“Successful People Know That They Must
Sacrifice Something Today in Order to
Achieve a Lot More Tomorrow. ”
For years I denied to myself that this was one of the secrets of
becoming a millionaire, or achieving anything else of note for that
matter.
I think the reason that I avoided naming this secret was because I
dislike the word 'discipline.' There's something Dickensian about it -
more than a whiff of the workhouse and shades of 'honest toil for the
bosses,' but there isn't a better single word which adequately covers
this concept. 'Focused Will' is close, but that's two words. Single
words work better for concepts like these, so we're stuck with
discipline.
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Do You Sincerely Want to be Rich?
In my discussions with other multimillionaires, this was the word
they used most frequently when trying to explain their success. I
became really excited when I finally accepted this. A lot of things fell
into place. This was the key concept which differentiated the rich
from the poor; the successful from the failures.
Discipline.
Without it, you're one of the 80%+ - the failures in life.
Remember, this is not my judgement on others - I have no right to
judge. These people are failures by their own admission and
definitions. If you were to ask them if they feel they have succeeded
in life, or failed, they would readily confess to having failed, although
they would, of course, blame factors outside of themselves for this
failure.
With discipline, you have a good chance of rising above the crowd
and retiring early as a wealthy man or woman.
Everything I write is aimed at preventing you from reaching
retirement with nothing. If you reach retirement as a pauper
dependant upon charity, having lived a life of quiet desperation,
frustrated, never having achieved anything much of note, not really
having had a good time (apart from the odd high point), never having
dreamed, never beaten a real challenge, then your life is a failure by
any standards, but certainly by your own. Of course, if you are happy
in your powerlessness and poverty, then none of this matters.
Are you a disciplined person, in general?
There are hundreds of indicators of a disciplined mind, not one of
which is essential, but put together, they start to add up to a pattern.
Can you get up in the morning? Are your shoes clean, your hair and
teeth brushed? Are your car and house tidy? Are your personal papers
(gas bills, bank statements, etc.) filed in some sort of reasonable
order? Do you turn out a good job of work, even when nobody is
looking? Do you ever get drunk? (No disciplined person would ever
get drunk!). Do you use recreational drugs? I could think of five
hundred more indicators, but you get the idea. It’s up to you to look at
your life and make an honest assessment of your level of discipline or
lack of it. Again, I am not judging you. Live how you want to live,
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including in a pigsty, unwashed and doped-up half the time - it's your
life. But if you want a life of power and wealth, then I can guarantee
you will not get it if your life is anything like I have described.
Discipline is vital.
When I meet consultation clients face to face, I often say
something like this: "There's nothing really special about me. I'm just
an electronics engineer made good. You could do what I have done."
I say this to try and remove the 'guru factor.' You can't get people to
emulate you if they think you're the incarnation of a sun-god! So I tell
them I'm just a regular guy, and that's the truth. Yes, I have an
education and a certain amount of common-sense. But I also have
discipline. Often, the people sitting opposite me do not have
discipline, or at least they haven't made it central to their lives
because, heck, it takes discipline to be disciplined! I can see the lack
of discipline in the way they dress, the way they sit, and the way they
talk.
What is Discipline?
Well, I guess one definition is being strict with yourself.
You know why discipline is important for a child or teenager, don't
you? It's to keep them in line. It's to stop them getting out of hand -
getting away with too much. Also, you discipline your children out of
love, and not because you enjoy the power-trip (I hope!). Often, you
hate to discipline your kids because it spoils their immediate
gratification and enjoyment, doesn't it? But you do this because the
long-term benefits and rewards vastly outweigh the immediate
greedy, thoughtless and short-term gratification of their desires.
Correct? I think so.
So another definition might be 'gratification postponement.' Not
eating the whole bowl of jelly right now. Eating some and saving the
rest for the next few days. Not because it's 'naughty' to eat all the
jelly. Not because it's 'wicked or sinful' to eat all the jelly and God
will slap your wrists. It's because if you eat all the jelly now, your
enjoyment will be, say, ten units (8 for the one bowl, plus 16 for the
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rest of the jelly, minus 6 for the sick feeling, minus 8 for the
realisation that you're a spineless worm with no will-power!).
