The No Excuses book Author says one quality that most philosophers, teachers, and experts agree on is the importance of self discipline. Discipline is what you must have to resist the lure of excuses. It is self discipline that enables you to “vote yourself off the island.” It is the key to a great life and, without it, no lasting success is possible.
No Excuses ! The Power of Self Discipline By Brian Tracy
Summary of No Excuses By Brian Tracy
Author Says Self-discipline is self-mastery. Success is possible only when you can master your own emotions, appetites, and inclinations. People who lack the ability to master their appetites become weak and dissolute, as well as unreliable in other things as well.
Your ability to think, plan, and work hard in the short term and to discipline yourself to do what is right and necessary before you do what is fun and easy is the key to creating a wonderful future for yourself.
Motivational speaker Denis Waitley has said that the top people were those who were more concerned with activities that were “goal achieving,” whereas average people were more concerned with activities that were “tension relieving.
Self Discipline & Success
Author says the indispensable requirement for hard work is self-discipline. Success is possible only when you can overcome the natural tendency to cut corners and take the easy way. Lasting success is possible only when you can discipline yourself to work hard for a long, long time.
One of the most important requirements for success, once you have decided what it is that you want, is the quality of willingness. Successful people are willing to pay the price, whatever it is and for as long as it takes, until they achieve the results they desire.
Success is Its Own Reward
The wonderful thing about the achievement of success is that every step in that direction is rewarding in itself. Each step you take toward becoming a better person and accomplishing more than you ever have before makes you feel happier, more confident, and more fulfilled.
The person you are today, your innermost character, is the sum total of all your choices and decisions in life up to this date.
Each time you have compromised, taken the easy way, or behaved in a manner inconsistent with what you knew to be right, you have weakened your character and softened your personality.
Summary of No Excuses The Power of Self Discipline
The payoff for becoming a person of character, for exerting your willpower and self-discipline to live consistently with the very best that you know, is tremendous. When you choose the higher value over the lower, the more difficult over the easy, the right over the wrong, you feel good about yourself.
When you see yourself as calm, positive, truthful, and possessed of high character, you behave with greater strength and personal power. Other people respect you more. You feel in control of yourself and the situation.
Your self-esteem is largely determined by how consistent your self-image, which shapes your personal behavior, is with your self-ideal, or your vision of the very best person you can possibly be.
Self Discipline & Responsibility
Author says your ability and willingness to discipline yourself to accept personal responsibility for your life are essential to happiness, health, success, achievement, and personal leadership.
Most people grow up believing that if something goes wrong, someone else is responsible. Someone else is to blame. Someone else is guilty. Someone else is the villain and they are the victim. As a result, most people make more and more excuses for the things in their lives, past and present, that make them unhappy.
People who develop the habit of automatically blaming often become angry at things. Blaming inanimate objects when they do not function as expected is so silly that it almost becomes a mild form of insanity.
Self Discipline & Goals
Your ability to discipline yourself to set clear goals for yourself and then to work toward them every day will do more to guarantee your success than any other single factor.
The tragedy is that most people think that they already have goals. But what they really have are hopes and wishes. However, hope is not a strategy for success, and a wish has been defined as a “goal with no energy behind it.”
The difference between successes and failures in life is simply that winners take the first step. They are action-oriented. As they said in Star Trek, they “go boldly where no man has ever gone before.”
The discipline of daily goal-setting will make you a powerful, purposeful, and irresistible person. You will develop self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-respect. As you feel yourself moving toward your goals faster and faster, you will ultimately become unstoppable.
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