It is very difficult to make sufficient sacrifices for the future when your expectation of your future ideal is rooted in the limits of your present self. If you are a rational person, you will only expend effort up to the worth you expect it to yield. If you calculate potential benefit in terms of your present self, you will not see what you could be as worth the cost. It’s important to realize that the best future outcomes will require you to make better use of the resources you have now as well as make the concerted effort over time required to obtain greater resources than what you presently have. This requires sustained sacrifice over time that will exceed the outcomes you can presently perceive for doing so.
Most people limit their perceptions of their potential to the improvements that would be worthwhile in the short-term. Making long-term decisions based on short-term rewards is a form of dishonesty that people use to excuse themselves from potential that they could otherwise fulfill. For example, a person who is poor now is correct in acknowledging that they have no money with which to help others. However, there are many sacrifices they could make over time that would lead to them having money with which to help others later, and their refusal to engage in those sacrifices is just as sinful as the refusal of the rich to donate their wealth—if not worse, because by making the improvements necessary to have surplus to give others, the poor would also encounter a much better life for themselves.
Because your understanding of your potential best is limited by your present understanding, it will change over time. As you increase in experience and insight, and as you get to know the examples of others, you will refine your idea of what is ideal given your circumstances. The path to refining your idea of the ideal is to live up to the ideal as you presently see it. You will become the ideal version of yourself by consistently doing what the ideal version of yourself would do, even as your vision of the ideal changes over time.