Feeling demotivated is part of the journey to success. Here’s one way to get over it.
So many people have great ideas, but few of these ideas become reality. Many of us give up on our plans due to temporary setbacks and obstacles.
One of the main characteristics of great achievers who stay the course is an ability to see the big picture—in other words, they focus on the final prize instead of on the difficulties of the moment. This is also a useful strategy for coping with blips on the road to financial freedom.
The problem
When it comes to finance and running a business, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by your current situation. For someone who is in debt or has no savings, achieving financial freedom can seem like an impossible task. Starting a new business can be daunting—and indeed, it’s a challenging and risky job which takes years of hard work and commitment. There will also be many mistakes, setbacks, and failures along the way. Sometimes these setbacks can appear insurmountable, and you may feel like it’s easier to quit and go back to your day job.
There are also times in business when there’s no progress for weeks or months. Maybe you haven’t made a profit for a long time, or it may well be that you’re just bored. This normally happens a few months after starting a new project. In the beginning, you’re all excited and positive about it. You may even have bragged about it to your friends and family. But after some time, when the real work starts, enthusiasm can wane—especially when the work is hard and the rewards aren’t instant. In some cases, this can lead you to quit.
There will be no success until you break the cycle and start to focus on the big picture.
After a while, another new idea sparks in your mind and you embark on another venture… only to give up on that too when things get tough. And so the cycle continues. Unfortunately, the cost of starting over is huge. There will be no success until you break the cycle and start to focus on the big picture, instead of allowing yourself to get discouraged by temporary setbacks.
Why success stories don’t always help
Another thing that can demotivate you is other people’s extraordinary success stories. For sure, it’s fun to learn about people who became millionaires, but when you read the stories of how they achieved their success, it seems it came easily and they had instant results. What most of those stories don’t tell us is how long and arduous the journey was, and the difficulties that were overcome.
Even if you get a glimpse of what these people did to rebound from their failures, it’s still very hard to see what it really took. The upshot is that reading success stories can be counterproductive when it comes to dealing with your own situation, especially when everyone else seems to have it so easy while you’re struggling just to break even.
How can you overcome this lack of motivation? There are dozens of motivation techniques, but one of the important ones is being able to see the big picture.
Seeing the big picture
All good leaders have the ability to see the big picture. History is full of examples of people who turned their visions into reality. Some of these things seemed impossible at the time, but after they’d been achieved, people wondered why they hadn’t been done before and why they hadn’t been able to do such things themselves. The answer is partly that many people lack imagination, and partly that they don’t see the big picture.
You may have seen this ability in senior management in some large organisations. Being able to see the big picture helps these people rise above day-to-day hassle and stress. It helps them know if they’re moving towards their end goal or deviating from it, regardless of the problems or temporary setbacks they’re experiencing.
Okay, so how do I do it?
For some people, seeing the big picture comes naturally. This is often true for people in leadership positions. A person can’t run a big organisation or a country without a vision—regardless of whether they’re an elected leader or a tyrant. A vision may be for personal gain or for the public good, but visionaries all have a natural tendency to see the big picture and focus on the end goal.
For the rest of us, this is a habit we need to cultivate.
When you think about your end goal, you see your setbacks and mistakes in the context of the bigger picture of your lifetime. When you think about where you want to be in five or ten years’ time, your failures become insignificant.
Take a look back at the past ten or twenty years of your life. Where were you back then? What were you doing? Maybe you were in school or college, taking boring lectures and exams that didn’t go well. Maybe there were awkward social events, or you were in a job that you hated.
At the time, it might have felt like those nightmares would never end. Some situations may even have felt so terrible that you thought you’d never be able to turn things around. Yet when you put these things into the context of your lifetime, those setbacks actually shaped your life. Every single corrective action you took at that time made you the person you are today.
Now fast forward to today. If you’re having a tough time with your business, job or relationships and you’re feeling demotivated, think about your final goal.
Think about where you want to be in five or ten years’ time.
Try to put your current setback in the context of the big picture.
Ask yourself: Is what you’re doing at the moment—regardless of how insignificant it may seem—taking you a step forward to your goal?
If the answer is yes, you’re making progress. Despite how it may feel right now, you’re building a tiny piece of your future wealth. So just keep at it.
Practice makes perfect
Seeing the big picture one day is one thing. Cultivating a new and more lasting mindset is something else.
Every time you go through a painful temporary setback, try to focus on the big picture. You need to make this a habit. Create reminders for yourself of where you want to be in the long term. Have your goals and visions written down somewhere. Have the reasons why you’re doing this written down in a list so that they’re easy to read.
You have to look at your reminders every morning and every night before going to bed so that your brain subconsciously prepares you for your goals. Keep your notes in a portable format, such as on your phone or in a notebook, so that you can look back at them when you’re feeling low and defeated.
For example, imagine you want to be financially free in five years’ time so that you can travel for three months of the year. You’re working on your business on a daily basis to achieve that goal. You need to keep this goal written down in clear, short sentences. I also suggest finding a nice picture of your dream travel destination and putting it up on the wall by your computer, or somewhere else that you see often. Now you can compare your present difficult situation with the place you want to be in five years’ time. Most of the time, your current difficulties will seem negligible.
These two simple strategies—putting your challenges in the context of a bigger picture, and frequently reminding yourself of your goals—will help reduce the time you spend worrying about day-to-day minor issues, and give you a better chance of success.