How to Maintain Motivation for Months

Quit worrying about tomorrow.

We most often lose our motivation to keep going for one of three reasons:

• We start focusing on how far we have left to go.
• We realize that what we’re doing is far more difficult than we anticipated.
• We encounter failure or a setback.

Those three things kill the most pursuits — and all three come down to a poorly managed focus.

When we focus on the gap between where we are now and where we have to go, we naturally start calculating how much time it’ll take us to get *there.* Most come to realize that their “quick trip” to success is more like a long voyage. Then they quit.

When we realize that our pursuit is much more challenging than we thought, we stop focusing on what we’re doing and instead focus solely on the obstacle in front of us. We tend to complain, waste time looking for quick “hacks,” or stand still, staring at the obstacle that “we can’t move” (yet).

And when we encounter failure, we tend to focus solely on the setback and mentally beat ourselves up instead of focusing on what’s more important — what we can learn from the setback and what we do next.

You maintain your motivation for months when you learn to control your focus on today.

You’re not worried about how far you have to go because you’re locked into what step you can take today to advance down the road.

You’re not concerned with the challenge before you because you’re focused on what small piece of it can you chip away today.

And you’re definitely not distracted by the failure behind you because you’re focused on what step you’ll take next.

You may not feel that powerful motivation every day that seems to set you fire toward your goals, but what is motivation at its core? The willingness of someone to do something.

Motivation is your choice to do something, like say, take action toward your goal every single day.

We want to feel motivation because we believe it’s the only way we can make progress toward our goals. And we’re wrong.

We just need to focus on what step we can take today, then take it. That’s more powerful than any feeling you have because it’s pure action forward.

You maintain motivation for months by training yourself to not need it in order to make moves.