How To Build Your Stamina so You Can Start Building Your Dream Life.

Everything has a process, and if you want to start doing more to begin building your dream life, you’ll need to go through this process.

When I first took a crack at being an entrepreneur, I was under the false assumption that I only needed to do some work for a few hours a day, and eventually, everything would fall into place.

My mindset was not where it needed to be for me to remain consistent, be disciplined, and follow through on the days it felt like I was going nowhere.

After a few short weeks (back in 2021), I gave up on everything I was working on.

Thankfully, I stuck with one thing over the years — Medium.

Doing so helped me tremendously, and I learned some essential lessons about what’s required of you: not to have the life of your dreams but to begin building it.

I’m far from where I genuinely wish to be — I have these crazy, huge, bonkers dreams I want to accomplish, but as the famous Chinese parable says, ‘The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.’

And this is my first step — building my stamina.

Here’s how you can do it, too.

1. You must learn to follow through with everything — it all starts with following through with the small things.

You must build discipline. Otherwise, you won’t be able to take on the responsibility of more.

I didn’t understand what this truly meant until recently when I decided to do more and add more to my schedule.

I kicked up my writing a notch in November, and in January, I added another hustle (YouTube).

And so far, I’ve been able to follow through with everything I said I would do.

But I’m sure I wouldn’t have gotten to this point if I hadn’t decided to take care of all the other small things happening in my life.

Let me explain.

Before moving out, I wasn’t very good at maintaining my room and space.

I didn’t have a cleaning schedule or a routine to help keep things organized.

Fast forward to when I moved out. I slowly but surely started developing a cleaning and organizing schedule for my apartment — I got into the habit of sticking to a routine that allowed me to follow through.

More importantly, I built discipline to clean my place even when I didn’t feel like it.

This may seem like it has nothing to do with the other, but let me tell you, it does.

Discipline doesn’t discriminate.

When you build discipline in one area of your life, you can easily transfer it to another.

And that’s precisely what I did.

I started following through more and more with other things, like my budget, writing, journaling, organizing, decorating, saving, etc.

2. Pay attention to how much time this actually takes you.

You’ll realize you have much more free time available to work on the things you said you wanted to work on.

When you get into the habit of following through with the small things, you realize they don’t take up as much time or energy as you initially thought.

That was a huge ‘aha’ moment for me.

Most of my chores could be accomplished in a few hours on one of my days off.

I saw how much extra time I had available.

And with the momentum I had built by cleaning at the start of my day, I wanted to continue riding it.

One day, I sat down at my desk and came up with a few ideas of what I could do with this ‘new’ free time.

One of those ideas was getting back to YouTube.

I didn’t jump on it right away, but now that I knew realistically how much time I had available, I knew I could come up with a simple plan to start.

3. If you can learn to manage your time (and follow through), you will get done much more than you thought you could.

After seeing the reality of how much free time or unscheduled time I had, I realized an important lesson.

Most of the time, we have a time management issue, not a lack of time issue.

I realized this the moment I decided to ride my momentum waves. I would look at how much I had done in one morning and be shocked.

I could wash dishes, dust, vacuum, mop, shower, write, do laundry, and cook, all before 2 pm, and I didn’t have to wake up that early (9:30 — 10 am).

And the more I followed through with these tasks, the more confident, proud, and disciplined I became.

I wrote a blog about confidence, and this ties into it. Here it is if you want to check it out.

Here’s the gist of what I’m trying to say — Continue to follow through with the small things, and over time, you’ll get into the habit of scheduling yourself and simultaneously build the discipline to get what you want done.

Now, here’s how you use this to start doing the things you said you would do that will help you build your dream life:

4. SLOWLY, start adding new activities, projects, hobbies, or side hustles to your schedule.

I recently added YouTube because I’ve developed and cemented a routine with writing. I realized I had enough time available on my schedule to take on the responsibility of this new endeavor.

I didn’t add YouTube to my side hustles until almost three years after starting Medium.

Why? Because I had to be on this journey to build real discipline.

If I had started sooner, before I learned this lesson and shifted my mindset, I would have dropped it like I had before.

Instead of finding a way to make it work, I would have found excuses as to why it wouldn’t work.

Instead of looking at my schedule and looking for the small gaps I could take advantage of, I would have looked at how a large part of it was booked and would have said no.

Here’s another crucial lesson I realized: When you say no to the activities, projects, or side hustles you said you wanted to do, you’re saying no to bettering yourself and changing your future.

When I thought about it this way, it hit me hard.

I also thought of myself as a hypocrite because I said I wanted to change my life and my future, but I was saying no to the activities I needed to do to, well, actually do this.

But don’t get overwhelmed with the big picture. That’s why I’m writing this: to show you that it’s not as complicated as you may think and that it all starts very simply.

All you need to start with is following through with the small, mundane things.

When you’ve cemented a routine, you will have discipline. When you have discipline, you’ll follow through more often than not.

And that’s what this journey of changing our lives is about — following through as often as we can.