Mentality - Archives - Page 4 of 10

Breaking the Horse of Emotion

Most people are carried around by their emotions. They are pulled by them as if the emotion is a horse that has not been broken. If you have seen footage of a herd of wild horses, you know they run free and relish that freedom. When men capture them and try to domesticate them there is a process where the animal is completely resistant to being controlled. It concentrates all of its power into ridding itself of the rider who would subjugate it.

But given enough time, the horse will surrender and learn to obey the commands of the rider. You can learn to do the same thing with your emotions. Even though your emotions currently run free and wild, you can learn to put bits in their mouths and turn them where you want. You can be the one in charge of your emotions rather than having your emotions be in charge of you.

Working to control your emotions is painful at first. It contains the risk of being thrown from the horse and injured.

Many riders cannot hold onto horses and are thrown off. They break arms or legs and sometimes sustain more serious injuries. There is a basic, inherent risk in attempting to break a horse. It is the simple risk of pain. Since we are humans are trained from an early age to avoid anything painful, we continue this trend by avoiding the pain of personal change. Rather than gritting our teeth, accepting that attempting to change ourselves will be painful, we instead sit content in our own mediocrity.

Instead of turning our focus inward, pursuing personal excellence, we say that where we are is “good enough”, though there is no such thing. One of our many responsibilities as men is to shoulder difficulty for some greater good. And I argue to you that outside of God the greatest good is the improvement of the self. Because without the improvement of the self, you cannot take care of your family, lead others or accomplish all the other tasks that society imposes upon you. While some people focus on their families and on everything but themselves, you must learn to focus on and improve yourself. By doing this you will bring much greater value to others than those who focus exclusively on others without ever bothering to improve themselves.

The man who focuses only on his family is limited in how well he can truly serve them. Your ability to serve others is limited by your skill level. Take some time and invest in yourself and alter you will be of greater value to others.

Improve yourself by taking a firm grasp on your emotions. You cannot be moved by external events. This is the state of mind you should be training to achieve. The man who is unmoved by external circumstances is like a mountain or the stony cliffs facing the ocean. People build homes and castles on mountains or even on the edges of these stony cliffs because they trust their strength. You need to be the type of man who is the stone, who is the unmovable rock face on the ocean’s edge. With that degree of self-control, you provide a sense of peace and security to everyone around you. They all begin to relax and feel calm because you, because of the man who is the leader, the man who is in complete control of his emotions and cannot be moved by circumstance.

Most men choose not to control their emotions. They are pulled around by them because it is easier to do so. As hard as life is when you are pulled by emotion, that period of time where you work to break the horse of emotion is even more difficult than that. But on the other side is absolute freedom. You have the power of the horse combined with the power of self-control. This makes you the free, independent man who has the strength to stand on his own.

With that newfound power, you can concentrate it into any facet of life that you want.

You have harnessed the horsepower of emotion, now all you have to do is decide what to do with that limitless energy. Will you continue to work on yourself or perhaps concentrate more on that career? Whatever you decide to do, you can do it with newfound energy and focus. You are no longer losing energy through the leak of emotion.

As a man in perfect control of yourself, your energy system is flawless and perfectly sustainable. You cannot be moved by external events and on top of that, you have massive personal power. The benefits that come from being able to control your emotions cannot be understated.

Also understand I do not mean that you should not feel emotions. I am not trying to rob you of your humanity. Again, you must learn not to divorce emotions completely, but rather to use them as fuel.

Embrace the pain of change.

All change is difficult because we are reconstructing who we are all the way down to our brain cells. When changing who we are, we literally change at the cellular level. We adjust the way our hormone and emergency systems respond to events. By being in control of our emotions we limit the time we spend being stressed or in fight-or-flight mode. That not only saves buckets of personal energy but is inherently masculine to the core. The ability to resist emotion, control it or be unmoved by external circumstance is a demonstration of strength.

Be disgusted by others who have no emotional self-control.

One of the ways to continue to be motivated on the path to any change is to be disgusted by others around you who show no regard for emotional control. You can apply this to any type of change you want. Before anyone misunderstands, I am not saying that you look down on others or hate them for their actions, but rather that you simply be disgusted by the action itself. Love the weak but hate weakness.

