The Power of Self - Discipline

The great secret of success is that there are no secrets of success. There are only timeless principles that have been proven effective throughout the centuries.

There's one special quality that you can develop that will guarantee your greater success, accomplishment and happiness in life. Of a thousand principles for success developed over the ages, this one quality or practice will do more to assure that you accomplish wonderful things with your life than anything else. The quality is so important that if you don't develop it to a high degree, it's impossible for you to ever achieve what you are truly capable of achieving. The quality that I'm talking about is the quality of self-discipline. It is a habit of practice, a philosophy and a way of living.

All successful men and women are highly disciplined in the important work that they do. All unsuccessful men and women are undisciplined and unable to control their behaviors and their appetites. When you develop the same levels of high personal discipline possessed by the most goal-oriented successful people in our society, you will very soon began to achieve the same results that they do. It's no miracle all great success in life is preceded by long sustained periods of focused effort on a single goal with the determination to stay with it until it is complete.

Throughout history, we find that every man or woman who achieves anything lasting and worthwhile had engaged in long often unappreciated hours, weeks, months and even years of concentrated discipline work in a particular direction. Fortunately, the quality of self-discipline is something that you can't learn by continuous practice over and over until you master it. Once you've mastered the ability to delay gratification, the ability to discipline yourself to keep your attention focused on the most important tasks in front of you there is virtually no goal that you cannot accomplish and no tasks that you cannot complete.

Successful men and women are those who work almost all the time on high-value tasks. Unsuccessful men and women are those who waste their time - by wasting the minutes and hours of each day on low value activities. You see, there is a crowding out principle in time and personal management. It simply says that if you spent all of your time on highly productive tasks by the end of the day, you will have crowded out all the unproductive activities that might have distracted you from your real work and from what's really important. On the other hand, if you spend your time on low value activities, the reverse happens. Those low value activities will crowd out the time that you need to complete the task that can make all the difference in your life. And the key to this attitude toward time and personal management is always self-discipline.

There are several disciplines that you need to develop if you want to achieve your full potential. The first of these is the discipline of goals. This means that you sit down with a pad of paper, a pen and ample time to think through and then make a written list of all the things that you want to accomplish in the next years. You organize the list into the various areas of your life, your career, your money, your family your health and the other parts that are important to you. Interesting me enough, if you can be clear about your goals and write them down. There's nothing that can stop you from achieving them. But if you're not clear, that means that you haven't written them down, there's nothing that can help you. You set priorities among your goals and rewrite your lists so that your most important goals are at the top. You then take a separate sheet of paper and you make a list of all the things that you can think of doing right now to move you toward the attainment of your most important goals.

Most people are trying to live their lives without clear specific written goals. This is the same as setting off across an unknown country without a road map, you may get somewhere eventually but it will take you much longer and it's far more likely that you will get lost and waste an enormous amount of time than if you planned your trip carefully with a road map and full information about the futur terrain before you started out.

The second discipline you need to develop for success is the discipline of planning. Many people think that they are too busy to plan or they don't give themselves enough time to plan. You will save ten minutes in execution getting the job done for every minute that you invest in planning. You will get a 1,000 percent return on your time investment by taking the time to think through in advance what you are going to do in the hours and days ahead.

I'd leave you a question today so you can comment your thoughts anout discipline. Is this self discipline important to you?