Life seems to be a game of mind over matter, that what is almost always standing in our way of achieving our goal is our own inability to conquer the inner voices telling us what we should and shouldn’t do.This is characterized as weak mental discipline and the problem with lack of mental discipline is that it is like a disease.

There is always a list of things we NEED to do in a day and a list of things we SHOULD. Most, even relatively, productive people get done the things they NEED to do in a day but people with a lack of self discipline often skip the things they SHOULD do but don’t necessarily NEED to do. 

For example, you have been telling yourself you want to start waking up early and working out. So, you set your alarm for 530am, which will give you enough time to go to the gym, shower there and then head to work. 

530 am rolls around and your alarm starts going off. You roll over and…. snooze it, then you snooze it again and again. By the time you end up getting out of bed its 630am and you have missed your chance to go to the gym.

This doesn’t seem like a big deal so you brush it off and will just wake up the next morning early and go workout. Except you don't, you end up doing the exact same thing, hit snooze again and again and again. And miss your chance to go to the gym.

This is a slippery slope.

One day turns into 2, 2 to a week, a week to a month. Yes, you avoided the initial discomfort of waking up early but you set off a chain of events. It's now stuck in your sub-consciousness that you took the easy way out. your Yes you might have told yourself it would be better to just get 30 more minutes of sleep, that it would be good for you but your subconscious knows the truth. And when the next difficult thing in your life comes around, because you haven’t conditioned your mental discipline, you might revert to taking the easiest way out and the easiest isn’t always the best. Whereas, if you had conditioned your self discipline by getting up every morning even when you didn't want to, even when it was cold outside, even when you were a little sleepier than usual, if you had conditioned yourself mentally, when you are faced with something difficult, you understand how to persevere because you’ve done it you’ve coinditoned yourself to fight off the voices telling you to take the easy way out.

Now not waking up early to workout isn’t the worst thing, the problem lies in when that lack of self discipline starts bleeding into other areas of your life. Work, family, friends, hobby etc. your lack of mental discipline has now led you to choose the easiest way out when the going gets hard and like a diamond made under pressure, yes you avoided the pressure but you won't ever be a diamond.