You can apply this to diet and training by being disgusted at what the majority of people in the world decide to do with their bodies. Rather than training them and taking care of them, they live sedentary lives and pack on enough fat to last them a year-long famine.

Learn to be disgusted by people who show a complete lack of emotional control. Recognize it is total weakness and effeminacy and promise yourself that you will never be like those weak men. This is critical: you need to have a goal to aim at combined with something you want to avoid if you want maximum motivation for change. Most people do not spend enough time developing the appropriate anger and disgust at particular actions, so they simply wallow in their lifestyle. Many men live in obesity, pornography addiction, and mediocrity because they do not have the proper amount of hatred for those things. Not that simply having hatred is a cure-all for conditions, but it is a very important piece of the recipe.

Hold on tight and be persistent during your change.

You may be thrown from the horse. That is okay, remount and work again. Breaking a horse is about breaking its will and making it willing to obey a master. You also have to break your need for comfort, and your desire to be mindlessly pulled by emotions and external circumstances. Take ownership of your emotions then dominate them.

No more are you content to live a life where you are not in complete control of everything. You are unwilling to live a life dominated by emotion. Understand though, that this change will take a great deal of time as any change does. It starts with awareness of emotionalism and finishes with the complete subjugation of emotion.

Maintain gains – the consolidation.

Whenever we learn something new, there is a period of time where we are consolidating the memory and organizing it so it can be retrieved later. There will be a moment when you break the resistance of your emotions and everything seems easier to control. It is critical that at this moment you do not let go of the control you have over your emotions. You have to consolidate that victory and cement it so that it becomes permanent.

Do not be the man who finally loses all that weight and then falls right back into his old habits of overeating and laziness. You have to maintain your gains; this is of critical importance. Everything in life has to be maintained simply to mitigate the effects of the law of entropy.

Feed and water the horse. Keep up with your victory over yourself and maintain the virtue of self-control.

The Weak Go Home

Then Jerubbaal (that is, Gideon) and all the people who were with him rose early and encamped beside the well of Harod, so that the camp of the Midianites was on the north side of them by the hill of Moreh in the valley. And the Lord said to Gideon, “The people who are with you are too many for Me to give the Midianites into their hands, lest Israel claim glory for itself against Me, saying, ‘My own hand has saved me.’ Now therefore, proclaim in the hearing of the people, saying, ‘Whoever is fearful and afraid, let him turn and depart at once from Mount Gilead.’ ” And twenty-two thousand of the people returned, and ten thousand remained.
Judges 7:1-3

“Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”
Isaiah 41:10

The fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is safe.”
Proverbs 29:25

One of the first battles under the leadership of Gideon, a judge chosen personally by God, was the ambush-like assault on the Philistines with a mere 300 men. When Gideon was initially assembling his army, however, the number was much greater. 32,000 men gathered before Gideon prepared to go to war. God told Gideon he had too many men, they needed to reduce the size of the army to prevent the troops from thinking they won the battle due to military strength alone. So, Gideon told the army that any men who were afraid should go home. More than two-thirds of the army left, leaving 10,000. The army would then reduce to 300 based on a combat-survival behavior test.

Moral of the story: There is no place for fear in the army of God. Fear is weakness. The weak are to go home.

You do not see fearlessness promoted in modern religion because it is easy to be weak yet remain in the church. There is no real violent persecution in the U.S. and no accountability for people who are not progressing spiritually. In fact, most people use the church as a convenient social gathering. They walk into the assembly with their worldly problems and thoughts, discuss them with their friends, “worship” for an hour (are angry if worship goes five minutes over the scheduled time), then fellowship while again complaining about their worldly problems and leave to go back to the world. This is the extent of the faith of most men. These are the men who would have left Gideon’s army out of fear, but they remain in the church because it takes no courage to do so.

Weak men have done more to damage the church than the so-called “persecution” facing Christians in the modern world. I argue that fearfulness damages the reputation of Christians and makes it harder to evangelize because fear is anti-masculine.

Secular men do not want to become part of the church because they believe it will require them to become emasculate, effeminate eunuchs.

No man wants to be weak but being weak and effeminate has been popularized by modern religion. Megachurches and evangelists have made faith a matter of emotion, and as a result, have made it weak and unstable. One blow to the “faith” of these men and they crumble. These men have dead-tree faith. The tree still stands upright, but it is dead, and one good kick or a light storm will topple it. Do not be like these fearful men. Reject their weakness and embody the strength and spirit of the Spartan.

