What are the Two Hardest Challenges for Achieving Anything?
Does your salary and co-workers suck? Does your boss make Michael from The Office or Dilbert’s boss look like exemplary leaders? Are you feeling bored and unchallenged? Well I guess it’s time to move on to you next job! Why waste your talents and time at your current place when there’s a lot of great places to work for? Or maybe you want to start up that new business idea of yours.
I’m sure a lot of people have felt this way at one point in their life. It doesn’t even have to be job related. It could be anything that they really wanted to do such as investing, saving, getting rid of debt, asking that hottie out, etc., But do you know what’s the most difficult thing that’ll stand in your way? It’s pretty obvious. The hardest thing is to actually starting it.
Most people are too lazy to set forth on their new adventure. Also they might be too comfortable in their current situation to change. Or they are risk adverse and can’t take the risks involved. Or they ‘re just apathetic. What bugs me sometimes is that even if the new thing is something cool and fun, and they know it’s cool and fun; but they still won’t do it! Whatever the reason, the hardest thing to do is to actually start it. It took me a long time to actually start on this blog.
But what’s the second hardest thing to do? It’s keeping it up. Say you thought about taking up piano. After months of thinking, planning, and just being lazy; you finally get off your rear and do it. The first month or so is great. You’re finally learning something you wanted to do for a long time. It’s great to get that off your chest. Not only that, you’re doing pretty good! Those scales are coming along fast. And you can play some bars of Fur Elise.
All of a sudden, you hit a plateau. You’re not improving as fast anymore. In fact, it kinda sucks now. Now where’s the motivation? Some people just quit at this point. Some people stick it out.
So how to overcome this? I don’t have a good advice for the first problem other than just do it. Once you start on your new job search, business, or whatever; you’ll find out it’s not that bad. And it might be even funner than you expected. Also no matter what happens, you’ll get rewarded in some way.
To overcome the decreasing motivation is a bit tricky. What I do is I usually set realistic goals. The goal can’t be too easy or hard. And I give myself a time frame to achieve that goal. Then you work towards that goal. Then I set a schedule to do the thing I started. You can set an alarm if you need to. This is called implementing a habit. However, you do need rest. If not you’ll burn yourself out. So figure out a good rest schedule along with your work schedule. Then just chug along to your goal.
If you don’t reach your goal, then you can quit. Or you can regroup, develop a new goal, and work towards that. Deciding whether to quit or continue depends on the situation.
To sum this up, let’s give an example. Say you want to look for a new job. First, start writing your resume. Then post it to Monster, Careerbuilder, and other job sites. Then mercilessly revise your resume every week and repost it to those sites. Set a goal to get a new job in the next 2 months. Set up a schedule to revise your resume, apply to jobs, and interview. Then rinse, wash and repeat.
There you go. I hope this was helpful.
Stumble it!
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment