How to Find Motivation in Long Term Goals

I recently wrote an article about Putting Your Life into Perspective, where I aimed to inspire you to make a Life List. I’ve found that making a life list is a wonderful way of setting some goals for yourself in the long run, and it can even help you figure out what you want to do in the future and how to get there. So, I wrote about how to write the list, but how about keeping motivated? How do you stay motivated to achieve these goals that you’ve set aside for yourself?

Oscar from Freestyle Mind is here to give you ideas on how to find the motivation to keep going and ultimately achieve those long term goals. If you’re looking for productivity, motivation or learning skills, please check out his blog. He himself has quite a goal – he wants to eventually make 10,000 Euro’s a month (he’s Italian), all from passive income. He does monthly updates on how he’s doing and it is rather fascinating to see the progress and the hard work that goes into it.

Sometimes I feel like I’m going nowhere, it’s easy to get distracted by futile things when you are working on something that will take a long time to accomplish.

Yet I know that working everyday will pay off and the only secret of success is to keep going and add a little bit every day to the main puzzle.

Seth Godin taught this concept in his book, The Dip. He basically says that there’s a long way to travel if you want to become successful at something, and it serves as a filter for all those people who don’t want to put enough passion and hard work into what they’re doing.

This is always true, but unfortunately the media tends to show only the final step of successful people, resulting in the majority of us looking for the quick fix.

But the quick fix never happens. When you see a successful person you often don’t see all the hours he or she spent doing hard work, probably for free, in order to create the status that’s needed to become successful.

Take blogging for example. Hundreds of blogs are created every day, yet only a tiny fraction of them will reach a point where the owner will be making serious money through it. But do you know why 99% of bloggers fail? Because after a few months, when they see little or no result they give up, often because they get distracted by something else, and the cycle repeats itself.

I’ve already talked about the success formula before, and I think it’s quite easy to understand. Yet the remaining question I often get is… How do you find the motivation to do something every day?

And how could I ignore such a question. It’s true that I work most of my time for things that don’t provide direct result. My family often thinks that I do nothing because they don’t see a paycheck the day after.

The truth is that I just focus on few things at a time. If I would keep myself busy with tens of projects and ideas it would be hard to maintain concentration and focus on long term results.

In fact I’m currently working on only three projects where I want to give the best of myself in each of them. But if you could look at those projects a bit closer, you would see that only one of them is a very time consuming activity (which is my blog), and is also the one I care the most about.

Another thing I do is to eliminate distractions. Distractions for me are activities that contributes little or no value to my goals. I don’t watch television, I don’t watch youtube videos for hours, etc. That’s not to say I don’t have a social life, as I’m part of a martial arts club and I still go out with some friends in the evening. But when it comes to work, I know I have to do my stuff, and no, checking email every 20 minutes is not doing work.

In this view it’s easy for me to answer the question “How do you find the motivation to keep going”, as my response is that I simply micro focus on some activities until they get done.

The good news is that it’s simple to do the same yourself. Simplicity is not only the key to happiness, but also to productivity and success. Ended are the days when we thought that we have to do more to achieve more. If you want to have more, do less, but do what truly matters and do it well. Learn from your mistakes and treat failures as a powerful lesson to improve tomorrow rather than being discouraged from them. You have to reach a point where you’ll be happy to fail because you’ll have learned something new. I know this may sound odd at first, but once you’ll get started you’ll understand what I mean.

Finally, I want to say that everyone has the opportunity to do awesome things in life. If you have read this post so far you already know what the key of success is, now you only have to apply it to your own life.

Oscar Del Ben writes about productivity, personal development and lifestyle at FreestyleMind. Check out his website and subscribe to his RSS Feed.

6 Responses to “How to Find Motivation in Long Term Goals”

1. Oscar - freestyle mind says:

   November 27, 2009 at 19:54

   Thanks for giving me the opportunity to write for your blog!
   Oscar – freestyle mind´s last blog ..Analysis Of A Typical Working Day

   Reply
   • K says:

     November 28, 2009 at 00:27

     Thank you for writing Oscar!

     Reply
2. Alana says:

   November 27, 2009 at 21:37

   He makes a very good point in regard to blogs – I definitely agree that the only way to succeed is to keep trying, keep learning and evolving and eventually things will fall in to place… I guess that works with all of life. It took me a long time to learn that the only way to have the life I want is to start living it, making small changes and taking a step toward what I want everyday. What keeps me motivated is always remembering that there’s no deadline for achievement. Working hard and moving forward are all that matter. Reading inspirational and productivity-related blogs definitely helps me a lot too :)
   Alana´s last blog ..Blog Revamp

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   • K says:

     November 28, 2009 at 00:38

     “What keeps me motivated is always remembering that there’s no deadline for achievement.” – that’s exactly it. I love that you said that, because it’s so important. As long as you keep trying and doing the best you can to achieve that what you want, when you achieve it is not important. What’s important is that one day you will achieve it – yes, you’ll most likely fail along the way, but pick yourself up and go at it even stronger than before. As you said, eventually it all falls into place.

     Reply
3. Candice says:

   November 29, 2009 at 04:55

   I love setting long-term goals, such a good way to keep things in perspective. I’ve started my own!
   Candice´s last blog ..Mouth stitched shut, brain wide open

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   • K says:

     November 29, 2009 at 10:11

     That’s awesome! Glad to hear it.

     Reply