If you’re trying to get a lot done, you’re probably going to experience a plateau at some point in your career. This is normal, but they suck. Plateaus are really dangerous. Not usually because you aren’t seeing results, but rather because you can’t see a way of scaling up your endeavors and building real traction. It can be really demotivating when you’ve done a bunch of work and are only seeing small earnings. It can be devastating, as a matter of fact. So, plateaus are really dangerous because they can make you quit. If you quit, you lose. Not only do you not get the full benefits of your work, but you also oftentimes won’t have slid far enough up the exponential earnings curve that occurs in most disciplines to earn real money for your efforts. Lack of persistence and follow through will kill you. Maintaining performance during your plateaus is one of the keys to life. Bloggers and webmasters are experts at this. A lot of online business is a whole lot of nothing, followed by a massive spike in earnings. We’re used to plateaus, because the majority of our work revolves around them. I know exactly how to keep pushing forward.
Remember what you really want
Never give up what you want now for what you want in the future. If you’re able to internalize this principle, your decision making improves dramatically. The most important thing when it comes to maintaining motivation and work ethic is having a clear goal. If you don’t know what you want, take some free time to figure it out if you can. If you’re going nowhere, you’re going to have an easy time sinking your own ship. Whether it’s through self-sabotage or giving up, it’s highly likely to happen.
Know yourself
If you don’t know yourself, you won’t know why you want to do things. Life will be difficult and confusing. You’ll scale mountains for no reason, and struggle to find contentment in life. I know this because I’ve done this before. I’ve set about the task of working hard, figured out how to acheive my goals, and found myself lost and confused. You don’t want to be like this if you can avoid it. The best thing you can when you’re young is introspective work.
Do what you love
This doesn’t necessarily mean doing the most fun thing. But try to add economic value in a way that you find appealing. Focus on your interests and try to help people in ways that relate to them. If you find that you’re an analytical mind, consider something related to mathematics or finance. If you’re more of a caring person, try and get into academia or medicine. Doing what you love will make it easy to perform because motivation will never elude you.
Create systems and routines
When you get into a routine, it becomes far easier to perform. This is because performance becomes second nature. You get up and start working automatically. You feel weird if you don’t work. You want to get to this point when you’re young. This way, you’ll create something for yourself early on. Don’t worry too much about numbers during the first year or so, just come up with a plan, along with daily habits to make it happen. This is how you create routine in your life. Imagine a state of being, create a system to maintain it, implement that system. Easy…ish.
Maintain your health
Do whatever it takes to stay healthy enough to perform. Without your health, you don’t have much of anything. Maintaining good health takes a lot of work. There are many things which can bother you, especially if you’re stressing your body with hard work. Things should improve a lot as you age, however. The catch is that you’re going to need to front load your work. In order to do that, health basically needs to become your second job. Make sure everything is working well so that you can perform.
Exercise
Exercise to loosen up. Get your blood pumping. It’s cliche, but it works. If you make sure to move around a bit every day, you’ll feel a lot better in the long run. This applies even if all you’re doing is pacing. Move around.
Have a realistic idea of your end goals
With most pursuits, you want to know when you can stop. There’s no point in doing something that you’re going to have to do forever, unless there’s a point at which you can hit “cruise control”. If your plateau isn’t ending on time, it’s time to reevaluate, or quit.
Diversify
If you diversify, you make your life a lot easier. When one project is letting you down, you just switch to the other. If you keep it 50/50, you should never find yourself being bored or hurting for cash. Take if from someone who lives in a poor country, where you have to fight to earn a decent quality of life. You want to diversify, so that you don’t build your castle on sand. I’m personally building two businesses while attending university. It’s still a struggle to get much done in today’s economy. We’re in a winner take all world, so those with large amounts of targeted content are seeing success while the rest of us struggle.
As you see, and as with a lot of my other articles, a lot of the work required to maintain performance comes during preparation. You want to position yourself such that the way you work has little to no bearing on your emotions. You know that you’re going to fall back to your level of practice in life, so set yourself up to perform at a high level from the beginning. You want to be calm and consistently growing. Not struggling and “pushing yourself” in the first quarter. Consistent work always beats hard work, over the long term. If you can set up the routine required to push through plateaus, the world is pretty much your oyster.
Thanks for paying attention.
