You want to be great.

Or at the very least, the best possible version of you.

You want to be kind, cheerful, respectable, gentle, and strong.

You want your children to love, adore and respect you. You want them to look up to you.

You want your spouse to speak of your tenderness, and servant hearted attitude towards them.

You want your coworkers to value your contribution, and enjoy working with you.

In all the things, you want to honor the Lord and make much of Him. To be the very picture of righteous living and a grace filled life.

You desire all this to be true of you and more.

It all starts with the daily disciplines.

With a small collection of habits, you adopt and hold firm.

Becoming the person you want to be takes a lifetime. It takes effort and discipline over the long haul.

It takes getting one percent better each day, even if no one else can tell.

Focus on building and holding firm to a small collection of daily disciplines. Things that may appear to have a small return on the front-end, but which yield massive change and growth on the back end.

Things like getting up early, working out, controlling your tongue, responding rather than reacting, learning, and eating well.

Focus on the daily disciplines rather than the vague notions of who you want to be and how you want others to view you.

How you define success is critically important.

Focus on things within your control, not circumstances over which you have none.

Winning, for example, is something you have little control over. Other competitors and external factors could derail your chances.

You’ll be crushed if things don’t pan out. Worse still, you won’t reach your full potential. You’ll be focused on beating the next guy’s potential instead of your own.

Doing your absolute best, however, is fully within your control. You can do something about it.

Define success in these terms. Define it by your level of effort instead of a scoreboard.

Of course, effort means nothing if you haven’t prepared.

Make giving full effort to preparation part of your definition of success.

Redefine success to mean giving maximum effort every day to everything in your life—family, friends, work, training, helping others, etc.

Do this and you’ll walk away a winner no matter what the scoreboard says.