At this moment, look inside.

Close your eyes. Feel your eyelids grip gently upon each other. Focus. Hear the sounds around you – even that of silence. Raise your hand to your chest. Feel the steady thump of your heart beating against your rib cage. Feel the pace of your heartbeat. Turn your thoughts to the pace of your life.

Direct your mind to your dreams. Think of what you should be doing next, to get one step closer.

Because comfort is a trap and okay is a snare. Every single time you give yourself an excuse to ignore your heart, you deceive yourself, and you let so many people down whose lives would have been that much better had you been that little more disciplined.

We young people nowadays always think that motivation is the key to success. We look for motivation all the time, we read quotes and we follow social media pages that strike up our fire; but what if motivation isn’t the key to success? We’re all familiar with this. You see something that inspires you. You feel fired up, and want to do something about it. You take baby steps to start something…

And then the going gets so tough you start to doubt yourself. Or you start getting lazy. Or both. The comfortable option of passivity presents itself on a couch, with Netflix blaring. Hours pass, and you return to your job the next day lacking sleep. You lose momentum. Hours turn to days. The firemen have succeeded once again.

As someone who has succumbed to many of these moments, and someone who faces them still, I implore you to fight. Start building discipline. Start by doing things that you’re too lazy to do, or that task you’ve been sitting on for months. Go for that run, commit to that daily one hour in the gym no matter your schedule. Make it a habit. Make yourself infallible, your discipline flawless. Make your body listen to your mind, at will, anytime and anywhere. You will be surprised how many people are unable to do this. It will only get easier the more you do it.

You will inevitably fail. You will still succumb to life’s distractions and lose your routine. We all fall sometimes, but what makes you special is that you always get back up no matter how much you’ve lost, because the future is always what matters and not the past.

This is life, and you will get better at it the more you work on it. That is how we humans are built. The formula has been proven time and again through the history of mankind. Many will try and fail, and you might too, but just imagine the burst of light on that day when your infallible discipline meets true motivation.

Imagine the world, better because you chose to take your dreams seriously.