Been there multiple times. It’s a creative block I still hit frequently and everything starts to feel like diminishing returns from that point on.
I believe our perspective on the consequences of we’re doing is what affects our motivation significantly, or in other words, motivation heavily depends on what we visualize to be the result of what we’re doing. While the act of completing a project itself triggers a sense of accomplishment, the deeper we go into the project and visualize the result of the effort, it can be easy to feel like “it’s just not worth it” in the end.
In these times, it’s best to step back a bit and think about the goal, the reason why you started the project in the first place and the vision you had at the time. It’s the goal that motivated you enough to get started in the first place, and as we move further, the goal starts to become rather blurry because the process becomes too apparent and possibly rather tedious to be able to see any substantial value in the effort. It’s very important to recognize this feeling and take a break whenever need be. You don’t want to be working heartlessly. Never be hard on yourself. If you’ve lost motivation for something that you’re passionate about, it’ll eventually return with time and you’ll want to revisit the project. It’s one of those things that will linger around the back of your head sooner or later. Nobody’s ever reached success without failing or feeling like you’ve failed at least once. Instead, think about all the possibilities that will contribute to you succeeding, because there’s always many, it’s just our perspective is deteriorated to be biased towards the negative outcomes in such times.
The visualization of your “goal” that I mentioned earlier? Think about how you would feel and the sense of gratification and reward that you’d get when you achieve it. The feeling of progress, accomplishment, achievement, fulfilment, it’s these that drives the world towards success. If you run into a place where you feel your goal is too ambitious to achieve, divide into smaller segments and go after the source. Setting a smaller target and giving ourselves enough room to be flexible in and to work at the pace of our convenience and taking on smaller goals one at a time that contribute to the greater good (which is your final goal) can significantly help when feeling mentally burnt out. Whenever there’s a moment when you feel like you’re after something too over-ambitious (which in turn results in loss of motivation), split your target into smaller counterparts. Feel like even the smaller goal is too much to continue working on? Slice that into 2 and narrow down to what you can actually take on and feel accomplished when you actually finish it, no matter how small or big the accomplishment may be. Feel accomplished in the fact that kept going and remember that it’s always taking you a step closer to where you want to be, regardless of if the attempt is a success or not.
This post has already gotten a fair bit too long but I genuinely hope you find something of meaningful value to take away from it and something that helps you reignite that drive that’s still somewhere alive inside of you.
I wish you the very best, friend.
Additionally, while I understand some may think this is some AI–generated response, but I guarantee you it’s not. Everything I’ve mentioned here is purely out of my personal experience with motivation in life.
