Rich Bello argues discipline is the ability to control your thoughts and actions for long-term benefit. He connects it to four practical areas: habits, prioritization, procrastination, and decisions, using examples from exercise, relationships, and income to show how discipline changes behavior.
Chapters
Discipline is a word that people find kind of like a dirty word. They're scared of discipline. Why are they scared of discipline? It invokes effort. People are like, oh, discipline. I don't want to put out discipline, right? But if people focus on discipline and focus on the power of discipline, the rewards are enormous, right? Get discipline under control. Figure it out. And that's what we're going to talk about today. So the power of discipline relates to habits, prioritization, procrastination, and decisions. Those are the four topics we'll be talking about today. One of the questions that fascinates me the most is why don't we always do what's in our own best interests? Why don't we always do that? You'd think that we would. We don't always seem to act in our own best interest. If you could push these buttons, these four buttons here, like when people push this. Exercise for an hour. If you wanted to get this into your practice for this year, Exercise for an hour, four times per week. Eliminate my worst habit this year. Instill a new great habit, like regular exercise or whatever that great habit is for you. Improve your relationships, increase your income. If you could just push a button and that would be done at the end of this year, how many people would do that? I surmise that people would do that if they could just push the button. So that's kind of where we're coming from. So let's figure out what it is that we're afraid about this discipline, this willpower. Discipline. In the simplest of terms, this is my definition. It's the ability to do as in your overall best interest by controlling your thoughts. Right? And thus your actions. That's what it's all about, controlling your thoughts. If you can control your thoughts, they can do anything, right? Lift my arm. I thought to do that, right? You can control your thoughts. You can do anything. And it's also the ability to not take an action, not to do things that you don't want to do. Right. That you deem are not in your best interest. That's why we got the cheesecake right here, right? Who wants to eat a whole cheesecake? Mmm. Sounds good. But probably not in your best interest to do that. You get on the treadmill tomorrow, you're like, why'd I do that?
