Motivated by Stickers

Do you remember the golden stars? I can’t even remember if I ever got golden stars in elementary school, but I do remember them existing. There’s something about that little sticker of motivation that works. It’s not expensive, it’s not even elaborate, it’s just a simple sticky piece of paper shaped like a star, with sparkly gold coloring.

When doing anything, it’s hard to find motivation to keep it up. Enjoying something is helpful, but whenever you set a goal to build a habit, roadblocks always find their way to you. It’s not about wanting or not wanting. It’s about life. One day, you have hours to write and nothing occupying your mind. The next day, you have a bad day at work. You have endless household chores to do, and honestly, sometimes you’re just not feeling it.

When these challenges hit, it’s nice to have a bit of reward showing your efforts. At first, I measured my accomplishment by engagement. The more people saw and interacted with my blog, the more I felt I could put into it. Honestly, though, I didn’t have that much engagement, so that motivator fell off pretty quickly. Then, when I changed my goal to write daily, a new motivator suddenly appeared. The website builder I use sent a notification I had a two day streak.

It wasn’t much. I mean, who cares that you did two blogs in a row? I did. It was really fun watching that streak build from two to three to four. With that new motivator, it was fun to see how long I could go. Now other things in life occupied my brain enough. I sadly broke my streak. Unfortunately, I realized it was walking in the door on a late shift and saw it was past midnight already.

Here I am back again, though, hoping to build a better streak. I’m excited to see how many blogs I can do in a row. I can only hope I keep up my writing enough to have a blog available to post each day. I have plenty of ideas, though.