Easy Now, Hard Later: Why Discipline Today Leads to Success Tomorrow!

0:06Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode. If you haven't heard, there's only a few more days for the one year anniversary of my book on Kindle. It is massively discounted and on sale for$1.99. So if you wanna get my book about the psychology of taking action, go to Amazon, type in Rob Dial. The book is called Level Up and it'll teach you how to stop procrastinating, how to get focused, how to upgrade your life and take massive action towards your dreams. So get it before the price goes back up.

0:40Today, we're going to be talking about how to have discipline to follow through and to stop giving up on yourself. And I'm going to give you three tips today to help you push through when you want to give up. One of the things that I get Instagram messages about all of the time, people in my courses ask me all of the time. All too often, I hear people say, Rob, I'm really good at starting. Like, you know, I used to just like want to do something and not doing it. But now I start and I always give up. I never finish. You know, I start my New Year's resolutions and then two weeks later I stop them.

1:17How do I get better at finishing? And I want you to understand, if you started something, you started it with the intention of finishing. But somewhere along the way, you didn't finish. But you started it with the intention of finishing. You wanted to finish. You actually still want to finish, most likely. So why are you not finishing? And I'm going to make it as simple as possible. You stopped because giving up is easy. Giving up is the easiest thing to do in the world. There's literally nothing easier than giving up because giving up at doing something requires absolutely nothing of you. If you say, oh, I'm going to start my workout routine.

2:04And you do a workout routine. You say, I want to lose five pounds. And you give up on trying to lose those five pounds. Why? Because you chose to do nothing. Now, you might have chose to do something different. Maybe you decided to do something different with your life. But you chose to do nothing in regards to changing your diet, doing your workout, whatever it might be. It requires nothing of you. It is the easiest, simplest thing to do is to give up. So it's not that you stopped caring about it. It's that you chose the easy route because the easy route is what we are. It's what's ingrained in us to do as humans.

2:40I believe that our species is inherently lazy. You know, if you think back, like I live in Austin in the middle of the summer, it gets to like 105, 107 degrees. I guarantee that any ancestors that we have, you know, 50 ,000 years ago, we're probably not working in the middle of the day. I would guess, that's my guess. Maybe I'm completely wrong, but my guess is that they probably woke up before the sunrise, which is pretty typical in tribal settings as they wake up right before the sunrise. That's when their body usually wakes them up. They do work, they go hunting, they do gathering when it's nice and cool.

3:15It's 65, it's 75 degrees. And then they probably worked really, really hard up until like 11, until it gets really hot. And then they took some time off. They hung out under a tree. They hung out with each other. They conversed. They ate their food. They took a nap, whatever it is that they did. And then they probably started working again and they went hunting and they did gathering. They did all the things they need to before sunset. And they would probably eat and they'd probably go back to sleep. And then that's just, that would be my guess, my idiot mind guess with absolutely no evidence that that's probably what they did.

3:46So I think our species is inherently lazy. Our species will usually choose the easy route. So to decide that you want to do something different and to make yourself follow through is against what I think is actually inherent within us. But you know, it's not that you stopped caring, it's just you chose the easy route and no great life has ever been lived by taking the easy route. There's nobody that's like, if you go up to anyone and you're like, hey, who's your mentor? It's very rare. Like, who's your idol? Who do you want to be like? It's never like, oh, the person who took the easy route. No, it's usually the person who did something, that challenged himself, that brought the potential out to the world, that did something different than everybody else was, that inspired you.

4:28And so if you're listening to this podcast, it's not because you want to take the easy route. I know that. You're here because you want to get better at taking action. You want to get better at doing what you need to do to create the life that you want. You want to figure out a way to get yourself to do what needs to be done in order to create the life that you want so that you can have something amazing of your life, so that you don't get to the end of your life and wish that you would have done something different. So you don't get to the end of your life and have regret. You want to learn how to start taking the hard route, to take the road less traveled, to do what other people are not willing to do.

