How to stay motivated while pursuing your dream

(≈10 min read)

Before you know it, it’s all going to be over, everything you know and love…gone. Surprisingly, I’m not reminding you of this fact to scare you. It’s just that this inevitability, the assurance of things coming to an end that should in theory provide enough motivation for you to wake up every day with a burning desire to go towards achieving your dreams.

Michael Landon Jr. – “Whatever you want to do, do it now. There are only so many tomorrows.”

But as I’m sure you’re painfully aware, motivation is not that simple. We humans are biologically hardwired to gravitate towards opportunities that offer short term gratification, and so harnessing motivation, especially in tough times, can be insanely difficult.

There’s always that temptation lurking in the back of our minds to sleep in that extra hour or binge that TV series or rewatch that movie we’ve seen a thousand times. Compare that to the alternative where we’re compelling ourselves to endure hours of voluntary discomfort for the slim chance that our dreams might manifest and it’s fairly easy to see why we stray towards the lifestyle predicated on instant gratification.

Suffering, even for our future selves is hard. Pleasure in the present moment is easy.

Deep down, most of us know what we should be doing and how to do it. We just can’t seem to muster the willpower to get it done. So in this article I’m going to discuss several tips and tricks to help you motivate yourself to pursue those dreams.

Establishing your true ‘why’

When life is devoid from any kind of deeper meaning, it’s easy to fall into the trap of relying on short term pleasure to sustain us through the struggle that is life. And when we’re looking to pursue our goals, overindulgence in momentary pleasures can reduce the odds of those dreams becoming a reality. A quote from Nietzsche:

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

The quote is discussed in quite some depth in Victor Frankl’s novel, “Man’s search for meaning” where he outlines how those in Nazi prison camps that had a reason to continue living, whether that be to see their children or to finish their novel, were much more likely to survive than those who didn’t.

For those of us who already have dreams, we already kind of have a ‘why’. But that ‘why’, in a lot of cases, has not been considered with more depth than simply ‘I want to get rich’. To truly have a reason to go towards this goal you’ve created, you need to get to the bottom of why you actually want to achieve that dream you feel like you need so bad.

Questioning your dream

To get a deeper understanding of exactly why this specific dream is important to you, the first thing I’d recommend is asking yourself this question: “Why do I actually want to do this thing I’m telling myself to do?” Then ask yourself “why?” or somehow question each response given. If you have no clue what I’m on about, let me give you an example to try and clear things up. A father might say:

“I want to motivate myself to do well as an artist so I get more money.”

Why do you want more money? “I want to help me children to live the best lives they can.”

And do you think money helps with this? “I think love is most important but I also want to have the money to be able to give them opportunities like going to college and paying for school trips.”

Why do you want your children to go to college? “So they can get educated, get a good job have a stable foundation for their own lives.”

This could continue for longer, but the idea is that the more reasoning you can give, and the more scrutiny your idea stands up to, the more reason you have to do what you set out to do. Now for the father, it’s no longer just, ‘I want to do well as an artist’ but there is a why – ‘I want to do well as an artist so I can give my children access to opportunities such as education and so they can live their best lives’. And that’s so much more powerful.

So don’t just settle with a basic reply. Imagine you’re an interrogator trying to dig as deep as humanly possible. Your job is to find flaws, really get to the bottom of why you want to reach this dream you’ve set yourself.

Maybe someone who dreams of creating a million pound business might say:

“I want to create a million pound business so I can afford to do things I can’t now.”

Like what things? “Like buying a helicopter and eating in fancy restaurants.”

Why do you want to buy a helicopter and eat in fancy restaurants? “Because I can’t right now and it’ll make me feel good.”

Why will it make you feel good? “Because these things are pleasurable.”

And do you think they’ll always be pleasurable? Are there things, like perhaps family or love that will always be there, things that won’t fade when you become accustomed to them?

Sometimes, when we interrogate ourselves, we discover that the reasoning behind our dreams is actually quite faulty. So although this is perhaps unconventional advice, I would make sure that whatever dream you’re aspiring towards you can truly back with a strong reason that can survive this kind of interrogation. As you continue to ask yourself ‘why’, you’re giving yourself more and more reasons, more and more fuel to push yourself to do what needs to be done.

Create strong habits

To achieve anything, a solid structure is required. We need order, a default mode which our body can revert to when in crisis. This default is usually established through habits. The basic idea is that by forming constant and consistent habits that are working towards a larger overarching goal, you’re maximising the odds of actually achieving it. You’re utilising routine and structure to forge a new identity.

