Entries Tagged 'achievement' ↓

As an alternative to posting the hackneyed advice of self-proclaimed life coaches and storytellers (e.g. Tony Robbins, Tim Ferriss, etc…), I thought I’d collect and share advice from real people in the mySomeday community that achieved real goals.  In the past, they admitted to having issues with finishing what they started.  ”So, what was different this time?”, I asked.  Although they all agreed that building a detailed step-by-step Plan was essential, each had a unique aspect to that Plan that kept them motivated.  Here are their tips.

1.  Break It Down

Maia was determined to get out of credit card debt but was daunted and occasionally paralyzed by the enormity of the goal.  She decided to break down the path into clear, achievable steps and discovered that checking off smaller to-dos generated real momentum.  These small flashes of progress kept her head in the game and allowed her to continue to believe that the goal would someday be reality.  Maia is convinced that taking the time to break down the path into incremental steps made the difference for her.

2.  Picture It

Globehound turned 40 and decided it was time to go back to the future and get back in shape.  To stay motivated, he strategically placed unflattering pictures of himself in various places next to images of people he’d like to emulate.  This ‘in your face’ approach worked wonders.  Whenever he felt lazy or was eyeing that bag of Doritos, he’d take a quick look at the pictures and the urge was squashed.  Now that he’s back in shape, he posted before and after pictures of himself as a constant reminder of a place he does not wish to return.  Globehound was adamant, this visual anchor located in a prominent place had a profound impact on his ability to stick to his plan.

3.  Broadcast It

Christine wanted to change careers.  She knew it for a long time but it wasn’t until she shared this goal with friends and family that she started to make real strides.  Knowing that others were watching and rooting for her proved to be just the motivation she needed to continue to check off steps in her plan.  She used the ‘Share’ option on the  Someday page and broadcast her intentions to her Facebook Wall.  It profoundly affected the accountability factor by adding social pressure and expectations to the mix and Christine says it was just what she needed to make the move from consulting to fashion.

4.  Make It About Something Bigger Than You

A4S4L4 had run a half-marathon before but she was feeling a bit unmotivated this time around.  Someone suggested that she make someone else the beneficiary of her efforts.  She built a plan to run a half-marathon and included a charitable partner.   Knowing that her efforts would do good beyond personal satisfaction gave her a real sense of necessity.   If she was in a rut, she would visit the charity’s website and suddenly her laziness felt insignificant.   She claimed that adding this one element shifted her entire perspective and gave her massive amounts of motivation.

Got any stories or motivational tips?  Please share.  We’re always looking to incorporate new elements into our site to increase the motivation and accountability factors.

To all our American readers, I and the rest of the Lifehack team wish you the happiest of Thanksgivings today.

I wanted to avoid the typical, clichéd, count-your-blessings-what-are-you-thankful-for posts. You all know that. Grade school kids know that. Heck, the unborn already know that. So let’s take it as a given that you’re deeply considering your blessings and what you have to be thankful for today. At least during the commercials, if nobody’s yelling.

(Non-US’ers may not be aware of how we celebrate Thanksgiving here in the US. First, there’s enough food to feed a small country – weird food, though, food we don’t eat any other time of the year except maybe Christmas: turkey – deep-fried, roasted, or stuffed with a chicken that’s stuffed with a duck – stuffing, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie, mashed potatoes, gravy, and something odd that an aunt or great-grandmother comes out of retirement once a year to cook. While that’s all getting magically cooked by our mothers, aunts, and grannies, the rest of the family either a) watches a big American football game, b) argues viciously, or c) alternates between “a” and “b”.)

But what’s got me thinking today is not so much the “thanksy” part of Thanksgiving, but the timing. Thanksgiving is, first and foremost, a harvest festival. That’s what the Pilgrims were supposedly giving thanks for – their first harvest in this new land. Every agricultural society in the world has a similar festival. After the crops are in and the hay laid up and the grain stored and the herds brought in and the work of the farm is done, there’s a festival, an opportunity to thank whatever god or gods a people consults on such matters and to celebrate the end of another year’s hard work and to prepare for the quiet months to come.

