Aim Low and Have Even Lower Expectations
Most of the time, you will fail to achieve your goals because of giving up on them. No matter with how much motivation you start something, things will always get more difficult as you progress further. The common pattern you and many other like you will have is to try to envision the greatness of achieving your goal from the get-go and then to use it as the main source of your motivation. In order to achieve that greatness, you struggle for some time but eventually manage to convince yourself to start taking actions towards achieving that goal. The actions you take also take significant effort from you since achieving greatness is not an easy thing to begin with. But, why are you still not able to turn that vision into a reality then? The answer is simply because you gave up on your actions in the middle as things were getting more and more harder, which made it difficult to keep your initial fire from burning out.
The reason why you give up is also pretty simple to understand. When you have just started to make up your mind to achieve something by walking on a difficult path, you already spent much effort in trying to create the vision of you actually reaching the end-goal which was still quite far from the current version of yourself. This vision can orient you towards the right direction but it will never be something that will turn into an exact reality so adding more details only increases your disappointment when you do meet with the reality of things. Afterwards, you even take significant actions towards achieving your goal but, no matter how hard you start working today, results can only be seen if you stay consistent towards reaching your goal. Instead, since you are forcing yourself to work harder in the beginning, you would also like to see some results as soon as possible to keep you motivated. The more amazing vision you come up with in the beginning, the harder you will convince yourself to work for it and the earlier you will start expecting some significant rewards from it as well. When you do not achieve the results that you had hoped, you feel dejected and decide to ‘temporarily’ stop your actions. This short break then becomes a long break and before you know it, you start to realize that you have actually given up on that task. Now, your grandiose vision from the beginning only becomes a source of guilt for you since you couldn’t keep going.
How Should You Approach This?
This was just a general pattern that you might observe for the things you gave up in the past, but, what is the correct path to follow then? The answer lies in setting your aim to achieving less than what you initially envisioned and also to expect even lesser than what you had worked for. It doesn’t mean to give up on your initial dream of achieving greatness and you can still keep that as your main goal. However, what I first want from you is to not aim for reaching your goal by taking bigger steps, but rather focus on taking just one small step forward today and take action accordingly. Instead of forcing yourself to over-work, try to work hard to achieve something small today which you did not have yesterday. Even if you only take a small step every day consistently, you will still cover more distance than taking some bigger steps before giving up on the path entirely. Second thing is to focus on the actions you take in order to achieve your goals. Not only should they be relevant towards reaching your goals but, you should also have lower expectations from them. Your expectations can easily lead you astray if you do not consciously temper them accordingly. This can be imagined in cases where the actions you take are indeed too hard for you and require much effort and dedication from your end. Naturally, you would expect to make significant headways towards reaching your goal as well. However, that may not be the case in reality since certain actions can be difficult for you alone, but they will not necessarily be a major step towards reaching your end-goal at all. You final destination may just be a combination of many such tasks making it difficult for you to see any significant progress. The best way to solve this issue is to divide your goal further and further down and aim for that. If you still find yourself over-working to achieve that, aim even lower. I do not ask you to not work hard, but in the long run, working hard and achieving something small is better than working hard and not achieving something at all. Even if you aim low today, it will be better th3en where you started from and it will allow you to aim even further tomorrow.
Consider, for example, your goal to read more books this year. You might hear some people reading a hundred books in a year and so you envision yourself doing tha5t as well. But, when you do start, you always give up after reading a few pages. This continues for a few days where you exhaust yourself mentally trying to forcefully convince yourself to keep going every day to ready more and more. However, once you are fully exhausted, you realize that you still have not ready even the first half of a book. This serves as a huge blow to your initial determination and you slowly move away from this path. From not reading on consecutive days to reading once a week and so on into oblivion.
Though you forget to take any action to read the books once you give up, the initial vision go reading a hundred books still remains in your mind to remind you that you gave up.
A better approach would be to understand that reading one hundred books in a year would not happen over night just because you decided to do so. You should first aim to read one book within a month or if that is too difficult then reading one chapter for the book weekly. Maybe even reading one page daily if you really do not have the habit of reading. You should also focus on lowering your expectations that going on a slower pace may only allow you to ready only ten books this year. This difference from your initial vision is too stark, but remember that it is still more than what you read in the year before this. Maybe you can try to ready twenty books in the next year as you continue to increase your reading ability.
Since you started from reading only one page daily and lowered your expectations accordingly, you will still feel content with the results. On the other hand, if you forced yourself to read a whole chapter of the book daily to reach your initial goal, even when you did not have such reading ability, you would only exhaust yourself quicker and stray away from your goal completely thinking it too hard.
conclusion
It is good to have a big goal in life and it is even good to have a vision of you achieving that someday. However, you should always evaluate yourself first and aim lower based on your capabilities rather than simple focusing on what the goal requires you to do so. You should aim for something lower first and if that is still too difficult to continue with, try to aim even lower. On the other hand, if it is not longer that difficult to achieve your smaller sub-goal, try to aim a little bit higher next and keep repeating this process.
Always remember that patience is the key towards reaching your goal so no matter how low you aim, you should lower your expectations to not get dejected. Only this way will you be able to persevere with your actions to keep achieving your aims. Over time, these smaller aims will combine and you will be able to achieve your destination. Good luck and keep going!
