Here’s why it is always better to sacrifice in the short term for long term success

Every moment we have 2 decision to make. Which one you choose determines your future & your happiness.

Decision A:

All of my life I was depressed because I was always distracting myself with social media, drugs, alcohol, pornography, etc. and I always stayed in comfort. Of course, it feels good (in that moment) but all that hardcore procrastination leads always to hate, feat and self-hate.
Because I know that I have to do stuff and be productive, but when you are depressed it is much easier to distract yourself from those negative feelings and fall into distraction and procrastination again.

If that is the case and I distract myself, because I don’t want to feel that hate and fear, I will get those positive effects like short term gratification. But it is absolutely time wasting und I am constantly depleting my super precious Dopamine, that I need for motivation. And that is a big problem, if someone is constantly distracting oneself with those “distraction things” things because than it feels even harder to start to learn, read a book or do boring stuff which most of the time is necessary for out future results.
And the big surprise is that, after we finish those distraction we feel even worse than before, because of the self hate and self guilt.

And I learned that all that short-term gratification stuff is absolutely worthless. It just feels in the moment good but we sacrifice with it our future. I stayed in that state for many many years. And you just stay inside and absolutely nothing changes over the year. Same depression, same self hate.

But there is a way out of it, which is also very logical.

Decision B:

We can also decide to make a decision to do uncomfortable stuff. Like reading, learning, building our business, etc. It’s boring and not so exciting as taking drugs or scrolling through social media I know. But because in life, nature and universe EVERYTHING has it’s counter part and that’s why we feel shit after scrolling hours through social media there is the other side of the coin. If we decide to go against that resistance we feel, to create something we feel afterward always better. I am sure you know this feeling.
When you did the step into the gym, when you opened the book to learn or you did that course you need for your business you feel afterwards always good and proud of yourself.

And because you are productive and put work into the work you get results and success. Maybe not directly but after 1 week you are clearly much further in life & business than you were before. Maybe you also get your first client or you get a job offer. So you grow in general, when you d that “uncomfortable” stuff.

A nice effect to that is, that those results and success give you more motivation again and because of that motivation it is much easier to start that first step to your endeavors. So you see, it’s a positive cycle. You just have to start with that first hard step to do something uncomfortable and sacrifice your “good feelings” you would get from instant gratification stuff like social media etc…

HUGE long-term benefits if you decide to sacrifice

There is a mathematical function, called the exponential function that you heard of.

So what does that have to do with our decision making we ar discussing?

Simple,
if we put the value [time] on the X axis (horizontal) and the value [success] on the Y axis (vertical) that functions explains us, that in the beginning when we work on ourselves and do productive work not much is happening. We usually don’t get fast and easy success, we usually don’t get over-night success or big results. That’s not true what a lot of people are telling you on social media etc.
Fast, quick, over-night success is not real.

It looks more like this graph. We invest our time & energy and we build, build and build. Without those big results because we know, as that exponential function tells us, that we at some point of time there will be a huge turning point and everything we put into our business/life etc. connects, make sense and skyrocket.

That gives at least me huge motivation and every time when I have a low I just think about exactly that and start to do stuff again and face that uncomfortable feeling.

Can money buy happiness?

One more thing I started to really understand is that money IS really important.
And money is an inevitable cause of those things I am talking about and that’s good. Not only money come with the point when everything goes up like in the graph. Social life, new, good friends, valuable connections, community, growth etc..

But back to the money. We can invest that money back into ourselves. What do I mean by that?
We can invest in different kind of coaching, like mental coaching, business coaching, psychological help etc etc to grow even further and help ourselves with topics that we cant solve ourselves.
Health is also an important point that we can buy with money. Not only physical help but also mental health like going to spas, getting massages, good quality food, high quality supplements etc.
It gives us also a lot of different possibilities like traveling, going on events like conferences and seminars and grow and learn even more.
I think all those things contribute to our happiness.

However I am sure that we can’t get happiness from the external world. It has to come from within, but those things in the outside world make a lot things happier. At least for me.