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PAY THE PRICE
By Dr. John C. Maxwell
Every Sunday when I was growing up, my dad would give me a list of the
chores I had to do that week. Some, like taking out the garbage, were daily
tasks. Others, such as my regular assignment of cleaning out the basement,
could be completed anytime—as long as they were done by noon on Saturday.
I knew I could do the basement on Monday, Wednesday or even Saturday
morning. But I quickly figured out that the sooner I got it done, the more I
could enjoy the rest of the week.
Without even realizing it, I was learning an important life lesson: pay now,
play later. I could have waited until the last minute to do my chores. But
if I had, I would have risked missing out on some fun activity my dad had
planned for Saturday afternoon—an activity I knew I'd have to skip if I
didn't get my work done. So I chose to make the effort on the front end.
Whether you're doing household chores or building a company, practicing the
"pay now, play later" principle requires one key element: discipline. What
exactly is discipline? It's the means to getting what you really want even
when you don't want to do the thing necessary to get it.
I've written about how the ability to make right decisions is critical to
success in life. That's true, but good decisions have no value without
discipline. Decision-making takes care of goal-setting, but only discipline
results in goal-getting. As I wrote in my book, Today Matters, "Everyone
wants to be thin, but nobody wants to diet. Everybody wants to live long,
but not many want to exercise. Everybody wants money, yet few want to work
hard. Successful people conquer their feelings and form the habit of doing
things that unsuccessful people do not like to do. The bookends of
success are starting and finishing. Decisions help us start; discipline
helps us finish."
In other words, when it comes to success, good decisions and discipline go
hand in hand. Good decisions minus discipline equals a plan without a
payoff. And discipline minus good decisions equals regimentation without
reward. Only when we have good decisions plus
discipline do we have a masterpiece of potential.
Now, it's not easy to practice discipline. In fact, it can be downright
painful at times. We all know what it's like to do something that we don't
want to do but know we should do. That's the pain of discipline. But if you
don't engage in that kind of pain, you open yourself up to the pain of
regret, which is far more excruciating.
This leads me to an obvious question: How do you develop discipline? Here
are four steps.
1. Set deadlines and priorities. Don't make a list of everything you have to
do and start working from the top. Prioritize your to-do list. Determine
which projects you need to accomplish first and how much time you need to
get them done. Then give yourself a deadline and get busy.
2. Challenge your excuses. I get so tired of whiny people telling me why
they couldn't, shouldn't, didn't and wouldn't. Put the violin away and start
taking a hard look at the so-called reasons you cite for not being able to
get things done. As I like to say, it's easier
to go from failure to success than from excuses to success. As long as
you're making excuses, you're never going to make it.
3. Remove rewards until the job's done. Marathon runners don't stop for a
break after each mile, and neither should you. I'm not saying you shouldn't
divide your work into manageable chunks or celebrate the achievement of
intermediate goals. Just don't have that Krispy
Kreme doughnut too quickly.
4. Stay focused on results. Jackson Browne once said, "Talent without
discipline is like an octopus on roller skates. There's plenty of movement,
but you never know if it's going to be forward, backwards, or sideways."
Staying focused on achieving results—with the priority items on your to-do
list, I might add—will keep you from acting like an octopus on roller
skates.
If you want to be successful—as a leader, as a parent, as a member of
society—you have to pay the price. You can be disciplined and pay on the
front end, or you can take the seemingly easier path and pay on the back
end. Unfortunately, if you play now and pay later, the payment's much
heavier. As I often say, hard work is the accumulation of the easy things
you didn't do when you should have.
So, learn from my boyhood basement-cleaning strategy. Pay now, and play
later. Because if you pay now, you'll get to play a lot longer.
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