No Excuses!: The Power of Self-Discipline

There are 999 other success principles that I have found in my reading and experience, but without self-discipline, none of them work. With self-discipline, they all work.

“There are a thousand excuses for failure but never a good reason.”
—MARK TWAIN

You must get out of yourself and your own preoccupations in order to get into other people and how they might be thinking and feeling.
Therefore, if you want to have a friend, you must first be a friend. If you want people to like you, you should first like them. If you want people to respect you, you should first respect them. If you want to impress others, you should first be impressed by them. In this way

Losers make excuses; winners make progress.

Stop using your incredible brain to think up elaborate rationalizations and justifications for not taking action.

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

They think and dream and fantasize about all the things they are going to do “someday.”

However, it takes tremendous self-discipline to become a person of character. It takes considerable willpower to always “do the right thing” in every situation.

All of life is a test, to see what you are really made of deep, down inside. Wisdom can be developed in private through study and reflection, but character can be developed only in the give and take of daily life, when you are forced to choose and decide among alternatives and temptations.

When your level of integrity is higher, you are more honest with yourself and more likely to live consistently with all the other values that you admire and respect.