Go small then go home.

You have no fucking time. I know it. You know it.

You want to write your movie or learn to edit or practice your camera skills, but you have no fucking time.

"We all have the same 24 hours in a day" you berate yourself.

But you know that's Bullshit.

Oprah is not doing her own laundry and The Rock is not working a second job at AM/PM between movie gigs.

So you pull an all-nighter occasionally (which fucks you up the next day) and by sporadically doing this, you find ways to ooch closer to your goal like at least twice a month. You either do this endlessly until you accomplish in ten years what you feel should have taken six months, or you say "Fuck it" and quit after years of dead end progress.

Sound familiar?

No?

Just me then?

Ok.

Let's pause so the 3 people who can't relate to the previous statement close their laptops and move on with their optimized lives.

Anyone else?

Ok. If you are still with me, I want to state that you are (obviously) not alone. You, me, and anyone with any lofty goal nowadays suffer from the same struggle.

As motivating as it is to listen to Arnold or The Rock, us mere mortals will probably have a head on collision with burnout by following their examples.

I have worked my ass of for years. The problem with relentless work is that you don't know the time frame of when it will pay off. To keep myself sane, I have to believe that (eventually) hard work will be rewarded. But external factors make it difficult to know when.

If you set yourself up to work at a level you can sustain for 6 months and your actual goal takes a year

(or six years). You might be forced to stop when you were 90% there.

Now, I too, have read the motivation and self help sayings: "Enjoy the journey", "You are entitled to your labor, not the fruits of your labor", " Love the process" etc. And these are all true to a certain extent.

But no matter how much I love to cook; If I never get to eat, eventually I will have to do something else.

So you can't set yourself up to do any level of work that you cannot sustain indefinitely.

If you can't consistently write for four hours a day without it breaking other aspects of your life, you should not set that as a task for yourself.

Here is the thing: Everything has weight.

Five minutes of writing? One pushup? One new vocab word in Spanish?

They will move you slightly closer to your goal.

There is a great workout that was popular a few years ago called Stronglifts 5X5. And every lift started with an empty bar. It worked amazingly well.

Why? Because you saw progress without burning yourself out.

Burnout is the enemy. Far more so, than substandard effort.

Mediocre effort done daily is far more effective than sprinting and crashing. In all aspects of life. Studies prove it.

I hate that, don't you? It goes against my work ethic. My belief in suffering to prove that I want it more.

But, do you want to feel like your working?

Or actually get stuff done?

Study after study shows that the best way to habituate anything is to start off easy. If you do a daily pushup or write for five minutes every Tuesday night before bed; eventually you will do 2 pushups or write for 7 minutes.

Perhaps accidentally.

You will want to finish your thought and two extra minutes go by.

I meant this to be a five minute blog post.

So start by lifting the empty bar. With everything that you think will bring you toward your goal.

Then, when you feel it's too easy; do a little bit more.

But you have to make it a habit first.

And to do that, you have to make it easy.

Thanks for reading.

-E

PS Please note that I am writing this for me as well as you. I know this is hard. You are not alone.

PPS If you liked this post, let me know and I'll create more like it.