You can find a lot of advice about working hard and never giving up until you have reached your goals but it is quite easier to give advice to someone else than it is to implement it in your life. It is easier for me to tell other people to put in their maximum effort but it is definitely going to take all you have in order to actually do it. I can tell you to do certain things to improve your life and they can be easy for me to do because they are already a part of my life but, it will be a different case for you altogether. For you, it can vary from being extremely taxing to being even more easier than me. And as long as we are being honest, it is more often going to be the former case than the latter. So, instead of just simply saying that you should work hard and keep going after something, I want this post to tell you about something that will actually convince you to do that all on your own. That something is just exploring the negative scenarios in as much detail as you possibly can with your creativity. It is not something that I will simply tell you to do but rather it is something that I will just put out there for you to try. In essence, knowing about it will not give you any kind of motivation but if you do let your imagination run wild, then you will motivate yourself.
I understand that it sounds a bit too good to be true right now but I can say with absolute guarantee that it has worked for me and it will work for you as well. Most people reading this already know what they have to be doing in order to achieve success in the present goal that they have set in mind but they just lack the will to do it. Bear in mind that I am not saying that most people know the full picture or blueprint to reach the pinnacle of success, but rather that they do at least know the right thing to do in order to obtain success in the current milestone they have on that same path. Once you have been in this state where you know something that you should be doing but you are still not able to do it, two things will start happening. First is that you will be more inclined towards giving up and opting for an easier path. You will naturally come up with, what would seem like, very logical reasons to actually abandon your current millstone and opt for something more relaxing. One of the most favourite one is delaying the milestone rather than “giving up” as the latter is not something you want to be associated with as it makes you look in a certain way which does not reflects who you are inside. Another reason is to think about the short span of life and convincing yourself that it should be enjoyed rather than spent on working and grinding out as you cannot comprehend it being the purpose of your life. Then there are multiple other things that were otherwise nothing but small events in your life but now seem like major distractions. These small “distractions” act like the supporting details for the earlier argument about delaying the milestone and everything sums up nicely in complete coherence. But now comes in the second thing, the guilt. You will not feel this disappointment at the beginning as you have the logical coherence to back you, but as you proceed to move further and further away from your goal, it keeps linearly increasing. You finally reach a point where you have more regret in life than the enjoyment that you actually set out for by opting for the easier option. The reason for this disappointment is that you already know that no matter how sugar-coated it was, the logical option you opted for was actually you giving up. And because the image you have of yourself in your mind is not something that can ever be associated with it, you feel dejected.
If you can only use your imagination to actually vision yourself walking the seemingly easier and more logical path, then you will find out about not only the positives that are apparent to you now but also the negatives that seem to be non-existent right now. No matter how shining the positives may appear and how hidden the negatives are right now, the positives will gradually begin to lose their glitter and the negatives will begin to become more apparent as you walk on this easier path. And once the negatives outshine the positives, you will eventually being to feel regret over your choice. Lets take an example of a child who gets one chocolate each week. Lets say he would get an additional chocolate for every five chocolates he saves. Initially, it is going to be very hard for the child to not eat his candy every week but he knows that he will get more chocolates the more he saves. So, lets say he has been saving for three weeks now and he gets the additional chocolate after two more weeks. It is more enticing for him to eat his three chocolates together right now and enjoy his life rather than waiting for two and potentially even more weeks to keep increasing that number. But, if you imagine the scenario playing out then you can see that although eating three chocolates may seem like a good option but it comes at the cost of giving up three more chocolates just after two weeks. Once you are done with the three, you will begin to think about the other three that could have been yours as well. In this example, the chocolate represents the things that attract you and encourage you to abandon your milestone but what we don’t see in this analogy is the opposite counter-part to the chocolate i.e. the actual work you are putting in instead of enjoying your three chocolates. When you add in that work and the additional chocolate that you get at the end along with all the chocolates that you can enjoy right now, it begins to look like a pretty good deal. Yes, you are sacrificing right now but you are eventually gaining much more than what you can have right now as well.
In conclusion, all that glitters is not gold. So, the next time you feel like giving up on something and pursuing something different or easier, do not simply brush it off by thinking that you do not want to give up. Instead, try to let your creativity draw the picture of what you would gain by doing that. Will the things you gain really make you happy or can you actually gain all of those things and much more if you continue to march forward?
The answer to this question will remove all the doubts and answer all the seemingly` logical questions you have in your mind and you will self-sustain yourself to reach your goal. Good luck!
