Học cùng Zuri

 ---------------------Week 4------------------- Day 26: On the Long-Term Consequences of Your Choices  Whenever you are presented with a choice, ask yourself which option you would prefer to have taken in ten years.  —Erik D. Kennedy 25  Self-discipline is largely dependent on your ability to look into the future and imagine yourself not having taken the difficult choice today. If you paint the mental picture with enough detail, you won’t be able to bear the thought of letting the situation remain the same or getting worse.  A simple exercise of asking yourself which option you would prefer to have taken in ten years can help you avoid succumbing to temptations. And let’s not fool ourselves — it probably won’t work every time, but even if it doesn’t work every time, at least it will make you pause sometimes .  Let’s imagine that you’re torn between buying a new piece of furniture you don’t really need but like a lot, or saving that money for your retireme...

 -----------------------Week 4------------------------------ Day 25: On Starting Today  Don’t wait for tomorrow to do something you can do today.  —Spanish proverb  Have you been pondering starting on a new goal but are still procrastinating on it? Come up with the easiest, simplest, and quickest action you can take today to initiate momentum .  If you want to stop eating sugar, eliminate all chocolate bars from your house or choose one day a week during which you won’t eat sugar in any form. Take it from there, step by step.  If you want to start exercising on a regular basis, do three push-ups and three squats now or any other super quick exercise. Tomorrow, do one more repetition. Find a more suitable workout once you establish the basic habit of some exercise — even if it’s just a few push-ups a day.  If you want to start saving money, take just one dollar out of your wallet and put it in a jar. Yes, it won’t change anything today, but if you ad...

 ---------------Week 4-------------- Day 24: On Happiness Through Self-Discipline   It is one of the strange ironies of this strange life that those who work the hardest, who subject themselves to the strictest discipline, who give up certain pleasurable things in order to achieve a goal, are the happiest. When you see 20 or 30 people line up for a distance race in some meet, don’t pity them, don’t feel sorry for them. Better envy them instead.  —Bruce Hamilton  For a person who has never tested their self-discipline over a long period of time, it’s hard to believe that giving up pleasure can lead to immense happiness. Most certainly, it doesn’t feel that way when you’re fighting against the craving for chocolate, compare exercise to torture , or feel sad that you have to set money aside and can’t spend it on this new cool gadget.  However, in the long haul, based on my personal experience, subjecting yourself to a strict discipline does lead to a happier life...

 ---------------Week 4 ------------------- Day 23: On Disciplined Education  To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. The natural laziness of the mind tempts one to eschew authors who demand a continuous effort of intelligence. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.  —Aleister Crowley 23  The way you get information can affect your self-discipline. By getting your news from just one source and blindly  believing it, you run the risk of mental laziness. After all, why think about what the provided news really means or whether it’s even true in the first place? It’s the job of the newspaper or news site, isn’t it?  Take advantage of the opportunity to improve your self-discipline by exposing yourself to other points of view and thinking for yourself. It takes work and questioning your beliefs is uncomfortable, which results in a great exercise for your self-dis...

 ------------------Week 4----------------- Day 22: On Self-Discipline as Freedom  Self-discipline is a form of freedom. Freedom from laziness and lethargy, freedom from the expectations and demands of others, freedom from weakness and fear or doubt. Self-discipline allows a pitcher to feel his individuality, his inner strength, his talent. He is master of, rather than a slave to, his thoughts and emotions.  —H. A. Dorfman 22  Changing the way you think about self-discipline can help you become more self-disciplined. If you think about it in terms of deprivation and suffering, guess what! You’ll never find enjoyment in personal growth, and most likely will soon give up on your endeavors .  On the other hand, a person who thinks of self-discipline as a form of freedom will welcome opportunities to practice his or her self-control.  When facing temptations and fighting hard to not let them enslave you, remember that through letting go of them, you aren’t losi...

 --------------------Week 3--------------------- Day 21: On the Importance of Habits   Success is actually a short race — a sprint fueled by discipline just long enough for habit to kick in and take over.  —Gary Keller 20  Habits are like magical powers. The moment they kick in, you no longer need more than perhaps a modicum of self-discipline every now and then to continue performing the same action on a regular basis. What originally was extremely difficult to do is now something you largely do automatically, with little thought or willpower.  When something becomes a part of your routine, resistance drops to nearly zero. The challenging part is forming a new habit. Research suggests that it takes anywhere from 18 to 254 days 21 to form a new habit, with 66 days being the average time (not 21 days, as the common knowledge goes).  When working on your goals, remind yourself that it’s the first months that will be the hardest. Once the proper habits kick in...