“We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular”.
Edward Murrow

Affirmation

Fear is worse than death, therefore I am fearless.

Application

Consider yourself and look at areas of your life where you are fearful. It is okay to be fearful, but it is wrong to stay that way. As always, our nature requires progress in order for us to be satisfied, so we have to work on reducing our fear over time. At the very least our goal should be to take courageous action despite fear. Because even though fearlessness is the goal, is it truly something that is attainable? The 10,000 men who were left after Gideon sent home the afraid – how many of them do you think were truly fearless? Some perhaps still felt a twinge of fear but stayed out of courageous action.

The way we reduce fear is through training.

Think back to all the times you have been afraid and try to think of the root of that fear. You were afraid about taking a test in school, but by studying you reduce your fear. Through preparation, you increase your level of control over the situation and that reduces the anxiety associated with tests. Or perhaps you are giving a lesson in your church and you are afraid. You can reduce your nerves by rehearsing the speech many times and immersing yourself in the moment of practice.

Training and rehearsing are natural anti-anxiety medications. They force you to exist in the present moment, which is a place that anxiety cannot exist. Think about this, anxiety can only exist in the future because it is a mental prediction of a negative outcome(s). So by involving yourself in the present moment through training or meditation and by preparing for events in advance, you ensure that you become fearless. One day you may even be fit for the army of Gideon. But it is imperative that you train this ability now so that if difficulty or persecution does arise in your lifetime, you will at the very least be better mentally prepared than your peers.

Conduct yourselves like Men.

The Ancient Warrior Avatar

Not everyone is so fortunate to have a mentor. Especially in the modern days when mastering a trade is less frequently accomplished. Very few of us have had proper role models during our upbringing.

Sure, we had a few men who tried to suggest they were good at being men because they were religious, but we understand that is a conflation. Being a good man does not automatically mean you are good at being a man. There are plenty of good men who are not strong, courageous, honorable or have gained mastery in some skill. Yet they will still take the time to tell you that you should be like them or that you should be like one of their equally unimpressive friends.

What is a man to do if he has no mentors? I will give you two options.

The first is simple: find mentors online. There are plenty of masculine men who make and post videos or write articles online. Even though you cannot be with all of them in person, you can still be heavily influenced by them. Many of these men make themselves available through coaching or webinars where you can speak to them face to face. If you have not had a masculine mentor in religion, buying some coaching from a masculine mentor may be well worth the investment.

After all, you were going to spend that money on something else. You might waste it on the ethereal potential of a job offer. By that, I mean that many people waste tens of thousands of dollars purchasing knowledge during their college years only to have nothing to show for it. If you are willing to make that kind of investment in a system that only produces results half of the time or less, why not try investing in some personal training for your character?

Even if you decide not to do that, there are plenty of masculine men on the internet that you can learn from and begin to emulate.

This was my path as a young man. I had no mentors growing up in the church, and I luckily stumbled upon men like Greg Plitt, Elliot Hulse, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and others. By listening to the speeches and advice of these men I was able to integrate their life philosophy. The only philosophy I got in the church was that of blind obedience. I am all for obeying the commands of the God of War (Ex. 15:3), there is no need to have blind faith. If you dig deep enough you will find that the laws make sense, that they are protective measures for our wellbeing so we can live quiet lives and minimize unnecessary trouble.

Learn from the men of the world but remember to still act as a man of God.

The second option is one of my favorites. It is called the Ancient Warrior Avatar. This is a character you create in your mind who speaks to you and gives you instructions. We are already talking to ourselves, so we might as well take total control over what we are saying and make it good and positive. We can do this by using the ancient warrior in our minds.

First, he must be created. This is done by visualizing who you want to be many years down the road. Perhaps 20, 30, 40 years or more. Who will you be and what will you have accomplished? What will your eyes have seen and what wisdom will you have gathered? What perception will you have and what strategies will you employ? Decide who you want to be when you are older and create the image of that person in your mind.

This is the Ancient Warrior avatar.

