Last time, we talked about how to hold fast to your ideas and then how to get them off the ground. Passion is such a strong booster and will take you far enough at the beginning. But like a space shuttle, that booster will fall off, and from there it is up to you to sustain your momentum. How do you keep on moving forward towards completion?
Be Undeterred by the Challenges
Just because you’re passionate about your idea, doesn’t mean it will be easy. If it was easy, everybody would have done it, and you wouldn’t be in this rare position of potential success.
Some people quit as soon as the difficult reality becomes apparent. But you won’t. Accept that there will be challenges. Develop resilience and grit to solve these challenges and move past them. You are not only building your character, you are also making your project bulletproof when these challenges crop up again in the future.
Hold on to Your Vision to Keep the Fire Burning
The first flames of passion will get extinguished gradually. Those challenges, the long timeline, and the failures along the way can burn you out. There may even be naysayers who are unwittingly getting you down. Whatever the reason, ensure that you always have your vision clear in your mind. Use this as your overarching life goal, what you want this idea to look like in the future. Remind yourself why you wanted this in the first place, and then continue moving forward. Move forward even on days when you don’t want to. On the day it gets better again, you will thank yourself a lot for pushing a little bit more.
Break It Down into Shorter Milestones
In one of the chapters in Brian Tracy’s book, Eat That Frog, he talked about the oil barrels in the Sahara. Back in the day, traveling through the Sahara desert was such an overwhelming and dispiriting undertaking because all you see is miles and miles of nothing. You cannot tell where you are headed, nor see how far you’ve made it. In response, the French positioned several oil barrels through the desert, in the direction of where people need to go. These oil barrels were large enough and were set five kilometers apart from each other. It was enough to see the next oil barrel on the horizon once you’re past the previous one.
In the same way, you need to break apart your tasks into chunks, so you can set feasible and visible milestones. Not only does it give you a tiny reprieve from work every end of the task, it also gives a reason to celebrate as you move forward one milestone at a time. Go ahead and celebrate these small successes!
Making your biggest dreams into reality is a marathon, not a sprint. Keep your energy levels high, even when others would have given up. Enable yourself to keep going, and empower yourself by celebrating your milestones!
