It is better to practice a little than talk a lot.

A Zen saying, attributed to Muso Soseki

Announcing to all of your friends, family members, and colleagues that you’re going to change and going deep into details how you’re going to do it is useless at best and sabotaging at worst.

Firstly, not everyone will be happy to hear that you want to improve yourself because it will make it painfully obvious that they’re lazy or don’t have as much courage as you do. Instead of support, you can receive criticism that might make you less likely to act upon your dreams.

Secondly, research suggests that announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them. 38 By talking about your plans, you get the erroneous satisfaction that you’ve already taken action to change yourself and consequently, you’re less likely to take real action.

If you want to tell your friends about your new goal, choose a person whom you know will support you. In addition, instead of telling them in a self- congratulatory way that you’re finally going to achieve your dreams, ask them to hold you accountable if you don’t honor your resolution.

Monks, these two extremes ought not to be practiced by one who has gone forth from the household life. What are the two? There is addiction to indulgence of sense-pleasures, which is low, coarse, the way of ordinary people, unworthy, and unprofitable; and there is addiction to self-mortification, which is painful, unworthy, and unprofitable. Avoiding both these extremes, the Tathagata has realized the Middle Path; it gives vision, gives knowledge, and leads to calm, to insight, to enlightenment and to Nibbana.

Gautama Buddha

When you set firm resolutions to improve yourself, you might be tempted to push your limits well outside of what you’re capable of doing. Ambitiousness is a virtue, but there’s danger involved in going from one extreme to another.
If you’re currently struggling to be productive, don’t force yourself to work sixteen hours a day. If you’re struggling to control your appetite, don’t impose a week-long fast. If you can’t find it in you to choose the stairs over the elevator, don’t expect that you’ll maintain a workout plan that requires you to work out every single day.
Find the middle path, stick to it for at least several weeks, and then, based on the results you get, decide whether you can further stretch your limits or require more time before advancing.
As much as I believe in pushing your boundaries and exploring the extremes, you don’t need to put yourself through mortification to achieve good results. Subjecting yourself to extreme hardships has some merits, but over the long term it’s unsustainable, if not downright dangerous.
Remember that there should be moderation in all things, including moderation itself. Sometimes a more extreme approach is needed for a short period of time, and sometimes it’s beneficial to set your goals lower. In whatever you do, seek to not spend too much time loafing around, but also make sure that your life hasn’t turned into the life of a self-flagellating ascetic.

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.