how to keep going when you hit the plateau

Once you embark on a worthy pursuit, there comes a time in the journey when your intrinsic motivation starts to wane, when you hit a plateau. Your heart may point you in one direction, while your head might point in another. So who do you listen to? On one side are emotions, and on the other side is logical reasoning. And it’s during those times, when you must persist and resist.

There are times when you must think logically, and then there are occasions when emotions take precedence. To keep moving forward, you must strike the right balance between the two. Giving priority to just one of them might be a risky, dangerous strategy in the long run; you’ve got to be flexible and pick the right approach for a given scenario.

As Jocko Willink writes in his book Discipline Equals Freedom: Field Manual, “It takes both emotion and logic to reach your maximum potential, to really give everything you have, to go beyond your limits. Because emotions and logic will both reach their limitations. And when one fails, you need to rely on the other.” He further offers this great piece of advice: “Fight weak emotions with the power of logic; fight the weakness of logic with the power of emotion. And in the balance of those two, you will find the strength and tenacity and the guts to say to yourself: I. DON’T. STOP.”