7 Reasons Keeping You From Achieving Your Goals (in Business | Career | Life)

The mental barrier of deciding to learn or start anything is more difficult than the act of learning or doing that same thing. You should take action today, make progress (fail or succeed), and crush your goals.

You are Afraid To Start

Recently, many of my friends and family have been asking about how they can create side hustles or make money online and I verbally explained to them some of the few methods I use and have used in the past. It sounded gibberish to them. I started writing a series called Creating Online Hustle Series where I explained in full details with the following ideas on how anyone can start making money online:

Part 1: Make Money As A Writer
Part 2: Getting Your Upwork Profile Approved
Part 3: Flexible Online Tutoring Jobs You Can Start Today
Part 4: Get a Virtual Call Centre or Customer Service Work
Part 5: How To Start A WordPress Blog | Benefits Of Blogging
Part 6: How To Make Money From Blogging
Part 7: Proven Ways To Make Money Online With Your Multi-lingual Skills
Part 8: 10 Best Freelance Websites For Getting Remote Jobs

My greatest surprise is that almost two months into this series some of them are still asking me to help them with how to start. Have you signed for any of the methods I wrote in the series? No. Then how will you know if any of them works or not? While some people stay and complain about how broken the system is others are busy crushing their goals by going all in to try available opportunities.

Just Start! Just Do It! Every person who you admire their success today started from Zero. Oleg Vishnepolsky started with Zero subscribers on LinkedIn. Coca Cola Started with Zero Sales. Mark Zuckerberg started with Zero knowledge of programming until he started learning before he created Facebook.

You are Afraid of Feeling Stupid, Failing and What People Will Think

I see no reason why a full-grown adult will still care about what others think of them. Show me a person who is making progress in whatever area they choose to make an impact in their lives, then I’ll show you a person who is not afraid to try new things, not afraid to fail and doesn’t care about what others think of them.

I once had a discussion with a friend who to me is very smart and has a lot of value to give to the world. She really wants to create her own online course and publish it on Udemy and Skillshare. I asked her why she has not created the course yet. She told me that she thinks her thick Vietnamese accent will make people not buy her course. What if no one buys my course, she said? She thinks people will make fun of her videos. She has already defeated herself by playing the “people’s dislike” card on herself.

I showed her example of a course I bought on Udemy (Selenium WebDriver with Java — Basics to Advanced+ Frameworks)which is taught by an Indian with a very thick accent. I didn’t care about his accent. What mattered most to me was the value and knowledge I got from his course. I paid for the course, learned from it and the value I got from the course helped me secure my first Software Testing job. People are looking for the value you bring and not how your voice sounds. After all, English is spoken in different ways and voices.

The rude shock is that people are not even thinking about you. Just start. Your idea will only become a reality if only you give it a chance by trying. What’s the worst that could happen? The idea will either fail or work. Just two things but at least you gave it a try.

You Keep Pushing The Idea Away

Do you remember,
That song you have been planning on writing or producing?
That app you have been thinking of publishing?
That book you have always wanted to write but keep pushing back?
That blog you have dreamed of creating?
That great business idea you’ve been sitting on?

What’s stopping you from working on it?
You’ve got no time?
Do you think it won’t work?

Start Today! Stop pushing your ideas away till tomorrow.

Let me tell you about 5 Powerful Life Lessons Learned From Volunteering In Seniors’ Home. When you hear life regrets from elderly people, you would never want a second to pass you by without working on your dreams.

These 20 Wayne Dyer Quotes About Life | Sprinkled With My Review will spur you to action. According to Wayne Dyer, “Don’t die with your music still in you”. I believe so much in this quote because the richest lands on earth are the graveyards. They are filled with very smart people with brilliant ideas who did not work on those brilliant ideas. We have all shown up in this universe. Don’t let your age, gender or race deter you from working on your dreams.

You are Overthinking The Idea or Situation – Break it Down

Have you heard about the Japanese woman who created her first iPhone app at the age of 81? Your mind is stopping you. I used to always play the blame game until I changed the way I think. It took me many years of self-discovery to realize how my thoughts crippled my life. Quoting Wayne Dyer again, “When you change the way you look at things, the things (situations) you look at change. What you think is what you become.”

Most of us overthink situations. We think of all that could go wrong without looking at all that could go right too. I understand it is to our best interest to perform a detailed risk analysis, but letting this analysis deter us from even making the first move doesn’t help. Break down the process and start working on them in tiny bits will remove the complexity associated with learning or starting any new thing. If you are starting a blog and feeling overwhelmed by the whole blog writing process, try to write maybe 300 words a day to help you break down the task instead of writing a long blog post all at once. If you are learning to code, try to code or read about a programming topic for at least one hour every day. You will surely get better and get closer to your goal without burning out.

You Think You Are Not Good Enough and Don’t Have The Skills

When I move to Canada, I was faced with the confusion many new immigrants faced in their first year (Your imported skill is no longer selling!). Go back to school, learn a new skill and change your career. I was so confused that I registered for MCAT so I could go to medical school to become a doctor instead of waiting for the oil and gas industry to recover (a story I will leave for another day). I told a friend about my decision. She screamed, “That’s so much of a shift from what you do! Go for nursing! That’s much easier!”. I sat there looking at how she thinks I don’t have the skills or brains to do it.

Negative people and our negative thoughts can make us question our abilities. Whatever new venture you want to embark on, don’t let naysayers deter you. We can also be our own naysayers if we don’t control our mindset. No one knows it all. Even if you don’t have the skills today, keep learning. One day you will look back and see how far you have come.

You Haven’t Named 25 Reasons Why This is So Not Worth It

If you are at that point in life when you are not sure if what you are doing is worth continuing, use this method to determine when to kill an idea. When you try writing down 25 reasons why a business, training, project or idea will not work, you will find 75 reasons why it should work. I learned this from a life coach and I don’t know how he came up with the numbers but it sort of works because the mental energy you would use to write the 25 reasons will be so emotionally draining that you will automatically resort to finding ways to make it work. So, before you abandon your work due to its complexity or challenges, use the 25 reasons method.

Feeling Like An Imposter? Get Over it!

Almost everyone gets this feeling when starting a new thing. It could be when starting a new job, project, business or something else. I get it. I have felt like an imposter many times in my life. The most current one was when l switched my career from Geoscience to Software Engineering. When I got my first job, I always felt that one day I was going to be confronted by someone who would tell me how much of a fraud I was and that I wasn’t meant to be a software engineer. Did I get over it? Yes. Am I still coding? Yes.
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Just learn as many skills as possible to burst anyone’s bubble who would or may rise to doubt your skills. Your skills at the beginning may be shaky and rusty but with constant personal training and practice, you will no longer feel like an imposter.

Ask questions about what you don’t understand no matter how stupid you think it might sound. Even the most experienced person in your industry or business field has something they don’t understand.

Wrapping it up

After many years of procrastination, failure, being afraid to fail and worrying about what people thought of me, I have discovered that I have been fooling myself by holding onto these unhealthy habits and fears. My decision to change the way I think, squeeze out the juice in me and give my all to everything I engage in has helped me become a better person. Let me know if any of these reasons resonate with you and how you were able to overcome them and grow your mindset.

Don’t forget to leave lots of claps and comments on this article to support me.

Disclosure: The course mentioned in this article contains an Udemy affiliate link so I will receive a commission at no cost to you.