If you have one bowl now, one tomorrow, and one the next day,
you get 8+8+8 = 24 units of pleasure, plus 6 units for feeling smug
about your strength of will. That's 30 units of pleasure compared with
10 units.
I'm not fooling around with this jelly analogy. This is exactly the
way it works.
Disciplined people save money. They don't spend every single
penny they have in their pockets on goodies to consume right now, as
fast as possible. They don't then rush out and borrow more money to
buy more goodies to consume because they can't wait until next pay
day. Such people are eating all the sweets in one sitting, then
borrowing sweets from their friends so they can eat those too! What
would you say to a child who did that?
Why, what a spoilt and greedy child that would be, don't you
think?
One of the keys to a successful life ( however you define it) is the
ability known as ‘gratification postponement.’
The name speaks for itself and many people learn this ability and
its advantages quite early on in life. At its most fundamental, it is the
ability not to eat all the sweets today, in order that you will have some
left over for tomorrow. As you grow up, it manifests itself in several
ways. For example:
1. As a child: Your ability to delay playtime until you have
completed all of your homework.
2. As a teenager: The ability to postpone the advantages of cash in
your pocket right now from some mundane job. Instead you do
further study so that you might enjoy a higher salary later on. Every
hour of study you do gears up through your life to an effective rate of
£1,000 for each study hour - but paid later, not right now.
3. As an adult: The ability not to spend every penny of the money
you earn on goodies, but instead to save a percentage so that it might
grow and you can enjoy more goodies later on.
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Before I proceed, let me tell you there is nothing ascetic in what I
am describing. The point is not to deny yourself forever and always
postpone pleasure, possibly even until you die. That is ridiculous. No,
the point is to enjoy today with all of its richness and pleasure, but to
master the trick of gratification postponement for a percentage of
life’s pleasures. And this has only one, entirely selfish aim - to enjoy
more of life’s pleasures tomorrow. I want to be very clear on that
point.
Many religions preach that you should deny yourself pleasure
because it distracts you from your true task which is to sacrifice
yourself for others and for God. Your reward, they say, will come
when you die. Sorry, but that’s just too long to wait, and too late to
collect it.
For example, I consider the savings habit to be an absolute give-
away sign of success or potential success. To save takes discipline -
the discipline not to spend every penny you earn, but instead to put a
little by. Most people do not save. They cannot manage the trick of
postponing the gratification which the immediate use of their money
would bring, consequently, they are always broke and struggling for
cash.
Disciplined people don't save money out of altruism or because
they are being good little boys or girls. They do it from a position of
'enlightened self-interest' or selfishness, by another name. It's
important that you realise this. You're doing it for you, nobody else.
They know that if they take some pleasure now (spend some money),
then postpone the rest of the pleasure for a later day, they will get far
more pleasure in total than if they spent all the money in one go.
Everyone knows this. It's something we all learn at about age eight.
It's part of the curriculum taught at the 'University of the Obvious!'
Disciplined people apply this knowledge - it takes will-power not to
spend the lot right now - undisciplined people just can't keep their
hands out of the sweetie-jar, and that's the plain truth.
Modest saving - just 10% of your wealth - means you can retire
with a quarter of a million in the bank. Nice.
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Not saving means you retire penniless and with about five hundred
pound's worth of useless junk. What a difference!
All successful people score highly on their ability to delay
gratification, and research backs this up. Daniel Goleman in his
remarkable book Emotional Intelligence (ISBN 0-553-37506 - 7)
quotes the following amazing study, which I’m sure you will find
illuminating:
The ‘Two Marshmallow’ Test
Just imagine you are four years old and someone makes the following
proposal: if you can wait until after he runs an errand, you can have two
marshmallows for a treat. If you can’t wait until then, you can have only one
- but you can have it right now. It is a challenge sure to try the soul of any
four year old, a microcosm of the eternal battle between impulse and
restraint, id and ego, desire and self-control, gratification and delay. Which
of these choices a child makes is a telling test; it offers a quick reading not
just of character, but of the trajectory that a child will probably take through
life.
