Last night, a friend of mine recounted a familiar story and offered his two-cents on the story’s theme.

When I was little, I remember Mom reading me the story about the Grasshopper and the Ants. Grasshopper comes along in the spring and wants to spend all his time playing. He tries to get the ants to play along, but they’ve got work to do, storing food for the winter. They suggest that he does the same.

“But winter’s such a long way off!” says the Grasshopper, and he plays all summer.

When winter comes, and Grasshopper has no food, he comes begging to the Ants to let him in. They do, of course, since this is a sugar-coated story and shows that the Ants have compassion.

The story should’ve ended with the Grasshopper freezing to death. That’s what would have happened in real life. The Grasshopper, stuck in the snow and dying, would have shaken his fist in the air and proclaimed, “It isn’t fair!”

But, by golly, it’s fair. He discovered the rules when the Ants told him, and he chose to play instead of to work.

In order to succeed in life, you have to figure out the rules and play by them.

One of the rules of success stems directly from the Grasshopper/Ants fable:

Every one of us will pay a price eventually. Life is a toll road. To use it, you pay up front, or you pay at the end, but no matter what, you will pay one of these tolls.

Feel the Pain of Discipline. Or, Feel the Pain of Regret.

A little bit of work/discipline daily goes a long way to erasing the regret at the end of the road. Lack of discipline at the beginning feeds into how much regret we feel later on in life.

Luckily, we know the rules. We get to choose.

The Pain of Discipline now. Or the Pain of Regreat later on.