Working on something you love and feel passionate about gives you immense happiness and satisfaction. It need not give you any dividends but the work that you are doing for your self-development and satisfaction will give you hope for the next day and something to look forward to. Starting small on your idea beside your regular job is quite possible. You just need to decide to do it and take action.
It is hard to work in a full time job and come home, look after your family and taking of whole lot of other things could be difficult in itself. But once you start making slow progress and do some work on your passion in whatever time you find daily, consistently, it becomes a habit. This is how everything starts. This is how to get momentum. Start with something small with your passion project nurturing your idea, add some fodder daily and develop your skills and work on building your knowledge on the area you want to work. This is how you keep yourself engaged, this will keep you going, you will be focused on the important things in life, you will keep yourself busy, you would not waste your time on trivial things which do not matter to you or any one else around you.
With all our pressures, responsibilities, stress in life and other challenges, we try to fit in. Many of us try to fit into something that we are not supposed to. We do that because of our obligations and also to a extent due to our complacency. It’s like fitting a square peg into a circle shaving its corners to fit in. This is what we do generally in our lives as well by compromising our interests, passions, love to do something that we do not care about. Means even though our objectives, our attitude, our vision does not meet the job profile, we will be forced to take up those mismatched jobs because we have genuine reasons like debts, loans, credit card bills, need to get married, need to settle in life etc.
Keeping self-limiting barriers will not serve you in any way. They would block you from pursuing anything in your life. Just try to be critical to yourself, list out the various issues and challenges you need to deal with . Assess yourself, come up with some ideas to manage the various things that you need to manage. As long as you self-evaluate, rethink, strategize, open to challenges and work consistently with passion and focus you keep progressing.
One thing that you must never have in life is regrets. The feeling that you did not do everything possible to work on something you love, that you did not try to dedicate the minimum amount of time for your passion project would haunt you a the years later.
As Henry David Thoreau said “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and die with their song still inside them” .
What’s important is to whether we are involving ourselves in what we love and working on it continuously. It does not matter how small the progress is as long as we progress. There is no need to quit the current job and immediately start working on what you love and passionate about. All of us have the bandwidth to commit some time and effort towards tasks that light us up. Just spend a little bit of time and take small steps. Do what ever you could do with whatever you have. Do the best you could where you are and with what you have.
For instance, we might not be able to do 50 push ups daily because of various constraints, but can you just do a single push up. Regardless of the obstacles, what is the minimum we could do keep our integrity. What is the least we could do to keep our promise and stick to our decision.
Failures are important because they make us humble and give a chance to become stronger and better. To enjoy success we must experience failure in life. For that you need to first act and do something. Failure gives you a change to retrospect about what you did,. Failure is painful and that’s makes it even more pertinent in life. Failure is uncomfortable. Out of pain and misery you take some decisions – decisions to change, decision to learn, decision to improve. Through these activities you become better than before and now you are in a better position to face the next challenge. Becoming a better version of yourself itself is a success. Failure tells you what not to do and how to do things better.
We see many successful high achievers in life, just try to read some of their biographies, their struggles, the financial problems they had to overcome, the sleepless nights they had to spend, how many times they had to survive hungry without food, how many sacrifices they had to make to reach that level. When you see someone having a luxurious life or travelling in private jets we ted to see their success but do not see the process of years and years of effort and pain they went through.
Doing hard things develops your will power and stamina. Overcoming challenges to become skillful in something improves our self-confidence and ability to deal with unknown circumstances. Like you are comfortable with strength training, do yoga, it is a hard activity to do. Once you complete the yoga session you come out with the enhanced confidence that you were able to sustain it. This builds your mental strength which extends to others areas of life.
You have to do some boring repetitive stuff to grow. To develop that patience to learn the stuff that is needed for future. Like studying , going back to basics, asking simple stupid questions, seeking advise from people who are younger to you. Building some rituals is necessary in life as it builds our patience and our mental strength to put up with hard things in life. Sometimes in life we have to manage irrelevant stuff just to keep everything together in life.
Energy is everything. You only can manage your energy and focus by taking care of your body and mind daily. Your health is your everything. If you are unhealthy and unfit, it negatively effects everything you approach in your daily life. Of course you will be able to be functional, do the job, take care of your family but if you want to do lead and give optimum performance then you must keep your engine called body in top notch condition. You get better ideas, thoughts, you can keep your enthusiasm, energy high through out the day only when you feed high quality food, ample amount of physical activity and sleep well.
*Do read the Disclaimer
References:
My own words and Excerpts from famous motivations speakers