There is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental than resisting
impulse. It is the root of all emotional self-control, since all emotions by
their very nature, lead to one or another impulse to act.
A remarkable study in which the marshmallow challenge was posed to
four-year-olds shows just how fundamental is the ability to restrain the
emotions and so delay impulse. Begun by psychologist Walter Mischel
during the 1960s at a pre-school on the Stanford University campus and
involving mainly children of the Stanford faculty, graduates and other
employees, the study tracked down the four-year-olds as they were
graduating from high school.
Some four-year-olds were able to wait what must surely have seemed an
endless fifteen to twenty minutes for the experimenter to return. To sustain
themselves in their struggle, they covered their eyes so they wouldn’t have to
stare at temptation, or rested their heads in their arms, talked to themselves,
sang, played games with their hands and feet, even tried to go to sleep. These
plucky pre-schoolers got the two marshmallow reward. But others, more
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impulsive, grabbed the one marshmallow, almost always within seconds of
the experimenter’s leaving the room on his ‘errand.’
The diagnostic power of how this moment of impulse was handled
became clear some twelve to fourteen years later, when these same children
were tracked down as adolescents. The emotional and social difference
between the grab-the-marshmallow pre-schoolers and their gratification-
delaying peers was dramatic.
Those who had resisted the temptation at four were now, as adolescents,
more socially competent, personally effective, self assertive and better able
to cope with the frustrations of life.
They were less likely to go to pieces, freeze or regress under stress, or
become rattled or disorganised when pressured; they embraced challenges
and pursued them instead of giving up, even in the face of difficulties; they
were self-reliant and confident, trustworthy and dependable; they took
initiative and plunged into projects. And, more than a decade later, they were
still able to delay gratification in pursuit of their goals.
Those who grabbed for the marshmallow, however, tended to have fewer
of these qualities, and shared instead a relatively more troubled
psychological portrait. In adolescence, they were more likely to be seen as
shying away from social contacts; to be stubborn and indecisive; to be easily
upset by frustrations; to think of themselves as bad or unworthy; to regress or
become immobilised by stress; to be resentful and mistrustful about not
‘getting enough’; to be prone to jealousy and envy; to overreact to irritation
with a sharp temper, so provoking arguments and fights. And after all those
years, they were still unable to put off gratification.
What shows up in a small way early in life, blossoms into a wide range of
social and emotional competence as life goes on. The capacity to impose a
delay on impulse is at the root of a plethora of efforts, from staying on a diet
to pursuing a medical degree. Some children, even at four, have mastered the
basics: they were able to read a social situation as one where delay was
beneficial, to pry their attention from focusing on the temptation at hand, and
to distract themselves while maintaining the necessary perseverance toward
their goal - the two marshmallows.
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Even more surprising, when the tested children were evaluated again as
they were finishing High School, those who had waited patiently at four
were far superior as students to those who had acted on whim.
According to their parent’s evaluations, they were more academically
competent, better able to put their ideas into words, to use and respond to
reason, to concentrate, to make plans and follow through on them and more
eager to learn. Most astonishingly, they had dramatically higher scores on
their SAT tests. Those who at four had grabbed for the marshmallow most
eagerly had an average verbal score of 524 and quantitative (or ‘math’) score
of 528. Those who had waited longest had average scores of 610 and 652
respectively - a 210 point difference in total score.
At age four, how children do on this test of delay of gratifications is twice
as powerful a predictor of what their SAT scores will be as is IQ at age four.
IQ becomes a stronger predictor of SAT scores only after children learn to
read. This suggests that the ability to delay gratification contributes
powerfully to intellectual potential, quite apart from IQ itself.
Poor impulse control in children is also a powerful predictor of later
delinquency; again more so than IQ. What Walter Mischel, who did the
study, describes as ‘goal-directed self imposed delay of gratification’ is
perhaps the essence of emotional self-regulation: the ability to deny impulse
in the service of a goal, whether it be building a business, solving an
algebraic equation, or pursuing the Stanley Cup. His findings underscore the
role of emotional intelligence as a meta-ability, determining how well or
poorly people are able to use their other mental capacities.
