Two things in life

All your life you’ve heard that the only thing you can control in your life is your attitude. It makes sense, right? As unpleasant as a day can get, a little attitude can turn it around. Rod Olson wrote this book, “The Legacy Builder,” and in it he asserts that life takes two things, not just attitude. It thrilled me honestly, since one of my biggest beliefs is on hard work and a solid work ethic, to hear that “effort” is the second part of that equation. No matter what you’re looking at, if you don’t put in the effort to make that change, to achieve that goal, or get your tasks done, you will never get anywhere. Attitude is necessary to want to progress forward, and effort is the force that acts on your inertia.

Motivation and discipline are important to have when examining the human struggle. These ingredients make for the foundations of our accomplishments. If we look at these components as the necessary pieces to form effort, then we can define motivation as the inner will to accomplish something we want, discipline then becomes best understood as the ability to get things done even when we don’t want to. Life is full of sacrifices and hard work, but having that discipline ensures that we can take care of our families and ourselves in spite of laziness or apathy. This factors into how we understand effort. It’s one thing to know what you need to do, it’s quite another to feel good about it enough to do it, and the ultimate challenge: to do what needs doing when it is not what we want to do.