““People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered; Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives; Be kind anyway. If you are successful you will win some false friends and true enemies; Succeed anyway. If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you; Be honest and frank anyway. What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight; Build anyway. If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous; Be happy anyway. The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow; Do good anyway. Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough; Give the world the best you’ve got anyway. You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God; It was never between you and them anyway.””

- Mother Teresa

Because what matters the most is your heart. It’s never about the things outside of your heart.

You know that feeling. Where you’re that close to finishing a project, or achieving a goal, or crossing a task off your to-do list … but you just can’t muster the energy. You’ve lost interest. You’re exhausted. Drained. And you don’t know why. From zenhabits.

I have been burned out several times in my life while working on big projects. There are several trends I see during the times I’ve burned out: it’s a big project where I am the only person working on it, I spend the first couple of months working tirelessly and after a while my interest has dropped. And the article from zenhabits describes it beautifully:

It’s like driving toward a mountain in the distance. You can drive for hours, but the mountain doesn’t seem to get any closer. And spinning your wheels gets real tiring real fast.

And the rest of the article talks about how you should set goals, work less and just enjoy your free time. I find a balance between work and life are extremely important and the article stresses this point and I couldn’t agree more.

I’d just like to add a further point of “How to start working”. Sure we may have all the right requirements in the car to start the engine, inspiration, motivation and anticipation, but we first need to start the car. This is also a problem I usually face. But usually I overcome this by doing some extremely simple/mundane work to get started; writing down stuff/taking notes is usually the best way I get my engine started.

Then just like a snowball rolling down a mountain, it turns to an avalanche. And hopefully it keeps on rolling