Following my email yesterday about the myth of creating untold wealth quickly and without effort, I received a great email from one of my clients, Nick Lockhart from MRD (who has a fantastic newsletter about property investing) …

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Hi Scott,

How true. Let me add that we will either live with the pain of discipline, or the pain of regret.

We get the choice when it comes to which pain we experience, but there is no choice to avoid it.

Have a great week.

Nick
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Well, I couldn’t agree more with Nick’s comments – discipline truly is the key to success.

Yet here’s where it gets tricky.

What do you do when you are going through the “pain of discipline” and not seeing any results.

Well, in order to explain this, let’s look at the bamboo plant for a moment.

When initially planted, it doesn’t seem to do much for the first few years.

Everything is happening underground. It’s putting out stems and everything is occurring underground.

As you can imagine, it would be easy to become despondent while growing a bamboo plant.

But here’s what happens once it shoots above the soil and sees the light.

It becomes the fastest growing woody plant on this planet. In fact, one species grows by as much as one metre per day – you can virtually watch it grow.

And it often grows many metres in just a few weeks.

So what’s the lesson here?

Not only do we need to be disciplined, we also need to be patient.

We need to invest in the future of our business… knowledge… marketing… systems… relationships…

with the vision of a bamboo plant, knowing that although we may not see the fruits of our labour immediately, if we water our “inner plants” on a regular basis, eventually we will get the exponential growth we are looking for.