What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.

Thomas Pain

Easy successes may be pleasant, but if they’re the only successes you achieve, you’ll come to expect quick, effortless results. Then, when life hits you hard with a difficult challenge, you’ll lack the mental toughness to overcome it.
Moreover, you’ll never appreciate the easy successes as much as the ones that required blood, sweat, and tears.
Does it mean that you should reject easy successes and seek the most difficult ways to accomplish your goals? Of course not.
However, you should make sure that you don’t deliberately avoid hardships. Resist the temptation to set your aims low. Scoring exclusively easy wins might feel good, but you’re limiting your potential that way.
Over the long term, make sure that you always have at least one big, ambitious and demanding goal in life, as that’s where the power of self- discipline shines, where most personal growth happens, and which delivers the greatest feeling of having accomplished something worth doing.

Before enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water. After enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water.

Xinxin Ming

It’s tempting to believe that, after enough time passes, suddenly you’ll attain enlightenment and acquire permanent, unbreakable self-control.
In reality, there’s no sudden awakening that will happen if you deny temptations for long enough. Just like today you’re consciously choosing to reject a chocolate bar so you can enjoy an attractive physique a year from now, a
year from now you will still need to reject a chocolate bar to maintain the body you attained.
There are no secret powers that self-disciplined people have somehow
attained that give them magical powers to resist temptations.
Despite having built a healthy, fit physique, I still fight — and sometimes fail — to overcome temptations. I still need to make sure my plates are full of satiating, healthy foods so that I don’t fill them later on with something less than healthy, yet again. I still need to monitor how much I eat and avoid places where I’m likely to overeat. I still do full-day fasts every now and then to practice self- control that is associated with hunger.
No matter the challenge, I still mostly use the same strategies I’d been using prior to accomplishing my goals. The actions don’t change. What changes is the person performing them .
For example, rejecting chocolate today may feel like the greatest punishment in the world. A year from now, rejecting chocolate is simply a fact of life: you want to stay in top shape, so you don’t stuff yourself with chocolate on a daily basis.
It will still require self-control, but as long as you diligently exercise your willpower muscle, the temptation will most likely be easier to overcome. And in the end, that’s what building self-discipline gives you: an easier life, through voluntarily choosing to live it the hard way.

The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.

Fred Brook

Patience and self-discipline are close cousins. If you want to reject instant gratification for the sake of accomplishing your long-term goals, it might take months or years before you receive your big compensation. Without patience, you’ll get nowhere.
While sometimes you can force results to come more quickly — by pushing yourself harder and being as diligent as you can during the process— oftentimes things take time and there’s no way to rush them, no matter how many resources you apply.
Like pregnancy, some things follow a natural schedule you can’t control. If you fail to identify which things cannot be rushed, you might misapply the power of self-discipline and instead of achieving them more quickly, fail to achieve them at all.
For example, a body has a natural limit of how much body fat it can burn during a week without breaking down your muscle. If you try to rush the process by starving yourself, the most likely end result is an unplanned cheat week that will not only take you back to square one, but most likely add some additional body fat to your frame .
Even with things that are difficult to measure, such as learning to control your mind so that you can eventually radiate optimism, you can’t force yourself to change overnight. Rewiring your brain takes time, and it doesn’t matter how much time you spend meditating or reading books about emotional control; a process that is so profound takes time.
Generally speaking, if it has taken you years or decades to develop a negative trait, don’t expect that you can reverse it within weeks or months. Approach such undertakings with the belief that you’ll do your best, but that you won’t get discouraged or frustrated if the process is slow. It would be as futile as a woman complaining that pregnancy lasts nine months.

Virtue is not a mushroom, that springeth up of itself in one night when we are asleep, or regard it not; but a delicate plant, that groweth slowly and tenderly, needing much pains to cultivate it, much care to guard it, much time to mature it, in our untoward soil, in this world’s unkindly weather.

Isaac Barrow

If self-discipline were like a mushroom that springs up of itself without the need for a gardener, everybody would possess it. Unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on how you look at it — it’s more like a plant that you need to constantly cultivate, or else it withers.

Some people believe that one either possesses a “green thumb” or not — as if one person were born with an inborn talent to care for plants and another not.

In reality, the person with the supposed green thumb is simply more attentive to their plants. They make sure their plants have everything they need to thrive and regularly check up on them to make sure they stay healthy.

Think of self-discipline in the same way. You plant its seeds the moment you decide it’s time to stop coasting through life and prioritize long-term rewards over instant gratification. However, this moment is just the very beginning; as in the case of planting the seed for a new flowering plant, there’s a lot of time and energy you’ll still need to invest to make it bloom. If you want to have a beautiful plant, you can’t water it occasionally or move it from one place to another every other week.

Ask yourself: what kind of a gardener am I for my own self-discipline? If your self-control were a plant, how would it look based on how you’ve been cultivating it the past years?