 ------------Week 3------------ Day 20: On Taking Small Step s  We should discipline ourselves in small things, and from there progress to things of greater value. If you have a headache, practise not cursing. Don’t curse every time you have an earache. And I’m not saying that you can’t complain, only don’t complain with your whole being.  —Epictetus 19  Rome wasn’t built in a day, and you won’t build self-discipline overnight. If you’ve never been particularly disciplined, start small with easy challenges and then build on top of them.  Epictetus suggests a simple exercise of not complaining when you feel unwell. To make the first step even easier, he says that you don’t even have to immediately stop complaining at all — just stop complaining “with your whole being.”  Could you do it just for today? Once you successfully go one day without complaining with your whole being, how about two days? Three days? A week? A month? Could you then add other little ch...

 -------------------Week 3----------------------- Day 19: On Fighting Well  The important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win, but to take part; the important thing in life is not triumph, but the struggle; the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.  —Pierre de Coubertin 18  Nobody will ever give you any grades for your level of self-discipline. There’s no finish line and there’s no podium for the winners. The only purpose of building self-discipline is to conquer yourself — your own urges, your own weaknesses, and your own self- sabotaging behaviors.  It’s easy to forget this fact and assume that when you reach your goals you’re done. In fact, the moment you make your dreams come true isn’t the most important moment. It’s important, no doubt, but without the process leading to it, in itself it means little.  The most important moments are the moments of struggle, when you’re striving to fight even when you can barely stand...

 -----------------Week 3----------------- Day 18: On Higher Standard s  Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard master to yourself — and be lenient to everybody else.  —Henry Ward Beecher 17  The only standards that should concern you are your own standards. If you act in accordance with the standards of the majority of people, you’ll be overweight, unfit, unhealthy, lazy, hating your job, not having enough time for your family, and in debt.  I sometimes get flak for my goals. “You’re already slim. Why do you still watch your diet?” “Why do you save so much money? You should live it up!” “Can’t you live like a normal person, instead of waking up at 5 a.m. and going to sleep as early as 8 p.m.?”  By the standards of the person criticizing me, I should have stopped improving myself a long time ago. According to my standards, the growth should never end. I always ...

 ---------------Week 3----------- Day 17: On Rising from the Ashes of Failure  A setback has often cleared the way for greater prosperity. Many things have fallen only to rise to more exalted heights.  —Seneca the Younger 16  No matter how self-disciplined you are, there’s no escaping the fact that sometimes you’ll stumble . Perhaps you’ll eat a piece of a cake instead of a salad. Maybe you’ll skip a workout out of laziness. It’s possible that when your efforts result in a failure, you’ll lose the self-discipline to continue and revert back to your old undesirable habits.  It’s all par for the course, and the sooner you accept, it, the easier it will be to handle the setbacks once they occur. However, don’t consider your failures a useless waste of time and energy; a failure can often present new opportunities or lead to important realizations.  I failed to learn how to play tennis despite putting considerable amount of time, energy, and money into it. H...

 --------------------Week 3------------------- Day 16: On Self-Relianc e  A man then must stand erect, not be kept erect by others.  —Marcus Aurelius 15  There’s no doubt that surrounding yourself with people who support your goals is helpful. It’s easier to exercise with a friend, diet along with your spouse, or belong to a community of frugal people.  However, as Marcus Aurelius says, you need to beware of relying too much on others.  If the only reason why you exercise is because you’re doing it with a friend, the moment they drop it, you’ll likely revert to the old ways, too.  If you’re on a diet only because you want to lose weight to attract this beautiful friend of a friend, the moment you learn they’re in a relationship or aren’t interested in you, your self-control will be gone.  If you’re productive at work only because you’re afraid of your boss, how likely will you be to exhibit productivity when they aren’t around?  Your motivat...

 ---------------Week 3----------------------- Day 15: On Constant Improvement  Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.  —Peter Drucker 14  Just like knowledge, you can’t take self-discipline for granted . Unfortunately, being a self-disciplined person isn’t a “one and done” kind of thing. Once you have learned how to live that way, you can still lose it if you don’t consistently strengthen it by setting new challenges and rejecting instant gratification in favor of bigger future rewards .  Never assume that you’re “disciplined enough.” There’s always a new area in which you can improve your self-control and further expand your comfort zone.  For example, regular exercise poses no challenge for my self-discipline. In order to strengthen it, I need to set bigger and bigger exercise-related challenges for myself.  Instead of focusing on fitness, I can also find a new area in which my discipline is lacking (such ...

 --------------------Week 2---------------------- Day 14: On Long-Term Focus  In order to succeed, you must have a long-term focus. Most of the challenges in our lives come from a short-term focus.  —Tony Robbins 13  I spent several long years starting one business after another, deluding  myself that it was possible to build a six-figure business in a few months. Each time I failed to reach this goal, I closed one business and started working on another. Sometimes I worked on two or three ideas at the same time, thinking that one of them would surely succeed.  I would have saved myself a lot of time if I had realized that I had a short-term focus and this attitude had been the very reason why I couldn’t accomplish my goals. The moment I switched my mindset to that of being in it for the long haul , things started falling into place.  When I look back at my other goals, I struggled in a similar way due to the same reason.  In fitness, I wanted to...