Alright, I just started a Pomodoro timer (blog post on Friday! stay tuned!), turned on my Sunday Study – Thomas Frank playlist, and sat down to write this blog post. Let’s jump into it, shall we? ?
If I were to ask you to name someone you know, that comes home from work every day and is mentally and physically exhausted? More often than not they just crash on the sofa or in their easy chair, pop on the television or scroll through their phone….and “relax” and “wind-down” after work. This could be you as well and don’t feel any shame in it. The irony of being tired, or “thinking you are tired” as it were, means your mind will tell your body that it is time to relax.
Okay, you might be tired, but THAT’S NOT A BAD THING!
This greatly varies depending on your job. You might be a landscaper ?or carpenter who is physically using your body all day, and this is definitely going to cause more PHYSICAL exhaustion than say, sitting at a computer developing a program for 8 hours. Both of these jobs are certainly exhausting but we’ll get to the mental exhaustion part later. When you’re physically exhausted, you may genuinely need the rest. I remember a few weeks last summer where my coworkers and I were shoveling crushed granite out of the back of a truck ALL…DAY…LONG. I came home, ate 5 hot dogs, and went to bed. I was depleted, drained, and in no place to start a side hustle.
If you’re working a blue-collar style job, you need to focus on nutrition, sleep, and learning to understand your body’s hints for showing you when it’s tired or rejuvenated. I’m certainly no expert in any of these fields and haven’t completed the necessary research on these topics yet so I won’t give too much information on them. But it certainly is something you should take on yourself and really learn. Simply cutting coffee and soda and replacing it with water will significantly improve your life. (Been there, done that, got the healthier bod to prove it!)
Unmotivated
Now, with that out of the wayyyyy, let’s start with being unmotivated. It’s hard to make a post about things like this because it does require a lot of generalization. However, I believe the generalization is something that can benefit most people which makes it a….valid…generalization????!? sure. We’ll roll with it ?
If you’re a high school student, college student, and/or white-collar worker, your day to day activities likely aren’t too physically taxing. But more likely than not, you still feel this crash when you get home from any large particular event (school, university, work, etc.). This is something I deal with every single day. After spending a day in the library all day, I’ll come home and just want to lay in bed and watch Beastyqt StarCraft II videos…but that’s obviously not going to benefit my side hustle at all.
So, what will enable you to get out of your media binge and actually start?
How to start?
Identify why you feel tired, and what you need to work on. It’s totally acceptable to come home and spend an hour eating dinner and watching a YouTuber’s latest vlog. But you must find the way to get out of that rut and into the hustle you should be doing. And the first step to that is you NEED to WANT it.
This reality really came to me a few weeks ago when I started using this blog again. I know I want a successful blog where I share all the knowledge I’ve learned and practiced over the years. But you can’t just want the END goal. – Namely, you MUST ENJOY THE PROCESS.
Enjoying the process isn’t always easy. It can be difficult to sit down and write a 1000 word blog post. But I fell in love with the idea that every word I write onto this paper is benefitting a minimum of 2 people. It’s improving my writing ability so that I can create better content in the future, and it’s helping at least 1 reader who decides to scroll through my ramblings. I don’t do this to make money off of a blog, I don’t do it for the clout. I do it for the genuine enjoyment of marketing the things that have worked well for me and sharing that with any viewer.
Identify the path
Identify what it is that you want to do, whether as a hobby, or a side hustle, or anything you need to do that you’ve been putting off. Then take that subject and break it into the various steps needed to reach the final goal. You have to learn to enjoy those steps, at least 8/10 of them. Sometimes something might not be enjoyable to do, that’s LIFE! But if you are appreciating the majority of the moves you’re making and you can love the journey, not just the final destination…you’ll feel far more motivated to break the consumption slump and start working on your project.
Pomodoro timer just finished, I guess I’m wrapping it up!
I plan on doing a more in-depth post for this process in the future, where I identify something I am struggling with and demonstrate how I took this process and applied it so I could complete the project.
Thank you for reading! As always let me know what you thought over on Twitter or Instagram, and I’ll be sure to respond to all tweets or DMs!
Fresh blog post getting scheduled as we speak!
— Geoffrey Burdo (@GeoffreyBurdo) October 28, 2019