It is not about money ...

Discipline produces success even if your definition of
success has nothing to do with money.

If your idea of success is to be a great pianist or
painter or gardener, then to get there you must
postpone immediate trivial pleasure such as watching TV
or going out to the pub.

Instead you must practice the piano, study painting, or
weed the garden ready for the spring. I would submit
that even if your definition of success was to be at
peace with the world and to be in a blissful connected
state with the universe you must first practice the
long hours of discipline required for meditation, and
practice the minute-by-minute discipline of pushing out
the constant chatter of thoughts from your mind. A Zen
monk, for example, could be said to be almost perfectly
(and excessively) disciplined.

I think unsuccessful people are often that way because
they have these two characteristics:

1. They rarely think of the future or plan for it.
They live only for today.

Self-development guru Jim Rohn's secret of happiness is
'enjoying today whilst planning for a better tomorrow,'
and this is a subject I explore further in later
articles.

Living for the moment is only half of the story. You
can only enjoy today because of the plans you made or
work you did 'yesterday.' Similarly you can only enjoy
tomorrow because of the plans you make or work you do
today. This includes simple pleasures like a day
walking in the countryside listening to the birds sing.
You can only do that because 'yesterday' (last year,
etc.) you worked hard enough and saved some money so
that you could take time off. It is obvious that you
can only eat today because of the work you did
yesterday, unless you have set up your life to sponge
from others.

2. They spend every single penny they earn (and
usually more) on pleasures right now, today, and do not
put anything away for the future.

This is similar to being given a week's worth of sweets
and eating them all in one sitting!

Disciplined people use their time and talents to create
present and future wealth for themselves. This means
getting out of the armchair and doing something. This
is hard. This takes effort and it takes will-power.

Undisciplined people watch soap operas three times a
week, go down the pub all the time (a net outflow of
money), go out for meals, buy all the latest toys or
generally fritter away their time and talents for
thirty of forty years. And then.... huge
surprise...they're broke when they retire!

Look, this hardly needs saying. There's nothing wrong
with watching television sometimes, going down the pub
now and then and having the odd meal out. These are
pleasures. This is jelly now. Then, you turn the TV off
and get to work on projects which will make you
wealthy. You stay in several nights and work through
until midnight on the same thing. This is investing
time in your future, and is an identical concept to
investing (saving) money for your future.

A disciplined person does not spend all his/her time
now, in trivial pleasures, they save some for the
future. Time is funny stuff. You can't put it in a box
and save it for a future day, say the end of your life,
and then haul it out and get extra days of life. The
rule with time is that you have to invest it straight
away. It multiplies and produces money in the future.

You use this money to buy time from other people. For
example, the money releases you from the need to work,
and so that gives you a whole lot of time - much more
than your original investment of time. Or, you use the
money to pay someone to do your garden or your DIY, and
that frees up a whole lot of time for more pleasurable
things.

So the analogy is exact. Undisciplined people squander
all their free time now on pleasures (eat all the
jelly) and get, say, 100 units of pleasure. Disciplined
people use a little of their time for pleasures (eat a
little jelly now), then invest their time for the
future. This multiplies many fold, and frees up vast
amounts of time in the future. The net result is that
they get (say) 1,000 units of pleasure in total over
the years. This is their reward for being disciplined.
I hope this makes sense.