The Year of Discipline

While I was at World Domination Summit this past June, I dubbed 2011 “the year of confidence“.

What does that mean? Essentially I realized that for me to be successful accomplishing my goals, and helping others do the same thing, I was going to need to be fully confident in my ability to make those things happen.

Whether it’s being able to help someone quit their job, start a business, or start checking off their own bucket list goals, I had to be confident.

These days I’m feeling pretty good about my ability to do all of those things, so it’s on to the next piece of the puzzle:

The Year of Discipline

Confidence will only take you so far in your quest to build a business and live an interesting life – if you don’t have the discipline to build, create, and fail, then it becomes extremely easy to stay stagnant.

I’m the first to admit I’ve never been the most disciplined person in the world.  Far from it actually.

In the past, I’ve talked about my Golden Rule in which when given the opportunity, I’ll choose fun over work.  This doesn’t necessarily need to change in 2012, however it means that I’m going to have to be much more disciplined about getting work done when I am “working”. 

You all know how that goes.  You sit down at your computer for a nice work session, and 4 hours later you’re feeling pretty good about yourself – only to realize you spent 2 hours watching stupid You Tube videos, another hour sending emails that probably shouldn’t have been a top priority, half an hour of checking out Facebook, 20 minutes of tweeting, leaving you with approximately 10 minutes of real work.

That happens to me way too often.

Last week I and some of the other Location Rebel Academy members shared our top 5 goals for the year.  Mine included getting a six pack, helping 50 people quit their jobs and build a business, and to make a six figure income – among others.  At the rate I’m going now, none of that will happen because I haven’t had the discipline necessary to accomplish them.

A good question to ask yourself is, “what does discipline look like?”

Your response will be different than mine, but being aware of what it’s going to take to accomplish your goals in the new year is vital to your success.  Everyone makes goals, or resolutions, but few people have the discipline to follow through with it.

To me discipline looks like this:

• Following through with a workout regimen long enough to turn it into a habit.
• Taking time each week to assess progress on my goals and make changes as necessary
• Learning to actually get things done when I’m supposed to be getting things done.
• Set timelines and actually stick to them

This next year will involve more travel, more opportunity and more reasons to slack off.  This makes it that much more essential to spend “working time” actually working.

This morning I woke up at about 9am after a long New Years Eve and all I wanted to do was turn back over and fall back asleep.  That’s when I realized, if I don’t start making progress on my goals now, it’s only going to get harder in the future.  So I went downstairs in our mountain cabin, put on some coffee and wrote this post.

Let the year of discipline begin.

If you had to give a theme to this year, what would it be? I’d love to hear, so share with us in the comments!

Sean Ogle

Sean Ogle is the Founder of Location Rebel where he has spent the last 12+ years teaching people how to build online businesses that give them the freedom to do more of the things they like to do in life. When he's not in the coffee shops of Portland, or the beaches of Bali, he's probably sneaking into some other high-class establishment where he most certainly doesn't belong.