smart cookie. Ask yourself, when it comes to choosing either X or Y, which direction appears most prudent?

3. Seek advice.

A wise leader seldom makes decisions in a vacuum. He invites input from a small cadre of trusted advisors. He purposely allows them to ask him hard questions before a decision is made.

Ask yourself: What do wise people think is the right decision for me to make?

4. Wait 24 hours.

Most big decisions don’t need to be made instantly.

This principle particularly applies to going to war, getting married, or having your girlfriend’s name tattooed across your chest. A wise leader knows when to walk out of the Lamborghini showroom. He refuses to buy on impulse.

Yet the principle of patience can also be carried too far. It’s best to give yourself a reasonable deadline to mull your decision—a day, a week, or a year. Then pull the trigger.

5. Do a gut-check.

Peace is underrated, particularly that intangible soul-deep type of peace that’s hard to describe other than by the phrase, “You know when you know.”

How does something truly sit in your stomach? Imagine yourself making a decision, and then imagine yourself living with it over time.

Ask yourself: Can I truly live with this choice?

Okay, you’ve got the principles. What big decision do you need to make?

Mull your decision. Then make it.

Question: What’s an important decision you made, and how did you make it?

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A few weeks back, I told you how I had become sick my senior year of college from too much stress, and how one thing that helped me heal was the simple practice of going for a walk on a daily basis.

Another thing I did toward the end of that year produced a helpful long term perspective to the stuff of life.

I saw a counselor.

I didn’t want to go at first. Even 20 years ago, it wasn’t as common as it is today to see a psychologist, and there was a deep-seated pride in me that said, “I’m not nuts. There’s no way I’m going to see a shrink.”

But the wise words of a university professor helped change my mind.

“Listen, Marcus,” he said. “Life can get complicated these days. We go to a mechanic when our car needs to be fixed. We go to an accountant to get help with our taxes. What makes you think you can handle your emotional life all on your own?”

“Emotional life?” I said. “I’m a guy—I’m not supposed to know what an emotion is. Sometimes I get hungry for deep dish pepperoni pizzas—is that an emotion?”

I went.

I saw the counselor four or five times, and I learned pretty quickly that a counselor’s role is not to solve your problems. I think I was hoping he’d do that, but it doesn’t work that way.

Rather, a counselor’s role is to offer objectivity and insight. It’s to help you cut through the forest, see the trees, and work toward solutions yourself.

Early in our sessions, the counselor drew me a helpful diagram to illustrate how easy it is to let our objectivity get clouded so we’re not seeing correctly, and, conversely, what a difference an unclouded worldview makes.

He drew a line on a piece of paper, and on the far side he wrote this word: catastrophe.

—————————————————————-CATASTROPHE

One harmful extreme people lean toward, the counselor explained, is viewing all their problems in an overly important light. Like, Oh no, my friend said so and so, and now it’s the end of the world.

That’s bad news if you want good health. Few things in life are actually a catastrophe. Avoid this extreme.

On the other side of the paper he wrote another word: indifference.

INDIFFERENCE————————————————–CATASTROPHE

Another harmful extreme people lean toward, he explained, is the tendency to shrug everything off. These people experience real problems, but they pretend the problems are no big deal. Like, I’ve got cancer. Oh well. Easy come, easy go.

That doesn’t work either. When problems happen, they’re real, and if something is bugging you, it should be dealt with. Avoid the extreme of indifference.

In the middle of the sheet he wrote a final word: reality.

INDIFFERENCE——————–REALITY——————–CATASTROPHE

Reality is always what to aim for. Problems are seldom catastrophic, but at the same time, you don’t want to be indifferent to them, either.

The balance is to seek reality, see problems in perspective, learn what you can do about life’s hard stuff, and discern what you simply need to let lie.

That’s a diagram that’s helped me enormously over the years. When the stuff of life happens, it helps sort out an appropriate response.

Question: When bad things happen, what helps you know what to do?

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I was interviewing T.I. Miller the other day, a 92-year-old WWII veteran who fought in Guadalcanal and New Britain, and someone I featured in my previous blog. One of his stories helped put things into perspective for me when it comes to the tendency to complain about work.

I mean, most days I really love my job. But it’s fairly easy for me—or for anyone else for that matter—to gripe about how hard we have it these days.

