Success Takes Time: How To Stay The Course Toward Your Goals

Success doesn't happen overnight

 

It’s easy to get discouraged when it feels like you’re not making any progress toward your goals. It’s important to remember, though, that “overnight success” doesn’t happen overnight. If you stay the course and keep working hard, you will eventually achieve your goals. In this article, we will discuss some ways to stay motivated and continue working toward your dreams!

 

Success doesn’t happen overnight. Every person you see who can do something very well, whose skills you admire, did not just wake up one day with those abilities.

 

Even people who are naturally talented at something have to practice at that thing and put in extra effort in order to be the best, or just to expand on the effective use of their natural talents.

 

Every person starts at a different place in life – but you’ll never move forward or get anywhere different if you never move at all! So the best time to start is always sooner rather than later.

 

Identify Your Goals

 

First, what is it that you want to do, and why? Always be honest with yourself. Something that you truly want to do, and for a sustainable reason, will give you the most intrinsic motivation to achieve it.

 

Identify where you are right now in your life and in your mentality, and what you hope this goal will give you, and what you hope it will change about your current situation, your view of yourself, and your experience of your own life.

 

Progressing from point A to point B is much easier when you know where point A actually is. Being able to clearly and honestly identify the current point you are at, and your current situation, will give you more clarity in actually achieving what you want.

 

Hard Work And Why It Will Always Be A Prerequisite To Success

 

success doesn't happen overnight

 

There is a tendency in our society to understate effort while overstating talent. Our media often tells legendary tales of heroes who picked up a sword or a ball or a wand one day and were instantly world class contenders.

 

We mythologize quick success and innate talent – as if those things make a person’s achievements more superior or more legitimate than they would be otherwise.

 

People who make a hard thing look effortless have basically always actually put in a level of effort and a number of hours toward its practice that no one would envy.

 

Hard work and progress is how true success always happens. And having the will, ability, and commitment to put in that hard work is more admirable, and says more positive things about you, then just picking something up and being able to mindlessly use it.

 

Coasting is a privilege, and never having to put in work can set you up for a lot of problems later. The hard work you put in not only leads to the success of achieving your goal, but the further success of learning the skills necessary to sustain and manage that success once you have achieved it.

 

Hard Work And Smart Work Are The Ultimate Combo

 

Yes, this hard work will sometimes be just what it says – hard. But it does not need to be a miserable struggle or a hard grind every step of the way.

 

Always remain humble and never be ashamed to learn other people’s methods for success and the ways they have achieved their own goals. It is never a bad idea to imitate the processes and methods of other people who have achieved what you want for yourself.

 

This is not about looking for shortcuts – this about learning from people who have already found the success you seek, to achieve your goal in the most effective way you possibly can.

 

This is another reason why being honest with yourself, about yourself, is so important: the better you know yourself, the more able you will be to identify the methods that work best for you, and to know, learn, and respect your own limitations and talents and channel your own way of doing things into your most effective route to your own version of success. 

 

Don’t Resent Your Limitations

 

Don't resent limitations

 

A goal is something you chose on your own to strive for, and something that means enough to you for you to choose to put in the effort. So it follows that to resent and dismiss any of the efforts its success requires is to resent and dismiss yourself.

 

Which is silly and will not help you get what you want. Recognizing your specific limitations and areas of particular struggle are important not so you can feel held back by them but so that you can work around them, or even incorporate them into your progress.

 

Part of why progress requires hard work is because everyone has limitations. But some limitations can be changed or overcome in the midst of your hard work. Some limitations can lead you to find a different, better way of doing things.

 

If you have a problem that someone else does not, all it means is that it is your particular problem. Problems are a normal part of the process for everyone.

 

Being confronted with your limitations, and needing to devise ways to work with them, work around them, or overcome them, is in fact a sign of effort and progress!

 

You would never have to figure these things out if you were not headed in the right direction to achieve your goal.

