Discipline Now or Regret Later

It's your choice

I like Pinterest. I get a lot of my creative ideas pertaining to sewing, housekeeping, and food making there. Pinterest is also rife with “inspirational quotes” which are utter rot and nonsense. But…I also end up finding a lot of really profound ideas that I save to a special board called “Good Points.” One of them goes like this:

Each day you must choose the pain of discipline or the pain of regret.

It was this quote and others similar which prompted me to resume getting up before 8:00 no matter what after a month and a half of not feeling well at all and sleeping in later and later because of it. I still don’t feel very well, but I have not yet regretted my decision. I can always take a cat nap later. There’s just something about getting up late that puts the entire day in the hand basket that leads to you-know-where.

Personal discipline is probably THE most important quality about a person. People who have no discipline don’t make good spouses, parents, or breadwinners. Because there’s no discipline, there’s no consistency, no follow through, no good habits, and there is nothing there for anyone to count on. People without discipline leave chaos in their wake and are content to let the world clean up the aftermath. People without discipline are expensive, creating severe health problems for themselves that the rest of the world has to pay for.

People without discipline have a tendency to take the path of least resistance, and they fail to consider what this will mean later—namely the personal pain and suffering it will cost. Undisciplined parents reap dysfunctional adult children. Undisciplined eaters reap a frail and sickly body prone to all sorts of metabolic dysfunction. Undisciplined workers reap anxious and exhausted days of overworking to make a deadline, or they just don’t make the deadline and get fired.

Undisciplined people create misery for themselves and everyone around them.

Of course, there are very few people in this world who have no discipline. Most of us have some discipline to greater or smaller degrees. So, how much discipline is enough? Probably a little bit more. (Including the discipline to know when it’s time to stop working and rest. Being a workaholic is just another way to be undisciplined.) Discipline is like growing. When a plant stops growing, it dies. When discipline stops growing, it dies.

I told someone the other day, that I made myself start getting up earlier even though I haven’t felt well, because the world is full of people with great ideas who never see them through because they can’t be bothered to do the simplest things, like getting up on time, to complete them. And I cannot bear the thought of lying on my death bed knowing that I had great ideas and great projects I started but never finished because I wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning.

And it’s for that reason that I fill the kitchen sink at least once a day and hand wash dishes that can’t go in the dishwasher for whatever reason instead of leaving them to pile up beside the sink for a whole week. It seems like such a small and insignificant little detail that shouldn’t matter that much. But it does. Because if I have a child who grows up watching me neglect these small things, they will also think they don’t matter and add to that neglect in bigger ways or have an even harder fight breaking the cycle so they don’t pass that laziness on to the next generation. But even if I don’t have a child, you and I have all kinds of people who are watching these little things about us and either being inspired to greatness or lulled into apathy.

Little things matter. Little excuses build up and tear down the discipline you’ve worked hard to foster.

I am not saying that you should never sleep in if you need it. But I am saying that it’ll be a lot harder to wake at the proper time the next day…unless you’ve built some self-disciplined consistency into your life prior to that day.

Why does this matter so much to me? Well…because I’m looking around at societal changes and trajectories and the odds that life will continue to be as easy as it has been for Americans, Europeans, and other first-world nations are slim. I think it is more likely that life is going to get very difficult, more difficult than most Americans have ever seen. The ones who possess some discipline will be okay. The ones who don’t will not. That’s one reason.

The other reason is that I am always thinking forward to the day I die. What will be going through my mind those last few days, hours and minutes of struggle? Will I look back and be happy that I spent my mornings in a dark room, my mind hazy and sleepy or scrolling on my phone, while the beautiful life God gave me is waiting for me to just get up and take it?! I know I won’t. I will be full of regret.

Trust me. I have more excuses than most to stay in bed. People like me have to work even harder than most to maintain personal discipline. It’s not fair, but life isn’t. Even now as I type, I am experiencing some pain and even fatigue. Sometimes I have to stay in bed longer. But more often than that, you just have to get up and fight even though it hurts so you don’t waste your life.

How do you do this? There is no magic bullet or “five ways to get more motivated!” Just get up. Just do it. One foot in front of the other and don’t quit unless it’s to rest up so you can take more steps. It’s that simple and that hard.

In closing, I give you another couple quotes from Pinterest:

Follow your plan and not your mood.

You will not always be motivated. So you must be disciplined.

As usual, the next chapter of The Pursuit of Elizabeth Millhouse will go out to paid subscribers this Wednesday morning at 7:00 AM! Please do consider upgrading from free to paid so you can hear Elizabeth’s story and help me get it back in print. And above all, please share, share, share this post with whomever you think might benefit from or enjoy it!

That’s all for now. Until next time, folks…