How Do I Stick To Long-term Goals I Set For Myself?

[Locke]

I am having an internal struggle and I need some help. Right now I am 3 and a half months in on a 9-month commitment that I told myself I wanted to do in order to see how much potential I have to get good at a competitive video game. 3 and a half months ago I told myself that I wanted to commit to playing only one character for the next 9 months to see how I can develop in the game as just that character, since before I would be switching characters every 2 or 3 months. I am once again at the part where I am contemplating why I am doing this again and it's been putting a lot of stress on me. 

 

My main question would have to be about how to have a better mindset on getting to the end of the tunnel, if that makes any sense. Of course my thoughts are not necessarily dictating my actions, as I am brute forcing this commitment because I believe if I don't do it otherwise, then I will never truly get to know what I am capable of if I just commit to the long-term action that I set out to do. I know that there are many ventures in life that will take you way longer than 9 months to just get to the end of, and I am afraid that when I reach the end of this theoretical tunnel, there will only be assertion in the fact that I truly am incapable of being good at the competitive game I am playing. Don't get me wrong, I have been practicing on a daily basis for the past month now and even since I started this 3 and a half months ago, I have been studying about the game and basically putting in as much effort as I am comfortable with or I am feasible of accomplishing, since I am in college and so much of my time cannot be dedicated to getting better at this game. I've thrown away the concept of trying to have fun with the game since I started this because every time I have done this in the past, it just keeps having this cycle repeat and I feel like I don't actually go anywhere. It's what I have been struggling with for almost 3 years now and this 9 month journey will hopefully provide me an answer when I'm done with it.

 

I'm familiar with the concept of "No Pain, No Gain" when it comes to exercise and building muscle. I can accept that I have to do the same thing mentally when I am on this journey. It's rough. I'm filled with a lot of worries and anxieties that this won't work out in the end and I'll reach an unfortunate truth at the end. It's hard for me to visualize me being successful at the end because I feel like when I have done that before, I get way too ahead of myself and then I have expectations that I will consistently let myself down on. So I don't have any "real" expectations or goals with this 9 month period other than to give it a good consistent effort and see where that takes me. I don't know if this is a pitfall or not because I don't have much experience with making these kind of commitments. Maybe at the end of it even if I do reach the worst-case scenario, I can at least be a little more enlightened in what I should actually do with the game and pursue a different path that focuses more on my enjoyment of the game instead of trying to improve and get better. Of course I feel totally fine when I actually perform well at a tournament to my satisfaction, but it feels especially defeating when you practice for a whole month and then you actually play and then see that the practice doesn't actually come into play. It feels like a constant guessing game where I have to keep going deeper and deeper down this tunnel just to see what happens and I'm afraid that I am wasting my time. This game is what I am currently invested in with most of my free time when I am not occupied with doing college work.

 

Another negative feeling about all of this is that in my quest to see if I'm actually good at the game or not, there are other people who have been naturally staying committed to a character for longer than I have and are starting to surpass me in skill and results, even though I have been playing the game competitively for almost 3 years and they have been playing for less than that. It's nice to know that my friends are catching up and even surpassing me, but it just feels like more walls are being built in front of me that I now can't get past. It feels better now to have written this stuff out instead of just keeping it bottled up inside. I might not even need to change much of my actual routine, but I probably need to be thinking about it in a different way so that I'm not distraught every time I don't perform to my satisfaction. And what if that's just the way thing are for anything competitive? Is it just inevitable that you will be upset when you don't perform the way you want to in any case? I'd like to think not because I've seen people in my community who look as though they handle losses and their under-performance pretty well, but that is only what I see on the surface and I have no way of knowing what is really going on inside their head. 

 

How do people stay committed to just one thing for such long periods of time? There's so many things that I want to do and I feel conflicted on doing any of them because I feel like I'm missing out on the things I'm not doing. Do they just accept everything that comes along? Never give up?

[Henri]

Contemplate as much time as you play the video-game and look of all your questions still exist.