Have you ever envied anyone who has better grades, bigger house, more recognition, popularity.. and grumbled “Why did she get xxx and not me?!?*#” It’s easy to look at people who seem to have it all–beauty, fitness, great career, wealth, freedom and tell ourselves that it’s all luck. Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his bestseller book, Outliers, that all successful people who achieved mastery in any area have devoted at least 10,000 hours to it. No exceptions.
We live in a culture of instant gratification and overnight fame. The youtube star that you believe to have gained fame overnight has hours of disciplined practice that people don’t see. . 10,000 seems like an insurmountable number, but when you’re consistent, a small step forward each day adds up to a lot of mileage over time. Your life is too important to just leave it to chance. To guarantee success, harness the power of discipline.
Free Success Fortune Telling Chart
What it takes to top the Billboard chart, win the Wimbleton, best-selling author, Nobel prize winning scientist, world renowned violinist
| 5 days a week | 6 days a week | Everyday | |
| 1 hour / day | 38.5 years (260 hours / yr) | 32 years(312 hours / yr) | 27 years(365 hours / yr) |
| 2 hours / day | 19 years(520 hours / yr | 16 years624 hours / yr | 14 years730 hours/ yr |
| 3 hours / day | 13 years780 | 11 years936 | 9 years1095 |
| 4 hours / day | 10 years1040 | 8 years1248 | 6.8 years1460 |
| 5 hours / day | 7.7 years1300 | 6.4 years1560 | 5.5 years1825 |
P.s. If you’re aiming for the best in your city, country, the bar would lower and you’d get to your target level of mastery sooner than what the chart below indicates.
Time is an egalitarian, limited commodity. No matter your age, race, intelligence, wealth, we all have the same number of hours each day. The power to steer the direction of your life is in your hands! How do you choose to spend your time? Are the little things you do each day adding up to something positive? Do they lead you to where you want to go in life?
With consistent action over the next 10 or 20 years, what could you accomplish? 30 minutes of extra math practice each day / 5 days per week equals 130 hours in 1 year–surely a time investment that would get you an improvement of a full letter grade in math. Five small pieces of chocolate over the same duration is roughly 25,000 calories, or the equivalent of over 7 lbs. 4 hours in front of the TV everyday gets you to become a world class TV watcher in less than 7 years.
Are your consistent behaviors helping or harming where you want to go in life? Be disciplined enough to make your dreams come true.
If you re-live today for the next 10 years, where would you end up? (It’s a classic. Go watch it here if you haven’t seen it yet.”)
An effective way to predict your success is to honestly examine your average day and project the likely logical outcome into the future. It’s a no brainer that if you saved just a small amount of money each day, you’d eventually be wealthy. If you overeat slightly each day, you are guaranteed to gain weight. Your teeth aren’t clean because you brushed them for an hour straight. They’re healthy because you brushed them for 2 minutes twice a day for 365 days straight.
For one week, carefully record how you spend your time in 30-minute increments everyday. Consider where your daily habits and behaviors are leading you academically, financially, socially, spiritually, and physically. What logical conclusions do your daily activities predict?
3 Steps for More Self-Discipline
1. Set success on auto-pilot. Good habits decrease resistance and help make self-discipline easier because research shows that people have a finite amount of self-discipline . By building good habits, you’re creating helpful, positive actions that are automatic and don’t require you to use up your reserve of self-discipline. Relying on discipline day after day is an uphill battle. While discipline can grow with effort and the right training, having helpful habits is more effective and much less painful. To make sure habits stick, Tie them to environmental triggers or something you already do to encourage consistency. I discussed habits more in this article.
2. Just do it. The greatest barrier to self-discipline is procrastination. Each day, you have the choice to get closer to making your dreams come true. Each day lost is lost forever, so if it’s the right thing to do, then isn’t it worth doing right now?
3. Have reasonable expectations. When your time horizon is unrealistic or when you ask too much of yourself too soon, disappointment and frustration are sure to follow, and you doom yourself to give up. Be positive and enthusiastic, but be reasonable. Focus on your trajectory and aim for regular and consistent improvement. Perfection isn’t required.
Whatever your dreams are, you need self-discipline to make it happen. What you do once in a while doesn’t impact your life significantly. Rather, it’s what you do consistently with discipline. All of curaJOY’s social emotional training programs build up children’s self-discipline with consistent practice of critical skills in dynamic, gamified formats. Click here to find a program appropriate for your child today with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