5:04Otherwise, you wouldn't be here with me. You wouldn't. You've heard me say before over and over and over again that your life is either hard now and easy later, or it's easy now and hard later. Either you choose to make it harder now when you're younger because you're never going to be younger than you are right now, or it's going to be harder when you get older. There's no way around it. That's just the way life goes. The hard will eventually happen in your life, but the good thing is whether you realize it or not, you get to choose when it's going to be. And so like, I'll give you an example of easy now and hard later.

5:45So if you decide to skip your exercise, you decide to skip your run, that's easy now, which is going to make life harder later. It feels comfortable to skip your workouts now. But over time, the lack of physical activity, the lack of movement, the lack of, you know, getting used to getting your heart rate up could lead to health issues. It could lead to fatigue. It can lead to chronic conditions and it can make your life harder down the road. Yeah, it's just the way it goes. Studying if you're still in school. Learning new skills if you're trying to get better at something. Both of those are hard now, but easy later.

6:23It can be tough to focus and to study. It can be tough to put yourself into a situation where you need to develop new skills. But the knowledge that you get from school or from learning something new, the abilities that you get from acquiring a new skill, all of those make future tasks easier, which then eventually will make more opportunities open up for you in your life. If you decide to save money, that would be hard now and easy later. So when you look at money just in general, money is just a skill set. Making money is a skill set. Saving money is a skill set, investing money is a skill set.

7:05You don't have to be the smartest person in the world to realize how to play the game money. You just have to decide that you're going to learn how to play the game. And so like sticking to a budget or sitting down and learning how financial systems work, how economies work, how money works, how the stock market works. All of those are really challenging in the moment, but over years and years and years, it creates financial security and peace in your future. It just makes it a little bit easier later on down the road, which is hard now, easier later. Let's decide you want to procrastinate. Procrastination is the simplest form of easy now, hard later.

7:43You're putting off your tasks that you know that you need to do because it makes this moment that we're in easier, but it can lead to stress later on down the road because all of your work starts to pile up, your deadlines start to pile up and you know it makes it harder for things to handle so procrastination is the definition of easy now hard later and we will be right back and now back to the show let's say that you decide to eat junk food because it tastes good right that's easy now hard later it's convenient it's enjoyable it's easy that's you could go to a drive-thru and you could pick up food right now It's, you know, they load that stuff with sugars and with salts.

8:26And so it tastes good. So it's enjoyable to eat unhealthy foods now. But long term, it can lead to weight gain. It can lead to low energy. It can lead to serious health conditions. That's the definition of easy now, hard later. So life is always hard now and easy later, easy now and hard later. Did I say that correct? Easy now, hard later, hard now, easy later, right? So I'm gonna give you three tips to help you push through whenever you do wanna give up. Okay, the first thing is this, you need to train yourself. And this is something that I've had to like really push myself. I was actually talking to my wife about this the other day.

9:02And the thing that I came to realize is I said, when I first started in my first sales company, I changed myself. And she's like, what do you mean by that? And I was like, I had to change myself because I was so lazy. I had to basically get the laziness out of me in order for me to be successful. And so that goes to number one, which is to train yourself for what's hard. Train yourself for what is hard. Train yourself to do what you need to do. Train yourself to basically, if you train yourself right now and do what's hard, it makes the hard things that come later on in life easier. It becomes easier the more that you learn how to push past this invisible mental barrier.

9:43So like the example that I always think of is like, train for the worst of times. Don't sit around and worry about it and be like, oh my God, apocalyptic times are coming. But there's a really great Japanese proverb, I think it's Japanese. And it says, it's better to be a warrior in a garden than to be a gardener in the war. Like, just take that for a second. It's better to be a warrior in a garden than it is to be a gardener in a war. And so the way I like to think about it is to train myself mentally, physically, emotionally for the possibility of life being harder later on down the road. And I think about it, like I said, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally as well.

