Goal
Last week, we covered how patience, fortitude, and discipline are crucial to developing a game plan to accomplish your life goal. This week, we’re covering how frugality, industriousness, and persistence ensure your success when pursuing greatness.
Pursuing Your Life Goal – Frugality, Industriousness, Persistence
When you push forward, waste nothing, and refuse to give up, you’ll reach greatness.
A life goal lasts a lifetime. Thus, pursuing your goal will require immense focus, hard work, and a refusal to waste time, energy, and efforts on activities irrelevant to your life’s purpose. When we pursue our missions with a burning passion, we will find our anxiety decrease, our happiness increase, and our confidence grow.
How do our three virtues play in your efforts to “get after it“? Frugality means never wasting your limited resources on garbage which won’t help you move forward. Without frugality, you’ll squander your money on pointless knick-knacks, your time on dead end schemes, and your energy on consuming mass media. With your resources depleted, you’ll have nothing to use when you need to move onward.
Your industriousness determines your ability to work hard and work well. The more productive you can be, the more money you can make, the further you can march towards accomplishing your life goals, and the more useful you are to virtuous people. Without industriousness, you’ll become lazy, ungrateful, and useless. Lazy and useless people don’t amount to anything.
Lastly, your persistence is all about keeping the blinders on and charging forward like a madman. When you’re persistent, failure and upsets don’t knock you down. You get back up and move onward without pause. However, if you lack persistence, you’ll freeze up when life gets hard and failures will keep you down for good. An individual without persistence has lost the battle before it has even started.
Frugality – Save Your Time, Energy, And Resources By Refusing To Engage With Destructive People And Ideas
Frugality means being intentional with your time, energy, and money.
Frugality is the art of being intentional with your resources. You have limited time, energy, and resources. Thus, it is crucial you do not waste what you have on meaningless, petty people, pursuits, or ideas. You need to utilize the resources you have towards serving your end goals.
For example, I don’t keep up with politics. I don’t invest much energy into learning the ins and outs of a corrupt, sociopathic system. I have my beliefs, set my standards, and vote for the lesser evil when necessary. Other people love to debate politics with friends, family, and strangers, especially online. Additionally, they love to read articles which emotionally charge them so they have a license to complain about the state of affairs.
I don’t care. There are goals which need to be accomplished and dreams which need fulfillment. Thus, I don’t invest in a system I know to be corrupt and evil. And I certainly don’t waste my time reading material from political opponents who hate my very existence and claims to individual sovereignty.
Along with time and energy, you have to protect your money. Don’t buy crap you don’t need with money you don’t have to impress people you don’t like. Save your money, invest it, and remain debt free. Also, don’t forget to create a budget and stick to it.
In conclusion, don’t waste what little you have on objects, people, and ideas who do not help achieve virtue or reach your end goals. Be selfish (even “greedy” as the envious collectivists claim) and protect everything you have from the jowls of waste.
Industriousness – Your Work Ethic Needs To Be Impeccable
The more productive you are, the more you can create and accomplish.
Do you work until your tired or until your done? A firm work ethic is necessary to ensure your dreams become a reality. Additionally, the harder you work the less likely you are to feel anxious, restless, and unsure. A firm work ethic frees you from the doubt which settles in when you sit still. By continuously pushing forward, you ensure your complete success is all but guaranteed.
Don’t be lazy and reward yourself for every small victory. When you feel like quitting, go further and you’ll see you’re stronger than the artificial ceiling you’ve always placed on yourself. Furthermore, when you work you need to put in the hours and the concentration: an hour of intense concentration is worth more than four hours of fleeting focus.
Be disciplined and cut back on your idle consumption of junk media. Be frugal with your time and cut the office gossip short, so you can get back to your work. Streamline your meal plans, menial tasks, and relax time, so you can focus on being productive.
Don’t buy into the myth of the “accidental genius.” If you want to win at life, then you need to work your ass off.
Persistence – No Matter How Much You Sweat, Cry, Or Bleed, You Need To Keep Going
Persist. Forever Onward. Get After It.
So you’re disciplined, industrious, and frugal. But are you persistent? Persistence is the capacity to soldier through difficulties and reach your end goal, no matter the costs. Another way to look at it is to see your fortitude as your defense and your persistence as your offense.
When we lack persistence, we are easily distracted and thrown off our path. Doubts, fears, and struggles easily weigh us down and we find it impossible to muster the emotional strength and willpower to march ahead. Therefore, when you set a life goal, you have to learn the art of persistence.
The best way to develop your persistence is to kick bad habits and develop new ones. Habit forming can be as simple as placing a block on your phone or having your meals planned in advance.
Additionally, provide yourself with awards when you reach certain thresholds. Do you like to play games? Then set a daily regiment you have to reach to earn the right to indulge in your favorite past time. You can also do this with junk food, TV, and even warm showers.
Furthermore, always reflect on and study your goals. The more defined your path is, the more you’ll be able to persist in productive and meaningful ways.
Lastly, I want to mention zeal. We work hard for the things we love. If we have a passion for our life’s task then we are willing to work past mistakes, ignorance, and failures. If you lack love for what you want to achieve, then you will easily give up when faced with difficulty or resistance.
Greatness Is Achieve By The Mature, Hard-Working, And Persistent
The better you work, the more likely you are to succeed in your life’s task.
In order to accomplish greatness, you need to develop your capacity to endure hardships, work hard, and spend wisely. If your life’s task is important, then it’s crucial you don’t waste anything. So, hold your head high. You’ve created your life goal, you’ve set up your game plan, and you’ve committed to being mature with your resources. Next week, we’ll conclude by contemplating the power of social commitments and support.
Actionables
- When looking at your life goals what are the doubts that spring to mind? What difficulties do you expect to face?
- Do these difficulties scare you? Annoy you? How can you prepare for them in order to take away their power over you?
- What character traits do you need to overcome these obstacles? What resources do you need to overcome these obstacles? How do you come to peace with the fact that you can’t overcome all obstacles?
Please remember that it’s important to do the actionables. You’re not on this earth to simply read but to do. To become an individual, you must act more than you consume.
*Image credit to Unsplash