 

Maintain Steady Progress

 

When you value and recognize your own time and motivations, it is easier to stay on track and focused on your success. Steady progress is easier to make, and the effort behind it feels like less of a burden, when you think of it less as toil and more as the best and most effective use of your time.

 

Figuring out how much time and effort you can healthfully give, and then actually putting in that effort within those parameters, when you say you will, is how success happens, and what will yield you the most benefits from all your effort in the end.

 

Steady progress builds momentum and keeps you in the direction of your goal. Steady progress is also less likely to burn you out on the process of hard work that success requires.

 

Track Your Progress

 

Keeping track of your progress is important in life. You have to remember that success doesn’t happen overnight,  it will be helpful to look back on if you ever feel discouraged (which is normal), and it is especially helpful in identifying patterns of progress and behavior.

 

Keeping track of your progress can often give you very useful insights into the timing and other circumstances of your hard work that lead to your best and fastest progress, or can clue you in to areas that are holding you back, or slowing you down, or tendencies you have that either help you along or hold you back.

 

Experiment with different ways to track your progress. You can keep a journal, or make a note every day on your calendar. You can take a picture daily.

 

Find whatever works best for you in your life, that you can consistently keep up with, and do that. Making sure you keep track also helps remind you to keep going.

 

Keep Yourself Motivated

 

Feeling discouraged is normal. When you really want something, it can be very difficult to wait for it to happen, and even when you really are making progress, sometimes it is difficult to truly recognize it when you are in the midst of it.

 

But always remember that even if it feels impossible, or incredibly hard, right now, nothing stays the same forever. If other people have gotten as far as you have now, and even farther, then it is certainly possible.

 

You have already started, so why stop now? Be sure to surround yourself with affirmative images of what you are striving to achieve. Stay focused on it, watch videos about it, and talk to other people about it who will support and recognize the progress you are making in life.

 

Getting tired is normal, but putting in the work toward your goal is admirable! Even if you feel discouraged at this moment, you have already proven that you are capable of the small successes that brought you this far already!

 

You can always do more. If you need to rest, then rest. Then go back to your routine of steady effort, and progress once more from there. Here’s a great article on staying motivated.

 

Be Proud And Celebrate Your Progress

 

 

be proud of your progress

 

It is a positive thing to be proud of all you have accomplished, and how much closer those accomplishments have brought you to achieving your ultimate goal.

 

Being proud of yourself, of the changes you have enacted in your own life, and of the ways you have utilized your own resources and spent your own time, is very important and will help you stay motivated.

 

Never let anyone dismiss your progress and the road you are on – even your own self. Your having the will and determination and putting in the effort to get what you want is always something to be proud of.

 

Hard work toward your own cherished goals, and the things you learn along the way, are always something to be proud of.

 

Understand: Success Doesn’t Happen Overnight

 

Do not be fooled: there is never any magic shortcut or key or method that will give you what you want overnight.

 

Hard work that fuels your progress down the road to success is a law of the universe. The amount of effort you put in does not indicate anything wrong or deficient about you, and it does not make you foolish.

 

If you are clear and secure in what you want in life and are steadily maintaining the effort to achieve it, then you have already done something impressive, that many people never do.

 

Success doesn’t happen overnight for anyone, so do your best with the time you have, and never resent the time your success needs to take.

 

Closing

 

I believe that “success doesn’t happen overnight” appears quite obvious on the surface, however, most people don’t truly understand this. We often go about life with random spurts of excitement for something, give it a shot for a while and when it doesn’t come immediately, we assume it wasn’t for us.

 

Not only this, but we also tend to criticize others who have managed to make something of themselves and call it luck, chance, or flat-out bs. Nobody sees the work behind closed doors, aka, the 99% of the other stuff that isn’t surface level. Understand the concept that things don’t just happen, things happen just… and you’ll realize, that so long as you sow for something, you will absolutely reap the benefits when the time comes. No matter what it is.

Thanks for reading.

 

With Love,

 

Mason