goals
Understanding your goals to help you achieve them.
Preparation Is...
Facebook sends memories every day of our activities from years past. I have had a Facebook account for over 25 years. I love getting those memories. Many of my friends are no longer on Facebook for various reasons. However, new people are always joining the site and requesting to become friends. Therefore, people are often coming and going.
By Margaret Minnicks4 months ago in Motivation
When the Strategy Is Right but the Timing Is Wrong
I have seen more well-crafted strategies fail not because the thinking was flawed, but because the timing was off. A brilliant market entry plan launched six months too early. A restructuring initiative rolled out in the middle of a leadership transition. A capital raise timed precisely when the credit windows were closing. The idea was right. The moment was wrong.
By Scott Gelbard4 months ago in Motivation
Build a Better You
Build a Better You Every now and then, we self-analyze. We think of clean slates, new motivators, ideas or habits. However, if we are completely honest, we all face the same old risk of falling back into old patterns. Most of us have abandoned our resolutions within a month, most times making those declarations a distant memory. Staying focused on a goal isn’t about hype or fancy planners. It’s about the discipline of small intentional changes every day. It means being mindful of performing those unglamorous things that isn’t worth posting to our social media outlets because adapting to change, even if its’ for our good can be exhausting. Here are some suggestions on how to keep your eyes on the prize when the hype around change beings to fade.
By Denise J Williams4 months ago in Motivation
The Woman Who Locked the Door for an Hour Every Thursday
Margaret Crane locked her office door at ten o’clock on a Thursday morning. The cord of the blinds paused between her fingers. Oak Park, Illinois, sixth‑grade classroom, Mrs. Barnes’s fountain pen tapping her desk. Two short, brittle raps. “Margaret, what are you looking at? The window won’t take the test for you.” Thirty‑one years later, standing in her office on the thirty‑fourth floor in Midtown Manhattan, her fingers still pulled the blinds all the way shut.
By Jin4 months ago in Motivation
The Author Who Became Famous Only After Dying
The day Elias Rowan became a literary legend was the day after his funeral. Newspapers called him "the forgotten genius." Universities rushed to add his books to their reading lists. Critics wrote thousands of words explaining the brilliance hidden in every sentence he had ever written. The strange part? While he was alive, no one wanted to read a single page. Part One: The Man Nobody Wanted Elias Rowan lived in a one-room apartment on the edge of a city that had long stopped noticing him. The apartment was cold in winter. Not the kind of cold you shake off with a warm cup of tea. The kind that settles into your bones and stays there. Elias couldn't always afford heating. Some mornings, he wrote wearing two jackets and a scarf, his breath fogging the air above his notebook. He had been writing since he was nineteen. By the time he was forty-two, he had finished seven novels, three short story collections, and a slim volume of essays that he privately considered his best work. He had also collected four hundred and thirty-one rejection letters. He stopped counting after that. Not because the rejections stopped coming, but because counting them had started to feel like measuring his own failure. Publishers were polite, mostly. "The writing is beautiful, but we don't see a market for this." "Brilliant in places, but too slow for modern readers." "We loved your voice, but the story isn't commercial enough." He pinned the early ones to his wall. Later, he stopped doing that too. His sister, Mara, visited him every few weeks. She would bring food, sometimes groceries stuffed into cloth bags, sometimes just warm bread and cheese because she knew he would forget to eat when he was deep in a chapter. She watched him write in the margins of newspapers when he ran out of notebook pages. She watched him skip sleep for days when a story was pulling him forward like a current. "You should try something else," she told him once, gently, the way you say something you don't fully believe but feel you have to say. He looked up from his notebook and smiled. Not the sad smile she expected. "Words outlive the people who write them," he said. "I just have to trust that." She didn't argue. But she worried. Part Two: The Winter He Stopped The last winter of Elias Rowan's life was the quietest. He had been rejected again, this time by a small independent press he had genuinely believed in. The editor had written back with a careful, apologetic email that said everything except what Elias needed to hear. He read it twice, closed his laptop, and sat by the window for a long time. He still wrote. But slower now. Like