Ever heard about a learning fund
Take one simple purpose, break it down, let your mind dissect it, and visualize an approximate path that has highest probability of success. Acting on one’s strengths and designing circumstances that promotes easy atomic actions should be ideal way to make it happen.
Now say, the purpose is continuous learning, not in spurts but a genuine habit. Habit is nothing but effortless repetition of an action. The word effortless is much more important here than anything else!!
Focus on creating/adopting effortless ecology around planned action. Lets say we want to get into the habit of learning. Now lets understand in general, without taking into account one’s strength/weaknesses, what are the important factors at play?
Motivation to start- We often fall into the trap of excessive research,- just start from where you are and incentivize! Incentives can take the form of treating oneself with a block of planned free time, getaways, clearing a professional exam, getting certified, binging on random treats like tv shows, food etc. but conditionally tying it to certain interim outcomes.
The frequency of incentives can be carefully woven to make sure we have enough bread crumbs along the way to fruition. The fun is in delaying until one sample milestone is accomplished. A simple one can be, 12 day streak followed by 2 day treat- but then just Start!
Making it easy- Overcome hurdles by predicting frictions and make shift/design conditions around, to rather promote actions. This is super important!- section where our topic tries to emphasize.
first, we should have time blocks to act and initiate hyper focus sessions everyday- can try Pomodoro technique for this, no matter the duration window. This window can be customized to be as less as even 5 minutes — just think of it as, minimum threshold where the task no more intimidates us, and purely promotes action. Worthwhile to note, time blocks earlier towards the day makes it easier since we tend not to fall back on limited resource of will power, that is mostly drained by the end of a typical working day. Additionally, first few hours of everyday has highest degree of predictability when it comes to single player hustles :-)
second, a definite place designed and designated only for this work, that alienates distractions too.
third, A FUND. Yes, this always comes in the way of acquiring good resources. This one’s a very simple, yet unnoticed area. Often, we tend to start something because source of our interests and inspiration coincide on the same thing. This inspiration is very short lived and often to our surprise, quickly fades away since we come across resources that has a price tag attached to it. Our mind finds ways to shape this one reason as a barrier not to act, and we give a hard pass, or settle for services or products that do not provide us the adequate leverage. Hence, over time I have noticed we should be saving for learning- on one hand this elevates a sense of purpose, second this might even become a reason to remind and make us act swiftly without real logical delays.
Making it obvious- Be accountable to self EVERYDAY! Past that initial motivation to act, rationing fun break events around milestones is cool, but we also need to dig deeper and assign a purpose, write it down and make sure we come across it everyday- Live it! This takes the game deeper, since we now have skin in the game in terms of fulfilling a meaningful purpose.
On self assigned side hustles, or anything that demands delayed gratification, we should carry a default process of being accountable to self. This can be a simple daily routine of reflecting on our purpose (the why), current daily process (the what is), and feedback loop of activities performed (the progress made). All this being a single player game, demands more self reflection since our circle however inner may be, seldom live a purpose beyond daily means.
We can fool everyone around us, literally every single person in the world, but can not do the same to ourselves. In the long run, practicing honesty to self far outweighs socially established validations. Intrinsic value always catches up by +ve or -ve adjustments, sooner or later :-)
Absorb it into one’s own identity- practice, speak, discuss about it.
Result of repetitive actions to an extent that we ourselves become a living evidence of those choices and actions- this is Identity. Now along this path of becoming a living evidence, we need to deliberately repeat an action and also find ways to support it by sharing our intentions, results, experience with social circle. Because once everyone around us start believing, they become our conscious critics- and we as humans are engineered to be cautious about onlookers, hence we have even more reasons to act.
Let people know you ARE this; tactful social approval- Once you are able to live this identity, spread and publicize the evidence by serving others and focus on creating multiple levers of compounding that self sustains and ignites this very presence of a purpose filled journey, we call life. At this stage once we productize the identity a lot of social congruence is developed around it, that inherently helps us thrive slowly but exponentially.
