I have to say, I have felt a lot better since we talked yesterday. It’s amazing what a little communication can accomplish. I do worry, however, that our conversation didn’t actually solve anything. You act like me getting my own place will be good for our relationship. I don’t necessarily see it that way. Like I said, I came to my parent’s house to put my life on hold until we could work things out Me getting a place feels more like moving on, especially if you continue to refuse to acknowledge our relationship in front of the kids.
Anyway, I spent a few hours listening to that ebook on self discipline. I think I may have found my ALANON. So far, at least, the book is really speaking to me. To be sure, has it’s cheese. Like the line, “if it’s meant to be, it’s up to me,” which I don’t even hate to be honest. What I like about it is that it’s getting me to think about how I’ve been living my life and where these problems have been coming from. Just the idea that self-discipline is simply the ability to do what you should do, when you should do it, regardless of if you want to or not. That’s such a simple concept but, without thinking about that, without intentionally having that very simple, obvious idea in the philosophy I’m using to live my life, it's been easy for me to come up with reasons to act differently.
And that’s when you begin to realize just how important that idea about self-discipline really is. The author says that there are other principles to being a successful person but, without self-discipline, none of them work. On the other hand, with self-discipline, they all work. And, just logically, it’s easy to see how that’s true because otherwise, you’re living like I’ve been living just doing whatever the hell you feel like doing in that moment and that’s a recipe for disaster.
I really do crave self-mastery. I want to be proud of who I am. Confident. Sexy. I’ve been under-achieving for too long and it’s time to change that. I need to develop consistent productive habits based on well-considered long-term thinking and I need to do my best to avoid excuses for failure.
I’m proud to say, I’ve already begun to take some small steps toward achieving this in some areas of my life. For a couple of weeks now, I’ve been exercising twice a day plus what I do with my mom. Next, I need to develop that financial spreadsheet to keep track of my finances. I'm going to work on that this weekend. If I keep doing these things and keep building on them, I feel like I can make some pretty significant improvements to “Kevin” in a relatively short time. We’ll see.