I’d like to share with you a concept I read about recently that changed how I look at discipline and “doing the hard thing”. You have never heard me say the words, “I love discipline!” But this concept helped me look at discipline in a totally different way. Rory Vaden, author, marketing guru, and speaker, coined this concept the “Principle of Sacrifice” and takes the act of discipline and reframes it in a way that makes it much more attractive.
Simply stated, the “Principle of Sacrifice” says that easy, short-term choices lead to difficult, long-term consequences and difficult, short-term choices lead to easy, long-term consequences. You may have heard me say that when you do life easy, life becomes hard. The concept is the same. I’ll tell you a quick story around that. When COVID hit, I stopped going to the gym. I started working out in my living room … sorta. I was not putting in even 50% to my routine. Then suddenly, I couldn’t pick up a 40-pound bag of dog food. I was making easy short-term decisions to not put 100% in my exercise routine and suddenly, life became difficult around picking up a bag of dog food.
Vaden also says that when we take the easy road, the problems surrounding it are always amplified. Let’s take our health as an example.
Have you ever noticed when you want to take action on a goal you’ve set, you view it as a sacrifice? For example, let’s say you’ve made the decision to lose that extra 30 pounds and you’ve decided to go to the gym to help you accomplish that goal. When you go (or think about going) to the gym, you likely view it as enduring discomfort or pain.
But here’s the thing: we are always going to experience pain. We try to avoid pain, but that’s impossible. We have the option to choose
whether we have the pain now or later.
And if we choose later, we’re going to accumulate interest that we’ll have to pay. If we take action now to lose the extra pounds, we will likely avoid health issues later. Which makes life easier, to go to the gym today or suffer a weight-related illness later? Vaden says that
taking action now is a short-term down payment on a rich future blessing.
The shortest, most guaranteed path to the easier life is to do the hardest parts as soon as possible. In other words, don’t procrastinate.
This concept can be applied to all areas of your life. Debt management expert Dave Ramsey said,
“Live like no one else so later you can live like no one else.”
In other words, make sacrifices now to live better later. How about relationships? Don’t put off that difficult conversation because it will grow and fester and make your life more miserable than if you’d just had the conversation to begin with.
Either way (doing it now or later) it’s going to be hard. But if we can avoid the interest, life in general will be easier.
Vaden studied ultra-performers and found that they don’t like discipline any more than the rest of us. They’ve just learned to train their brain to process choices differently. The “Principle of Sacrifice” is one way they look at discipline.
The bottom line is that just about anything we want in life, we’re going to have to work to get (health, wealth, relationships, career, spiritual). And it’s going to be hard. If it’s not hard, we’d already have it. But if we don’t do it now,
it is going to be harder later.
And that, my friends, is the “Principle of Sacrifice”.
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Here’s to discipline made easier!
