The fourth blog post.
The second month in an important project.
The tenth episode of your podcast.
The sixth year in your wedding.
The eleventh year of being a parent.
The fifth exam at the university.
The twentieth cover letter you customise.
The third year in your job.
That’s where the real challenge lies.
Getting started takes mindset and effort, but the adrenaline of “new” might make up for a lack in both. It’s when you have to keep going with no cheers at every turn that things get tough.
What habits do you know you would stick to no matter what?
Developing habits takes time and dedication, and yet once the habit becomes such, it’s the most solid thing to fall back upon in times of need.
It is worth the effort.
Most of our time is spent thinking about what was, what could have been, what will be.
As our days go by, we are rarely in the moment. Doing. Feeling. Breathing. This increases our sense of dissatisfaction and incompleteness. Bit after bit, we grow more unhappy.
Meditation is not a practice to become better or more satisfied. It is a training in the habit of being here and now, of appreciating what is going on around us and within us, of being in charge of our attention and focus.
It’s the only way to be reliable narrators of our own story.
The outcome of the things you do is heavily determined by your motivation and by your method.
Motivation is what gives you the reason why, what makes you feel all ecstatic, what gives you the kick to get started. Motivation is powerful yet fragile, and very often it is dependent on the feedback we get from the environment around us. If people don’t like our work, if we do not get the reward we were expecting, if things do not work as intended, motivation fades and leaves us wondering why we got started in the first place.
Method, on the other hand, is unexciting. It is a system, a discipline, a practice to obtain what you set out to obtain. Method is not as powerful as motivation, it is more of a muscle that needs to be trained, over and over again. Yet it can become solid, and when it does, you can fall back on method when motivation falters. It becomes a given, a reason in itself, not something others need to acknowledge for it to exist.
Motivation and method do not often go hand in hand, and when they do they are unstoppable.
The stories we tell others, the ones we use to buy people into our cause, to inspire action, to convince buyers that our brand is better, to present ourselves and the work we do.
They are not lies.
They are ideals waiting for an audience.
You've got this 