In order to escape the 9 to 5, or achieve anything meaningful for that matter, you must have focus & deliberate intent. If you’ve ever set a goal for the New Year (a New Year’s Resolution) and then later completely disregarded it, you’ll understand. Most people have done this. They set a goal, to perhaps lose some weight, and start off with good intentions.
They join a gym in January, and turn up regularly, making a real go of it! But little by little their interest wanes. The old habits scupper your good intentions and a few drinks on an evening puts you back. So you resolve to start up again next week! Little by little, old patterns knock you back and you find it more and more difficult to keep up with your good intentions.
Once the momentum has died out, you’re back where you were and you stop going altogether!
Focus & Deliberate Intent
You may resolve that the goal of maybe the “beach body” wasn’t that important to you anyway, and that it’s not worth the effort! There’s two important factors which are going to help you stick to a long term intention/goal. You must be motivated enough to overcome the barriers to achieving it. This can often mean, overcoming your old habits and even changing who you are fundamentally – more on this in another post. A good long term goal will score high on desirability and also high on achievability too. If you’re not fussed about achieving something, you’re not going to sustain the necessary effort and if you don’t believe you can achieve a particular goal, you won’t either!
This is often why many good intentions fall quickly by the wayside. You don’t really care that much about the outcome and/or you don’t believe you can do it!
Focus & Deliberate Intent – Highly Motivated
Those who do Escape9toFive jobs and build dream online businesses, for example, are highly motivated . The have a big enough reason to overcome challenges which naturally arise. Is your job is ok? If you don’t desperately need to escape your job, you’re hardly likely to maintain the effort involved. But if you’ve been made redundant, and you literally have to come up with a solution or you’ll be out on the street, you’re going to be much more highly motivated.
When you have the key ingredients of high motivation, being purposefully driven, (deliberate intent), you have a recipe for achievement. When a key part is missing, most people will drop off. If you’re happy in your job, don’t believe you can change things, or aren’t driven by deliberate intent, it’s much easier to stay where you are!
After all, making change in your life is hard. Most of us want an easy ride. It’s often only when the proverbial shit hits the fan, that we have to make the effort!
Daily Routine
Know what you want to achieve, know your desired goal and have an action plan to achieve it. Most people don’t have this. Most are controlled by their habits. To create change you must control your habits and make sure they align with your long term goal/s. Your daily routine should therefore line up with your longer term intentions for your life.
When I discovered I could build an online business, I lacked focus. I jumped around from one task to another, trying to “keep busy”. But many of these tasks didn’t lead me to my goal. They were the result of long term “busy-ness” – the habit of filling your time with the unnecessary in order to feel productive.
Once you have a goal/intention, it’s important to keep a check on your focus. Are you focusing daily on taking another step towards your long term outcome? When I was training to become a stuntman, I had a lot of skills to achieve in various disciplines. It took me four years to achieve the goal of joining the BSR (British Stunt Register), which I achieved in 2002. If I had thought of this goal alone, I would have been massively overwhelmed, and probably given up. But I divided the goal into smaller more manageable goals instead.
When I started the online business (get started here), I used this video to help me focus on the longer term outcome.
Knowing What You Want
Knowing what you want is half the battle. If you’re unsure, or are wavering, that’s a sure signal that you aren’t massively motivated towards a particular outcome. When you know what you want, you know it! The people who succeed online know what they want and create a plan to purposefully get it.
The people who climb mount Everest don’t start by just wandering around! They have a strong purpose and direction first! When you know your outcome you want, use the video above to continue to focus on it, and do the things which will take you there! If you’re unsure about what you want long term, pick a short term goal and start there!
You don’t have to climb Everest, or even build an online business. But if you’re aligned with what you genuinely want, whatever it is, and you’re motivated enough to keep going when it gets tough, there’s nothing you can’t achieve!
