Discipline

Behind every great achievement in anyone’s life lies discipline. We see this in every human endeavor. In the field of sports we see this repeated again and again. Outstanding sportsmen spend all their time practicing.  In the process many of them make so many sacrifices which ordinary men and women are not willing to make. The same is true of businessmen who build up fortunes. Most often we see only that they achieve, but once we go behind the scenes we see that they have put in a lot of discipline. We all have read of great musicians, writers and inventors who have credited or discovered breakthroughs in human achievement. Invariably they have said that they owe all their success to discipline.

Discipline is the art, where having determined where we want to go or what we want to create or discover, we stick to our goals whatever the disadvantages until we achieve the goal. Though there are other meanings of the word, this is what concerns us most. We find many applications for discipline in our daily lives; ranging from doing our homework to building up our physical fitness to make sure we join the soccer squad. If we look carefully at the periods of failure in our lives, we will see that in almost every occasion when we failed, it was due to lack of discipline. Hence both in the areas of success through discipline and the lack of success through the lack of discipline and the lack of success through the lack of discipline, there are many examples for us to refer to.

Since a life lived with discipline can offer us much, it is worthwhile discussing how it is to be done. First we have to be sure of what we want to achieve and how much we want to achieve it. If one is obsessed with wanting to succeed in a certain area, the chances of attaining that want is so much more. To do this, one has to dwell on the want through visualizing it happening. The second step is determining what has to be done to attain that want. This will come to mind naturally if one’s want is a sincere and serious one. Hence if a man wants to join the national soccer squad, he must really want to and if he does, he would know what he has to do to get there. The same procedure applies if one wants to write a book, or own a successful business or top the school in English literature. The final step is the discipline to do and keep doing what must be done until the results appear.

There are countless examples to show how people achieve success in this way. One example is the sage of Colonel Saunders. The 65-year-old man from Kentucky had a dream to start a chain on fried chicken restaurants all over the world. To realize that dream, he knew that he needed a restaurant owner to go into partnership with him to open the first restaurant and to fry chicken according to the secret recipe the old man had. Colonel Sanders knocked on 1008 doors before he found a restaurant owner willing to share his dream. It is doubtful if many of us would have had the discipline to knock even a hundred doors.

The old man from Kentucky is just one example. There are thousands of such which show that success can come to anyone through the application of discipline.