Article: What To Do When It Feels Like You're Making 0 Life Progress

Firstly, struggling is a natural part of a growth process.

You work towards a specific goal or problem you want to solve and experience difficulties.

 If you don’t experience any difficulties at all, either you’re very good at it already, or you don’t even try to make it work in the first place. 

Life can grind us down. When we’re really low, it can be difficult to find any meaning in our life. We often search for reasons to live. Reasons to keep going with everything when it’s so exhausting.

When life feels pointless, and we’re struggling to find any meaning in the things we’re doing or to think of any reasons to live, suicidal thoughts can become louder.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a magic meaning-finding formula. There are times when no matter how hard we try life continues to feel pointless. Sometimes we just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other until we’re able to find some meaning again.

Sometimes when life feels pointless, it’s because we feel stuck. We know that we’re not where we want to be in life but might not know what it is we do want, or how to get there. Life can feel pointless because we’re putting all of our time and energy into things that aren’t fulfilling us, so we feel empty.

To Start Building Confidence, You Need Evidence From Reality.

Get those small daily wins on the board!

Here’s the hard part about all this.

There isn’t some kind of trick or method to get confident overnight. It’s a process which happens slowly, for the most part, if you ask me.

To ignite that feeling of self-trust, that self-confidence that you seek, you have to get hard evidence from reality that you’re doing well. That you’re good enough. 

Yes, you need some sort of feedback and validation to rely on. For example, if you’ve never gotten an A in a math exam before, it’ll probably be hard for you to believe you can do it. But it doesn’t mean you’re not capable of it.

In the beginning stages of starting something new you probably don’t have much positive feedback from reality yet.

You’re new. You’ve just started out. How can you possibly feel great about your abilities.

Here’s what you do: You keep moving towards your goal while learning from your mistakes. I call this learning cycles.

How To Achieve Your goals: Learning cycles

I call this a learning cycle, not a curve.

Because growth never ends, and you don’t have to wait until a certain point to experience success. Your biggest breakthroughs might not come soon, but you can definitely experience that positive reinforcement while you’re there.

The way I see it, a learning cycle consists of a simple loop: 

taking action-> succeeding/failing -> learning from your mistakes or success-> implementing next time-> repeat.

It’s not sexy. But it works. It’s just a simple mechanism that keeps you moving forward if: one, you’re patient enough. Two, you don’t give up.

Theoretically, if you never give up, you won’t lose. You can’t. Success is yours, and it’s only a matter of time before you experience it.

In theory, You might die trying, but the odds of that happening are slim to none.

How To Not Give Up While You’re On The Way To Your Goal

First, don’t be hard on yourself. Don’t. Be. Hard. On yourself.

So you fucked up? Big deal.

If you manage to give yourself a break after you mess up, you’ll spare yourself unnecessary pain and frustration.

EVERYBODY fucks up. It happens. Learn from your mistakes and move on. Implement what you’ve learned next time. Bit by bit you start building an “arsenal” of success and gather positive reinforcement from reality.

Get those small daily wins on the board.

Why Are Small Daily Wins So Important?

Small wins help us track all the incremental steps involved in achieving much larger goals.

A person who has smoked for over 10 years can decide to quit, but the actual process of quitting might not be as straightforward. Every time they turn down a cigarette or resist the urge to buy a pack at the grocery store, that signifies growth and a small step toward their larger goal.

A person who wants to get in phenomenal shape won't achieve such a grand goal overnight, they can implement a small win the day by NOT getting lazy and missing the gym which is on their current training schedule.

A person who wants to get amazing results in their academics can implement a small win by studying for X amount of hours in order to be more confident in acing their exam(s) 

A guy who wants to be good with social interactions with women may not be able to stop his perfect woman and charm her pants of at the club/bar/restaurant/train station or on the road overnight, but he can win his days by having the balls and the courage to go and say something to a woman he finds attractive whether he gets rejected or not.

Regardless of the type of goal you set, it’ll take time to achieve it. If you wait till you’ve reached the end to celebrate your accomplishments, your day-to-day progress may be impacted because you don’t recognise the improvements you’re making.

The power of small wins is that they allow you to focus not on figuring out the what of your next actionable step but zoom straight to the how. And because the smaller goal is attainable and deliverable, you gain feedback faster. As you stack your small wins, you’ll also create a constant source of motivation and inevitably build confidence.

Even if it’s only a “small” success at first. You start believing you can do it. Something within you changes- your awareness starts to expand. 

You’ll realise, “hey, you know what, I can actually do this.”

Your mindset shifts from failure to success. From scarcity to abundance. Be patient with yourself. Whenever you feel like you messed up, give yourself a break and think about all the good things you did.

All your success from different areas of your life. That good feeling will bleed into other parts of your life.

Dealing With Failure & Setbacks

If you struggle with this, give this podcast a listen: https://youtu.be/GqlvJzeVwGo

In addition to not being hard on yourself, you must learn how to process your emotions correctly. 

The concept of “emotional processing” is this: 

You get clear on what happened, validate your feelings, and then determine a course of action. 

Let’s say you made a mistake at work which you feel bad about.

You start by asking yourself what happened. Was it conscious, unconscious, outside of your control, etc. 

Why did you make this mistake, and why it’s bothering you so much. You then validate your feelings, telling yourself odds are most people will feel like this in that situation. That it’s ok to feel this way. Lastly, you draw your conclusions and decide how to avoid this mistake next time and improve your work.

Conclusion 

You’re doing just fine as long you’re dealing with your problems.

Life always gets better if you deal with stuff, but it gets worse if you ignore all the things that are bothering you. 

It’s natural if you’re worried about your future. Don’t freak out, learn from your mistakes one at a time.

There is no meaning TO life.

YOU are the one who gives a meaning to life

Till next time.