Hopes Are the New Fears

There’s a great quote from a movie called Rudy to begin this article, he says

“My whole life, people have been telling me what I could do and couldn’t do. I’ve always listed to ’em, believed in what they said. I don’t wanna do that anymore.”

Another movie about how McDonald’s becomes a great and one of the most respectable companies in the world called The Founder says.

“Nothing in the world can take place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent”

If we can learn something from history, is that persistent always be the best thing to achieve our success, and it’s not a secret ingredient, everyone knew that already.

The motivations that we heard often repeated by our teachers, that the willingness to not give up on our dreams is a core to achieve great things in our life.

We knew it already, but somehow, being persistent is not something an easy thing to do, it’s a process that we have to practice every day.

So how can we keep being persistent especially in something that we do in the long term in order to achieve our success?

Motivations

I remember when one of my closest friends asked me what is motivation? what is a dream? he said because he thinks that he doesn’t have any purpose nor dream in this life.

I do exactly remember what I said to him, I told him:

“It is something that whenever we come and think about it, our chest seems fuller, our adrenaline rushing and our lips smiled, it’s something that we have to pursue because we believed in achieving that thing, we will be happy”

Motivations can come from in many forms in your life, and it’s really subjective to each person. Some people have their motivation because they and some people have motivation and dream of relying on other people.

It’s hard to tell that we can create our motivation, because most of the time motivations come in the most unexpected ways, and it’s safe to say, it’s quite hard to make our motivations by ourselves.

I personally remembered, the first time I went into a university.

I just sat with my dad, and heard him having conversations with my fellow families, I heard him said “I think it’s nice to have someone in the family who went into a good government university”

Especially in my country, getting to a good university is quite hard enough, and searching for one of the best government-issued universities is another challenge.

Back then I wasn’t interested so much to get into those kinds of universities because I knew how slim the probabilities are. But somehow those conversations between my dad and my uncle motivated me to achieve that almost impossible thing for my life.

I often call that kind of moment is Click-moment, where suddenly as fast as clicking finger, my whole mindset seems to be changed into the most extraordinary ways.

From that motivation, I made a long-term study schedule, which required me to study for 6 hours a day in 4 months. For someone who tends to study a lot, this might do not come as a surprise.

But for me, it was quite unbelievable how I willing to commit myself to such a ruthless routine. I know how lazy I am more than anyone, but somehow I’m willing to spend 6 hours of my day just looking at my laptop’s screen, learning something from that online tutor.

There are days where I got so frustrated, and the first few weeks were brutal, because I’m building a new habit that I never experienced before in my life.

But, it’s getting better through times, somehow I managed to keep persistent until the end of my schedule, and I was so shocked, not because I got into that university that I always wanted, I was shocked, how I can keep being motivated during those months.

I couldn’t be happier, applying the power of persistence in my life.

If this works on my academics, I wonder if the power of persistence also works into other aspects of my life, so I tried into something that I always thought rather impossible.

I have always been an obsessed person, it gets worse over time, for someone who has a height of 172cm, my weight is above 80kg.

No matter how hard I tried to do some diets that I read on the internet, I couldn’t just do it, because I was not persistent enough to do it.

I got another click-moment when I came back to my high school to be a tutor of English Debate, one of my teachers said, that’s I’m getting bigger than ever.

Few weeks from that, having no idea about diet, and doing weight lifting, I went to the nearest gym and join the memberships, somehow I managed to lose 14kg in just 3 months, that was something that I’m proud of, doing 6 days of the gym for 3 months really gets me into somewhere that I have always dreamed of.

It was by the power of nature that comes in the most natural way that changed my life, and how I persistent enough to achieve things that I always thought it was impossible.

It just comes without being asked. I know you’re thinking that what’s the point of this article when you couldn’t tell the reader that you couldn’t make your own motivations?

It comes to the second point in this article.

Pressure

Having known that you couldn’t just force yourself to do motivations, I’m trying to find a way to make ourselves being persistence doing things.

Through events and a lot of talks with my friends trying to figure out what it is, I’ve come to a conclusion is that Pressure is one of the things that could force us to do things over and over again.

We cannot always create motivations in our life, but we can always create pressure in our lives, for a thousand years, pressure have become a tool to push the society to move forward.

We get bad grades when we didn’t come to school, and we have a deadline paper in college, those are pressures that were given by us, to do our task, and the best thing about it, keeps us move forward.

So the next time you are setting a goal for yourself, you have to create pressure in order to make yourself persistent enough.

The first blog that I created was in 2013, and it only has less than 60 articles, I was too lazy to write because I have no deadline or enough pressure to do it.

I mean I love to write, and I have been using my blog to write something that I wanted to and whenever I wanted to, it’s relaxing, but it doesn’t get me anywhere.

I have been working for a book, that hasn’t even finished for more than one year because I haven’t set any deadline for when I have to finish that book.

But, when it comes to pressure, I have always felt that I’m pushing myself to finish the tasks. It does nothing but good things for me, being in pressure all the time is not always good as well, so whenever I’m finished with my task, I always giving myself a reward and to cool off myself.

Whenever you are having a project, set pressure for yourself but also be reasonable about the pressure and the deadline.

There are also things that you may have, to make you be a persistent person, learn from your past experiences, evaluate it, and make yourself a good note, about things you achieved in the past, and how you did it.

The last thing that I wanted to say is, what makes you different from thousands and millions of people in this world? it’s the efforts that you took with everyday decisions that count the most.