I don’t doubt that genuinely difficult experiences exist at people’s work—including mine. But what I’ve noticed over the years is that grousing about any job is a familiar conversation topic around any workplace water cooler.

Perhaps too familiar.

Mr. Miller came home from the war, married his childhood sweetheart, and found the only job a young man without education could get in 1945 in West Virginia—mining coal.

One of his first positions was “cleaning belt,” a dusty, heavy job done each day for hours in the belly of underground darkness.

As a sidelight, back when the troops were in the murk of the Pacific, they had encountered rats, mosquitoes, and stagnant swamps. Many men came down with malaria. Mr. Miller took his regular dose of quinine and somehow avoided the misery of an outbreak until he came back to the States.

Strange thing about malaria—you never really get over it. It camps out in a body’s spleen, Mr. Miller pointed out, and you battle it the rest of your life.

In the first 10 years after the war, Mr. Miller suffered some 42 bouts of malaria—a disease that exhibited itself in fever, chills, and aches so bad you thought your body was going to rattle apart, he said. The disease can strike without warning, anytime, anywhere.

One day Mr. Miller was down in the coal mine cleaning belt when he felt a malarial fever coming on. He mind swirled in delirium, and the resulting hallucinations reflected the horror he’d faced during the war.

He recorded the experience in his 2001 self-published book titled War and Work:

One day as I shoveled, the old chill began to shake me, and the sweat stood out on my forehead. The black coal dust mingled with the salty taste, and I wiped my face with a dirty glove.

I glanced over at the moving belt and blinked my eyes. I shook my head to clear it, and looked again. A dead Japanese soldier rode by on the belt.

I grabbed a timber, shook myself, and began to count silently. One, two, three, four, five, six. I was here. I was there.

There went some more bodies on the belt. Again I blinked, shook myself, and began repeating, “I am here. I am here.”

Mr. Miller knew he needed to get to the surface—fast. Another miner sensed he was in trouble and helped him get up to sun. In the daylight, the apparitions disappeared, and Mr. Miller spent the next 20 days in the VA hospital recovering from his fever.

Thinking about that story helps me put my work into perspective.

I might have had a bad day today. But at least I’m not down in the darkness of a coal mine fighting off malarial attacks while having hallucinations of dead Japanese soldiers.

A thought like that goes a long way toward me being grateful.

Question: What are you most thankful for at your work?

Link: http://www.amazon.com/War-Work-Autobiography-Thurman-Miller/dp/0595181740

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I want to tell another story about T.I. Miller, a 92-year-old WWII vet I interviewed recently who fought on Guadalcanal and New Britain.

When it came to war, Mr. Miller had seen it all. Charging banzai attacks. Severed heads. Bloody arms, legs, and torsos. The works.

After he came home, a man doesn’t forget these things instantly, he said.

I asked him what helped. This was his answer:

What helped? My wife and family were a big help, especially my wife, Recie. At the same time, it’s something you gotta just do yourself. The secret, I found out, is just to stay busy. There were no government programs to help back then. No therapists to see. Nothing like that.

I was born and raised out in the country. So after I came back from the war, I built me and Recie a house out there close to where I’d grown up. I got out there and roamed around in the mountains. That’s what helped.

One time they closed the mines down for three months. Someone said, “Where you gonna go look for a job.” I said, “I ain’t. I’m gonna spend the summer out in the sunshine.”

And I did. I took a two-pound double-bladed axe, walked a half mile up above where I lived. We had a field there, and I cut down big trees and cut them into fence posts. All I had was that axe. I made my own mallet and split those trees myself.

I got me a half acre of ground, plowed it up, and had a field. That same summer I grew potatoes, corn, and beans. The whole summer I spent growing things I wanted to. I’d be out in the woods at daylight. I just worked like that and built myself back up.

Notice three key actions in Mr. Miller’s plan to heal. I’m not a therapist, but I’d consider these important components to helping anybody out of a hard spot.

1. He busied himself with straightforward, non-emotional work.

The war had taxed Mr. Miller’s ability to cope. During those years of horror, he had experienced too many events larger than himself. Splitting wood helped him connect with a simpler world.