10:22This is one of the reasons why I'm such a fan of cold plunges. I hate cold plunges, but I also love cold plunges. Why? Because no matter how many cold plunges you do or cold showers you've taken, you never look forward to it. Well, maybe you're some freak of nature that looks forward to it, but I do not look forward to it ever. But I love the way that I feel after. I love the way that I feel after, but I love the accomplishment of knowing that I did what I didn't want to do. And there's this mental barrier that me, I, but I find most people encounter at the moment when you're about to jump in.

11:03And it says, okay, it's 35 degrees in that water. Just skip today. Nobody's here. Nobody is around. Nobody's going to know if you skip it. This is what my brain says to me every single time. This is dumb. You don't need to do it. Do you know how cold it is? You have a busy day. You have so much shit to do. Just skip it. And I'm like, wow. And I come up with that mental barrier. And that's that little inner bitch that's always trying to hold me back. And then I'm like, screw it. I'm going to go. And I jump in the water. And does the voice go away? No, it doesn't go away when you're in the cold.

11:37that voice just says, okay, just jump in, jump out. Hey, you did it. You're in the water. You know, you said you're going to do five minutes. It's been one minute. You did what you're supposed to do. Just get out. Just turn the water a little bit warmer. If you're inside the shower, it's, it's, it stops you. It wants to stop you from getting in the cold. And then when you're in the cold, it wants you to get out of the cold. And it's, so it's this mental back and forth. It's like the angel on one side, the devil on the other, and the devil's on one side. And he's like, get out of the water. Don't go in the water.

12:04Don't do this thing. No one's going to know. And on the angel is like, do it. It's going to be better for you. You're training for harder times. You're training your brain. You're training your emotions. You're training yourself physically. It's the same voice that comes in all of the time. The one that says, hey, hit the snooze. The one that makes you give up. It's the mental gym to do what needs to be done, regardless of how you feel. Which brings us to basically our next point. So that's number one. Number one is just train yourself for what is hard in life. Number two is to do what needs to be done regardless of how you feel.

12:40Don't, now let me say, let me put a caveat in here. It is important to listen to your emotions. You know, like if something happens to you and someone that you love dies, yes, you definitely need to listen to your emotions. You definitely need to grieve. But 95 % of the time, what you need to do is you need to do what needs to be done regardless of how you feel, aka stay consistent. If you said you were going to do it, get it done. Get better at following through. One of the things that used to drive me crazy, when I opened up my first business and I started off in sales and then I opened up a franchise in Fort Lauderdale with that business and I trained a couple thousand sales employees.

13:17It drove me crazy how many people said, oh yeah, I'm going to make 100 calls today. And then they make 10. They said, I'm going to go and I'm going to do 12 appointments this week. And they do two. And so I had this big, huge sign that was put. You had to walk out of like my main training area. There was a huge sign that was right above the door and it said in capital letters, follow through. And I used to just talk about following through, following through, following through because so few people, I realized at that young age at 22 years old, so few people follow through on anything that they say they're going to do.

13:52So if you can set your mind to something and follow through over and over and over and be consistent, you will be light years ahead of every person who just wants to make their life easy. You don't want to be motivated. You don't want to be skilled. You don't want to be amazing. You don't want to be better than everybody else. You might think that you do, but what you want is just to be consistent. You don't need to be better. You don't need to be this freak of nature. You just need to be consistent. Consistent people win. Day in, day out, show up no matter how you feel. Decide what your goals are.

14:27Decide what you want for your life. Decide what you want your life to be. Figure out what actions you need to take on a daily basis and then just take them every single day. Show up and do it. One of the things that I love, it's a Will Smith quote and he says, you can't overcome fear, so just do it scared. Like you're going to feel the fear. You're going to feel the resistance, but do it anyways. Just train yourself to do it anyways. Don't give up. Just do it scared. Do it worried. Do it angry. Do it no matter what. The person who is the most consistent in the long run will always win. So don't wait and hope that you become motivated.

