I work upwards of 4 hours a day building a business and maintain a full time job. I have focused on only one project for the past 9 months. My day job supplies a regular paycheck but this project may never be profitable!
So how do I push through the daily grind and fear of failure? How am I excited to hustle every single day? Well, there are lots of factors, and honestly, I may not know everything that drives me. But I can at least try to answer those questions.
These are some of the high level themes that keep me motivated: Long term goals, vision, passion, skill, and patience.
For this post I am going to focus on Long term goals and vision. This is the foundation to everything else. I have set a goal to release a high quality game. To get there, I need to make sacrifices in my immediate future (ex. watching Netflix) for long term benefits (my own business).
A good exercise is to start with a goal and then reverse engineer it. For example, my goal is to operate my own independent video game studio. I take one step back and say “well how do I get there?” People must play and spend money on my games. I keep asking, “how do I get people to play and spend money on my games?” I must make high quality and fun games. “How do I do that?” I spend hundreds of hours designing and developing video games.
There are many other examples for this exercise. But first I want to repeat this:
To reach our long term and greatest goals, we must give up something we want now for something we want even more in the future.
I work on this business instead of watching Netflix, playing video games, browsing social media, etc. The feeling of achieving this goal outweighs the feeling of finishing another season of House of Cards. The problem is that long term goals delay gratification, while social media does that instantly. Knowing that the long term goals are more rewarding is what keeps me going.
Here’s another example for a marathon runner. You first ask yourself:
“How do I run a marathon?” You run 26.2 miles.
“How do I run that many miles?” You should be able to run at least 15 miles.
“How do I run that many?” You run at least 10 miles.
“How do I do that?” You run 5 miles.
“How?” You get your ass outside and run.
How about money?
“How do I buy a house?” A million dollar home will have a down payment of 20% or $200k.
“How do I get $200k?” You save it.
“How do I save?” Many ways, you eat out less and cook more, you buy less drinks when you go out, you invest your money wisely.
Put simply, you learn to budget your personal finances.
Going outside and running, budgeting yourself, and working everyday on a business may sound like no fun, but I have actually found quite the opposite. These tasks can lead to some of the most rewarding accomplishments in life. The best part, what used to sound miserable, like going outside to run, will now be exciting. You will want to do it and you will get intrinsic pleasure from it. I guarantee that you will feel much more accomplished than sitting on your ass and browsing through your Instagram feed.
If these kinds of self development topics interest you, please don’t hesitate to reach out!
Cheers,
Olin
