Stop Being Undisciplined: How Delayed Gratification Can Lead to a Meaningful Life

In my language discipline means making sacrifices because you are not disciplined if you just do something you want rather than something you need to do and so discipline is when you want to do something right now, and instead, you say, “No, am gonna forestall my sources of pleasure” and you concentrate on something you think will bear fruit in the medium to long term. So you look into the future and decide that today I’m going to make it less impulsively pleasurable and make tomorrow a little bit more secure and productive than you actually do it and it’s difficult. For years People have watched the successful succeed while the unsuccessful fail I thought it over and made the conclusion that “THE SUCCESSFUL AMONG US, THEY SACRIFICE, THEY DELAY GRATIFICATION AND THEY BARGAIN WITH THE FUTURE”.

You wake up in the morning and you think, “Okay today I wanna have a good day” whatever that means and you ask yourself, “What is it that I need to do today so that this may be a good day?” and while meditating on it your brain will tell you but it won’t be something you want to do but something you need to do because there is something you’re avoiding that’s making you anxious that your brain will pick up and say you have to this number of commitments and if you do them then you have fulfilled your obligation. If you listen to yourself and do what is necessary, then you don’t have to compute the ideal future because following what you tell yourself to do is the best path for the best outcome.

So at least you can start your self-organization by improving those things around you that are self-evidently not good and all you have to do is sit down and say am gonna be honest with me, I’m probably doing a dozen stupid things that I could stop that are making my life wretched. and you gonna get a bunch of information that you don’t wanna hear but you know they are true then you ask yourself, is there one of those things that I would be willing to do something about that I would do something about and as soon as you get the answer to that then you have a responsibility of some you don’t wanna do but if you do it you will obtain some humility and so your improving your character and constraining the kind of actions and perception that you have that’s gonna make you sick of life.

You take on this great task of putting yourself together and through that, you give your life meaning and that also helps you be buttressed against the fact that there is a lot of suffering and it’s worse than you think but you can do more about it than you think. And so any positive emotions, that any of you will get to experience will not be a consequence of attaining things but a consequence of seeing things are working as you proceed towards a goal you value, and that is why when you are hungry you eat and you feel good but it goes away and that’s what we call consummatory reward and the other type is called incentive reward and that’s what tells you that you’re moving forward towards something worthwhile. if you have no meaning to your life then you are more prone to addiction because drugs also give you the incentive to reward positive emotions.

So if you have a purpose, then it’s analgesic, it takes out some of the pain from your life, it’s very positive in the sense it motivates and energizes you and it quells fear.