Want To Be Successful? Follow This Simple Rule

Introduction

Self-improvement is a complex accumulation of many good habits, and oftentimes these good habits lead to successes, be they small or big in many areas of life: in your health, relationships, financial income, lifestyle, spirituality, mental health, etc.

However, there is one rule of success that is universal, one rule that is the ultimate rule that will pave your success if only you follow it diligently. This rule is for every walk of life, it's for every category of self-improvement.

This rule reads as follows: DELAY GRATIFICATION.

Delaying gratification is simply when you do an action today that will benefit your future self. You see, most people choose instant gratification in favor of delayed gratification: they prefer to sacrifice their future by having pleasure now.

Instead of working on themselves now to then unlock benefits in the future and reap the rewards of their hard work, they rather spend their present having fun (eating junk food for example) and then they wonder why their life is so bad down the line (they're obese).

All of this is to say: if you want to reach success in any singular path in life, you need to delay gratification. Now, if you want to be like 90% of the population, be like 90% of the population: eat unhealthy foods daily, don't exercise often or consistently, never get out of your comfort zone, never grow intellectually or spiritually, and so on and so forth. But if you want to make a change, continue reading.

Also, before diving in on how to apply this rule in your day-to-day life, it's important to assess the definition of instant gratification. Instant gratification as I said before is when we have pleasure now whilst sacrificing our future selves, and this instant gratification is literally INSTANT. It's when you bite into that junk food (it's instant, very fast, and accessible) or when you scroll on Instagram (it's instant, very fast, and accessible).

It's NOT when you work out and you feel proud a few minutes later: this is delayed gratification. Instant gratification is an instant action that gives you a lot of dopamine (the hormone of pleasure) but this action ultimately makes you a worse person.

Now that we got this out of the way, let's see how we can apply the Delayed Gratification rule in our day-to-day lives.

How to apply this rule

The rule of delaying gratification can be used in every walk of life to achieve any outcome: gaining muscle, fame, money, status, bettering your relationships, anything.

For example, let's say you want to be successful in improving your health and gaining muscle mass when you exercise: this is a potent form of delayed gratification. You're sacrificing the pleasure you could have from staying in bed or at home scrolling on social media. Instead, you have pain in the current moment (it's painful to work out, it requires discipline and willpower, etc) and this ultimately unlocks benefits in the future (improved health, you can live 10 years longer, improved muscle mass, etc).

Let's say you want to be successful in launching your business. You could use the rule of delaying gratification by working hard on the difficult tasks first, getting the hard work done, and then, you will later unlock the benefits of your actions. If you procrastinated, scrolled on social media, watched TV, and worked on useless business work such as making the logo for an hour and thirty instead of actually producing real work, you wouldn't reap the same benefits, or you would reap no benefits even.

Let's say you want to better your relationships. You need to delay gratification by having pain now (maybe making excuses to people you've hurt or you've fought with, meeting more people, going out there and cold-approaching girls, sacrificing time spent in front of the TV to spend a loving day with your children despite your craving of a new TV program) so you can unlock the immense benefits of a richer and happier life, as well as better relationships.

Anything worthwhile achieving begins with delayed gratification. Think about that for a moment and you would have understood why I'm telling you that this universal rule is the key to success in any domain of life.

Delayed gratification gives you the values of discipline, consistency, patience, willpower, hard work, masculinity, wisdom, and anything in between. It's just a universal rule to success. However, realistically, if we scale that power of delaying gratification over the years, you will have setbacks and you will sometimes be led to...

Procrastination

Procrastination is, according to the Oxford Languages, "the action of delaying or postponing something."

It's when you got that big assignment due in 2 days and you push it back to the next day. It's when you know you should exercise but you push it back because the couch feels comfy and the donuts taste pretty good. It's being a low-status procrastinator.

Now, if it happens rarely: fine, we can fix that. But if it happens regularly then there is clearly a problem here. And, independent of whether it happens rarely or regularly, let me show you a few steps to stop procrastinating.

The first step to stop procrastinating is to admit that you're procrastinating, it's to be accountable. You have to look at yourself and say "Oh, I'm procrastinating. Let's fix that". Recognizing that you're procrastinating is the first step to victory because it puts you in a position of power. It enables you to look clearly at the situation, not in an emotional lens but in a real, tangible lens: you understand what you're doing. You can now fix it.

This gives you an opportunity to fix your mistakes and to understand them, understand why you're procrastinating. Maybe you're not aligned with your deepest purpose. Maybe your work has become less passionate than it was before. Maybe your diet is making you feel tired and lethargic which leads to procrastination. Maybe you just needed to empty the bin or reduce "brain space" before working or doing that thing.

The second step is to set smaller goals or to simply reduce expectations. If you just got into the gym and you expect to go to the gym six times a week, it might be way too much at first. You should start with at least twice or thrice a week but no need to put your expectations so high. Focus on getting small workouts in every few days or twice a week. Then, progressively overload the time spent in the gym from there.

