Why and How to Keep Moving Forward?

 

So often in our lives whenever a bouncer smashes our face, or we get punched right at the nose, or we hit a wall head-on, or when life beats us to a pulp, we collapse brutally then and there. There simply seems to be just no way to keep moving forward, to not give up as the adversities cast a looming shadow over us. Succumbing to the hardships and blaming the external situations is perhaps the easiest and the only way out(at the moment).

While it surely is easy to simply spew out the words “Fall 9 times and stand 10 times”, when we actually are in the same situation, it’s not exactly a walk in the park. If only it were that easy to keep moving forward even after both of your legs cut out, then everybody would have done it, and everybody would have done something worthwhile with their lives, but that’s unfortunately not the case.

Terrible things happen, poo-poo happens, shit happens, setbacks happen, unanticipated things happen, and bouncing back from the abyss isn’t exactly everyone’s cup of tea. How likely are you to keep moving forward with your head held high even after you were abhorrently stabbed in the gut and the knife kept on twisting?

Let’s say you were working on a project(can be anything related to work or relationship) of yours for the last 3-4 years. Every waking second of your life was passionately and crazily dedicated to your project. You were literally living and breathing your project but it turns out that your sweet little venture, at last, went its belly up. 

Now I know all the reasons why you are gonna be frustrated and mad as hell and wouldn’t be willing to keep up with that shit no matter what, but I am here to tell you why and how you should still keep moving forward and that too with the utmost grace and poise. 

WHY SHOULD YOU KEEP MOVING FORWARD?

 

You Are Not Alone

Here’s the thing. Consciously or unconsciously your actions and your reactions aren’t just limited to you and your life but others as well. You wouldn’t even know that how and in what ways your ‘moving forward’ attitude is inspiring and motivating others. People may or may not be citing you as a positive or negative example to others or even themselves, depending upon what you did.

They may either applaud your never-giving-up attitude, praise your valor, strength, mental rigidity and convince themselves that if you can do it then so can they. Or they may simply assume that if you couldn’t do it then it must be really hard and they would give up before even trying.

Always keep this thing in mind that whenever you face a situation of either giving up or keep moving forward, choose the latter because you don’t know who you might be inspiring to do the same at any given point. It can be your children, your siblings, your parents, hell it could even be the guy next door for all you know. 

You have to fight not just for your own selfish ass but for this world too. You won’t even realize how many paths you are unlocking not just for yourself but for the people who are already walking on a similar path as yours or for the upcoming set of people who are about to embark on the same journey as you did. 

Just imagine the impact your actions can have on them. The kind of attitude and mental belief system that they are gonna initially set will be, to a certain extent, based on what you already did.

Keep this in mind, if you lose, then you are not the only person who loses; a number of other people will also lose their hope along with you. Consequently, if you win, then you aren’t the only person who’s gonna benefit from the win and countless other people will take inspiration from you. That’s how you initiate a chain reaction, and whether you want this reaction to be an impactful one or a discouraging one, that’s up to you to choose. 

At the end of the day, it’s not what you say that people listen, it’s what you do that people care about and pay heed to. So, just DO! Don’t stop. Keep grinding, keep hustling, keep moving forward. Hang in there.

Take it this way, of all the people who you feel inspired from, be it Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Abraham Lincoln, Abdul Kalam, or Mother Teresa; they too had a choice at some point in their lives to either lay down their weapons and abandon the ground or to keep taking shit and keep moving forward irrespective of how messy things got. And because they chose the latter, they are where they are and that’s how they made themselves capable enough to be an inspiration for the masses. 

 

Don’t Break Your Heart

Well, whenever it comes down to situations of either giving up totally or keep moving forward, then chances are that whatever it was you were doing is pretty close to your heart. If it weren’t then you wouldn’t even give it a second thought and straight away jump to the next thing and forget about it totally. It’s only when something we care about or are passionate about gives us pain that we usually contemplate screwing everything and just get out of the way, quitting.

Here’s the thing, the matters of the heart are very complicated. Following your heart, your desire, your core purpose doesn’t come for free, it comes with a price of its own. You gotta pay with your blood, sweat, and tear, literally, to be able to buy the privilege of living or even chasing your dream.  

If you give up on your dreams, if you give up on what your heart set out to do, then you are not gonna live a satisfied and blissful life. You will keep on recollecting your old memories which will fill your vessel of regret up to the brim, and that’s not a pretty situation to go through.

And just to be clear, moving ahead and trying again and again and still failing isn’t gonna hurt as much as not trying at all right after the first blow. In fact, failing isn’t gonna hurt at all if you know it in your heart that you tried pretty damn hard, that you were all in, that you gave in your everything.

At last, if you are not looking out for what your heart truly desires and what your soul actually wants, then who else is gonna do it for you? You got one life, and if you wanna live your life to its fullest instead of barely surviving and getting through life, then you have to have to do what’s in your heart, irrespective of how much pain it inflicts upon you. 

