Maintaining Success: Keeping
Momentum Without Going Crazy
Putting in some extra effort
at work can pay off. You can get a promotion or a raise, or wind up on a choice
project. The same goes with your personal finances — going the extra mile can
help you pay off a debt early or save up for a purchase. You can push through
to success in just about anything. But once you’ve achieved your goal, it can
be hard to keep up that level of effort. If you’ve been staying late every
night to finish a project, you don’t want your boss to start thinking that’s
the level of effort you can commit to every project. If you cut way down on
your expenses, you don’t want to live a spartan lifestyle forever.
Just the same, however,
you’ve seen your work pay off. You don’t necessarily want to give up every perk
that all that extra work got you. In order to find balance, you have to find a
way to keep that momentum going, without driving yourself over the edge with
all that effort.
Looking
for Balance
Keeping up an extreme pace
for weeks or even months can turn your extraordinary effort into something that
you consider quite normal. That trap can make it hard to take a step back and
decide whether you can really keep up this level of effort. However, it’s a
necessary step: when you’ve accomplished your goal, considering the work that
got you there is important. Of course, your work alone isn’t the cost of
completing a project or reaching a goal. There are other costs, like the time
you’ve been able to spend with your friends and family, your own comfort or
even your health.
Life isn’t a balance sheet,
but you can tell the difference between your lifestyle at a project’s beginning
and at its end. Depending on the benefits, you may decide that keeping up your
exertion is well worth it: maybe getting a raise means that you’re getting paid
enough to make an increase in your workload well worth your while. But, then
again, you might decide that you need to reintroduce yourself to A few things
that have been missing in your life: if you stopped going out entirely in order
to save up money, allowing yourself the occasional night out isn’t the end of
the world — and it might do you a little good.
If you can decide just what
you’ve cut that you want back, you can tell just how much effort you are
willing to put into keeping momentum on your goal. Think about the example of
saving money by cutting entertainment expenses: you may be willing to continue
to keep those expenses down, but with at least a little bit of a budget for fun
with your friends. You won’t negate all that hard work of saving money — keeping
up at least some of the momentum of your original goal and maintaining your
success — but not depriving yourself of all entertainment.
Setting Up
Balance
Once you’ve got an idea of how far you’ll go to maintain your
success, you can go about reintroducing balance to your life. You may need to
inform a few people of your plan to do so, though. If you’ve been putting in
12-hour workdays, it’s probably a good idea to inform your boss of the fact
that you won’t be doing that anymore. Many employers will revise their
expectations upwards if you’ve gone the extra mile — it stops being extra and
becomes required. You don’t want an employer to think you’re suddenly slacking
off. But sitting down and talking out the matter can be all that it takes to
step down to a more sustainable schedule.
Depending on just what your goal was, you may find that other
considerations must be made. Perhaps your friends or family members changed
their schedules in deference to yours: changing that schedule back may be
difficult. Being willing to compromise might come in handy if you are ready to
cut back on your effort in other areas. Unfortunately, creating a bit more
balance in your life may not be as simple as waving a magic wand, but it
possible with a little consideration.
Key to creating balance is ensuring that you do follow through
on any commitments you made upon achieving your goal. Maybe you set a secondary
goal — something that provided a little continuation and helped you take
advantage of the rush of meeting your initial ambition. Or maybe you have a new
project set for you by someone else as a product of your prior effort. You may
not be in a position to throw quite as much at your new goal as your last, but
if it is important enough for you to follow through on, you’ll find yourself
putting at least some effort into it. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as
long as you’re able to maintain balance with other parts of your life in the
long run. But you may need to set a few initial limits to ensure that any new
projects won’t consume your every waking moment.
With a little care, all that extra effort won’t become an every
day expectation. If you’re willing to prioritize other parts of your life, you
can build on your successes and keep some momentum without working yourself to
the point of going crazy.
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