2. He got active, outside.

Fresh air, sunshine, nature, and physical exercise helped him regain a sense of security and peacefulness. Notice he didn’t turn to alcohol, drugs, or any such trappings that only result in harm.

3. He could see what he accomplished each day.

Plenty of beneficial activities have non-identifiable benchmarks, but it’s much harder for a man doing this kind of work to feel good about what he’s done. By splitting wood and growing a garden, Mr. Miller could see clear progress on a regular basis. At the end of each day he could point to a pile of fence posts and say, “There it is. I did that.”

If you know a returning veteran, or anyone for that matter struggling with a dark place, please consider passing this article along.

The advice doesn’t come from me. It comes from someone who was there, survived, healed, and went on to thrive with the rest of his life.

Question: Have you ever been in a dark place? What’s the best thing you did to help you heal?

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Gather ‘round boys, and listen in.

This here piece of advice I got years ago from Crazy Ned Van der Meyer, an 88-year-old Holstein farmer living on a lushly plowed dirt patch in Custer, Washington.

Ned had fathered six kids and been happily hitched to the same good woman since he was 20 and she was 17. He knew powerful secrets about marriage, he said. Yet what he told me sounded too easy to be true, and when I dared question its credibility, Ned grinned like a Buick and answered cryptically, “Well, when it comes to thick headedness and wise living, you know the Dutch.”

I just shrugged.

“Now, you forget about marriage books,” Ned went on to say, poking my shoulder with his finger. “Too many words, and they muddle your mind. Therapists cost money. And don’t ever go to any of them marriage seminars, ‘cept to get busy with your teeth at the potluck afterward. Near every second married couple in this country is getting divorced these days, so none of the advice from those experts amounts to a hill of cow manure. That’s what I figure.”

I was all ears.

“Here’s what you do,” Ned said, his voice hushed to a whisper. “When you come home from work each day, the first thing you do inside the front door is give your wife a 15-second kiss on the lips.”

I nodded, waiting for the rest of the advice.

“That’s it,” Ned said flatly.

“That’s it?” I asked.

“You might want to chomp a stick of Wrigley’s so you don’t taste like a coffee cup,” Ned added, “and as yer kissing her you can count to 15 in yer mind if you want. Go on and picture it. One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five. Fifteen seconds is a long time when it comes to a daily smooch. Scientists will tell you it sets the chemicals in yer brain to firing. But I don’t know nothing about science. I just figure it sets both of your dispositions right, and everything else good will come from that.”

Years have passed, and Crazy Ned Van der Meyer is gone now. In his honor, I’m passing along that advice from Ned to you and letting it stand.

First thing inside the front door, greet your wife with a 15-second kiss on the lips.

Go on, give it a try.

Question: What other sound marriage advice have you heard?

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Two summers ago I found myself at a book signing event seated alongside seven of the original Band of Brothers, the men of Easy Company who have become symbols of heroism in World War II.

I sat near the tail end of a long table. The men and I were on one side, and a crowd of well wishers on the other. The line of people in Pennsylvania that day waiting for autographs and to shake hands with the men stretched for—literally—an hour in the hot sun.

To my left sat William “Wild Bill” Guarnere, and to my right sat Edward “Babe” Heffron. To tell you I felt out of place between two legendary WWII heroes as well as with the rest of the men in that lineup is an understatement. But two of my books were there, being frequently passed down the line and signed by the vets. Thus I sat, scribbled my name, and kept my mouth shut.

After a few hours, Mr. Guarnere announced he’d had enough. He doesn’t sit well for long. Wild Bill gathered his crutches and left for beers with a woman half his age. He’s a colorful figure, which you know if ever you’ve seen him. A larger-than-life American hero.

Babe Heffron signed for the rest of the day, pausing only to debate baseball and curse anyone who wasn’t a Phillies fan. Babe is less flamboyant than Bill, and bluntly authentic, with never a hint of pretense to anyone in line.

We spoke directly a few times, Babe and me.

Babe asked who I was and why I was there. When I showed him my book, he raised an eyebrow. “Well, good for you,” he said, his voice like gravel.

When people in line kept calling him “Mr. Heffron,” and he kept saying, “Just call me Babe,” I said, “Mr. Heffron was your father’s name.”