And that’s the thing with change:

In order to truly become who you want to become you’re going to have to kill your current self. (Metaphorically [of course])

Now that’s not an easy thing to commit to. You need to have a strong ‘why’ to remind yourself why this death is necessary and you need to have habits and systems in place so that when your body attempts to regress to that old mode of being (and trust me, it absolutely will), you can resist and quickly pull it back into order.

It’s a well-known scientific fact that a person lacking routine and order is much less likely to do what they say they’re going to do. That’s because the mind chooses the path of least resistance. But if you’ve created habits which your brain can follow without thought, you’re making the chances of sticking to that routine much more likely.

If you leave yourself to make decisions about what you should be doing to the day itself, from the moment you wake up, your brain will always be straying towards the easiest task, the task that requires the least effort (watching TV, playing games etc.), which won’t be most beneficial to you.

But even after you establish habits, it’s still easy to indulge in those devilish things we know we shouldn’t. And that’s why it’s so important to learn to love the journey.

Learn to love the journey

Most of us know what we ought to do. We know what exercises we should be doing yet lack the motivation to get up of the sofa and do them. Why?

The reason, in most cases is this: we enjoy fantasising over the end result (the lean body, the athletic endurance, the flexibility) but despise the actual process required to get there. Sitting in your bed and thinking about what it’d feel like to be fit and healthy is a very different thing to when your muscles are burning and your forehead is dripping with sweat and your whole body feels like collapsing. We don’t want to feel that kind of pain. We want the end result yet are not willing to adhere to the process required to get there.

The way to bypass this is to stop fixating on the end goal and start focusing on the journey. Learn to love the journey. Learn to love that kind of pain that you know is growing you. Learn to love that feeling when you can run that extra mile, or lift a little more than you could yesterday. That needs to be your motivation. Not the end goal but the process.

Once you’ve achieved a big goal, you may notice that your life suddenly starts to feel empty. The reason for this is because the psychological research suggests that we’re all prone to something known as ‘arrival fallacy’ – the illusion that once we arrive at our goal we will feel much happier. Truth is, you probably won’t. We get significantly more contentment not from reaching the goal but from chasing it.

But while chasing it, you also need to keep in mind your purpose, your end goal. Give yourself a reason for why you’re actually doing the task and the task will become so much easier.

Having said all this, I’m fully aware that telling yourself to love the journey is easy, but voluntarily enduring the pain along that journey is much harder. So here’s a quick little technique you can employ before you’re about to engage in a painful (yet necessary) activity:

Every time you are about to engage in an activity, let’s say for example going to the gym, remind of yourself of two things:

1) That there will be a last time you ever do this activity

And:

2) That there is a possibility that this time, right now, is the last time you will ever do this activity

For all you know, tomorrow you might be involved in a terrible accident or be diagnosed with a certain kind of illness that strips your ability to move as you currently do. As depressing as it is to think about, this time in the gym may very well be your last. Now take a moment to think about how this consideration might change your workout?

If we were able to do things over and over forever, we would lose appreciation for them entirely. It’s the finitude of life; the fact that everything comes to end that motivates us to do painful things. The procrastination that would ensue if life was infinite would be immeasurable – we could always do that painful activity tomorrow.

Now obviously this thought that there’ll be a last time you ever go to the gym and that this could very well be that last time is not a thought any sane person wants to consider. Surprisingly, it’s not exactly pleasant to remind yourself of the fact that one day you’ll turn into a vegetable, and that you don’t know when that day will come.

But by actively reminding yourself of this possibility before engaging in that painful activity, you’ll be way more engaged in the activity and intrusive thoughts will be much less frequent. Imagine for example the difference between an average person eating a meal and a prisoner eating that same meal but knowing it is their last. How might the experience differ for each person? Who would appreciate the food more and be more present whilst eating? The idea is to transfer this idea of active engagement to painful activities too.

So in short, learn to enjoy the process of change. Derive your motivation not from the desired outcome but from that feeling of gradual improvement.

Be willing to fail

Everything you do well today involved repeated failure along the way. As almost every athlete or successful entrepreneur can undoubtedly attest to, failure is a fundamental part in your path to success. To get good at anything, you have to learn not just how to be willing to make a mistake but how also to learn from that mistake for next time.

When something happens which wasn’t in the script, instead of beating yourself up over it, it’s important to take a step back and realise that this is just part of the process. Analyse what happened and why it happened. What could you have done differently? What would you do differently next time?

This willingness to fail and learn from failure is something that should drive you towards where you want to go. Easier said than done, I know, but try not to let small setbacks distract you from your end goal.

