Your Drive and Fuel are two of the biggest contributors to the ways you conduct yourself in your business and personal life. I attempt a simplistic explanation towards helping you figure it out!
Goal setting has been done and dusted
We probably all have a hundred “SMART” goals at the moment. But they’re not enough for self-motivation, are they? Personal growth involves focusing not only on the goals you’re set out to achieve, but also in the sustainability of the path you end up taking. Building up to purpose-driven success is only possible once that purpose is at least a little earthquake-resistant.
There’s a thousand frameworks for increasing your efficiency in reaching your goals.
This isn’t one.
This is a call to introspect what your desires and pathways are. An internal look into your external consequence, if you will. And a definitive path towards personal growth and self-motivation.
What this is: a simple visualisation that helps you categorise your needs and wants better, and sync the two as you get a clearer picture.
Think of your drive and fuel to be just pure mechanisms that push you towards (or away) from your purpose. And it’s alright if you haven’t figured them out just yet, the point is to enable you to see your drive and fuel as some traits that are either chosen or thrust upon you.
Your Drive: where are you headed?
If you are at point A, and need to get to point B (then point C then D and you get the picture) – how far along is your journey? What are the next steps you can think of? If there is an obstacle on one path, is there a workaround you can do to skip a few checkpoints? Is there a longer but more worthy route you can take that gets you to the same next stop?
Think going natural at the gym instead of loading yourself with supplements.
Your drive is all about your vision, inspiration and creativity that gets you positively thinking about your future, and consistently so. A lot of people drive around during the day truly getting nowhere. We must think differently about this.
Your Fuel: what do you need to get there?
Continuing with the gym analogy, what is your fuel that gets you to where you need to go? Is it supplements? Is it more protein in your diet? Is it a diet plan to begin with? Is it better sleep so your inner drive and ambition sustains your lofty goals?
If anything, it should be resilience to get to your next goal and a persevering spirit to keep refueling yourself when you can.
The Pits: Here you may detour or defer from your goals.
There are a numerous bunch of pits that people fall into – shortcuts that truly aren’t, addictions that were better off in hypothetical settings, and lies to oneself that bring out the worst in a person. Any mindset shift can be a pit if we let it become one. A perspective of self-care, grit, and positive thinking (and not to the point of naivety) helps you nourish some personal accountability when faced with the pits. The pits themselves can be pretty pit-iful if you choose to be bothered by them.
The Pits are sometimes also necessary breaks you have to take from the drive itself, but be careful – they mirage themselves into looking like final destinations way too easily. Vanity metrics on social media, financial aspirations from day-traders who aren’t even there yet, a tonne of self-help books and overly helpful gurus, the disguises are pretty incredible.
The Pitstops: your micro goals, your refuel stations.
There is one key difference between pitstops and pits. The voluntariness of it all. If you recharge, you must do so in all consciousness. That is the key to even getting good sleep. If you ‘crash’ every night because of your favourite bar or poison of choice (A Pit) there’s only so much time before the crashing comes its way into the mornings.
As you inch towards purpose-driven success, self-discipline and personal development, you must ensure that your vehicle (your body) is near stasis, driven, and fueled up. Good food, good conversations, good planning, are all perfect Pitstops to resume your journey into the futuristic abyss. We’re all seeing what AI can do, so having well-planned pitstops are essential to even survival, I’d say!
How I Operate:
My favorite pitstops are my to-do list, my bed, my gym, and my family. That’s all I need to recharge and refuel for the next day’s drive. Yours may look wildly different. Just make them voluntary, not involuntary. That’s all the perspective shift I expect of you.
Of course, one can’t be fully immune to taking more than the necessary amount of pitstops. As you begin to gauge more mileage out of your daily drives, you’ll find it easier and easier to stick to it and build an engine you’re truly proud of.
What’s a bigger motivator than knowing that you’re going to inevitably reach your goals?
Until next time.
