Chisom Olamigoke: Are You Tired and Unmotivated? Relax, You Can Still Achieve This Year’s Goals

If designing a vision board were all it took to achieve our goals, everyone with a good imagination would be a high achiever. However, the truth of life is that beyond setting SMART goals, it’s the ugly work of ruthless execution that makes goals a reality.
What happens when you lose the zeal to pursue your goals? What do you do when you wake up with low energy and zero motivation? How do you explain that hesitance to do meaningful work because, suddenly, you are tired of everything?
We have just wrapped up the first quarter of 2025, and unless you have been living under a rock, you know the buzz of Q1 reviews and celebrating wins. In January, you were high on the excitement of a new year and set audacious goals, but it’s April, and while you know the goals are important, you are tired.
We have all been there. It is a very human emotion. Even your all-time faves have had their fair share of moments like this. Doubt this? Ask them! You are not a loser because you haven’t started working on your goals. Yes, Q1 is gone, but you still have nine more months to go. You can still win.
Dearest gentle reader, you can get your head back in the game and win this year. Let’s call this the 4Ls: Live, Leverage, Lean, Learn. Let’s examine what each one entails.
Live Intentionally
This includes knowing when to take a well-deserved rest. Sometimes, the most productive thing you can do is rest. And please, take it easy on yourself. You were created to be a human being, not a full-time machine. Lose the guilt that comes when you slow down to catch your breath. You are not wasting time. If you’re a born-again Christian, believe that as long as you’re in the Father’s will, you are right where He needs you to be.
Living intentionally also means taking deliberate steps in line with your desired goals. At the core of your being, you need to believe that you can succeed in life. Accept that you can make that happen, and then intentionally design a life where your dreams meet reality.
The call to live intentionally shouldn’t be seen as extra work or stress. See, the only things that grow without care are grasses. If you want a fruit-bearing plant, you have to show up and care for it. If you want your life to bear fruit, show up and care for it. Make this as practical as picking an area of life and, for the next 30 days, being intentional about the daily steps you take. A 1% increase every day is a big win.
Leverage Your Peak Periods
If you have ever described yourself as either a morning person or a night person, you have a clue about your most productive time of the day. By nature or nurture, some people find that they can commit to their most productive work at specific times in the day. As you get older, growing self-awareness means understanding when those periods are for you and scheduling your day’s work accordingly.
However, beyond identifying as an early bird or night owl, your peak period can also be influenced by other factors such as new months, new years, new weeks, or vacation seasons. For example, you might notice that you focus on work more when friends and family are around. It could be that their presence offers you some measure of support and frees you to commit to the projects at hand. It could also be that the excitement around new beginnings—whether a new month or a new year—motivates you to kickstart long-desired projects or adventures.
While it is important to build sustained discipline that carries through other days of the year, you can take advantage of that energy and take the bold step to start big projects. Pair this with a system of accountability, and you will have a winning combo.
Lean on Others
Growing up and passing through school, we learned to view examinations as a measure of success. We learned that to truly succeed in an exam, we had to take it by ourselves. We recalled the knowledge and training from the teachers from memory, answered the questions correctly, got a passing grade, and were counted as a success by our parents and every watching adult.
As we transition into adulthood, we often approach life’s challenges similarly to how we handled our school exams. We learned to rely on ourselves, recalling information from memory to succeed independently. Dependence on others during an exam is considered cheating. If we were raised to uphold moral values, we understand that cheating is unacceptable. We take pride in being honest individuals with our integrity intact. However, we have to grow to the point where we realise that adulthood does not follow that same template. The sign of growing up, the sign of maturing, is realising that I cannot do life alone.
This exam called life does not require you to rely solely on your memory. It’s not about proving my success through sheer independence. I don’t need to achieve everything by myself to show that I’m successful. Instead, I should learn how to leverage the strengths of others. I need to contribute my own strengths to a collective project—giving of myself while also accepting help.
When you adopt this mindset for your goals and plans this year, you’ll realise that you don’t have to accomplish everything on your list alone. You can depend on the strengths of others. You can collaborate, outsource tasks, and partner with people to achieve great things. This has been one of the hardest lessons I’ve had to learn as an adult, but it’s also one that brings the greatest rewards.
People cannot help you if you do not open up about where you need help. We are all here for each other, and the sooner we begin to recognise the people in our lives that God has blessed us with—those who can help us in unique parts of our journeys—the sooner we can begin to lighten the load we carry.
Adulthood is realising that you were not made to do life alone. Whether it’s through an accountability system, collaborations and partnerships, or outsourcing, all these prove that we need each other to succeed. As the wise proverb states, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
Learn as You Live
None of us came to this earth with a handbook detailing how we ought to live. And even if we were given a handbook at birth or our parents laid down strict rules to follow, the biggest shock of adulthood is realising that things don’t always follow templates.
So, what do you do?
Give yourself grace. Give yourself grace to navigate this life. Give yourself grace to learn from your mistakes. Give yourself grace to pick yourself back up. Yes, plans may not have gone as you envisioned, but give yourself grace, knowing that when you made those decisions, you did the best with what you knew at the time. That’s how you can easily dust yourself off, dream big and continue your journey.
If you stay bound to mistakes and regrets, you will not make progress. If you wake up every day mourning lost time, you will not make progress. Commit to continuous development; take feedback and get better. Ernest Hemingway captured it best when he wrote, “The world breaks everyone, and afterwards, many are strong at the broken places.” I hope that as you step into the next quarter of the year, reviewing your plans and dreaming big, you find ways and opportunities to fully maximise your gifts for the benefit of our world.
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