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Think you’ve got a tough day ahead of you? How about taking on President Harry Truman’s to-do list:

• He made the decision to drop two nuclear bombs on Japan
• Helped form NATO
• Lead the Berlin Airlift

Those three things alone would drive the average man to curl up in the fetal position and suck his thumb. Harry Truman chose another route, he started his day with a prayer that had been a part of his life since high school. Here’s how it went:

Oh! Almighty and Everlasting God, Creator of Heaven, Earth and the Universe:  Help me to be, to think, to act what is right, because it is right; make me truthful, honest and honorable in all things; make me intellectually honest for the sake of right and honor and without thought of reward to me. Give me the ability to be charitable, forgiving and patient with my fellow men-help me to understand their motives and their shortcomings-even as Thou understand mine!

Amen, Amen, Amen

If a President who accomplished as much and faced as many life threatening situations as Harry Truman started his day praying, that means prayer is a pretty good way to start your day too. No matter how big the load you’re carrying, God has heard the prayers of men with even greater loads and was perfectly able to help them. Chances are He can handle your load to.

If you want to do a little self-evaluation of how much discipline you have in your life, take a look at how you respond when your alarm clock goes off (if you just get up when you feel like, then this is really for you). If you hop right up out of bed, there’s a good chance all of your bills are paid on time and your checkbook is balanced, but if you hit the snooze button 10 times before you get up, then there’s a good chance your credit rating sucks not because you don’t pay your bills, it’s just that you’re always late and you probably only check your bank balance when you look at the ATM receipt.

It’s much easier to stay up late playing video games and getting up whenever you feel like it than it is put down the controller so you can get some sleep, which means you can get a job that pays more than tips. It’s easier to go through your stack of bills once a month and than it is get a calendar out and write down when a bill is due.

But that’s really discipline in a nutshell, doing what’s right, even when it’s hard.

Discipline is very counterintuitive and counter-cultural, the world and your buddies don’t get it and don’t want any part of it because they and all of us are spoiled. Most of us have grown up in a microwave, instant gratification world so we want it NOW. I’m the chief among sinners on this one because sitting right next to me while I write this is my iphone, that I can get instant feedback and connection with a ton of people and I can even hit amazon.com or my crack, the App store and get whatever I want immediately.

But the results of living an undisciplined life are predictable and easy to spot. Thankfully discipline is a skill that any man can develop. Here’s a hint: developing discipline in one area of your life will spill over into every other area of your life. For example exercise. If you’ll make a commitment to exercise for 30 minutes, 3 days per week, 3 months from now you’ll discover that you’ve put the dates your bills are due on the iCal and now you’re not late paying them anymore. You didn’t start out to work on paying your bills on time, you just started running 3 days per week. But somehow, getting up at 5:30 to run started to rub off on other areas. And those areas started rubbing off on others.

Developing discipline overwhelms so many guys because they try to attack too many areas at one time. The chances of any guy going on a diet, quit smoking, going to the gym every day, and stop watching porn all in the same week and making it past monday night are slim in an none. But that’s how most guys do it and that’s why they fail and think they are a failure, when the truth is they are not a failure that just didn’t know how to develop discipline.

If you want to make the jump from boy to man, then you must develop discipline, because you can’t always have what you want, when you want so you have to develop discipline. The reason most guys rebel against the idea of discipline is they don’t know that discipline equals freedom. Productivity guru Stephen R. Covey once wrote, “the undisciplined are slaves to moods, appetites and passions”. An undisciplined man never learns a new language, he never learns how to play golf, an undisciplined man never learns how to play the guitar.

Here’s a little mantra I use to help me develop discipline.

do the right thing,
do it the best of my abilities
do everything in my life that way.

When I’m running and don’t feel like I can finish, I think about that. When I’ve got a project at work that I have to do but I’m not all that excited about it, I think about that. Every time I do, I get this inner satisfaction of knowing I acted like a man and not a boy and that’s powerful! It makes another deposit in my man-account that confirms and reaffirms that I am a man. Which is crucial because the world and circumstances are going to constantly tell me otherwise and try to keep me from even trying. So have a mini celebration the next time you don’t hit the snooze button because you know that you just acted like a man.