In the Marines, we are told that discipline is the instant willingness and obedience to follow all orders. Most of those orders involved doing things that I did not like to do, this involved me waking up early in the morning to go run 10 miles just because it's raining. This also involved doing minuscule tasks like cleaning my room every Wednesday and not being able to leave my room until it was inspected. Only once my room was clean and I was cleared to go on liberty (time off). I never understood the point of these ridiculous tasks as a young private. With time I grew as a leader and started to realize that the minuscule tasks had purpose and reasons behind them. I may not necessarily have agreed with the reasons but nonetheless, there was a point to the madness.
I have learned to apply this to my civilian life now. I have learned that it requires daily discipline in my daily life to get the results that I want to receive in the long term. If I want to live a long and healthy life I need to ensure that my daily consumption of food is healthy and ensure that I am working out and staying fit. The way to ensure that you can achieve your goals is to first understand that it is going to require you to develop self-discipline. You will need to sacrifice bad habits and develop new healthy habits that propel you towards your overall long-term goal. You may not feel like you are winning or being productive at the time because you don’t see any immediate results.
I can guarantee that if you are looking to succeed in whatever it is you want to succeed in it is going to take patience, practice, and discipline. If you are looking for handouts or life to be easy then you are already losing. Taking shortcuts is not an option. You need to work hard every single second, minute, and day to ensure that you can achieve your goals. It is part of the journey to fail, it is normal to want to quit, push past the weakness of temptation. Continue to be focused and goal oriented with your daily tasks. Life provides valuable lessons in the midst of failure and you usually learn after you have been through an experience. Enjoy the time through the journey of failure and learning. You cannot taste success without experiencing constant failure. Please make sure that you dedicate yourself to making the daily tasks in your life part of your long-term goal. It will provide you peace of mind and you will be able to make better decisions in your personal and professional life.