Michael Jordan, professional basketball player attributes much of his success to failure. As he said:

“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Failure is normal and natural and doesn’t mean you’re not going to get where you want to go. Take that failure on the chin and learn from it, allow it to give you the necessary fire to propel you towards that dream.

Take action

In general, I’d say reading and researching to find motivational techniques that work for you personally is never a bad thing.

But there’s a tendency for us to use research as a kind of procrastination. Weirdly, we plan in excess detail what needs to be done in order to avoid actually doing it. This planning makes us feel like we’re being productive and making good use of our time.

But you need to question whether it would be more beneficial to just get on with your dream instead of spending your entire life planning how you’ll get there.

Sometimes it’s better to throw out the planning and procrastination and just dive right in. Plan and prepare all you like, but the only thing that’ll actually get you closer towards your dream is action.

The heaven/hell technique

Asking yourself questions and laying out answers in a detailed manner can be an invaluable tool when you’re looking to find ways to get motivated. Like I’ve said about ten times already, oftentimes the reason we struggle to stay motivated is because of our tendency to drift towards short term pleasure and avoid the somewhat painful things that need to be done. Here are two questions to ask yourself to help with this:

“If I continue living exactly like I am now and don’t make the changes in my life that I know I need to make to go towards my dream then in three years what will my life look like?”

The idea is not just to read that question and let it slip through your brain. You have to stop. Think. And after you’ve done a lot of thinking, perhaps over the next day or two, map out in detail how you think your future might unfold. Spend a while just writing. What do you think will happen? How will your career or that dream unfold? How much progress do you think will be made? Will it have an impact on your family? On your friends? On your career?

The purpose of this question is to create a kind of hell for you to run away from. So now when you’re deliberating whether you want to indulge in that form of instant gratification as opposed to working, there’s no uncertainty – you can always refer to this and know what you think will happen if you don’t change. But now we have a hell to run from, it would be useful to have somewhere to run towards…

“If I can successfully implement the changes in my life that I know need to be made in order to go towards my dream, then in three years what will my life look like?”

Yay, now for the fun part. Imagine you were able to actually do everything you said you were going to do (every adults dream). Imagine you were able to somehow harness all this internal motivation and put all your energy into pursuing this dream. Spend a while thinking about exactly what impact this might have on your life. What would your new life look like? What things could you now do that you couldn’t do before? How might your mood change? How might this change your relationships with others?

Paint a rough picture – it doesn’t have to perfect. But it’s essential that you spend a good amount of time really thinking. Don’t just half-heartedly spend ten minutes writing the first things that come to mind. Give yourself a day or two to really think. The purpose is not so much to create a vision that’s realistic but just something to aim towards, the best version of what could happen if you actually focused your mind on the things you know you should.

The idea is that now every time you hear your brain telling you to indulge in a form of temporary pleasure, you now have something to refer to. Take a fleeting glance at your heaven and hell. Which direction do you want to go? Having these loose and unarranged thoughts concretely and distinctly lay out as best and worst case scenarios can help to give you that extra push when times get tough.

The old man/woman technique

“Picture yourself as an old man/woman sprawled across your armchair. Now imagine looking back your life at all the things you’ve achieved. Do you have regrets? Could you have done more? Come back to the present moment. Are you on the right path to do all those things you want to get done before you no longer can? And as that old man/woman would you have regrets if you didn’t do the things you should be doing right now?”

Posing these questions to yourself turns the inevitability of ageing into an asset to help you make the right decisions in the present. I hate to break it to you, but it’s true, no matter how hard you try to repress it that one day you’ll have grey hair and be ensconced to your armchair because your bones are simply too frail and fragile to stand on your own two feet. And it’s also true that that old man/woman will think back to their past and think about what could have been. You (presumably) want to grow old and be content with how your life unfolded. So make those changes you need to make now because one day it’ll be too late.

But always be realistic…

When we talk about pursuing our dreams it’s also important to be realistic and realise that progress will inevitably be slow. We’re not going to change overnight. The main thing is that over time, we’re improving. We’re allowed setbacks and we’re allowed those days where we simply don’t have the motivation to do anything, but as long as over time we’re improving, that’s all we want.

As long as you’re striving to do better than the you yesterday, then that’s really all that matters. Your journey is not going to be a straight line with a constant gradient. It’s going to be spiky and have dips along the way. In fact there’ll undoubtedly be days you won’t do better than the you yesterday. But that’s ok. As long as the general trajectory is upwards, then that’s all that matters. As James Clear outlines in his book, Atomic Habits, just improving 1% a day, can lead to extraordinary results.

So be realistic, don’t expect rapid results, stay consistent and make sure you’re remembering to enjoy the journey along the way.