Ironically, Thanksgiving became a national holiday in the US just as the agrarian lifestyle it celebrates was entering its final decline. It was Abraham Lincoln who made Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, as the Civil War which gave the US’s industrial revolution its running start raged. After the Civil War, farming would be increasingly industrialized, and the vast bulk of America’s population would leave the farm and migrate to the city, to lives of factory and service work. Today, fewer than 2% of Americans work in agriculture.

Which is to say that the majority of us lead lives that are no longer defined by the annual cycle of planting and harvesting, summer bustle and winter quietude. Our harvests are no longer brought in every Autumn; instead, we sow and we reap throughout the year.

What strikes me about Thanksgiving, then, is that this is a holiday about finishing, about congratulating yourself and your community for a job well done. The Thanksgiving story with the Pilgrims and the Indians is a myth, of course, a story we tell ourselves to give ourselves some kind of grounding in the world, to explain who we are. But it’s a good myth – it tells of a people who looked at what they’d done and realized that they’d accomplished something. They were so excited about what they’d done that they couldn’t resist showing off a little, inviting their neighboring Indians to see (much like thousands of Americans will spend tonight giddy with excitement over the new widescreen television they’ve installed in the living room for tomorrow’s game, knowing that there friends and family will see that they’ve accomplished something).

It’s important to celebrate our accomplishments like that. It’s too bad that in today’s world of cool reserve and ironic detachment, too often we downplay our achievements, even to ourselves. We resist sharing our triumphs with others, for fear of being seen as bragging, boastful, “too big for our britches”, a show-off.

This is unfortunate because the festival not only marked the end of the harvest, it gave farmers the energy and incentive they needed to slog though the dreadfully difficult work of tending and reaping their crops. We should allow ourselves the same benefit, but instead we sap away our motivation by downplaying the things that are most important to us.

I guess what I’m saying boils down to this: while we’re giving thanks tomorrow for a harvest that we didn’t bring in tomorrow, maybe we should be thinking of the harvest we did bring in. And maybe we should be giving ourselves permission to have a little Thanksgiving throughout the year, to learn from the Pilgrims and mark our achievements as they happen – and share the bounty with our families and neighbors. Count your blessings if you must, but be sure to count your successes in the list, the projects you’ve completed, the steps both large and small you’ve taken towards your goals, and yes, your own harvests.

Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer's Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he's not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don't Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.

Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.

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Believe it or not, one of the most paralyzing fears is the fear of success. That’s right, the fear of achieving one’s goals. It seems insane, because of course, we want to reach our goals, right? I mean, don’t we?

The short answer is that yes, we do want to accomplish our goals, but that it’s complicated. There are several factors that complicate our relationship with achievement. For example, we may fear that pursuing our goals might cause tension between ourselves and our family, friends, and other acquaintances. People close to us can exacerbate this by scolding us for having a big head, being too big for our britches, or thinking we’re better than them. Success can feel like abandoning the people we care about.

Or we might fear the way that accomplishing something big opens us up to criticism. Even one negative review among dozens of positives can feel like failure if we’re deeply-enough invested into a project’s outcome. Accomplishment also brings with it heightened expectations, new responsibilities, and new goals more difficult than the ones just realized — all of which can cause us to fear the accomplishment itself.

Finally, our projects are often so much a part of ourselves that finishing feels like a death of sorts — what will I do, or more importantly, who will I be when I no longer have my novel/dissertation/degree/start-up/other big project to define my days and my self? That’s a pretty big whammy!

Success and Other People

Working on any big project can cause conflict with the people around  us. There are practical concerns — not being able to socialize, for instance, or neglecting day-to-day chores to work on our life’s work — and there are emotional ones — feeling selfish about choosing your work over your family and friends, for example. This is why it’s vitally important to build relationships with supportive people (and be genuinely supportive in return) and to nourish those relationships no matter what else is going  on.

