Tuesday, January 17, 2012

The Motivation Struggle

I read up on a lot of sports, and the articles that laud the great players in their respective sport often times mention the hours spend in the gym, the early morning workouts no matter the date or location, and the drive to be the best.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are those people who are not interested at all in improving, and are content with their current knowledge, career, and financial level, among other things.

Smack dab in the middle are people like me with the potential to improve themselves and reach every goal he or she sets ... only to waste away precious time and effort behind other activities. As you may have guessed from the title, this is a motivation struggle, but not in the general sense of the phrase. I personally want to reach my dreams, and the prospect of doing so excites me. I am held back by four mental barriers, however:

1. Getting started
2. Continuing the process until its finished
3. Doing these things alone
4. Fear of failure

Aaaand that's my elevator speech, when do I start? All jokes aside, these problems appear easy enough to solve, especially to my engineering-tuned brain:

1. Start
2. Finish it
3. Grow up
4. Seriously, grow up

Simple enough, right? It should be. I'm even one of those people blessed to have things come easy to them (#humblebrag) so it shouldn't be a problem. At the end of the day, however, it is. So what am I doing to solve it?

Super Mario 64.

I've never been good at video games (start wall), when I did play, I could never get very far so I'd stop (finish wall), it's a 1 player game (alone), and you lose lives a lot (fear of failure re-enacted with a dying Mario).

It sounds silly, but as of a week ago, I received this game through eBay and have started my quest to conquer these irrational fears 1 star at a time. Hell, if I can beat this game, what can't I do?

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