Paying double

Chapter 309

"The price of discipline is always less than the pain of regret." ~ Nido Qubein

Price versus pain, which are you planning to pay? Oh I understand that you would rather pay neither, but that doesn’t happen very often in the course of your life. Resign yourself to this reality, and stop wasting so much effort each day on trying to get out of price and pain. You are just flushing all that great energy down the toilet, when it could be put to productive use.

The pain of regret sharpens as you get older and the price of discipline lessens, if that makes you feel any better. So the choice seems easier in my late 50’s than it did in my early 20’s. Having said that, the pain of regret was plenty sharp back in my 20’s. Maybe it was just that I had so little internal discipline that I felt it more often back then. I certainly had no systems and no judgement and no will-power to speak of, so discipline was pretty much a write-off. AWOL. But toward the end of my college years, I started to pull together some discipline and get things done and doing the right things.

But then after college and in the early years of my married life, it seems that I fell back into that “I don’t want to pay either” mode and that is when I finally learned that you pay double when you get stuck in the “I don’t want to pay either” mode. You are going then have the pain of regret and double the pain of discipline to get your life back on track.

Pay the price. Avoid all the pains.