Five tips to keep yourself motivated

I find that projects, especially major ones like launching a new income vehicle, tend to go through three phases. Launch happiness where it is all exciting, new and coming together so fast. An agonizing push through the dry spell. Finally, a usually satisfied resolution. Of course, not all project make it to that last phase. Sometimes the agonizing push is really too much, I get discouraged and give up. As I’ve gotten older, however, I find that I am much more able to make it through the dry spells, using a few motivational techniques I’ve picked up over the years.

My top 5 tips to get through the dry spell

1. Have written goals. Nothing makes the water murkier than constantly changing the goals. Pick a time frame, write down some goals, and try to achieve those goals.
2. Focus on the successes. My goal for this quarter is to make $10 per day from one of my new sites. In the last week, I made a grand total of $18, while spending $1.50. That’s not very far along the way to $70, but it is much more than nothing. The first few dollars are the hardest dollars, they are the ones which prove you are on the right track with your product.
3. Overcome your fear of marketing and success. If you think marketing is beneath you, or that it is some shameful thing, you will never be very good at it. Sadly, I have friends and coworkers who think exactly that. No wealthy ones though. You don’t have to lose your ethics to make money, the pie is big enough for us all to have a big sloppy piece.
4. Find supportive people, which is almost certainly not your coworkers. I guarantee you that your coworkers are going to think you are an idiot. Most people do not want to believe that going outside the 9-to-5 cube could possibly work. Ignore them. I think that ksblog put it best when she was writing about her first rejection letter.
   

   There are two camps. One that thinks this single rejection is the end of the world or at least the end of my writing career. They say things like “well, you tried” or “better you find out now that it isn’t going to work.”
   [ ... ]
   The other camp is the keep on trying crowd. They say things like “Now you’re a real writer” and “So how many more queries you have out there?” And then they tell the war stories about how many rejections they’ve received in life.
   You’re a smart person so you can probably guess the disparity in net worths between the two groups.

   She then goes on to point out that the “keep going” crowd are the ones she’ll want to talk to when she is seriously thinking about dropping a project.

5. Finally, if despite the above, you are still getting bogged down and bored, why not apply what Steve Pavlina calls “Overwhelming force”?
   

   Ask yourself, “What would it take for me not only to achieve this goal but to absolutely dominate it?” What would you consider overkill? Imagine your goal as if you’re planning a battle that you MUST win, regardless of the cost. Write down what you think it would take to be certain of success.

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