Conquer a day first…
We have all tried atleast once in our life to inculcate a hobby or to learn anything new but most of the times we have failed miserabely. Of course there are people who succeed and I have huge respect for them.
So why do we fail and how can we fail in a better way. The question is, Is there a better way to fail? Yes, certainly is. You can still fail to achieve final goal by failing in a better way but your ROI will never be zero.
I have tried so many things in my life. Like things to learn, sports etc but I have failed miserably at all of them. So am I the right person telling this story? Probably no or maybe yes because I have started failing better now and have a firm believe that will start to succeed soon. So, I just want to share what’s been working for me.
Earlier in my life I always made a long term goal which will start from a specific day. Like I will start learning python from Monday 5th and then so many mondays will come and go and I would still not know how to write “Hello world” in python. It would happen for most of my goals.
It took me sometime to figure out that making long term goals which start from a specific day or date is not working and is not going to work. Why? Because, firstly you cannot control every day of your week. You have your office, impromptu meetings, family and whatnot as a result you start and stop regularly to achieve your goals and when you see your long term goal as Mount Everest and suddenly you notice that it’s been 1 month and you have not reached even 1000mts and you have 8848m to climb, you lose your motivation and goal remains a goal always.
So what I started doing is not to have two things. Firstly a long term goal and then not starting from a specific date. I started planning just for a single day by writing what i did in my Evernote.
It helped me a lot because it would help me feel better about myself in a very small manner but it worked. For example, I wrote a blog on medium and i noted it down in my evernote. It made me feel better that i did something out of my mundane routine and utilised my day in better way. Also it helped me weed out unnecessary goals. Unnecessary goals are things you want to achieve just because it’s cool or someone else is doing. When you plan just a day then at first you meddle with lot of things and slowly tend to settle down and know what you really like or you really wanna do.
Part 2 is the more difficult one. Once you start planning your day and figure out hours where you would do something productive and also something that interests you, now you have to learn to build on that. So If you plan your day to read about blockchain at anytime of the day and you achieve it the next important thing is to build on that (if you really like it). So the next day again just invest sometime while you are on cab or just before going to sleep. Start bouncing ideas in your brain. This will help you generate more interest which will lead your brain to find more hours for this task.
So the next time when you think of doing something just don’t make a routine to start with. Just try to conquer a day. Win day 1 and then day 2 and keep a note of it. Suddenly you will start noticing that the days are turning into months and even if you lose your mind will know that you just lost one day and you can start over again from tomorrow.
One day to conquer and you will win the war before you even know it.