I’m still fighting to regain the leverage that I had a few years ago. As my quality of life has improved, I’ve become complacent. I am trying my hardest to channel my energy once again; after all, my life is at stake here. If I don’t do everything I can to ultimately prevent my death and accomplish my other goals, I will have wasted my life, and I feel an immense pressure to avoid that.
I created a new method lately to motivate myself; I constantly reminded myself how scarce time really is. It feels like I have millions of days to live, but the truth is that I only have about 20,000 more—if I’m lucky.
This method worked great, yesterday. I worked four times harder than normal, probably about 40 percent of my full potential. Whenever I started to click onto a website that caught my attention, I screamed “No time! No time!” and got back to work.
I haven’t had as much success today because I haven’t been trying as hard. But I will prevail!
I recommend adding the time scarcity realization to your list of mental motivators. It’s helping me and I hope it helps you too! I just recorded an episode in my podcast about time scarcity if you want to hear a little more about my perspective.
Is it really prudent to state that you normally work at 40% of your potential when you bill by the hour? Just trying to help….
Hmm… I wonder how much time, cumulatively, has been spent playing all of your games. It would be interesting to compute the ratio of the time spent (by you) in developing them to the time spent (by others) engaging with them.
It’s perfectly acceptable. I have extremely high standards for myself. I expect to one day be worth $100-200 an hour at least.
So for me to be selling 10% of my potential at $10 an hour is fine–I’m providing $10 of value per hour. I could just generate more if I lived up to more of my potential.
I charge market rates for my services (unless you count outsourcing overseas, which is cheaper.) People are free to shop around for the best value.