Forget motivation — The difference between your dreams & reality is discipline.
“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today” — Abraham Lincoln.
I used to be extremely lazy.
Each morning, I’d wake up later than intended, watch Netflix, order pizza, and complain about how I wasn’t becoming successful.
Procrastination was not just a habit. It was a lifestyle.
Let me explain.
I turned my financial safety net into a hammock & began paying for elegant meals, meeting with the biggest names in culture, and staying in fancy hotels while in Dubai. I was living “the good life”.
At least, that’s what I thought.
But despite an ever-increasing workload, I was delaying every single task until the following day.
“The difference between who you are, and who you want to be, are the actions you take”.
The truth is that I had become complacent. I was no longer working hard enough to achieve my goals. I was not putting in the blood, sweat & tears required to fulfil my ambitions.
Something had to change.
I realized that there was nothing magical about cultivating better habits. I simply had to put in the work every single day, and have faith that results would deliver over time.
“Self-Discipline is the ability to make yourself do what you should do when you need to do it, whether you feel like it or not.”
What most successful people realize is that discipline is the gateway to the accomplishment of every single goal within life. By learning how to leverage & apply it, these people can create habits that build foundations for their future.
Why Self-Discipline Is So Hard
Every single day, you have a choice of decisions that determine the fate of your future:
Do you get up on the first alarm each morning?
Do you prefer to read educational articles or watch funny YouTube videos?
Do you go on vacation this summer to relax or use that time to work on your side-hustle?
The choice is yours. But what becomes extremely difficult is having to decide between short-term & long-term pleasure. Just about all of us want to build self-discipline. After all, you wouldn’t even be reading this story if you didn’t.
But the problem lays in the fact that almost nobody wants to put in the work.
It’s why “get rich quick” schemes & diet pills are so prevalent in modern society. Instead of putting in the actual work to build wealth or eating healthy food accompanied by regular exercise, we are always looking for shortcuts.
There Are No Shortcuts to Any Place Worth Going
Remember — life doesn’t give you what you want. It gives you what you deserve.
If you want to be successful within your field, discipline is the only thing stopping your goals from becoming a reality.
Think about it.
Olympic athletes are not hitting snooze for 27 minutes before getting up & practising their sport.
Firefighters don’t abandon burning buildings when the flames get too hot.
Fortune 500 CEOs aren’t taking breaks for several months because “they don’t feel like it”.
“We must all suffer one of two pains, the pain of discipline, or the pain of regret. The difference is discipline weighs ounces, regret weighs tons.” — Jim Rohn
Find ways to encourage discipline into your daily routine. Because if you quit on the process, you are quitting on the result.