Why My Work Limit Increased Drastically
How I went from struggling to work more than 2 hours per day to having to force myself to stop working
For most of my writing journey, I couldn’t get myself to work more than one or two hours a day.
After seeing how much time successful creators dedicated to their craft, I became frustrated by my inability to push past this wall.
"How will I ever work that much?" I was staring at a gap that I did not know how to close.
More recently, I’ve been struggling to get myself in bed before 1 am because I work until I can’t keep my eyes open (not saying this is healthy).
What I once thought was impossible—giving the vast majority of my energy to one adventurous endeavor—has become my reality.
From the moment I wake up to the moment I sleep, almost all of my free time is dedicated to my dream.
Not only am I progressing like never before, but I’ve never felt so alive.
So what’s changed?
Nobody talks about this, but it’s incredibly difficult to work on something for more than an hour or two at the beginning of your journey.
Why?
Well, it’s partly that you haven’t built your focus muscle.
But it’s mainly two-fold:
You simply don’t have more than one or two hours of work to do because . . .
You don’t see a clear path from where you are to where you want to be (making everything other than the creative process feel like a burden).
What do I mean by this?
At the beginning of a journey, you have NO IDEA what you’re doing.
You think all you have to do is create and publish (which you can only do for so long in a day).
This works for the first couple of months because you’re entirely unaware of all the background work that goes into creation—not to mention, the vast intricacies of creation itself.
But as you progress and learn more, you become aware of everything you must do.
The path you must walk becomes just a little more clear.
And it opens to a seemingly unnavigable canyon of scary shit.
What was once just write and publish has become write, edit, framework, CTA, publish, share, comment, DM, post, thread, etc (this is just a fraction).
The beast you must become makes itself apparent, and you’re driven to a state of overwhelm.
I don’t know SEO! How am I gonna make a website? Design graphics? Learn these frameworks? Build an audience??? NETWORK?! It’s simply not possible. Can’t I get away without having to do these things?
Now less enthusiastic, you make apprehensive attempts.
And, of course, you suck, and they don’t work. After a couple of weeks or months, you are nowhere near where you first thought you’d be by now.
At this point, most people quit (perhaps you did too).
What you once dreamt of becoming no longer seems possible. You don’t see a way through this canyon of shit.
But something special happens if you don’t quit— you’ll step down into the canyon, placing one foot before the other, slowly and steadily.
Realizing the only barrier between where you are and where you want to be is clarity, you invest in your education.
Here’s where the magic happens: the barriers that once blocked your path lift, and a new world opens itself for exploration.
With more clarity than ever before, you see even more of the path, and you have a better idea of how to navigate it.
You are now more driven (because you see—via clarity—that what you want is possible), and as a result, you have more things to do with your time because you’ve accessed new skills (like missions in a video game).
Knowledge cultivates clarity
You see, without the right knowledge, you simply won’t know what to do.
But when you see everything you must do to get exactly what you want, it becomes much easier to focus on doing what you must (and doing more of it).
Your energy will align, and you will give more and more time to the accomplishment of that goal.
I struggled to focus for more than one or two hours because my goal was unclear.
I had no clue what the thing I was aiming at looked like, so I felt like the work I was doing wasn’t getting me anywhere.
But knowledge lifted this fog.
Over time, as I recognized all the stuff I wasn’t doing, I started finding the keys to unlock each new level.
My journey became more exciting because I started to believe that what I was doing was actually possible because I saw the path I must walk.
When I realized what I needed to do to make my dream a reality, I started spending all my time pursuing it.