Terry Mitchell

Make Good Things Painless and Bad Things Painful



Posted: Wednesday, March 10, 2010

by Terry Mitchell
http://commenterry.blogs.com

One way to try to enforce self-discipline is to make the positive things you want to accomplish as painless as possible, while making the negative things you want to avoid as painful as possible.

Let's say you have a goal to save a certain amount of money during the coming year. You can make this saving as painless as possible by having the money automatically deducted from your paycheck and deposited into your savings account before you ever see it. That way, you are more likely to meet your goal for the year. If you wait until you get the money in your hands and then try saving it, you are more likely to fail. A similar concept would apply to giving to your church or other charities. Take the money out (or have it taken out) first, before you can acknowledge even having it in the first place.

On the other hand, let's suppose you also set a goal to stop smoking by the end of the year. As a result, you would probably want to immediately stop buying cartons of cigarettes at the grocery store and start buying them one pack at a time. This would make smoking a little more painful, or at least more expensive and inconvenient. From then on, you would run out of cigarettes a lot more often and would find yourself having to run to the local food mart or convenience store at all times of the day and night. This would, no doubt, get old very quickly -- which is what you should be hoping for in this case.

Terry Mitchell is a software engineer, freelance writer, amateur political analyst, and blogger from Virginia, USA. He posts a least one article a day to his blog - http://commenterry.blogs.com - on subjects such as current events, politics, technology, society and culture, religion, health and well-being, self improvement, personal finance, trivia, and sports. He is also the owner of a new privacy-enhanced search engine - http://www.SearchMost.com.

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