If you want to improve your life, there is one important thing you should have: self discipline. Why? Because there are things that you should do regardless of whether you feel like it or not. Without discipline, it’s easy for you to just stop when you don’t want to do something. This way you will experience up and down periods in your self improvement. On the other hand, if you are disciplined, you will consistently do what is right to do. You will always do things that will give you the biggest benefit in the long term.

Long term is actually a key word when it comes to discipline. The essence of discipline is the willingness to choose short term pain in order to get long term gain. While you may feel inconvenient in the short term (which is normal when it comes to building discipline), discipline will benefit you greatly in the long term.

How do you build discipline? In essence, there are two things to do: determine what you think is the right thing to do and choose to do it even if you need to take short term pain for that.