He has already seen all the war and trouble of your life and has survived. Now you want his knowledge and assistance. When it comes time to take actions that you do not like, you can step into this character and act like him. When you encounter those situations where you would rather not be disciplined, you have to think about who you are becoming many years down the road. Would you as an ancient warrior fall prey to weakness at this moment? No. It would stop you from becoming that man later in life.

What you are doing here is creating an identity. You are emulating the warrior you want to be, and this makes it far more likely that you will act in accordance with those warrior values.

Whenever you begin to have thoughts creep into your mind, call upon the ancient warrior. Have an image of him in your mind. What does he look like? Does he have a long beard and walking stick? You need to be as detailed and clear in your visualization as possible. Then once you encounter difficulty, visualize the ancient warrior speaking to you.

One of my favorite lines that the ancient warrior uses to me is, “Demonstrate the power of your will”. Then as quickly as I can I initiate whatever action I was avoiding. Whether it is a cold shower, a training session, or some work for my job or the website, I immediately jump into it before my mind can generate any more excuses.

Your ancient warrior can say whatever he wants.

But you need to view him as a part of you but still as a separate entity. A person who can speak to you and give assistance when you need it like an old warrior training up a new generation of fighters. You are that new generation, so make an alliance with your mind. Make an alliance with your thinking and do not allow your mind to be a place of defeat.

One of the benefits of this character is that eventually, you do not want to let him down. If your visualization is extremely clear, you will want to become that warrior all those years in the future, so you will endure the pain of discipline today. Even though he is a fabrication, you still want to live up to his expectations.

Another legitimate visualization exercise is to seek the counsel of this warrior. I know this continues to sound more “woo-woo” and in a way it is. But that does not mean you cannot get benefits from the exercise.

To seek the counsel of the warrior you need to imagine yourself walking down a path towards the home of this warrior. He lives in your mind, yes, but you need a place for him to live. A place you can travel to and seek out his wisdom. So, decide where he will live. Will it be a cabin, a temple, a fortress, a dojo, or some other place? I would recommend that it be a place that represents the intersection of discipline and serenity.

Once you have built your ancient warrior’s dwelling place with as much detail and clarity as possible, you can then travel there in your own mind.

For this exercise, we will say our warrior lives in a secluded cabin in the woods. Imagine yourself walking along the edge of a river that parallels a forest. You continue along until you come to a well-worn path leading directly into the forest. You walk along that path, admiring the oaks and enjoying the scent of the pines, enjoying the deer and other wildlife that run through the trees. To the side, you can hear the sound of a babbling stream that shoots off the side of the river you traveled beside earlier.

In the distance, you begin to see a slight clearing with a cabin in the middle. There is smoke rising from the chimney and hot coals in the forge. You walk up to the door, open it and enter. There is the ancient warrior, sitting comfortably in a chair with complete peace, but you can see in his eyes that he could leap into a warlike frenzy in just a moment. You sit down, and state your problem, asking a question from him. Then simply listen to his answer. Perhaps it does not come immediately, but you will get an answer.

This is just a very detailed visualization exercise with the goal of giving a problem to your subconscious mind for solving. The detail is very important because it tricks the mind into thinking that it is real. You need to have this level of detail in your own exercise. And after you complete it, eventually an answer will come “bubbling up” from the back of your mind, as many great insights do. Even though it seems a little strange, there is no doubt you are handing off a problem to your subconscious mind, which will produce a solution much faster than the conscious mind usually can. All of this can happen through the simple power of visualization.

Become the ancient warrior you visualize and then assist others.

If you did not have good mentors growing up, you have all the more responsibility to be a mentor to other men. Most of the young men around you are growing up with weak, beta male fathers who do not know how to lead. It is going to be your responsibility to make whatever impact you can on those young men. Be the mentor that you would have wanted but were never able to have. This will give you peace, and you will have become the Ancient Warrior.

Isolate and Annihilate

When the Romans were laying waste to the Gallic tribes around them, they frequently utilized an important strategy. It was the strategy of “Divide and Conquer”. We will learn about another strategy: isolate and annihilate.

Now when we hear this phrase, sometimes we do not think of it the way the Romans would have thought of it. We hear “divide and conquer” and think about splitting up a task and working together with our team to finish it. We think it means to separate our forces and send them in all directions.

