New Years comes around and you’ve set new ambitious goals for the coming year. You’ve been waiting for New Years to come so you can get back on your feet and start to achieve your goals. But by waiting you’ve already failed. If you can’t or simply won’t do something RIGHT NOW, you will never do it. Why wait? If the you right now can’t do it why would you in a month or 1 week be able to do it. When asking sophomore Jack Lynch when he will do his Spanish homework, he simply said “I’ll do it later,” how foolish. Tomorrow isn’t guaranteed, DO IT NOW!
Now you must be thinking, “Hayes I want to start but, I just can’t.” The issue is your ego. If you want to start working out for the first time, I can guarantee that you’ll be unable to start working out for two hours five times a week. So why do we keep setting these ambitious goals that we never achieve? The reason for that is your ego. Erase your ego, start from square one and take the baby step first. It’s much better to do something easy consistently than to inconsistently doing something very hard. So you say you want to start working out, okay then do 10 pushups every night before you go to bed. Nobody is just suddenly amazing at something, not even the greats.
Kobe Bryant spent countless hours working on his shot, he got to the court before his teammates were even awake and was always the last one to leave. If you start with these little improvements then you won’t fall off track. Gradually, you’ll find that all of these little habits have built up to bring you nearer towards your goals. Then you can add on to the simple things.
Do you think motivational speaker, David Goggins, was always carrying “the logs and the boats?” Of course not, he was just your average guy, working in pest control and depressed about his routine, weight, and appearance, but then he made a change. He decided to go for a run. The first time he went running he told himself he was gonna run for 15 minutes, he got 2 minutes in, gave up, and walked home. He let his ego get ahead of him. The next day he got up and it was raining, he told himself he didn’t have to run because it was slightly drizzling outside, pathetic. A week passed since he went for that first run, he set himself up against something much too difficult and the result was complete failure. But failure is okay. In fact, you will fail, but what’s important is that when you fail you don’t stop, you must get back up. And that’s just what David did. David went out for a run once again. He set himself the goal of 5 minutes and guess what, he got it done. Then he ran the next day, and the next after that. David slowly began to build himself up into the man we all look up to today, and you can to. How? Set time and place specific goals that aren’t out of reach. For example, you could set yourself the goal of studying 15 minutes everyday from 7:15-7:30 pm in your living room every weekend. So what are you waiting for? Start RIGHT NOW! Build yourself up and soon you’ll transform. Change from the stone once rejected to the cornerstone supporting the rewarding life you’ve built up for yourself brick by brick.