9 Things You Do Differently When You’re Motivated By Progress Instead Of End Results

9 Things You Do Differently When You’re Motivated By Progress Instead Of End Results

1. You are more encouraged to keep persevering and moving forward, no matter how slowly it might seem, despite how different your current state of progress is from the idea of what you thought it would be. You know that nothing worth having is attainable from following a formula and that the steps aren’t as straightforward as someone else might claim it is.

2. You don’t lose sleep over what you have failed to do in a day because you know that it’s detrimental to torture yourself over what your own limitations are in contrast with others’ strengths. You care about your own health, and you believe that slow and steady improvement is more sustainable than overworking yourself for the sake of instantaneous rewards.

3. You realize that all your life, you’ve been acting upon anxiety and self-doubt, which means you weren’t able to actualize your full potential and you tended to freeze up when you started something new, simply because you were more concerned about how everything would go wrong and how people would ridicule you or be disappointed in you for not succeeding right away. You now pursue your goals with a sense of calm, knowing that improvement is what matters more and momentum is what will sustain your personal growth.

4. You love to see how far you’ve come and how much you’ve evolved in the process of trying, failing, persevering, learning more about yourself, and changing your lifestyle to help you evolve one step further. This encourages you to keep going, whereas people who are motivated only by end results tend to be discouraged, give up early, and resign to a mediocre life in order not to face failure.

5. You know that enlightenment is something that you already have within you and that you need to live a lifestyle that enables you to actualize a higher form of thinking that keeps you at peace with the fact that all the things that you’ve ever worried about are only distractions that stop you from achieving mental clarity and objectivity.

6. You’re not afraid to explore a variety of topics of interest and synthesize them in a way that’s self-evident and applicable to you. You’re able to build your personal life philosophy, think more clearly about the direction you’re headed, and spend significantly less time worrying about your image because you’re so intrigued by what you’re learning and how you can incorporate new practices and thoughts into your life.

7. You know that overplanning and thinking too much about what you’re going to do only breeds more resistance and procrastination. Instead, you dive into the work you want to do, and when you accomplish something, you feel good because you’re making small progressions that keep adding up, and you’re able to do more without overthinking it or experiencing paralysis from an overwhelming list of demands.

8. You don’t lash out at others when you’ve failed to get the jobs, the rewards, the salary, the grades, or whatever end result you wanted for the sake of how it would prop up your ego. You understand that failures are there to teach you that you either are not a good fit for something or that your mindset is limiting you and that you need to become more self-aware about the way you view yourself in relation to the idea of success.

9. Your irrational fear of the worst possible outcome no longer prevents you from making small changes in your life because you ultimately know that acting upon this fear will cause the fear to manifest itself and become reality. Ultimately, you understand that fear doesn’t equip you to tackle the worst. It only reinforces your fear of doing the worst, which causes you to avoid living for the best, or in other words, the life that’s evidently truest to you and maximizes your latent potential. Thought Catalog Logo Mark


About the author

Lark Morrigan

Poet, sci-fi/fantasy writer, music lover, composer, & INFP.