Be Ambitious With Goals, and Patient With Deadlines. I’ve learned that the best way to estimate how long something will take is to speak with someone who has already completed it.
“Be grateful for what you already have while you pursue your goals. If you aren’t grateful for what you already have, what makes you think you would be happy with more.” ― Roy T. Bennett
Be Ambitious With Goals, and Patient With Deadlines
Sounds obvious, but few people do it. When you’re motivated, it’s easy to think that somehow you can beat the odds and compress the years of work from someone else into a few months.
The truth is that setting unrealistic deadlines is a recipe for stress. One of the biggest mistakes we sometimes make is getting frustrated when things wouldn’t manifest as quickly as we expect.
As you embark on any new journey. You will inevitably have an idea in your mind of how long it should take you to accomplish your ultimate goal.
You might be working incredibly hard, but always achieving few results, you even decide to work harder but the results would still trickle in. Maybe you burn yourself out trying to speed up a timeline that already had its own pace.
Be Ambitious With Goals, and Patient With Deadlines
The mistake is that you are trying to run a marathon as if it were a sprint. When you run a marathon, you need the motivation to get started and go the distance. But you need to have the patience to not burn yourself out early on.
Try to ask the people that come before you. And set a goal to find someone who has accomplished what you want to do (or something similar). Then, try to ask them to give you an estimate of how long it will take. That number will be far more accurate than any estimate you can make up.
Remember, the path is long, learn to enjoy it. If you can’t enjoy the process leading up to a goal, it probably isn’t worth starting. The time spent enjoying a win is far shorter than the work leading up to it. If reaching the end is your only motivation to keep going, you probably won’t make it very far.
Be Ambitious With Your Goals, and Patient With Your Deadlines. Learn to Enjoy the Journey. If you know upfront that the journey is going to take longer than expected. You can enjoy the time it takes to get there.
Be Ambitious With Goals, and Patient With Deadlines
In conclusion
With your eyes trained on the road ahead instead of on the endpoint on your map, you will have time to enjoy the scenery and really acknowledge where you are at any given moment. Allow yourself to enjoy the journey you are on. Keep a journal of your successes and failures and just keep moving forward, one small step at a time.