a man carrying something heavier than usual. Mara noticed. She noticed the way he paused mid-sentence during conversations, like he was listening to something far away. She noticed the stacks of finished manuscripts arranged neatly on the shelf beside his bed, labeled in his careful handwriting. She noticed he had stopped talking about future projects. One evening, she asked him if he was alright. "I think I've said everything I needed to say," he told her. She thought he meant the book he had just finished. She didn't realize he meant something else entirely. Elias Rowan died quietly on a Tuesday in February. His heart, which had carried so much for so long, simply gave out. He was forty-three years old. The apartment was left exactly as he had lived in it. Notebooks on every surface. Pages clipped together with little yellow notes in the margins. Seven finished manuscripts stacked beside the bed like quiet passengers waiting for a train that had never come. Part Three: The Discovery It was Mara who called his landlord. It was the landlord who called a local charity to clear the apartment. And it was a young volunteer named Daniel, nineteen years old and studying literature at a nearby college, who picked up one of the manuscripts before putting it in the donation box. He only meant to glance at the first page. He read it standing in the cold hallway. Then he sat down on the floor and read for another hour. When he finally looked up, it was getting dark outside. He took the manuscript home. Then came back the next day and asked Mara if he could borrow the others. Mara, still numb with grief, said yes without fully understanding why. Daniel shared the first chapter with a professor. The professor shared it with a colleague. Within three weeks, a photocopy was circulating in three different university departments. Within two months, a small literary magazine had published an excerpt with a short note: "We believe we have found something important." The internet did the rest. Part Four: The Legend Builds Itself By the time autumn arrived, Elias Rowan was everywhere. A publisher offered a substantial advance to release all seven novels. Readers devoured them. Then read them again. Online forums filled with theories about hidden meanings, symbolic patterns, and what one popular account called "Rowan's uncanny ability to predict the future." Literary journalists wrote long essays about his "fearless vision." One widely shared article claimed he had anticipated three major political crises in his fiction. Another argued his prose style had quietly influenced several contemporary writers who claimed never to have heard of him. Universities added entire modules dedicated to his work. Tourists began visiting the city. They photographed the building where he had lived, the coffee shop two streets away where the owner vaguely remembered a quiet man who always ordered the cheapest thing on the menu and stayed for hours with a notebook. A documentary was commissioned. A stage adaptation was announced. Social media turned Elias Rowan into something between a saint and a myth. They called him fearless. They called him ahead of his time. They called him proof that true art always survives. Mara watched all of this from a careful distance. Part Five: What Only She Knew The world was building a statue. Mara was still holding the man. She remembered things no documentary would capture. She remembered finding him once, sitting on the kitchen floor at two in the morning, a rejection email open on his laptop, crying quietly in the way men do when they've decided they're not allowed to cry loudly. She had sat down beside him without saying anything. They stayed there for a while, her hand on his shoulder, the laptop screen going dark. She remembered the weeks he barely spoke because a chapter wasn't working. She remembered the celebrations too, small and private, when a sentence finally came out exactly right. He would read it aloud to her over the phone, and she could hear the relief in his voice like someone had set down a heavy bag. She remembered his hands, always slightly ink-stained. His jacket, the same one for six winters. The way he laughed at his own jokes before finishing them. Now journalists were calling him a visionary. They said he wrote with no concern for commercial success, as though that had been a brave artistic choice rather than a painful reality. They said he was content to write in obscurity, as though he had chosen it. None of them asked what it had cost him. A reporter contacted Mara for an interview. They wanted her perspective on "the genius she had known personally." They wanted her to confirm the legend. She sat with the question for three days. Part Six: The Choice There were two versions of her brother she could give the world. The first was the one they had already written. The visionary. The fearless genius who wrote without needing applause, who saw the future in his sentences, who