Face it, we've all been there. You open up your browser, scroll through the headlines, and realize you just don't have it in you to do anything today. Maybe the markets are down and that depresses you. Maybe you look at a couple of the articles posted on Leo and realize you've got nothing to add. Maybe you click on the pencil to try and write a post and nothing comes out. There's nothing for you to add to the conversation. It's all been said already. Everyone is making money around you while you sit spinning your wheels. It can be very disheartening. You're in the doldrums and as "easy" as it should be to comment and vote on a few posts, you just can't get yourself to do it.
It truly is one of the hardest things about being successful on this platform. No matter where you look, you always, ALWAYS see someone doing better than you. They write better posts than you do. More creative, more pictures, better sentences, better ideas, etc. And, of course, they are getting better payouts as well. You see posts reaching $100 or more while you struggle to even get to 100 Leo, or 1000 Leo, whatever your goal happens to be. Meanwhile, your posts get pennies or a few dollars and it seems like it will take forever to create the stake you want to have. Your votes are worth pennies, at best, while they throw out votes in the dollars or even tens of dollars. All the while, the excitement keeps building in the platform and Leo/Cub/Hive keep going up making it even harder to get what you want.
Sound familiar? It should. Because, as I said, it doesn't matter who you are, there is ALWAYS someone ahead of you. Even the biggest accounts on here are looking "up" at someone wishing they could be there instead of where they are. It's human nature. I would even bet onealfa has a few people in mind out there he'd like to chase down at some point. Maybe not. But it wouldn't surprise me.
So what do you do? How do you get over the feeling of futility that can sometimes overwhelm our ability to act? I don't have a magic answer but I have a few suggestions and a few "tools" I use when I reach that point (which happens on a regular basis, by the way).
First, I repeat a couple of mantras to myself. One is to just "keep my head down and do the little things so that the big things can happen without even noticing." It is an often overlooked fact that people fear being too successful almost as much as they fair failure. Everyone has their own personal sense of "worth" and sometimes, if we start becoming too successful, we subconsciously put on the brakes.
It's like the temperature in a house. If it gets too cold (we're not doing as well as we feel we should be), we turn on the heat. But if it gets too hot (we're doing better than we feel we might deserve), we can also turn on the AC to cool us down. By just sticking to the game plan of doing the little things (curating, commenting, voting) we can keep taking little steps without feeling like we're getting too big for our own good. After all, making 3 cents on a vote or comment isn't going to make a difference, right? Over time, this allows us to create a new "comfort zone" where we aren't so afraid of our own success.
A second phrase I use that I'm sure you've probably heard before is, "Do now what most people won't, so that later I can do what most people can't." As I said, lots of people start fast and then fizzle out for whatever reason. The tortoise and the hare comes to mind. If you can keep doing the little things consistently, you WILL continue to grow and ultimately reach your goals. While other people are off doing other things, if I can just keep engaging consistently, I know I will get to where I'm going.
The last thing I do, and probably the most important, is I try to have, at a minimum, my "worst" day. My pastor at our church gave a sermon about his prayer habits. He wanted to be "better" at praying. So he came up with a plan that his worst day of prayer would be two minutes before he went to sleep. That way, when the same doldrums hit him, he would have something that he always knew he could accomplish, even when nothing else seemed to be going right.
Now obviously, the goal is to be much better than that, but if you know that on your "worst" day, you still will be accomplishing something and taking positive action, you can at least feel like you're not completely stuck in neutral. Mine is simply to make sure I keep my voting bar off of 100%. I also want to comment on at least two posts, but absolutely worst case, I go find 5-10 posts or even comments that I can upvote. It takes 5 minutes.
Very few of us have the mental fortitude to perform at a high level every single day. I know I don't. But if I can at least have my "worst" day every day, I will continue to make progress and the good days will be that much better.
What tricks do you use to get yourself going when you get "stuck"? Let me know in the comments below.
As always, if you like the content, please consider an upvote and comment. I will happily reciprocate.