When you first start out on a journey to accomplish something, the biggest success factor is to be persistence at it. Persistence is difficult. It’s easier to carry out your tasks in the initial stage because you are motivated. Persistence comes easy during that time. But when things start to get redundant, your motivation fades away, which will bring consistency to halt.
Being persistent at your goal requires discipline. It’s what you should do to move one step forward towards your end goal. It’s difficult and painful.
However, if you don’t carry out your work and be persistent at it, you’ll regret it. You’ll regret that you weren’t consistent at your goal. Because if you were, you’d be closer to success. Of course, success depends on how you define it.
At the end, it comes down to this: either pain of regret or pain of discipline.
For example, you might have a goal to not eat junk foods to stay healthy and fit. Doing so requires lots of willpower and determination. It’s easy to enter the vicious cycle of resolving to not eat junk food, eating junk food and again, resolving to not eat junk food. It just keeps moving in cycle.
If you eat junk food, you’ll regret it later. While you see junk food, you’ll just think that you’re in pain of discipline, not being able to eat what you desire. You try to make it easy for yourself and eat it, not realizing that pain of regret will follow.
We only realize that there is pain of discipline, but fail to realize that pain of regret will follow if we lose out on pain of discipline.
We humans try to set ourselves free from the factor that’s causing us pain. Here in the example of junk food, that pain comes from discipline of resisting to eat junk foods. So we try and remove that pain by eating junk food, only to find pain of regret following us.
If we’re aware of pain of regret, it will at least be easier for us to not eat junk food, realizing that we won’t be free of pain.
We need to embrace pain, because that’s a part of self improvement journey.
So, next time when you set out a self improvement goal, realize that you have two choices during your journey: pain of regret or pain of discipline.
Pain of discipline will take you closer to success, whereas pain of regret will stop you from achieving your goal.
Webmentions
We’ve come a long way as a human being. We had to hunt and gather for food even some hundred years ago. It was the way humans used to live.
Life was hard.
Fast forward today and you can find everything you need at your finger tips.
Hungry? Order food.Want to buy something? Consider online shopping.
You don’t need to do anything. The present world offers everything itself.
You won’t die due to hunger easily, nor will you die because of common sickness. The world has advanced a lot in every field.
Since the world offers comfort, the only way to stay away from comfort is by consciously refusing it. But it’s very hard.
Who wouldn’t want the privilege to order food right from their home? Who wouldn’t want to connect with their loved ones through their smart phone? Who wouldn’t want to shop online without even going to the store?
We’re living a life of comfort. And I think that’s the biggest reason we’re very weak compared to ancient humans. We have very weak willpower. We procrastinate easily. We eat foods we shouldn’t just because it tastes good.
Nobody can resist comfort. Actually, humans work hard all their life so that they can live a comfortable life in the future. So that their spouse and children don’t have to suffer much.
This is counterintuitive but comfort actually makes you suffer in the long run.
Take an example of eating junk foods. It’s very difficult to resist it. It’s uncomfortable to resist eating those foods when it’s right in front of you. You don’t like being uncomfortable or suffering in the short run by resisting the junk food. You crave for comfort and instead of resisting the urge to eat the food, you simply eat the food.
Eating those food will directly harm your body and health in the long run.
So, be aware of wanting be comfortable and instead try achieving stuff that are uncomfortable. By doing so, you’re not only improving yourself in the long run, you’re also expanding your comfort zone.
Don’t think that the person who’s living in comfort is lucky. If you ever run into situation where you have to choose between being comfortable and uncomfortable, always choose the latter. Choose being uncomfortable. It makes you strong, helps to improve in the long run and expands your comfort zone.
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