"by the standard of pleasure, nothing is more pleasant than self-control and... nothing is more painful than lack of self-control." Nobody who has given themselves over to excess is having a good time. No one enslaved to their appetites is free.
If your standards are so high that you give up when you fall short of them, then actually you don't have high standards. What you have are excuses.
"Every fighter should be a little afraid of what could happen to him," Patterson would reflect on the fight later, "because fear makes your mind sharper. When you have nothing to fear, your mind becomes dull."
To procrastinate is to be entitled. It is arrogant. It assumes there will be a later. It assumes you'll have the discipline to get to it later (despite not having the discipline now).
Just as days are made of mornings, lives are made of days. To procrastinate at any time, day or night, young or old, to push it until later, is a loser's game.
"Do the hard things first." Don't wait. Don't tell yourself you'll warm up to it. Don't tell yourself you'll get this other stuff out of the way and then... No. Do it now. Do it first. That's called prioritization. Get it over with.
Perfect is not just the enemy of the good, as they say, but it's the enemy of everything that might come after. If you get stuck, your potential does too. This is why finishing is itself an achievement, an act of monumental discipline that must happen.
But that's the point. If things went exactly the way we wanted, if it didn't demand discomfort and sacrifice and patient endurance, then no discipline would be required, and everyone would do it.
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