The important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win, but to take part; the important thing in life is not triumph, but the struggle; the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.

Pierre de Coubertin

Nobody will ever give you any grades for your level of self-discipline. There’s no finish line and there’s no podium for the winners. The only purpose of building self-discipline is to conquer yourself — your own urges, your own weaknesses, and your own self-sabotaging behaviors.

It’s easy to forget this fact and assume that when you reach your goals you’re done. In fact, the moment you make your dreams come true isn’t the most important moment. It’s important, no doubt, but without the process leading to it, in itself it means little.

The most important moments are the moments of struggle, when you’re striving to fight even when you can barely stand and the whole world is spinning around you. It’s this very act that proves your mettle and showers you with life- encompassing benefits, not the act of winning in itself.

Whenever you find yourself frustrated that you’re still a long way from the finish line, remember that it’s right now, at this very moment, that you’re collecting the biggest rewards. It’s the struggle in itself that improves you and makes you a more successful person.

Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard master to yourself and be lenient to everybody else. Henry Ward Beecher

The only standards that should concern you are your own standards. If you act in accordance with the standards of the majority of people, you’ll be overweight, unfit, unhealthy, lazy, hating your job, not having enough time for your family, and in debt.

I sometimes get flak for my goals. “You’re already slim. Why do you still watch your diet?” “Why do you save so much money? You should live it up!” “Can’t you live like a normal person, instead of waking up at 5 a.m. and going to sleep as early as 8 p.m.?”

By the standards of the person criticizing me, I should have stopped improving myself a long time ago. According to my standards, the growth should never end. I always hold myself responsible for a higher standard, and this allows me to maintain success-friendly habits in my life and achieve even more success.

If you allow yourself to have low standards, how are you supposed to ever achieve excellence? Exhibiting self-control is one of the most powerful demonstrations of having high standards; letting fleeting emotions and urges control your life — as most people do — is a sure-fire path to mediocrity.

Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes. Peter Drucker

Just like knowledge, you can’t take self-discipline for granted. Unfortunately, being a self-disciplined person isn’t a “one and done” kind of thing. Once you have learned how to live that way, you can still lose it if you don’t consistently strengthen it by setting new challenges and rejecting instant gratification in favor of bigger future rewards.

Never assume that you’re “disciplined enough.” There’s always a new area in which you can improve your self-control and further expand your comfort zone.

For example, regular exercise poses no challenge for my self-discipline. In order to strengthen it, I need to set bigger and bigger exercise-related challenges for myself.

Instead of focusing on fitness, I can also find a new area in which my discipline is lacking (such as developing more patience when dealing with other people) and focus on improving it until it’s no longer a test for my resolve.

Such consistent practice ensures that you’re at least maintaining your level of self-control, and ideally always getting better at it.

I spent several long years starting one business after another, deluding myself that it was possible to build a six-figure business in a few months. Each time I failed to reach this goal, I closed one business and started working on another. Sometimes I worked on two or three ideas at the same time, thinking that one of them would surely succeed.

I would have saved myself a lot of time if I had realized that I had a short- term focus and this attitude had been the very reason why I couldn’t accomplish my goals. The moment I switched my mindset to that of being in it for the long haul, things started falling into place.

When I look back at my other goals, I struggled in a similar way due to the same reason.

In fitness, I wanted to build a well-defined physique as quickly as possible. I frequently reduced my daily caloric intake to levels that were impossible to maintain over the long term. In the end, I would have accomplished my goals more quickly by taking a more sustainable approach that would take me a year or two to reach my goal than fooling myself I could reach it in two or three months.

In learning languages, I wanted to learn new words as quickly as possible and soon found myself discouraged from looking at even one more word. I wanted to learn a few dozen words a day, but in the end I would have accomplished more with a routine of learning just 5-10 words a day but maintained and used over years, not just weeks or months.

Analyze your goals and how you approach them. Replace short-term- oriented behaviors with those that show that you’re in it for the long haul. Self- discipline isn’t limited to rejecting a cake or sticking to an exercise habit; you also need self-discipline to maintain a long-term focus in all of your endeavors.