Thanks to Daniel Goleman for that amazing insight.
Before I continue, I want to sound a word or two of warning. The
problem with studies like the one Daniel Goleman describes is that
you have to be careful about exactly what is causing the measured
results.
Here are just four thoughts I had whilst reading Daniel’s account -
doubtless there are a dozen other possibilities:
1. The 'didn’t grab' children could have come from severe and
restrictive families who placed a disproportionate emphasis on
manners and politeness thus inhibiting those children from greedily
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grabbing for a sweet without saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ Perhaps
such families could also be strong disciplinarians, forcing children to
do their homework to a high standard and on time, etc. In other
words, it is the family background causing the increase in ability and
better SAT scores, not some inherent ability to resist gratification.
2. By a similar argument, the 'grab-a-marshmallow' children could
have come from relatively deprived homes where treats were rare or
non existent. That marshmallow was just so much more tempting to
these children than to the other children who perhaps have plates of
the sweets lying around all day, just for the taking.
3. Perhaps the ‘grabbing’ children came from larger families and had
many siblings. Perhaps they have learned, even at age four, that if you
don’t grab it now (e.g. a biscuit) the plate will be empty in about three
seconds! These poorer and more deprived children could do worse in
life purely as a function of those factors (less parental time spent with
them, etc.).
4. The 'didn’t-grab' children might have been indifferent to
marshmallows, or actively disliked them. The 'grab' children might
have had a passion for marshmallows.
Having said this, the ability to resist impulse is still a powerful
predictor of achievement and well-being, no matter how the ability
arose (i.e. whether it was learned, imposed or somehow inherited).
I have to add my own experience in here.
After many years of teaching success principles to thousands of
people, the one factor I would isolate in particular as being at the root
of poverty and frustration is ‘indiscipline.’
Put another way, successful people are disciplined - and one
characteristic of a disciplined mind is the ability to postpone pleasure
temporarily. Discipline, many times, means doing what you don’t
particularly want to do right now, in order that you can gear-up your
efforts and have a far better future. That future sure comes around
fast, and those ‘lucky’ disciplined people who were able to keep their
hands off the sweeties, are soon able to enjoy their two marshmallow
reward. Meanwhile the ‘grab-a-marshmallow’ gang look on in envy at
the ‘lucky’ people with two marshmallows and are often bitter about
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the unfair state of the world in which some people seem to have two
'marshmallows' and some have only one.
As an aside, they almost certainly then vote for politicians who
promise to steal marshmallows by force from people with ‘too many’
and distribute them free to the ‘needy.’
It's Not Just Money
Discipline produces success even if your definition of success has
nothing to do with money.
If your idea of success is to be a great pianist or painter or
gardener, then to get there you must postpone immediate trivial
pleasure such as watching TV or going out to the pub. Instead you
must practice the piano, study painting, or weed the garden ready for
the spring. I would submit that even if your definition of success was
to be at peace with the world and to be in a blissful connected state
with the universe you must first practice the long hours of discipline
required for meditation, and practice the minute-by-minute discipline
of pushing out the constant chatter of thoughts from your mind. A
Zen monk, for example, could be said to be almost perfectly (and
excessively) disciplined.
I think unsuccessful people are often that way because they have
these two characteristics:
1. They rarely think of the future or plan for it. They live only for
today.
Self-development guru Jim Rohn’s secret of happiness is 'enjoying
today whilst planning for a better tomorrow,' and this is a subject I
explore further in the last chapter.
Living for the moment is only half of the story. You can only
enjoy today because of the plans you made or work you did
‘yesterday.’ Similarly you can only enjoy tomorrow because of the
plans you make or work you do today. This includes simple pleasures
like a day walking in the countryside listening to the birds sing. You
can only do that because 'yesterday' (last year, etc.) you worked hard
enough and saved some money so that you could take time off. It is
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