The choice is yours: do you simply wanna revolve around the sun doing meaningless and heartless things as you stopped doing what you truly loved because it got hard, or do you wanna spend the rest of your life relishing every moment and giving in your 100% to the thing you love to do and not giving a damn as to whether you are succeeding or failing? 

I’d choose the latter. I would be more than happy to give my best and fail in the thing I love rather than doing something I don’t have my heart, soul, and mind into and succeeding in it. That success would be hollow and meaningless and uninspiring. This doesn’t mean I wouldn’t want to succeed in the thing I actually love either.

And besides, come to think of it, if you are not able to make it in the thing you love from all your heart and soul, then what makes you think you can excel in something you are not into in the first palace? It doesn’t need a rocket scientist to figure out that we don’t really have a choice here but to keep on continuing down the path that we were meant to follow.

Success is not guaranteed and failure isn’t final. Keep this in mind.

 

It Will All Be Worth It, Eventually

That final moment of your life when you will be able to say that “Yes! I finally did it. I knew I would be able to do it and now AT LAST I FINALLY DID ACHIEVE IT! Everyone around me kept saying otherwise but I knew in my heart what I was capable of and now I proved it.”

It definitely will be worth it. Goes without saying. 

And when it does become worthy, then let me also tell you that the period you struggled and wandered around not knowing what you are gonna do and getting punched in the face again and again and becoming hopeless at times contemplating giving it all up, will be your most cherished memories of all time.

You will come to the conclusion that you were able to make the biggest leap in making your dream a reality only when you felt like succumbing to the pressure but chose not to and decided to keep moving forward nevertheless. And besides, we all know that ‘No Pain, No Gain.’ But when it comes to real life, we kinda subside all this and simply focus on getting what we want with the least possible endeavors. 

The thing is that the harder the struggle, the more painful the process, and the more challenging the situations, the more meaningful will be your success, the more satisfied you will be with your life, and the more content and ecstatic you will feel with yourself. 

Just imagine guyz, if you get everything you want just by swinging a magic wand, or by simply gulping a potion or something, and waiting for a miracle to solve all your problems, then what good is it gonna do? 

You didn’t grow or learned anything new. You simply acted like a baby who gets what he wants by whining, complaining, and rambling, getting happy for a moment or two, and then again wanting something else as he got bored with what he had. One doesn’t wanna regress into a baby now, does he?

The sacrifices, the hardships, the challenges, the mental turmoil throughout the process, the busting of one’s ass to get things done, the never giving up and keep on moving forward attitude—shits like these give meaning to your success. Stuff like this makes you realize that “yes, it indeed was worth it”.

So, what would you like to remember when you are 80, lying on a hospital bed, waiting for death to take you far-far away? The fact that you kept pushing your boundaries, you kept moving forward without giving a rat’s ass as to what came in front of you, you did whatever it took to keep your dream alive, or that you tapped out after the first round itself and gave in at the slightest discomfort and pain? The choice is all yours, like always.

 

HOW TO KEEP MOVING FORWARD?

Now that we have established the ‘why’ of ‘keep moving forward’, it’s time to get into the ‘how’ of actually making it happen, the nitty-gritty details, the “getting your hands dirty” part.

 

Listen To Your Heart to Keep Moving Forward

So many people miss the most important point: listening to their heart. They either subside what they truly want and do what others tell them to do or are just simply oblivious to what they actually want. And needless to say, it isn’t gonna matter whether you kept moving forward or not if it’s the wrong direction that you have been treading on. You can hustle, grind, and sweat all you want; but if it’s pointing to the wrong destination, then it is all for nothing.

The thing is you can’t let anybody decided things like these for you, and I mean anybody, I don’t care if it’s your parents, spouse, friends, relatives, or society. You gotta make decisions like these on your own. Doesn’t matter if it’s right or wrong, the more pressing issue is whether you were the one who took the final shot or not.

Right or wrong is totally subjective and keeps on changing from person to person and from situation to situation. If you are wrong then you are wrong, if you are right then you are right. You will have to bear the consequences ultimately, and hence, it should be you only who should be responsible for the kind of consequences you want to face. It shouldn’t be someone else’s hand on the steering wheel in your own car of life.

When you listen to what your heart has to say and take decisions based on that, then you will automatically find it super fun and exhilarating. Because nothing is above the fact that you are doing what you love to do.

Even if you fail and hit a wall, it won’t matter much to you and ideally, you would still keep on surging ahead with your head held high. You will be living each and every moment of your life if you are truly in sync with what your heart has for you. Now, that’s something to relish.

Don’t worry if you are unable to please everyone, it’s not your job to seek validation on what you want to do with your life. In all honesty, if you truly decide to take the plunge and actually follow your heart, you are gonna piss more people than you thought you would. Yeah, that’s the cost of following your passion which is by the way far less than not following what’s in your heart.