What the Romans meant was that the enemy must be divided if they are to be conquered. So, when it came to the tribes of Gaul, the imperative of the Romans was to split them up. Cause them to break their alliances or fight amongst themselves and they could be destroyed one by one. The Romans would cause internal division so that their enemies could be more easily defeated.

Today I propose to you a slightly different idea but with a personal development application. I call it “Isolate and Annihilate”.

What it means is that we are going to list all the faults we want to eliminate in our lives and start attacking them one at a time. We will split them off from each other, not viewing our faults as one giant mass, but instead as tiny individual parts adding up to a pseudo-powerful whole.

This may seem simple, but the classic religious approach to personal development has always been the “flash in the pan” method. Apply a massive amount of effort for approximately four days and then give up and remain the same for the rest of the year. It is the New Year’s resolution of the church.

This is why year after year, people in the church make no progress on themselves. Think about it: how many people in the church do you know who have actually improved areas of personal weakness in their lives? Perhaps 2%?

While there are plenty of people who talk and preach about changing themselves, in reality, no one is willing to put in the effort to change.

It is an element of human nature, and change is expensive for the human organism. Just as most people are not interested in the general concepts of self-improvement, most people are also not interested in spiritual improvement. They are interested in it enough to talk about it, but not enough that they take action.

Here is our protocol for actually making improvements in ourselves. Isolate and Annihilate.

I – Identify the Enemy

It is hard to fight an enemy if you do not know who the enemy is. War is difficult if the enemy is dressed like civilians and you cannot tell the two apart. You need to have a firm idea in your mind of what you are trying to improve before you can actually start to improve it. Most people make mistakes right here! They go to war with the vapor and are surprised when they get lost in the fog.

Perhaps they want to get in better physical shape, so they just mindlessly start exercising and “eating healthy” with no real direction and end up going in circles. They have not identified specifically what their problem is. Is it a lack of muscle, excess fat, or lack of heart health? It could be any number of things, but without identifying exactly what the enemy is, every attempt at change will be ineffective at best and will fail at worst.

To correct this, we need to make a large list of all the faults and undesirable character traits we currently have.

Write down everything from character flaws to sins you are at war with. Make this list exhaustive; leave nothing out. You are going to total war, and everything must be considered. Do not be alarmed if your list seems massive and unconquerable. That which can be identified can be destroyed, and you have just identified every enemy you have.

Draw a line down the center of a blank piece of paper. On the left put character flaws and, on the right, put sins. The right side should have more behavioral components while the left should have personality components.

Just by making this list, you are ahead of the majority of people in the world. Because now you have a written list of enemies and by virtue of that you have a written list of goals. Once you have your list, move to part two of the protocol.

II – Avoid Taking on Too Much Change at Once

As mentioned before, the classic error of most people is attempting too much change at once and burning out. When it comes to their health, they try to change their diet, weight training, cardiovascular exercise, and sleep habits all at once. They do this even though in every one of those areas they have not practiced discipline for years. The result is that they burn out, quit everything, and are back where they started.

What we want to do is select just one behavior, flaw, or sin to focus our efforts on. So, on your list, take a pen and circle the biggest bottleneck trait or behavior. Circle the most prominent character flaw or sin you are dealing with. This should be the one that, if crushed, will have the greatest impact on improving your overall character. Most men have “that one thing” holding them back from being truly excellent. It could be gossip, a bad temper, or a drinking problem. They may have many other smaller level evils, but there is always one behavior that is so prominent even the people around him can see it.

After circling the biggest problem, put a box around the smallest problem.

This can be some habit or behavior that is annoying despite being quite small. If you fix it, it should give you a certain sense of pride and confidence that you can change other aspects of your life.

So, in the end, you should have two flaws identified: the biggest and the smallest.

III – Attack One Flaw at a Time

Do not try to tackle your whole list at once. You need to systematically destroy one fault at a time. What would have happened to the Roman legions if they have tried to conquer every single tribe in Gaul at once? It would have been a disaster. They would have needed to spread their troops so thin that they would have been overrun at every battle.

Rather, they needed to systematically break down the oppositions so they could be crushed. You must do the same. Forging your character is a systematic process that will take time and persistence and will not work if you attempt to change everything about yourself at once.

IV – Choose the Dragon or the Wasp

Now you get to make a decision: do you attack your largest or smallest fault first? While you can do what you want, I would encourage you to try attacking the small fault first, especially if you have never tried to change yourself in any major way up until now.

