I recently interviewed a big entrepreneur for a new book. He has just turned 30 and has an annual income of over 10 million. He drives a luxury car and lives in a mansion. The people he interacts with on a daily basis in his circle of friends are all ordinary people like us. A person who has a name but is out of reach.

But you may not imagine that three or four years ago, he was a middle school teacher in a third-tier city with an annual income of less than 100,000. He taught students the same thing every day, corrected homework, and met with friends after get off work. Although he lived a stable and comfortable life drinking beer and eating seafood, in the dead of night, he often felt empty and doubted the value of life.

Later, he no longer wanted to continue the boring life where he could see the end at a glance, so he decisively resigned and went to Hong Kong to study for a master's degree. While studying, he began to explore the financial insurance business. After getting the first pot of gold in his life, he quickly seized the business opportunities and expanded his business territory little by little.

Now, in his thirties, he already owns two companies. In just a few years, his life situation has undergone earth-shaking changes.

He believes that in addition to being able to seize opportunities at the right time, he can achieve today's achievements mainly due to his self-discipline in recent years.

He introduced to me his daily schedule: he gets up at 5 o'clock in the morning to work hard, and never goes to bed before 12 o'clock in the evening; for three consecutive years, except for a few days when he went home for the Spring Festival, I never give myself a day off; I keep exercising every day and eat healthy meals with less oil and salt.

Now, he is not only making money every day and having a successful career, but his personal image is also completely in line with the standard status of elites: well-proportioned, energetic, neither decadent nor tired, a complete winner in life.

We all lament, "In the adult world, there is no such thing as easy." But many people just talk about it, using it to complain about their surrounding environment and lament why fate is unfair to themselves, and then they can feel more at ease with the status quo.

In fact, the more you get in touch with outstanding people around you, the more you will find a pattern: those who are a hundred times better than you are really more self-disciplined than you.

After adulthood, the comprehensive state of each of us can be simply divided into two types: one is becoming mature, and the other is getting older.

A self-disciplined lifestyle and state of life can not only help you delay aging, but also make you richer and more mature. Without self-discipline, not only cannot it help you resist the invasion of time, but it can also slowly destroy you.

A netizen once told the story of one of his classmates.

This classmate was admitted to their 985 key university with the top score in his hometown town. In the first English proficiency test, he took the first place in the whole grade. At the end of the freshman semester, he also got the School scholarships.

It stands to reason that a top student with such a high starting point will naturally have a cheating college life, but what is unexpected is that in the end, this classmate started high and low. Unexpectedly, because he failed several subjects and passed CET-4 in English, he didn't even get a diploma.

A top student does not turn into a scumbag overnight. It was his lack of self-discipline after he relaxed his demands on himself that slowly ruined his college career.

After entering college, he was very proud. He always felt that he was much higher than the classmates around him and that no one could match him. So he was complacent and relaxed at the same time. He slept in late every day and was late for class. The good results are achieved by resting on one’s laurels.

When I was a sophomore, I often stayed in the dormitory playing games and skipped classes. After being scolded by the teacher several times, my self-esteem couldn't stand it anymore and I started to break things. Later, I stopped going to class at all and yelled at the same time. Thinking that he can cope with the exam without going to class, he complains that others are unfair to him.

When he was in his senior year, he looked up from his addiction to games and looked around. Many of his classmates had either applied to schools at home and abroad with excellent results and continued their postgraduate studies; With an eye-catching resume, he found the job he wanted, but he failed several subjects every year and received a drop-out notice from the school.

He regretted it too much. Unfortunately, no matter how good his foundation was, the neglect and slackness in the past few years had seriously affected his learning ability and mental state. State, how easy is it to regain self-discipline mode all of a sudden?

In the end, he became the last employed classmate in the class. He returned to his hometown and relied on connections to find a job there. Later, he failed to recover and his temper became increasingly bad. Work and family relationships were not going well.

In 2013, the American "Forbes" magazine conducted a survey and found that compared with people with poor self-control, the happiness index of self-disciplined people is significantly higher. People with poor self-control have to fight against their bad habits every day, struggle in a repetitive state of regret and self-blame all day long, and spend a lot of time on negative emotions.

On the contrary, people with a high degree of self-discipline have clear goals and decisive actions. Although they are actually a busier group of people, they feel less tired and stressed, and their entire life is more relaxed.

This is the truth about self-discipline. Self-discipline can make us different and live a higher level.

Walter Mischel, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, once conducted a famous experiment called "Postponing Eating Marshmallows."

He found some four-year-old children, left them alone in a room, and told the children, "I will give you a marshmallow and give you 15 minutes. If I come back This marshmallow was still here when I was here, you’ll get another one,” and then closed the door and left.

The result of the experiment was that two-thirds of the children did not persist to the end and ate the marshmallows midway. Another third of the children swallowed and resisted the temptation to eat the marshmallow.

Fourteen years later, the professor conducted a follow-up investigation and found these children. They had reached college age. Those children who did not eat marshmallows were all successful without exception. Whether it was academic performance, interpersonal relationships, or character development, they were all on the right track in life.

Among the children who ate marshmallows, a large proportion had some problems. Some had poor grades in high school and dropped out of school, failing to enter college. Although others are still studying, their grades are very poor, and only a few are doing well.

This experiment tells us that even for children, only those few who have self-discipline can more easily achieve success.

Self-discipline is actually a kind of self-control to postpone enjoyment and self-management ability in the face of difficulties. This is also the most important factor for success.

The lifelong pursuit of each of us is to achieve a state of freedom: freedom to control time and money.

In fact, as Kant said, freedom is not about not doing whatever you want, but about having the ability not to do what you want not to do. Only true self-discipline can bring us this freedom of choice.

There are too many people around us who are always anxious about the current situation, but do not have the perseverance to change themselves. It's always three minutes of enthusiasm to start something, and then it stops. Although I always complain about my lack of success, the things I insist on the most often just can't persist.

The consequence of this is to be buried in the crowd as an ordinary person and continue to live a life of entanglement and suffering. Only by developing the habit and spirit of self-discipline can we break through ourselves and get closer to our ideal self.

"The best time to plant a big tree was 25 years ago, and the second best time is today."

The same goes for self-discipline, if you want to have something different Life starts from today.

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