Often times when you are working hard to achieve a particular goal, you tend to fantasize about what you will do after achieving it. How you will spend time in enjoying that particular fruit of your labour. This not only serves as a distraction from your hard work but also a sort of a motivation for you to keep grinding. This is true, provided that you are indeed spending only a moderate amount of time on fantasies, and your main focus is still on putting in the hard work needed to turn your goal into a reality i.e. your routine is not affected by it in the slightest. This is easier said then done because the more hard work you actually put in, the more fulfilling you want your reward to be when you reach the other end. However, if you keep raising the bar for the ultimate reward you will receive, then you are only setting yourself up for disappointment because even if the benefits you receive at the end are awe-inspiring to other people, you will have an idealistic image in your mind against which you will try to compare it. And it will most definitely pale in comparison when stacked up against something ideal.
The way to handle that is to dream but also keep some aspect of the future unknown so that you can solve that mystery when you actually get to the finish line. Think about it, if you know everything that you are going to get, your mind will get accustomed to it quicker and then you would want to attain something even more exciting as this is just human nature. This leads you to make haste on your current work so you can begin your journey on the next thing that excites you. We all know that “haste makes waste” so this is just a recipe for disaster. Focus on the milestones you have set for yourself and once you have reached them, feel free to dive into the wonderland and imagine every scenario possible. As long as you are disciplined enough to do that, you will have nothing but success(though too high expectations would make you believe that your success is inferior even when it is great to others around you).
Another kind of mistake I often find myself doing is to think about ways how I will break free from this arduous routine that I have set up for myself after reaching my destination. This seems like a perfectly fine thing to do, however, the routine you have set up for yourself usually consisted of removing distractions and adding productive tasks that could contribute to your success. This is a very length process because no one can just adapt to a whole new routine in life on their first day. It involves dividing your current lifestyle into multiple activities and evaluating them individually. The end goal being their replacement with more efficient activities so you can turn your dream into a reality. So, giving it all up after reaching your current goal may not be the smartest move as there is inevitably going to be a different goal that you will set up for yourself soon. Even if the new goal is different, you know that the routine that you would have to adopt would be a one that is quite similar to your existing arduous routine rather than the fun routine you are thinking of adopting.
So does that mean that you should just accept that you will not have any fun as long as you want to keep improving yourself? Not at all. The thing that I would suggest you to do is to use the same methodology you used whilst you were first transitioning to this efficient routine. But only this time in reverse. Instead of doing away with your full routine altogether, try to do it incrementally. Evaluate each one of your activities and replace it with something more fun that you would like for it to take its place. While you are doing so, ask yourself how hard it was to first adopt this pattern and whether do you really need to replace it entirely. Consider, for example, your productive routine activity to get up early in the morning. It would have been really hard to adopt it, and though it never really became easy, you certainly grew accustomed to it. Rather than now throwing it away entirely, maybe you can now still get up early in the morning but instead of working on something tedious(i.e. reading books for some people), you do something fun that you would have done later in the day. The benefit for this approach can be estimated if you imagine the fact that giving up on just video games, as your exams draw closer, is comparatively easier than waking up early in the morning to start working and also having no video games for the rest of the day as well.
This is just one example of how you can turn your “work” routine into your “fun” routine incrementally and still keep some of its elements. This does not take away from your leisure but it certainly will help you when its time to grind for that new goal that you will set for yourself soon. Good luck!
