REGRET CAN BE AVOIDED WITH THIS SIMPLE HABIT

by Chad Howse

Breezing through the pages of Titan, the biography of John D. Rockefeller, I realized the secret to him becoming the richest man in the world was the same secret that Andrew Carnegie used. I continued reading and realized that Napoleon Bonaparte used this same habit, and when he lost the habit, he failed. Theodore Roosevelt, Hemingway, Bill Gates, Tim Ferris, Warren Buffett, it doesn’t matter the name nor the profession, when success is attained it comes as the result of a habit every one of us have access to.

This habit is discipline, and it doesn’t matter if you’re talking about making more money or spending less, living an adventurous life, or building a better body...your desire to succeed, to lose fat, to become fit, acquire wealth, experience adventure, or just about anything else, hangs on your ability to be disciplined. Discipline gives you the freedom to realize your potential, and to have the things you want in life.

No matter what your idea of success is, you need to ACHIEVE (do something) to get it. Accomplishment is why you're here, it's using your talents and your interests to CREATE a great life instead of wishing it would happen (which is what most people do).

If you don't succeed you're going to find yourself on your death bed regretting that you didn't do more and become more. Regardless of whether success looks like a leaner/more fit/healthier body, a better job, a billion dollars, boats, mansions, or simply creating a quality life, it all depends on your ability to be disciplined.

Why aren’t you as successful as you COULD be? SIMPLE (think about it…): Are you as disciplined as you could be?  Are you focusing on the right things, that is, the steps and habits that will lead you to what you want? If you haven’t taken the right steps or formed the necessary habits required for your vision to become reality, you can hardly expect to get results.
No matter how audacious your goal is, the reason for your lack of success has nothing to do with innate intelligence or talent, but a lack of discipline, over time. The more focused and the more disciplined you are, the less time it will take you to accomplish your goal, no matter how improbable it may seem.

Why aren’t you disciplined? Our society sets you up to destroy your attempts at discipline. Think even in terms of distraction. We used to do our writing on typewriters, it’s now done on computers. With a typewriter there’s one option, do your work. With computers, there are endless options, and only one small part of them is your work.

Think about what we aspire to in our society. Thanks to things like social media, we now aspire to portray an image rather than becoming the person we want to become. This portrayal is led by “feel good” dialogues and consumerism which promotes acquiring debt, not value. We buy to fit in or to make others envious, using funds we really don’t have.

Our society trains us to lack discipline. Rather than reinforcing the habits that keep you average (or below) in comparison to who you can be and what you could accomplish, try a different approach. The code of discipline is simple, to be disciplined you have to practice discipline, but we all know this is easier said than done.

Discipline requires structure and direction, and if you don’t create the right structure, one that allows a degree of flexibility, you’re not going to remain disciplined for that long. Discipline without longevity isn’t discipline, it’s a fad, and it’s useless. On top of that, discipline commands that you have a clear idea of where you want to be, who you want to be, and what you want to accomplish.

Much of our quest to become disciplined can be justifiably spent on figuring out what we want to be disciplined on. Then there’s distractions and our own resistance. We may want to be disciplined, we may know what we should spend our time doing and what we want to accomplish, but we don’t actually do what we need to do.

We still fail to create the right habits and keep the bad ones even if we know what’s best for us. Smokers know that smoking is bad, yet they still do it even if they want to quit. Porn watchers do the same. Lazy people, the same. Overweight people, unfit people, people who spend too much. They all know what they should be doing, and yet they don’t do it. This means you can’t rely on willpower. You have to use every trick in the book, every tactic, tool, and app you have access to. You have to start small, then go bigger, but you have to start somewhere by taking action, even if only a small one.

So, rather than focus on a muscle building program or a money-making program or an investing program, why not focus on the single thing that each endeavor, each goal, each dream depends on? Another workout program won’t solve your problem if you don’t work to develop the disciple to use it. Rather than theory or 'inspiration', discipline needs to be trained as if it were a muscle. Like a muscle, it gets stronger every time you use it.

Whether you're trying to burn fat, build muscle (or both), persist longer, quit some bad habit or another, earn more money, keep more money (yes, they’re 2 different things…), or simply live a successful life, however you envision it, on your own terms, discipline will help you create the habits that will help you accomplish the goal. The shortcut you hope exists will never come.

Developing the simple habit of discipline allows you to accomplish anything, it's the one skill that's transferable throughout every goal, pursuit, and plan.

Instead of focusing on what you intend to accomplish, focus instead on the habits, the mindset, and skills that your goals depend on. Take action in developing the virtue that your goals need in order to be realized, discipline.  You're simply not going to get what you want in life without it.