👋🏼Hey everyone,

🍂 Autumn is finally approaching, despite having some weirdly hot days in October. I guess climate change is real after all. As the days get shorter, and everything becomes colder and more gloomy, it also becomes harder to stick to the grind and stay on track with your goals. Motivation is usually lower, your mood might be worse, and things just become more inconvenient. If, and when, you push through at this time of the year - it is also much easier to burnout (literally me rn) 🤕

So this week, allow me to share the methods I (should have) used, and am currently using, to bounce back:

• Light Your Fire In the Right Place

• Find More Fuel

• Appreciate the Heat, Not Just the Light

Apply these insights to your specific problems, stick to it, and I’m sure you’ll see changes in your motivation and passion for your projects. ❤️‍🔥

Enjoy,
Umar ⚡️

🔥 Light Your Fire In the Right Place

Your environment is the most important factor behind your performance, and preventing burnout - or coming back from it. Not being able to find something you need because your room is messy adds that little bit of friction that accumulates over time and can just push you over the edge. So can poor quality sleep, a poor diet - and an often overlooked aspect, poor company.

Being surrounded by people that consume your energy rather than nurture it can stop you from achieving your goals regardless of everything else.

What do energy consumers look like? 🧛🏽
People who don’t believe in you, who wear you down slowly with negative comments about you or even themselves, people that laugh at your ambitions rather than champion them.

This 5-minute video explores the idea of your social environment further: 📼

Key Takeaway: You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with - choose them wisely.

🧱 Build an environment that serves you and your purpose, it’s the second person on your team so don’t neglect it.

A good way to stay accountable is to journal and evaluate the factors that led you to feel or perform in a certain way - it helps to look at the bigger picture when searching for patterns.

🪵 Find More Fuel

Everyone starts things for a reason. It’s rarely random. Weeks, months, or years after starting out though, it’s easy to forget what pushed you to begin in the first place. Or maybe it just isn’t sufficient motivation anymore. Maybe you exceeded the original goal, or you changed your intentions.

🧭Revisiting your intentions and updating your goals is a crucial step to maintaining a project in the long-term. Failing to do so can quickly lead to burnout as a result of declining passion and most importantly; direction.

You can find fuel by looking at those who are on the same journey as you, and have been through the same struggles. Be careful here though, because seeing others succeeding where you’re failing can worsen your burnout. Focus on the aspects that they struggled with and how they overcame them.

Engage with and consume content that resonates with you as a person, that is unrelated to your work. Doing something different can be massively beneficial to avoiding burnout.

🍿Watch a film with an inspiring story, read a book that increases your creativity and gratitude, you get the idea.

Make personal gains without a cost. Costs lead to stress, which is a must-avoid when you’re already feeling on the ropes. Quality time with family and friends can be free, so is a walk in the park.
Clean your lenses, and regain sight of your goals.

My inspiring documentary recommendation: Beckham, on Netflix

Key Takeaway → If you don’t let it break you, you become unbreakable.

🤒 Appreciate the Heat, Not Just the Light

There’s more to what you do than the end goal. Along the way you’ll gain so many things which you might not have actually set out to achieve. Just because it wasn’t a part of the initial plan, that doesn’t mean you should ignore it.

🔨 You might not have reached your 1000 follower goal just yet, but the 800 you’ve gained so far are all part of the process, the skills you’ve learned to grow that much are now in your inventory. If you stop to look, you’ll see how different you are.

If you put an ice cube in a room that’s -20 degrees and slowly increase the temperature, nothing changes for the first 20 degrees. Once it creeps over 0, the cube begins to melt.

🧊 Even if you aren’t seeing progress or numbers just yet, your temperature is still increasing. Wait for the cube to melt.

This is all a part of learning to enjoy the process, so that you can keep maintaining it. Even now, when doing work is the last thing I actually want to do - I know that doing it will pay dividends further down the line. To make this process more enjoyable, I invested in this book:
The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down : How to Be Calm in a Busy World by Haenim Sunim

Key Takeaway → The world notices your efforts more quietly than you think

That was Edition Three. Thank you for reading. Burn bright.

If you have any comments, enquiries, or feedback, DM me on LinkedIn: