No Excuses!: The Power of Self-Discipline

There are 999 other success principles that I have found in my reading and experience, but without self-discipline, none of them work. With self-discipline, they all work.

“There are a thousand excuses for failure but never a good reason.”
—MARK TWAIN

You must get out of yourself and your own preoccupations in order to get into other people and how they might be thinking and feeling.
Therefore, if you want to have a friend, you must first be a friend. If you want people to like you, you should first like them. If you want people to respect you, you should first respect them. If you want to impress others, you should first be impressed by them. In this way

“Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anyone else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard master to yourself and be lenient to everyone else.”

Another success principle is that “to achieve something that you have never achieved before, you must learn and practice qualities and skills that you have never had before.”

The rule is that “to become someone that you have never been before, you must do something that you have never done before.”

The payoff for developing high levels of self-discipline is extraordinary! There is a direct relationship between self-discipline and self-esteem:
• The more you practice self-mastery and self-control, the more you like and value yourself;
• The more you discipline yourself, the greater is your sense of self-respect and personal pride;
• The more you practice self-discipline, the better is your self-image. You see yourself and think about yourself in a more positive way. You feel happier and more powerful as a person.

Self-discipline is the ability to do what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not.

No more excuses! Do it or don’t do it—but don’t make excuses. Stop using your incredible brain to think up elaborate rationalizations and justifications for not taking action. Do something. Do anything. Get on with it! Repeat to yourself: “If it’s to be, it’s up to me!”

Losers make excuses; winners make progress. Now, how can you tell if your favorite excuse is valid or not? It’s simple. Look around and ask, “Is there anyone else who has my same excuse who is successful anyway?”

Perhaps the most important insight of all with regard to success is that to achieve greatly, you must become a different person. It is not the material things you accomplish or acquire that matter so much as it is the quality of the person you must become to accomplish well above the average. The development of self-discipline is the high road that makes everything possible for you