5 Ways To Help You Keep Your Ambition Alive

We have created our ambition. We may have even made it bigger. Now we need to keep it alive and going. So how do we do that? Just like a plant we need to nurture our ambition. We can't just set a goal or create an ambition, write it down, stick it in our desk and forget about it and hope someday it will come true. I know, I tried it, that strategy didn't for me. I wanted it to work, because if it had it would have been so much easier then actually doing the hard work to make it happen. But we do actually need to do something. We need to feed our ambition. We need to give it life. In the plant example, we need to give it water and sunlight for it to stay alive. If we shove it in a closet it will die very quickly. So let's not let our ambition die. Here are a few helpful tips to help us keep our ambition alive and going strong:

1. We need to touch our ambition everyday. Spend at least 30 minutes a day working on it. When we are consistently working on something we add fuel to our drive to complete it. Have you ever start a work out routine and you were consistent for a few weeks or months, and then you got sick. You had to take some time out to rest and heal. Then when you felt better it was hard to get back into the routine. That has certainty happened to me. It is so much easier to keep something going then to start and stop, and start again. Keep a log of the days you worked on it. Jerry Seinfeld would have a paper calendar and put a big red "X" everyday he wrote jokes. His goal was to write jokes everyday. When he had a streak going of red "X", his goal was to not break the chain. It added a little extra motivation to write something everyday. What can you do everyday for at least 30 minutes to work an your ambition? Don't break the chain.
2. Just Begin. What is the next thing you need to do? We don’t have to have it all figure out before we begin. Just begin. Clarity will come as we keep moving forward. When we work on it everyday we will begin to get more clarity on how this could actually work. When we chose our ambition, we may not have had the slightest clue about how to make it work, to get it done. That is perfectly normal, in fact, I would say it is probably required. If we knew how to do it when we began, we probably don't have a big enough ambition. By working on a consistent basis we will eventually run into a problem, a setback, something we didn't take into account. When this happens, of course, we will need to solve it, I mean after we're done swearing about it. One by one we knock down the obstacles, we solve the problems and we overcome the setbacks. When we do this, our clarity of how to do it begins to get clearer. Our belief we can do it gets stronger, and the path gets easier.
3. Understand what knowledge we will need to acquire. What do we need to know that we don't know now. Where can we learn it? Who can we call? What book can we read? Where can we acquire this knowledge? The more we learn about what is necessary to know, the more positive we will feel about the probability of achieving it. Of course, we can always find someone else who knows what is needed and hire them. One tip here, don't spend too much on learning without action. Reading books is great and sometimes I admit that I can spend too much time acquiring knowledge. We need to apply that knowledge, because we will learn so much more when applying the knowledge to our ambition. Also, what good is the knowledge if it doesn't get applied. So learn, then apply and learn so more. I know this is obvious, but writing out this makes me feel better.
4. Understand what skills will be necessary. Understand that everything is learnable and skills can be developed. In order to accomplish our ambition, we will need to identify what skills are necessary and go about developing those skills. Where can we practice those skills? Is there someone who could train us or coach us? As our skill improves, things will become easier, things will move more quickly. One more word on skills, when we start, those skills will not be great, in fact, they may be embarrassingly terrible.  Be ok with that. Remember it is not where we start but where we finish.
5. Understand we will have setbacks. Stay committed to your ambition. Just because the publisher you show your manuscript to doesn't pick it up, don't give up. If you’re a writer, you write, and you get books published. Publishers like to publish books from authors who have already had books published. But if you had a book published in the past, your manuscript wouldn't be sitting on their desk right now. You would have just called the publisher who published your last book. Remember that first time authors get published everyday. Setbacks are just a way to test us to see how much we really want it. It may get hard, but as Tom Hanks said in the movie A League of Their Own, "It's the hard that makes it great."

Remember that everything we have in this world is a product of someone's ambition. The computer you are using to see this was a product of someone's ambition. It is the ambition of people just like you that make the world better everyday. I can't wait to read about how you were able to make your ambition a reality.