Discipline is Freedom

Hey team. All right, here we are. School started and we are in September. Can you believe it?

Today’s quote is called, well, the word is discipline. Discipline is freedom in disguise. Now, I want you to think about that for a second. Discipline is freedom in disguise.

So often we have, probably like me, I imagine many of you have tried to cut corners when you were a kid. Clean your room by picking everything up and putting it in a closet, making it all look good, but when you open the closet, everything falls out. Or sweeping it all under the bed. Mom and dad tell you to put your clothes away. So, you open up the drawers and you just start throwing stuff in there, knowing that the next time you need something, A, it is going to be wrinkled, or B, you cannot find it because you do not know which drawer it is inside of because you want to spend more time playing.

You want to spend more time doing the things that you want to do. You want to have fun doing the things you want to do.

And a famous writer that I love to quote an awful lot, John Maxwell, his dad used to tell him, “You can play now and pay later, or you can pay now and play later.” But there is no such thing as getting to do both.

You do not get the one without having to do the other. You have to pay in something. The time you put into school, you get out dividends over your lifetime. If you learn to read. Reading is everything. If you learn to spell well, spelling well is also very important.

If it was not for my wife and Sonja and Codie and heck, spell check on Microsoft computers, you guys would not be able to read what I write.

Why? Because I am the play now, pay later. So, all the stuff I did not do well in my younger years, I am paying for in my older years. Now, I have gotten a ton better. And it has not been easy to do. But I have learned that discipline is freedom. Discipline is freedom in disguise.

If you are disciplined with what you do and how you do it, and how you accomplish things. If you put money away every month and do not live paycheck to paycheck, and I know that can be hard, but my wife and I started doing it way early in life when we first got married. We got out envelopes, and we started doing the money plan, and we stayed with it for years.

Still to this day, I go every payday, and I go down, and I get money, cash out of the bank that I set up for spending purposes. I used to get out all the money, and I used to take my whole paycheck and divide it up and put it into car payment and put it into rent, and put it into those kinds of things.

And over the years, I have been able to not do those things because the money is there and it comes out automatically out of my paycheck. But I still, to make sure that I do not use a credit card and I do not go out in debt, I still take money out to go out to eat, and I pay cash. I still take money out to go buy groceries because I pay cash.

I have disciplined myself so that I can continue to save. Also, I have money that comes out before I ever see my paycheck. It goes into a different bank and a different bank account and I make it, I do not have a credit card for it or anything else. I literally have to call somebody on the phone. And ask them to mail me a cashier’s check.

I make it hard on myself to get money. I do. And the reason I do that is because I believe that discipline is freedom.

So for you this week, what are you needing discipline in? What do you need to discipline yourself to do better? Whether it be at work, at home, in your finances, in your eating habits.

I am working on those things. I got up last week. And I made like five or six different meals. I made spaghetti, I smoked chicken, I smoked teriyaki chicken. And I made little frittatas for me and my wife for breakfast. I did a whole bunch of different kinds of meals because I wanted to set up a better eating habit for Karen and I because some of you have noticed I have gained a little weight.

So, I am setting up. I am disciplining myself and I am putting out the effort and making meal plans and doing things in that focused effort.

So, what do you need to do to discipline yourself this week? That is the Wednesday message, guys. That is workshop Wednesday. Work on it. Discipline yourself.

God bless you. Have a wonderful week. I will see you guys next week. Bye. See you.