Discipline is never an end in itself, only a means to an end.
If you are playing repertoire material, you're stuck. There's not huge amounts you can do.
Performance is a vehicle for entering different worlds of experiencing.
Purely by hard work, one can become an artist.
And if you are playing in several meters at once, there has to be a - not a rigid - but there definitely has to be a reference to a common pulse in the band.
Music so wishes to be heard that it sometimes calls on unlikely characters to give it voice.