No matter how big a project or goal, we must make time for socializing, relaxing, and playing. For one  thing, non-work time can be just as crucial to our success as the time we spend directly working towards our goals, because it recharges our batteries and lets our minds move our work to an unconscious part of our mind where it often continues to work (ts is why the solution to so many problems pops into our heads as soon as we stop thinking about them). But just as important, this “together time” with the people who matter to us strengthens our relationships and lets them know that they are a big part of the life you’re working toward your goals to create.

Of course, there are always one or two emotional vampires who, because of jealousy, resentment, or just an overly negative nature, will never be quite satisfied. If you can cut them loose, do so — life’s too short to try to please theunpleasable . If you can’t, though — if they’re family, for example — then do what you can to firewall them from your life while you’re working, and let the results speak for themselves down the line. If you can learn to see their negativity as their problem, not yours, all the better.

Fear of Falling

Not achieving our goals has something really big going for it — if you don’t get off the ground, it won’t hurt if you fall. Striving for success always involves a risk — and the higher you climb, the farther you have to fall. Dreaming without acting can even be soothing: we can dream of a brighter future without risking anything. At least for a while.

A fear of failure or of negative criticism can instill in us a perfectionism that leads us to shy away from finishing a big project, and even from starting. We internalize and amplify the criticism we expect, and almost always find ourselves lacking. “Who am I to attempt something this big?” our inner critic asks — and all-too-often, answers, “Nobody.”

While that inner critic may not be totally unavoidable, you can make an end-run around it by giving yourself permission to suck. Realize that some of the greatest works of art were profoundly disappointing to their creators, that the greatest entrepreneurs are always striving to make their companies better, that some of the most brilliant scientists of all time made incredible mistakes. Einstein almost undermined his entire Theory of Relativity by adding a cosmological constant to his formulae because he couldn’t accept what his work was telling him about the universe. Bill Gates became the richest person in the world releasing software that consistently failed to live up to expectations.

Who Do You Want to Be Today?

The biggest psychic beast roaming the jungles of our mind is the fear of the unknown that comes when we’re done with whatever big project we’re working on. In it’s mild form, it is simply a fear of deferred failure — we may succeed in the short term, but that success will give way to more and greater projects that will, eventually, overwhelm us.

In its more chronic form, this is a fear of becoming someone else — finishing a novel makes us an author, finishing a dissertation makes us a Doctor, building a company makes us a CEO, and so on. Life may be better, we hope — but it will also be different. Our lives will change in ways we cannot imagine, and that’s pretty scary!

It’s important to remember, though, that life doesn’t work like it plays out in our imaginations. We don’t suddenly jump from wherever we are into some unknown future where we have no idea what we’re doing. The responsibilities that might evolve from the successful completion of a big project will build on the skills and talents we developed in executing that project. That is, the entrepreneur hustling to make her first big sale today isn’t going to be the CEO of her company when it’s successful; the CEO will be the person she gradually becomes as she amasses experience and know-how in the course of building her company.

But most important of all, we need to cultivate joy and satisfaction in the work itself — and in our lives as they are. That might seem counter-intuitive; after all, why strive to improve your life if you’re satisfied with it as it is? But how can we expect to be satisfied with some unknown future life if we can’t be satisfied with the life we already know? We have to replace the notion of a better tomorrow with a sense of purpose, with each step towards that purpose being equally as important as the next and the last. It’s not that who you are today is lacking, somehow, but that who you are today is essential to the realization of your life’s purpose.

Where you get that sense of purpose will differ from person to person. For some, it is religion; for others, a commitment to their art; for still others, humanitarian ideals; and others will find purpose in the face of their newborn child, their spouse, or their parents. Each of us has our own path to walk, and each of us has to find it on our own — though there are plenty of markers out there if you just look, given that the quest for purpose is humanity’s oldest preoccupation after the sheer fact of survival. And even just accepting that there is some purpose in your life, without necessarily knowing what it is, can be a huge motivator — that alone can give you wings and help overcome the fear that keeps you from using them.

Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer's Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he's not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don't Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.

Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.

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