My thoughts just a few years back:
“There’s no way I can get out of this mess, I better be dead rather then being a burden on the society”
I use to say this to myself when I was working at a job. I hated every hour of it. I was fresh out of college and I knew I just don’t wanna be a doing this anymore.
I cried on my every birthday and new year from the age 18–23 because I felt I am losing so much of the time and I am achieving nothing. I am just as average as I could ever be. I’m 25 now.
I distanced myself from friends (Bad choice.) I restricted myself from every form of entertainment for years! (No music, No TV, No going out, nothing.) I use to watch Youtube, consume every content that would make me better. Read almost all books I could find a good review on, about self-help, entrepreneurship, business and what not.
All this for what? Just like your question, I couldn’t understand why I feel I am wasting my life. I use to invest much more time in doing something that was productive from my perspective(Reading books, Taking courses, Learning new skills etc..) While learning skills really paid off, but later, I realised why I use to feel like I am wasting my life even though I had a better job than an average engineer from my college.
Because I didn’t had any GOALS.
Now, read this slowly and carefully.
You feel you’re wasting time because you’re lacking something in your life. You are lacking something that you think you deserve but you haven’t got it yet and in an attempt to get it, you read, take all courses you find online(ends up dropping out halfway from most of them) but still find yourself no where close to the life you wish you’d rather have. You don’t set goals for yourself then you don’t have a North Star to aim for, nothing to work towards.
You NEED to have something to work towards. Something you can see, visualise and wake up for every morning.
You asked how can you change the situation? Let me show you what worked for me.
This right here, seems to be a dead simple chart, but it has the potential to change your life, for good.
You can choose to fill this up anyway you’d like, But I recommend starting from the top.
Put your yearly, or monthly goal at the top:
“The Goal”
Suppose you want to make like, $1000 or 70,000 INR.
Large Milestones
In second boxes, just ask yourself what would you’d need to do to achieve those milestones, Either you need to have a reliable brand or company with good social presence and authority you need a stable finished product or reliable service(this can be anything you’d love, like graphic design, product design or writing skills. ANYTHING).
Medium Milestones
In order to achieve the large milestones, you’d need to have medium milestones in places, if your large milestone is to be able to have a strong skillset(Graphic design, 3D design, Animation, App development or anything) You’d need to take some actions in place, like, take up a course on UDEMY. I cannot tell you how disproportionately underpriced, undervalued and underrated, they are today.
You can also choose to join a community and interact with people to learn more and post 3–5 content of whatever you created, on your social media across platforms.
Small Milestones
Those are small milestones that you should achieve on daily or weekly basis depending upon your timeline to achieve the main goal.
Those are just the samples I have filled in to show how the end result looks like, You get a table like this.
Make this your life until you’ve achieve your goals and remember, you can fool everyone but not yourself. So, don’t have a cheat day. Just follow this as badly as you want your goals to become a reality and it would lead you to it.
You cannot achieve something you can’t see or measure. This simple table helps you to achieve what you deserve and make you work for it. It worked for me, I hope it does works for you as well.
I love to write about startups, growth hacking, some power hacks, like this one and unheard challenges while building a startup, all the time. Feel free to follow to get more of similar content and like this on your feed.
You won’t regret it!