No Excuses!: The Power of Self-Discipline — Brian Tracy

 

Summary:

Self-discipline is the key to success and happiness in life. Hard work, delayed gratification, and mastering your impulses all lead to better outcomes in professional, personal, and spiritual life. There is a constant battle going on within each of us between easy, pleasurable, short-term behaviours and challenging, uncomfortable, long-term ones. In order to develop self-discipline, you must become a different person through your actions.


Book Notes/Quotes:

• Many people want to achieve great things, but defer action until later, and make up excuses for their inaction. They don’t want to pay the price for success.

 

• “Losers make excuses; winners make progress.”

• “Perhaps the most important insight of all with regard to success is that to achieve greatly, you must become a different person. It is not the material things you accomplish or acquire that matter so much as it is the quality of the person you must become to accomplish well above the average.”

 

• Success requires hard work and struggle. There are no shortcuts. Anyone who tells you that there is a shortcut is trying to sell you something. 

 

• “Self-discipline is the ability to do what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not.’”

 

• “Every day, and every minute of every day, there is a battle going on inside of you between doing what is right, hard, and necessary (like the angel on one shoulder) or doing what is fun, easy, and of little or no value (like the devil on your other shoulder). ”

 

• Self discipline can also be thought of as self-mastery and self-control. It requires delayed gratification: doing things that put you in a position to succeed in the future. 

 

• The law of perverse consequences: behaviour that is gratifying in the short term often leads to oppositional, negative long term results. 

 

• Herbert Grey’s classic common denominator of success: “successful people make a habit of doing the things that unsuccessful people don’t like to do.”

 

• Taking the easy way becomes a habit; conversely, being disciplined can become a habit that requires very little conscious effort.

 

• Self-discipline pays off in terms of increased self-esteem, self-worth and confidence. 

 

• Success and achievement are like brushing your teeth or eating. They need to be worked at every single day.

 

• “The greatest benefit you enjoy from exerting self-discipline in the pursuit of your goals is that you become a different person. You become stronger and more resolute. You develop greater self-control and determination. You actually shape and strengthen your personality and transform yourself into a better person.”

 

• Responsibility is the cornerstone of discipline. No one else is coming to the rescue, and no one else cares. You must take extreme ownership for everything. 

 

• When negative emotions crop up and the desire to blame external factors arises, use the phrase “I am responsible”. This cuts through the resentment, envy, hostility, etc.

 

• Writing down your goals or resolutions increases the chances you will execute on them dramatically. 

 

• “Your thoughts create the conditions of your life. When you change your thinking, you change your life. Your outer world becomes a mirror-image reflection of your inner world.”

 

• To succeed professionally, you need two things: the ability to prioritize and work on high-value tasks first, and the discipline to carry them out.
• “Persistence is self-discipline in action.”

 

• Most people waste enormous quantities of time at work, because they aren’t clear on what their three biggest priorities are.

 

• “if you do what the most successful salespeople do, over and over, there is nothing that can stop you from eventually achieving the same results and rewards that they do.”

 

• “In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves; self discipline with all of them came first.” — Harry S. Truman

 

• The difference between people’s financial situations largely boils down to how much self-control and self-mastery they have.

 

• Time management is essentially life management. 

 

• The best uses of your time are usually challenging and painful while the worst uses of your time are easy and pleasurable.  

 

• “Only your actions tell you—and others—what you truly value.”

 

• “The essence of time management is for you to discipline yourself to set clear priorities—and then stick to those priorities.”

 

• Problems are inevitable, but solvable. Most people react to problems by throwing their hands in the air, getting angry, and looking for someone to blame. Self-discipline can help you stay cool, rational, and solution-focused. 

 

• The reward for solving problems is the opportunity to solve bigger and more difficult problems—which leads to quicker promotion and higher compensation. 

 

• Stress and unhappiness are the product of feeling like you are not in control of your life. Contentment and fulfilment come when you feel like you are in control of your life. 

 

• When you have an internal locus of control, you feel as though you are in charge and make your own decisions. An external locus of control is when you feel that the world, fate, or other external forces determine your life. 

 

• “Happiness is [...] not a goal that you can aim at and achieve in and of itself. Happiness is a by-product that comes to you when you are engaged in doing something that you really enjoy while in the company of people who you like and respect.”

 

• “All of love, of any kind, is a response to value. We love what we most value, both in ourselves and others.”

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