And Babe laughed. “That’s a good one,” he said. “I’ll have to remember that.”

After a dozen autograph seekers had looked disappointed and asked Babe where was “his good buddy Bill,” I said, “I’m curious if you get tired of being asked that.”

And Babe grinned wryly. Bill and Babe are best of friends—(read their book)—but there was transparency in Babe’s eyes, too. You could tell that the same question repeated so many times had irked him.

I left the lineup early and went to secure a wheelchair for one of the vets who’d been having difficulty walking. I had been helping this man throughout the weekend of the event.

As I headed back to the signing table from the holding station where the wheelchairs were kept, Babe was already headed for the street, homeward bound. He was surrounded by well-wishers and he walked with confident, easy strides.

When he spotted me, he broke away, headed over to me and shook my hand, then kept going without another word.

I’d like to think we connected that day, a military hero and a young author, signing books together in the Pennsylvania summertime.

Yet I doubt if the connection was forged by the books or the jokes or even the deeper question I’d asked and Babe had been gracious enough to field. Because there’s one more important thing to tell about that day. I think it’s what won Babe Heffron’s respect in the end. It speaks highly of the type of man he is, and the depth of brotherhoods he’s formed over the years. And I mention this last bit of the story out of tribute to Babe, not me.

The man who helps Babe travel, a man who knows Babe well, pulled me aside and said, “Babe doesn’t do that, you know. He doesn’t shake hands like that with just anyone.”

“I wonder why he did that for me,” I asked, and shrugged.

The man pointed to the wheelchair. “Because you’re taking care of his friend.”

Question: What’s the best thing a friend has ever done for you?

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Trends come and go in the commercial publishing industry. A while ago, everything was paradigm this and paradigm that. Then paradigm became overused, and any editor today will slash the word with his red pen. I encountered another editor who banned proactive and partnering as evil, bureaucratic words. Special, very and interesting are bland, colorless words that definitely needed to die.

Another despised word nowadays is discipline.

Yet that’s a word that needs to live. And I hope we don’t lose it—either in etymology or in practice.

Its fuller definition involves much more than putting a child in a timeout or sending a teen to the principal’s office. Discipline, in its truest form, is an activity that improves a skill. Success in business requires discipline. A gold medal hockey team is disciplined in its performance.

The challenge as an author is to sell discipline when modern publishers want you to put hip twists on things. Bestselling books are ripe with quick fixes, and, although the benefits of discipline are big, they are seldom felt immediately.

“Discipline—ugh!” an editor e-mailed me recently. “That’s your grandfather’s word. Discipline connotes pain. Can’t you find a better way to say what you mean?”

I pushed back on his counsel. The word might be stodgy, even pejorative, but I’m a fan of the word myself and of the concepts behind it.

Here’s what I mean. Sure, discipline involves pain. It’s not always comfortable or convenient. But pain is inevitable in life. And every man must pick the pain he’d rather have. You either pick the pain of DISCIPLINE. Or you pick the pain of REGRET.

There are no other options.

Consider the following:

• Discipline wakes a man at 6:30 a.m. to go for his 2 mile jog. It’s cold outside and dark, and he’d rather stay in bed. Sure, that’s painful.

or

• Regret lands him in the hospital at age 52 from a heart-attack.

• Discipline permits a man to let a stupid driver fly by him unimpeded on the freeway. Sure, it grates on a man’s ego. Hey—that louse needs to be taught a lesson. It takes restraint and a cool head to not floor it, swerve around that muttonhead, and flip him the bird.

or

• Regret lands both drivers in the morgue.

• Discipline installs filtering software on man’s computer. It’s inconvenient, sure, and might slow the computer. It might be embarrassing to explain why you want to safeguard your integrity like that.

or

• Regret sees a man’s self-respect disintegrate and his marriage fall apart.

Catch my drift? In this day and age of lighthearted masculinity and short-range living, it’s not popular anymore to advocate discipline. But you can’t avoid pain. You can only pick the one you want.

One pain is preemptive. The other operates in hindsight.

One pain moves a man forward. The other sets him back.

One is wise. The other is foolish.

Discipline: it’s a perfectly good word. Better than regret.

I say leave it in.

Question: What’s an example of a discipline that seems costly at the time, but in the end actually reaps big results?

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