As we begin a new year on Wednesday, I thought an essay from my new book, Practical Wisdom: The Art of Living Well would work well for today’s blog. It’s titled “The Art of Achieving” and I believe it will provide a great challenge as we prepare for the new year.

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I recently read an interesting book titled Flourish. It was written by the prominent psychologist Martin Seligman who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

In the book, he says the basic equation to growth, devel­opment, and achievement (in any area of life) is based on your skill and ability, multiplied by the effort you expend. He defines effort as the time you are willing to spend on a task.

Seligman then looks to the findings of Dr. Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State.

Ericsson has argued that the cornerstone of all high exper­tise is not God-given genius but deliberate practice: Mozart was Mozart not primarily because he had a unique gift for music but because from toddlerhood, he spent all his time using his gift. World-class chess players are not faster of thought, nor do they have unusually good memories for moves. Rather, they have so much experience that they are vastly better at recognizing patterns in chess positions than lesser chess players – and this comes from the sheer amount of their experience.

Seligman then makes an interesting observation about the time we are willing to devote to growth and achievement. He says it has to do with our character. Self-discipline is the char­acter trait that engenders deliberate practice. Self-discipline is defined as the ability to make yourself do something you don’t necessarily want to do to get a result you would really like to have.

He then shares some very interesting research on self-dis­cipline with the students of Mastermind High School, in Phil­adelphia. Mastermind accepts promising students beginning in the fifth grade, though many of them wash out and the real competition begins in the ninth grade. The researchers studied a group of eighth graders to find out how self-discipline com­pares with IQ in predicting academic achievement.

They employed a battery of tests to determine which stu­dents possessed the character trait of self-discipline. For in­stance, they looked at how well the students could delay gratifi­cation. Therefore, they might ask, “Would you rather I give you five dollars today or ten dollars in two weeks?”

They then studied the highly self-disciplined eighth graders and found they:

• Earned higher grade point averages
• Had higher achievement test scores
• Spent more time on their homework and started it earlier in the day,
• Were absent less often
• Watched less television

In the end, the research concluded that self-discipline out predicts IQ for academic success by a factor of about two.

Whenever we underachieve in any area of life, we look for something or someone to blame. In reality, the reason is an un­willingness to sacrifice short-term pleasure for long-term gain.

Seligman believes his findings apply to every area of our lives, without exception.

Richard E Simmons III is the founder and Executive Director of The Center for Executive Leadership and a best-selling author.