existed on a higher plane than ordinary ambition. The second was the truth. The man who cried on kitchen floors. Who skipped meals to buy notebooks. Who checked his email every morning hoping for a different answer and learned, slowly, to stop hoping so loudly. Who never stopped writing not because he was fearless, but because he didn't know how to be himself without it. Mara thought about which version of her brother deserved to live. She thought about the young writers who were now discovering his work. The ones who felt seen by his sentences, who posted online about how his words had named something they couldn't name themselves. She thought about a girl in Lahore who had written that Elias Rowan's novel had made her feel, for the first time, that her own quiet life was worth writing about. She thought about a boy in Toronto who said he had been about to quit his manuscript until he found the essay collection. She thought about what her brother had said to her once, in that cold apartment, smile on his face. Words outlive the people who write them. Maybe the truth didn't have to replace the legend. Maybe the truth was the legend, just without the polish. She called the journalist back. "I'll tell you about my brother," she said. "But I'm going to tell you who he actually was." Part Seven: What the World Needed to Hear The interview was published on a quiet Sunday morning. It was not what people expected. Mara talked about the cold apartment. The rejection letters. The meals skipped, the notebooks prioritized. She talked about the kitchen floor at two in the morning. She talked about a man who was not fearless but persistent, not visionary but deeply, painfully observant of the world around him. A man who wrote because he needed to, not because he was certain anyone would ever read it. The response was not what she feared. It spread further than the myth had. Because something in the real story landed differently. The legend had been inspiring in the distant, untouchable way that legends are. But the truth was something people could actually hold. A man who kept going without proof that it would matter. Who wrote in the dark, not because he could see the light coming, but because stopping felt worse than continuing. Writers who had been struggling shared the article with one line: this is why I don't quit. A publisher in London said it reframed how they thought about the manuscripts sitting in their slush pile. A professor in Karachi built a semester around the question Mara's interview raised: does a work need to be understood in its own time to have value? The legend grew. But now it had a human heart inside it. Elias Rowan never knew his books would one day sit in university libraries, be translated into eleven languages, and make a young volunteer sit down on a cold hallway floor and forget to finish his job. He never heard the applause. But somewhere in those seven novels stacked beside his bed, in the careful handwriting on every yellow note, in the ink-stained margins of borrowed newspapers, he had already said what he needed to say. And the world, in its slow and imperfect way, eventually listened. He was right about one thing. Words do outlive the people who write them. They just sometimes take a little longer to arrive. "The world never ignored my words. It simply waited until I was no longer here to answer them."
By Muhammad Farman4 months ago in Motivation
The Most Expensive Thing You Waste Every Day Isn't Money
The Most Expensive Thing You Waste Every Day Isn't Money Nobody tells you this when you're young. You grow up watching adults stress about money. Save more. Spend less. Don't waste it. And that lesson sticks. You track your expenses, cut subscriptions, feel guilty over a five-dollar coffee. But while you were busy counting coins, something far more valuable was slipping through your fingers. Time. Not in the cliché motivational-poster way. In the very real, very quiet, very painful way that you only understand when it's already gone. The Moment It Hits You Think about last Tuesday. Not a dramatic day. Just a regular one. You woke up, scrolled your phone for twenty minutes before even sitting up. Made tea or coffee, watched a few videos. Got to work a little late, spent the first hour half-focused. Lunch break turned into a ninety-minute mental vacation. Evening came, and you were tired, so you "relaxed" for three hours before sleeping. Nothing bad happened that day. But nothing real happened either. Now multiply that by 365. That's when it stops being a bad Tuesday and starts being a bad year. Time Is the Only Thing You Can't Earn Back Here's what makes time different from money. If you lose a hundred dollars, you can work and earn it back. If you lose a job, you can find another. If a business fails, you can start over. But if you waste today, it doesn't come back. There's no refund. No overtime shift that recovers it. It's simply gone. A young man in Karachi once told me