It's not difficult to chase your goals.

From hours of Youtube, books, audio-books, movies, and TED talks from extremely successful people I derived a lot of insights on what separates the people who do succeed and those who don't want to. I guess this is the best time to write such an article as I see half of the people being too optimistic and the other half being too lazy.

Let's face it, everyone wants to do something right now. But just because you do something, doesn't mean it's going to get you to a place where you want to be. It's about channelizing your time into a clear vision. I consider these things as the most important factors in reaching your goal and what helped me reach mine during this time:

1. A feasible goal that you love doing and find cool when you're doing it.
2. A proper timeline with Vision.
3. Discipline.
4. Your Environment.
5. Beating the fear of Rejection.
6. Chunks of Motivation.
7. Advice only from people whom you want to be.

Everybody will ask you to do something you really love doing. But here's the thing, even if your job was to just sit around and binge Netflix all day, you are going to get an "It's okay" feeling about your job and that's completely normal. That's why it's more important to choose a feasible goal that you find cool while you're doing it. To elucidate, if your goal was to lose 50 pounds right now, you shouldn't hate working out every day. It's about enjoying the workout every day that'll lead you to achieve a goal. You should find it cool enough about it to go around and say, "Hey, I did a plank today!". If you don't find the process of reaching your goal cool, just don't do it.

I'm a nihilistic optimist which makes me feel that even when you don't derive any value out of your life you can still be positive about your goals and I think if you can apply that to your existence it can help you as it helped me. I'm a huge extrovert and when the clock hit 7 in the evening I had to socialize. In an episode of Joe Rogan's podcast, Joey Diaz explains Joe how it feels to have a cocaine addiction and I feel like we're all addicted to some of the habits we excuse ourselves from considering not okay because it's acceptable on our own grey morals. When I told my friends that I should be working after 7, but I'm just a huge sucker for conversation so I'd skip work just to talk to someone - no one really related or could brand it as a bad habit.

One of my favorite quotes from the book "The subtle art of not giving an F",

“The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.”

The pandemic made me realize I had tricked my brain into thinking that it was a part of my identity to socialize and without that, I wouldn't be me. This would be fine if I didn't have ambitious goals but it clearly isn't the case. When the lockdown was announced, I no longer had the opportunity to do it. This made me change a part of my identity without realizing it and I didn't even feel alone the first day I stopped socializing with someone. Removing the read-receipt from my WhatsApp conversations was the best thing I did to myself.

Time is a very abstract concept. It's something we humans invented and decided to use as a measure for all the things we do. If I say, one month is a very long time you're mind is just going to compare that relatively to how your life has gone in the past year. It's not a standard tool and there never can be one. The way we perceive things is restricted to each brain and it can be trained to interface and learn things faster, but it's relative. The key concept of moving towards a goal is based on your timeline. If your peers can outperform you, it doesn't matter because it's all very relative. Nobody knows if he or she's going to make it to 40 or you make it to 80. Thus, you should understand what it takes within you to succeed or hit a milestone for your path and set that as your project timeline.

The preliminary difference between a wise person and a dumb person would be whether they learn from their mistakes or mistakes other people have done before. If you're reading this, you should be grateful that you have the strongest tool that our forefathers never did, the freedom and right to literally all the information in the world. That little tool is called the internet, whatever it is you're chasing there are at least a million people this very instant chasing the same goal, use their experience, and don't make those mistakes. It's important to have a timeline for your goals because when you lapse them you realize you can change something and catalyze the process. You can also use this amazing tool to get set your timeline from people who've already done it successfully.

If you follow productivity channels on Youtube, they'll all quickly tell you that discipline is much more important than motivation and I can't agree more. Motivation is very temporary, it's pretty much like getting a Ferrari when you're 80. It looks very shiny, tempting to have but you can't drive it to an IKEA and load your commode chair into it. Discipline is very much like a 90s Volvo, it's not shiny, it's not tempting, but it will not break down. It is very reliable and it's a way to trick your brain into doing the things you actually want to do.

Charles Duhigg wrote this quote in the book, "The Power of Habit",

“If you believe you can change - if you make it a habit - the change becomes real.”

The amazing thing about being disciplined is that you can't focus a lot on negative thoughts when you've changed your habit cycle. You see our brain doesn't have a lot of space in it, so when you do something in a disciplined way it stores the sequence as a single chunk in your brain so it doesn't have to register the stuff you do again and again. The perfect example of this would be how you follow the exact same pattern whenever you want to use the bathroom in your home, do you remember the last time you thought the path you had to take to go to the bathroom at your house? You would remember wanting to go, and then probably remember coming back. The same thing can be used to trick your brain into doing things you love.

My goal was to do a coding challenge, amidst learning new things. Every day after I did my challenge I used to go on Youtube to check the other answers and there was a specific person who uploaded the most efficient solutions. He had this habit where he used to say "Um, first we do this ... correct?". By the fifteenth day, I'd be prompted to do the challenge because I wanted to be done with it and listen to him saying "correct?".

I believe a lot of successful people are just good at tricking their brains into secreting dopamine from the stuff they don't actually love doing. An easier way I could do this was to eliminate the freedom of choice. If you had the choice to eat candy or fruit, everyone's going to love eating the candy. That's because you have a choice. The best thing to do would be to just have one choice - Get rid of the candy, only have fruit.

Do you watch too much Netflix? Uninstall it right away and only have something that can help you. Unfollow those negative people on your feed. By the fourteenth day, your brain would have processed your memory chunk of not doing these and it would just be a part of your schedule to do other things.

Now, for the most important factor of all. The fear of rejection. One of my favorite TED talks of all time that honestly changed my life was "100 days of rejection". I think it deeply resonates with Steve Jobs' "Just Ask" video. I got rejected by 43 companies in the past 72 days before I closed with one company I really liked. I believe those two videos really made the biggest impact on my life when I compare myself with my peers.

Most of the people are really just afraid of getting rejected because they link their self-worth to the lesser amount of rejections they receive. This is a very wrong approach. Your self-worth is built on the foundation of rejections because that alone will lay the strongest foundation. Like Rocky Balboa says, "It ain't about how hard you hit, life's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward."

Coming to another important factor, not losing motivation. You might be confused about my stand on motivation after reading my previous comparison of motivation to having a Ferrari when you're 80. Just hear me out here, a lot of people can hold discipline without having constant feedback but a lot of people can't. If you're like me and you can't continue a process without actually getting constant feedbacks, motivation is a great way to kickstart you back into the game. However, motivation is not the solution but a mere pitstop to your goal built on the tracks of disciplined habits.

Quoting my reference to the difference between a wise person and a dumb person, it's always better to follow guidelines from people who've failed before you. This can be very tricky since there are a lot of people out there who won't believe that you will succeed. It's fine if they don't respect or believe in you but still take their advice as a factor in your pros and cons list. If you can separate the emotions in you from taking decisions towards your goals, there is no stopping you.

I could talk about these all I want, but I guess it the end it comes down to one simple thing. How badly do you want to achieve your goal? Do you want it more than you want to text your crush? Do you want it more than sleep? Do you want it more than laying on your couch and binging shows?

Goals are simple to achieve, it just comes down to how badly you want to achieve it.

I'd like to end this article with a quote from Elon Musk which drives me insane.

if something is important enough you should try even if the probable outcome is failure.