We have quit in the past and we will quit again: goals, resolutions or races — we do quit them. The zest that propels us in the beginning makes it easy to continue. We know what we want — reaching our goal is motivating in itself to go on, we don’t need anything else. With time, our initial excitement depletes and we can’t find a reason to continue. We come up with excuses and decide to quit. Again.
We look around and notice those who persistently go through the process of making it and get what they want. We follow their progress living vicariously through them. Inspired, we decide to take on the challenge again.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. — Albert Einstein
It’s your turn to try a different approach. Here are 3 ways to help you get what you want:
- Make sure you know what you want. Be specific. Be as detailed as you can describing what you want to achieve. Avoid the words: more, better, etc and use numbers instead. So instead of saying that you want to write more, determine the word count and consistency. Instead of setting a goal of losing weight, decide exactly how many pounds you want to lose.
- Have a strong WHY. Be as detailed as you can describing how getting what you want will impact your life. If you decided on a writing goal of 500 words per day, determine how you’ll use these pages. Will it be a book? A series of articles? Or are you writing for yourself in a journal to help you get clarity. If it’s a book, decide how long it’s going to be and see how long it’ll take you to complete it. If you write 500 words per day, it’ll take you 4 months to finish a book with the word count of 60,000. Your reason to loose weight may be to feel better during your vacation. The more clear your why, the easier it’ll be to visualize it and get what you want.
- Be OK with not being able to see the shore — you may not be able to know when you’ll attain the goal. If this is the case, you need to focus on finding joy in the process, in all the actions you’ll be taking to get there. If you write to build your platform and gain loyalty of your audience, you may not know how long it’ll take you to get there because you didn’t specify exactly what you want. If your goal is to be open to opportunities that may arise thanks to your writing, you may be tempted to quit because what you want is not specific. Here are two ways around it: set a number of followers you’d like to gain or find pure joy in the writing process without getting attached to results.
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Originally published at medium.com