I will reiterate once again, living life on your terms trumps everything else. Even though what you set out to do might not be some grand worldly event, and it doesn’t have to be, what matters is whether it came from your heart or not. And when you couple this with the ‘not giving up’ and ‘keep moving forward’ bravado, something truly magical starts happening.

Doing something small with all your heart and passion is infinitely better than doing something big in the eyes of the world where you don’t feel alive. In fact, the real ‘big’ is that ‘small’ thing you do with all your heart, mind, and soul. So, stop chasing the worldly standards of ‘something big.’ Create your own standard.

   

Change the Plan, not the Vision

In essence, this is what the whole notion of ‘keep moving forward’ is all about—sticking to your goals, not compromising your vision, and making your dream a reality. Your plan is not your endgame, it’s merely a means, a path, an option to help you get where you want.

No matter how many times your plan falls apart or puts you in an even worse condition than before, you cannot, and I am saying it pretty strongly, you cannot change your vision because your plan is letting you down.

If plan A failed, then you come up with another one and another one and another one until you make it. People are funny, they set up multiple plans for different goals which is a horrendous mistake. Plan A for Goal A, Plan B for Goal B……and so on. What you should be doing instead is fixate yourself on a single goal and focus all your energies there. Plan A for Goal A, Plan B to make Plan A work, Plan C in case A and B fall short. What you don’t do is take your eyes off of the 8th ball. 

Switching goals like a teenage girl switch her dress isn’t what I would call ‘moving forward’. It’s more of a starting from the square one which isn’t the smartest thing to do. Walking tortoise pace in your journey is far better than starting all over because you feel the need of pacing like a rabbit.

Maybe there’s a steel plate behind the spot where you are trying to hammer a nail, so instead of instantly giving up and choosing another wall, simply try and move the location of the spot. Also, you don’t have to keep on hammering the nail if it isn’t going in at all. If your goal is to hang the picture frame on the wall, then maybe try something else if hammering the nail is not right up your alley.

This is also what some people do. They misunderstand the whole point and keep on trying the same plan again and again that’s utterly failing them and then hide under the notion of ‘never giving up’. Well, that’s not moving forward, that’s plain nuts. That’s like trying to row a boat against the flow of the river. You are more likely to get stuck at the very same place if not thrust back with the river. 

The ‘how’ is not as important as the ‘why’. Once you figure out the ‘why’, then I don’t care how you do it, I mean as long as it’s legal and within your moral and ethical boundaries.

Change your entire game plan, think outside the box, enhance your mindset, come up with a new strategy, take a break or any one of the hundred and twelve different things to make your vision successful—that’s what ‘keep moving forward’ is actually all about.

Screw the Results, Focus on Your Work

Stop worrying about fear, success, pass, or fail. Our job isn’t to keep looking over our shoulders and keep on checking the score every 2 minutes. If your eyes are glued to the matchboard, then who’s gonna focus on the game? 

Unfortunately in today’s world, that’s what’s happening with most of us. All we care about is the results, which is mostly responsible for why we stop putting in the work needed. That’s what makes us quit, lose our shit, and deviate our attention from the most important thing. 

Now, this doesn’t mean that you are working your ass off blindly and totally aimlessly. If what you are working on isn’t set in the right direction, well then you are definitely gonna find yourself in a pool of shit pretty soon.

You should only look at the results to take feedback from them so that you can eventually improve your work and know that you are walking in the right direction. One shouldn’t judge his worth based solely on the underlying results. In all probability, there are simply too many factors in play that you don’t really control the outcome, you simply can’t. 

So, why really bother with something you have no direct control over? This is precisely why I don’t really measure my worth based on the results or the outcomes. That’s how the world will measure you, but not you because that’s an incomplete metric. You should quantify your success on the basis of how many dedicated hours you put in, how much you grind and hustle, how you kept moving forward irrespective of the external circumstances, how much hard work and smart work you did. 

Let your focus hit the spotlight on the right thing, and the result will automatically take care of itself. And when I mean the right thing, or the work, it doesn’t just mean all the physical work we do all day long through our physical bodies, it also means doing the work to get our mindset straight, to elevate our intelligence, and to enhance our thoughts. Until and unless you straighten the latter part, you can forget about doing anything right. 

So now, who do you think is gonna play the better game: the one who’s glued to the scoreboard or the one who’s concentrated on playing the best game possible? See my point? So, in essence, your not focusing on the result is what will give you the result. Strange isn’t it? Yeah, I know we live in a funny world.

So, if failures strike, strike back with double the amount of passion, hard work, and dedication. Be attentive to the shit that you control instead of letting something you can’t control, control you.

 

 

You neither have to run for your goal nor should you stop. All you have to do is keep on walking.