something that stayed with me. He said, "I kept waiting to have enough money to start my YouTube channel. I waited three years. Now I see people who started with nothing three years ago, and they're doing well. I had the same three years. I just didn't use them." He wasn't talking about money. He was talking about time spent waiting instead of doing. That story isn't unique to Pakistan. It's the story of millions of people everywhere, from London to Lagos, from Toronto to Lahore. The Sneaky Ways We Waste It We don't usually waste time in obvious ways. Nobody sits down and says, "I'll do nothing useful for the next four hours." It happens quietly. You open Instagram to check one notification. Forty minutes pass. You didn't decide to spend forty minutes there. It just happened. You say "I'll start Monday." Monday becomes next month. Next month becomes next year. Years go by wrapped in the same promise of "soon." You spend two hours in a conversation that drains you, solving a problem that wasn't yours to solve. You sit in front of your laptop, technically working, but mentally you're somewhere else entirely. None of this feels like waste in the moment. That's exactly why it's so dangerous. The Cost Nobody Calculates People calculate financial costs all the time. If I spend this much on rent, I have this much left. If I save this much per month, I'll have this much in five years. But almost nobody calculates time costs. Here's a simple one. If you spend ninety minutes a day on your phone doing nothing meaningful, that's over five hundred hours a year. Five hundred hours is roughly twelve full work weeks. Imagine what twelve extra weeks could do for your life. A skill learned. A project started. A habit built. A relationship invested in. Rest that actually restores you instead of guilt-ridden scrolling. The math isn't depressing. It's actually the most hopeful thing you'll read today. Because if the waste is that consistent, so is the potential recovery. It's Not About Being Productive Every Second Let's be honest about something. Rest is not waste. Sitting quietly with a cup of chai and doing nothing is not waste. Laughing with friends, watching a film you love, sleeping eight hours because your body needs it, that's not waste. The problem is not rest. The problem is unconscious time, time you didn't choose to spend anywhere in particular, that simply disappeared. There's a difference between choosing to relax and accidentally losing three hours to a screen without feeling refreshed at the end. One fills you. The other leaves you emptier than before. What Actually Changes When You Respect Your Time You don't need a perfect morning routine. You don't need a color-coded planner. You don't need to wake up at five in the morning. You just need to start making small, deliberate choices. A woman in her early thirties, working a full-time job in Manchester, decided she would protect just one hour a day. Not a life overhaul. Just one hour, after dinner, before the TV went on. She used it to write. Eighteen months later, she had a completed manuscript. She didn't have more time than anyone else. She just stopped letting it disappear. That's available to almost everyone. Even people with demanding jobs, families, and lives that feel overfull. Even people who don't have the luxury of flexible schedules or quiet homes. One hour. Chosen deliberately. Protected consistently. A Practical Shift You Can Make Today At the end of each day, ask yourself one question. What did I do today that I actually chose to do? Not what happened to you. Not what you drifted into. What did you consciously decide to spend your hours on? If the answer is mostly things that were chosen for you, by notifications, by other people's urgency, by habit and autopilot, that's your signal. You don't need to fix everything at once. Just find one hour tomorrow that belongs entirely to you. Put something in it that matters to you. Something you'd be glad you did a year from now. Then do it again the next day. The Real Lesson Money can be made, lost, and made again. Opportunities come around more than once. Relationships can be repaired. Careers can be rebuilt. But this moment right now, this specific Tuesday or Thursday or Sunday morning, it only exists once. The most expensive thing you waste every day isn't money. It's the hours that quietly leave while you were busy assuming there were plenty more coming. There are. But not infinitely. And the earlier you treat time like the finite, irreplaceable thing it actually is, the more of your life will actually feel like yours.
By Muhammad Farman4 months ago in Motivation
You Failed Because You Closed The Door On Your Success
Inspired by true events. Sitting in the restaurant waiting on Gorja, Teri said to Rose as she glanced at the heart-shaped clock over the door at the entrance, “She was arguing with Lance about getting a job when I spoke with her an hour ago. I hope she didn’t break up with him.”
