Don't Get Stuck: 3 Tips to Kickstart Your Goals
Do you have a goal to make some positive change in your day-to-day life? Maybe you want to wake up earlier to be more productive in the morning. Or you decide it's finally time to start working out and get in shape.
Whatever the goal, if you're not careful, you can get caught in this vicious cycle:
- Resolve to make a change
- Research the best way to make that change
- Abandon the goal
- Repeat 1 through 3
To start off, deciding to make a change is great! You don't make any meaningful change without first having the desire to. And looking for the best way to make your change happen is a smart second step. After all, there are tons of useful advice out there that can help you succeed. But then what happens? You drop the ball and, some time later, you find yourself coming back to square one, resolved to try again.
I've fallen into this cycle countless times and for multiple things. For example, I had wanted to start a blog for years. One time, I even went as far as getting a domain name, signing up on a platform, and paying for hosting. But before I knew it, my efforts fizzled and I found myself looking back to each failed attempt with the same frustrated thought: If I had just started then, look how far I'd be now.
I was never able to break out of the cycle—that is, until I realized I kept returning to the same destructive patterns. Every. Single. Time.
If I had just started then, look how far I'd be now.
If you want to make a new change, you can learn from my mistakes. Avoid potentially wasting years of your time by remembering these three things:
- Limit the time spent on research
- Don't try to make everything perfect
- Just start doing
Let's jump into it.
Limit the time spent on research
You will discover a treasure trove of helpful information. Countless websites and prominent influencers of our day telling you the secret sauce for x, y, or z. What you need to do is find trustworthy material, scan through what it has to say, but don't linger!
The danger to avoid here is getting sucked into a rabbit hole and exposing yourself to so much content (as relevant and useful to your goal as it may be). You can make a whole list of things to apply and it can quickly become too much too soon. It will be hard to keep track of, overwhelming you and making it much easier to give up.
Also, by lingering too long, you risk stumbling across multiple methods to do the same task or conflicting opinions on the most important thing to remember. Then you're in the weeds trying to figure out what to take away, what to ignore, and so on.
Save yourself some trouble. Search with a discerning eye and, instead of being bogged down with information overload, decisively take what you find and whittle it down to the absolute minimum you need to get started. Then step away from the screen—the research is over.
Don't try to make everything perfect
If you're a perfectionist, you need everything to be just right before you start. Especially when you're just starting out, this is a recipe for disaster. Of course, you need to spend some time setting up to properly do a given task, but this can easily get out of hand if not kept in check.
I'm Exhibit A. It's easy to start blogging, or so you'd think. Create an account on a blogging platform and start writing, right? Not for a perfectionist like me. I need to come up with a clever name for my blog. The site theme needs to be precisely the way I envision it in my mind. My 'About' page has to give off the exact tone I'm looking for. Before I know it, I use up all of my precious evening hours without writing a single word. To make matters worse, I'm nowhere near being settled on any of those things I spent all that time on, all because I need perfection.
It's absolutely paralyzing and a surefire way to impede progress.
Just start doing!
Go and do it. It's as simple as that.
You already kicked off the proactive steps of resolving to make a change and identifying the core ideas to steer you in the right direction. Don't stop the momentum! Roll up your sleeves and just get started.
Keep all the pitfalls and distractions out of the way and channel that saved energy and time toward being consistent until it becomes second nature. Once you're rolling, you can make improvements as you go and incorporate new things you learn, bit by bit.
This took me longer to figure out than anyone I know. But now that I'm aware of these pitfalls, it's become so much easier to accomplish what I want to accomplish. This blog is proof.
Keeping these three simple tips in mind will ensure you don't miss your opportunity to build something, and your future self will thank you for it.