“People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing — that’s why we recommend it daily” (Zig Ziglar).
Nomatter how long it takes to reach a goal, as long as we stay consistent to reach toward it, we are making progress.
Even if that progress is doing it once a week for only an hour or two. Sure the time spent on something determines when you get there, but you are never backtracking unless you stop.
Creativity is like exercise
I don’t mean to say this in a way of creativity needs to be trained or strengthened. What it means is the only time progress goes backwards is when it is left decayed.
Even then, after the decay, the knowledge on how to grow back the progress is there.
The milestones can’t be forgotten even if they become a milestone once more.
When we exercise we add weight or reps to our sets.
We go from lifting 20-pound weights in each hand to 25, 30, 35 and keep adding. Yet we are doing the same thing at the same rate, allowing progress itself to happen to us.
Taking a break in exercise helps. It allows us more room for improvement when we go back. But an extended break, one that leaves us to backtrack only gives us more to achieve when we return.
Everyone says no pain no gain and in this connection, creativity is first doing things that we don’t quite understand or don’t comprehend and tell ourselves that we are going in the right direction.
We learn how to do things wrong
Rarely is someone a prodigy, yet we all set goals for ourselves and all have the drive to try and achieve them.
It’s when we take a failure and turn it into a message to ourselves that says, “I’m not able to do this” that we are truly failing.
I’m sure most of us have heard that “the master has failed more times than the apprentice has tried.” If any motivational quote deserves to not be considered cheesy and actually worth remembering, it’s that one.
We have to try something to see where we stand on it and learn our rank. This gives us an idea of what’s next.
Someone who starts at a lower handicap in a skill just has to have the drive to keep climbing to pass those that start higher. It’s the understanding that failures mean you are going in the right direction that can lead someone to achieve their top and final goal.
Small wins and achievements make us happy and encourage us to keep going because those small wins are actually parallel to the small failures.
We simultaneously learn how to fail and how to succeed. The problem most face in not understanding you need to witness both to make the new fork in the road that utilizes both sides.
Our attitude shapes how far we will get
With both of the above that I’ve talked about, it should be clear that the connection in both exercise and learning things wrong are built upon toward results through mentality.
Sure as the media grows motivation begins to feel cheesy and overused. What people share seems to be too over the top and like shared motivation is saying it can teach us everything.
But that doesn’t mean it is not worth our time. Motivation can be used not in the long-term method of how everyone believes it should be consumed.
Motivation that gets us to do one thing is useful. Even if forgotten right after.
Temporary motivation doesn’t need to be remembered. As long as it works for the time that we utilize it, it shows we have the technique to change our mentality just by influencing ourselves.
If we want to reach a goal and feel like we can’t do it, in the back of our minds we know that we just have to convince ourselves we can to pass that one hurdle even if we go through that whole process again for the next one.
Our mentality is strained and mainly by us because in our own light we know what we can do if we were always motivated. But we also understand that even though that isn’t the case, we can influence ourselves and motivate ourselves once more.
Ethan Greavu
Arizona State 2020 - Journalism. All of my stories are cross posted to www.ethansethic.com