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

Perhaps the most important insight of all with regard to success is that to achieve greatly, you must become a different person.

It’s not that you don’t know what to do, but rather that you don’t have the discipline to make yourself do what you should do, whether you feel like it or not.

What Grey found was that successful people are more concerned with “pleasing results,” whereas failures were more concerned about “pleasing methods.” Successful, happy people were more concerned with the positive, long-term consequences of their behaviors, whereas unsuccessful people were more concerned with personal enjoyment and immediate gratification.

Motivational speaker Denis Waitley has said that the top people were those who were more concerned with activities that were “goal achieving,” whereas average people were more concerned with activities that were “tension relieving.”

Self-discipline requires delayed gratification, the ability to put off satisfaction in the short term in order to enjoy greater rewards in the long term.

Losers make excuses; winners make progress.

Stop using your incredible brain to think up elaborate rationalizations and justifications for not taking action.

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”