A lot of us have certain goals already defined for ourselves or at the very least, we know in which direction we want to go even though we might not know the exact path to take to get there. I am not talking about your grand goals in life here but rather those sub-goals that are time-specific and require your immediate attention like an upcoming exam, a job interview, or maybe even starting a new side-hustle etc. When we consider only these smaller goals in our life, we can readily come to the conclusion that these kind of goals are always there for us but they have varying priority based on what you value the most at this particular moment in your life. For example, you can always apply for a better paying job but that would mean that you will have to spend some time and exert some additional effort to prepare for it beforehand. If you already have a decent job(although a little less paying) then you might not be in too much of a haste to put yourself through all that effort. Even though the goal exists, it is way down in your list of priorities. However, if your current job comes under danger for any reason(hopefully, it never happens for you), then getting that new job will immediately become a top priority for you. Regardless, even when we have a clear goal defined for ourselves and we know that we should work for it to achieve the result that we want, it does not become any easier. In fact, for the most of us, it is very hard to do. And the reason for that is because exerting effort for something new not only means that we would need to push ourselves to our limit but also that we would have to alter our current routine that we have become so comfortable with. This is much easier said than actually done in life, even for people who are used to working hard. A thing that is unknown to you is considerably more difficult than something that you have grown accustomed to even thought the latter might be the more difficult of the two.
After much trial and error, I found three things to be extremely helpful for allowing me stay on track, once I had a clear yet very difficult goal in mind. I only came to the use of these after experiencing more setbacks than I care to admit. If I could instinctively come across these habits after failing many times than you will also be able to validate their effectiveness for yourself in a short amount of time. The only prerequisite to them is that you should have a goal in mind for yourself.
1. Self-Imposed Restrictions
The very first thing that you should do, after having set up a goal for yourself, is to identify which things in your daily routine are preventing you from taking the path that leads you to success and what should they replaced with or what additional things(completely new) you need to incorporate. Maybe you want to get in better shape. You would probably want to incorporate going to exercise or a walk early in the morning. Staying up till 3-4 A.M. might be getting in the way of that. Once you have identified what needs to added and what needs to be replaced, you need to impose self-restrictions on yourself to help you do them. These are not self-restrictions like you will work hard because you need to work hard. If it were that easy than life would be perfect. Self-restrictions are on little things that either support your new habit or prevent you from an existing bad habit that you need to give up on. For example, you cannot simply self-impose a restriction on yourself that you will sleep at 10 P.M. every night and wake up at 6 A.M every morning. You should identify what the cause is for you staying up so late at night. Maybe you are idly browsing your phone instead of going to sleep and spending hours without even realizing it. A restriction I would suggest is to not touch you phone after 12:00 A.M. Then you can try to incorporate this with restriction that you will sleep before 1:00 A.M. and wake up exactly 8 hours after you go to sleep i.e. 9:00 A.M. Eventually you will be able to impose a restriction that you will not use your phone at all for atleast an hour before you go to sleep at 10:00 P.M. and that you will go do exercise at 6:30 A.M.
This is just an example but self-restrictions are just you own oaths that you take in front of yourself and they are not to be declared in front of others at all. They are mostly meant to remove the causes and not to correct the behaviour itself i.e. you cannot simply restrict yourself to go to sleep but you can restrict the thing that is keeping you up at night. An important thing to keep in mind is that you should not replace one bad thing with another i.e. if you are restricting one thing to achieve a certain behaviour than you should make sure that it goes as planned and you do not end up in the same place from where you started i.e. leaving phone usage at night only to replace it with laptop, games, etc.
2. Realistic Sub-Goals Rather Than Ideal Sub-Goals
If you are aiming for a difficult goal, as you always should, just thinking about the path you would have to take will overwhelm you. Once you overcome this feeling in your heart and decide to tread on this capricious path, you will naturally want to divide this overwhelming goal into smaller sub-goals that appear much more doable to you so that you do not give up before you even have a chance to start. Here lies the second thing that people will do wrong and that is, they will set some ideal sub-goals to be achieved within a specific amount of time to make it possible to actually achieve their goal. It may sound perfect but an ideal sub-goal in a restricted amount of time is perfect for the goal itself, but it does not take your own current capabilities into account. So what will eventually happen is that you will find yourself unable to meet even the sub-goal(as it will be too hard for you in give time restriction) and get demotivated. Because if you are not even able to meet the sub-goal than how would you achieve the main goal itself?
The answer is simple; you should aim for a realistic sub-goal that you are comfortable with even if it is a thousand times simpler than the real goal itself. At the beginning, your realistic sub-goal should not even be slightly challenging to you because its purpose is to get you into the habit of showing up daily to achieve your sub-goal rather than make strides towards it from the first day. Once you have grown comfortable in achieving your sub-goal daily, you should try to gradually increase its difficulty but remember to only make it as difficult as you can realistically handle(realistic sub-goal) rather than making it as difficult as your goal requires(ideal sub-goal). Always trust the process and your consistency to get you to your goal. Even slow and steady wins the race but you will eventually avalanche into fast and steady to absolutely guarantee your success so never allow yourself to give up in the middle due to doubt.
3. The "5 seconds" Rule
I have briefly mentioned this previously as well, but whenever you are breaking away from your routine to work on something else, you will need to make a sacrifice to make time for it in your routine. For example, if you are studying for an exam then you will probably have to give up on playing games for a while to make time for studying. Leaving something is easy but your mind will make it difficult. Even though you know and understand that you have to study and stop playing games, you mind will keep reminding you of that game. Different seemingly unrelated queues will trigger this nostalgia for you and you will find yourself either going back to playing games or spending a lot of time daydreaming about the very same thing that you had decided to leave behind. This is natural and happens to everyone. What I forced myself to do to counter it was the ‘5 seconds rule’. You can think of this as a promise that you make with yourself where any such thing that you have decided to leave behind for the sake of achieving your goal, cannot stay in your thoughts for more than 5 seconds. As soon as you find yourself thinking about it, remember that you are being tricked by your mind into wasting your time and you have to keep your promise.
This simple self-promise is what I call my ‘5 seconds rule’ and its purpose is not to make me forget about the things that I wish to leave behind(it may seem like an ideal result but chasing it adds unnecessary expectations on the rule itself), but rather to never allow me to think about them for more than 5 seconds so I can keep my focus where it is needed the most. That means I do not even spend more than 5 seconds thinking how I will make up for this sacrifice after I have achieved my goal as that too is a trick to make me waste my time.
