Sacrifice for your Future
Nobody likes to make a sacrifice, giving up something in our life we enjoyed spending time on and brought great pleasure, isn’t easy. It could be a piece of entertainment, something that made our life easier or a scheduled, weekly event with friends. Cutting something like this out of your life is a hard step to take, but it’s a crucial step in the long-term if your think of, or in the middle of starting something long-term.
If something is important to you, more important than something else in your life, you may want to evaluate the people, events, or things you are given your time away. Time that could be spent on building your future, if it’s your health, a business, side-project, hobby or a career. Something to enhance your life further. You may want to make time to learn something that is integral to your long-term plan. For example, you have a great idea for an app, an idea so great that it inspires you to take action. Action in the form of a night course in iOS programming. The drive to complete and achieve something great is enough to make you change your mindset and make sacrificing anything else that isn’t important much easier.
Having a passion for something makes sacrificing something else easier.
This was the same with me and my platform here. I was so passionate about Lettering, writing and building a platform for others to learn that I picked specific a specific time after my day job where I came home in the evening to work on it. I sacrificed anything that would have come up on those evenings, whether it was family, friends, events, or some form of entertainment. It was difficult in the beginning, but over time when i explained to the people in my life what my goal was and what I was doing and they understood why I was doing it, it got easier. Then it became habitual. When you dictate a time and show up to do something specific, you create a habit from it. It stays with you mentally and becomes something you do by nature.
This is a similar mindset that people use when on a weight lose program. You have to set aside a specific time, to a specific task, and do it regularly.
Evaluate your situation and your personal life. Do you want something bad enough that you are willing to sacrifice the things you enjoy in order to achieve it? What are you spending time on that you don’t need to?
It will be hard to sacrifice the things you enjoy at the beginning, but what if you can’t identify what you need to sacrifice? Or what if the things you sacrifice are having a negative impact on your situation. For example, if you have something that can’t be sacrificed such as commitments to family or pets etc. If you have walk your dog, take care of a sick family member. These are priorities in your life, things that can’t be sacrificed.
If you find yourself in a situation where you are surrounded by negative people, or people who foster a negative mindset that pull you down, you need to remove yourself from that situation. You can remove yourself from negative people in your workplace, leave your job. If someone you hang out with brings you down, cut them out. But what if you have a family or partner who isn’t on board with what you’re doing or your mindset for building something you have a passion for? This is a little harder than cutting them out, because you can’t cut them from your life. You have to get them on board with what you are doing. Explain what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and your vision for the future. Bring them on board and make them feel apart of what you’re doing.
Be around people who are going to foster a positive, successful mindset.
To achieve your long-term plans, you need to build a runway, financially. A good practice is to maintain at least a 6 month runway in the bank. Meaning, you have 6 months worth of finances to cover your bills and expenses. This changes for person to person, depending on their individual circumstances. But when you eventually make the leap from your day job to your next thing, you know you will have at least 6 months runway if anything goes wrong in the meantime. Which can happen. When you work for someone else, unless you’re the companies accountant, you will never know the financial situation of that company. Likewise, when you are starting a business, especially a freelance career, you don’t know what your financial situation will be in 6 months time. There is a way to forecast it if you are getting regular work, but if you are not. At least you have a 6 month runway.
It all starts with a day job. This is how you build the runway. You are always going to have to make a leap when it comes to your career or starting a business. There is no gradual transition out of one commitment to the next. It will come down to making a leap. Completely dropping one course to take another. With your day job, you have some level of regular income. I say some level because there is no such thing as job security when you work for someone else. Like I mentioned about, anything can happen, and you may be out of a job because of some unforeseen circumstance. It’s not your role to know how the business is running financially when you work for someone else. They don’t have to, or need to tell you.
Having a day job allows you to gain a financial runway even if you are not building someone in the future. It offers you some leniency if something goes wrong or an unforeseen circumstance comes up. Invest in yourself and invest in the knowledge needed to create something great in for your future. Take a course that you need in order to build your own business. Learn the skills required to do the best that you possibly can in your career. If you want to run a side business making screen-printed t-shirt designs outside of your day job, take a screen printing course that allows you to accelerate the process of learning. Courses are great because it’s condensed knowledge with a practical application where you will meet a lot of similar-minded people with your interest in that thing.
This ties into what I mentioned about surrounding yourself with the right people with a positive mindset. This allows you to grow professionally, learn the required skills, make money on the side through your side business, and in time, may even scale into something you can do full-time. It all ties together.
Find your passion. Evaluation your circumstance. Make sacrifices to build on what you love. Have a day job that builds you runway and which you can invest in yourself. Get around the right people.
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