By Annelise Lords 4 months ago in Motivation
The World's Most Dangerous Addiction Doesn't Look Like an Addiction
The World's Most Dangerous Addiction Doesn't Look Like an Addiction Nobody warned me about this one. When people talk about addiction, they picture someone in a dark room, unable to function. They picture bottles, pills, something visibly destructive. Something that looks like a problem. But the addiction I'm talking about doesn't look like that at all. It looks like productivity. It looks like ambition. It looks like a person who's always busy, always online, always doing something. It looks, honestly, like success. And that's exactly what makes it so dangerous. Let Me Tell You About Raza Raza is a 26-year-old guy from Lahore. Brilliant, motivated, the kind of person his family pointed to with pride. He had a laptop, a decent internet connection, and a burning desire to build something for himself. Every morning, he woke up and immediately picked up his phone. Before brushing his teeth, he was already watching a YouTube video about passive income. By 9 AM, he had three new tabs open — one about freelancing, one about crypto, one about dropshipping. By noon, he'd consumed four hours of content. By evening, he hadn't built a single thing. He went to bed feeling productive though. Informed. Like he was getting closer to his goal. He did this for eight months straight. Sound familiar? Maybe not Raza specifically, but the pattern? It Has a Name, But Most People Don't Know It What Raza was experiencing is called passive consumption addiction — and it's arguably the most widespread addiction of our generation. It's not about scrolling mindlessly. It's more subtle than that. It targets motivated people. Curious people. People who actually want to improve their lives. The trap is disguised as learning. You watch a video about starting a business — that feels useful. You read an article about morning routines — that feels productive. You follow seventeen creators who talk about discipline — that feels like growth. But here's the uncomfortable truth: consuming information about doing something is not the same as doing it. And your brain, the sneaky organ that it is, can't always tell the difference. When you watch someone explain how to build a website, your brain releases a small shot of dopamine. It feels like progress. It mimics the feeling of actually building something. So you chase that feeling again. And again. And suddenly you've watched 200 videos about freelancing and never sent a single proposal. Why This Addiction Is More Dangerous Than It Looks Traditional addictions come with obvious consequences. You can see the damage. You know something is wrong. This one? It comes with a highlight reel. You feel educated. You feel inspired. You collect knowledge like trophies. You can talk about business models, productivity systems, investment strategies — and never apply a single one. The danger is in the delay. A person addicted to scrolling Instagram knows they're wasting time. Deep down, they feel the guilt immediately. But a person addicted to self-improvement content? They feel virtuous. They feel like they're doing the right thing. The consequences only show up months later, when they look around and realize — nothing has changed. Same bank account. Same situation. Same dreams, still waiting. That delayed consequence is what makes this addiction so hard to catch and even harder to break. This Is a Global Problem, But It Hits Differently in Different Places In the West — the US, UK, Canada — this addiction shows up in people drowning in online courses they never finish. Studies suggest the average completion rate for online courses globally sits somewhere around 10 to 15 percent. People buy knowledge and never use it. There's even a term for it: the "course graveyard." Dozens of programs purchased, opened once, abandoned. But the buyer still feels good because they own the course. Ownership felt like progress. In countries like Pakistan, India, and across South Asia, it takes a slightly different shape. Here, the dream of online earning — freelancing, YouTube, content creation — is incredibly powerful, especially for young people who see it as a way out of limited job markets. So they consume. Endlessly. Tutorials in Urdu and English about Fiverr, about graphic design, about how to make money on YouTube. The hunger is real. The effort of watching is real. But the application never comes, because the next video is always more appealing than the discomfort of actually starting. In both cases, the pattern is identical: information without action becomes a comfort zone disguised as a growth strategy. The Neuroscience Behind It (Without the Jargon) Here's what's actually happening in your brain when you fall into this loop. Every time you learn something new — watch a video, read an article, finish a podcast — your brain gets a small reward. A tiny hit of dopamine. It associates that feeling with the act of consuming content. Over time, your brain starts to prefer that easy reward over the harder, slower reward that comes from actually doing something. Building a skill is uncomfortable. Progress is slow. You make mistakes. You feel stupid. There's no dopamine hit at the beginning — just frustration. But watching someone else do it? That's smooth. That's comfortable. That's ten dopamine hits in one hour. So your brain quietly starts steering you toward consumption and away from creation. And you don't even notice it happening. You just notice that you've been "learning about freelancing" for a year and still haven't landed a client. The Moment I Recognized It in Myself I'm not writing this from the outside looking in. I