Celebrate Doing Just Parts of Things

One of my favorite animated shows is Futurama.  I just love the snarky critique of our culture.  In episode 17 of season 6 the professor asks Bender the robot to fold his sweaters.  But Bender is the laziest robot known to man, and he complains about having to do “one whole thing.”  Naturally what follows is a quirky series of events; hilarity ensues.

The point is not to plug Futurama (but seriously if you need a break from working hard on your side hustle, check it out), but that there are a lot of lessons about our lives that we can learn if we read between the lines on some of these TV shows.  Sure they are designed to be entertaining, but who says you cannot use entertainment for self improvement?  Last week I talked to you about celebrating the little wins.  There is more to keeping yourself motivated.

Those little wins are important, don’t get me wrong.  Without them we would easily get discouraged.  But what about those big projects that you are working on?  The ones that could end up taking years to complete?  If you wait until you are completely done with them, you could be waiting a long time to get any encouragement.  Instead, there are ways to keep yourself motivated along the way.

Bender’s comment was about doing some trivial work.  But your work is far from trivial.  Whether you are working on starting your own business, writing a novel, building a house, or anything else, your work is important.  In order to keep you motivated enough to reach your end goal; you need to celebrate little things, even parts of things.  You see, there is no reason to even do one whole thing.  You can do a part of a thing; every step should be a cause of celebration.  Each part that you complete, take the time to be glad that it is over.  How much you celebrate is up to you (although you probably shouldn’t overdo it; no reason to down a bottle of wine because you wrote a chapter in your novel).

There are many ways that you can go about keeping yourself motivated.  There are some people that will plug away and try to get all the way through each project before celebrating.  Others will want to celebrate along the way.  The point is that keeping yourself motivated and encouraged will help keep your drive strong.  How about you?  What do you celebrate?  Personally I outlined this article and then had a small celebration (I checked my Facebook).  After my celebration, I came back and finished writing.