Remember, convenience is built through inconvenience! I hope that by the end of this post, I can convince you to make that above statement your very own mantra or tagline, that you say to yourself every single day. Even if you are not yet fully acting on it, I hope that you can at least reiterate it again and again to yourself everyday to reaffirm your journey towards your goals.
If you speak to anyone about the importance of discipline or how success is dependent on them putting in the hard work first then they will accept this as common sense. It would be like pointing out the obvious to them, however, each and everyone of those people is not where they think they should be in their life. They know that they need to do something but something keeps coming up or they just do not feel like doing things in that particular moment. So, even if they do have that common sense imbued on their minds, they refuse to actually adhere to it. I think of it as someone who has learned all the theoretical knowledge about boxing and has all the plans in his mind but has never actually stepped into the ring to fight with someone. And just like boxing, when life actually hits you in the face unexpectedly, all of their theoretical plans and common sense goes out the window. A good example of checking whether you belong in this category or not is to ask yourself whether you are delaying something that you need to do little by little. A thing that you know you have to do is not something that you can delay for maybe a year and you will never imagine yourself doing it. But, you will always delay it today, or just until the end of this week or you will promise to turn over a new leaf after the current imaginative crises passes over in your life. By allowing yourself to do things only when you want to do them and putting them off when you do not feel like doing them, you can delay the important things not just by a year but perhaps even for your whole life and the worse part of it is that you will only realize your negligence when the due date has passed. Only when you come face to face with the consequences of doing only what you felt like doing in that moment will you realize the importance of hard work but you can never turn back the time.
Many people want to believe the fantasy of being able to do anything that they want to do and by extension they do what they feel like doing and live in the moment. Unfortunately, the bitter reality is that anything that you might want to do in your life will not turn into a reality on its own(unless you have a magic lamp) and depending on what exactly you want, you will have to make appropriate sacrifices in other spheres of your current lifestyle to achieve that goal. For example, if you want to get into good shape, you have to sacrifice your sleep and go to the gym every single day as per your plan and not only when you manage to get out of the bed in the morning. Instead of believing in a fantasy of being able to do anything, accept that you can only do something if you can manage to put in the work for it. Otherwise, there a many other people in the world who have the exact same goal as you have, and they also want to achieve it just as much as you do. So, you can either be doing things as per your convenience or doing things regardless of even contemplating about whether they are convenient or inconvenient to you. If you really want to have something then accept that you will have to put yourself in a discomforting position to achieve that because everyone wants to ascend to the next level. If you can bear these inconveniences every day, then you can claim the right to achieve your goal faster than everyone else who even took one day off because they thought it made no difference. And, if you do not like the thought of putting yourself through all that or if you simply are afraid of taking on all that stress then that is completely fine as well. However, then you should also accept that even if you do also have a grandiose goal in mind, you accomplishments would only be mediocre at best and that you always reserve the right to scale them up by putting yourself through more and more difficulties.
Lastly, I think that each and every person should realize that the things that initially make us afraid or which force us away from our comfort zones are actually not that scary at all. They are just things that many other people have already gone through in the past and even when you decide not to, there will be someone just like you who will be bold enough to give it a go. In reality, it is just that each person has grown accustomed to their own version of a comfort zone. Some people’s comfort zone involves doing things that may seem dreadful to many others and the way to add any task to your comfort zone is to repeatedly go through it without considering what you feel about it. Life is full of inconveniences but people’s perspective sometimes turns these minor inconveniences into difficult problems. In a sense, you have to accept that inconvenience in hopes of one day achieving the convenience that you desire. Good luck!
Thanks!
You are very welcome!