lived this. There was a period where I had bookmarked so many articles about writing that I genuinely felt like a better writer — without having written anything new in weeks. I had a folder called "Inspiration" with over 400 saved posts. I revisited it often. It felt like research. It felt like preparation. But preparation without execution is just procrastination with better branding. The wake-up call came when a friend asked me to share something I'd written recently. I opened my drafts. Everything was half-finished. Everything was saved "for later." Later never comes when you're addicted to consuming. The Three Warning Signs You're Already In It You might be in this trap right now. Here are three signs that are easy to miss: The first is that you feel busy but stuck. Your days feel full. You're always consuming something — a podcast during your commute, videos in the evening, articles at night. But when you look at your actual progress toward your goals, nothing is moving. That gap between feeling busy and actually progressing? That's the addiction at work. The second is that you need more content to feel motivated. Early on, one good video could fire you up for a week. Now you need three videos just to feel like starting. That's tolerance building — the same mechanic that operates in every addiction. You need more of the same thing to get the same effect. The third is that starting feels harder than it used to. The blank page, the empty screen, the first step — it all feels heavier than before. That's because your brain has been rewired to prefer passive intake over active output. Creation now feels difficult because consumption has become the default. How to Actually Break It This is where most articles would give you a seven-step plan. I'm not going to do that. Not because steps don't work, but because the real solution is simpler and harder at the same time. You have to make creation non-negotiable before consumption. Not instead of consumption. Before it. Before you watch a single video tomorrow morning, do one thing. Write one paragraph. Send one email. Design one element. Record one minute. Code one function. Whatever your craft is — do one unit of it before you consume anything. This sounds small. It is small. That's the point. The addiction is powerful because consumption is easy and creation is hard. You're not going to out-discipline it. You're going to out-structure it. When creation comes first, your brain starts reconnecting effort with reward. Slowly, the dopamine starts attaching to doing, not just watching. The 24-Hour Test Here's something practical you can try today. For the next 24 hours, cut your content consumption by 80 percent. Not forever. Just one day. No YouTube tutorials. No podcast episodes about productivity. No saved articles about how to succeed. Instead, spend that time doing whatever you've been consuming content about. Want to be a freelancer? Spend those hours sending proposals, not watching videos about proposals. Want to be a writer? Write. Not about writing — just write. Want to learn graphic design? Open the software and make something ugly. Make something wrong. Make something. At the end of 24 hours, notice how you feel. Probably a mix of frustrated and alive. That frustration? That's real progress. That's what growth actually feels like before it becomes comfortable. A Different Kind of Success Story Let me tell you about someone who broke this cycle. Amara is a 23-year-old in Toronto, originally from a Pakistani family. She spent two years watching YouTube videos about becoming a freelance graphic designer. She knew every tip, every tool, every platform. One day, her internet went out for a week. With nothing to consume, she opened Canva and just started making things. Random posters. Fake logos for fake brands. She posted them on Instagram with no strategy, no plan. Within three weeks, someone messaged her asking if she was available for work. She wasn't ready. She didn't feel ready. She said yes anyway. That client led to three more. She now runs a small freelance design business and earns more than she did at her part-time retail job. She told me later: "The internet going out was the best thing that happened to my career." She didn't need more content. She needed less. What This Addiction Is Really Costing You Time is the obvious cost. But that's not the heaviest one. The heaviest cost is identity. When you spend years consuming without creating, you start to see yourself as someone who learns about doing things — not someone who actually does them. That self-image hardens. It becomes who you are. And changing your habits is one thing. Changing who you believe you are is a much bigger fight. The longer you stay in passive consumption, the more you convince yourself that you're "almost ready." That you need just one more course, one more video, one more source of inspiration before you begin. But you're already ready enough. You've always been ready enough. The content told you that you needed more. That was the addiction talking. One Last Thing The most dangerous addictions are the ones that feel like virtues. And consuming self-improvement content feels virtuous. It feels responsible. It feels like you're taking your future seriously. But at some point, preparing to live your life and actually living it have to switch places. You don't need another video about finding your purpose. You need to go find it — messily, imperfectly, without a tutorial. The world doesn't reward the most informed person in the room. It rewards the one who actually showed up and did the work. Close the tab. Start the thing. That's the whole lesson. 
By Muhammad Farman4 months ago in Motivation
