What's your pump-up?

Everyone competes or practices some activity that at a point requires a bit of motivation to keep going. No matter is swimming, running, boxing or coding, after a while, your brain gets tired, and ready to give up. Well, in that moment, you need something to stimulate you, so you can keep going. This is called a pump-up. Often boxers for instance are using war-songs to make their entrance. These greatly increases their confidence and puts them in a proper battle stance.

In my case, I often get tired while swimming, before achieving my goal for that session, and I really need to keep pushing and pushing while my lungs or muscles are letting me off. At that point, I put myself either in a life-saving scenario, where I imagine that at the end of the lane relies a drowning person, so I push harder and harder to get to it; or I think to something I'm dreaming at, and imagine it at the other end. This really works for me!


So, my question is ...what is your pump-up method/thing/thought etc?

application context

Interesting question.

I'm currently working on a biggish pet project that's pretty out of my usual comfort zone- starting up a website (which I'm terrible at) using jsp (which I've never used before) and tomcat (again, starting from the ground level) to help people show off their Java applets and applications (deployment has its own set of icky problems). So there are times when I get pretty frustrated with how slow it seems things are progressing, since I spend a lot of time going through basic tutorials instead of actually working.

But then I think about my end goal, and the fun I'll have once the website is established, or just being able to have something to show for my work. That gets me excited about the project again, and it lets me get back to work. Going on a walk or putting on some music doesn't hurt, either.

I think that way of thinking can be applied to pretty much any task. I don't know anything about swimming (I can't swim!), but I would assume it helps to be genuinely excited about your progress towards some goal. That's probably true for most things.

That being said, there's also a downside to thinking too much about your end goal- it's important to not get sidetracked, and to work on finishing the little things before worrying about bigger picture stuff. Daydreaming about your goals is a good motivator, but it's also important to become actually excited about the progress you're making and to continue making that progress.