The Long Haul

You're listening to the uppercase life where we are doing our best to be doing our best. And I'm your host, Joseph Brewster. 

You know, for a lot of what we do in life, there are definite start and end moments. And you have a task list. You check things off the projects. Eventually close and you shut everything down. But then there are some really long term endeavors.
There are some big commitments that you make in life that may not have such a neat ending. Maybe they have no foreseeable ending, and they are just what appears to be indefinite. And when you hear that you may have a resistance in your mind and think, well, I don't want any indefinite obligations, I wouldn't take those on. That just sounds like a bad idea.
And I think well, for most things, that's true. And if you were just signing up for something with no intent of ever finishing it for a lot of things, that would be a bad situation. But there are other other things in your life that require that long term commitment and thinking of things like family, things like careers, things like roads to recovery.
If you're struggling with addiction and these things don't really have a foreseeable expiration date, you're just jumping into this and you're planning to do this for the foreseeable future. If you have ever stood at the altar and gotten married to a significant other, you probably made some sort of really long term commitment. And I bet you didn't put a time on it.
Right. And you probably didn't say for the next five years at least. And then after that, we'll see. No, we commit to these things long term, but then sometimes we get into them and we think, wow. Forever is a long is a long time. So how do you stay motivated? How do you stay everyday really invested in enjoying long term commitments?
Here are some ways. I think you can do that. These are attitudes you can take that will help you in these long term commitments to not lose joy over time and also help you to just continue to be invested and not be bored. We have a pretty short attention span these days and we like to be jumping on to the next thing as soon as possible, and it's only getting more and more that way.
The more that our media and the things that we intake are very fast and rapid paced, and yet there are still some long term commitments we're taking in. It's it feels harder now to do them. So here are a couple of thoughts for you. First of all, and this might sound weird, but wear it like a badge. And here's what I mean by that.
And I'm going to draw for this one off of the recovery community. So when you are a struggling addict and you're recovering, you might go to a group, you might be acknowledged in that group, and you might start on a journey of saying, I'm going to be sober from whatever. The thing was that you were struggling with addiction from.
And you're going to identify as an addict who is now going to be sober. Now, when does sobriety end? Well, hypothetically, never. Right. You're constantly on that journey for the rest of your life, which is a really long time. But you aren't encouraged to disguise that fact. In fact, part of being able to see the journey through is acknowledging it and saying, Yeah, that's me.
This is what I'm doing. I'm not ashamed of it. I'm not trying to hide it from the world. This is a part of my experience and this is a part of my identity where it's like a badge. And I think when you when you do that, say you stand up in front of an altar and you get married.
You put it on your finger. Most of the time, you literally wear it like a badge so that you can show people here, look, I've made a long term commitment to somebody. I'm no longer on the market. I'm not available anymore. I think wearing it like a badge is very important. It ties it in to our identity and it says to the world, I'm not ashamed of this, and maybe this isn't the choice that you guys have made, but I've made it, and I'm seeing this through and I'm actually quite happy about it.
I think that that self-talk and saying this is something I am proud of, I want people to see this about me is really important because it ties it into your identity and makes you feel a sense of pride for what you're trying to accomplish. And then the second thing, learn to level it up. I mean, nobody wants to play a game in which you never improve.
If you're playing a video game or if you're playing a board game, you constantly want something else, right? You want to get to the next level. You want to get more coins or something like that. So how can you level up in your long term endeavors? And I think this is where in particular when I think about marriage, this hits me.
I think a lot of times people are trying to level it up to find a partner and then they get married and they stop trying to level it up because they think, well, it's over, game's over. But I think what a sad way to look at your life, right? Like, game's not over now. You got to level it up from here.
So that doesn't mean sit on a couch and get fat because there's nothing left to do. It means, how can I take this endeavor to the next level? How can I make this even more awesome? Which for me, isn't that hard to do because I know more today than I did yesterday, so I should be able to improve it, right?
In what ways can you level up some of your long term endeavors, maybe in your career path? You're looking ahead and thinking this career is going to see me through the rest of my life. Perhaps. How can you learn a new skill? How can you take the skills you have to the next level? How can you use them creatively to enhance that vocational realm and just benefit everyone involved?
Level it up. All right. Number three. Recognize the mile markers? I've been on some really long road trips. We traveled a lot when I was a kid. And as a kid, you just think that the trip will never end. And, you know, there's that cliche of the kids always asking, how much longer are we there yet? And I think as a kid, I recall that we didn't have GPS, but my dad taught me how to read mile markers.
And so if I knew where we were on the highway, I could calculate how far we'd already gone by the mile markers, and then I could see where we were to the next place that we were going. Now, the journey never really ends, right? You're always driving somewhere new the next day, but in this way, watching the mile markers, there's this sense of motion, motion, motion, motion, motion and movement where I just sort of squish those two words together.
And it came out as motion. I'm going to use that. So you have motion and movement that you can sense by the mile markers, which is vital in a long term endeavor, because sometimes, man, you get on that highway and you're driving and you have 400 miles to go and it feels like hours have passed and all you see is the same highway.
But if you're watching those mile markers, you know, I'm a little further down this road. I am making progress and that's really vital. So how can you look for mile markers in your long term endeavors? And it might be different depending on what endeavor we're talking about, but make sure that you can find and identify ways to show how far you've gone.
Maybe they're natural. Maybe you just have reoccurring reminders of how far you've gone. I have been trying to learn a language and have been using the Duolingo app along with YouTube and everything else. But the app tracks how many days in a row I have been learning in, and so I can see that number of days and it makes me feel a sense of accomplishment and it reminds me how much effort and time I put into this.
I also use habit trackers so I can go in at the end of the day and track my habits for the day to just see how frequently I'm doing these things in. Man, when you go back and you look at a tracked series of habits over the course of two, three, four years, that is really revealing. And it'...