Goals require sacrifices

You have hopes and aspirations for the future and you have the potential to achieve them. One big hurdle between you and reaching your goals is the sacrifices you need to make to turn a dream into a reality.

“Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.”
– Martin Luther King Jr.

The biggest win you can make is dedicating daily scheduled time to work on progress towards your goal (singular intended), let’s call this goal hacking. After all, compounding comes into effect with effort as well as money.

At this point, a typical push-back would be that you don’t have the time to devote. This is where the hard truths kick in. If you are a single parent, juggling a job and kids, you’re going to have it harder than most but it’s still possible, you’ll just need to scale the daily time sessions back.

The lowest hanging fruit on finding free time is to be honest with how much idle screen time you have. If you spend 4 hours a day watching Netflix, cut it down to 3 (initially) and you’ve found 1 hour of the day to start making meaningful progress.

The next option is to look at using some if not all of your lunch break on goal hacking.

Another option geared around a day job is to leverage your commute time. If you’re required to have a specific environment for goal hacking (e.g. computer for coding, ski-slopes, canvas for painting), try using your phone instead to write notes or research the topic so you’re primed when you reach your operating environment.

Once you start getting serious about goal hacking and start seeing results, it’d be prudent to start cutting deeper on the sacrifices to accelerate progress. This includes reducing pastimes you regard highly such as socialising, hobbies and leisure time. When you start seeing the gains of your goal hacking endorphins will start flooding your body, and you’ll start having these thoughts anyway but you’ll find it hard to action the change.

“The time I burned my guitar it was like a sacrifice. You sacrifice the things you love. I love my guitar.”
– Jimi Hendrix

If you don’t make hard sacrifices, then dreams will stay as such.