Discipline is a choice. There is no such thing as a person born disciplined. There are just people who choose to pursue a life of discipline and those who don’t.
Daniel Goleman, in his ground-breaking book, Emotional Intelligence, which you should read, discusses the “Marshmallow Experiment.” At an early age, a set of children were told to sit at a table in a room for an hour, and were given one marshmallow. They were told that if they did not eat the marshmallow during that one hour, they would be rewarded with an entire bag of marshmallows. If they ate the single marshmallow, they wouldn’t receive any more.
It turns out that the children, who at an early age had the discipline to resist the marshmallow, were more successful later in life in terms of financial wealth, education, and satisfying relationships.
When I first read this book (during law school), I thought to myself, “Well, so much for me. I’m sure I’d eat the one marshmallow now, let alone when I was five years old.” I’ll agree that, for some of us, it’s not the most encouraging story.
But my message to you is that you feel like you can’t resist the marshmallows of life, then you’re in good company. Help is on the way. Take heart from this simple truth:
It’s never too late to learn discipline!
So, if you feel like saying, “I wasn’t born with discipline,” then I feel like saying: I wasn’t either! We weren’t born with the ability to eat without help. We didn’t leave the hospital and go buy cigars for our dad’s friends. We learned those things. Likewise, we can learn discipline. If you can read this book, you can learn discipline. In fact, the decision you made to read it in the first place is part of your decision to do anything it takes to become successful at disciplining yourself. The fact that you’ve made it this far in the book is another sign. Believe me, there are a lot of people out there who want to be successful but who aren’t willing to do whatever it takes to get what they want.
So, to summarize, you’ll find that all of us were born with the potential to discipline ourselves. I’ll also remind you that I’m not asking you to have as much discipline as a Marine drill sergeant. I’m asking you to develop as much discipline as you are able. Your greatness is achieved by increasing your discipline, not by reaching Charles Atlas’ level of discipline. This bears repeating:
It’s perfectly fine to emulate another’s discipline, or learn from it. But you are not in a race or competition to acquire more of it than anyone else. You are only in a race against yourself. If comparing yourself to other people motivates you, then by all means do it. But be warned that there will always be someone else who appears to have more discipline or less discipline than you. You will always be happier if you simply strive to improve yourself, measuring your progress against your own abilities.
When my aunt completed her 400-page dissertation, one week before defending it, she breathed a sigh of relief and shut off her computer. The next day, when she awoke, she walked to her computer and – tried to turn the computer back on so she could print the dissertation.
And the computer bombed.
She gasped. Was the entire dissertation lost? Would she have to start writing all over? First tears, then fear.
What would she do?
Right there, she determined that she would borrow a friend’s computer and start writing immediately. She faced all of those sorrows, all of those people she had treated – she faced them all over again as she started to write.
She finished on time. But she could have easily made a different choice.
My wife and I tried to have children for 6 years. Finally, one January evening, when we were just a week away from being certified to adopt by the state of West Virginia, we discovered that our greatest dream came true: she was pregnant. Two months later, the ultrasound showed that he was a boy. A month later, we decided him to name him after my father and I. We bought a crib, a stroller, clothes.
Five months later, we raced to the hospital at 1am because I couldn’t detect a heartbeat when I leaned my ear against her womb.
An hour later we started to lose hope.
An hour after that the doctor told us that there was no hope for our son.
And later that same morning, on September 23, 2003, my wife had to give birth – naturally – to our dead son. Could she have chosen to give up? Sure. Would anyone have criticized her? Absolutely not. Instead of taking on a defeated attitude, my wife bravely cried and pushed and cried and pushed. The doctor had told her that under the circumstances, her labor would last 12 to 18 hours.
It lasted 2.
It took discipline for my wife to simultaneously lose hope that her dreams would come true on that day, but still give birth. It took discipline for her to trust that another child would come and not become furious with me, or with God, or with the doctors. This doesn’t mean that she wasn’t heartbroken. What I’m saying is that she made a conscious choice to discipline herself under the most difficult of circumstances.
Choosing discipline isn’t easy. But it’s worth it.
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