Discipline is Your Salvation
Habits for Creating a Life Worth Living
Perry C. Douglas
“The only thing standing between you and your goal is the bullshit story you keep telling yourself as to why you can’t achieve it.” ― Jordan Belfort
Salvation is not about deliverance from sin and its consequences, as told to us through the ideology of Christianity. Salvation is about preservation and perseverance, deliverance to a better existence, one of choice. Salvation is the end of suffering and the beginning of enduring and authentic happiness. However, getting there requires discipline, not just talking the talk but walking the walk, the conscious practice of self-awareness and training of the mind. But honesty is number one because there can be no progress without practicing honesty first.
Making the best of this life requires an intelligent and focused system, however, regardless of the system or methodology discipline is always required. Discipline is the bedrock of achievement — developing good habits. Because everyone has the freedom to choose one of two paths; the path of discipline and achievement or the path of excuses and suffering.
Author Moreno Zugaro, in a recent article, titled 5 Surprising Habits Of Extremely Disciplined People, highlights the disciplined behaviour of people who can achieve whatever they put their minds to. One of my favourites is what he lists as They Embrace the Suck; because succeeding at the most meaningful things in life requires doing the hard things first, but most people never do so, therefore, they never get what they desire most out of life.
Most people resist or avoid uncomfortable situations, a habit of always running away from the fire; sidestepping challenges through well-fermented habits of making excuses. Always pulling the escape hatch. However, disciplined people do the opposite — they embrace adversity and endure the grind. Adopting this attitude is the beginning of the end of suffering, and when it’s over you realize that you are stronger, and it didn’t kill you.
Discipline is playing the long game and requires self-care:
- Creating healthy diets, lifestyles, and healthy relationships, and avoiding nonsense-infused negative people
- Developing a schedule and doing the things you need to and the things you enjoy
- Relax, resting, and recharging; getting enough sleep is most important
- Celebrate your achievements every step of the way because doubt fear and worry will only slow you down
- Engage your natural energy in spirituality and free yourself from the restrictive ideology of religion, and its culture of suffering
You must go the extra mile and do the things that others won’t — separating yourself from the herd. This is how success happens. And “when you’ve reached the end of your comfort zone, pushing further becomes that much harder. But that’s what disciplined people do.” Every action each day defines more of who you are. It defines your identity.
Discipline requires focused thinking, and helps avoid the crippling self-inflicted condition of constant avoidance and excuses; never taking responsibility and accountability for your decisions or behaviour. So, resist the need for instant gratification and think long-term instead, because negative situations usually develop over time. Accordingly, positive outcomes develop over the long term too. Remember, a crisis is temporary but you can also use it as a wake-up call, a life lesson, to do better the next time.
Reading is essential to a good life, being well-read requires focused discipline, and always paying attention to the necessity of life-long learning. It provides you with knowledge-perseverance, empathy, humble confidence, and fair-mindedness. Reading slows things down, allowing for reflection, less emotional thought, precision thinking and imagination. It lifts your consciousness sharpness, your thinking and perspective, and gives you better contemplation of virtue.
It intensely drives your curiosity to ask more inquisitive and insightful questions and explore more ways to acquire more knowledge. Breaking you away from the conformity that society stifles you with.
As you are learning new things you are also building new foundations of growth in understanding the universe, its basic concepts and the laws of nature. These concepts provide for better footing in the universe which allows for more efficient and effective thinking. Logic and intelligence now begin to prevail over emotion and intuition; self-reliance enters your existence.
“Everything hangs on one’s thinking,” said Seneca to Lucilius.
Knowledge acquisition helps with objectivity, and clarity and builds your courage to become an independent thinker with intellectual humility. When you don’t read you degrade yourself to denseness, willful ignorance in believing in social media, for example, as your main source of information. Not managed properly, social media just makes you stupid.
Thus the more you read the more you realize how little you do know, but the more you want to learn. Because in the end life is Game Theory, the interactions between people and their agents, but the game is played in the real world, not the classroom. Your points are accumulated from what you value, relative to what is valued in society — that’s the game. So, winning is defined relative to what you authentically want out of life, versus what society tells you should what.
Focus on the process instead of the results, life is discovery work and must be led by evidence, not intuition or feelings, and the insights you discover along the journey creates you. Your value then creates confidence and inner freedom. Fear and anxiety start to go away, and your trajectory to fearlessness and leadership begins to take a directional shape. Your circumstances are neutral, it’s how you deal with them that matters most — do you choose fear or courage?
So, when you employ discipline as your salvation, your fear of things like losing money on an investment or what’s stopping you from becoming an entrepreneur? Or having the courage to bask in your individuality. And in my case, writing a future best-selling book — fear and anxiety can no longer exist in a focused and disciplined environment. Achievement and goals now become a matter of taking action.
Nevertheless, thinking and reading won’t make an ounce of difference, the difference will only come when one finds the courage, and the intestinal fortitude to take a disciplined approach to life. Because in the end, it’s actions, not talk that makes the difference.
