Self-Discipline's Significance in Decision-Making

Freedom is a sometimes passive ability where a choice is made about what action to take, and the acceptance of any consequences that arise from that choice, although whoever made that choice may regret it, and fight against the consequences. Discipline is needed to carry through with whatever choices are made using freedom; discipline is not needed to achieve freedom.

Whenever a choice is made, the people who make that choice are challenged, whether by those with opposing views, or nature.

These decision makes will find obstacles everywhere they turn. Self-discipline helps one to stick with a choice in the face of intimidating obstacles and temptations. For example, I need self-discipline to go meet every Wednesday the Boy Scouts of America troop I am in, Troop 359. To gain new skills and leant how to do a large variety of useful things, I attend every week. However, a lot of the time we have each week is spent on talking. A small fraction of it is practicing what we learn.

It takes self-control to stay focused and leant how to do things like cook, tie knots, and how to give first-aid. The same could be said for school. It takes a lot of self-control to stay in a classroom and actually learn complex subjects like Algebra II or Chemistry.

Whenever someone decides to do something, there will always be people who agree with what they did. those who critique what they did, and those who critique the person behind the action. The people who critique the person behind the action often have the intention of intimidating the person into retracting their opinion.

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Although self-control can be used as a shield, sometimes it isn’t enough to protect a person from a wall of intimidation. For example. Laurie Penny, in her article “Laurie Penny: A woman’s opinion is the mini-skirt of the internet” says “An opinion, it seems, is the short skirt of the internet. Having one and flaunting it is somehow asking an amorphous mass of almost-entirely male keyboard-bashers to tell you how they’d like to rape, kill and urinate on you. This week, after a particularly ugly slew of threats, I decided to make just a few of those messages public on Twitter, and the response I received was overwhelming. Many could not believe the hate I received, and many more began to share their own stories of harassment, intimidation and abuse” (Penny 2).

Many internet users have the opinion that females shouldn’t be able to use the internet for ‘intellectual’ things, and that the only place on the internet for a lady is a sexual place. “I’d like to say that none of this bothered me – to be one of those women who are strong enough to brush off the abuse, which is always the advice given by people who don’t believe bullies and bigots can be fought. Sometimes I feel that speaking about the strength it takes just to turn on the computer, or how I’ve been afraid to leave my house, is an admission of weakness. Fear that it’s somehow your fault for not being strong enough is, of course, what allows abusers to continue to abuse” (Penny 8).

Intimidation overwhelms her self-control at times. Even though she is free to choose, she is constantly bullied and the bullies keep trying to chain her down. There is always freedom, but if self-control is overwhelmed, we might not be able to carry through with a choice we make. Imagine trying to walk upstream. Intimidation is the stream. At the beginning of the stream, there is fruit that we call reward. The person walking in the stream is self-motivation. Now imagine it rains heavily. The small stream has become an overflowing river. It’s not easy to keep traveling upstream, and the person in the stream gets carried downstream and further away from ‘reward’ by the strong current of the river. Self-discipline helps people to carve a path, not to have others carve it for them.

Self-discipline allows for a path be created, and helps to prevent defaulting to a predefined path.