Battle laziness and pursue your goals
One step at a time - motivation for media distracted students
Seeking validation and satisfaction from media consumption and socials is easy. It’s easy to get lost in that colorful world of information, where your brain can constantly find distractions and not have to focus on anything particular for more than a couple of seconds. It gives you small boosts of dopamine and makes you feel good for a while, until you get bored. And at that point, you’re not sure what to do because your attention span can’t deal with anything complicated right now, so you keep scrolling. You become increasingly apathetic while you seek for something that makes you feel … anything, really. But you keep on scrolling, or you keep on watching, or you keep on counting your own likes and interactions to see how many people appreciated your last post… and maybe it gives you that feeling that you’re looking for… just for a few seconds, before it’s gone again.
You know that this is no long term solution for happiness, for finding purpose. And the knowledge makes you feel sad, guilty and disappointed, because you’d like to do something meaningful with your time and achieve something. Make a dream or a goal come true. Pass a test, an exam. Complete your exercise. Or create something. You want to do something that gives your day purpose, that makes you be able to say “Yeah, I’ve done that.”
But that’s it, isn’t it? We like having done something. We don’t like having to do it. Because that part is hard. And it takes effort and energy not to be a passive media consuming brain cell and to instead set our minds to actively focus on one thing and one thing only for the next hour. Or even the next half hour. It’s hard not just because you’re challenging your attention span, but also because it might not seem to give you immediate validation and success. You want to feel good now. But if you really want to achieve something, you know that that feeling of success isn’t gonna happen right away. It might take hours, days weeks, years, to achieve your goal. And that’s … too far away. You want it all, and you want it now. And it makes you feel frustrated. Because how are you going to find the motivation to put in that time and constant work you knows it’ll take to get where you want to be? How are you going to find the motivation to use the tools you have at your disposal to do… anything really.
Because isn’t it funny? Right now you are reading this from a device that can find pretty much any information in a matter of seconds. You could learn any language, any skill, any topic, all just from this small machine. And yet, you use it to distract yourself from your tasks, from the passing of time, from your thoughts, from your work, because it’s easy. It’s hypnotic, momentarily fascinating and it distracts you from reality. And it also distracts you from your dreams and goals.
There is a part of you that really wants to achieve that particular goal, but it’s struggling because the lazy, apathetic part of you keeps monopolising your attention and time. But do you think that distracting yourself will make your goals go away? No, it just keeps you from thinking about the work you have to do to get there, and the guilt of not having done more today. But your goals are still there. Your potential is still there. And all the tools you need to get somewhere, are still there.
So take small steps. Sounds cliché but if you think about it, even if you’ve just learned that one, small paragraph, and even if it took you half an hour, it already brought you closer to your dream than the ten episodes of the tv show you watched this week ever could have. Even a sentence, a word, a number, is a tiny step in the right direction. And learning that seemingly insignificant bit of information is already more meaningful to your goal than watching a two hour movie, or scrolling through socials for four hours. Even a tiny tiny step, counts. And taking a tiny tiny step, that’s not hard, is it? You can read a sentence, right? So read it. Then picture its content. What does it mean and what does it remind you of? Do you think that that sentence is relevant, and why?
Engage with your work, as if you were having a conversation. Except there’s no judgement. There is the input from the source material, but your output, your interaction with the information, counts just as much. And it helps you understand and memorise it better. And once you’ve dealt with one sentence, you can face the next one, and repeat the process. And each time you learn a new particle of information, tell yourself you did a good job. Because you did. That small particle of information is more valuable to your goal than distracting yourself for three hours, jumping from one app to another. So celebrate even the smallest steps with a smile, and a “you did well”. Then look at the next step, with the knowledge that you have all the tools you need to understand and learn that next sentence, that next formula, or that next graph.
Slowly build on the things you’ve learned, connecting new information to old one. Don’t look at your end goal, it’ll only overwhelm you. You know the steps to get to the end goal. So just look at the next step. And once you took it, celebrate that. Give yourself validation for taking that step. Because it counts. Every single step counts. And no one’s gonna stop you from taking another small step. And another one. And another one.
A goal isn’t just one big thing. Thinking that is just part of an “all or nothing” mentality. A goal is just… steps. Lots of steps. And steps aren’t scary. Steps are something you can reach right now. Maybe you don’t know the total number of steps, but you know that when you take one, you have one step less to walk towards your goal. And that is already a small cause to celebrate before you move on to the next one.
So divide your work into steps. Steps aren’t scary. They’re harmless and you’re stronger than them. Take one step at a time. And someday you’re gonna look back at the road you’ve already walked and say “wow, I’ve come a long way”. But that’s for someday. Right now, there’s just one small, next step. And nobody’s stopping you from taking it.
