On Motivation
Motivation is a fickle creature. One moment it’s burning in your belly like a fire, pushing you on to complete your task, and the next it’s…
Motivation is a fickle creature. One moment it’s burning in your belly like a fire, pushing you on to complete your task, and the next it’s vanished entirely. As a result, relying on motivation in order to get things done is very likely to be doomed from the start. When motivation leaves us in the middle of a project — whether it be for school, work, or a hobby — we feel lost, as if we’re drifting at sea with no direction.
These feelings can be extremely detrimental to our mental state and productive effort. More importantly, the anticipation of these feelings can cause us to engage in a form of self-sabotage. If we know that our motivation will leave us during a project, why even start it? We begin to withdraw into ourselves, avoiding new tasks and experiences because we know we won’t follow through on them. We start to actively give up, even before the fire has left us, in order to avoid the embarrassment that occurs when motivation leaves us without our permission or foresight. We start to wonder if we’re broken because of our consistent loss of motivation — if we’re doomed to always start new projects, never finishing them.
The key is to stop relying on motivation. We will never be able to control when motivation arises and when it abates. What we can control are the systems we put in place to support us in the pursuit of our goals when our motivation leaves us — or when it never appears at all.
These systems, or habits, allow us to automate our productivity by prioritizing the key components of our projects. We do this by first identifying the small steps that can be taken each day in order to reach towards our goals and then decreasing them to the simplest possible form. For example, if your goal is to be a reader, you know that you need to read every day to cultivate that identity. We have a few options we can use to decrease “read every day” into a simpler form — we can change it to “read one page of a book every day”, “read one sentence from a book every day”, or even just “open a book every day”. We now have a daily objective which is much simpler to implement and accomplish, decreasing the effort required to continue making progress on our project.
Even more importantly than the decreased perceived effort, we’ve now removed all ambiguity in how to make progress on a day-to-day basis. A large problem with motivation, and the subsequent loss of it, is that it provides no direction on where to go. It simply tells you, “I need to go somewhere.” By identifying our overarching goal and then breaking it down into easily-achievable daily microgoals, we provide ourselves with a detailed roadmap showing where we’re going and how to get there. Try implementing these microgoals in your daily life in order to work towards some of your larger ambitions, and allow the roadmap to lead you to your destination.