Always Have Short-Term Goals

You have a big, audacious goal, right? You want to be a starter next year, you want to get a D1 scholarship, you want to conquer the world! That is great! You need to have the vision, that desire, that drive.

You also need a path to get there. Human psychology shows that people are more likely to work hard to reach goals that are closer to their expiration date. This is called Goal Gradient.

The way to achieve this is to set up a game plan of where you want to be and how on a daily, weekly, and/or monthly basis you are going to work to achieve that goal. This essentially gives you check-in points to A. tell you if your reaching your goal B. give you shorter term motivation to reach smaller, more manageable targets.

For example, if your goal is to be a D1 athlete, that is certainly something to shoot for. But it doesn't give you daily targets to reach that goal. So in that instance maybe you set up a daily goal of completing 5x5 of bench press @ 80%of 1rep max. Or maybe you set a goal to have 2 tackles for loss in the football game. Or maybe it is a recovery day, so you just set a target of doing a contrast bath for 15 minutes and get 10 hours of sleep.

The more manageable and current the goal, the easier it is to achieve. The more relevant the short-term goal is to the long-term goal, the more likely you are to achieve that long-term goal.