Whether you’re learning a language, starting a business, or trying to get physically fit, there’s always a key component involved in succeeding in any one of these endeavors: Being consistent and building good habits.
Before you can start doing this, you need to first think about what’s motivating you to accomplish a certain goal. Does it excite you and give you purpose to achieve these goals?
Once you realized your purpose, it’s important to make a plan and then break it down into smaller steps that you can work on every day. This helps in building good habits, and the most important thing here is in creating a routine that you will become second nature to you by blocking out a set time or place to carry out your behaviors.
One big issue that I’ve always had is that I always wanted to do so many things at once, but reality is that we only have enough time and energy to tackle one main area in our lives at a time.
The hardest part for me in accomplishing my goals has always been when I hit a brick wall after the initial excitement and energy that I get when planning or thinking about doing all the things that I want to do.
Now, I just focus on getting the little steps done and focusing on consistency. It doesn’t feel as overwhelming and with building up these good habits you don’t have to think too much about doing the work towards your goals or it won’t be as tempting to make excuses on why you shouldn’t be able to do it.
One of the goals I always wanted to achieve was to become a writer. Today, I watched a video by Marie Forleo that gave me writing advice from 7 famous authors and inspired me to keep trying with writing:
One of the most important pieces of advice I took from one of the authors was that if you want to become a writer, you just need to WRITE! Sometimes, it’s easy to overthink things and believe that your writing isn’t good enough for other people to read. However, just getting it done is better than never releasing it, and this gave me motivation to write for at least 15-30 minutes a day on any topic.
Some of the things in life worth achieving take time to build up to, and I can relate this back to folding origami, where it takes many folds until you create an actual paper crane or object. It also reminds me of why there is an ancient Japanese legend that promises that anyone who folds a thousand origami cranes will be granted a wish by the gods: It’s because it takes so much consistency and work to achieve this goal that even the gods would be impressed.