Still Looking For Motivation?
Hi guys, welcome to my blog! This week’s story will be on the importance of discipline or, rather, an explanation as to why I feel it is better to resort to discipline than to search for an unending source of motivation.
Let us have a very practical approach here: there are very few people who have a constant motivation to stand by their decisions. Try to remember the New Year’s resolutions that you have taken in the past years; how many of them have you actually stuck to? Most of us make a resolution with the enthusiasm of entering a new year; we feel motivated to change our lives and make it better than the previous year. But why aren’t we able to follow it through? This is because the effect “motivation” has on our mind lasts at the max for a few weeks. For you to be able to continue with the resolution, you should be a little more than just motivated.
Being disciplined doesn’t mean that you must follow a particular schedule throughout your life; it simply means that you must have a sense of duty and responsibility. You should have a clear vision of what you must do every day to reach your goals and ensure that you do it irrespective of what you feel like on those days. An athlete undergoing training doesn’t get up in the morning to work out and train every day just because he is motivated; motivation alone cannot drive a person to get up in the morning to do such tiresome exercises every day. There might be days on which all he would want to do is cuddle up and sleep for a few more hours, yet he gets up and trains not because he is fully motivated but because he is disciplined. Focus shows a man the right path, and discipline keeps him going.
I am sure that many of you would have decided to start working out at one point in your life, but you didn’t stick to it. It is impossible to feel motivated every morning to get up early just to lift weights; sometimes cold mornings do get the better of us, and it is moments like these when the discipline must take over. We wake up and go to the gym because we must! Because it is our duty to!
Armed forces focus on discipline for similar reasons; the officers get a strong sense of duty by the end of their training. Nothing can get the better of them. They are so strong in the mind that the time interval between thoughts and actions is a bare minimum. Discipline plays a major role in the development of this mindset.
So, what I want to say is that it is not always about motivation. At present, we are way too dependent on motivation to get us going; I feel that it is difficult for us to stay consistent with just motivation. Motivation gets you addicted to the result, whereas discipline gets you addicted to the process. Trust me, there is no better feeling than seeing yourself grow every day, and maybe down a few years, you might just be reading your own success story on the internet…
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Until then,
Godspeed.
