How do you stay locked in? 🎯

Have you considered keeping a list of "Buoys"? I have a little section in OneNote where I paste all of the good vibes that I receive for the work I'm doing so that if/when I'm having a rough day, I can refer back to those happy little snapshots to keep me on track. Instead of "IP Reuse", it's like ~ "Encouragement Reuse"! 😂😂

One way to stay locked in is to focus on short term goals - weekly/monthly. What do you need to stay focused on this week to meet your monthly targets. How will those get you to where you want to be at the end of the quarter. Refocus every Sunday night. Look over the week. Get started. Don't beat yourself up for a bad day - look at what went wrong and solve that for the future.

These seem like a natural part of entrepreneurship, and probably for many other pursuits as well. One idea is instead of trying to avoid the swings, embrace them. For me, this means on days of overflowing confidence, I try to push forward as much human outreach as possible-- confidence is best shared with others. On days of skepticism, I'll focus more on internal matters like coding, bug hunting, QA testing, catching up on important articles I should have read, etc. -- sometimes will even ask to reschedule calls!

Yeah I'm often getting that feeling, too. Actually think there are a couple of distinct ways of dealing with these mood swings (which are natural, cause we are all bags or flesh and so on..) 1) Like with mindfulness, you just acknowledge that fact like "Yes, I am having a change of attitude towards my goal or my results, or whatever I'm doing. But that's natural, and it's nothing bad; also I can use this to my advantage by coming up with improvements and meaningful enhancements when I'm felling skeptical and just getting shit done when I'm feeling energetical" 2) Some books and productivity blogs say that you just need to focus on small pieces of work or tasks every day (as Juliet points out below) and try to divert attention from existential questions (like "why am I doing this"?) most of the time. Reflecting is cool, but it shouldn't get in the way of you incrementally crawling towards your goal with each passing day and adjusting your tasks based on the results; with this approach you "just do it" And rewarding yourself by looking at what's already there or motivating by looking on what other's already achieved should also be beneficial. All in all, I think it's good to just recognize you're a human being and not a productivity machine and keep going where you're going

First of all, we're all a little crazy for working on our companies :) It's only stupid if you're absolutely sure it's not going to work (..and continue to work on it). A few things really help to ride the waves: • Meet other founders in person (you'll often find that you're way ahead or "in-tune" with your company far more than you think) • Talk to your users/audience. You might get praise (boom!), or criticism (womp.), but at least criticism act as invaluable clue of what to improve, which drives motivation. Often times, when a user finally has the conviction to tell us something they don't enjoy about guestboard.co, I think "THANK YOU. Let's fix that". • Always think back to the most basic thing you're solving (for me it's huge group texts), and keep it top of mind as a motivator. There ARE other people out there who have that same pain point (but, you know, confirm this as much as possible :) Keep grinding! Embrace the suck!