Although our portion of the greater mission seems to end when we die, our success is determined by how well we duplicate our efforts through others. If you have something of great value to others, the last thing you should want is for its value to die when you die. The greatest gifts are the gifts that keep on giving long after the giver is gone. Just as our personal calling and mission relates to the missions and callings of others, and just as we received a legacy, we must create a legacy to pass on to others and future generations. In that sense, our success is predicated upon the disciplined efforts of those who preceded us, our disciplined determination to complete our leg of the mission well, our willingness to duplicate ourselves, and the willingness of others to take up where we leave off.
Discipline and success must be modeled. We receive the modeling and then we pass it on as an improved model to others. Duplication is about reproducing and upgrading. Just as parents want their children to excel beyond their own achievements, we should want our successors to succeed beyond us. If students only stopped at the limitations of their teachers’ knowledge, new discoveries could never be made.
Being disciplined for success is having the vision to see that even those we train, and those we engage along the way, now become part of the mission that we inherited. The more powerful the mission, the greater the potential for production and reproduction. The more dedicated we are to our mission, the more likely we are to pass on something of value to those who come after us.