When I was growing up, every Sunday my dad would give me a list of the chores I had to do that week. Some, like taking out the garbage, were daily tasks.

Others, such as my regular assignment of cleaning out the basement, could be completed anytime—as long as they were done by noon on Saturday.

I knew I could do the basement on Monday, Wednesday or even Saturday morning. But I quickly figured out that the sooner I got it done, the more I could enjoy the rest of the week.

Without even realizing it, I was learning an important life lesson: pay now, play later.

I could have waited until the last minute to do my chores. But if I had, I would have risked missing out on some fun activity my dad had planned for Saturday afternoon—an activity I knew I'd have to skip if I didn't get my work done.

So I chose to make the effort on the front end.

Whether you're doing household chores or building a company, practicing the "pay now, play later" principle requires one key element: discipline. What exactly is discipline? It's the means of getting what you really want even when you don't want to do the thing necessary to get it.

In the last issue of Leadership Wired, I wrote about how the ability to make right decisions is critical to success in life. That's true, but good decisions have no value without discipline. Decision making takes care of goal setting, but only discipline results in "goal getting."

As I wrote in my book, Today Matters:

Everyone wants to be thin, but nobody wants to diet. Everybody wants to live long, but not many want to exercise. Everybody wants money, yet few want to work hard. Successful people conquer their feelings and form the habit of doing things that unsuccessful people do not like to do. The bookends of success are starting and finishing. Decisions help us start; discipline helps us finish.

In other words, when it comes to success, good decisions and discipline go hand in hand. Good decisions minus discipline equals a plan without a payoff. And discipline minus good decisions equals regimentation without reward. Only when we have good decisions plus discipline do we have a masterpiece of potential.

Now, it's not easy to practice discipline. In fact, it can be downright painful at times. We all know what it's like to do something that we don't want to do but know we should do. That's the pain of discipline. But if you don't engage in that kind of pain, you open yourself up to the pain of regret, which is far more excruciating.

This leads me to an obvious question: How do you develop discipline? Here are four steps:

1. Set deadlines and priorities. Don't make a list of everything you have to do and start working from the top. Prioritize your to-do list. Determine which projects you need to accomplish first and how much time you need to get them done. Then give yourself a deadline and get busy.
   
2. Challenge your excuses. I get so tired of whiny people telling me why they couldn't, shouldn't, didn't and wouldn't. Put the violin away and start taking a hard look at the so-called reasons you cite for not being able to get things done.
   
   As I like to say, it's easier to go from failure to success than from excuses to success. As long as you're making excuses, you're never going to make it.
   
3. Remove rewards until the job's done. Marathon runners don't stop for a break after each mile, and neither should you. I'm not saying you shouldn't divide your work into manageable chunks or celebrate the achievement of intermediate goals. Just don't have that Krispy Kreme doughnut too quickly.
   
4. Stay focused on results. Jackson Browne once said, "Talent without discipline is like an octopus on roller skates. There's plenty of movement, but you never know if it's going to be forward, backwards, or sideways." Staying focused on achieving results—with the priority items on your to-do list, I might add—will keep you from acting like an octopus on roller skates.

If you want to be successful—as a leader, as a parent, as a member of society—you have to pay the price. You can be disciplined and pay on the front end, or you can take the seemingly easier path and pay on the back end.

Unfortunately, if you play now and pay later, the payment's much heavier. As I often say, hard work is the accumulation of the easy things you didn't do when you should have.

So, learn from my boyhood basement-cleaning strategy. Pay now, and play later. Because if you pay now, you'll get to play a lot longer!

This article is used by permission from Dr. John C. Maxwell's
free monthly e-newsletter: Leadership Wired
available at www.INJOY.com.