15:01There's actually a lot of science that finds and psychologists have found out that people usually wait for motivation before they take action. What they've actually found is that consistently motivation follows action. So what that means is usually when you start doing something, you're not very motivated. But as you start doing, you become more motivated because your body starts to create the chemicals with the endorphins, with the dopamine that make you want to keep going. And so it's like, I don't know about you, when I work out, I never want to, I never feel like working out when I work out.

15:30And then about 30 minutes in, I'm like, this is great. I'm going to keep going. I'm going to do just a little bit more. So don't worry about tomorrow. Don't worry about all the stuff that needs to be done tomorrow. What actions need to be taken today? And most importantly, what actions need to be taken right now? Don't think about the wins and the losses of yesterday. day. Don't think about what it is that you need to do tomorrow. Think about what action do I need to do today, but more specifically, what action do I need to take right now? Because taking action today is all that matters. You know, yesterday's successes, yesterday's failures means nothing about today.

16:06So you just take action today regardless of how you feel. That's the second thing. And the third thing is have a why. You know, there's a really important phrase and it says, when you think about giving up, remember why you started. All too often when people give up, they've forgotten the reason why they wanted to do it in the first place. And when you remember the reason, when you have a why, when you have a really strong why behind the reason why you're taking action, it makes it easier. And this why will push you to take action when you're too busy thinking about yourself. The people who really win at life have something outside them that they're fighting for.

16:39They have other people that they're fighting for. And I've told this many times, and it's actually in my book, this story as well. But I had a client years ago and I was like, it was the beginning of the year. I was like, what's your number one goal for the year? What's the one thing that we need to accomplish this year? And he's like, I want to make$100 ,000 this year. I was like, awesome, why? He's like, well, I've never done it before. I was like, cool, why? And I went, why and why? And I call it the seven levels of why. And I wrote about this process in my book. The seven levels of why. You go deeper and ask why and ask why and ask why and ask why and ask why.

17:12And eventually we got to the point or the reason why, the real reason why he wanted to make$100 ,000 that year was because he had just gotten divorced about a year ago from his ex-wife now. And he had two young children and he lived in New York. They both lived just outside of Manhattan. And his ex-wife had custody of the children and she lived in a really bad part of town. And he was extremely worried about his child's well-being. And so what he actually said is that this is, we had to water it down. My publisher wanted to water this story down. So that's what they did. But the true reason what he told me out of his mouth was that the reason why he wanted to get custody of his children was he wanted to make enough money to put a down payment on a house to put his children and himself into a better part of town because he was afraid that his daughter was going to be pregnant by the time she was 13.

17:56And he was afraid that his son was going to get murdered in a drive-by. That was his words. So every time we spoke, we talked about how he was going to be helping his children by making that$100 ,000. When he says, I want to make$100 ,000 and he's just focusing on the money, it's easy to give up. But when he's talking about his children's safety, when he's talking about his children's life, he's talking about how if they're in a better part of town, they can get better education. All I did was I would say, hey, how much closer are you to getting your children into a better part of town? And that is the why that drove him to then that year make over$100 ,000 that year.

18:28And so it's really important that if you're going to be going towards something, you have to have a really good reason why. And it's usually important to take it out, Take yourself out of the equation and focus on other people. Focus on the world and have them be the reason why you're doing something. And then when you think about giving up, remember why you started. My very first mentor used to always say, if your why is strong enough, your how will reveal itself. When your why is strong enough, you'll figure out how to get it done. Nothing will stop you anymore. You won't make excuses. You won't procrastinate.

18:59And so that's what I really want you to focus on. And so those are the three things that you should do to really have more discipline and to follow through. Number one, train yourself for things that are hard. Number two, do what needs to be done regardless of how you feel. And number three, make sure you have a why. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me at RobDialJr, R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. And as always, I'm gonna leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better.

19:26I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.