Having Discipline

Having Discipline is a goal worth pursuing. Discipline today equates to freedom in the present and the future. I think people are “free” when they have a the will and the means to pursue personal goals. If you have a day job like me, it can be easy to get caught up in work goals. Then you spend all your time trying to accomplish your daily work tasks. It’s great to accomplish work goals. Those things need to be done when you have a job and rely on it for income. However, I think people need to have personal goals that they pursue as well. Otherwise there is no work/life balance and people start to feel “LIKE — A — RO — BOT”.

A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder. Thomas Carlyle – from BrainyQuotes.com – please check their website out for tons of awesome quotes! 

As the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle stated, people need goals or they have no direction in life.

• An interesting bit of serendipity; I recently “Audibled” the Charles Dickens classic, A Tale of Two Cities. In researching Carlyle, I learned that his book about the French Revolution was the inspiration for the Dickens classic. I might write up a book review of A Tale of Two Cities sometime. I was thinking of doing a late summer into fall reading list. More to come there 🙂

In my early twenties I was a ship with no rudder. I had no goals for myself. Even in pursuing my education, I did it more for the company job than my own personal goals. In pursuing my education, I had to teach myself discipline. I had to learn goal setting. In trying to be a business professional, and trying to be a decent human, those principles have carried over. These things have helped me overcome my own “imposter syndrome”. We call discipline a practice because it’s a continuous effort. There is no perfect self-discipline. It about taking in the information that results from your decisions, evaluating those results, determining if it was a result you wanted or not, and then either adjusting, or reinforcing, that behavior based on what you learned from the evaluation. This links into some past concepts like breathing, continuous improvement, mindfulness practice, thinking outside the lizard brain, and goal setting. I was listening to a motivational compliation video on YouTube this morning and it really struck a chord. Besides having an amazing Les Brown section – one of my personal inspirations, this video is filled with great stuff! About 10 minutes into the video there is a great quote. I think this is Jocko Willink talking and he says, “Discipline yourself so you can free yourself and move forward into the future”. This whole video is full of great nuggets like that.

Having discipline in life now, will give us freedom to pursue goals we want in the future. Doing things that are difficult leads to freedom. Things that are difficult are often times the things that give the best rewards. Having discipline helps us get those rewards and that equates to new freedoms every time rewards are acheived. Thanks for reading! Be happy and healthy my friends!