What are you willing to sacrifice to reach your goals?
Sacrifice is an important part of life. Recognising what you are willing to sacrifice to achieve your goals is an important step in reaching them.
When looking at your goals and what you would like to achieve, it’s important to take a moment to think about what in your life you are willing to sacrifice. What are the things you are doing every day, right now, that aren’t serving you and your goals? Do you spend too long on your phone? Are you watching too much TV? Are you hanging out with a group of friends that aren’t supporting you? These questions can be deep and confronting, but it’s important to consider asking yourself these questions and answering honestly about the areas in your life where you are not making the most out of your time.
Finding a balance is important, of course, going full ‘Grindset’ mode is only going to burn you out, but look at your day honestly and see what things tend to leave your routine first, and what are your non-negotiables. For example, for me, a non-negotiable of mine is sleep. If I don’t have a sufficient amount of sleep, I get moody, unmotivated, and the day is just a lot harder for me. Poor sleep affects my mental health and my ability to show up for myself for the rest of the day. Therefore, I am not willing to sacrifice hours of my sleep, and this reinforces many of my decisions, especially when it comes to staying up late at night. But what am I willing to sacrifice? This can change depending on what is in my routine. One hobby/skill I have been working on is learning to draw. I slot this in when time allows, but it is also the first thing to go when my attention is needed elsewhere because it isn’t directly related to any of my future goals. It’s just something that I like doing and want to get better at. But other examples are having breakfast in the morning, going to the gym, journaling, going out for drinks with friends, etc. Look at the activities you participate in often and decide what can stay, and what can go.
The Goal
A friend invited me to participate in a 14-day challenge. The topic of this challenge was to choose something that you can do every day that brings you closer to a personal goal of yours. My choice for this challenge was to learn 20 new German words a day. I have been studying German since the start of 2025, and I wanted to make some progress towards my goal of being able to understand German. While participating in this challenge, I found that in order to maintain the daily cadence, I had to throw out some of my other daily habits to make room for the tasks in this challenge. I found that my sleep schedule was shifting later because I was reaching the point where I wanted to go to bed, but I hadn’t finished my daily goal for the challenge yet, so I was staying up later to finish it. I usually Journal before bed and by the time I was finished my daily goal, it was well past my usual bed time and I was heading straight to bed. Reflecting back on the two weeks, I could see how much my usual schedule had shifted and the effect that was having on me overall.
It’s important to recognise that we make choices in life and those choices reflect on who we are as people. Making the right choices will push you in the right direction, making poor choices will hold you back. It’s also important to recognise that in order to achieve some of your goals, you may need to sacrifice things that are also beneficial to you, even if it’s just in the short term. You can always return to things later when you can make more time for them. This matters because trying to cram everything into your day is going to have the opposite effect of what you intend. You will burn out, struggle to complete things, and feel stuck.
The Problem
So what was the issue I was facing? The problem was that my schedule was already overloaded with tasks, and adding another one meant I had to remove something. This isn’t to say what I removed was the right thing for me to remove. I probably could have removed some time from my phone or slotted in my task somewhere else in the day where I could have kept up. But I’m not a machine, I am human, and sometimes I just feel mentally capped out, and it can be hard to show up doing everything over an extended period of time. So the trade-off was that I needed to remove something, and the thing that was left just so happened to be the last thing I did during the day, which for me was journaling.
At first, I slotted the German vocabulary study into my regular schedule. I was doing it on my commute, and it was only taking me 10-20 minutes to get through. Initially, I had the capacity to add it without removing anything. This changed as I got further in as the words I needed to review was getting longer and longer and I was still learning 20 new words everyday. This meant I was carving out up to an hour of time to get my study done, and I was either not able to do it in a single sitting or was left doing it just before bed. It quickly became unmaintainable. Especially if I had a busy weekend or a German lesson. I either had no time to fit it into the day or I was spending over 2 hours studying on certain days.
Going forward, I would lower the cadence into the ground. Instead of 20 new words, we’ll do 5. Consistency is king. But if I wanted to do an intense sprint at a higher cadence, the answer would be to choose something that I am doing regularly that I will sacrifice to make room for it. That way it’s not defaulting to something I would prefer to keep. Maybe I can make an effort to go to bed earlier and wake up earlier to knock it out first thing. The sacrifice needs to be a conscious decision because whether I liked it or not. I had to give something up to make space for it.
The Lesson
So the good news is that after recognising this, I have a better understanding of my limits as well as how I should approach goal setting and working towards goals in the future. Understanding that it is ok to put something down and focus on something for a short amount of time and then returning to what I put down is not only a great way to find balance, it is a good way to focus on one thing at a time and give it my all, rather than spreading myself thin trying to do everything at once.
I’m still human, and I’m not the best at recognising what I’m doing in the moment. I didn’t intend to cut out journaling and push my sleep schedule back until after it happened. I think going forward, it would be good to go into a sprint with something I want to cut out beforehand, so I can consciously cut something back as I focus on something and hopefully don’t lose things I still want to be doing.
Here is a condensed list of my takeaways from this experience:
Achieving goals requires sacrifice
You can choose what to sacrifice
If you don’t decide on something, it will be chosen for you.
How does this relate?
Now, if you made it this far, you might be wondering how this has anything to do with game dev. Well, on the surface it doesn’t directly. It applies to everything you do in life, and that includes game development. If you are struggling to fit working on your game into your schedule, I implore you to consider what I have discussed today and try to apply it to how you approach game development.
Where to from here?
So what’s next? I’m going to take a break from the vocabulary study for a little while, and I’ll pick it back up with a much more manageable cadence so I can maintain consistency. I do however want to be more conscious of my learnings from this and apply it to game development. Maybe I will do a game dev sprint in the future and choose something to sacrifice to achieve the goal.
Conclusion
This post is meant to act as a reflection on that experience and noting what I can take from it so that maybe it can provide some value to someone else.
If this resonates for you, I’d love to hear your experience. Please feel free to leave a comment on this post, or send me an email at mail@fearlessgamedev.com.