Also, setting smaller goals can help you reach a feeling of success faster which can motivate you. For example, if instead of aiming for a million dollars net worth you aim for a 10 dollars, 100, 1000, 10000, 100000, and finally a 1000000 dollars net worth, it already frees up some expectations and "procrastinating opportunity" from then on.

The third step is to take even the smallest step. Remember, you either become better or worse, so even the smallest step to victory can be of help. Think about it, if you're on a mountain, but each second you're not climbing you're slowly falling back to the bottom, would you sprint multiple times and then be tired for minutes and fall back to the bottom, or would you take even the smallest step to victory? You would take the smallest step, wouldn't you?

Well, apply this idea to real life. You might not yet be able to exercise six times a week but you can try to incorporate a small 10-minute light jog on top of your weight-lifting session today. Try to find the small spark that will set fire to the forest.

The fourth step is to eliminate distractions. If you've been procrastinating lately on your phone, set phone blockers (you can only use your phone for an hour and thirty minutes for example) or put limitations on each app (parental control for example). If each time you're trying to work you get a notification that leads to you being less focused or which leads to you spending the next thirty minutes scrolling on Instagram, turn off that phone or put it in airplane mode or in silent mode. Do something to reduce or eliminate distractions from your environment.

You can do this with environmental change too, but I'll keep it for later on.

The fifth step, which is connected to eliminating distractions is to...

Make it easier

We should always count on discipline and willpower to stop procrastinating, but if we make our daily habits easier, we will reduce the chances of procrastination. It's quite logical yet most people do not think about it.

For example, if exercising regularly first thing in the morning is a struggle for you, make sure that your workout clothes are prepared, that your workout bag is prepared too and that your shoes are in front of your bed when you wake up. So, you can just grab everything and go to the gym.

If you struggle to eat healthy, replace the unhealthy food in your kitchen closets with apples and bananas. Put healthy food in evidence and unhealthy food hidden or take unhealthy food out of your home entirely.

If you're procrastinating from working on your business project, make sure the day before that everything is prepared in advance (physically and in the device, be it documents or opening a Word page). Instead of diving into writing a chapter without a plan, take the time to write a plan beforehand so it's easier.

If you make your daily habits easier, you'll undeniably reduce your procrastination rate and you'll increase your productivity. Now sure, some things cannot be made easier: if you have to do the work just do the hard work. But if we can try and make things a little bit more accessible, especially for the most procrastinators of us, we can achieve better results and actually get to work instead of being unproductive and wasting time away, pushing back projects and deadlines and workouts and good habits to other days.

Use environmental change by changing your environment to better fit your goals. If you want to work more on your business, erase any distractions on your device and pre-prepare it for work (opening the useful tabs, etc). As I said before, if you want to eat healthier, replace the junk food on the kitchen counter with apples, etc.

Also, you can try and find alternatives at first. If you struggle with quitting eating (or drinking?) ketchup, find low-calorie ketchup. Then, make homemade ketchup. Then, use tomato sauce. Then, use no sauce. It's an easy and accessible way to make things easier. You can use the same logic by making the bad habits harder (having to go to the supermarket and buy junk food to eat it for example can be a huge stop sign for most fat people who fall into their cravings to procrastinate on their diet).

Also, before moving on to the conclusion, if you procrastinate one day or have a setback on your self-improvement journey remember that self-improvement is a game of climbing the mountain. If you fall, get back up and keep climbing. Remember also that you're going to get crushed by your competition or by life if you don't get your shit together, because death is coming for all of us, and you don't want to die unfulfilled, stupid, unwise, and procrastinating, do you? So get your stuff together. NOW.

You can also use a calendar such as Google Calendar to time-block your day so you know what to do at each hour of the day: sometimes all we need is a little structure to stop procrastinating because the cause of our procrastination in the first place was the infamous question "What am I going to do today?". Click here to use Google Calendar.

Conclusion

In summary, the rule to success is delaying gratification. It consists of sacrificing our present pleasure to unlock benefits and reap incredible rewards in the future. It's the basis of self-improvement, the rule to success. Remember that anything worthwhile achieving in life starts with delaying gratification.

As always, thank you for reading. I truly appreciate it.

By the way, are you interested in losing weight? Well, I got what you need! Here is the weight-loss course I made! It's an effective and no-nonsense to long-lasting sustainable weight-loss, used by a 16-year-old to lose weight, change his life forever, and keep the weight off!

On top of that, not only is it cheaper than most courses and it provides EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT WEIGHT-LOSS, it also has 12 FREE BONUSES, such as habit trackers, workout plans, guides to losing weight on vacations, bulking up after weight-loss to gain muscle or even optimizing your testosterone. For FREE.

If you're interested, click on the button below.