365 Days With Self-Discipline: 365 Life-Altering Thoughts on Self-Control, Mental Resilience, and Success

Day 10: On Building Your Story

Words  create  sentences;  sentences  create  paragraphs;  sometimes

paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.

—Stephen King

 

10

Writing a novel is a daunting task if you’ve never written one before.

It’s  hard  to  write  even  a  single  paragraph,  let  alone  write  two  or  three

hundred  pages  that  will  capture  the  attention  of  the  reader  and  keep  them

reading  until  the  last  page.  What’s  worse,  after  all  this  effort,  you’ll

probably  realize  that  your  novel,  when  compared  to  a  widely-acclaimed

bestselling novel, is only good for kindling.

What  you  fail  to  see  is  that  the  author  of  that  bestselling  novel  most

likely  has  spent  a  decade  or  more  mastering  their  craft.  They  started  with

words,  which  then  became  sentences,  paragraphs,  and  eventually  stories.

Their first attempts — like those of everybody else — were unsuccessful. It

took  them  hundreds  of  thousands  of  words’  worth  of  practice  to  finally

write a masterpiece.

Building  self-discipline  is  similar  to  writing  a  novel.  You  might

consider a disciplined person who always wakes up at four in the morning,

is physically active every day, eats a healthy diet, is super productive, and is

capable of balancing it all with their social life and family obligations as a

superhuman.  But  in  reality,  this  person,  like  the  bestselling  novelist,

probably started with one simple change and kept building on top of it.

Whenever you get discouraged, or feel tired by how far you still have

to  go  to  accomplish  your  goals,  remind  yourself  that  everybody  who has

built  self-discipline  had  to  go  through  the  same  process  —  starting  with

little changes which then turned into habits, which then led to big lifestyle

changes and identity shifts, and eventually, into successes.

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