The reason for this is that once you crush that small, annoying part of who you are, it will fill you with a small dash of confidence. The net value of your character increases and you begin to think positively. You start to believe that you actually do possess the power to change yourself, and that belief will lead to even more change.

Begin to work your way up the list of personal defects that you made earlier.

Systematically crushing them one at a time from weakest to strongest. All along the way you are building confidence and positive pride in your character. You are developing the inner belief that is going to allow you to face the dragon with a ferocity that you did not even know you possessed. You will have built the strength of character by forging your own path and improving yourself. Once you get to the dragon, it will not even be a problem. Through the strategy of isolate and annihilate, you have demonstrated the power of your will.

Of course, you always do have the option to attack the dragon first. I think for a great many people that would simply be too much to ask. They cannot muster the willpower and long-term discipline to stay focused on an enemy for that long. They will begin to break down, lose focus and doubt themselves. Then they will question why they even tried to change in the first place. Finally, they will quit on themselves, because they had not developed that level of inner strength necessary to face the dragon.

I will not deny that if you can attack the dragon first and crush it, it will do wonders for your mind. Then you can enjoy an easy descent as you systematically crush your character flaws in reverse order, moving from the strongest to the weakest.

Continue repeating this process until you have the character you want. Truthfully, you will likely never be where you want to be. You will never believe you have arrived, but that is okay. It does not mean you should not work to improve yourself. The rewards of wisdom and character that come from correcting your behavior are valuable beyond measure.

V – Hold the Line

After your character is established, when you are finished with your isolate and annihilate strategy, it needs time to solidify. You do not want all your hard work to fly out of the window. Yet how many people lose fifty pounds for a wedding just to gain it all back over the next year? How many men quit smoking, drinking, using drugs, or looking at pornography only to fall back into that pattern of behavior time and time again? To avoid this, we need to hold the line.

Holding the line is primarily mental. The reason is that most people relapse into their old behavior because they think, “Well, I’m in shape now so that means I’m good to go! No need to keep training and managing my nutrition”. That attitude is a recipe for disaster, but it is the most common attitude in human beings. We like it when things take care of themselves after we have done our part. Unfortunately, character will always require some degree of upkeep. It will not be a large amount of upkeep, but it will still be required.

I submit a different mentality to you today. Once you correct your behavior, you should double down on your discipline. Become even harder and more aggressive about your training. Become more militaristic about your self-discipline. Not in a self-flagellating type of way but understanding that this attitude allows for the maintenance of gains.

For at least a few weeks, you need to train the mind to never let its guard down.

You are at constant war against the enemy, and he is waiting for you to look away or fall asleep at your post just for a moment so he can strike. Prevent this by being hyper-vigilant and intense.

Maintenance is mental, simply do not let your guard down until you have made your new character or behavior completely automatic. You need time to establish any new behavior as a habit. Once you are automatically performing the way you want to, then you can slowly begin to transfer your attention to the other parts of yourself that you want to change.

To isolate and annihilate is to split your overall character into small components, select the areas that need change the most, isolate them and crush them. Through this practice, you will gain limitless personal control and strength.

2nd and 3rd Order Consequences

A mark of a man is the ability to think beyond the present moment and consider the 2^nd and 3^rd order consequences of an action. While most people make all their decisions while stuck in the present moment with no thought for the future, a man looks ahead to see how his present action may affect future outcomes.

2^nd and 3^rd order consequences are the results that come after the main action (with its 1^st order consequence) is taken. And it usually happens that actions that are enjoyable at the moment have painful long-term results and vice versa.

Food that is bad for you tastes delicious (1^st order) but the result is that it makes you fat and lethargic (2^nd order). It just so happens that food that does not taste the best is typically good for you, especially in the long run.

The ability to look past the present moment and whether it is enjoyable or painful is how a man thinks.

You too must develop this ability. When you are going through your life and trying to make decisions, always look past the here and now. Look forward to the 2nd, 3rd, and 4^th order consequences. You need to be in the habit of thinking about how your decisions impact you long-term.

