If you've ever tried to do things, chances are you've wanted to do them. I'm going to talk a bit about habits, mindsets, and tips & tricks that have helped me stay motivated in moving towards large & difficult goals over time.

1. Picture success

I mean really picture it. Imagine yourself having taken that next step or achieved that goal. What does it feel like to be that person? What kind of person would have achieved that?

If you're going to work towards a goal over a long period of time, it helps for that goal to be something you want on a deep level rather than a passing fancy. If you're motivated to work towards that goal now, but won't be in a week, chances are you won't achieve that goal if it's going to take longer than a week.

Frame goals & the effort you put in towards them in terms of the "why". When the effort seems high and your patience is running low, what is it you're really after? A clear picture of this helps keep you on track as time goes on, as you grow and change, and as you hit hurdles along the way.

2. Picture failure

This is the photo negative of #1, so why is it worth mentioning separately? Studies show that avoiding failure can be a more powerful motivating force than picturing success. Does not achieving your goal lead to embarrassment? Irrelevance? Financial ruin?

While inherently less pleasant than focusing on success, it's undeniable that fear and anxiety are there for a reason. These can be powerful motivating forces. Since they're an unpleasant reality anyway, why not take advantage of them as powerful motivators? Use the scary pictures of failure & unfulfilled potential as a scary monster to run away from, propelling you in the direction of your goals.

3. Set yourself up for success

Achieving big goals is hard and takes time. If your goal is to climb Mt. Everest, and you've never climbed anything before, you're going to spend a lot of time in the "in progress - not achieved yet" stage of this goal. And that can be discouraging.

The feeling of actually accomplishing something is a powerful motivating force - it's important to find ways to feed yourself this feeling en route to your final goal. Do this by setting small, easily achievable goals. Rack up the wins, give yourself frequent reasons to high five yourself. Don't make them trivial, but also don't ignore the baby steps it takes to get to your final destination. These smaller steps towards a large goal are necessary and important - as you get them done, remember to take a moment to feel good about those achievements, and let those feelings of accomplishment fuel you onward.

4. Separate yourself into two parts.

What's that supposed to mean? Glad you asked - I'll tell you.

We have many component parts to our psyche, so this is really about recognizing and leveraging a division our brain. Without delving into the technical specifics, consider your brain consisting of a front brain - this is "human" part with higher reasoning functions - and the rest of the brain, or the "animal" brain, which controls base impulses (hunger, sex drive, etc.) and involuntary activity like breathing. When you feel a basic hunger and eat as a result, or when you take a nap becasue you're feeling sleepy - these are impulses & reactions that are the domain of the "animal" part of your brain.

To best harness our capacity as human beings to do great things - to set out complex goals with incremental steps to achieve them - it serves us well to acknowledge & leverage this compartmentalization in our minds. When you set out a firm plan for self improvement, such as a diet or workout regimen, you are using your human mind to project an abstract plan into the future. When temptations call on you to skip a workout or eat that cake, recognize these as animal voices in your mind. Position your human mind as the one in control - you can hear out the other voices, but remember to keep the human voice as the one in charge. When you can recognize where your various urges are coming from, you can better attach the correct weight to each and decide which to listen to.

5. Use themes

There was a fantastic CGP Grey video (here) discussing New Year's resolutions and why they don't work most of the time. I'd highly recommend you go watch it if you haven't already. In essence, it discusses how hard and fast goals are not typically condusive to human success, especially in the midst of a bunch of other things to worry about in life.

For example, a common traditional New Year's resolution might be to lose a certain amount of weight - let's say 20 pounds. This is a strict & measurable goal, but it has some challenges to it. It's a big goal that doesn't provide a roadmap for how to get there. It's inflexible & doesn't account for an individual's body and how easy or difficult it might be for them to gain weight. And becuase it's so set in stone, it's easy to fail at acheiving, which can be discouraging, furthering a sense of failure and lack of accomplishment.

An alternative strategy is to instead use a "theme" as a guiding force to propell you in the right direction. Instead of such a concrete goal as "lose 20 pounds", you might consider a theme along the lines of "eat healthy". What this does is give you a guidepost for reference over a long span of time. Whenever you have a decision or a fork in the road, such as deciding whether to have a piece of cake or not, you have your theme to guide you. You may decide to act in accordance with your theme, declining the cake, and even if you don't, it's not the end of the world. The theme is still intact, and you can go about furthering it in other ways. The next time you have a similar decision to make, you'll have your theme and previous decisions to bring to bear. If you've already lost 5 or 15 pounds, or if you haven't lost any at all, the theme means that you haven't "failed a goal" and provides flexibility.

Themes help expand the definition of meeting our goals and provide a more human nature-condusive way to go about pursuing our desired goals. Framing your goals in terms of themes - or supplementing big goals with themes - can help move you in the direction that you want to go.

And there you have it - 5 tips to help stay motivated when making your way towards big goals. Do you have any to add, or feedback about any of the points listed here? Reach out with your own experience & ideas on motivation.