The phrase people use now is motivation motivation motivation. It is everywhere. But ask someone born or raised in the 1970s and you get a different ledger of values. They will tell you, often without ceremony, that you showed up. You did the thing even when you did not feel heroic. That instinct to depend on discipline rather than on a fluttering feeling has shaped households jobs and neighbourhood life in ways we barely credit.
Not nostalgia but a pattern
I do not argue that every family in the 1970s was stoic or joyless. I am saying the cultural grammar favoured steady habits over pep talks. The era produced fewer self help pep rallies and more visible rituals of obligation. Kids were walked to school in wet shoes because the day demanded it. Adults worked through ten hour shifts because the rota did not negotiate with moods. Small acts accumulated into a worldview where doing what must be done mattered more than waiting to feel like doing it.
How discipline looked then
Discipline then was dull and practical. It was the dinner table set at the same time every evening the same neighbour who fixed your bike and expected it back without fuss the manager who arrived before the meeting started because that was the job. Those microstructures were not sold as character building seminars. They were just how life was organised. That ordinariness meant discipline did not carry the weight of moralising rhetoric. It was ordinary scaffolding.
Motivation is theatrical. Discipline is plumbing.
We can admire a stirring speech or a trending challenge on social platforms. Those are theatrical and contagious. But the 1970s model had less patience for spectacle. It treated motivation as something that might arrive and then leave. People invested instead in making their environment do the heavy lifting. Routines were designed to survive bad moods bad weather and small domestic catastrophes. The invisible architecture of a life that works was built not on inspiration but on repetition.
Evidence from psychology
Grit is passion and perseverance for very long term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future day in day out. Not just for the week
Author