If you look around you at your peers, you will often find them doing the opposite. In college you will find them studying some simple subject matter, staying up late playing games, and hanging out with friends. They have the time of their life for a few years but later realize that they have no marketable skill. They have nothing to offer the marketplace so they end up with a low income. Then they sit around complaining about the “greedy rich”, how they are righteous for being poor and how college days were the “good ole days”.

But you have the chance to take a different route.

It is not that you never have any fun or relax, but you are focused on your time. Instead of studying an easy subject, you decide to learn a difficult STEM field or a trade. For a few years, you focus, gaining skills that the marketplace actually values and making yourself more and more of a man. A few years later and you can already see how much farther ahead you are than your peers.

They took the easy path and it led them to mediocrity. You took the difficult path, and it is leading you to wealth. All of this is because you were able to look beyond the immediate gratification of the moment and concentrate on the future. This single skill will make you more successful than 80% of your peers.

So, what are some tips to help you along this path of thinking long-term and delaying gratification?

I – Start Working on Your Vision for Yourself

You have probably heard this tip thousands of times in the self-help community, but it is no less true. In fact, you probably already have a vision for yourself. To even possess the ability to delay gratification, you must have the ability to visualize in your mind a 2^nd and 3^rd order result that is more desirable than the 1^st order pleasures. That alone is a great secret to success, but also is the reason many people fail in various pursuits.

The lack of a compelling future vision can spell the difference between giving in to immediate gratification or pressing on with discipline. Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in the practice of sexual discipline until marriage. Among many reasons men do not wait for marriage is the fact that no one in religion paints a desirable picture of marriage. No one can describe marriage in a way that appeals to men.

You can blame society for perverting marriage into a high-risk/low reward deal for men. You can blame 2^nd and 3^rd wave feminism or the government. Or you can blame the feminized men running your local church for portraying marriage in a way that placing women as the objects of worship.

Either way, the disastrous result is that men do not have a compelling vision of marriage. And as a result, they have no reason to commit to it.

They hear marriage praised in vague, non-specific terms from the pulpit, but degraded in crystal clear terms from other men. Everything they hear from other men is negative, and everything they observe through their behavior is negative as well.

This clarity of speech about the negative aspects of marriage paints a crystal-clear image in the minds of young men. And that image is one of pain and suffering in marriage. But every time some man wants to say something good about marriage, it is shrouded in vaguery. Marriage is described as “Fulfilling”, “holy”, “The best thing I ever did”, “wonderful” but are never provided with any specific evidence to support those claims. Not only is marriage described in words that are so poorly defined that they would cause even a seasoned religious man to be confused, but they are never supported with any real-life evidence.

The result of this is that the negatives of marriage are easily and clearly portrayed while the positives are vague and lofty.

When the vision is not clear, the actions do not follow the vision. Actions follow the clearest vision and avoiding marriage seems to be the best decision because the negatives are extremely clear.

This is just an example of the effect of the vision, which underscores why it is so incredibly important for you to create a compelling vision in your own mind of a future you want to live. The clearer you are about your vision, the more meaning you will ascribe to the seemingly insignificant actions it takes to get there.

Get as clear as you can about your goal. Write down everything you want to achieve. Just start with your work so you do not get overwhelmed. Write down what you want to do. How do you want to spend your days? What do you want to experience mentally while you work? How do you want to feel when you come home? How much money do you want to make? What will you wear on the job?

Write down everything you can. The more you write the clearer your vision becomes. When your vision becomes clearer, your actions become easier.

Spend some time visualizing yourself doing exactly what you want to do. See yourself in your mind’s eye working, being excellent at your craft, and earning fantastic money as a result. Train your mind to see yourself as a success before you even become one. Get your mind accustomed to self-confidence and esteem. Clear visions produce clear results.

II – See the Consequences of 1^st order pleasures

You likely do not need help with this tip because if there is anything religious people are good at; it is about threatening you with consequences. While they tend to get carried away and focus exclusively on the negative, what they are saying is important.

It is necessary to understand the price we pay for actions we take, whether good or bad. Write down all the consequences of not taking action or of taking the wrong action. You can probably look around you at your peers to collect evidence for this. How often have they taken the easy road and had it come back to bite them? Likely often enough for you to notice.

They waste several years studying liberal arts and earn the same $10 per hour 5 years after graduating. They laughed and giggled their way through college and then walk around wondering why they are not successful, blaming everyone but themselves for their situation.