If you want to follow your goals, learn to say no to alternatives
Published: 2020-12-25 06:19:22

We are all raised by the feeling we can do everything. Our brain convinces us this every time. We want to go for a walk, hear a podcast, try to learn new things, and every time we feel proud of being multi-tasking. We try to push this to our goals too. We make plans for a month or a year, trying to bring every desire to reality. Our desires are countless, have their own will, working to nudge us in their selfish direction. But, our willpower is limited. Once it got exhausted, our brains start to lose focus.

It's not we are not competent to achieve a goal. Too many goals with their own willpower cancel out each other. The more direction you get pulled in, the less distance you'll travel.

I can relate to this when I was building an app and planning to launch it at the end of the month. First, I immediately start to plan with a bunch of features and push myself to develop them. As the deadline approaches, I had a bunch of fixes and undeveloped features. Sometimes I want to postpone the deadline a little further, hoping I can finish if there's a little more time. By the time I launch, I already exhausted a lot in the process.

We blame ourselves there isn't enough time in a day. We feel endlessly conflicted. And what happens to us is stronger than our ability to combat it. The clocks will never adjust for us to go beyond 24 hours. We should learn to say no to things that are not so important. 

Perseverance to success comes with immense will power and self-control to say no to our temptations. We must train ourselves to say no to what doesn't matters to reach the goal without quitting. We can do this together.


### Action items
1. Set your goal higher - More powerful and impactful it is, lesser the chance you think about other things.
2. Pick the tasks that only directly impacts your goal.
3. Never work on more than one objective at a time. 
4. Always have your decisions noted. Remember why you are doing this. This will neutralize your idle wants.

### Willpower - Super strength within to say no
When I was taking the #100daysofcode challenge, I got stuck in the initial days. Only when I said to myself, at the end of 100 days, I should have launched my product, I bring up my willpower to stay consistent. But this will be the hardest thing I think I had in the journey, always boosting my will to stay on track and postpone alternative desires for instant gratification. There were days I had my inner voice saying it's just one day to skip. To my experience, this is far more reason I said to myself for procrastinating. 

Saying no to alternatives, preventing distractions all require powerful
inner strength. It sure cannot be built in a day, but it's the thing that
we should be working to improve every day. Powerful it is, the lesser the
chance we quit.

100daysof.codes developed primarily on this, focusing on working in smaller batches and picking one task enough to push one step ahead to the goal.

![day03.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1608399218424/ePzxDyqF-.png)

### Thought for the day

![Set out to conquer the ocean. (6).png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1608394423539/7hXx-J0lq.png)

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This article is written by [Rams](https://twitter.com/code_rams) and co-authored by [Karthikeyan](https://twitter.com/_karthikyn). 

> This article was written as part of day 03 of the [#14daysbreakloop](https://100daysof.codes/the-14daysbreakloop-challenge) challenge. This article was originally published in [blog.100daysof.codes](https://blog.100daysof.codes).