TLDR:
- Motivation. If your soul can no longer be satiated by the pursuit of this ambition, move on. Otherwise, what’s stopping you right now?
How do you continuously fuel the pursuit?
So you’ve been working on something for a while now. It can be anything, be it a startup, a product, a newsletter, whatever.
You began the pursuit out of genuine interest and love for that topic and what it is you’re doing.
You found that you had a natural aptitude for a particular thing, so you wanted to see to what extent you could take it; it’s now an ambition you find yourself chasing to the deep ends of the earth.
But now, it’s been a few months in, and you’re finding yourself starting to run out of gas.
So the question now becomes: “How do I find the fuel I need to continue?”
It’s simple: ask yourself questions pertaining to your motivations and see what are the answers you come up with.
What motivated you to even begin this pursuit in the first place? What motivated you to keep you going all this time, in spite of all the highs and lows you may have experienced? What is the motivation that drives you to take the initiatives you do pertaining to the ambition every time? At your current stage, what is your motivation now to keep chasing that ambition to the deep ends of the earth, or how do you now feel about it?
From my personal experiences, as obvious as it is, I’ve found motivation to be the biggest driving force to continue any pursuit I’m currently in the middle of. In a literal sense, for me, motivation is the fuel needed for my driving force. If it is not there, then I can no longer turn on the ignition.
If you’re still confused after asking yourself the aforementioned questions and beyond, think about it this way: just like how we ideally want to satiate our stomach with the foods we like, our soul should also be satiated in that manner. Except in the case of the soul (unless you believe that food can also nourish the soul), it should be satiated by doing the things we enjoy doing.
Ask yourself this: “At my current stage, would my soul still continue to be satiated by this pursuit? A week from now? A month from now? A year from now?”
And you’ll get your concrete answer just like that, instantly.
Simply put, the fuel for the driving force in my view is motivation. If you find your brain’s gas station (formally known as dopamine) to be more or less virtually empty for this ambition, the soul cannot be satiated from that pursuit any longer; it’s time to move on.
But if the nozzle is still full of dopamine for that ambition, then what’s stopping you from pursuing it further right now as you finish reading the final sentence of this article?