Last Wednesday I woke up at 7 a.m., and usually I’ll go to the gym on a Wednesday.
But this time I didn’t make it. For some reason I did not get up on an instant, put on my clothes and walk to the gym.
At first glance this looks “bad” and to some extent it is. On the other hand, I have learned to listen to my body and analyze what it tries to tell me.

I’ve been working on a topic over the past week, that absolutely explodes my mind. Said topic is located within high class mathematics, and since I neither studied math, no have been very good at it in school, I fail to achieve success with the task.

To have you understand why I am telling you this a few sentences in between:
I am always telling people and mostly myself, that what I want to achieve, I can and will.
But one very important fact to always keep in mind is to be realistic with your approach.

I am sure that I could achieve the task I am writing about, but not within this short amount of time and not directly. At first, I would need to get into the basics of higher mathematics, then work my way towards the topic and then I could start working on the task and achieve success.

This post wants to show you, that it is one very important fact to take care of yourself and not let others push you to do something you clearly cannot achieve without extensive preparations.

I have been urgently pushing myself, reading about it, learning it. And in the end, I still do not have the slightest glimpse of an idea why it doesn’t work.

When it was given to me, I understood very soon, that the topic (it’s about implementing Frequency spectrum analysis btw.) would either take very long and way more preparation than my superiors thought. So, there were two options, either saying on an instant that I cannot achieve it or telling that I am not able to do so, with my current knowledge and that (in my opinion) it would be much better, economically and timely, to buy a solution or hire someone who studied said topic and exactly knows how to do it.
Well, they didn’t listen to me, and pushed me to do it on my own.
Since I still want to accomplish everything I am asked to or ask myself to do, I went on and tried.

I have been reading paper over paper, slowly grasping the idea of how it would be done. At the end of the week, I thought I got it, since I understood how Fourier Transformation worked. So, I went on and implemented what I had previously read and learned. It did not work. And I did not have any clue why, and what I might be doing wrong. I tried and tried and tried, read and read and read. Without success.
Being unable to achieve this task, but still being pushed to do so, made me sick.
It made me lose my motivation and disturbed me at my innermost self.

The past day I have reexperienced a phenomenon I already knew too well.

I went to bed, couldn’t sleep for hours, when I woke up, I was as tired as if I didn’t sleep at all.

It took me a long time to learn it, but now I know the importance of this early warning sign.

Having to accomplish something that you would need to take a long approach, like studying math for example, without this approach, is simply impossible and will destroy you.

Very dramatic words, but they’re true and it is very important to keep this in mind.

To make this clear, I am not talking about situations where you have task you don’t like, or that looks too difficult.

I am speaking of tasks that you are forced to approach in a completely unrealistic way. Sadly, the only way to protect your health, both mental and physical, is to say

No.

I won’t go into detail how this went on, but to give you a short wrap-up it was something like. “Well, that’s okay, I know someone who could help us with that topic. But I wanted us to achieve it on our own”

So, no drama, no disaster, no shouting. Best case. 😉

I’ll continue this text by another post, writing about how to approach goals, no matter how big, ambitious or “unrealistic” they are.

Since I laid of this task (which was very hard for me, you might already have gotten a slight understanding on how I act and that giving up is something I certainly do not like or do), I’ve been way better. Motivation returned, Today I woke up and felt so good and rested, that I not only woke up an hour early, but also went straight to the gym and now wrote this.

As always, I hope I can help some of you reading this, and on an extent, if you’re interested in direct contact, feel free to write a comment and get in touch! (English or German 😉 )