Your choice in life is simple; you’re either disciplined or you’re unsuccessful.
Discipline equals freedom. Jocko Willink says that over and over again as a way to explain discipline and its true benefits. Without it you cannot save, nor can you earn. You can’t live life on your own terms without discipline, instead you’ll be a victim to every wish and desire that comes into your wee little brain.
Discipline is the route to freedom, and freedom is necessary for happiness, yet discipline is avoided, it’s chided, looked down upon by those who aim to live life on whim, without direction or purpose or meaning, claiming to be in the present, yet for no good reason.
You have a choice in life, and that choice is discipline or failure. Failure is dependency, it’s never creating something of value, it’s being a slave to your desires and never fully understanding that desires are often the distraction, not the true source of happiness that we all crave.
What do you really want in life?
Are you fine with accomplishing nothing, with choosing ease over meaning?
What you want is what you give your time to. Most people give their time to dreaming or TV. Winners give their time to activities worthy of their time, understanding that time is limited, fleeting, and disappearing.
Choose discipline, and not just in your work, choose it in how you use your time, to give your time to things that you deem important, beneficial, things you may even call living.
Don’t get lost in the lie that is doing whatever you want in a given moment. That’s not how happiness is earned nor created, it’s how it’s avoided, it’s how life is avoided. Have the discipline to decipher what is good and the balls to act upon only what is right.
